Chapter I: Part 1

Books in General

_BOOKS OF ESSAYS_

THE MERRY-GO-ROUND
_by Carl Van Vechten_

MUSIC AND BAD MANNERS
_by Carl Van Vechten_

A BOOK OF CALUMNY
_by H. L. Mencken_

A BOOK OF PREFACES
_by H. L. Mencken_

PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES
_by H. L. Mencken_

PAVANNES AND DIVISIONS
_by Ezra Pound_

ALFRED A. KNOPF, _Publisher_

Books in General

By Solomon Eagle

Alfred A Knopf
New York Mcmxix

COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

_ARTURO WAUGH_

Preface

These papers are selections from a series contributed weekly, without intermission, to the _New Statesman_ since April 1913. I do not feel that the responsibility for reprinting them rests on my shoulders; I trust that where it does rest it will rest lightly. I shall have done all I hope to do if I have produced the sort of book that one reads in, without tedium, for ten minutes before one goes to sleep.

The pseudonym “Solomon Eagle,” I may explain, is not intended to posit any claim to unusual wisdom or abnormally keen sight. The original bearer of the name was a poor maniac who, during the Great Plague of London, used to run naked through the street, with a pan of coals of fire on his head, crying “Repent, repent.”

S. E.

Contents

Who’s Who, 13

Political Songs, 19

An Oriental on Albert the Good, 25

Epigrams, 31

An Eminent Baconian, 37

The Beauties of Badness, 42

More Badness, 54

A Mystery Solved, 58

Carrying the Alliance too far, 60

May 1914, 63

May 1914: The Leipzig Exhibition, 69

The Mantle of Sir Edwin, 75

“The Cattle of the Boyne,” 81

August 1914, 83

Mrs. Barclay sees it through, 88

A Topic of Standing Interest, 94

Was Cromwell an Alligator?, 99

The Depressed Philanthropist, 105

A Polyphloisboisterous Critic, 111

“Another Century, and then ...,” 115

Herrick, 121

The Muse in Liquor, 127

£5 Misspent, 133

Shakespeare’s Women and Mr. George Moore, 137

Moving a Library, 143

Table-Talk and Jest Books, 146

Stephen Phillips, 150

Gray and Horace Walpole, 155

A Horrible Bookseller, 161

The Troubles of a Catholic, 166

The Bible as Raw Material, 168

How to avoid Bad English, 172

Woodland Creatures, 177

Other People’s Books, 183

Peacock, 187

Wordsworth’s Personal Dullness, 189

Henry James’s Obscurity, 195

The “Ring” in the Bookselling Trade, 201

Music-Hall Songs, 207

More Music-Hall Songs, 213

Utopias, 218

Charles II in English Verse, 224

The Most Durable Books, 229

The Worst Style in the World, 234

The Reconstruction of Orthography, 240

Mr. James Joyce, 245

Tennessee, 251

Sir William Watson and Mr. Lloyd George, 254

Stranded, 259

Mr. Ralph Hodgson, 264

Double Misprints, 268

The History of Earl Pumbles, 270

On Destroying Books, 276

Who’s Who

Works of reference are extremely useful; but they resemble Virgil’s Hell in that they are easy things to get into and very difficult to escape from. Take the Encyclopædia. I imagine that my experience with it is universal. I have only to dip my toe into this tempting morass and down I am sucked, limbs, trunk and all, to remain embedded until sleep or a visitor comes to haul me out. A man will read things in the Encyclopædia that he would never dream of looking at elsewhere—things in which normally he does not take the faintest interest. One may take up a volume after lunch in order to discover the parentage of Thomas Nashe; but one does not put it down when one has satisfied one’s curiosity. One turns over a few pages and becomes absorbed in the career of Napoleon. Thence one drifts to the article on Napier, which sends one to that on Logarithms in another volume; and when night closes in and (as we used to construe it) sleep brings rest to weary mortals, one still sits in one’s chair, bending heavy-eyed over the book, with a dozen pressing duties left undone and the last post missed. By that time one has reached, perhaps, the abnormally complex diagrams which illustrate the article on Metaphysico-theologico-cosmolo-nigology—of which science, the reader will remember, Voltaire was the father and Herr Doktor Pangloss the first professor.

_Who’s Who_ takes me in the same way. Ordinarily I have no particular thirst for it. I should not dream of carrying it about in my waistcoat pocket for perusal on the Underground Railway. But once I have allowed myself to open it, I am a slave to it for hours. This has just happened to me with the new volume, upon which I have wasted a valuable afternoon. I began by looking up a man’s address; I then read the compressed life-story of the gentleman next above him (a major-general), wondering, somewhat idly, whether they read of each other’s performances and whether either of them resented the possession by the other of a similar, and unusual, surname. Then I was in the thick of it. There was nothing especially exciting about most of the information that met my eye. Generally speaking, the biographies were of people of whom I had never previously heard, and whose doubtlessly reputable achievements had been recorded in spheres as unfamiliar to me as the dark side of the moon. What can it mean to me that Mr. J. Fitztimmins Gubb worked for five years under Schmitt at Magdeburg and is now demonstrator in Comparative Obstetrics at the Robson Institute? Or that the Bishop of the Cocos Islands has been five times married and was educated at King Edward VI Grammar School, Chipping Chester, and Pembroke College, Oxford? Yet I read of some six or seven hundred such, and found it as difficult to refrain from “Just one more” as would a wealthy dipsomaniac just parting from an old friend in a public-house at five minutes before closing time. I cannot easily account for the attraction. Something, I suppose, may be put down to the fact that character comes out in a man’s account, however bald, of himself; and that the _Who’s Who_ autobiographies, in spite of their compression, exhibit many and diverse interesting traits of character. But mainly, I think, it must be that we most of us have collector’s mania in some form or another, and that one cannot resist the temptation of collecting facts even when they are so irrelevant and of so little importance to one that they slip through one’s fingers as soon as one has gathered them. For I am sure that I do not know now whether I have got the number of the Bishop’s wives right, or the sites of his education, or even the name of his diocese.

