Chapter IV: Part 4

I do not remember that any of our meditative essayists has written on the subject of Moving One’s Books. If such an essay exists I should be glad to go to it for sympathy and consolation. For I have just moved from one room to another, in which I devoutly hope that I shall end my days, though (as Mr. Asquith would put it in his rounded way) “at a later, rather than at an earlier, date.” Night after night I have spent carting down two flights of stairs more books than I ever thought I possessed. Journey after journey, as monotonously regular as the progresses of a train round the Inner Circle: upstairs empty-handed, and downstairs creeping with a decrepit crouch, a tall, crazy, dangerously bulging column of books wedged between my two hands and the indomitable point of my chin. The job simply has to be done; once it is started there is no escape from it; but at times during the process one hates books as the slaves who built the Pyramids must have hated public monuments. A strong and bitter book-sickness floods one’s soul. How ignominious to be strapped to this ponderous mass of paper, print, and dead men’s sentiments! Would it not be better, finer, braver, to leave the rubbish where it lies and walk out into the world a free, untrammelled, illiterate Superman? Civilization! Pah! But that mood is, I am happy to say, with me ephemeral. It is generated by the necessity for tedious physical exertion and dies with the need. Nevertheless the actual transport is about the briefest and least harassing of the operations called for. Dusting (or “buffeting the books,” as Dr. Johnson called it) is a matter of choice. One can easily say to oneself, “These books were banged six months ago” (knowing full well that it was really twelve months ago), and thus decide to postpone the ceremony until everything else has been settled. But the complications of getting one’s library straight are still appalling.

Of course, if your shelves are moved bodily it is all right. You can take the books out, lay them on the floor in due order, and restore them to their old places. But otherwise, if you have any sense of congruity and proportion, you are in for a bad time. My own case could not be worse than it is. The room from which I have been expelled was low and square; the room into which I have been driven is high and L-shaped. None of my old wall-shelves will fit my new walls; and I have had to erect new ones, more numerous than the old and totally different in shape and arrangement. It is quite impossible to preserve the old plan; but the devisal of another one brings sweat to the brow. If one happened to be a person who never desired to refer to his books the obvious thing to do would be to put the large books into the large shelves and the small ones into the small shelves and then go and smoke a self-satisfied pipe against the nearest post. But to a man who prefers to know where every book is, and who possesses, moreover, a sense of System and wishes everything to be in surroundings proper to its own qualities, this is not possible. Even an unsystematic man must choose to add a classification by subject to the compulsory classification by size; and, in my case, there is an added difficulty produced by a strong hankering for some sort of chronological order. There is nothing like that for easy reference. If you know that Beowulf will be at the left-hand end of the shelf that he fits and Julia Ward, the Sweet Singer of Michigan, at the right-hand end, you save yourself a good deal of time. But when your new compartments do not fit your old sections, when the large books of Stodge are so numerous as to insist upon intruding into the shelves reserved for large books of Pure Literature, and the duodecimos of Foreign Verse surge in a tidal wave over the preserves of the small books on Free Trade, Ethics, and Palæontology, one is reduced to the verge of despair. That is where I am at this moment; sitting in the midst of a large floor covered with sawdust, white distemper, nails, tobacco-ash, burnt matches, and the Greatest Works of the World’s Greatest Masters. Fortunately, in Ruskin’s words, “I don’t suppose I shall do it again for months and months and months.”

Table-Talk and Jest Books

Samuel Butler’s _Note-Books_ have now gone into another (popular) edition, issued by Mr. Fifield. I don’t know how large these editions are: if, as I fear, they run to less than fifty thousand copies apiece, Samuel Butler has not yet got his due. There is no other volume in the whole of his collected works to equal this selection from his note-books: you have here the quintessence of his wisdom, his taste, and his superb impudence. The book really belongs to the “table-talk” or “ana” class of books. Butler, that is to say, recorded his own table-talk. His principle was, he said, that if you wanted to record a thought you had to shoot it on the wing. If, therefore, he thought of or said anything especially illuminating or amusing, or heard any one else say anything of the sort, down it went. And it always went down as colloquially and freshly as if a Boswell had been present recording conversation with a faithful pen. Butler Boswellized himself. For Boswell’s _Life_, as has been remarked before, is the greatest collection of “ana” in the language. It consisted of Johnson’s table-talk strung on a biographical thread.

