Chapter VI: Part 6

The Halifax extract comes out of another funeral poem On the Death of His Most Sacred Majesty. “Farewell,” he cries,

_great Charles, monarch of blest renown,_
_The best good man that ever fill’d a throne._

He sketches Charles’s career. He compares his exile to the banishment of David (an open crib _from Astræ Redux_) and says of England that, when he came back,

_to his arms she fled_
_And rested on his shoulders her fair bending head._

He “Us from our foes and from ourselves did save.” Only the almost inevitable comparison to the Almighty can do him justice:

_In Charles so good a man and King we see_
_A double image of the deity._
_Oh! had he more resembled it! Oh, why_
_Was he not still more like, and could not die?_

What did become of Charles is suggested by “the Lord R” in a poem which appears in _Miscellany Poems_:

_Good kings are number’d with Immortal Gods_
_When hence translated to the best Abodes,_
_For Princes (truly great) can never die,_
_They only lay aside Mortality._

After which we are told that the deceased is in Olympus passing the nectar round; an occupation that should have suited him very well.

Perhaps the suggestion will be adopted. Let some publisher with a series of anthologies get somebody to compile The Hundred Most Fulsome Poems in the English Language. It would be a more entertaining book than most. Very few examples, I think, would be drawn from the last hundred years. As respects the monarchs, Great Elizabeth, the Great Jameses, the Great Charleses, Great William, Great Anne, and the Great Georges all got their full share of adulation. The break comes, I think, with George IV; since whose accession we have lost the habit. Any one who should address his sovereign to-day in words like those addressed to Charles II by his subjects (e. g. Great George, the planets tremble at thy nod) would be suspected of pulling the sovereign’s leg.

The Most Durable Books

The question of what books one would take with one for a prolonged sojourn on a desert island is an old one. I thought it had lost its interest for me, as too remote. For I do not propose to live on a desert island; and if ever, by accident, I am cast upon the shore of one, clinging to a solitary plank, it is unlikely that I shall have spent the last hour on shipboard selecting mental food for a highly problematical future as a hermit. But a letter from a distressed man in the trenches revives my interest in the question. He complains that he very rapidly exhausts the books that are sent him; that few of them are much use as permanent companions; and that, as they take up room, he can carry only a small bundle of them about with him. He cannot make up his mind which ones to get and stick to; and he ends by putting the ancient poser to me: “What three” (it is always three) “books would you rather have with you if you had to live on a desert island?” He adds, with somewhat unnecessary bluntness, that he will not believe me if I say that one of them would be the Bible.

I suppose there must be some definition of what a book—what _one_ book—is. Otherwise one’s first impulse is to demand, as the companions of solitude, _the Encyclopædia Britannica_, the _Dictionary of National Biography_, and the _Oxford English Dictionary_—say some hundred and twenty volumes in all. With these one could spend a fairly long life in retreat without ever reading the same page twice. One might even read with a definite scheme which would give one the semblance of systematic inquiry united with a happy unexpectedness of route. Suppose, for example, one were to start each day from something one had seen in the morning. A boa-constrictor, for instance. Having twisted its neck and left it for dead—castaways are very powerful fellows—one would go home to the old hut and refer to _Boa in the Encyclopædia_. Having learnt all about its anatomy, progenitiveness, and habitats, one would then refer to the _Oxford Dictionary_ for the derivation of its name. Underneath the philological discourse would be quotations from authors who had referred to the beast or to its feathery similitude. The swift advent of the tropic night would find one still immersed in the _D.N.B._ lives of these authors. On a large rock outside one would keep, with a charred stick, a list of the objects already dealt with; once in a way perhaps, for sentiment’s sake, one would start from an old word again and revive memories of the Boa Trail. A person of simple tastes, granted the island produced enough goats and not too many constrictors, might well spend in this way a life as contented as Horace’s. But to select those three books would be cheating.

One might fairly suggest, in such a connexion, that a book is either (1) any single coherent work by one author, or two in collaboration; or (2) any series of works which either has been, or might reasonably be expected to be, published in a single volume. The edition for island use would not, however, necessarily be a one-volume edition. This rules out these distended works of reference, whilst letting in every single piece of creative literature that exists. There may seem to be an unfair discrimination between author and author, the poets, especially, as a body, being at a great advantage over the novelists; but if novelists will be so verbose they must suffer for it. What, then, would one’s three books be?

I can think of a good many books that I have not read and that I hope to enjoy reading. There is _The Life of John Buncle_, there is _Old Mortality_, there is _Hard Times_, there is Tom Paine’s _Rights of Man_, there is Hooker’s _Ecclesiastical Polity_—and I am imperfectly acquainted with the works of Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher. (I have also not read _Ordeal by Battle_, and I don’t intend to.) But the mere fact that one has not read a work which one knows to be interesting is not enough to qualify it. It would be enough if one were proposing to be marooned for a fortnight or three weeks and then taken off the island by “willing hands”; but the books one wants for a residence of many years are books one is sufficiently familiar with to be certain that they will not grow stale at the fifty-fifth reading.