I suppose that no one ever tells an untruth in _Who’s Who_. There is not much scope for it, though it is conceivable that there may have been exaggerations of the truth. The compilers are extremely capable; and the contributors seem to be as uniform in their veracity as they are various in their loquacity. Only in rare circumstances could any one hope to impose on _Who’s Who_ without very rapid detection. An opportunity of that nature did once occur to me. There is a compilation called the _American Who’s Who_, published (if I remember correctly) in Chicago. By some curious accident, which I have never been able to explain, its conductors got hold of my name—I don’t mean “Eagle,” but the other. By some accident more curious still they got the impression that I was an American settled in London; and with admirable enterprise they sent me, for two or three years in succession, yellow forms on which I was requested to inscribe my age, antecedents, and accomplishments. Each year I was dazzled by the idea of a joke which, I felt, would immensely amuse me, and which could (so the Devil argued) hurt nobody. On each occasion I filled the form exhaustively. I put down my name and address correctly; but beyond that not a word of truth did I tell. I invented for myself a career, a career not imposing enough to arouse suspicions, but far more picturesque than my actual career has been. I described my parents as being Homer E. —— and Anna P. ——, of St. Louis, Mo. I copied out of an American minor poet’s autobiographical preface a list of academies at which I had been educated; and then I launched out.

I had, I stated, left America for Europe at the age of nineteen. I had written (I was cunning enough to put down the names of one or two of my actual works) such and such books, including a Manual (for Schools) on Political Economy and a small brochure on Polycarp. I had travelled over four continents; my recreations were “all forms of sport, especially big-game hunting”; I had gone through the Balkan War as a volunteer with the Greek Army; and I possessed several decorations, including the Blue Boar of Rumania, the St. Miguel and All Angels of Portugal, and the fourth class of the Turkish Medjidie. Notice the fourth class; no common liar would have thought of so convincingly modest a claim as that. Each year, as I say, I lived laborious days in the delineation of an imaginary pedigree and a supposititious career. Then I broke down. There was no risk of punishment attached, and, I take it, small risk of discovery. But my softer self began telling me that it was a scandalous thing to hoax foreigners; that the trick was unworthy of an Englishman, or, indeed, an adult of any nationality, down to the most backward of Nicobar Islanders; and that the only fitting punishment for a person addicted to such practices would be to have pins put upon his chair by his children or his back chalked by infants in the street. I weakened and broke; sentiment overcame reason; my heart gained the victory over my head. And each year, with reluctant deliberation, I tore up the well-filled sheet and destroyed again my other self, my American self, the romantic self who had done the things I had never done, who had stalked the bear in the snowy fastnesses of the Caucasus and won the gratitude of exotic potentates. The forms have stopped coming now; but the memory of my vision still burns with a melancholy yet tender brightness; and those mythical progenitors, Homer E. —— and Anna P. ——, are to me all that his Dream Children were to Charles Lamb.

Political Songs

If one goes up a mountain and surveys all the kingdoms of the world one sees a good many horrible things. Few of them are worse, in their way, than the modern political song. There have been bad political songs in all ages. Cæsar’s soldiers used to sing some which were not merely uninspiring but irrelevant, and _Lilli Burlero_ (or _Lillibulero_) itself was no great shakes as a poem although its tune had a swing. But there have never been any to equal in badness the kind of songs that has been generated by the British party system. The only modern politicians who ever manage to generate a good song are the Socialists. Socialist song-books, in spite of their plenitude of hack phrases about chains and freedom’s dawn, always have a good deal of tolerable poetry in them. William Morris’s political songs are excellent, and some of the modern foreign Socialist songs are really worthy expressions of the movement. When their words are not good their tunes are: witness the _Internationale_ and that stirring Italian labour song that is now, I believe, prohibited by King Victor’s Government. But the kind of songs that our good Liberals and Conservatives sing at their meetings are gruesome.

I hold in my hand—as the saying goes—the _Liberal Song Sheet_ now being used at big party meetings. One or two of the more facetious ditties show some ingenuity, and there is a certain go about the first line of “Stamp, stamp, stamp upon Protection”; but for the rest the only song the writer of which would not get a birching in any properly constituted society is Ebenezer Elliott’s _God Save the People_, which is generations old. “Let who will make a nation’s laws as long as I make its songs,” said some writer. One might add: “Let who will make a nation’s songs as long as they are not done by the people who make its laws.” Caucus-provided laws may be all right, but caucus-provided songs, written by party agents and under-secretaries, are not successful.

The chief characteristic of the Liberal songs, apart from their metrical and linguistic peculiarities, is their insistence upon incongruous military image. Imagine Mr. Asquith donning bright armour and taking part in the incidents depicted in these verses—to the tune of _Who will o’er the Downs?_

_Our leaders, tried and trusted men,_
_Still love the ancient faith,_
_To Freedom and to Conscience true_
_In danger and in death._
_And they have donned their armour bright,_
_Their courage all aglow,_
_To lead the toilers of the land_
_Against the Tory foe._

_For years we’ve suffered pain and loss,_
_By privilege oppressed;_
_Our birthright has been filched from us_
_And left us sore distress’d._
_But now our leaders—trusted, tried—_
_Are keen to strike a blow,_
_And wrest our stolen acres from_
_The proud, disdainful foe._

It is not my business to discuss the justness of the judgments here implied, but what on earth is the point of suggesting that Mr. Asquith, Mr. George, Mr. Lulu Harcourt, Lord Haldane, and so on, are true “in danger and in death”? They may have come unscathed through the fire of Suffragette dog-whips, but nobody calls them to die for disestablishment. There is here an utter lack of reality, a lack that must prevent these songs from moving anybody to action, as good songs should do. They are as conventionally false as the cheapest kind of leading article.

