Chapter C: A. Tait (1)

Meopham, Kent.
December 13th, 1919.

[In answer to the first and second charges we plead guilty to misprints; the third error was due to a slip of the pen.--EDITOR.]

* * * * *

JOHN THOMSON OF DUDDINGSTON

(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)

SIR,--A material error occurs in the review of my book, _John Thomson of Duddingston_, in your journal for December. The price is given as 42_s._, whereas the published price is 31_s._ 6_d._ net; edition de luxe, £3 3_s._ net. The correct title of the book is: _John Thomson of Duddingston, Landscape Painter; with some Remarks on the Practice, Purpose, and Philosophy of Art_. Some reviewers express a high opinion on the latter department of my book; the full title ought, therefore, to be given--in justice to the volume.--Yours, etc.,

ROBERT W. NAPIER.

26 Bruntsfield Place, Edinburgh.

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THE MOON

(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)

SIR,--I do not know whether the scope of your "Correspondence" pages is intended to admit small criticisms of the original pieces of poetry and imaginative prose which you publish. If it is, I would beg leave to offer two perhaps niggling comments upon _The Moon_.

(1) In Stanza 22, "Emperor" is a fine word and perhaps inevitable: but would it be merely pedantic to remind the poet that when Bonaparte was in Egypt in 1798 he was not yet Emperor, nor even First Consul?

(2) In Stanza 30, eighth line, does not grammar require the reading "but thee" instead of "but thou"? "But" here is a preposition, not a conjunction--in spite of the "Boy on the Burning Deck." Burns (I think) has a line somewhere that clearly shows the true usage:

"Live but thee I canna----"

_i.e._, "_without_ thee." I do not think "but" in such a phrase can rightly be construed as merely equivalent to "and not."--Yours, etc.,

A. F. G.
December 12th, 1919.

BOOKS OF THE MONTH

POETRY

POEMS, 1916-1918. By FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG. Collins. 5_s._ net.

Mr. Brett Young's _Marching on Tanga_ was the best written of all the books produced during the war by men on active service. Its imaginative quality and the charm of its style were no surprise to those who knew his early novels, of which _The Dark Tower_ was the most notable. It has been succeeded by two other prose works, _The Crescent Moon_, an African story, the melodrama of which is veiled by the beautiful descriptive writing, and _The Young Physician_, a more naturalistic essay which was noticed in our first number. Unobtrusively, amid these other activities, he published two or three years ago a little book of verses, _Five Degrees South_; and in this new volume are gathered the contents of that book and the poems that their author has written more recently.

The volume is characteristically Georgian. There are hints, here and there, of musings which may develop into a general conception of the universe and of man; there are points of contact with the problems which vex the reflective spirit. But, generally speaking, Mr. Brett Young is content to sing, briefly and with deep feeling, of a few things securely loved: and those points of contact are points of departure. He writes of England--friends, landscapes, and a woman--before he leaves England. When he is in Africa the blood and struggle, the fell tropical scenery, seem but to make acuter the response to the England that is lost; and when he comes home again he sings again of home recovered and loved with a new intensity. _The Gift_ gives the keynote of the book:

Marching on Tanga, marching the parch'd plain,
Of wavering spear-grass past Pangani River,
England came to me--me who had always ta'en
But never given before--England, the giver,
In a vision of three poplar-trees that shiver
On still evenings of summer, after rain,
By Slapton Ley, where reed-beds start and quiver
When scarce a ripple moves the upland grain.
Then I thanked God that now I had suffered pain,
And, as the parch'd plain, thirst, and lain awake
Shivering all night through till cold daybreak.
In that I count these sufferings my gain,
And her acknowledgment. Nay, more, would fain
Suffer as many more for her sweet sake.

That is from Africa, where he rides through marshes swarming with cruel life and admires the sickly beauty of the fever tree, but always as an alien. Then he returns:

I saw a thrush light on a hawthorn spray,
One moment only, spilling creamy blossom,
While the bough bent beneath her speckled bosom,
Bent, and recovered, and she fluttered away.

The branch was still; but in my heart, a pain
Than the thorn'd spray more cruel stabbed me, only
Remembering days in a far land and lonely,
When I had never hoped for summer again.

All his deepest feelings--patriotism, love, friendship--are interwoven with natural beauty. In _Testament_ he leaves to his friend the common memory of a summer in the Cotswolds: sunlight on the gables of Evesham, a boat on the cool water of Avon, sunsets over Bredon, evening stocks and the scent of hay; and in the most eloquent close, putting the most beautiful scenes of earth behind him to sing of spiritual beauty, he lingers on them to describe them. But his descriptions are always prompted and suffused by emotion: like Brooke in _The Happy Lover_ and Mr. Masefield in _Biography_, he catalogues the scenes, the fields, trees, flowers, and faces that live sweetly in his memory, and his affection is communicated. He is poles away from the "careful nature poet" who makes a neat drawing of anything that at all interests him. Emotion selects his subjects; he does not manufacture. He writes clearly too and unaffectedly. Except in _Thamar_--the most ambitious poem in the book, but promising a greater success than it achieves--he is never obscure for a moment. And his simplicity of expression conceals a good deal of technical effort. The longer pieces--such as _The Leaning Elm_--are elaborately musical, and an examination of the first poem quoted above will reveal studied, though not obtrusive, assonances and internal rhymes which show that Mr. Brett Young (it might be deduced elsewhere from his metres) has not read his Bridges in vain. There is scarcely a bad poem in the book, or one without an interest peculiar to itself. Several beyond those we have mentioned--the best are the exquisite _Prothalamion_ and _Invocation_--are to be found in the recent Georgian book. The poem on prehistoric remains on the battlefield might well have been added, and _Bête Humaine_:

Riding through Ruwu swamp, about sunrise,
I saw the world awake; and as the ray
Touched the tall grasses where they dream till day,
Lo, the bright air alive with dragonflies,
With brittle wings aquiver, and great eyes
Piloting crimson bodies, slender and gay.
I aimed at one, and struck it, and it lay
Broken and lifeless, with fast-fading dyes.
Then my soul sickened with a sudden pain
And horror, at my own careless cruelty,
That where all things are cruel I had slain
A creature whose sweet life it is to fly:
Like beasts that prey with bloody claw: Nay, they
Must slay to live, but what excuse had I?

This is a book which excites great curiosity about its author's future; but at present his verse, beautiful as it is, lacks energy.

COLLECTED POEMS OF THOMAS HARDY. Macmillan. 8_s._ 6_d._ net.

RUDYARD KIPLING'S VERSE: INCLUSIVE EDITION, 1885-1918. Three vols. Hodder & Stoughton. 63_s._ net.

It is always a satisfaction to have in one volume--or in two or three uniform volumes--the verses of a poet which we have previously had to search for in self-contained books. The publication of a collected edition of Mr. Hardy's poems is welcome for another reason. In the last few years his reputation as a poet--quite apart from the fact that he has continued, right up to his eightieth year, to produce novel and beautiful work--has greatly increased. Critics may now be found who even hold that Mr. Hardy's chief claim to greatness will rest, in the eyes of posterity, upon his poems (including _The Dynasts_) rather than upon those novels which in themselves made him one of the two or three most conspicuous writers of his generation. But even now we do not think that his stature as a poet is widely realised, the volume and quality of his poetical work generally known: and there will probably be many who, in perusing this "collected" volume, will be struck for the first time with the fact that here alone, leaving all the prose out of the question, is work sufficient, and sufficiently good, to place its author among the greatest English writers of the last century. There are hundreds of pages of short poems, some of them exquisitely beautiful, and all of them so direct and fresh that even the most faulty are worth having. Faults--though we might rather call them idiosyncrasies--Mr. Hardy certainly has. His language is sometimes bald and sometimes cumbrous; his consistent pessimism sometimes leads him, in the dramatic poems, to extremes of deliberate gloom. But can we regret a sad philosophy which has enabled a sweet and sensitive spirit to shine with such uninterrupted brightness amid that gloom? And can we regret a habit of phraseology which has enabled Mr. Hardy to win some of his greatest technical triumphs (for he makes music out of scientific or journalistic words which would ruin an ordinary lyrist) and which will probably have direct results in the way of enlarging the poetic vocabulary, which is in constant need of oxygenation? It is inevitable that a collected edition in one volume should be printed in smaller type than is entirely comfortable, and the text of this edition is not so attractive as that of the separate volumes. But it is all here, and when the reader compares the volume to some of its companion Macmillan collections (Clough, for instance, falls into nothingness) he comprehends that in the history of English literature Mr. Hardy will rank above many of the supposedly established classics. He is a great poet.

The Kipling collection is luxuriously got up, but unfortunately the covers are not all they might be, and the reader is irritated throughout by the presence on the top of every right-hand page of "Inclusive Edition" in large black capitals. Mr. Kipling would show up far better in a selection than in a complete edition, so much of his verse is at best vigorous journalism. Were a good selection made we believe that some of those who depreciate him would admit for the first time that he has a fine poet in him; a collected edition merely shows that he does not know the poet in him from the rhymer. The greater one's admiration for his best work the greater the irritation one sustains when reading through the great body of his jingling journalism and pompous sermonising. Had he written nothing but the _Ballad of East and West_, the songs from Puck and a few more he would be as well remembered as he will be now with all this mass of versification to his name.

WHEELS 1919: A FOURTH CYCLE. Blackwell. 6_s._ net.

The end-papers of this volume bear a charming design of athletes throwing darts at targets, and it is to be observed that no one of them as yet has hit the bull's-eye. We do not know if the symbolism was deliberate, but it is apt, for the volume is full of potshots so wayward that we are usually uncertain as to which target these erratic slingers wish to hit. Music at least is not desired: most of the verses consist of strings of statements--if they are not disconnected the connections between them are not apparent to us--interesting neither severally nor jointly, and entirely without beauty of sound. Miss Edith Sitwell's verses, though incomprehensible, contain a good deal of vivid detail, pleasant because it reminds us of bright pictures. There is one poem by the late Wilfred Owen (_Strange Meeting_) which has a powerful, sombre beginning:

It seemed that out of the battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped,
Through granites which Titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall.
With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached here from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
"Strange, friend," I said. "Here is no cause to mourn."
"None," said the other. "Save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also."