Personally I find it hard to draw the line between general table-talk and anecdotes told of certain persons: most collections include both. But such works, of whatever kind, consisting of detached scraps of great men’s wit, are an agreeable form of reading, and an old-established one. The Greeks possessed volumes of excerpts from people’s conversation, and some Latin wrote a book, now unfortunately lost, under the piquant title of _De Jocis Ciceronis_. The great age of such collections began, however, with the Renaissance, when Poggio the Florentine collected his “facetiæ.” My own extracts from Poggio are included in a German collection of 1603, all written in Latin, which gives also the “facetiæ” of other wits, notably of Nicodemus Frischlin of Balingen. This man was a German scholar of exceptional brilliance who finally, on being incarcerated for the last of many escapades, broke his neck trying to escape. We have no such University professors of classics now. “Ana” so-called begin with the _Scaligerana_, which gave the drastic conversation of the younger Scaliger as recorded by two of his disciples. The success of this led to a rush in France. Every one who had known an eminent man deceased rushed out with a volume of table-talk; _Thuana_, _Perroniana_, etc. The _Sorberiana_ “sive excerpta ex ore Samuelis Sorbiere” was famous in its day, but I find it very dull. Much the best collection is _Menagiana_, “Bon Mots, Rencontres Agréables, Pensées Judicieuses, et Observations Curieuses de M. Ménage,” of which the second edition (my copy) is dated 1694-5. This man was a scholar, knew everybody and had a sharp tongue: he is extremely good reading, though, nowadays, very little read. The contents of both of these books are arranged (as is Butler’s) under subject-headings, in alphabetical order. The same order is observed in Selden’s _Table-Talk_, the next best book of the kind to Boswell in our tongue. It was published after Selden’s death by his private secretary, and is full of extraordinarily sensible and witty things. And, unlike many wits, Selden always possessed a sense of responsibility. He remarked himself (under heading “Wit,” as he did not realize) that

“He that lets fly all he knows and thinks may by chance be
satyrically witty. Honesty sometimes keeps a man from growing
rich, and civility from being witty.”

Few of the wits whose sayings are collected are so scrupulous. Our other classical example in the kind is Coleridge’s _Table-Talk_, which is full of fine criticism, funny stories, and good epigrams.

These collections shade off into the ordinary jest book. After all, there is no clear division between stories told by a dead man and stories collected and published by a living one, between stories about one man and stories about fifty different men. When the new learning was still new, men had a mania for collecting pointed anecdotes about the eminent. The fattest book of the kind I know is Casper Ens’s _Epidorpidum_, published at Cologne in the early seventeenth century. It is full of the remarks of Alexander to Diogenes and Pope Innocent to St. Vitus and the repartees of King Pyrrhus of Epirus to a recalcitrant phalanx. Right on into the eighteenth century works with titles like _Elite de Bon-Mots_, and full of such historical personages, were popular on the Continent. English jest books were perhaps more local and contemporary in their references. Our eighteenth-century ancestors were addicted to anecdotes about Mr. Quin and Mr. Foote and what the Duke of Wharton said to the Bishop. In our own time the larger, if not the smaller, public still shows some demand for collections of anecdotes of this sort: and popular weeklies of the _Answers_ and _Tit-Bits_ type usually seem to find it desirable to print columns of stories about Henry Irving, Mr. Gladstone, and such people. But it is a long way from _Tit-Bits_ to Samuel Butler: which shows where one may land oneself if one does not know where to draw a firm line when shading-off is apparently gradual. I cannot review Butler at this time of day; but there are very few books existing which contain more sense to the square inch than this. Though the worst of his books is good reading, the _Note-Books_ is as certainly his finest book as Boswell’s _Johnson_ is the finest of Johnson’s.

Stephen Phillips

The announcements of Stephen Phillips’s death must have carried many people’s thoughts backward. Me personally it took back to a time, years ago, when I was in the first flush of my youthful beauty and sitting out at a country dance. Coloured lamps burned between boughs, trees gently swished under a summer sky, the sound of violins and the glide of many feet penetrated softly from a distance; and a partner, whose face was shadowy pale in the faint light, sat clasping her knees, looking out into the night, and talking in a deep ecstatic voice of _Marpessa_, _Herod_, and _Paolo and Francesca_. It was not merely that she thought that I was that sort of person: the same thing was happening in every county in England. Phillips had the biggest boom that any English poet has had for a generation. The extravagance of the eulogies seems very strange now. There was scarcely a critic who did not lose his balance. I have just been looking up some of these panegyrics, and the pitch of them makes one feel a little sadly for a man who outlived so great and so early a fame. The history of literature was ransacked for comparisons. Chapman, Webster, Wordsworth, Shakespeare himself were brought in: and almost the most modest of the assessors was Mr. William Archer, who described Phillips as “the elder Dumas speaking with the voice of Milton.” I remember the _Daily Mail_ devoting its magazine page to a description of the poet, in the course of which it explained, with characteristic love of figures, that here was a man who had discovered how to make £1000 a year out of poetry. But it did not last. The climax of Phillips’s success came with _Paolo and Francesca_; the subsequent plays were received with a diminuendo of warmth; and in the last few years he was comparatively ignored.

The early adoration was absurd but not incomprehensible. It was due, one might say, to the fact that Phillips was not an original writer. Much used to be made of a certain trick he had of accenting occasional lines of blank verse in a strange manner: on the strength of this he was treated as a revolutionary innovator in English prosody. In reality, in spite of this one peculiarity, he was anything but an innovator. He had an ear for the magniloquent progress of Milton’s verse and the crooning music of Tennyson’s; he had a great facility for reproducing them; and to those who are susceptible only to artistic effects which (though they are unconscious of it) remind them of effects previously experienced, he seemed, therefore, to be a consummate artist. He gave them precisely what they had learnt to desire and expect from a poet, the familiar splendours and the familiar silences, the familiar agonies and the familiar tendernesses, the scents, the flowers, the gems, the old words with their unmistakable associations, the brilliant single lines, with here and there an alliteration and here and there an onomatopœia. His work was not, of course, a _mere_ compost. He added something. His emotions, though not deep, were genuine enough; he had a pretty fancy; and he had a considerable knowledge of how to produce effects on the stage. _Paolo and Francesca_ was certainly in every way superior to most of the other attempts which have been made in our time at stage-plays in blank verse. It was effective in the theatre. One remembers the excitement about the skilful ending: the murder behind the scenes, the bodies brought in, the murderer’s revulsion:

_I did not know the dead could have such hair._
_Hide them. They look like children fast asleep._

But those who did not shrink from comparing it with _Romeo and Juliet_ omitted to notice the same deficiencies as appeared in all his work. He was largely derivative and there was very little hard brainwork behind his verse.