Here are some more extracts from the same source:

_We defend the right we won in ages past;_
_We demand the measures by the Commons passed,_
_Let no Lords presume to wreck the work at last,_
_For we go marching on._
_Freedom for our trade and nation_
_From all insolent vexation._
_For democracy’s salvation_
_We all go marching on._

_Peers and Tories may to wreck the work unite,_
_Britain’s sons for Britain’s freedom still shall fight;_
_None shall hinder us till triumph is in sight,_
_As we go marching on._

_Then up to the sky with your Hip-hip-Hooray!_
_For the unbeaten leader, who leads us to-day._
_For ASQUITH—to-day, after long, weary years,_
_Our victorious Captain o’er Tories and Peers._
_Then cheer with a will for the great deed is done;_
_Attacking the Veto, we’ve fought and we’ve won;_
_Henceforward these islands of ours are to be_
_Not the Land of the Peers but the Land of the Free._

_Long, long in shameful slavery_
_The emerald isle hath lain,_
_The victim of past knavery,_
_And Unionist disdain._
_But Freedom’s day is coming—_
_See how the foemen flee!_
_Home Rule is just_
_And come it must_
_To set old Ireland free!_

_One blow will end the matter!_
_Strike, strike it with a will!_
_The enemy we’ll scatter_
_And quickly pass our Bill._
_Our leaders are determined,_
_True followers are we,_
_Our arms are strong_
_To right the wrong_
_And set old Ireland free._

A curious thing is that almost universally in these songs the virtues and actions of the party leaders get almost as much attention as the political questions at issue. This is the mark of the caucus.

It is a very difficult thing to write a good propagandist song at all. A first-rate tune will often cover up the most prosaic words, but generally speaking political songs split on the rock of the specific. It is the greatest mistake to expect to stir people with verses dealing with a particular Bill. The spirit of freedom, the spirit of revolt, the passion of love, or the passion of hate, may make good songs, but it is a hopeless task to try to make poetry out of the taxation of land values or an import duty on corn. A good Socialist song may deal with brotherhood or service, but it cannot deal with “the nationalization of the means of production, distribution, or exchange.” One should avoid the kind of concrete details that produce a sense of anticlimax, and the kind of personalities that sound false. The spirit of Liberty may appropriately be depicted in a helmet, but it is silly to conjure up a picture of Mr. Asquith with a suit of armour over his frock-coat. Even the fact that a thing is glaringly true does not necessarily make it suitable for metrical statement. It is true that there is an insufficient supply of sanatoria and that the thought profoundly moves many people. But a song emphasizing the fact must be a failure. Modern political songwriters fail (1) because they are usually people who cannot write verse at all, (2) because they try to make their songs like extra-rhetorical speeches or articles. Probably the next Liberal song will deal with the ravages of pheasants.

An Oriental on Albert the Good

The award of the Nobel Prize to Mr. Rabindranath Tagore is generally approved. I do not entirely agree with those who think that Mr. Tagore’s poems are masterpieces in English; for I find his English poetical prose monotonous and without rhythmical beauty, although, in a sense, immaculate. But those who know the Indian originals say that they are really great, and that they have got a hold on the general population unprecedented for centuries past.

I have just acquired a book by an Indian poet who was not so wise in his choice of subjects as is Mr. Tagore. The book is an English version (made in 1864 by the tutor of Sir J. Jeejeebhoy’s sons, and published by the Bombay Education Society) of an Epic on the Prince Consort by the Parsee poet “Munsookh.” The poem is enlivening if not inspiring.

It opens with the usual Oriental invocation to Heaven, ending “With that remembrance alone will I fill the cup of my heart and sing new and entertaining stories.” It then plunges straight _in medias res_ with a first canto, “On the birth of Prince Albert, his education and arrival at mature years; and his wish to marry Victoria.”

“There is a country of the world called Germany, the eminence
of which is known everywhere. In its interior is a large
district called the Dukedom of Gotha, about thirty-seven miles
in area, and containing about one hundred and fifty thousand
inhabitants. The air of this district is pleasant, dry, and
cool; and the water refreshing and pure. The land is good and
very fertile, and every article of food and clothing is cheap
there. In its neighbourhood is the city of Coburg, where the
richest blessings of Providence display themselves, near which
flows the river Itz, and where is a magnificent ducal castle,
having the appropriate name of Rosina, with a garden entirely
surrounding it. Here the birth of Albert took place.”

Prince Albert grew up wise and studious, and at last his preceptor said to him: “My accomplished pupil, this is the one hope of my soul, that thou make a hearty effort to be united to the worthy heiress of the Kingdom of England, and if thou do this, thou wilt not be disappointed.... Put in action therefore the effective dagger of contrivance; engraft speedily the plant of love ... lose not thy time, for if thou do thou wilt be considered a fool.”

Queen Victoria’s portrait was sent to Albert, the bearer telling him that he was searching the world for a worthy, loving, and religious prince. “Thou hast administered the medicine for my secret pain,” was the reply, and the Prince wrote a letter acknowledging the present. “When I would write thee a letter,” he said, “the water of my eyes flows from my pen instead of the black ink.... In my feeling of love for thee I am mad: I am a moth flying around a candle.... Though I swim always in a flood of tears, my body is burning to a cinder.” When Victoria’s mother heard about this she was glad, but said that “the hearts of the English people are intoxicated with haughtiness; they despise a stranger and a foreigner ... nor will they consider it honourable that thou should be united in love to a child of Germany.” Various letters passed, but Albert’s father was astonished at his rashness. “Foolish boy, heretofore engrossed in eating, drinking, and learning. Where didst thou get this information and these notions?... A nation proud and haughty like the English will think thee thoroughly mad.” But letters from England convinced the Duke; he admonished his son as to his future behaviour; and the party sailed for the port of London, where “Victoria immediately went upon the terrace.” The lovers met and sang, and the Prince returned home to complete his studies. “A little time after this occurrence the Queen again remembered Albert; she caused a letter, official, and according to rule, to be written to his father.”

