Chapter V: Part 5

So it is, at the moment, with me. I am in a place previously unknown to me. It is bestrewn with books; and, penned to the house by the brilliant summer weather, I have been doing some miscellaneous reading. For one thing I have gone solidly once more through Mr. Thomas Hardy’s verse. How extraordinarily good it is! And how remarkably he has gone on improving, especially as a metrist. But more than ever, after a heavy dose of these compressed statements of his point of view, one realizes his determined and unmitigated gloom. It is at its densest in _Wessex Poems_, and in places one laughs outright at it. He illustrated the book himself, his drawing is naïve, and the sketch of two floors of a church, the pews (and two lovers) above, and the skulls and cross-bones below, has an “I _will_ be grim at all costs” air about it that robs it of all its horror. The story attached is a neat one. The man is a consumptive about to die; he asks the woman if she loves him? She falsely says “Yes” in order to brighten his last hours. He dies, and her life is ever after blighted because she cannot reconcile herself to a Universe in which the telling of such lies is a moral obligation. There is another small drama in which a woman, maltreated by her husband, dies, telling her old lover that she wishes she had married him and that her child could have been his child, and asking him to see that the brutal husband does not ill-treat the child. The brutal husband remarries and does ill-treat the child. One day he finds the lover mourning on the dead wife’s grave, and demands by what right he is there. The lover, remembering the death-bed remark and suddenly seeing a chance of saving the child, says that he has every right to be there as he was really the father of the child. His supposed offspring is then left on his doorstep, to be looked after carefully, and he spends his time wondering whether he was justified in telling, etc. Probably these stories, if expanded into novels, might convince; as narrative poems they do not; and when they are squeezed into the brief compass of the _Satires of Circumstance_ they are grotesquely Life as Thomas Hardy makes it and not Life as Thomas Hardy sees it.

It is a little bold in these days to admit that one hasn’t read the whole of Mr. Conrad’s works, but until this week I had never laid hands on _Almayer’s Folly_. It was his first book. In his _Reminiscences_ he gives an account of how it was begun, in a Pimlico lodging-house, when he was a sea captain and carried about the ocean for five years until (when he was thirty-five) he finished it. When, half-done and laid by, it was yellowing and mouldering, he showed it to his first reader, a Cambridge man going to Australia for his health, and asked him if it was worth completing. The passenger, with a nice economy of words, answered “Distinctly,” and Captain Conrad was thus encouraged to proceed. I had read all this before, and also the novelist’s statement that before this he had not attempted literature and had hardly ever written even a letter—though I suppose there must have been an occasional entry in a log. I have certainly been surprised by the craftsmanship of _Almayer’s Folly_. Not only is the structure good, but the writing, except in one or two places, is astonishingly finished, accurate, and restrained. It is absurdly unlike a first book. Its weakness, as it appears to me, lies in the dullness of the principal character. It is difficult to keep up one’s interest in a person whose main characteristic is his impotence. But it doesn’t matter so much here as it might, for the subsidiary story of Dain and Nina is very fascinating, and the real hero, after all, is none of the people, white or Malay, but the Bornean river (its topography is not always clear to me) on whose overgrown banks they all live and the changes of which, night and day, are described with marvellous eloquence and certainty.

Peacock

Finally, after various minor excursions, I have settled down to the works of Thomas Love Peacock, of whom I had read nothing before except some poems. Why? I don’t know, but I think his name has vaguely repelled me. Anyhow, I am thankful now that I have been able to come fresh to Peacock’s novels. He has a few devotees, but it is surprising that so admirable a writer is not more read. _Nightmare Abbey_ and _Headlong Hall_ are not great masterpieces, but they are certainly small masterpieces. They belong to the class of intellectual comedy to which _Candide_, and, in some measure, _Rasselas_ belong; in fact, they must certainly have been modelled on _Candide_. They are burlesques of oneself and one’s friends, and every other discussing, theorizing person and his friends. Charlatans of all kinds, literary, political, ecclesiastical, and scientific, and philosophers of all kinds from the man who believes that upward progress is inevitable to the man who believes that downward progress is undeniable, from the secret revolutionary conspirator to the professional sceptic; he gets them all in, quintessentializes their doctrines into exquisitely flowing prose, and knocks their heads together with charming ruthlessness. Any extract will illustrate the flow of his dialogue:

“‘The anatomy of the human stomach,’ said Mr. Escot, ‘and the
formation of the teeth, clearly place man in the class of
fungivorous animals.’

“‘Many anatomists,’ said Mr. Foster, ‘are of a different
opinion, and agree in discerning the characteristics of the
carnivorous classes.’

“‘I am no anatomist,’ said Mr. Jenkinson, ‘and cannot decide
where doctors disagree; in the meantime, I conclude that man is
omnivorous, and on that conclusion I act.’

“‘Your conclusion is truly orthodox,’ said the Reverend Doctor
Gaster; ‘indeed, the loaves and fishes are typical of a mixed
diet, and the practice of the Church in all ages shows——’

“‘That it never loses sight of the loaves and fishes,’ said Mr.
Escot.”

If loud asseveration on my part sends to Peacock a few people who have not tried him before, I shall feel that the recent rain has not descended in vain.