_Herod_, _Ulysses_, and _Nero_ were all less well made: the last two were panoramas. In all three the author depended on succulent or flamboyant “purple patches” for his effects, descriptions too full of redundant metaphor and violent outbursts of picturesque but too flimsy rhetoric. There was little characterization in them, the persons were puppets in the hands of the contriver of stage spectacles: they were carried off by brilliant and exotic scenery and costumes, by the romantic language, and by the real and skilful, if conventional, melody of the verse. All the best qualities of Stephen Phillips, the qualities that gave people a thrill they were unaccustomed to in the theatre of his time, are quintessentialized in Herod’s megalomaniac speeches and in the oratorical Marlowesque remark that one of the suitors in _Ulysses_ made to Penelope:

_Thou hast caught splendour from the sailless sea_
_And mystery from the many stars outwatched._

His defects were observed by few when he was a popular dramatist: but those readers who only know him by his later work will misjudge him if they think that he never had more power than he showed in that. His more recent volumes, written in ill-health, would never have got him a reputation. Here and there the old bravura appeared, and there is a short lyric in the volume of 1913 which is certainly equal to anything in the early book of poems with which he made his name—and in which he showed signs of contact with the “movement” of the ’nineties. But from most of these later poems the life had gone, leaving the imitative structure naked to the eye. His last volume, _Panama and other Poems_, was issued just before he died by his original publisher, Mr. John Lane; and the way in which he had succumbed to his influences was very evident. Lines on the Canal such as

_Chagres by Dam stupendous of Gatun_

not merely remind one of Milton but are exact mechanical reproductions of Milton.

Incidentally the difficulties of literary biography are illustrated by his obituary notices. _My Daily News_ gave his age as forty-nine, my _Times_ gave it as fifty-one; and looking into the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ to see which of these estimates it would confirm, I found that it alleged him to be forty-seven. _The Encyclopædia_ says that he was at Queens’ College, Cambridge, when he joined Mr. Benson’s company; the _Times_ that he was cramming at Scoones’. When we have this conflict of evidence about a contemporary who was known personally to hundreds of people in London, where are we with Elizabethans and Romans? Personally I believe that, in the matter of birth-dates, nothing is really reliable—not even a man’s own statement—except public registers.

Gray and Horace Walpole

If a gentleman in Calabria digs up with a spade a hitherto unknown fragment of the obscure Latin historian P. Pomponius Fatto there is great excitement about it, and research congratulates itself upon its achievements. I can quite appreciate the feeling. All treasure-trove is exciting. The smallest recovery from the long-buried past is worth having; it may, in itself, fill a gap somewhere and encourages the hope of greater finds. But why not make just as much of a palaver about Dr. Paget Toynbee’s disinterment of nearly a hundred “new” letters by the poet Gray? The new letters are included in _The Correspondence of Gray, Walpole, West, and Ashton_ (Oxford University Press, 2 vols.); and they were found in the collection of Captain Sir F. E. Waller, who was recently killed in action, and to whose memory the volume is dedicated. Gray, Horace Walpole, Richard West, and Thomas Ashton formed a “Quadruple Alliance” at Eton. West went on to Oxford, the other three to Cambridge. We get first of all an exchange between all four; then West dies, in his twenties; then, years afterwards, relations with Ashton are broken; and, finally, there is a long series that passed between Walpole and Gray up to the time of the poet’s death in 1771. In all there are 248 letters; of these 153 were written by Gray, eighty-nine of which have never been published before. Others have never before been printed in full, and few have escaped maltreatment by previous editors. Their errors ranged from deliberate alteration, truncation, and blending to bad transcription and unintelligent acceptance. How easily the most comic errors may creep into a text where each editor neglects to use, or has not access to, original sources may be shown by the history of a single word. Gray wrote a Latin poem about the god of Love in which one line began “Ludentem fuge.” This was printed by Miss Berry as “Sudentem fuge”; and this has been “corrected” by subsequent editors into “_Sudantem fuge_”!

The characters of the correspondents come out very clearly. Even when, just after they have left school, they are all writing rather affectedly (and with a plethora of classical quotation), Ashton is obviously the one fundamentally insincere member of the group. He is hyperself-conscious, nastily artificial. Later on he even refers in Joseph Surface’s very own words to his “noble sentiments”: this was clearly the man to make, by his double-dealing, the temporary breach between Gray and Walpole, and, ultimately, to compel Walpole to cast him off by his incivility when Walpole was no longer useful to him. Richard West, son of an Irish Lord Chancellor, has no apparent defect save excessive seriousness. There is a touch of the priggish mixed with the high-mindedness and generosity of this able young invalid; but one can understand Gray’s devotion to him. Some of the poetry of his here given (he appeared in Dodsley’s _Miscellany_ by the way) is surprisingly good. He was the Arthur Hallam of the eighteenth century.