“Albert’s father prepared himself at once, taking necessary provisions, furniture, and money. Having sat in a boat Prince Albert went forward accompanied by his family. The gallant vessel floated down the stream, and did not leave her track on the way. From a distance she appeared like an alligator, or like the moon of the second day sailing through the heavens, or like a tree growing in the midst of deep waters, casting its shadows as it moved in a hundred directions; or she was like a horse leaping without feet, and bound only to the surface of the water, so swift and lofty of mien that the sun from afar uttered a shout of approbation. As a lover weeps on account of separation from his beloved, so the ship beating her breast, filled her skirts with water. She sometimes appeared from her motion tired and weary, and the bubbles about her seemed like blisters on the feet. In body she was a strong negress, but in speed lively; in her womb were hundreds of children, yet did she never bear.”

“Albert thought the waves were like an infuriated elephant,” but he arrived safely, and the marriage was celebrated amid general rejoicings.

“The voice of triumph arose from every side with guns and bells and bands of music; in every house, too, arose the heart-charming sounds of cornets, flutes, harps, pianos, and singing of various sorts; cannons boomed from every fort—one making a whirring noise, another a noise like thunder.... So pure became the waters of the Thames that one could see in them the image even of the soul of his body. It was not a river, but as it were a flower garden; and the bodies of the fishes glittered like rose-leaves. Everywhere were clusters of variously decked boats; the vessels were as shaking mountains, which made graceful motions like peacocks coquetting in the garden of Paradise.”

A great banquet followed, and when “the reign of wine” was finished the music began. “Trombones sounded so impressively that letters were imprinted upon the face of the air.” Then came the dancing. “What shall I say of the Mendozas and Polkas? for the philosophic and the pious lost their peace of mind through them.... The Polka was kept up with such zest and excitement that there was a stir among the angels of heaven.... In short, the ball was gracefulness itself which made the stars bite their own bodies with jealousy.” The dead rose up from the ground enamoured of the dancing, and the lamps put their hands over their eyes. The festivities over the royal pair retired and sang to each other.

Next year a princess was born, and all England was merry. Other children followed, and for twenty years the royal pair lived in happiness. In 1843 the Queen and the Prince revisited his native country in a ship furious as a leopard, that broke through hundreds of whales. Home awoke tender thoughts in the Prince. “Collecting himself he sang” a chant comparing himself to Joseph, and his bride to Zuleika—which indicates a somewhat different view of the Potiphar’s wife episode from that prevalent in Occidental circles. The rest of the work is mainly taken up with the Great Exhibition, the Prince’s death, and numerous maxims for the use of his son, such as:

“King must keep entirely aloof from several hurtful things as
... chess.

“A king’s country is like a beautiful woman, and the merchants
of that country are, as it were, the precious jewels and
ornaments of that woman; and the more these jewels and
ornaments are, the more heart-charming and beautiful she looks.”

This last aphorism is disputable.

Epigrams

Any one who reads Mr. R. N. Leonard’s charming little anthology of English epigrams in the Oxford Garlands Series will regret that the practice of writing poetical epigrams has died out. Until the Victorian age almost all professional writers, as well as many amateurs, tried their hands at epigram. If you had anything especially offensive to say about any one—and especially about politicians, doctors, and ladies unduly addicted to cosmetics—it was the natural thing to put it into a couplet or a quatrain. Ministers and Privy Councillors used to compose epigrams about each other; but who can imagine Sir Henry Dalziel writing witty quatrains about Sir Alfred Mond, or _vice versa_? Why the habit has died out I don’t profess to say. There may be some significance in the fact that the great age of epigrams was the eighteenth century—the prose age _par excellence_. There is probably more in the decay of knowledge of Greek and Latin. When almost every educated man was familiar with the Greek Anthology and the works of Martial—whence all kinds of epigrams, elegiac, amatory, and satirical, descend—it was perhaps natural that the temptation to continue the good work should be generally felt. It may even be that a form so small is incapable of infinite variety and grows exhausted. Johnson wrote a ludicrous burlesque epigram—

_If the man who turnips cries_
_Cry not when his father dies,_
_’Tis a proof that he had rather_
_Have a turnip than his father._

—and there is undoubtedly sound criticism in it. After a certain time the making of epigrams may proceed almost on a formula. At all events, the decline of the epigram is obvious. The well-meant effusions which the late Sir Wilfrid Lawson used to waft across the benches of the House of Commons were scarcely equal to the old level of our political quips; it is very rarely that a tolerable metrical epigram appears in the Press; and the poets have almost all abandoned the habit of attempting to get their thoughts into so small a compass. The custom of composing epigrams for private albums is virtually extinct. Every schoolgirl writes in every other schoolgirl’s album that there is nothing Original in her excepting Original Sin; and even that not very splendid _mot_ was constructed by Thomas Campbell nearly a hundred years ago. The rest is silence.