Wordsworth’s Personal Dullness

The Strange Case of William Wordsworth is to me of perennial interest, and I have just emerged from several days’ burrowing under Professor C. G. Harper’s two enormous volumes entitled _William Wordsworth, His Life, Works, and Influence_. It is a conscientious and valuable piece of work, very fully documented, and containing much out-of-the-way information and a great deal of sensible, if not always illustrious, criticism. The information may perhaps be a little too ample for the weaker brethren. The map (showing lakes, mountain ranges (brown) and so on) of Wordsworth’s country with which we open gives the clue to Professor Harper’s exhaustive method. Every procurable date of Wordsworth’s continental programme is copied out; and we are even supplied with the winter and summer timetables of the Grammar School at Hawkshead which he attended and at which (as Professor Harper rather sententiously observes) an education different in kind, but perhaps not inferior in quality, to that supplied by Eton was bestowed upon him. New light is thrown on certain incidents in his career; his “circle” is elaborately described; and a very charming picture is given of his sister Dorothy. But the old problem of Wordsworth’s defects remains much where it did.

It is a commonplace that Wordsworth is the most uneven of great poets. Every textbook writer tells one that when he was inspired he was a giant, that when he was not he wrote maundering doggerel, and that he himself never knew when he was and when he was not at his best. _The Idiot Boy_ has been held up to the ridicule of generations—beyond its deserts perhaps. The point was most forcibly put by J. K. Stephen when he wrote a parody of Wordsworth’s “Two voices are there,” saying that one of the voices was that of the sea, etc., and the other that of “an old half-witted sheep.” But a thing less frequently faced, and never, as far as I know, properly explained, is his personal lack of attractiveness. Flippant persons may be met who dismiss him as “a pompous old dullard”; but, generally speaking, whenever one hears such a remark it comes from some one who openly confesses that he cannot stand Wordsworth’s poetry at any price, and that he has very seldom attempted to read it. The people who are in difficulties are those (and I am among them) who agree without qualification that Wordsworth is our greatest poet since Milton, but who cannot sincerely say that they are drawn towards him as a man. If they—any one who does not feel like this is happy and I do not speak for him—pretend to be fond of him their pretence is glaring. If they do not stick up for him they feel that they are being faithless to a poet who still stands in need of all the propagandists he can get. It is not easy to face the truth about him even in the solitude of one’s own chamber. But, by heaven, he _is_ a dull man!

“There was a boy” (as Wordsworth would himself begin) who at one time used nightly to dine in hall under a large oil-painting of the poet. In this painting Wordsworth was represented sitting on a rock against a landscape background which was an agreeable and symbolical blend of wildness and tranquillity. The poet was clad in broadcloth; he held a book in his hand; his face was smooth and pink; and his mild eye surveyed the spectator as though the latter were a lamb about to receive a pat of the hand and his blessing. There he sat, meditative and benevolent, while the soup gave place to the fish and the fish to the beef; and when one had drained off the last dregs of one’s beer one went off still conscious of that meditative and benevolent eye. It became almost maddening. Every other great English poet had something fascinating about him. Even Milton, in spite of certain unsociable qualities, had a certain attractive force, a touch of the virulent, and the scars of suffering. But this Wordsworth! His genuine philanthropy was unquestionable. His portrait might, one thought, be that of a pioneer of the Anti-Slave Trade Agitation, or an inventor of Sunday Schools, or an endower of Bands of Hope. But not a poet; oh, not a poet!

So it is with all his portraits. Professor Harper gives a selection of them. Always the sage is a bland and upright man; the _mens conscia recti_ typified. But never a sign of eloquence or fire; of the magnificent oratory of his great passages, of the music and profound tenderness which are so profuse in his poetry. Not a sign of stress; not a mark of any but the most complacent vicarage thought; no passion, no enthusiasm, no challenge, and no response. It is not to be explained away, as Professor Harper attempts to explain it away, by saying that the myth of “Daddy Wordsworth” (as FitzGerald called him) is based on a disproportionate view of his life. Professor Harper thinks that far too little attention has been paid to his early revolutionary period, when the ideals of the French Revolution gripped him, and far too much to his later period of orthodoxy and respectability. Professor Harper himself attempts to redress the balance. He gives as full an account as he can of the earlier Wordsworth and of his relations with Revolutionary France. But, as Wordsworth’s French friends would have said (provided they were not ashamed of using such a worn-out tag) _plus ça change plus c’est la même chose_. The early Wordsworth may have been a different being; but Professor Harper certainly does not prove that he was. From birth to death in this biography he appears as the same high-minded, staid, sober, solemn monument. He joined in the Revolution not so much a “kid-glove revolutionary” as a woollen-glove and warm comforter revolutionary. Had he stayed in France he might have made even the Terror respectable.

