Chapter II: Part 2

Apparently the poem about “a polished female friend” is to be found in one of Mr. E. V. Lucas’s books. It was written, it seems, by a parson named Whur or Whurr, who flourished in Norfolk about a century ago. Whur delighted in all calamities, and described a father, on the birth of a child with no arms, exclaiming: “This armless child will ruin me.” No one has yet brought to my notice any whole volumes of bad verse worth acquiring, though various choice fragments have reached me. There is an epithalamium ending:

_And never, never she’ll forget_
_The happy, happy day,_
_When in the church, before God’s priest,_
_She gave herself away._

There is an _in memoriam_ poem beginning:

_Dear Friends, we had a sudden Blast_
_Which came to us unexpected._

And there is a loyal song to their present Majesties in which occur the lines:

_Our King and Queen are never proud_
_They mingle with the densest crowd._

But the most attractive new specimen is a poem on the late monarch’s death. It was printed and sold as a broadsheet in London, and runs:

_The will of God we must obey._
_Dreadful—our King taken away!_
_The greatest friend of the nation,_
_Mighty monarch and protection!_

_Heavenly Father, help in sorrow_
_Queen Mother, and them to follow,_
_What to do without him who has gone!_
_Pray help! help! and do lead us on._

_Greatest sorrow England ever had_
_When death took away our Dear Dad;_
_A king was he from head to sole,_
_Loved by his people one and all._

_His mighty work for the Nation,_
_Making peace and strengthening union—_
_Always at it since on the throne:_
_Saved the country more than billion._

There are two more verses. Personally, I find this considerably more interesting than any of Mr. Alfred Noyes’s various Coronation Odes.

Carrying the Alliance too far

Why is it that Japanese authors are allowed to write in English newspapers any sort of barbarous jargon they like? Mr. Yoshio Markino was the first to be licensed. To start with, one found his “delightfully quaint” English amusing in a mild way, but with repetition his sedulously cherished howlers became irritating. Still, he was only one; and primarily a painter at that. But now Mr. Yone Noguchi has turned up, and he is doing the same thing. Mr. Noguchi is considered in Japan—at least so his friends tell us—the first poet of the day. Those who remembered his last residence here assured us that on his return he would compel all men—like Helen of Troy or Mr. Tagore. He comes. One is prepared to be conquered. One turns to one’s _Westminster Gazette_ to read his works; and one finds there columns of stuff, possibly inspired, but certainly written in such pidgin-English that one cannot bother to read it.

Mr. Noguchi’s pidgin-English is not of quite so curious a breed as Mr. Markino’s, but it is sufficiently bad. One does not blame him for that. He writes English a great deal better than I do Japanese. But why on earth cannot the newspapers who print his works translate them into normal English? Is it that their sub-editors shrink from the task? Is it that they fondly believe that we are all so fascinated by English of the Noguchi-Markinesque brand that we had much rather have it than any other sort; or is it that a tradition has been established that Anglo-Japanese articles are not to be altered? If this is true, it is a thousand pities that, for all their charm, Mr. Markino’s early productions were not unmercifully damned. What should we say if newspapers began printing in all their native crudity articles by Frenchmen and Germans imperfectly acquainted with the tongue of this country? Suppose some journal came out next week with an essay beginning:

“What sadly fall the leaves of automne! What of sadness tumble
on the heart because that the winter put his snows on all the
country. And sad also the spring, the spring who arouse the
love in the soul, and who make to think to all the springs of
the time past. My heart weep like a bird who have lose her
companion.”

Or suppose a German were allowed by the _Westminster_ to present its readers with a political article opening:

“No Dutcher has the by Mr. Gamaliel Zoop, Amerikansh
postaltelegrafkommunikationdepartment minister on
politishekonomy famose lecture to a at Manchester
people-coming-together delivered recently without outerorderly
pleasure read.”

Obviously we should not tolerate it. Can it be that, even after the war with Russia, even after Japanese professors have written works on sociology, the superstition lingers here that a thing cannot possibly be truly Japanese unless it has the odour of an old curiosity shop?

None of this, I may say, is meant to be discourteous to Mr. Noguchi. I merely suggest that it would be better for him if he vetoed every endeavour to print his English articles as he writes them. If he were the Japanese Homer—indeed, he may be that for all I know—I should say precisely the same thing. Can he be aware that even his faulty spelling goes uncorrected?

May 1914

I write “these lines” just after arriving in Berlin. Not that I have anything to say about that. I merely mention the fact. It may explain my difficulties. The journey is really very dull. All those hundreds of miles over the Great Plain of Europe with never a hill except the ridge of Minden, very little water, nothing but endless flat fields sprinkled with trees, church spires, and red farm-houses. There is simply nothing to look at. If you put your head out of the window at Osnabrück, you may see some coal; and at Münster you may, if you choose, speculate as to which of the people on the platform are Anabaptists. That is not much during a twelve-hour run from Flushing.