The Walpole letters are, as always, unsurpassable of their kind. His undergraduate letter (in parody of Addison’s descriptions of Italy) relating a journey from London to Cambridge, is admirable; but the letters describing his continental tour with Gray are better, and those, still later, about the _beau monde_ of Paris are perfect. There is a peculiar charm too about the correspondence with Gray as to the details and publication of his works, the half-solemn, half whimsical concentration on the tiny antiquarian details to which each was addicted, the eager little controversies and explorations, the odd little jokes. But though Gray, taking his correspondence as a whole, considering both volume, range, and formal excellence, cannot contest Walpole’s position as the greatest of English letter-writers, there is a flavour about his letters that makes them peculiarly delightful. Walpole writes fully dressed, though with exquisite manner; Gray writes naturally, and without obvious reserve sometimes even gambolling. There may be people, familiar with Gray only through his elevated and sombre verse, who fancy him an exceedingly self-contained and formal man, who feel (like the person who greatly amused him by addressing him as “The Rev. T. Gray”) that he simply _must_ have been a divine. There were certainly contemporaries of his who met him and got the impression that he was constitutionally grave, reticent, aloof. His letters show that he was anything but that to his friends. The author of the _Elegy_ habitually “played the goat.” There are a whole string of skit letters here: in one he writes to Walpole as “Honner’d Nurse,” addressing the illiterate screed “to mie Nuss att London”; in another he wallows in Oriental imagery about the dew of the morning; in another he applies to stagnant Cambridge a whole long passage from Isaiah describing deserted Babylon, the home of dragons and haunt of screech-owls. He had a great habit of ending his letters with something openly idiotic. Once he bursts out with “Pray, did you ever see an elephant?”; another time his peroration is:

“The Assizes are just over. I was there; but I a’nt to be
transported. Adieu!”

and another excursion concludes with a ludicrous burlesque of the type of commonplaces usually to be found in letters:

“There is a curious woman here that spins Glass, and makes
short Aprons and furbelow’d petticoats of it, a very genteel
wear for summer, & discover’s all the motions of the limbs to
great advantage. She is a successour of Jack, the Aple dumpling
Spinner’s: my Duck has eat a Snail &c.: & I am—yours sincerely
T. G.”

Those who think of poets as persons without humour who live in a permanent exaltation and are quite unlike reasonable beings will be shocked with Gray’s remarks when he had, to the publisher’s alarm, withdrawn a poem from his forthcoming small volume:

“but to supply the place of it in bulk, lest my work should
be mistaken for the works of a flea or a pismire, I promised
to send him an equal weight of poetry or prose: so, since my
return hither, I put up about two ounces of stuff: viz. The
Fatal Sisters, The Descent of Odin ... with all this I shall be
but a shrimp of an author.”

On a night nine years before this, General Wolfe, as his boat crept towards the Quebec bank of St. Lawrence, had recited the _Elegy_ to his companions and told them that he had rather have written that poem than take Quebec.

Gray’s judgments on other authors (though he was unjust to the more fermentative kind of Frenchman) were uniformly good. He suspected Ossian, but hoped he was a fraud for the sake of the jest. If, he said, Macpherson had done it all to hoax fools, “I would undertake a journey into the Highlands only for the pleasure of seeing him.” He read Boswell’s early book on Corsica and almost prophetically observed:

“The pamphlet proves what I have always maintained, that any
fool may write a most valuable book by chance, if he will only
tell us what he heard and saw with veracity.”

In politics he was interested only mildly, but he liked to gossip about them. “Do oblige me,” he writes to Walpole,

“with a change in the Ministry: I mean, something one may tell,
that looks as if it were near at hand; or if there is no truth
to be had, then a good likely falsehood for the same purpose. I
am sorry to be so reduced.”

“A good likely falsehood”: is it not in perpetual demand?

A Horrible Bookseller

People often complain that booksellers know too little about the goods they sell. If only, the argument is, books were sold by men of taste, familiar with their contents, the public would buy more good literature: as things are, the blind bookseller leads the blind customer. There is something in this. An educated bookseller can actually educate other people. Many intelligent young persons reach the age of twenty-one without having met a single person with the habit of good reading, and do not “get on to” literature because it has never been suggested to them that they will like it. Booksellers may act as teachers. There are booksellers, though not many, who make a practice of “nursing” promising young customers, gradually cultivating their taste until they become confirmed book-lovers and book-buyers. One such complained to me not long ago that he had had scores of likely colts taken away from him by Lord Kitchener, and did not know how many of them would come back. That is an ideal sort of man for the trade in modern literature. One might say, in fact, that in a perfect world (from the book-buyer’s point of view) the dealers in new books would know everything about books, and the dealers in old books would know nothing whatever about them. The point of this last subsection is obvious, but the other day I had an experience that greatly fortified my view. I had often met the second-hand bookseller whose learning prevented one from buying anything cheap from him; I have now encountered one whose interest in his subject prevented one from buying anything at all.