Well, Gibbon is a large and a very long book. I have been through it once, and I am pretty sure I shall do so again. But after that I suspect that the passages with pencil-marks beside them will satisfy me. I certainly could not, just after finishing it, recommence it at once, as Lord Randolph Churchill used to do, or make a practice of dipping into it daily. Great as it is, it is not sufficiently varied or sufficiently human. For perpetual reference no general history, I think, would do; one must have something more of the flavour of everyday humanity in it. And every mood and every kind of character must be represented. Though the books may supplement one another, one finds one’s choice growing at once very narrow. Even Horace Walpole’s _Letters_ or Saint-Simon’s _Memoirs_ would pall—at any rate on me. Shakespeare will do; but I cannot personally think of anything which, for me, would contest the other places with Boswell and Rabelais, unless it were _Morte d’Arthur_.

There are people, no doubt, who would take _Don Quixote_ or Montaigne. One man I know thinks that _Tristram Shandy_ would go with him. But Sterne is too short; one would get to know him by heart in a month or two. _Robinson Crusoe_ would have obvious advantages, especially in an illustrated edition—which would provide one with useful models when one was cutting out one’s garments. But I think I should take the three I have mentioned—unless, indeed, I approached the matter from quite a different angle. There is a strong case for taking a selection of the more morose and bewildered modern novels—say _La Curée_, _Le Paradis des Dames_, and _L’Assommoir_, or a judicious selection from Artzybascheff, Mr. Cannan, and Mr. D. H. Lawrence. For these would do a great deal to reconcile one to one’s lonely lot. Whenever one was regretting the world of men one would find an everflowing spring of consolation in them. “After all,” one would say, after each agued page, “there is a good deal to be said for a desert island.”

The Worst Style in the World

The word “euphuism” is commonly employed: it is also commonly confused with “euphemism.” The thing is very properly condemned, and the book that gave it its name is usually condemned with it. But it is probable that John Lyly’s _Euphues_ has frequently been abused by persons who have never opened it. At any rate, confessions of having read it are few, and have usually proceeded from the small minority who have found merit in the book. It is very interesting, therefore, to see that Messrs. Croll and Clemons have just published, through Routledge, a new edition, fully annotated. A generation unfamiliar with it will have a chance of reassessing it.

The work is in two parts. _Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit_ was first published in 1578; _Euphues and his England_ in 1580. How immediately popular it was is shown by the fact that (my authority is Mr. Arundell Esdaile’s _Bibliography of English Tales and Romances_) four editions of the first part, three of the second, and then at least seventeen editions of both parts together were published in fifty-eight years. (His name, incidentally, is spelt on various title-pages Lylly, Lyly, Lylie, Lilie, Lyllie, and Lily: a diversity worthy of “Shakspear.”) For a time almost everybody with any pretensions talked and wrote euphuism, very often employing Lyly’s fantastic alliterations, antitheses, and superfluous imagery without the content of sense that Lyly always had. Some writers openly ridiculed it. Shakespeare and Jonson made sport with euphuistic characters, and Sidney (who, I think, did not entirely escape the influence) ridiculed this

_Talking of beasts, birds, fishes, flies,_
_Playing with words and idle similes._

But the development of English prose was sensibly changed by it, and its effect may be traced in the prose of Donne, Taylor, and Browne. The book itself, however, like all extravagantly mannered books, had its slump in the end. Early in James I’s reign the wider public seems to have turned away from it, and in 1632, E. Blount, the publisher, prefacing an edition of Lyly’s plays, referred to him as a forgotten poet whose grave he was digging up. Blount’s own language is a terrible example of what Euphuism may come to. He calls his author “a Lilly growing in a Grove of Lawrels”:

“These Papers of his, lay like dead Lawrels in a Churchyard;
But I have gathered the scattered branches up, and by a Charme
(gotten from _Apollo_) made them greene againe, and set up as
Epitaphes to his Memory. A sinne it were to suffer these Rare
Monuments of wit, to lie covered with Dust, and a shame, such
conceipted Comedies, should be acted by none but wormes.”

From 1636 to 1868, when the late Professor Arber (a man whose memory has not been sufficiently honoured) published his edition in the “English Reprints,” _Euphues_ never appeared again, save in two brief eighteenth-century adaptations. For almost a hundred years his names was never mentioned; Lilly the astrologer was much better known. Most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics dismissed him as a man who, in Sir Walter Scott’s words, deformed his works “by the most unnatural affectation that ever disgraced a printed page.” One of the few exceptions was Charles Kingsley, who in _Westward Ho!_ attacks Lyly’s critics with tremendous enthusiasm:

“I shall only answer by asking, Have they ever read it? For
if they have done so, I pity them if they have not found it,
in spite of occasional tediousness and pedantry, as brave,
righteous, and pious a book as man need look into; and wish for
no better proof of the nobleness and virtue of the Elizabethan
age than the fact that _Euphues_ and the _Arcadia_ were the two
popular romances of the day.”

Turning at this stage, on a sudden impulse, to my Encyclopædia, to see whether sense is talked about Lyly there, I find that the article on him is by Mrs. Humphry Ward. Life is full of surprises.