A pleasant travelling companion is an alleviation on such occasions. The other occupant of my carriage had points about her. She was a young, cheerful, and rather obese Jewess going home with a plethora of scarves and wraps, several boxes, two lobsters (for her father), and a canary. At Goch she was incensed to find that she had to pay a heavy duty on the lobsters, so heavy that it would have paid her better to get the creatures in Berlin and have a drink on the balance. This story might make an illustration for one of Mr. Lloyd George’s homely speeches on Free Trade. But there was no duty on the canary. In his little cage, covered with a green curtain, the canary sat, non-dutiable but very phlegmatic. At frequent intervals his mistress lifted the green curtain, looked him in the eyes with a bewitching smile, and piped “Peep, Peep.” The bird never replied, though perhaps he looked his response. The lady then turned to me and said, “Is ’e not a nice bird? Is ’e not goot?” and common politeness—leaving gallantry out of the question—compelled me to reply always, “Yes, a beautiful little bird.” About twice an hour she retired to the dining-car and came back exuding smiles and sighs “I half joost ’ad a bifsteck. I dawn’t like steck.” How true it is that in life we have to be content with second-bests! But I did not discuss the matter.

In intervals of silence I finished Mrs. Russell Barrington’s _Life of Walter Bagehot_ (Longmans, 12s. 6d. net). It is a strange thing—and unfortunate, since so much material has disappeared with the passage of time—that Bagehot should have had to wait nearly forty years for a biography. But now it has come it is an interesting one. The author being Bagehot’s sister-in-law (daughter of James Wilson, who founded the _Economist_), the work has rather a family air. Bagehot’s more obvious virtues are a little too much insisted upon, and excessive importance is attributed to irrelevant details. The long description of his ancestry and birthplace, for instance, might have been curtailed. But the _Life_ is well written; it contains a great many interesting letters, and it gives a really living picture of one whom Lord Bryce has called “the most original mind of his generation.”

One would wish, however, for a supplement giving a fuller analysis of Bagehot’s literary work. Mrs. Barrington gives little more than a list of the titles of his essays. It is true that to most people Bagehot is still primarily the political and economic writer. There are few intelligent Englishmen to-day who have not been influenced by _The English Constitution_ and, in a lesser degree, by _Physics and Politics_. His _Economic Studies_ make the rudiments of political economy as simple and even as entertaining as a good fairy-tale, and those who have read _Lombard Street_ speak of it as a masterpiece. But the most extraordinary thing about it is that this man, who knew all about currency, who was in the confidence of Chancellors of the Exchequer, and who invented Treasury Bills, was also one of the most illuminating and sympathetic literary critics that England has ever produced. Personally I find his literary essays inferior to those of no other English critic who was not himself a poet, and I think that in some respects, though not in all, they are better than Arnold’s.

Probably Bagehot’s celebrity as an economist militated for some years after his death against the popularity of his literary work. Many literary people, looking through the complete list of his works, and seeing _Literary and Biographical Studies_ jostling shoulders with works on money, may very pardonably have assumed that these Studies, however able, must have been of a dry, hard character. They are very far from that; no English criticism is more human than his, less coldly intellectual; his temperament, naturally emotional and mystical, was most valuably reinforced by the balance, the tolerance, the sanity that were developed by his more mundane activities, but the temporal man in him never overcame the eternal. Such essays as those on Hartley Coleridge, on Shelley, on Dickens, on Cowper, on the _Edinburgh_ Reviewers, are bound before long to be recognized as among the great classics of English criticism. Naturally he was not impeccable; posterity may think, for example, that he attached too much importance to his friend Clough. But he is usually completely convincing. Take the following passage from the comparison of Wordsworth and Jeffrey:

“A clear, precise, discriminating intellect shrinks at
once from the symbolic, the unfounded, the indefinite. The
misfortune is that mysticism is true. There certainly are
kinds of truths, borne in as it were instinctively on the
human intellect, most influential on the character and the
heart, yet hardly capable of stringent statement, difficult
to limit by an elaborate definition. Their course is shadowy;
the mind seems rather to have seen than to see them, more
to feel after than definitely apprehend them. They commonly
involve an infinite element which, of course, cannot be stated
precisely, or else a first principle—an original tendency
of our intellectual constitution, which it is impossible
not to feel, and yet which it is hard to extricate in terms
and words. Of this latter kind is what has been called the
religion of Nature, or more exactly, perhaps, the religion
of the imagination. This is an interpretation of the world.
Accordingly, to it the beauty of the universe has a meaning,
its grandeur a soul, and its sublimity an expression. As we
gaze on the faces of those whom we love; as we watch the light
of life in the dawning of their eyes, and the play of their
features, and the wildness of their animation; as we trace in
changing lineaments a varying sign; as a charm and a thrill
seem to run along the tone of a voice, to haunt the mind with a
mere word; as a tone seems to roar in the ear; as a trembling
fancy hears words that are unspoken; so in Nature the mystical
sense finds a motion in the mountain, and a power in the
waves, and a meaning in the long white line of the shore, and
a thought in the blue of heaven, and a gushing soul in the
buoyant light, an unbounded being in the vast void of air, and

_Wakeful watching in the pointed stars_

“There is a philosophy in this which might be explained, if
explaining were to our purpose. It might be advanced that there
are original sources of expression in the essential grandeur
and sublimity of Nature, of an analogous though fainter kind
to those familiar, inexplicable signs by which we trace in
the very face and outward lineaments of man the existence
and working of the mind within. But be this as it may, it is
certain that Mr. Wordsworth preached this kind of religion and
that Lord Jeffrey did not believe a word of it.”

The visionary and the epigrammatist are near allied, and both the practical and the ideal in Bagehot are illustrated in his own phrase: “If you would vanquish Earth, you must invent Heaven.” Bagehot, as he appeared to ordinary people every day, is portrayed in another sentence. “He left many,” it is said, “with the idea that he was a good fellow, yet with no idea that he was a great man.” A great man can have no better epitaph.