He was not so much a really learned man as a man with what is called “an inexhaustible fund of information.” It is quite possible that if he had had a real rarity in his shop he would have known nothing about it. But about the promiscuity of his reading there was no doubt. When I entered the shop he was seated at a table absorbing something that looked as if it might be the Travels of Livingstone or Speke. His spectacles were on his forehead, his elbows on the table, his hands in his hair; and his beard almost touched his book. “Do you mind if I go through?” I said. “Sairtainly,” he said, betraying his origin. “And what may you be interested in?” “Oh ... books,” I replied vaguely. “That is a verra conseederable category,” he observed. Was it poetry I liked? he went on. I murmured “Yes,” and he led me to the place where he kept it. But before I had got my fingers on a book he made it evident that it was he and not I that was going to have the “look round.” Here, for example, was a volume of Kirke White. Had I ever read him? How wonderful was that hymn (quoted at length) of his! What a career! He was a butcher’s son and a lawyer’s clerk. He had a gift for mathematics, and they gave him a sizarship at Cambridge. He would have been one of the greatest figures in English literature had he lived. Was I interested in Italian books? Well, then, perhaps I would like a good copy of (!!!) _I Promessi Sposi_. It was extraordinary the number of copies of that book which must have been printed. But there was no supply without a demand.

I tried in vain to check the torrent with some sort of remark which, though polite, might, nevertheless, have an air of finality. It was no good. My fingers never got beyond touching the back of a book before he had taken down another, pulled me round, and fixed me with a glittering eye for which the Ancient Mariner himself would have been tempted to offer a large sum. Godwin, now. Did I like _Caleb Williams_? Yes, of course! But had I read his History of England? It was by way of being a reply to Clarendon. Clarendon was a great writer. But he was not impartial. And the worst of it was that he seemed to be impartial when he was most unfair. When he was sacrificing everything for his King he little thought how his loyalty would be rewarded. He was too moral for Charles II; but, what was worse, he kept the purse-strings too tight. He would not give him money for one of his mistresses. Was it Barbara Palmer? No, it was not Barbara Palmer, and it was not Nelly Gwyn. At any rate, it was one of them. And when, in the end, the grant was made to her, she died before she got the money!

This appeared to amuse the old man. When he had laughed himself out, it was to resume with some work, dated 1784, which contained a recipe for making a Prime Minister: the chief ingredients being hypocrisy, mendacity, corruption, and cant. This opened up a large field of speculation. Who was Premier in 1784? Why, of course, it was young Billy Pitt! (“Yes,” I said.) No, it was Rockingham. (“Yes,” I said.) No, it wasn’t; it was Bute. So it proceeded. I spent, in all, two hours in that shop; in the course of which time I had stolen glances at about six worthless books. For all I know it was as full of gems of purest ray serene as are the dark unfathomed caves of ocean. I left without making a single purchase, and the proprietor seemed quite hurt at this unfriendly response to his attentions. How that old man earns his living I don’t know. I think he must have private means. But in future I shall have a warmer feeling than ever for the sort of red-nosed second-hand bookseller, now, unfortunately, not very common, who knows only the outsides of books, and who sits smoking on a heap of rubbish in the corner of his shop with the air of a tramp resting on a roadside pile of stones.

The Troubles of a Catholic

Being at the moment in bed with influenza, I was at once incapable of intellectual effort and in need of spiritual sustenance. I had therefore been reading a little Theology. The more modern works of the kind in my possession are at once too profound in thought and too arid in phraseology, so I worked rapidly backwards. One never knows what one is going to come across, and in the beginning of _A Just Discharge to Dr. Stillingfleet’s Unjust Charge of Idolatry Against the Church of Rome with a Discovery of the Vanity of his late Defense in his Pretended Answer to a Book Entitled Catholicks No Idolaters By way of Dialogue Between Eunomius, a Conformist, and Catharinus, a Nonconformist_, I struck a very pathetic thing. The work was written, I believe, by the Catholic controversialist Godden, and published in 1677. At that time it was difficult for Catholics to get anything out in England, and this work was published at Paris. Hence the unhappy author’s statement about “Errata”:

“The English Press being watch’d of late, as the Orchard of
the Hesperides was of old, and a necessity arising from thence
of making use of a Paris Printer, who understands not a word
of English, the Reader will have no cause to wonder, if he
sometimes meet with _ant_ for _and_, _bu_ for _but_, _te_ for
_the_, _is_ for _it_, _tit_ for _tis_, _wish_ for _with_, etc.,
and oftentimes with false Pointings, words unduly joined, and
syllables un-artificially divided at the end of lines, as
_Ro-me_, _appropria-te_, and the like. I can assure him, the
Correction of the Press cost little less pains than the writing
of the Treatise.”

In that century a great many English books were printed on the Continent, at Paris, Douai, and elsewhere; and the situation thus candidly explained must have been a common one. A collection of English books printed abroad, which would be interesting for other reasons, might also have an added interest as a repository of comic misprints. But my disease must have brought me very low that I can spend my time thinking of that.

The Bible as Raw Material

Mr. George Moore’s new novel, _The Brook Kerith_, is a Biblical story. Mr. Moore has adopted the legend which says that Our Lord survived the Crucifixion. He is taken away alive and joins a colony of the Essenes, complications afterwards arising with St. Paul. The book is named after the site of the Essene settlement; Mr. Moore personally toured the Holy Land looking for a really eligible position. The story opens with a description of the boyhood of Joseph of Arimathea: a beginning which at least avoids the reproach of being obvious.