The truth of the matter is that everybody is right, except those who do not trouble to read the book. Kingsley is perfectly correct; it would be difficult to find a book of the time finer in feeling or inspired by higher conceptions of conduct. Lyly is as full of common sense as of refinement; and the fact that he drew much of his discourses on education and religion from other writers does not diminish the impression made by his attitude to life. His narrative does not come to much; most of his space is occupied by harangues, debates, treatises, and letters; his Neapolitan and English love-stories move at a snail’s pace. But—his first discussion, by the way, is on heredity and environment which, with startling modernity, he calls Nature and Nurture—he usually argues about things of perennial interest, and always with subtlety, delicacy, and an insight into the human heart. Still, Sir Walter Scott really was not exaggerating the monstrosity—though it is not uniformly monstrous—of his style. It takes some patience to put up with the construction of his sentences and his recurrent bunches of similes in order to follow his argument. On the second page you fall plump into this sentence:

“The freshest colours soonest fade, the keenest Rasor soonest
tourneth his edge, the finest cloth is soonest eaten with
the Moathes, and the Cambricke sooner stayned than the course
Canvas: which appeared well in this Euphues, whose wit beeing
like waxe, apt to receive any impression, and bearing the
head in his own hande, either to use the rayne or the spurre,
disdayning counsaile, leaving his country, loathing his old
acquaintance, thought either by wit to obteyne some conquest,
or by shame to abyde some conflict, who preferring fancy before
friends, and this present humor, before honour to come, laid
reason in water being too salt for his tast, and followed
unbridaled affection, most pleasant for his tooth.”

The mania for balance and alliteration is shown here, but not the equally characteristic passion for piling animals and plants, mainly out of Pliny, into mounds of comparisons. They are most tolerable when the statements made are least verifiable. Here are two specimens:

“The filthy Sow when she is sicke, eateth the Sea-Crab, and
is immediately recured: the Torteyse having tasted the Viper,
sucketh Origanum and is quickly revived: the Beare ready to
pine licketh up the Ants and is recovered: the Dog having
surfetted to procure his vomitte, eateth grasse and findeth
remedy: the Hart beein perced with the dart, runneth out of
hand to the hearb _Dicbanum_, and is healed.”

“Then good Euphues let the falling out of friendes be a
renewing of affection, that in this we may resemble the bones
of the Lyon, which lying stil and not moved begin to rot, but
being stricken one against another break out like fire, and wax
greene.”

Yet sometimes he will conclude a paragraph of such abnormalities with a short, humorous, or pathetic sentence which is most effective; and even sentences bearing the evident marks of his style sometimes move one strongly in their context. I may quote such sentences as Lucilla’s two complaints: “But I would to God Euphues would repair hither that the sight of him might mitigate some part of my martyrdome,” and the extremely sibilant but musical “O my Euphues, lyttle dost thou knowe the sodeyn sorrowe that I susteine for thy sweete sake.” What a really judicious critic would do would be to ridicule the style and admire the book.

The Reconstruction of Orthography

Reconstruction is a blessed word, and very comprehensive: but I doubt whether the Government, when it established the Reconstruction Committee, anticipated that it would be asked to consider the problem of Spelling Reform. The Simplified Spelling Society, however, has sent it a memorial urging that “the reform of English spelling is eminently one that merits the practical consideration of the Committee.” The signatories include a number of scientific and other professors, scores of teachers, and a tail composed of “men of business, men of letters, editors, etc.” The editors do not include any man who edits a London daily or a literary weekly, though the directive minds of the _Lady’s Realm_ and the _Ardrossan and Saltcoats Herald_ are in the movement; and the only “men of letters” are Messrs. William Archer, H. G. Wells, Eden Phillpotts, T. Seccombe (at whom I am surprised), and a few persons who combine authorship with business or with “etc.” One did not want this piece of negative evidence to convince one that authors, as a body, will fight Simplifyd Speling to the last mute k. The memorial makes the usual points about saving children’s time, facilitating the acquisition of foreign languages, lightening the work of teaching defective children, and assisting aliens who are acquiring our tongue. We are also told that “the demand for a rational spelling may be compared to that for decimalizing our coinage and our weights and measures.”

This comparison seems to me very misleading, if by decimalization is meant the introduction of the Continental metric system. For this latter is uniform in various countries, whereas the reform suggested by the Simplified Spelling Society would do nothing to approximate the sound-values of our letters to those of letters in foreign tongues. Cosmopolitan systems have been proposed, very complex and full of odd new letters; but this Society’s suggestions, whilst eliminating some difficulties for the foreigner, would leave English just as difficult for a Frenchman to pronounce as French is for an Englishman. Take the phrase (I find it here) “A Ferst Reeder in Simplifyd Speling.” A Frenchman would still mispronounce it. If he wished to indicate those sounds in the French way he would write (I am not a phonetician) something like “E Fœust,” etc. So the Society had better not pitch its promises too high. This, nevertheless, remains a minor point. The chief considerations undoubtedly are the domestic effects of this piece of Reconstruction.

It sounds all very simple and convincing when people say: “Our spoken language has diverged from our written language: let our written language be made the same as our spoken language.” But directly you go into the matter you find that the difficulties are enormous. That we have no one spoken language is a commonplace. Our speech varies from fashion to fashion and from locality to locality. “Educated” English at present has an increasing Cockney element in it. The common “cultured” pronunciation of “No,” for instance, embodies an “o” sound which is anything but pure. Many rustics, however, still pronounce it with a good broad vowel. Even the spelling reformers do not agree about words. A. J. Ellis thought the “r” at the end of “proper” was still there; Sweet thought it had disappeared. As a matter of fact, it is both there and not there: in some classes and parts it is pronounced, in some it is not. And it is quite possible that it will become universal again.