May 1914: The Leipzig Exhibition

Any one who imagines that the English can, or at all events do, compete with the Germans in beauty of book-production had better go to Leipzig this summer and visit the Buchgewerbe und Graphik Exhibition—or “Bugra,” as it is universally called in Germany. The new railway station—the finest in the world—is also worth going to see; but that, presumably, will last after this year. In many respects the exhibition is like all other big exhibitions. It is much too enormous to be capable of thorough inspection. Leaving out of account the huge buildings devoted to the mechanics of printing and so on, there are a palace (“The Hall of _Kultur_,” of course), filled with engravings and photographs; a colossal structure containing the exhibits of German publishers of books and music; and pavilions for most of the other nations of the earth. Even Corea has a building—though I did not see it—and Siam is well to the fore. The exhibition grounds are very extensive; they contain (need I say?) a “Street of Nations,” many fountains, and countless cafés. There is a reproduction of Heidelberg Castle, full of drinking-cups and the weapons with which German students put a little interest into each other’s faces. There is a Bavarian Hall, where real peasant maidens bring your beer and the latest and cheapest musical-comedy tunes are played by real peasant musicians, with feathered hats and costume complete down to the bare knees that they insist on retaining in the face of a proclamation by the local Catholic hierarchs to the effect that such a display of naked charms is grossly indecent. There is no wiggle-woggle, but there is a waterchute and a shooting-gallery whose proprietors invite you to come in and try your skill at “live objects.” The man who was with me—he is a person who, like Mr. Galsworthy, would not touch a fly “save” (as the old verse has it) “in the way of kindness,”—refused to come in. Naïvely distrustful of aliens he was afraid, he said, that the targets might be dogs. But he need not have been alarmed, for we were afterwards informed that they were merely big game thrown on a screen by a cinematograph. When you hit an animal it did not drop, but a red light showed.

Naturally comparisons between the exhibits should be made very cautiously; the exhibition is being held on German soil and the German display is much larger than any other. In many respects England shows up very well. The English section in the _Halle der Kultur_ is certainly as good as any, and the etchings shown by Mr. Muirhead Bone, Mr. Charles Shannon, Sir Charles Holroyd, and other British artists are possibly the very best things in the place. The main English exhibit is housed in a pleasant Tudor building with some beautiful rooms. The Shakespeare exhibit of editions and portraits is most interesting for those who like that sort of thing; a fine collection of original Beardsley drawings has been lent by Mr. Lane; the Caxtons are coming; there are admirable specimens of the works of the Kelmscott, Riccardi, Florence, and other presses; there is a gallery of Medici prints unsurpassed by any colour-reproductions in the exhibition (the print of the Dresden Van Eyck triptych is the most completely satisfying colour-print I have ever seen); and the elaborate bindings by Riviere’s, the Oxford Press, and other establishments are not inferior even to the exquisite leather bindings by Noulhac and R. Kieffer shown in the French building. Everything our officials could have done has been done to perfection; and the special exhibits have been very well chosen. Where we fall sadly short is in the ordinary book of commerce.

I cannot but think that the English publishers who have taken stalls—and, of course, the selection of exhibits here had to be left to the publishers themselves—could have brought together a more attractive-looking lot of books than they have done. Most of them—I mention no names—seem to have bundled together their books without any consideration either of the contents or of the appearance of the volumes. Of course there are English publishers who have no fine books and few decent-looking books on their lists; but some of the specimens at Leipzig look almost like remnants which it is hoped to sell off to visitors. But even if all the English publishers had shown all their best books, and none of their worst, they would still have been put in the shade by the Germans. Even the French publishers—whose achievements in typography and in illustration have been great—are not now fit to be mentioned in the same breath as the Germans.

The German exhibits are a revelation. The mid-Victorian tradition in print and design—which was so tenacious in Germany—has now been almost completely abandoned. I don’t suggest that all German books are more presentable than English ones. Scientific works, theology, and shilling fiction are equally ugly in both countries. But there are to-day in Berlin, Leipzig, and Munich at least a dozen firms publishing for the ordinary market books whose average of beauty is far higher than that reached by the books of any considerable English publishing firm. Many thousands of really beautiful new books are now being produced every year in Germany; and of what can be done, especially in the way of making cheap books look presentable, our own publishers have no idea. There is, of course, a much larger educated reading public in Germany than in England. In every bookshop you are confronted by volumes of Dehmel, Hofmannsthal, and other writers who, were they Englishmen, would never reach large circles of readers in their lifetimes. Anthologies of contemporary German poets sell literally by tens of thousands; and you can even get an infinite variety of doses of classical and modern authors by dropping pennies into automatic machines on the stations. This much may be admitted: that there is a larger literary public and more interest in contemporary art, literary and pictorial. But, even granting all that, the German publishers in meeting the market have shown a taste, and above all an enterprise (sometimes reaching audacity, no doubt), which most of our own publishers have never revealed in the slightest degree.

To give a full account of the show is beyond my ability, desire, and space. But in looking at the latest products of commercial colour-printing in the French pavilion I was struck by the extraordinary divorce between craftsmanship and taste in modern industry. Here were some of the vilest pictures (I don’t mean morally) ever moulded by the mind of man; yet the experts were raving over them as being the last word in their own kind of colour-process. Needless to say, the exhibition, not being half over, is not yet completely ready. The Italian pavilion, when I was at the exhibition, could not be entered at all, and there were other lacunæ all over the place. This is the kind of thing that makes the whole world kin.