On myself and on others Wordsworth’s portraits and his biographies always leave this sort of impression: the impression of an old bore to whom one would not be rude simply and solely because one would not willingly hurt the feelings of a person so worthy. And then one goes back to his poetry—and his prose—and hears a voice of almost unsurpassed grandeur speaking the deepest of one’s unexpressed thoughts, appealing to and drawing out all the divinest powers in man’s nature. Of his greatness surely no rational and unbiassed being could entertain the slightest doubt. He is not so popular or so frequently read as some poets, and that is not difficult to explain. His absence of humour, or an equivalent vivacity, is not in itself an explanation; but the accompanying general absence of any luxurious appeal to the senses is. He speaks direct to the labouring intellect and the sensitive heart; and the enjoyment of him, if great, is usually enjoyment of the austerer kind, like mountain-climbing. There is nothing soft or enervating or luxurious which can make reading him an æsthetic debauch. He does not often sing to a tune which gives one pleasure even if one does not attend to the words. Without being in the least obscure he demands an effort from the reader parallel to his own. That, at least as much as the tediousness of many of his writings (and his irritating classification of them), is the reason of his comparative lack of popularity. But ...

Henry James’s Obscurity

Henry James’s last work was his essay on Rupert Brooke, written as an introduction to _Letters from America_. Mr. James’s essay is a personal appreciation, and not in any way a biographical memoir. Such a memoir, by another hand, will follow. Mr. James left unfinished two novels, and a third volume of the series begun with _A Small Boy and Others_ and _Notes of a Son and Brother_.

Presumably the public (which might well make a start with the short stories of which Mr. Secker has already published eight half-crown volumes, very pleasant to the eye) will at last begin to buy James’s novels. They have certainly not bought them in the past. He was, in critical circles, almost universally recognized as one of the three or four greatest of English writers living a week ago. But some of his books had not even gone into a second edition. He was intermittently talked about in the Press. Fifteen years or so ago he had a boom of the sort; then there was a period of comparative newspaper obscurity; in the last three or four years he suddenly and silently, like a star appearing from behind a cloud, took his unchallenged place in the firmament as one of the established great. But he was not widely read. _Daisy Miller_, ever so many years ago, had a fairly general success; _The Golden Bowl_, also, I should think, sold well. But many people who paid lip homage to him were very unfamiliar with his work.

In no case would a man with his interests, his approach, his subtlety and avoidance of the grosser excitements, his restraint and delicacy, have sold by the hundred thousand. But his appeal was still further limited by the legend of his style. I remember reading an old novel written in the days when Robert Browning was an Incomprehensible studied by a Cult. The heroine of it gave herself away rather by remarking, “Oh, Mr. Browning! I’ve never been able to understand a single thing that he has written. That is why I have never tried.” One feels that there were persons who were in the same position as towards Henry James. They had heard that he was a hard nut to crack; they had seen perhaps—it was always a great temptation to a reviewer to extract—specimens of his more elaborate discursions, complicated arabesques of sentences, parenthesis after parenthesis wandering from comma to comma like barbed wire tangled around its supports. And they thought therefore that he was an obscure eclectic as difficult as Jacob Behmen or Swedenborg and lacking their excuse of religious inspiration. Certainly he was sometimes difficult. But it was a unique kind of obscurity. There is an obscurity produced when a man, eagerly tumbling along an argument, writes down only a sort of fitful shorthand, a language which leaves things out and which resembles the stray pieces of disconnected paper in gutter or hedge which merely indicate the course that the runner has taken. There is another and commoner kind of obscurity of speech which derives from mistiness of mind; for a man cannot write clearly down what he does not clearly think. And there is a kind of obscurity which is produced by mere inaptitude for writing: the awkwardness of the cow handling a rifle. James’s obscurity was the direct product of his passion for clarity. He detested the slipshod sentence which, compact as it may look as a piece of grammar, is a mere pot-shot as a piece of representation. He wanted to make no statement which did not embody precisely what he wanted to say; what, that is to say, he saw as Truth. He would have taken, for example, that last sentence of mine and, endeavouring to give it a more exact shape, have made of it something like the following:

“He wanted, when, that is, he experienced anything so definite
or, shall we put it, so positively energetic, as a want, to
make no statement, none at any rate which might be taken by
even the least perceptive of his hearers as a _delivered_,
and, as it were, final testimony of his reaction to things as
he saw them, which did not precisely embody what he wanted
(when, once more, he coherently desired anything, as we have
it, ‘higher’ than the elementary physical) to say; what, that
is to say, he saw, at the moment of speech, be it understood,
for the eye of the watcher changes, as what, in the absence of
a happier name, it has pleased us to ennoble with the majestic
name of Truth.”

I don’t suggest that I myself have added anything to my own sentence by this addition of the pomp and circumstance of parenthesis and circumlocution. I have merely turned a short platitude into a long one. But it may serve to show the method by which Henry James arrived at his more tortuous pages. The method has its disadvantages. The man who employs it is sometimes like a man working with a pickaxe in a cave. The more he digs away the larger the unattacked expanse which invites his strength; or, as one might say, the bigger the hole he is in. But when this method is employed by a man with the analytical powers, the sensitiveness to fine shades, material and spiritual, of Henry James, the result is a “product” (the kind of word that James would always have put in actual or implied inverted commas) which never stales and from which one gets more and more enjoyment each time one reads. In the last resort novels live by the richness of their detail; and James’s detail is exquisite and inexhaustible.