This gets us on to the question of change in time. The Reformers can be met both ways. If it be argued that phonetic spelling fixes pronunciation, why have we abandoned the old pronunciation of words once phonetically spelt? Shakespeare pronounced the initial “k” in “know” and “knee.” We have dropped it out. And we have no guarantee that spelling these words according to our present slack pronunciation would not be followed by another divergence. The history of the word “sea” is odd. In the Middle Ages it was spelt “see” and pronounced “say.” In Tudor times the spelling was altered to “sea” in order to make the spelling correspond to the sound (the same as that in “great”). We have reached a pronunciation which the original spelling would have correctly represented! If it be argued that spelling does not fix pronunciation, the case for the reform is seriously weakened. The truth of the matter is that nothing can fix a pronunciation, but that the written word, especially in an age of universal literacy, does exercise a pull. And that pull can as well be exercised by our present spellings as by new ones. I think it was Titus Oates who went to the scaffold, or somewhere, crying “Lard! Lard!” Had he been a spelling reformer he would have quite unnecessarily assimilated the spelling of “lord” with that of the name of the white stuff they keep in bladders: a distinct loss to the language. Mr. Murison, in the _Cambridge History of Literature_, points out that the word “kiln” was originally pronounced as spelt; then for some time the “n” was dropped; then the old pronunciation returned. The same thing happened to words containing the diphthong “oi.” “Join” and “oil” were, in Middle English, pronounced as they are now. But for centuries men called them “jine” and “ile,” a habit that still persists amongst many of the most eager supporters of Spelling Reform. “H’s” were dropped wholesale and then picked up again. We never know, in fact, whether we shall not return to an old way of speech; and we might as well do that as diverge from an old way of writing.

The great consolation of conservatives in this matter is the length of time during which the enthusiasts have continuously failed to bring about a change. This is the oldest of the Campaigns. It was already old when in 1585 a book was published with this title-page (differently accented):

“AEsopz Fable’z in true Orto’graphy with Grammar-nótz.
Heryuntoo ar al’so jooined the short sentencez of the wyz Cato
imprinted with lyk form and order: both of which Autorz ar
transláted out of Latin intoo English. By William Bullokar.”

I don’t suppose that the Reconstruction Committee will find time to consider this matter. But if they do think of handling it they should realize that they are going to put their hands into a nestful of the largest hornets.

Mr. James Joyce

Mr. James Joyce is a curious phenomenon. He first appeared in literary Dublin about (I suppose) a dozen years ago: a strangely solitary and self-sufficient and obviously gifted man. He published a small book of verse with one or two good lyrics in it; and those who foresaw a future for him became certain they were right. He published nothing; but his reputation spread even amongst those who had never read a line he had written. He disappeared from Ireland and went to Austria, where he settled. The war came, and soon afterwards his second book—_Dubliners_—was issued and reviewed with a general deference, after wandering about for years among publishers who had been fighting shy of it because of its undoubted unpleasantness and a reference to Edward VII. Another interval and _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ began to run serially in the _Egoist_. “The Egoist, Ltd.,” has now published this book, and nobody is surprised to find all writing London talking about it. Mr. Joyce has only done what was expected.

Whether this book is supposed to be a novel or an autobiography I do not know or care. Presumably some characters and episodes are fictitious, or the author would not even have bothered to employ fictitious names. But one is left with the impression that almost all the way one has been listening to sheer undecorated, unintensified truth. Mr. Joyce’s title suggests, well enough, his plan. There is no “plot.” The subsidiary characters appear and recede, and not one of them is involved throughout in the career of the hero. Stephen Dedalus is born; he goes to school; he goes to college. His struggles are mainly inward: there is nothing unusual in that. He has religious crises: heroes of fiction frequently do. He fights against, succumbs to, and again fights against sexual temptation: we have stories on those lines in hundreds. All the same, we have never had a novel in the least degree resembling this one; whether it is mainly success or mainly failure, it stands by itself.

You recognize its individuality in the very first paragraph. Mr. Joyce tries to put down the vivid and incoherent memories of childhood in a vivid and incoherent way: to show one Stephen Dedalus’s memories precisely as one’s own memories might appear if one ransacked one’s mind. He opens:

“Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a
moocow coming down along the road and the moocow that was down
along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo ...”

“His mother had a nicer smell than his father,” he proceeds. There is verisimilitude in this; but a critic on the look-out for Mr. Joyce’s idiosyncrasies would certainly fasten upon his preoccupation with the olfactory—which sometimes leads him to write things he might as well have left to be guessed at—as one of them. Still, it is a minor characteristic. His major characteristics are his intellectual integrity, his sharp eyes, and his ability to set down precisely what he wants to set down. He is a realist of the first order. You feel that he means to allow no personal prejudice or predilection to distort the record of what he sees. His perceptions may be naturally limited; but his honesty in registering their results is complete. It is even a little too complete. There are some things that we are all familiar with and that ordinary civilized manners (not pharisaism) prevent us from importing into general conversation. Mr. Joyce can never resist a dunghill. He is not, in fact, quite above the pleasure of being shocking. Generally speaking, however, he carries conviction. He is telling the truth about a type and about life as it presents itself to that type.

He is a genuine realist: that is to say, he puts in the exaltations as well as the depressions, the inner life as well as the outer. He is not morosely determined to paint everything drab. Spiritual passions are as powerful to him as physical passions; and as far as his own bias goes it may as well be in favour of Catholic asceticism as of sensual materialism. For his detachment as author is almost inhuman. If Stephen is himself, then he is a self who is expelled and impartially scrutinized, without pity or “allowances,” directly Mr. Joyce the artist gets to work. And of the other characters one may say that they are always given their due, always drawn so as to evoke the sympathy they deserve, yet are never openly granted the sympathy of the author. He is the outsider, the observer, the faithful selector of significant traits, moral and physical; his judgments, if he forms them, are concealed. He never even shows by a quiver of the pen that anything distresses him.