Amongst the German authors whose portraits grace the walls of the exhibition is Mr. George Bernard Shaw. They have naturalized him, like Shakespeare, and the next thing will certainly be a statue at Weimar.

The Mantle of Sir Edwin

I have just spent three days reading Mr. E. G. Harman’s _Edmund Spenser and the Impersonations of Francis Bacon_, published by the firm of Constable. There are books which he who runs may read; there are also books from which he who reads will run. This to me comes into neither category. It is very large and crowded with most complicated detail; it is, though quite competently written, devoid of literary grace; and it supports a monstrous thesis with arguments many of which are of staggering absurdity. Yet in point of deadly fascination it vies with the basilisk. It is a monument of the “scientific method.” The author’s learning and industry are terrifying; his tone seems completely dispassionate; he proceeds from discovery to discovery with mild ruthlessness; and not the most uncompromising of Wospolus was ever more sternly resolved to embrace logical conclusions. His chief fault is that his premises are usually arbitrary or quite insufficient; but the objective charm of his massive progress, as of a steam-roller, from stage to stage, is not affected by this.

Mr. Harman does not in this volume discuss in detail Bacon’s authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. He assumes that. He assumes also that Bacon did publish literature under the rose and that he did employ impersonators; his reasons being that he had to express his feelings and that acknowledgement of authorship would have damaged his prospects of political promotion. This much granted, Mr. Harman looks around for writings in which he thinks he can detect traces of Bacon and examines the evidence for their reputed authorships. He does not descend to the puerile level of the late Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, with his “Hic, Hæc, Hog.” He says nothing of cryptogram. But in case after case he finds (1) that there are marks of Baconian thought and language, (2) that allegorical references to Bacon’s political disappointments may be found, (3) that documentary evidence supporting accepted authorships is very slight. Nothing stops him. Where there is a real resemblance in style things are easy. Where there are marked differences we are asked to note the fact that Bacon’s method enabled him to write in a variety of styles—as though serious writers expressing their inmost selves could put on styles like trousers. If somebody has borne witness that an Elizabethan wrote his own works, then that somebody was in the plot too.

As to Spenser, with whom Mr. Harman chiefly deals, one is certainly struck with the paucity of the evidence for him. We know less about him than we know about Shakespeare; and his biographers have had to rely almost entirely upon “internal evidence” drawn from his works. But personally I must say that I prefer their methods to Mr. Harman’s. He, analysing exhaustively the plot of the _Faerie Queene_, with its Britomarts, Arthegalls, and Blatant Beasts, finds a knowledge of court life that could not be possessed by Spenser, who lived in Ireland and was (according to him) an ex-Board School boy in a small Civil Service job—which is at any rate politer than “drunken, illiterate clown.” This is question-begging; but what shall we say of the assumption that if Spenser had written the poem the rivers of Ireland would have been described as fully as the rivers of England? Why should the emigrant Civil servant know anything about the rivers of Ireland? As far as that goes, there is one slip in the description of the rivers of England which indicates to my mind that the author relied on some inaccurate map for his information about them. The Baconian authorship forces Mr. Harman to the conclusion that some of Spenser’s sonnets were written by Bacon when he was eight or nine years old. But Mr. Harman is a strong man. After all, Mozart was a precocious child, so why not Bacon? He does not shrink from this any more than he shrinks from arguing that any book or letter which favourably mentions one of Bacon’s cryptic works must also have been written or instigated by him. They _must_ have been written by him, and, this granted, internal corroboration must be sought for. Anything is good enough for this purpose. Mr. Harman even finds evidence in the occurrence in several “Baconian” works of the phrase “golden wyres” as applied to the Queen’s hair. If he would read the body of Elizabethan lyrics, or even extracts of them in such a contemporary anthology as _England’s Parnassus_, he would find that an Elizabethan poet could no more help comparing a lady’s Hayre to Golden Wyres than he could help likening her Teares to Pearles or her Brests to Iuorie.

But there is no space here for detailed examination. It is enough to yield oneself to the pleasure of following the Harmanian trail. I have noted the works which in the course of his narrative or in footnotes he ascribes to Bacon. The Authorized Version of the Bible is not mentioned. But, apart from his voluminous acknowledged writings, Bacon wrote the works of Spenser (including the _Faerie Queene_, the longest poem in the world, which Bacon published before he was out of his twenties); the works of Shakespeare; practically the whole body of Elizabethan poetical criticism (including Webbe’s _Discourse of Poesie_, Puttenham’s _Art of Poesie_, Sidney’s _Apologie_, Daniel’s _A Defence of Ryme_, and Meres’s _Palladis Tamia_); many of the poems of Gascoigne (written by Bacon before he was twelve); certain works imputed to Nashe, Greene, and Gabriel Harvey; the poems of Sir Walter Raleigh and the _Last Fight of the “Revenge”_; the works of Essex; Sidney’s _Arcadia_ and _Astrophel and Stella_ (with this key Bacon unlocked his heart); Lyly’s _Euphues_ (a long book); Bryskett’s _Discourse of Civil Life_; Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s _Discourses_ and the account of his last voyage; _Leicester’s Commonwealth_ and _Leicester’s Ghost_; and other minor scraps. If this be all correct, we shall have to revise our opinion of the Elizabethan time as a time replete with various genius. All we shall be able to refer to now will be “the spacious Bacon of great Elizabeth.”