One might almost say that literature about Biblical personages can only hope to be good if its writers either deal with episodes that are not related in the Bible or if they tell the Bible stories from an entirely novel and unconventional point of view. Anatole France’s story about Pontius Pilate, _The Procurator of Judaea_, has this last quality, and owes its success mainly to the odd and unexpected angle from which the subject is approached. The unusual angle we may at least expect from Mr. George Moore. Attempts at covering the same ground as the Bible, at amplifying an already fine thing, are almost predestined to failure. One can understand the temptation. A modern writer comes across a noble story or a fine lyric passage, and thinks, “What a scandal that this should be buried away out of sight in the Old Testament! It is just the theme for me.” The lure is so strong that one contemporary poet has attempted, and failed (through not ignominiously), to rewrite David’s Lament for Jonathan, and another has endeavoured to adapt the dramatic poem _Job_ to the modern stage. It was a lamentable affair, redeemed only from complete inconspicuousness by a highly incongruous chorus inspired by Swinburne and by an arresting entry of Satan with the salutation:

_Ho Job! How goes it?_

No modern—but I have not thoroughly ransacked my memory—has really succeeded in rewriting a Bible story. The most striking of recent efforts was Mr. Sturge Moore’s _Judith_. Mr. Robert Trevelyan’s poem, _The Foolishness of Solomon_ (a title that, for some vague reason, I always resent), belonged to the other class of works dealing with Biblical personages (though he brought in a Chinese mandarin as well), but not on the Biblical lines. The most recent effort at elaborate treatment of the New Testament story was, I suppose, Maeterlinck’s _Mary Magdalene_. But in spite of its unorthodoxy and the novelty (at least as far as the Bible is concerned, for some of it was borrowed from a German) of the incidents, that play scarcely competed, in point of dialogue or dramatic force, with the more old-fashioned narratives of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Milton is the one English writer who has done anything with Biblical materials on a large scale. It will be observed, however, that in _Paradise Lost_ he enormously elaborated the story in Genesis; that his Adam and Eve are somewhat colourless; and that the finest parts of his poem are not directly concerned with “man’s first disobedience and the fruit,” but deal with regions into which the author of Genesis did not penetrate. In _Samson Agonistes_ he did take a story from the Bible and make out of it a work of art equal to almost anything in our language. Byron’s _Cain_ might mostly have been about Nietzsche for all the connexion it has with the Bible: but it is not very good. Almost every fine subject in the Scriptures must have been attacked at one time or another. There have been a few good short Biblical poems, like Browning’s _Saul_. But the only other really reputable Biblical poem on a large scale that I can think of is Charles Wells’s _Joseph and His Brethren_, which has strength as a story and some passages of fine imagery. Wells belonged to the generation of Keats and lived on into our own time. He was an engineer, stopped writing when young, and was admired by Rossetti and Swinburne. His poem, however, cannot really be considered such good reading as the Bible account of the same story. One of the episodes that came within his purview, that of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, has been a subject for poets in all ages. The last endeavour that I can recall to make something out of it was a somewhat bejewelled one of Sir Edwin Arnold’s. The longest, I should think, is Joshua Sylvester’s intolerably tedious series of couplets entitled _The Maiden’s Blush_. Why he conferred that title upon such a poem I don’t know, unless he was thinking of what might happen to the less robust of his female readers. Those parts of Holy Writ which are of purely historical interest have not been freely drawn on by English writers. I don’t remember that much has been done with the Maccabees, and the chronicles of the Kings of Israel, which supplied Racine with a subject for his _Athalie_, have left English writers cold. Jehu drove furiously, Jeroboam the son of Nebat made Israel to sin, and Rehoboam afflicted his people with scorpions instead of whips; but their violence does not seem to fire the poetic imagination as does that of Herod, about whom we know very little more. But Herod, of course, was fond of the Russian ballet; which brings him closer to us.

How to avoid Bad English

Good books on the practice of writing are rare. Sir A. Quiller-Couch’s _On the Art of Writing_ is extraordinarily good. It contains the lectures he delivered at Cambridge just before the war; and even readers who do not desire to write at all will find Sir Arthur’s jokes very amusing and his criticisms, general and particular, sound and (what is more unusual) new. He touches a great variety of subjects, though always in some relation to the main theme. He is especially illuminating on the Authorized Version, and on Homer’s skill in dealing with the “Primary Difficulty of Verse”—that is to say, the difficulty of filling up the interstices between highly emotional passages without lapsing into dull prosiness. His most diverting chapter is that on what he calls “Jargon,” which he distinguishes from Journalese. The distinction he draws may be appreciated if I concoct examples of both commodities. Writing in “Jargon” I might say:

“In the case of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch I am proud and happy
to associate myself in the fullest sense with a work of this
useful, elevating, instructive, and educative character.”

Writing in Journalese, as he defines it, I might say:

“‘Q.’s brilliant book goes to the root of the matter. It
strikes home. He is out to slay the dragons of bad writing.
He burns them with the fire of his passion. He lashes them
with the scourge of his invective. He tears them to shreds and
tatters with the shrapnel of his ridicule. He will not sheathe
the sword until ...”