His prose instrument is a remarkable one. Few contemporary writers are effective in such diverse ways; his method varies with the subject-matter and never fails him. His dialogue (as in the remarkable discussions at home about Parnell and Stephen’s education) is as close to the dialogue of life as anything I have ever come across; though he does not make the gramophonic mistake of spinning it out as it is usually spun out in life and in novels that aim at a faithful reproduction of life and only succeed in sending one to sleep. And his descriptive and narrative passages include at one pole sounding periods of classical prose and at the other disjointed and almost futuristic sentences. The finest sustained pages in the book contain the sermon in which a dear, simple old priest expounds the unimaginable horrors of hell: the immeasurable solid stench as of a “huge and rolling human fungus,” the helplessness of the damned, “not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it,” the fierceness of the fire in which “the blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls.” Stephen, after listening to this,

“came down the aisle of the chapel, his legs shaking and the
scalp of his head trembling as though it had been touched
by ghostly fingers. He passed up the staircase and into the
corridor along the walls of which the overcoats and waterproofs
hung like gibbeted malefactors, headless and dripping and
shapeless.”

No wonder. For myself, I had had an idea that this kind of exposition had died with Drexelius; but after I had read it I suddenly and involuntarily thought, “Good Lord, suppose it is all true!” That is a sufficient testimony to the power of Mr. Joyce’s writing.

This is not everybody’s book. The later portion, consisting largely of rather dull student discussions, is dull; nobody could be inspired by the story, and it had better be neglected by any one who is easily disgusted. Its interest is mainly technical, using the word in its broadest sense; and its greatest appeal, consequently, is made to the practising artist in literature. What Mr. Joyce will do with his powers in the future it is impossible to conjecture. I conceive that he does not know himself: that, indeed, the discovery of a form is the greatest problem in front of him. It is doubtful if he will make a novelist.

Tennessee

Letters from strangers can usually be accounted for. But why on earth I, more than any one else, should have received a letter from America asking me to contribute towards the re-establishment of a backwoods library I don’t know. This, however, has been my experience, and I trust that I am not endangering the new Anglo-Saxon Entente by relieving my feelings in the following:

LINES

_Written on receiving from the Librarian of a College which
educates “the mountain youth of Tennessee” a request for “a
book” to assist in the re-formation of the Library, which was
recently destroyed by fire._

_Mine ears have heard your distant moan,_
_O mountain youth of Tennessee;_
_Even the bowels of a stone_
_Would melt to your librarian’s plea._
_Although we’re parted by the ocean,_
_I’m most distressed about your fire:_
_Only I haven’t any notion_
_What sort of volume you require._

_I have a Greene, a Browne, a Gray,_
_A Gilbert White, a William Black,_
_Trollope and Lovelace, Swift and Gay,_
_And Hunt and Synge: nor do I lack_
_More sober folk for whom out there_
_There may be rather better scope,_
_Three worthy men of reverend air,_
_A Donne, a Prior, and a Pope._

_Peacock or Lamb, discreetly taken,_
_Might fill the hungry mountain belly,_
_Or Hogg or Suckling, Crabbe or Bacon_
_(Bacon’s not Shakespeare, Crabbe ~is~ Shelley)_
_And if—for this is on the cards—_
_You do not like this mental food,_
_I might remit less inward bards:_
_My well-worn Spenser or my Hood._

_Longfellows may be in your line_
_(Littles we know are second-raters),_
_Or one might speed across the brine_
_A Mayflower full of Pilgrim Paters._
_Or, then again, you may devote_
_Yourselves to less æsthetic lore,_
_Yet if I send you out a Grote[3]_
_For all I know you’ll ask for More._

_O thus proceeds my vacillation:_
_For now the obvious thought returns_
_That after such a conflagration_
_A fitting sequel might be Burns._
_And now again I change my mind_
_And, almost confidently, feel_
_That since to Beg you are inclined_
_You might like Borrow, say, or Steele...._

Envoi

_Yes, Prince, this song ~shall~ have an end._
_A sudden thought has come to me—_
_The thing is settled: I shall send_
_A Tennyson to Tennessee!_

But, as a matter of fact, unless I get a special permit for the export of second-hand books, I shan’t be able to send them even that.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] Or, with an appearance of greater generosity, one might return them the Pound they sent us some years since.

Sir William Watson and Mr. Lloyd George

“Representatives of literature and art” usually appear in the Honours Lists, and they are usually queer representatives. The knighted _littérateur_, as a rule, is either a second-rate man or a man long past his prime. Possibly more men than we know of refuse these knighthoods. For myself I do not see what on earth a really distinguished artist wants with a knighthood, unless he is poor, and thinks that a title would add a guinea or two per thousand to the price of his work. If Sir Samuel Johnson, Sir Charles Dickens, Sir William Blake, Sir Robert Browning, Sir W. Wordsworth, Sir S. Taylor Coleridge, Sir George Meredith stood beside Sir Lewis Morris and Sir W. Robertson Nicoll, Sir Henry Dalziel, and Sir Hedley le Bas (of the Caxton Publishing Company), I do not conceive that those eminent writers would be held in greater honour than they are, or that literature would cut a more important figure in our social life. The one man to whom a knighthood may _usefully_ be given is the deserving person who has worked conscientiously for years without adequate recognition and of whose existence the public might—to his and its advantage—be officially reminded. As the crown of a famous career a knighthood is absurd.