An enormous number of people—including supposed writers and their relations—must have been in the secret. Sometimes they must have marvelled at Bacon’s extraordinary behaviour, as for instance when he wrote for Raleigh a laudatory poem on the Queen:

“Bacon (who, in my opinion, is the author of the poem) makes
use of the opportunity in taking up the personality of Ralegh
to express his own feelings. He was undoubtedly most unhappy at
his exclusion from access and the waning of all his hopes of
advancement. This is what is reflected under the disguise of
Ralegh’s loss of favour in the poem.”

They must have wondered how on earth Bacon expected his grievances to be remedied if his complaints were published over another man’s name, and why, if Raleigh could address poems to the Queen _in propria persona_ without loss of caste, Bacon could not do the same. But no doubt most of them, for many were impecunious, did not allow such questions to bother them much. They were content to take Bacon’s bribes for the use of their names. What he must have spent in subsidies to sham authors one gasps to contemplate. No wonder that for years he was in such financial straits, and that at one point things came to such a pass with him that he was arrested for debt.

“The Cattle of the Boyne”

I have referred before to the frequency of misprints in the penny _Times_. It does seem a pity that the conductors of the paper cannot keep it up to its old traditions in this respect. Last week there was a more curious instance than usual. These words appeared:

“The anniversary of the Cattle of the Boyne was celebrated with
unusual enthusiasm throughout Canada.”

I was so moved by the report of these zoological novelties that I made a little poem about them, full of Celtic twilight. It runs thus:

THE SANDS OF BOYNE

_Och, Geoffrey, go and call the Cattle home,_
_And call the Cattle home,_
_And call the Cattle home,_
_Acrost the sands of Boyne._
_Shure, ye’re the bhoy that’s got inured to foam,_
_So come, bring in the koine._

_Och, are they fish, flesh, fowl or good red herrings?_
_Perhaps they are red herrings,_
_Forlorn and wildered herrings,_
_Strayed from their native broine,_
_This hapless party which has lost its bearings_
_Fornint the sands of Boyne._

_No, no, they have no herring for their father._
_The proof-reader’s their father,_
_A most prolific father_
_By mishap or desoign._
_If this is what wan penny means, I’d rather_
_Stump up the ancient coin_

_Than daily find—Och tempora, Och ~Times~!—_
_Bad grammar in my ~Times~_
_And misprints in my ~Times~_
_In ivry other loine,_
_Capped by this worst of typographic crimes_
_“The ~CATTLE~ of the Boyne”!_

But perhaps one ought not really to complain of misprints, even in the _Times_, when they are funny.

August 1914

And it is less than three months since I was writing complacently about the Leipzig book exhibition! I wrote about the exquisite collections of bindings and drawings, the bands, the parading crowds of peaceful Germans, the pavilions of all nations from Holland to Siam, and the charming Tudor structure erected by Britain, with its long low halls containing cases of Shakespeare folios and editions from the Kelmscott Press. Enormous crowds from all over Europe would, it was hoped, visit the exhibition as the summer wore on. “August, of course,” said the officials to me, “will be _the_ month.”

The buildings in the wide Street of Nations are still there, no doubt. The flags, perhaps, have been hauled down, but those files of white wood and plaster palaces still stand behind their flower-beds along the broad avenues. The crowds are dispersed. The officials in charge of the various buildings have fled to their respective domiciles. The cheerful male members of the Bavarian Peasants’ Band have taken off their green hats and put on helmets, left the women behind, and gone off to burn villages like their own, and disembowel sunburnt French peasants as naturally amiable as themselves. Memories so recent make the pit of one’s stomach sink. In May last a German barber in Berlin had his razor at my throat, and when he scratched my skin he was most concerned and apologetic. “Nescis, mi fili, quam parva sapientia regitur mundus.” The remark was made by a Swedish statesman in the eighteenth century. Voltaire, looking down from heaven—if one may risk his displeasure by presuming his presence in so uncongenial a place—must feel that since the eighteenth century there has been no great change, and that the human race is as horribly ridiculous an institution as ever it was.

But here we are.[1] Like most other inhabitants of the “civilized” world, I have for the last week read no books, but only newspapers. Fourteen a day is about my average, which means nearly a hundred a week. And nine-tenths of them contain nothing that one did not know before. There never was a war, since telegraphs were invented, about which news was so scarce. Almost every rumour that comes through is dubious, and it is invariably contradicted. In successive issues and even in the same issue of a journal one reads that troops have and have not entered a certain village, that somebody’s neutrality has and has not been violated, and that a naval engagement has and has not taken place. If you go over the eight pages of “war news” in a daily and make a summary of the unquestionable facts contained therein, as distinguished from the doubtful reports and the office-written padding, you find it could all be got into a paragraph. We have frequently heard that the day of the war correspondent was over. We heard it during the Russo-Japanese War—of which we certainly got very little news—and we heard it during the Balkan campaign. But at the moment of writing I have scarcely seen a single item regarding a single encounter which looked indisputable or which appeared to come direct from an eye-witness. Almost all the information we have been getting has come either from rumour travelling across many tongues or from official sources. Both these founts of news are great liars, the former excelling in the _suggestio falsi_, and the latter both in that and in the _suppressio veri_.