The greater number of our epigrams are satirical, and Mr. Lennard’s selection is mainly composed of these verses with stings in their tails. One of the most taking of these is A. Evans’s on a Fat Man:

_When Tadlow walks the streets, the paviours cry_
_“God bless you, sir!” and lay their rammers by._

But that, perhaps, is not really stinging; if Mr. Tadlow was good-tempered, he must have liked it himself. Good couplets like these are few, but Coleridge’s on the Swan-Song is one:

_Swans sing before they die—’twere no bad thing_
_Should certain persons die before they sing._

The most brutal epigrams we have are Byron’s on Castlereagh’s suicide, after that statesman had cut his throat. These are not very good, but Mr. Lennard gives them; and, in fact, almost every famous epigram in the language. He classifies them under headings: “Political,” “Professional and Trading,” “Amatory,” and so on. Of the Literary epigrams one of the best is Bishop Stubbs’s on two of his nineteenth-century contemporaries:

_Froude informs the Scottish youth_
_That parsons do not care for truth._
_The Reverend Canon Kingsley cries_
_History is a pack of lies._

_What cause for judgments so malign?_
_A brief reflection solves the mystery—_
_Froude believes Kingsley a divine,_
_And Kingsley goes to Froude for history._

Lord Erskine’s on Scott’s Waterloo Poem is good:

_On Waterloo’s ensanguined plain_
_Lie tens of thousands of the slain,_
_But none, by sabre or by shot,_
_Fell half so flat as Walter Scott._

Theodore Hook’s epigram suggesting that it would be impossible to find a reader who would pay for the binding of _Prometheus Unbound_ now falls as flat as Scott, owing to the utter falsification of the prophecy.

Mr. Lennard gives a fair number of epitaphs, including Evans’s well-known one on Vanbrugh and Gay’s even better-known one on himself. But I don’t think we have in English an epitaph so delightful as that written for his own tomb by the obscene French poet Piron:

_Ci-gît Piron_
_Qui ne fut rien,_
_Pas même_
_Académicien._

Landor’s “I strove with none, for none was worth my strife,” however, could not be surpassed by any serious epitaph. From Landor Mr. Lennard has naturally had to draw freely for his more serious sections. Landor came nearer than any English writers to rivalling the feats of the best Greek epigrammatists. Many people would say that his _Dirce_ is the most beautiful epigram in the language.

Mr. Lennard’s selection is, as I have said, a very good one. The only old one I miss is Richard Bentley’s on German scholarship:

_The Germans in Greek_
_Are sadly to seek;_
_Not one in five score,_
_But ninety-nine more._
_All, all except Hermann—_
_And Hermann’s a German._

The omission is the stranger in that Landor’s greatly inferior epigram on Germans is included. About the longest poem admitted is Clough’s revised version of the Ten Commandments: it is flat in places, but contains one famous couplet. Only when he comes to the moderns might Mr. Lennard have cast his net wider. Browning, who wrote some neat versicles, is unrepresented; and so is Mr. Watson, who, in his earlier days, wrote epigrams, some of which, if not masterpieces, were as good as some of Mr. Lennard’s old ones. And it would have been worth while to collect a few of the miscellaneous modern ones that float about. There are Limericks—and some Limericks will satisfy the narrowest definition of an epigram—which would be worth preserving; and then there are odd fragments like the effort alleged to have been written on the blackboard by a Cheltenham schoolgirl:

_Miss Buss and Miss Beale_
_Cupid’s darts do not feel._
_How different from us_
_Miss Beale and Miss Buss._

Tolerable modern epigrams are so few that it would be worth while saving all there are. Unfortunately the pleasantest personal ones that one hears privately, though they would have been printed in a franker day, must mostly remain unprinted in an age when direct satire is considered ungentlemanly, and the law of libel is so easily invoked. I remember Mr. ——’s epigram on Lady —— and Mr. ——’s on Sir —— ——. Mr. Lennard cannot be expected to publish these.

An Eminent Baconian

A very curious chapter in the history of the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy closes with the death of Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence. Amid all the strange multitude of retired judges, lawyers, astrologers, and American ladies who have championed the cause of Lord Verulam there has been no figure more singular than that of this affluent old ex-M.P., who, after a lifetime spent in business, platform speaking, and the study of modern mechanical improvements, suddenly plunged into the fight with unprecedented enthusiasm and methods of argument never equalled in their singularity. Setting out with the conviction that Shakespeare could not possibly have written the plays, and that Bacon was the only man who could have, Sir Edwin became so obsessed with the subject that he found proofs of his contention everywhere, and gradually came to the conclusion that Bacon wrote almost all the Elizabethan and Jacobean literature that is worth reading. We have heard of the devout mystic who sees “every common bush afire with God”: to Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence every common bush was afire with Bacon. His outlook being of this character, it is scarcely to be wondered at that his methods of reasoning and of research were most surprising.

Most people who read his pamphlet, _The Shakespeare Myth_, must have been astounded by the _naïveté_ of some of the “proofs” there contained. The fact that Bacon was called Bacon—a name so easily interchangeable with pig, hog, and rasher—was a great help; for where the application of ciphers did not obtain one word it might obtain another. Bacon, according to Sir Edwin, must have been at least as preoccupied with ensuring his identification by posterity as with the writing of good verse, for he would take great pains to work in such a word as “hang-hog,” or to make three consecutive lines begin with words—such as Pompey, In, and Got—out of the initials of which could be constructed the appellation “pig.” Everything was pork that came to Sir Edwin’s net, and he would by tortuous ratiocination get evidence from the most seemingly innocent contemporary English and foreign engravings. For there was a secret brotherhood at work carrying on the Baconian tradition, and the artist who gave the portrait of Shakespeare two left sleeves (the confirmation of this was, I think, obtained from the editor of the _Tailor & Cutter_) had a subtle and profound intention. Sir Edwin collected a very large library in connexion with his work, and the study of it was his passion; but, save industry, he had none of the qualifications for his task.