Sir William Watson has presumably got his knighthood for being one of the most industrious of the war-poets—and a war-poet congenial to the Powers-that-now-Be. Twenty years ago he had a greater reputation than he now has, and wrote several good and many respectable poems. He is still skilful, and can echo effectively the accents of Wordsworth and Milton; but he is certainly not a man of whom one thinks when one is estimating the vital forces in contemporary poetry. A new volume, _The Man who Saw_, has just appeared. The title-poem is about the Prime Minister:

_Out of that land where Snowdon night by night_
_Receives the confidence of lonesome stars,_
_And where Carnarvon’s ruthless battlements_
_Magnificently oppress the daunted tide,_
_There comes—no fabled Merlin, son of mist,_
_And brother to the twilight, but a man_
_Who in a time terrifically real_
_Is real as the time; formed for the time;_
_Not much beholden to the munificent Past,_
_In mind or spirit, but frankly of this hour;_
_No faggot of perfections, angel or saint,_
_Created faultless and intolerable;_
_No meeting-place of all the heavenlinesses,_
_But eminently a man to stir and spur_
_Men, to afflict them with benign alarm,_
_Harass their sluggish and uneager blood,_
_Till, like himself, they are hungry for the goal;_
_A man with something of the cragginess_
_Of his own mountains, something of the force_
_That goads to their loud leap the mountain streams._

Sir William proceeds to a peroration on

_the man of Celtic blood,_
_Whom Powers Unknown, in a divine caprice,_
_Chose and did make their instrument, wherewith_
_To save the Saxon; the man all eye and hand,_
_The man who saw, and grasped, and gripped, and held._
_Then shall each morrow with its yesterday_
_Vie, in the honour of nobly honouring him,_
_Who found us lulled and blindfolded by the verge_
_Of fathomless perdition and haled us back._
_And poets shall dawn in pearl and gold of speech,_
_Crowning his deed with not less homage, here_
_On English ground, than yonder whence he rose._

This must certainly be the most eulogistic poem ever written about a British politician.

There is nothing about Mr. W. M. Hughes, Lord Milner, Lord Curzon, or Lord Devonport in the volume; these, perhaps, will be dealt with in Sir William’s next book, which, I do not doubt, will be ready before long. But Sir Edward Carson gets his meed in a sonnet _To the Right Hon. Sir Edward Carson, on leaving Antrim, June 30, 1916_, and another sonnet acclaims Lord Northcliffe—to whom, possibly, there is a delicate allusion in the line quoted above, beginning “Whom Powers.” The sonnet is called _The Three Alfreds_; the three being King Alfred, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Alfred Lord Northcliffe:

_Three Alfreds let us honour. Him who drove_
_His foes before the tempest of his blade_
_At Ethandune—him first, the all-glorious Shade,_
_The care-crowned King whose host with Guthrum strove._
_Next—though a thousand years asunder clove_
_These twain—a lord of realms serenely swayed;_
_Victoria’s golden warbler, him who made_
_Verse such as Virgil for Augustus wove._
_Last—neither king nor bard, but just a man_
_Who, in the very whirlwind of our woe,_
_From midnight till the laggard dawn began,_
_Cried ceaseless, “Give us shells—more shells,” and so_
_Saved England; saved her not less truly than_
_Her hero of heroes saved her long ago._

It is a pity that there could not have been added some reference to Lord Northcliffe’s conviction that nobody in his senses ever dreamed of using shrapnel against wire. Had the shells passage been expanded it might have been less cacophonous. As it stands, it gives rise to the suspicious illusion that the sibilant cry was uttered by Mr. (or is it Sir?) Wilkie Bard. But no; it was “neither King nor Bard.”

Stranded

“No,” I thought, “I won’t take any books with me. I want a rest. I shall swim. I shall catch fish. There is sure to be a billiard-room in that pub., and pretty certain to be a few people who play bridge. The overtaxed brain must be allowed relaxation. So good-bye, Plato; good-bye, Spinoza; good-bye, Samuel Rawson Gardiner; good-bye, Freud. I won’t take any of you.”

I had been in the place twenty-four hours, and had plumbed the depths of my neighbours’ incapacity to play any games of skill or chance (except possibly—I did not ask this—loo and vingt-et-un), when, sauntering down the main, and indeed the only, street, I caught sight of the words, “Grocer, Chemist, Tobacconist, Draper, and Circulating Library.” It would be ungracious, I felt, to let such versatility go unrecognized. Besides, one might as well take a novel or two out with one in the boat. It might make the intervals between the bites seem a little shorter. So in I went.

A young girl with a pigtail escorted me past the Quaker Oats and the Gold Flakes, under a little low doorway and into a back room. “A shilling deposit, and twopence on each book,” she said; and left me to the shelves. There were books there all right: about two thousand of them, reaching from floor to ceiling on both sides. There was no sort of order, alphabetical or otherwise, so it was no good expecting to find a particular author right off. The only thing for it was beginning somewhere and going steadily along the rows.