Few modern writers have exercised so strong an influence over those who have surrendered themselves to him. He is, I should say, more infectious than any writer since (what a strange collocation!) Lord Macaulay. A man with a formed style can usually read and enjoy Carlyle, Jeremy Taylor, de Quincey, or George Meredith without showing the least tendency (unless deliberate) to imitate them. But when one has (I don’t speak only for myself) been reading James one finds for a time that one is tempted to write even one’s private letters in a style which shows plainly that one has set him as a seal upon one’s arm. Even now, when I am merely thinking about him, I feel the pressure of that stern artistic conscience, and can only with an effort resist the demand that I should guard myself here, qualify myself here, and elucidate myself there. He was irresistible, like one of those stammerers or persons with other attractive or unattractive vocal idiosyncrasies whom one cannot help imitating when one is with them. A person of any force gets through this and the permanent effect of a subjugation to James was always good. A too marked echo of him would be painful: but his example was salutary. It may be possible to grumble with him for this and that. He did write mainly about persons with incomes (though these also are God’s creatures); he did occasionally behave (as Mr. Wells very wittily put it) like a hippopotamus picking up a pea; and he did annoy some enthusiasts by refusing to place his pen habitually at the service of the Great Forces of Our Time and other things whose capital importance is of custom indicated by capital letters. But in an age of sloppy writing he stood for accuracy of craftsmanship; and even men whose subjects are Invisible Exports of the Parthenogenesis of Plants might learn from him how to use to more advantage their intellects and their pens.

The “Ring” in the Bookselling Trade

A bibliophile writes the following complaint: “At the recent sale of Swinburne’s library, certain lots, chiefly signed presentation copies, fetched extravagantly high prices. But the outsider is generally puzzled at the extreme variation in the prices, a variation which passing fashions in taste do not explain. There is an explanation, as one would-be purchaser was made somewhat rudely aware. He wanted a book by a modern poet, a poet of delicate talent and little recognition; and he asked a bookseller to bid for the lot. He was willing to spend between ten and thirteen shillings on it. The agent who was to bid arrived late, and another bookseller bought the lot for five shillings. So the would-be purchaser asked his bookseller to approach the man who had bought the lot, and find out if he would sell it. The book was cheap at five and would be rather dear at ten shillings. When approached, the purchaser informed his colleague that ‘he had had to pay a good deal more for the lot than the price given in the rooms, and that he could not part with it for less than eighteen shillings.’ Such are the blessings of the ‘ring’ at Sotheby’s.

“The ring consists of some of the largest and best-known members of the bookselling trade—all honest men—and their plan is this: they never bid against each other, except for show; lots go at small prices, thus robbing owners and executors of their right profit; and subsequently these cheap lots are put up again and resold among the members of the ring. The auctioneers can, of course, do nothing to stop the practice—and it is as legal as it is dishonourable. At times an outsider with a big banking account gives the ring a good deal of trouble; but it has survived all private attacks, and is likely to—though a private buyer with a confident manner and a quick power of decision can occasionally get a great deal of amusement by running lots up, and so forcing the ring to pay exorbitant prices for things they do not want.”

It is true. There exists among the second-hand booksellers precisely such a ring as gave rise to so much discussion a few years ago when the scandal of the art-dealers’ “knock-out” was widely discussed. For some time I myself have been trying to get information about it. But it is not easy. You can find out from booksellers who are not in the ring (few of these lone wolves are important) who the booksellers are who are in the ring, but that is about all. But the method is simple. The attendance at book sales is not large. Private collectors are lazy people; it is not now fashionable—as it was in the Duke of Roxburghe’s day—for the Old Nobility to crowd the salerooms, bidding desperately amid groans of anguish and cheers of triumph. The result is that very often one will attend a sale and be the only private person there, and it is a matter of chance (especially when the sale is a comparatively small one) whether any one at all is there except the members of the ring. The ring, _pro forma_, will run a book up to about a third of its value and leave it at that. At the close of the proceedings its members will adjourn somewhere—I don’t know where, but let us say a back room in the Charing Cross Road—and hold a “knock-out” auction of the books they have bought. The difference between the sums paid here and the sums paid at Sotheby’s or Hodgson’s will be pooled and divided, so as to equalize the spoil; and the owners of the libraries sold will have got only, perhaps, a half of what they really ought to have got considering the prices that the ultimate purchasers are willing to pay.

But I don’t see what is to be done about it. As my correspondent remarks, the auctioneers can’t stop it. They also must suffer as their work is done on a commission basis. It must not be assumed that all the booksellers like the system, but the minority cannot help themselves. I remember that one very well known bookseller, now dead, tried for several years to keep out of it; but in the end, by co-ordinated bidding against him, he was forced in. There the thing is; the dealers find it profitable; it is not easy to keep out of it unless you are a prince of the trade, with rich customers and great resources, or a person with special knowledge who is after a special kind of book and will be let alone; and there is no short cut to reform. How can Parliament interfere? If one dealer who buys a book can sell it to another after the sale, how can six or a dozen dealers be prevented from exchanging their purchases similarly. It would be all very well to make the “knock-out” illegal, but how many does it take to make a ring and how many detectives could be spared? The only conceivable remedy is for persons who habitually buy old books to make a point (when the war is over and they are released from their present occupations) of turning up at the salerooms and bidding against the pros. Even at that the remedy would only be efficacious as long as it was actively applied. It might be worth a guinea a box, but you would have to take a box every day; there would be no permanent cure. Directly the strangers slacked off again the ring and the “knock-out” would revive, and my unfortunate friend (for I presume that the disconsolate buyer he refers to is himself) would have once more to pay for his books much more than the price recorded at the rooms. “There is no cure for this disease,” as Mr. Belloc’s poem puts it, unless auction-frequenting again becomes a popular form of amusement.