I myself obtained in a strange way an amusing insight into his looseness of procedure. He had been writing letters maintaining his thesis in a contemporary weekly. Wondering whether he could be hoaxed, I sent to the paper a letter over what might have seemed, to a man with any real detective faculty, the suspicious signature “P. O. R. Ker.” In this letter I called Sir Edwin’s attention to a quotation (which I had myself invented and written in Elizabethanese) which I ascribed to one of the best-known works of Greene. My “quotation” (I forget its wording, but it contained phrases about “Shakescene” and “the semblance of a hogg”) made it perfectly clear that Shakespeare was merely Bacon’s dummy. Any man with the slightest qualifications for his work would have looked up Greene for reference—and would not have found it. Not so Sir Edwin. He wrote in at once (the editor, in order to spare his feelings, did not print the communication) to say that the fact that Mr. Ker’s important and convincing reference had been ignored by the Shakespeareans showed their utter incompetence.

But the most striking thing about him was his detestation of Shakespeare. There are people who hate Napoleon; there are people who object to Torquemada; there are even people who feel a pronounced distaste for Nero. But never has any one loathed and despised a dead man as the really mild and amiable Sir Edwin despised and loathed Shakespeare. No epithets were, he felt, too opprobrious for this rascal, who for three hundred years had cheated another man out of his due fame. He denied Shakespeare any virtue at all; he pointed out that there existed no proof that Shakespeare could even read; and he habitually referred to him as the “drunken, illiterate clown of Stratford,” “the sordid money-lender of Stratford,” and “the mean, drunken, ignorant, and absolutely unlettered rustic of Stratford.” So strong, indeed, were his feelings that when the _Times_ says that “One cannot but feel that he was happy in not living to see the celebrations which the British Academy and other friends of literature are to hold in 1916, the third centenary of Shakespeare’s—not Bacon’s—death,” it is not making a weak and untimely jest, but stating the sober truth.

Who will now take on Sir Edwin’s mantle as the most conspicuous Baconian? Mr. George Greenwood is _hors concours_ because, though an anti-Shakespearean, he has doubts about Bacon; and we have heard nothing lately about that romantic American doctor who a year or two ago began digging for evidence in the bed of the sylvan Wye. That another ardent combatant will soon appear is pretty certain; in fact, there will probably be a continual succession of such for all time unless—which is unlikely—somebody discovers documentary proofs of Shakespeare’s authorship so irrefutable that no one could dream of challenging them. For the examination of a mystery—if you can persuade yourself that there is a mystery—is always fascinating, and the search for and application of ciphers and hidden meanings produces such entertaining results that it would be almost worth while becoming a Baconian for the fun of it. Almost, but not quite.

The Beauties of Badness

The collector of amusingly bad poetry has never had such splendid opportunities as to-day. The world is all before him where to choose. Modern cheap production has made it easy for any one who can raise £20 to get a volume of poems printed; and of recent years the field has been greatly enriched by the growing body of verse-writers in America and the Colonies. There have always, of course, been poets who have given unintentional rather than intentional pleasure. I have before me a volume published (at Cambridge) in 1825, entitled _Original Poems in the Moral, Heroic, Pathetic and other Styles, by a Traveller_, which contains poems in the following style—amongst others:

INGRATITUDE

_My Muse, who oft recites on Love,_
_Or Heavenly Beatitude,_
_Her strains more melancholy move_
_Devoted to ~INGRATITUDE~._

_With thee, Dark Demon—what can charm?_
_Nor manners polish’d—chaste, or rude;_
_Nor Friendship’s hand—nor Safety’s arm_
_So vile art thou—~INGRATITUDE~!_

_Tho’ dear a Female’s face, or form;_
_Tho’ elegant her attitude;_
_We fly, as from the winged storm—_
_If she pours forth ~INGRATITUDE~._

But it is seldom that the collector comes across one of these delightful relics from an older day. The greater part of any collection must be formed of books published within the last forty years. Our age may be—indeed, it is—deficient in some respects, but in the production of unintentionally amusing writers no age, not even the Renaissance or the great ages of Greece and Rome, can vie with it.

It might be possible for a man with the industry of a Herbert Spencer exhaustively to classify the writers of whom I am speaking, and to tabulate the qualities which give to their works their peculiar virtues—incongruity of image, unfortunate use of colloquialisms, hopeless slavery to the necessity of rhyme, and so on. I am no Spencer; indeed, the only things I have in common with that philosopher are a taste for billiards and the recollection of a single visit to the Derby. To me there is a single broad division which connoisseurs may find useful in arranging their collections: in one class we may put those poets who are specifically cranky; in the other those (some silly, some quite sensible people apart from their artistic proclivities) who (Macaulay’s Robert Montgomery is the type) try to write poems like other people’s, but whose total lack of poetic perception leads them into strange aberrations of expression.

The first kind are comparatively rare, but there are some good examples still going strong. There is, for instance, a gentleman (at one time a distinguished scholar of Balliol) who describes himself as “The Modern Homer,” and has written a number of epics, including _The Human Epic_, _The Epic of London_, _The Epic of Charlemagne_, and _The Epic of God and the Devil_. Preoccupation with his matter leads him to such phrases as:

_When Murder is on the ~tapis~_
_Then the Devil is happy._

But he, perhaps, is not so interesting as Mr. William Nathan Stedman, who used to live in London, and now, I believe, is settled in Australia. This gentleman is addicted to prefaces proving that Mr. Gladstone, “this DIRTY OLD DEVIL,” “this sly old wizard, a protoplasm from the abyss of nowhere,” was the Beast of the Revelations, and he has an aversion from Mr. R. J. Campbell, whom he calls “moo-cow, kid-gloved Campbell.” It is well worth while buying his _Sonnets, Lays and Lyrics_. The poems themselves are not so amusing, though we sometimes came across such ambiguous phrases as:

_And when upon your dainty breast I lay_
_My wearied head—more soft than eiderdown._

But the illustrations—wood-blocks from eminent artists like Albert Dürer and Louis Wain—are charmingly irrelevant, and the prose passages are unique. The poet refers to the Laureateship—“an office I refused after Tennyson’s death, though made with the offer of a premier’s daughter and £30,000”—and he is violently down on critics who have failed to see the merits of a certain novelist whom he calls “Queen Marie,” “a woman who did you no wrong, nor envied ye your bones and offal, but gave Most Interesting Books for your betterment and education. Are ye not dirty dogs and devils? Eh?” “Bull-browed bastards” is one of the mildest terms he applies to the critics.