The desperate straits in which we have been for news could be gathered (if in no other way) from the outlandish places of origin ascribed to reports that get into print. Stockholm informs one that advices from Teheran report a conflict at Toul; and we hear that the _Mercure de Bruxelles_ states “on excellent authority” that something has happened at Basle. Deliberate fabrication has been at work all over the place. Our good old friend the doctor, with the cholera microbes which he puts into wells, even turned up at the very start. This mythical gentleman is at least as old as the Franco-German War of 1870, and his last appearance was in the Balkans. No sooner does a war start than one of the combatants hastens to describe his diabolical activities in the hope, presumably, of making the world’s blood boil at the thought of an “outrage against humanity.”

The papers cannot be blamed for printing rumours, but they might give the clearest indication, whenever possible, of the value of their sources. Rumours before they get into print presumably travel in much the same way as after they get into print. Of how rapidly “news” develops I had an experience in a club on Tuesday night. A late evening paper printed a brief report, stating that Aberdeen doctors had gone to attend to wounded who were being landed at Cromarty. Five minutes after I had seen this, I was told by a member that single British and German destroyers had had a brush off the Scottish coast. Five minutes after that the vessels had expanded into flotillas, and within the hour a club servant, with very gloomy face, remarked to me, “I don’t know if you’ve heard it, sir, but there’s been a great naval battle in the North Sea and the British Fleet has met with an awful disaster.” With correspondents kept out of the area of hostilities, it is no wonder that by the time reports of occurrences reach the persons who send them to our newspapers they bear very little relation to the events (if any) which have originally generated them. War correspondents in Europe to-day seem to be able to do little more than sit in friendly foreign capitals and send home little bits of news out of the local papers. And if we want a really accurate and full description of the big battles, especially the big naval battles, of the future we shall usually have to wait until peace allows combatants to publish such books as the Japanese _Human Bullets_, describing the attack on Port Arthur, and those vivid Russian books which told the story of Rozhdestvensky’s voyage to the China Sea with his mouldy squadron and the magnificent and pitiful end of it at Tsushima. But of no great modern war will the whole truth ever be properly known. Forces work over such vast areas that full information is impossible to collect.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I have left all this as I wrote it.—S. E.

Mrs. Barclay sees it through

_Over the turmoil of a world in arms_
_There floats a rich indomitable coo ..._
_’Tis Barclay.... Though excursions and alarms_
_Torture the firmament, though Wilhelm II_
_In shining armour waits his Waterloo,_
_Though on all sides the blood rains down in torrents_
_Love’s interests still are in safe hands with Florence._

_What though the rest of us are turning tail,_
_Assured by those who have a right to speak_
_That only Patriotism has a sale?_
_~She~ knows Love’s drawing-power remains unique;_
_~Her~ books need never be postponed a week;_
_Sure of her subject, certain of her vogue,_
_She has no need to adjourn, much less prorogue._

_Business as usual. Yet who knows, who knows_
_Whether she has not chosen the better part,_
_Swelling the proud full sail of her great prose_
_Still with the gentler zephyrs of the heart,_
_Rather than seize an Amazonian dart,_
_Leaping into the middle of the fray_
_Like certain other poets of the day._

_Has Robert Bridges’ success with fighting_
_Been such as to encourage emulation?_
_Or Dr. Watson’s “bit them in the Bight”-ing?_
_Or the same author’s other lucubration_
_(Yet one more blow for a disthressful nation)_
_In which, dead gravelled for a rhyme for “Ireland,”_
_He struggled out with “motherland and sireland”?_

_Did even the voice from Rudyard Kipling’s shelf_
_Say anything it had not said before?_
_And was not Stephen Phillips just himself?_
_And was not Newbolt’s effort on the war_
_Distinctly less effective than of yore?_
_And would not German shrapnel in the leg be_
_Less lacerating than the verse of Begbie?_

When the Muse seized me, in this manner, by the hair, it was three o’clock in the morning, and I had just finished the new novel by the author of _The Rosary_. Had it been earlier I should have written more. But next day the mouse of inspiration had fled to its hole; the spell of the book had been dissipated; my vision had faded into the light of common day; and I resumed my consideration of the position of Przemysl, a place of which, until this week, I had never heard. But what a fascination the book exercised while one was reading it! I can well understand why Mrs. Barclay commands a greater audience than perhaps any other living writer. She can beat the basilisk at its own game.

The reader is swept away with a rush of strong emotion at the very start. A tall, reticent, bronzed man arrives by the boat train at Charing Cross. Thrown over by a woman, he has been abroad for ten years, nursing his grief and creating a reputation as a novelist. No sooner does he get to the station than he extracts from the coy bookstall clerk a confession that to him the books of Rodney Steele are the best in the world. Lump in the throat number one; and a sovereign in the pocket of the clerk. Steele leaves the station to drive to a flat a friend has left him. Oh, the fragrance and glitter of dear old smoky London! Oh, the beauty of the Queen Victoria Memorial!

“Mysterious through the gloom, he saw the nation’s fine
memorial to a deathless memory. The gush of green waters, the
golden figure at the summit, needed sunlight for their better
seeing. But clear through the orange darkness gleamed the white
marble majesty of England’s Great Queen.

“Rodney Steele lifted his hand in reverent salute as he
passed....

“‘Lest we forget!’ quoted Rodney Steele as he looked at the
majestic marble figure, throned outside the palace above the
rushing waters. ‘Yet—could we, who really remember, ever
forget?’”

The rest of the book tells how he was wooed and won by his old love, now a widow. She had deserted him under a misapprehension and was resolved to recover him. She therefore took the next flat to his—or rather to her brother’s, which Steele was occupying. She had heard that owing to a change of telephone numbers her brother was constantly being rung up by mistake for a Hospital. One night therefore Steele was rung up and a Kind Voice asked for the Matron. The voice reminded him of Madge. He began to feel so lonely that he willed, with all his will, that the unknown Kind Voice should ring him up again.