But, if I may digress, I must say that, for persons of a bookish turn of mind, there is nothing more amusing than an occasional visit to Wellington Street or Chancery Lane. I shouldn’t care to do it every day; the combined mustiness of books and booksellers is a bit overpowering. But it is exciting to bid occasionally, and the books that come into the London auction-rooms are of such quality that sometimes you might almost as well go to Sotheby’s as to the Exhibition Rooms (now shut up so as to pay for two minutes of the war) of the British Museum. The bindings that great collectors put on their books are in themselves wonderful. And the booksellers, rich and poor, glossy and seedy, as they nod to the rostrum and paw the goods, are a sight to which only Balzac could do justice. They all wear looks of settled gloom as though they were on the verge of bankruptcy; they all (if one speaks to them) swear that “it is impossible to get anything to-day as everything is going so dear”; and they all have a sovereign indifference to everything but the commercial value of the books they deal in. I say all: there are exceptions; but the crowd as a whole is utterly depressed and completely free from the remotest concern with literature. But possibly when they get in that back room somewhere and assess the margin between what executors have got for books and what they ought to have got for them, their morose countenances may brighten. For all I know, every “knock-out” auction may end with the circulation of the punch-bowl, jolly songs, and toasts to the damnation of all the idiots who waste their money on rotten old books unfit to read and thereby keep in affluence a set of honest men who read the _Daily Mail_ in the morning and never a line for the rest of the day.

Music-Hall Songs

Mr. William Archer contributes to the _Fortnightly_ an attack on the music-hall. He says that it is the home of vulgarity and inanity; that the audiences, as a rule, would enjoy much better stuff than they are given; and that “the music-hall seems to have killed a genuine vein of lyric faculty in the English people.” With all that I don’t think that any one but a poseur could disagree. Mr. Archer makes an extraordinary slip when he puts forward _Sally in our Alley_ as a folk-product of which neither the composer nor the author is known to fame: both words and music being by Henry Carey, who was scarcely an obscure person in his day and is not entirely forgotten now. He concludes, too, with a somewhat vague suggestion of a remedy which has no bearing whatever upon the improvement of music-hall songs, and which one suspects to spring from his perennial desire to induce the public to go and see Ibsen. But his case as a whole is irrefutable. The nation’s songs since the industrial revolution have been immeasurably worse than at any other time in its history. They are almost all commercial products manufactured by half-wits.

Mr. Archer’s case being so sound, it is all the more a pity that he overdoes it. It is true that almost all these songs are vile rubbish, and that the songs of the _Villikins and his Dinah_ and _Champagne Charlie_ periods were even more fatuous than those of the present day. But it is exaggeration to say that

“what is certain is that the whole music-hall movement has
produced not one—literally not one—piece of verse that can rank
as poetry of the humblest type, or even as a really clever bit
of comic rhyming,”

for such songs turn up fairly frequently. Possibly Mr. Archer’s horror of the “red-nosed comedian” prevents him from ever listening to his words: certainly one gets from Mr. Archer’s article the impression that the critic is only acquainted with a few of the most famous of music-halls songs. But although I heartily support his general case and would willingly consent to the execution of all music-hall managers and versifiers and most music-hall artists, I must protest that “really clever bits of comic rhyming” do turn up occasionally.

I wish I had a better verbal memory. But I can at least refer Mr. Archer to a few songs of which, if he cares to spend a month in the Museum with old volumes of Francis, Day and Hunter’s song-books and other collections, he can find the full words. For instance, there is Mr. Harry Lauder’s _It’s Nice to get up in the Morning_. As I remember them (and here and elsewhere I don’t guarantee that my quotations are literally accurate) the words of the chorus are:

_Oh, it’s nice to get up in the morning when the sun begins to shine,_
_At four or five or six o’clock in the good old summer time;_
_But when the snow is falling, and it’s murky overhead,_
_It’s nice to get up in the morning—but it’s nicer to stay in bed._

Of course the tune helped it. But it is quite well turned and it springs clean out of popular experience. It is folk-poetry even if the folk didn’t write it. It is not the folk-poetry of the seventeenth century, but it is distinctly the folk-poetry of modern commercial and urban England. _We sat upon the Baby on the Shore_ I’m not sure about; it didn’t, I suspect, have a music-hall origin, though I do not know. But _A Little Bit off the Top_ was quite comic in places; so were _The Four Horse Charabanc_, _Right in the Middle of the Road_, _Whitewash_, and _’E dunno where ’e are_. I wish I could recall the words of the song which had a chorus beginning:

_More work for the undertaker,_
_Another little job for the tombstone-maker;_

but even that high-spirited couplet shows their quality. These mock-tragic songs are often quite good. The best known was _His Day’s Work was done_, which was undeniably a comic conception well carried out. Did Mr. Archer ever hear _If it wasn’t for the Houses in Between_? The one fragment that sticks in my mind both dates it and shows that it was a “clever bit of comic rhyming”:

_If the weather had been finer_
_You’d have seen the war in China—_
_If it wasn’t for the Houses in Between._

And what about _Waiting at the Church_?—

_There was I waiting at the church,_
_Waiting at the church._
_When I found he’d left me in the lurch,_
_Lor’, how it did upset me!_
_Then he sent me round a little note,_
_Just a little note,_
_This is what he wrote:_
_“Can’t get away to marry you to-day—_
_My wife won’t let me.”_

That seems to me a well-calculated chorus, and the clinch of the last two lines couldn’t be beaten. But perhaps the austere Mr. Archer would think it debasing on the grounds that it led the audience to think lightly of bigamy.