Difficult to place in either class are the poets who have some technical faculty, who are not necessarily cranks, but who endeavour to put such extraordinarily prosy things into verse that the result is as comic as though they were. I have, for example, a book containing “a lyrical romance in verse,” which tells a story, that might have gone quite well in prose, of a man who falls in love with a girl and has long discussions with her about politics. The author’s choice of a metrical form leads him to pages and pages of this sort of thing:

_I ceased, and somewhat eagerly she asked:_
_“Then you would justify the Socialist,_
_Or Anarchist, the brute assassin, masked_
_As a reformer, him who has dismissed_
_All scruples, and himself or others tasked_
_To murder innocence? Can there exist_
_A reason to excuse Luccheni’s action,_
_Of life’s great rights most dastardly infraction?”_

_“Excuse it, no!” I said; “nor justify it;_
_But understand it yes!—I find confusion_
_In both your questions; and, your words imply it,_
_They have their base in popular illusion._
_In Socialism and Anarchism, deny it_
_Who will, there’s no imperative inclusion_
_Of violence. Each, aiming at reform,_
_Would lay life’s ever-raging life and storm.”_

The growth of the Socialist and Suffragist movements has led to a great increase in this kind of argumentative verse; but the bad poems in the Conservative or Militarist interests are generally very much worse, a type-specimen being this:

_And so with foes about us_
_Just waiting for their chance_
_We must become a nation armed_
_Like Germany and France._

Another example of Imperialist verse is:

_I’m old John Bull of England,_
_My triumphs are in song._
_I’ve fought and won great victories_
_Which did not take me long._

_I’ve fought in many a battle_
_By sea as well as land._
_I’ve fought in Russia, Belgium,_
_Africa and India’s golden strand,_

which occurs in a work appealing for better treatment for British Honduras.

But most of the best bad verse is not propagandist. Amongst the classics of the kind the Works of Johnston-Smith rank high. These have been published complete in one volume, but the best of them are to be found in a smaller book entitled _The Captain of the Dolphin_. Mr. Johnston-Smith had a great vocabulary and peculiar gifts of metaphor and of abrupt conclusion. Here are some typical passages:

_A balminess the darkened hours had brought from out the South,_
_Each breaker doffed its cap of white and shut its blatant mouth._

_Strike, strike your flag, Sidonia,_
_And lessen death and pain;_
_“Strike,” “Fight” are but synonyma_
_For misery to Spain._

_On speedy wing the graceful sea-fowl follow fast—_
_They seem to me the souls of seamen drowned,_
_Who have for sailors, ships and ocean’s briny blast_
_Dumb love which they are yearning to propound._

_O’er the sea’s edge the sun, a dazzling disc,_
_In splendour hangs, preparing for his plunge;_
_Upon the heaven’s bright page he stamps an asterisk_
_Of yellow beams which Western things expunge._

_Reluctant I leave, like a lover who goes_
_From the side of the maid of his choice,_
_By whom he is held with a cord actuose_
_Spun out of her beauty and voice._

“Actuose” is very characteristic of this poet, who uses enormous numbers of astonishing words of which he does not tell us the meaning, although he gives us a glossary containing such definitions as:

_Derelict. An abandoned ship._

_Outward-bound. Sailing from home._

_Yo-heave-ho! A phrase used by sailors when two or more pull in
concert at the same rope._

One of his nicest surprises is the ending of:

_Where the sun circles round for the half of the year_
_And is cold—like a yellow balloon._

The kind of thrill produced by this unexpected ending is, of course, common in verse. Some readers will be acquainted with the epitaph:

_Here beneath this stone at rest_
_Lies the dear dog who loved us best._
_Within his heart was nothing mean,_
_He seemed just like a human being._

But a University poet’s anticlimax on Actæon may not be so generally known:

_His hands were changed to feet, and he in short_
_Became a stag...._

Nor this affecting stanza from a woman’s book recently published:

_What o’ the wind?_
_It hisses through a vessel’s spars._
_What o’ the wind?_
_It is in truth to mercy blind,_
_It surely from all rest debars,_
_And even frights the sturdy “tars.”_
_What o’ the wind?_

An equal bathos is sometimes produced by inappropriate metaphor. The worst instance I know is found in the poems of quite a well-known writer who describes roses:

_Aft before and fore behind_
_Swung upon the summer wind._

But the author of a recent drama of the Near East came pretty near it with

_... the diamond shaft of the fierce searchlight_
_From the lens of the crystal moon._

The chase after the unusual almost always means disaster. This is another recent example:

_I have found thee, dear! on the edge of time,_
_Just over the brink of the world of sense;_
_In dream-life that’s ours, when with love intense_
_We function above, in a fairer clime._

_I have found thee there, in a world of rest,_
_In the fair sweet gardens of sunlit bliss,_
_Where the sibilant sound of an Angel’s kiss_
_Is the sanctioned seal of a Holy quest._

But nothing produced in this manner is so attractive as the merely commonplace can be when carried to its farthest pitch. A year or two ago a young American published a volume with a preface ending: “He was apprised of the death of his invalid brother, whose remaining portion of his grandfather’s legacy accruing to him facilitated the publication of this book.” The epilogue ran as follows:

_Oh, the rain, rain, rain!_
_All the day it doth complain._
_On the window-pane, just near me,_
_How it sputters, oh, how dreary!_
_One becomes so awful weary_
_With the rain, rain, rain._

The difference between this and Verlaine’s _Il pleut sur la ville_ would be hard to define, but there certainly is a marked difference.