B. M. Croker: yes, I think I read a great many of hers in my youth. They were about penniless young ladies going to India and getting married. It is no good tackling this one. _The Gateless Barrier_, by Lucas Malet; that was about spiritualism, and pretty average tosh it was; I shall probably come to _Sir Richard Calmady_ presently, but I shall give him a miss too. _The Iron Pirate_: I liked that rather, but it would be a pity not to like it so much now. I feel the same about _Saracinesca_, _The Witch of Prague_, and _In the Palace of the King_, which are all in a lump together where some late devotee has replaced them. Marion Crawford, upon whose every word my childhood hung, I dare not attempt you again; even _A Cigarette Maker’s Romance_ and the chronicle of _Mr. Isaacs_ (who enjoyed Kant and deluded me, for a time, into the belief that I should like him too) will be more dear to the memory if they are not restored to sight. _Count Hannibal_: that was the man who either massacred somebody or escaped massacre on St. Bartholomew’s Day. He had a great square jaw and eyes that made you jump; and women cowered and obeyed when he emitted a short, sharp oath or looked like emitting one. William Black I never liked at any time, so nothing by him need detain me. _Flames_? No. _Dodo_? Oh dear, no. _Ships that pass in the Night_? No. There was edelweiss in it, and an old man who was otherworldly and read nothing but Gibbon. Queen Victoria thought highly of it, but I don’t want to read it again. Nor _Red Pottage_ either. The husband and the other man (I think) had a duel. They drew straws, and the man with the shortest straw had to kill himself. What the lady thought about it I don’t remember. But one of them was a Lord, New Zealand came in somewhere, and at suitable places in the conversation a moth would flutter or a kingfisher flash by. It is by touches like these that one can distinguish really imaginative literature, but I am not tempted.

It is not reasonable to expect a man at this date to return to _A Yellow Aster_, or _Moths_ by Ouida. As for _The Silence of Dean Maitland_, the predicament of that respected ecclesiastic with the undisclosed sin on his conscience is still fresh in my mind, and I still remember how my elders, when it first came out, debated whether such a book ought to be written, and whether Maxwell Gray was a man or a woman. Of _The Sorrows of Satan_ I recall little of the plot, except that the Devil was a gentleman. I think that the first sentences were: “Do you know what it is to be poor? Not with that—poverty that—on ten thousand a year, but with that grinding poverty that,” etc. How many years ago is it since that immortal paragraph, reproduced in facsimile from the author’s own script, appeared in the _Strand Magazine_, with pictures of the great novelist in divers postures? It would be Ethel M. Dell now, I suppose; but they don’t seem to keep Miss Dell’s works in this Circulating Library, of which the circulation seems to have stopped many, many, many years since. They keep instead Frankfort Moore and G. B. Burgin.

Anthony Hope now. Here is _The Intrusions of Peggy_. There was a grizzled inventor who lived in the Temple, and he had a daughter (?) who shone like a sunbeam amidst the dusty shades of the law. Anthony Hope, who was very nearly a first-rate writer, must have put it better than that; but I’m sure that that is what it was about. Seton Merriman now. This is better. But will or will not a reperusal of _The Vultures_ and _Roden’s Corner_ diminish the respect that still survives in me for him? He gave me immense pleasure at one time; can I risk it? I don’t know.

With meditations like the above I roamed up and down before the frayed and wrinkled backs of these veterans, fascinated by so systematic a recovery of the familiar. Then I remembered that the sun was shining in a blue sky, only slightly fleeced with cloud; that the salt wind blowing shoreward was driving broken sunlight over the waves; that there were as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it; and that I must really take care of my health. Catching sight of _She_ and _Many Cargoes_, which I have read at least ten times apiece, but am always good for again, I detached them from their faded companions and took them into the front shop, meditating upon the astonishing sluggishness of this shop, where even Mrs. Barclay had not yet penetrated and Garvice was a cloudy speculation in the far future.

I paid my one-and-fourpence and stepped out on to the cobblestones. As I passed into the sun, it occurred to me that it was not surprising that even the minor works in the library were like old friends. For—and things like these do strangely remain known, yet for a time, unrelated—I spent a summer in this village fifteen years ago.

Mr. Ralph Hodgson

Mr. Ralph Hodgson is a poet who has still not quite got his due. He has just collected into one volume (_Poems_), with a few others, the verses published in a series of “Flying Fame Booklets” with Mr. Lovat Fraser’s charming and ingenious cuts. Ten years’ work goes into seventy pages, so that a charge of over-production is scarcely possible. In the circumstances Mr. Hodgson might have included one or two poems, _The Last Blackbird_, for example, from his earlier book. That book as a whole, however, was not comparable with this, which contains _The Bull_, indubitably one of the finest poems of our generation, _The Song of Honour_, which is almost as good, and many charming lighter lyrics. _Eve_, particularly, is a feat. Mr. Hodgson makes a delicate tripping song out of the Fall of Man; he pictures Eve, “that orchard sprite,”

_Wondering, listening,_
_Listening, wondering,_
_Eve with a berry_
_Half-way to her lips,_

and the serpent, a graceful beast,

_Tumbling in twenty rings_
_Into the grass._

The whole story trips like that.

_“Eva!” Each syllable_
_Light as a flower fell,_
_“Eva!” he whispered the_
_Wondering maid,_
_Soft as a bubble sung_
_Out of a linnet’s lung,_
_Soft and most silverly_
_“Eva!” he said._

But—and this is the achievement—one is not left with a sense of inadequacy and triviality. For the feeling throughout is sincere, and the nature of the calamity is conveyed as clearly by Mr. Hodgson, who makes the small birds chatter with sorrow and indignation when Eve falls, as it would have been by another man with all the paraphernalia of darkening heavens, thunderous voices, and long Latin words.