Bigamy is one of the chief comic-song subjects. Vermin in one’s bed, drunkenness, and the food in boarding-houses are the others. The “booze” songs are not, as a rule, as good as they should be. The only one I remember that was at all neat ran _something_ like:

_First she had some marmalade,_
_And then she had some jam,_
_Then some dozen of oysters_
_And then a plate of ham,_
_A lobster and a crab or two_
_And a pint of bottled beer,_
_A little gin hot to settle the lot_
_—And that’s what made her queer._

I certainly don’t suggest that any of the songs I have quoted—and I’m certain that consultation with a few expert friends, now in Flanders, would bring better ones to light—are masterpieces. But I do think they are quite comic verse, and that if all music-hall songs were as well turned there would not be much ground for complaint. One does, that is, laugh _occasionally_ at a music-hall, in spite of Mr. Archer. But, unhappily, of ninety-nine songs out of a hundred the words are too abysmal for anything, and the serious ones are almost invariably imbecile. I wonder, by the way, whether the music-hall authorities ever try to induce competent comic rhymers, known in other spheres, to turn out songs for them? Probably not; they think the words don’t matter. That they are mistaken (though the tunes count for most) is shown by the way that a song with good words succeeds with the audience. Even one ingenious line will often bring the house down. I remember the old song _I can’t change it_. There was a stanza about a bride who appalled her bridegroom by taking herself to pieces, removing a wig, a glass eye, a wooden arm, two wooden legs, etc. In the chorus the narrator suddenly described her as “’Arf a woman and ’arf a tree,” and this admirable if unrefined trope was the most successful thing of the year. But as I say, I largely agree with Mr. Archer. If only they would let me smoke in theatres I would never go near a music-hall again until the programmes were improved, and I imagine many other people are in the same boat.

More Music-Hall Songs

How little do we know the consequences of our acts. “I say there is not a red Indian, hunting by Lake Winnipic, can quarrel with his squaw, but the whole world must smart for it: will not the price of beaver rise? It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the Universe.” That was Carlyle’s way of putting it. Somebody wrote a book of theatrical reminiscences: the book set Mr. William Archer pondering on the fatuity of music-halls; Mr. Archer’s article made me try to remember comic fragments of music-hall songs; and my observations would appear, judging from the quantities of correspondence they have produced, to have tempted whole families to spend their evenings trying to recall the popular choruses of their youth.

Numbers of them seem to have better memories than mine. Whole verses of _More Work for the Undertaker_ (I think it was Mr. Dunville’s song) reach me. The scheme may be illustrated by one stanza:

_Sammy Snoozer laboured on the railway;_
_His work he was very clever at!_
_Sammy one day was a-polishing the metals_
_With a lump of mouldy fat._
_Up come a runaway engine,_
_Sammy stood upon the track;_
_He held out his arms, for he firmly believed_
_He could push that locomotive back._

(The drum: _Boom!!_)

(Chorus)

_More work for the undertaker,_
_Another little job for the tombstone-maker;_
_At the local cemetery they’ve_
_Been very very busy with a brand-new grave,_
_For Snoozer’s_
_Snuffed it!_

I am afraid that I should have to grant Mr. Archer the verse: the second line, especially, cannot be called a model of good craftsmanship. But the chorus is very neat. It was varied with each verse. Another correspondent’s specimen finishes with “For Frederick’s fragments.”

I must bow to the correspondent who suggests that the success of the song about the bride with artificial limbs was at least as much due to lines he quotes as it was to “’Arf a woman and ’arf a tree.” His lines are:

_I can’t change her!_
_No matter how I try,_
_But I’ll chop her up for firewood_
_In the sweet by-and-by._

An equally impolite chorus is that of Herbert Campbell’s _’Blige a Lady_ which another correspondent sends. The conductor, on a rainy day, asked the inside males to give up a seat to a lady and go outside, and the reply was on the lines of

_Said I, “Old chap, she may have my lap,_
_But I don’t get wet for her.”_

That is very typical music-hall; and it will be observed that it gets its effect by sticking close, as Wordsworth advised, to the natural phraseology and sequence of everyday speech.