Most of the poets quoted above have, at any rate, the gift of moving with some freedom within their metres. But some people who publish verse cannot even do that, however simple the forms they choose. They struggle through their poems like flies in treacle. A good example may be taken from a book (excellently produced) issued only a year ago by one of the foremost publishers. Apart from its other qualities, it shows a most extraordinarily revolutionary conception of the way in which lines may be ended:

_A man’s home is a woman’s breast. There see_
_Him in infancy, and later, seeks he_
_Inspiration from the self-same source. ’Tis_
_His home, t’wards which, from cradle to the grave,_
_He doth gravitate, accomplishing his_
_Greatest works by aid of it. Man on the_
_Woman’s aid depends. Oft unconsciously_
_’Tis given, oft loyally the truth’s in_
_Loving breast safeguarded—less often ’tis_
_In cruelty withheld._

This supplies the only case I know of in which the article “the” has been used as a rhyme. But for sheer struggle the poem does not excel parts of this other one, which was published in a recent anthology:

_Along a marsh a hungry crane_
_With patient steps, his way did take_
_Each cranny of the rivage fain_
_To ransack with his slender beak,_

_When, suddenly, his watchful eye,_
_At but four paces distance, saw_
_A worm, that back, as suddenly,_
_To his subterranean hole did draw._

_Nathless the crane did, straight, begin_
_His beak, and claw, alike, to ply_
_And hoping the retreat be, in_
_The end, of the insect might destroy,_

_The turf did tear up, and dispel_
_The clods, and with such vigour strive_
_That he, at last, perceives his bill_
_At of the cave the depth arrive;_

_But lo! just when of all his toil,_
_The object he was nigh to get,_
_Beneath his very nib, a mole,_
_Without ado, devoured it!_

_Thus often, lurchers, onward who_
_Are prone by shady ways to creep_
_May the reward to those that’s due_
_Who, openly, have acted, reap._

This fable is called by the author _A Surreptitious Catch_; but it might equally fitly have been entitled _The Apotheosis of the Comma_.

I have, as I say, insufficient scientific talent to enter upon an analytic criticism of this kind of poetry; and in this brief discourse I have done little more than string quotations together. But that operation is all that is needed to serve my present object—viz. the propagation of the cult. Any one who has ever read the novel of Mrs. Amanda M’Kittrick Ros knows how much sustenance the human spirit may derive from the byways of literature; but it is very rarely that one meets, even amongst the best-read of men, one who is conscious of the peculiar poetic treasures that lie about in the publishers’ offices and on the second-hand bookstalls simply imploring to be collected.

More Badness

My appeal for interesting specimens of bad verse has brought me a large mass of material; but most of my correspondents seem not to realize that merely feeble and meaningless verse is so common as not to be worth preserving. The best single line I have received—sent me by a notorious dramatist who has forgotten its place of origin—is:

_The beetle booms adown the glooms and bumps among the clumps;_

and what promised to be the best whole poem is one that begins by rhyming “Atlantic” to “blanket.” But when I had got through it I found that my correspondent had got it out of a visitors’ book in an hotel. I really cannot count anything that has not been properly published; although I confess to being tempted by such lines as:

_Farewell, farewell, bonny St. Ives,_
_May I live to see you again,_
_Your air preserves people’s lives_
_And you have so little rain._

So really the best acquisition I have made is the following, the author of which I should like to discover:

_In this imperfect, gloomy scene_
_Of complicated ill,_
_How rarely is a day serene,_
_The throbbing bosom still!_
_Will not a beauteous landscape bright_
_Or music’s soothing sound,_
_Console the heart, afford delight,_
_And throw sweet peace around?_
_They may; but never comfort lend_
_Like an accomplished female friend!_

_With such a friend the social hour_
_In sweetest pleasure glides;_
_There is, in female charms a power_
_Which lastingly abides;_
_The fragrance of the blushing rose,_
_Its tints and splendid hue,_
_Will, with the seasons, decompose,_
_And pass as flitting dew;_
_On firmer ties his joys depend_
_Who has a faithful female friend!_

_As orbs revolve, and years recede,_
_And seasons onward roll,_
_The fancy may on beauties feed_
_With discontented soul;_
_A thousand objects bright and fair_
_May for a moment shine,_
_Yet many a sigh and many a tear_
_But mark their swift decline;_
_While lasting joys the man attend_
_Who has a polished female friend!_

My correspondent says that he received this from a friend (perhaps a polished female friend), who did not tell him whence it was extracted. I myself have seen two lines of it before—the last two of the second stanza. They occurred in a letter I received some time ago from a clerical acquaintance who was apologizing for having got engaged. He, on inquiry, pretended (with a mendacity very rare amongst clergymen) that he had written the lines himself; but I did not believe him. The poem bears the marks of the earlier decades of the nineteenth century. Can it be by Thomas Haynes Bayly?

One interesting thing I should like to trace is a metrical version of Holy Writ containing such lines as these on Jonah:

_Three dreadful days beneath the deep,_
_In fish’s belly dark lay he._
_How terrible methinks his fate._
_May no such torment fall on me._

The most ingenious writer who contributes the “Observator” column to the _Observer_ offers me a couple of specimens, one of which is new to me. The old one is the late Mr. Alfred Austin’s remark about Nature:

_She sins upon a larger scale_
_Because she is herself more large._

And the other, a touching narrative of a gipsy woman who fell ill, was a discovery of Andrew Lang’s:

_There we leave her,_
_There we leave her,_
_Far from where her swarthy kindred roam,_
_In the Scarlet Fever,_
_Scarlet Fever,_
_Scarlet Fever Convalescent Home._

A Mystery Solved