Yes.... The first kind consists of woolly, indefinite words, of redundancies and shapeless prolixities; the man who writes the second is trying to produce what he believes to be “literature” by means of imagery and rhythmical movement. Sir Arthur says that the greatest propagators of Jargon are public bodies, politicians, and so on; but he recognizes that journalists also use it. The two things, in fact, are often seen in one article. I conceive that there might be passages which would fall into either of Sir Arthur’s classes. But there is a clear difference between bad sentences produced by an effort to say something and those produced by an effort to say something vividly. All bad writers, however, have common defects, and these are dealt with in other chapters.

Every one who has thought about the art at all has discovered for himself the truths that Sir Arthur tabulates. One must aim at accuracy (a word that covers almost everything that is needful) and at clarity; one must, normally, prefer the concrete to the abstract word, and the short word to the long; and one must avoid the superfluous adjective. How well we know these rules; how certain we are of their validity; how feebly we struggle to obey them! At all times the ready-made sentence, the makeshift epithet, the pot-shot image must have been ready to the hand. In the present age, when we live in a honeycomb of print and begin each day by exposing ourselves, before, during, or after breakfast, to masses of the weakest English we can find, the job of writing well is more difficult than ever. Our fluency is the measure of our accursed memory. We have bales of phrases ready for every experience we describe; our pigeon-holes are stuffed with dead metaphors and bogus synonyms; and we are always ready to say in six words what ought to be said in two. Every time we sit down at a desk or open our lips to speak, the nymphs Jargonia and Journalesia, besieging us as the sylphs besieged St. Anthony, hold out their hands full of glittering treasures which will save us the trouble of thinking. Usually we do not even see them; we find the fatal gifts in our hands and employ them without remembering their origin. And the descent to hell is rapid.

It is good to revise: to correct, to improve, and to delete. Few, even of the most careful writers, find their proof-sheets free from trite and superfluous words which they would be ashamed to publish. It is better still to think long before writing, to make sure that one’s thoughts are clear-cut before one gives them a visible form. That habit it is a writer’s duty to acquire. But it does not do to be incessantly and acutely conscious of the qualities of good writing and the difficulty of securing them. That way madness lies. Sometimes, to a man who broods overmuch on these things, every phrase will appear a cliché, and every word a dummy. “God help me!” he will moan, “I have called the sun ‘bright’ and the grass ‘green’! Millions of men before me have written ‘bright sun’ and ‘green grass.’ I know I did not think freshly and independently _at_ these objects. I put the adjectives down mechanically. I have merely heard that the grass was green. Why haven’t I looked at it through my own eyes? If a real writer looked at it, I don’t for a moment suppose that its greenness would be the attribute which would impinge most forcibly upon him. Very likely it isn’t green at all.” This, I say, does not do. I don’t suggest that there is anything peculiar about grass which should make a novel statement about it impossible. In fact, Swinburne said that grass is hair, and Mr. Chesterton has very probably said that it is red. I merely use “green grass” as an example of the sort of thing that an exaggerated fastidiousness might lead a man to question in his own work.

There remains one property of good prose that no amount of painstaking or instruction can produce. That is rhythm. It is, indeed, remarkable that one of the most elaborate analyses of prose rhythms hitherto made was made by a writer whose own prose is anything but musical. Either Providence has given a man an ear or it has not; if it has not, he will not write great prose. But his prose will be better in proportion as he obeys the principles of good writing as “Q.” enunciates them. One suggestion more might be useful for him. That is, that he will be well advised in making his uneuphonious sentences short if he desires his writing to be an efficient instrument of persuasion.

Woodland Creatures

“Parnassus in Piccadilly,” is the headline I see in my paper. Follows an account of a “séance” promoted by Miss Elizabeth Asquith in aid of the Star and Garter Home. Ten or twelve poets read works of their own to an audience of four hundred who had paid a guinea apiece. Outside the house a large concourse watched the poets arrive. There were Mr. Yeats, Sir O. Seaman, Mr. Hewlett, Sir Henry Newbolt, Mr. Binyon, Mr. de-la Mare, Mrs. Woods, Mr. Belloc, and Mr. W. H. Davies, who is described as looking like “one of his own woodland creatures.” I read that one of the reciters intoned, that another was bluff, and that a third ought to get somebody else to read for him; also that Mr. Birrell, the chairman, sat with his head buried in his hands until the arrival of the first comic turn, Mr. Belloc’s. But I wish I had been there: for the account does not tell me how it was really done.

Did the poets sit in the audience and march up to the platform one by one as their turns came? Did they stand out of sight, each gliding in singly, and then retiring into the antral seclusion of the wings when ten minutes was up? Or did they rather, as I prefer to think, sit on the platform, the whole dozen of them in a semicircle, listening to, and discreetly applauding, each other’s efforts. I am sorry I missed it. Some of them will have been exalted by a sense of the holiness of their work; their eyes will have looked out across the audience with a prophetic and otherworldly fire. Others will have been uneasy and not knowing (unless a table was thoughtfully provided) what to do with their feet. And one or two, I think, will have been preoccupied with the control of their own faces, which, on such an occasion, must have “strained at the leash of dignified deportment.”