Mr. Albert Chevalier, I admit, I did not mention. He has not been primarily a music-hall artist, and Mr. Archer himself made an exception of his songs. Some of Mr. Gus Elen’s certainly might be quoted: _e. g._ _’E dunno where ’e are_ and _What’s the Use of looking out for Work?_ I am afraid that I am not sufficiently well informed to answer questions as to the sources of supply of modern music-hall songs. The only thing I have observed is that large numbers of the worst ones are composed by persons whose names suggest that the use of the English language is with them rather an acquired than an inherited characteristic. How far the practice prevails of a particular star employing a tame author to write the words of all his songs for him I do not know. I have never consciously met a writer of music-hall songs, though I did know one man who made two attempts to produce what he thought the right sort of commodity. He sent them to an entrepreneur, but all his wit was wasted. The chorus of one song mentioned a well-known and much-advertised comestible: this wouldn’t do, as all the vendors of similar articles would be jealous and, possibly, refuse to advertise any more on the programme. In the other song the author had had the misfortune to hit upon an idea which had been used before. His refrain was:

_And when the pie was opened_
_The birds began to sing._

But there was an old song with the same tail to it. It was a song about a pigeon-pie which was no better than it should be. This reminds me that in tabulating favourite music-hall subjects one should certainly have mentioned bad smells. Throughout history any reference to unpleasant smells has moved the Englishman to roars of laughter. Perhaps it is because we so thoroughly dislike them. I don’t think that these odours take all nations in quite the same way: but travellers on the Continent are sometimes tempted to think that most nations do not notice them so much as we do.

The music-hall versifier, usually feeble when funny, is certainly at his worst when serious. Such of the war-songs as I have heard are dreadful. Perhaps those I have not heard are better. Early in the war I was looking into a music-shop window in Upper Shaftesbury Avenue and saw two typical titles. One was _Only a Bit of Khaki that Daddy wore at Mons_, and the other was _The Little Irish Red Cross Nurse_. I did not dare to buy them, but I could not help admiring the ingenuity of the author of the second who had managed to work the perennial Irish Girl theme so neatly into the new subject. All music-hall poets seem to be obsessed by Irish girls. They will even work them into translations of foreign songs which do not mention them. Five or six years ago a German music-hall song which had nothing whatever to do with Irish girls was imported and became very popular here. The ideas of the original were largely preserved, but an Irish girl had to be stuck in. But _quo, Musa, tendis?_ If I go on like this I shall end by agreeing with Mr. Archer.

Utopias

I saw recently a very entertaining article by Mr. Walter Lippman in the _New Republic_ on the subject of Utopias. Mr. Lippman raised the question of why it was Utopias had gone out of fashion. Since Mr. Wells wrote his _Modern Utopia_ no one has had a shot.

It is, of course, not the longest period in human history which has gone without a new Utopia. As far as I know, nothing of the sort was constructed between the time of Plato and that of Sir Thomas More. Reasons might, no doubt, be discovered for this long lapse. The Romans were too realistic to bother about such things, and in the Middle Ages the only people who could write were priests, and they probably did not dare outline any other perfect society than that of the New Jerusalem. In fact, Utopias of any merit have until recently always been produced at long intervals: with the exception of Bacon’s _New Atlantis_ and Campanella’s _City of the Sun_, which were, I think, published in the same year. The nineteenth century must have produced more imaginary states of this kind than all its predecessors put together. And if we stop constructing Utopias, this will happen not because we have ceased to hanker after them, but because the complexities of civilization have become too unmanageable to handle. When the structures of society and industry were comparatively simple, a man could invent an ideal state which would not look too far removed from the states he knew. We can still go on dreaming of little paradises, such as that in Morris’s _News from Nowhere_; but what it is difficult to do is to describe fully an imaginary community which is world-wide, or, at any rate, in contact with the whole world, which has to face the problems of race, and which has to take over from existing civilization our highly developed methods of manufacture and distribution of labour. Mr. Wells did try to depict a state that might grow out of the existing order; but his picture is notably less complete than those of older writers. He could only hope to produce his effect by giving us a series of cinema glimpses of various aspects of life. Personally, I doubt whether any one else will even attempt the job.

One could wish that somebody would make a thorough study of the principal Utopias that the mind of man has conceived. Such a study would offer many interesting paths to research. We might find out, for example, to how great an extent the Utopians of various ages and nations have been influenced (as Plato was conspicuously influenced) by the transient conditions of their own time. For instance, the great variety of opinion which Utopians have held with regard to the precious metals would be worth examination. Some have held them in great respect; others have vindictively suggested that they should be put to the basest possible uses. Again, how far has each writer of this kind been influenced by his predecessor? It can scarcely be supposed, for instance, that Campanella did not lift his communistic ideas bodily from Plato, or that Mr. Wells’s class of Samurai owed nothing to the same inspiration. Sometimes one sees a quite minor and obviously personal idea lifted clean or adapted with slight alterations which make it all the more curious. For example, in More’s _Utopia_ brides and bridegrooms before marriage always inspected each other in a state of nature. It is to be presumed that More had some peculiar crank on this subject; for he mentions the possibility of concealing deformities as though it were a common practice that should certainly be guarded against by law. When we get to Bacon we find this odd idea copied, with the difference that it is now the friends of the respective parties that make the examination.