But this poem is not on the same plane as _The Bull_ and _The Song of Honour_. No writer has ever entered more completely into the feelings of an animal than does Mr. Hodgson as, in a setting of tropical forest and swamp, he shows the defeated, expelled, and dying leader of the herd remembering his calfhood, and his early fights, and his prowess and his final fall, whilst the obscene birds circle round overhead waiting for his death. _The Song of Honour_, an attempt to echo the Hymn of Praise sung by all things to their Maker, is, in the nature of things, more disjointed and impressionistic, less exact and well-shaped. It owes as much as any poem can decently owe to another to Christopher Smart’s _Song to David_. But the strength of feeling never fails, and parts of the breathless pæan are very beautiful.

_The music of a lion strong_
_That shakes a hill a whole night long,_
_A hill as loud as he,_
_The twitter of a mouse among_
_Melodious greenery,_
_The ruby’s and the rainbow’s song,_
_The nightingale’s—all three,_
_The song of life that wells and flows_
_From every leopard, lark and rose_
_And everything that gleams or goes_
_Lack-lustre in the sea._

_I heard it all, I heard the whole_
_Harmonious hymn of being roll_
_Up through the chapel of my soul_
_And at the altar die,_
_And in the awful quiet then_
_Myself I heard, Amen, Amen,_
_Amen I heard me cry!_
_I heard it all and then although_
_I caught my flying senses, Oh,_
_A dizzy man was I!_
_I stood and stared; the sky was lit,_
_The sky was stars all over it,_
_I stood, I knew not why,_
_Without a wish, without a will,_
_I stood upon that silent hill_
_And stared into the sky until_
_My eyes were blind with stars and still_
_I stared into the sky._

Those are two of the last stanzas, and even standing alone, I think, give something of the quality of the poem. They certainly are characteristic in the simplicity of their language.

Double Misprints

I take the following paragraph from the _Connersville (Ind.) Herald_:

“The Guest Day meeting of the literary club will be held at the
home of Mrs. L. A. Frazer to-morrow afternoon. Mrs. De Morgan
Jones, of Indianapolis, will lecture on ‘William Butler Meats
and the Garlic Revival.’”

I think the Lady of Shalott should have been brought in. Double misprints are rare, but I remember another which also was perpetrated in America but which has not quite so convincing an air of sheer accident as this one. A Colonel, who had fought in the Civil War, was described in his local paper as “a battle-scared veteran.” This imputation on his courage brought him to the office with a big stick and a demand that the paragraph should be reprinted with the offensive remark corrected. It was: but another misprint crept in and the word appeared as “bottle-scarred.” Every one who has dealings with the Press occasionally corrects, amid the mass of quite meaningless “literals,” a misprint that really makes some sort of sense. I myself in the last few months have had to emend printers’ references to Mr. Hotairio Bottomley and Mr. Edmund Goose. The former one felt tempted to leave uncorrected, the derangement of letters being so extremely apt.

The History of Earl Pumbles

“The late Earl (Eorl?) Pumbles was of lowly birth. He was born in the thorp of Stoke Parva in 1850, the son of a penniless timber-wright. Outdriven from his first school, he became a fighting-man. He was a dreadless and fearnought wight, and was once left for dead on the field, bleeding at every sweat-hole. The saw-bones brought him through. Coming back to England he saw the haplihood of making a gold-hoard in the soap-trade. He set up a business with the gold of others; got rid of his yoke-mates by sundry under-slinkings, and soon became amazingly wealthy. An earldom followed; though it is markworthy that on the morning after its bestowal a great songsmith wrote to the _Daily Score_ to say: ‘The Gusher of Fair-Name is befouled.’ In 1910 Lord Pumbles went as sendling to the King of Siam, with a bode-word from our King. In the back-end of the next year his health gave out; he became bit-wise worse; and he died last night of belly-ache. Lord Pumbles was often to be seen at Sir Henry Wood’s Out-Road Glee-Motes at Queen’s Hall, but he was almost a comeling at the House of Lords. He was cunning in Kin-lore, and in his fair wonestead at Pumbles wrote a great book on the stem-tree of his kin. By ill hap he was an eat-all and rather soaksome. He will be buried on Wednesday in the bone-yard at Pumbles, in which lich-rest his wife already lies. The earldom goes, by out-of-the-way odd-come-short, to his daughter.”

This little biography may have puzzled those who have got thus far. They may have thought it absurd. I compiled it with the help of “C. L. D.’s” _Word-Book of the English Tongue_, just published by Routledge. “C. L. D.” (the initials are, I observe, those of the author of _Alice in Wonderland_) is one of those enthusiasts who long “to shake off the Norman yoke” which lies so heavy on our speech. He follows, that is to say, in the footsteps of the late Rev. William Barnes (of Dorset), who asked his countrymen to call a perambulator a “child-wain” and an omnibus a “folk-wain.” “What many speakers and writers,” he remarks, “even to-day, call English, is no English at all but sheer French. Nevertheless, there are many who feel not a little ashamed of the needless loan-words in which their speech is clothed, and of the borrowed feathers in which they strut. Over and over again it has been said, and most truly, that for liveliness and strength, manliness and fulness of meaning, the olden English Tongue were hard to beat.” “In this little Word-Book, therefore,” he says:

“after having chosen a few thousand stock loan-words, I have
striven to set by the side of each, not indeed ‘synonyms,’ but
other good English words, which may stand in their stead.”

Which is certainly (or, I think I should say, “ywis” or “in good sooth”) a pure English sentence.