Why is it that so many people feel awkward when they are present at a public recitation by a poet of his own verse; and why should writers shrink from such recitations? Amusement on such occasions is closely allied to sheepishness: both spring from a feeling of inappropriateness, a sense that “the fitness of things” is being violated. We are accustomed, of course, to the other kind of recitation, the reading by an interpreter who is not a creator, and who is not exposing his heart in public: the prize child and the local elocutionist who declaims Tennyson’s _Revenge_, daintily fluttering his fingers in the air when he comes to the part about the pinnace which is like a bird. But our poets themselves have not recited much. It was not always so. “’Omer smote his bloomin’ lyre” in public; he had nowhere else to smite it, for he (presumably) could not write, and his audiences could not read. Every composer of tribal lays, from Tubal-Cain (unless his songs were _Lieder ohne Worte_) to the Druidic harpists, sang his compositions to his admiring fellows without embarrassment; troubadours and mediæval laureates had no objection at all to public recitation. Most foreigners, one supposes, do not feel so strongly as we do about it now; but the timidity of Englishmen in the matter is very pronounced. I am sure that nothing short of the needs of a War Fund would have induced some of the Piccadilly performers to face the ordeal.

It is all a part of our national reserve, that very reserve which, perhaps, accounts for the greatness and volume of our poetry. In poetry our feelings find an outlet. We have the habit of concealing our finest sentiments and our profoundest emotions. We don’t mind putting them into books and then running round the corner out of sight. But we dislike unbosoming them _viva voce_ in the actual physical presence of strangers. Our dislike of “scenes” covers equally the public row in a restaurant and the public demonstration of our yearnings after virtue and the stirrings of our hearts when we hear the nightingale or listen to the Atlantic at night. We sit bolt upright at concerts; look at pictures with our mouths set like vices; and observe “Yes, very nice” as, with wistfulness in our breasts, we stand on a hill and look at a wooded panorama under the moon. The grotesque Englishman who stares at a sunset and then laughs and says it looks like a fried egg is really bolting in terror from the admission that it looks like the flaming ramparts of the world. So, if somebody gets up to recite his most intimate feelings, we feel it as almost an indecency. He is usually bashful about it himself, and unable therefore to recite with that abandonment which will do his poem justice. The audience, at least that part of it which is most intelligent and self-conscious, feels as if it were intruding. It is like eavesdropping or opening a stranger’s letters. And everybody is conscious of the national titter in the background. When the authors of Prize Poems at the Universities give the official reading of their verses, their friends invariably assemble to grin in the galleries. Undergraduates have still some naturalness. They titter aloud, but the adult Englishman titters in silence. It is reserve that brings forth the titter and it is still more reserve that suppresses it; just as it is reserve that makes our soldiers sing, not invocations to England, home, or glory, but comic songs about cowardice and death.

The foregoing series of platitudes, slightly varied in accordance with each writer’s tastes and talents, is invariably repeated when the character of English people is under discussion. But it may be that, at any rate in our attitude towards poetry, we are changing. In the last four or five years the habit of public readings has been growing; and some of our poets have grown quite addicted to them. This may be a time of transition: if the enthusiasts for recitation keep at it hard enough, people’s constraint may be overcome, and it may be regarded as quite an ordinary and natural thing for a man to stand on a platform and, with all the passion he can release and all the vocal modulation he can command, chant his lyrics to congregations which will yield themselves to him with all the spontaneity, though less than all the gestures and ejaculations, of a Welsh revivalist’s converts. It is a commonplace that poetry gains by being spoken; and that if verse were always read and never recited, poets would be in danger of getting out of touch with natural speech-rhythms. We could do with a little less amusement and a little more excitement; and we might as well, if cowardice or a sense of humour are the only things that hold us back, hold and attend public readings until we are as unselfconscious about them as we are about church services or political meetings. The worst of it is that poets do not invariably read well, and that few persons with the taste for standing on a platform and declaiming are competent to take an author’s place as reciter of his work. There is such a thing as the inspired reader of other people’s verse; but the understanding, the inclination, and the voice cannot be expected to come often together. When the author himself is reciting you can at least be certain that the speaker—unless he is a very “advanced” poet indeed—understands the work which he is repeating. With other performers one always has to take one’s chance. From the professional reciter God save us all.

Other People’s Books

Like most people, I possess a number of books which I have not read. I am not referring to volumes, such as the _Speculum Morale_ of Vincent of Beauvais or the commentary of Œcolampadius on St. John’s Gospel, which I bought merely because they looked pleasant and which nobody on earth could be expected to read. I mean books in English and of comparatively recent date. There is, for example, Kant’s _Critique of Pure Reason_, for which, in a weak moment, I paid some shillings with the feeling that, as a cogitative being, I ought not leave so notable a stone unturned. The feeling passed and never came back. And there is Ranke’s _History of the Popes_—up to the present undisturbed by me; there are _The Last Days of Pompeii_, _Romola_, _Vittoria_, Carlyle’s essays on Burns and Scott, _What Maisie knew_, _What Katy did_, and dozens of other modern works, some of which, if I live, I shall certainly read, and others of which, I am sure, I shall never begin. But it makes no difference. Whether he has read them or not, a man’s own books get, in a manner, stale to him. If a book remains for years unopened on one’s shelves it becomes increasingly difficult to read it. Yet if one finds another edition of it in somebody else’s house one may fly to it, and, under the same conditions, one may read or re-read almost anything one finds.