The endless queer details in Utopias would in themselves make such a study amusing. Plato’s passion to secure that no mother should know her own child; the preposterously exact account of the amount of money subscribed towards the foundation of the new state in Theodor Hertzka’s _Freeland_; the wonderful battle between the fleets of, if I remember rightly, Abyssinia and Europe in the same book; the trains going two hundred miles an hour, so smoothly that people played billiards on them, in Mr. Wells’s New World. I remember another Utopia, an obscure eighteenth-century one, in which persons who had committed murders were given the choice of being executed in honour or surviving in disgrace. If they chose death they were led to the scaffold amid universal applause, their names were inscribed upon rolls of honour, and their relatives were given fat jobs. Then, again, one could have a quite interesting chapter on the various literary devices by which authors have precipitated readers into their supposititious communities. More’s introduction—with the bronzed and bearded seaman who went out with the companions of Columbus and was stranded on an unknown island—is as charming as any. Later dodges have been more far-fetched. Mr. Wells’s transferment to the twin-world of this one is very subtle; Edward Bellamy made his hero wake up after centuries in a room where he asked for Edith (his old fiancée) and was conveniently answered by another lady of the same name. I say nothing of the books which lie on the outskirts of Utopian literature, such as various grotesque Utopias and anti-Utopias and books like Lord Lytton’s _The Coming Race_ and W. H. Hudson’s _The Crystal Age_, which last is, I believe, the only book on record which purports to have been written by a man who dies in the last chapter and describes his own demise. And the practical attempts to set up working ideal communities—such as the Oneida community which developed into a prosperous “Mfg. Coy.”—are another pleasant by-way.

I think that with all the peculiarities of time and place, all the eccentricities of personal taste, and all the genuine varieties of ideals allowed for, a student of Comparative Utopianism would probably find that there was a good deal in the way of method and a very great deal in the way of aim that all Utopians have in common. Mr. Yeats once suggested that if we put together whatever the great poets have affirmed in their finest moments we should come as near as possible to an authoritative religion. In the same way, one feels that if one tabulated the ideals of the most successful writers of Utopias we should be able to extract, if not a residuum of agreed schemes, at least a common element of aspiration which we might fairly say represented the permanent ideals of the human race respecting the ordering of our life on earth. Really intelligent and altruistic men—and nobody without some intelligence and some altruism would bother to conceive a Utopia—have a tendency to dream the same sort of dreams. To take it on its negative side, no deviser of an ideal state, as far as I am aware, has proposed immense inequalities in the distribution of wealth, crowded and insanitary houses, child labour, wars of aggression, or sweating. There are large numbers of industrious and accurate people in this country and America who are hunting for subjects about which they can write volumes of “research.” I wish one of them would write the book I suggest.

Charles II in English Verse

I was talking to a man the other day about books that ought to have been written and have not been, when it occurred to me that somebody might publish a very amusing selection of panegyrics written on undeserving persons: say, the less immaculate of the English kings. I once thought of writing a life of Charles II, each chapter of which should be headed by an extract from some contemporary poem about him. The contrast between the character and private and public actions of this monarch and the descriptions of him by literary eulogists would have been illuminating. Gross flattery was the habit of the time. James the First was given, very unfairly as I think, the title of the British Solomon; and the Royal Martyr, who after all had some virtues very highly developed, was written of in terms which would have been extreme if applied to St. Francis of Assisi. But no one, not even his father, received such wholehearted praises as Charles II.

His career as a recipient of them began early. When he was a child Francis Quarles’s _Divine Fancies_ were dedicated to him. The Dedication was headed: “To the Royal Bud of Majesty and Centre of our Hopes and Happiness, Charles,” and began: “Illustrious Infant, Give me leave to acknowledge myself thy servant, ere thou knowest thyself my Prince.” The hope is held out that the illustrious infant will become “a most incomparable Prince, the firm pillar of our happiness and the future object of the world’s wonder.” Addressing then the boy’s governess, Lady Dorset, Quarles becomes even more rhapsodical:

“Most excellent Lady,

“You are the Star which stands over the Place where the Babe
lies. By whose directions’ light, I come from the East to
present my Myrrh and Frankincense to the young child. Let not
our Royal Joseph nor his princely Mary be afraid; there are no
Herods here. We have all seen his Star in the East, and have
rejoyced: our loyall hearts are full; for our eyes have seen
him, in whom our Posterity shall be blessed.”

One could scarcely hope that Quarles’s successors would quite live up to that.

Dryden’s poem on Charles’s return to England is pitched a little lower. It certainly contains lines like

_The winds that never moderation knew,_
_Afraid to blow too much, too faintly blew;_
_Or out of breath with joy would not enlarge_
_Their straightened lungs...._

but that is a mere excess of avowed fancy. When he wrote his _Threnodia Augustalis_ on Charles’s death, Dryden decidedly went one better. Perhaps it was that he had had twenty-five years of Charles’s reign in which to appreciate fully the King’s reverend qualities. He calls him

_That all-forgiving King_
_The type of Him above,_
_That unexhausted spring_
_Of clemency and love._

He apostrophizes the Muse of History:

_Be true, O Clio, to thy hero’s name!_
_But draw him strictly so_
_That all who view the piece may know;_
_He needs no trappings of fictitious fame,_
_The load’s too weighty._

The anguished poet almost blasphemes against heaven for taking away so peerless a sovereign; until he remembers that “saints and angels” had been done out of Charles’s company for so long that their turn might fairly be considered to have come. And there is the further consolation that a James has succeeded a Charles:

_Our Atlas fell indeed, but Hercules was near;_

or, as the Earl of Halifax put it,

_James is our Charles in all things else but name._

Which Charles himself at least knew to be untrue.