“‘Speak to me again,’ he said, ‘you, you spoke to me last
night. Speak to me again. What wait I for? I wait for you! Just
now—in my utter loneliness, in my empty solitude—I wait for
you.’...

“The distant clock slowly chimed a quarter past the hour of
ten; and—as that sound died away—the bell of the telephone
rang.”

This time he made the Kind Voice promise to ring him up nightly in order to console him in his loneliness. The Kind Voice consented. Ultimately on the telephone they discussed (he not revealing his identity or knowing hers) his novels. This is the kind of thing they say over the telephone:

“‘The thing of first importance is to uplift your readers; to
raise their ideals; to leave them with a sense of hopefulness,
which shall arouse within them a brave optimism such as
inspired Browning’s oft-quoted noble lines.’”

When finally he confesses to the Kind Voice that his life has been ruined by a girl with whom he is still in love, Madge thinks the time ripe for an appointment. They meet. He finds that the Kind Voice has been Madge all the time and he steels his breast against the woman who has added deception to her previous crime. But her “gracious gracefulness” and other qualities win in the end, and we finish at Christmas with Herald Angels and wedding-bells.

Mrs. Barclay certainly has skill. Nobody else can write a silly story half so well as she. Her English is fluent and vivid, although loose; her humour is genuine if not subtle; and she handles her dialogue, such as it is, very cleverly. But, above all, she knows how to serve out the glamour and the pathos with a ladle. The hero of this book is as generous as he is clever. He can conjure; he can make seagulls settle on his shoulder; and he does kind actions to widows. There are also an heroic ex-soldier who saved a man’s life at Spion Kop; a bishop’s window brimming over with love and reminiscences; and an honest, stupid Englishman with no thoughts of self. The only bad character dies, and the end is a pæan of joy. As long as she can keep this up Mrs. Barclay will never lose her hold. In spite of the war, this book, I should think, will sell in millions and millions.

_Vorwärts_ reports that Dr. Ludwig Frank, a member of the Reichstag, has been killed in battle near Lunéville. Dr. Frank, who sat for Mannheim, was one of the leaders of the Southern Revisionists. I had tea with him at the Reichstag last May. He took me into the Strangers’ Gallery of the House, where I heard Dr. Liebknecht makes one of his anti-armament speeches, the one in which he incidentally accused a Prussian general of negotiating sales of decorations. It seems very remote now. Dr. Frank was barrister; a big Jew with a heavy, handsome face—sallow skin, aquiline nose, black moustache, strong chin, dominating eyes. His romantic air—he was supposed to resemble Lassalle—made him very popular in the rich Jewish salons of Berlin. He was a strong man, and one would have said an ambitious one. But a middle-class man who enters the German Socialist Party sacrifices so much that he _ipso facto_ clears himself of the suspicion of mere ambition.

A Topic of Standing Interest

The Oxford University Press has just issued a beautiful little edition of Erasmus’s _Praise of Folly_, with a good reproduction of Quentin Matsys’ portrait of Erasmus as a frontispiece. The last edition of the _Encomium Moriæ_ with which I am familiar is that issued in 1887 by the firm of Hamilton, Adams. It had a binding which did not please, but contained Holbein’s interesting illustrations. Whether any considerable sale of the book is likely nowadays I very much doubt. Erasmus’s humour was an improvement on mediæval humour, which, except in a few cases, cannot make a modern man laugh save sometimes through the brazenness of its indecency. Erasmus was a child of the Renaissance, a wit, a scholar, a questioner of all things, a man of the world, a revolutionary conformist. But there are long dull passages in his most famous book, and many remarks that seemed most daring to the men of his own time are to us platitudinous; whilst he often labours some obvious joke in the worst mediæval way.

At the same time, any one who cares to go through the book will find occasional amusement. Erasmus had a mild theory of the satirist’s rights. “Wits,” said he, “have always been allowed this privilege, that they might be smart upon any transactions of life, if so be their liberty did not extend to railing”; and he disclaimed a desire to imitate Juvenal by “raking into the sink of vices to procure a laughter.” With these qualifications, he let out all around him with some vigour. The personification of Folly is rather feebly sustained, though the character is pleasantly introduced with the sentence: “I was born neither in the floating Delos nor on the frothy sea, nor in any of the privacies where too forward mothers are wont to retire for undiscovered delivery.” But the _obiter dicta_ on various classes of men who have often been the butts of satirists since his day are still entertaining and must in his own time have been shocking. He refers to priests as “wisely foreseeing that the people, like cows, which never give down their milk so well as when they are gently stroked, would part with less if they knew more, their bounty proceeding only from a mistake of charity.” He speaks of “The Carthusians, which order alone keeps honesty and piety among them, but really keeps them so close that nobody ever yet could see them,” and he is especially down on the scholastic theologians. Sterne, it will be remembered, described a dispute “as to whether God could make a nose as big as the steeple of Strasburg.” This is scarcely a caricature of the kind of discussion ridiculed by Erasmus:

“Whether this proposition is possible to be true; that the
first person of the Trinity hated the second?

“Whether God, who took our nature upon him in the form of a
man, could as well have become a woman, a devil, a beast, an
herb, or a stone. And were it possible that the Godhead had
appeared in the shape of an inanimate substance, how he then
should have preached his gospel? Or how have been nailed to the
cross? Whether if St. Peter had celebrated the eucharist at the
same time our Saviour was hanging on the cross, the consecrated
bread would have been transubstantiated into the same body that
remained on the tree?”

Word-spinning he detested, and he refers the Nominalists, the Realists, the Thomists, the Albertists, the Scotists, etc., to the primitive disciples who were “well acquainted with the Virgin Mary, yet none of them undertook to prove that she was preserved immaculate from original sin.”

“The disciples baptized all nations, and yet never taught
what was the formal, material, efficient, and final cause of
baptism, and certainly never dreamt of distinguishing between a
delible and an indelible character in this sacrament.”

Chaucer, with his observations about relics and “pigges bones,” and the novelists who never hesitated to put friars in the most ignominious positions (e. g. in chimneys and under tables) had made sport of the clergy, but Erasmus’s particular method of battering current theology had not been so devastatingly employed since Lucian. He showed, like Rabelais, that it is possible to reconcile the profession of Christianity with something of what a recent writer calls “the old Voltairean love of humanity.”

Erasmus made the familiar sport of lawyers and pedantic critics. He would have agreed with Sterne: “Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world—though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst—the cant of criticism is the most tormenting.” “When any of them,” he says,

“has found out who was the mother of Anchises, or has lighted
upon some old unusual word, such as bubsequa, bovinator,
manticulator, or other like obsolete cramp terms, or can,
after a great deal of poring, spell out the inscription of
some battered monument: Lord! what joy, what triumph, what
congratulating their success, as if they had conquered Africa,
or taken Babylon the Great!”

It was for such people’s benefit that he must have made his irritating final remark: “I hate a hearer that will carry anything away with him.”

Erasmus was the mildest of the famous satirists, but he has his place in the great succession, though his works cannot now compete for readableness with those of Lucian, Rabelais, Swift, Sterne, and Voltaire. Satirists have usually been considerable plagiarists, and _The Praise of Folly_ has an important historical place in the development of this kind of literature. Richard Burton cribbed a good deal from it, in spite of his own drastic remark about persons who “lard their lean bookes with fat of others’ workes” and his question: “If that severe doom of Synesius be true it is a greater offence to steal dead men’s labours than their cloaths, what shall become of most writers?” But Burton has an account on the other side, for Sterne later on reprinted chunks of his work almost literally without any acknowledgement whatever.

The new Oxford edition gives a modernized reprint of the Caroline Version by John Wilson. In the introduction Mrs. P. S. Allen gives some interesting bibliographical particulars. Over forty editions of the _Encomium Moriæ_ were published in the author’s lifetime; within forty years of its first Latin issue French, Italian, and English translations had been published; and later versions have appeared in (amongst other languages) Swedish, Czech, Polish, and Modern Greek.

Was Cromwell an Alligator?

Some people—who at least avoid the error of ascribing the invention to Steele or Addison—say that Abraham Cowley was the Father of the English Essay. It might alternatively be suggested that Q. Horatius Flaccus was one of its parents and Montaigne the other; Bacon having, so to speak, a watching brief at the birth. But the other statement is true in a sense: for though in patches Bacon (and Burton) anticipated the tone and method of that type of writing which was brought to its fullest perfection by Charles Lamb, Cowley was the man who fixed the type. His essays have just been republished in a beautiful little edition of the Collected Prose Works, issued by the Oxford University Press, and edited by Mr. A. B. Gough. Mr. Gough is a most painstaking editor, and his notes are abnormally full. They are so full that one feels that most people who are likely to acquire such a book will find nine-tenths of them unnecessary; but one ought not to grumble at that, since they have the complementary advantage of always supplying information when one looks for it.

The edition is especially to be welcomed as there are many persons capable of appreciating Cowley who have never come into contact with him. “Who now reads Cowley?” Pope asked in 1737; if the question were repeated to-day you certainly would not get a forest of hands raised, even in an audience replete with pince-nez and bulging brows. It was Cowley’s misfortune, as it was his ambition, to be known in his own days as one of the greatest poets of his time; when men discovered that he was not that, they at once concluded that he was nothing else. Not that his poems are as negligible as some critics assert; his mere skill and neatness make him worth reading. Even if he had, as Mr. Gough remarks, “too little passion and spontaneity to be a great lyric poet,” he was at any rate a good metrist and a most admirable phrasemaker. But his prose writings are certainly superior to the others; and this is true not only of the Essays. His _Vision Concerning Oliver Cromwell_, for example, is full of witty and whimsical things. Occasionally he employs very drastic language, as when he refers to the Protector as an “alligator” and when he abuses him for meditating the calling in of the Jews. This is how Cowley disports himself. The italics are mine:

“From which he was rebuked by the universal outcry of the
Divines, and even of the Citizens too, _who took it ill that a
considerable number at least among themselves were not thought
Jews enough by their own Herod_. And for this design, they say,
he invented ... to sell St. Pauls to them for a synagogue, if
their purses and devotions could have reacht to the purchase.
And this indeed if he had done onely to reward that Nation
which had given the first noble example of crucifying their
King, _it might have had some appearance of gratitude_, but
he did it onely for love of their Mammon; and would have
sold afterwards for as much more St. Peters (even at his own
Westminster) to the Turks for a Mosquito [Mosque]. Such was
his extraordinary Piety to God, that he desired he might be
worshipped in all manners, excepting only that heathenish way
of the Common Prayer Book.”