There are several other poems by him which have all the earnestness, and much of the force, of Mr. Sassoon's illustrations of the beastly cruelty of war. But the one poet included who is always arousing interest and curiosity is Mr. Aldous Huxley. Mr. Huxley, when these poems were written (though, in _Leda_, he seems already to be partly recovering), seems to have been in the same sort of revulsion against sentimentality as Rupert Brooke was in when his first book was being composed. He is anxious that we should not overlook the facts that there are noisome smells in the world, that many people are disgusting to see, and that even the most touching episode may be interrupted by an eructation: though, unlike Brooke, he does not usually even try to sing. There is something very familiar about the restaurant poem:

What negroid holiday makes free
With such priapic revelry?
What songs? What gongs? What nameless rites?
What gods like wooden stalagmites?
What reeking steam of kidney pie?
What blasts of Bantu melody?
Ragtime ... but when the wearied band
Swoons to a waltz, I take her hand,
And there we sit in blissful calm,
Quietly sweating palm to palm.

There is always strength about Mr. Huxley's epithets: he observes accurately and his language is hard, clear, and original. He conveys his unpleasing ruminations with such force that in several places we were incommoded by a rising in our gorge. But it is not in order to obtain sensations of that kind that we read poetry, and we shall not in idle hours beguile our leisure by repeating over and over the much-loved syllables of _The Betrothal of Priapus_. Mr. Huxley can see things with his own eyes, and has a powerful intelligence, and when he has discovered something to write about he may become a very good poet.

GENERAL WILLIAM BOOTH ENTERS INTO HEAVEN, AND OTHER POEMS. By NICHOLAS VACHEL LINDSAY. With an Introduction by ROBERT NICHOLS. Chatto & Windus. 5_s._ net.

Mr. Vachel Lindsay is best known as the author of poems, notably poems inspired by negro camp-meetings, which are meant for recitation; they have intoxicating rhythms and the language full of gusto. _The Congo_, _The Daniel Jazz_, and others should certainly be introduced to the British public, and perhaps Messrs. Chatto propose to follow up this volume with another containing Mr. Lindsay's later work. It is a pity, however, that the present collection should have come first, for it contains little that is characteristic of Mr. Lindsay at his best, and little, therefore, that will show readers here how good he can be. The title-poem, though not as good as some of its successors, is the only one now published which shows what Mr. Lindsay can do. It describes the entrance of the late General Booth into Paradise at the head of the motley army whom he has saved:

Booth led boldly with his big bass drum--
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
The Saints smiled gravely and they said "He's come--
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
Walking lepers followed, rank on rank,
Lurching bravoes from the ditches dank,
Drabs from the alleyways and drug fiends pale--
Minds still passion-ridden, soul-powers frail:
Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath,
Unwashed legions with the ways of Death--
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)

The other poems are far more ordinary in form and banal in language. Mr. Lindsay, at this stage, was writing like other people, and his verse was redeemed from commonplaceness only by its sincerity and high spirits. He is an "uplifter" who is as jovial as Falstaff; he is probably the only poet on record, except Shelley, to be a teetotaller, and certainly the only one to take an active part in an anti-Saloon campaign. The second best poem in this book is an elegy, in couplets, on O. Henry; an elegy both romantic and truthful. Of the others an address to the U.S. Senate is decidedly racy. A senator whom Mr. Lindsay regarded as undesirable was elected. His verses on the occasion begin:

And must the Senator from Illinois
Be this squat thing, with blinking, half-closed eyes?
This brazen gutter idol, reared to power
Upon a leering pyramid of lies?

That is what met the eyes of the newly-elected when he opened his local paper on the morning after the poll.

A TREASURY OF WAR POETRY, BRITISH AND AMERICAN POEMS OF THE WORLD WAR: 1914-1919. Edited by GEORGE HERBERT CLARKE. Hodder & Stoughton. 10_s._ 6_d._ net.

If this be a treasury it contains not merely gold and silver, but copper, nickel, Britannia metal, brass, and lead. Even if all the good poems inspired by the war were brought together they would not make a book of over four hundred closely-printed pages. Mr. Clarke is Professor of English in the University of Tennessee. His collection, amongst those who are sufficiently undiscriminating to like it, may promote Anglo-American friendship; if it does it will have justified its existence. Otherwise its only value consists in its reproduction of certain poems which are not, we think, to be found elsewhere. We believe that the Poet Laureate's _Wounded_ (which appeared in the _Times_) is one of these. It is a very lusty poem inspired by Trafalgar Square in sunshine: wounded lads lolling by the lions and Nelson standing above. It ends:

The gentle unjealous Shakespeare, I trow,
In his country grave of peaceful fame,
Must feel exiled from life and glow,
If he thinks of this man with his warrior claim,
Who looketh on London as if 'twere his own
As he standeth in stone, aloft and alone,
Sailing the sky, with one arm and one eye.

This poem--it is not the only one--was overlooked by those who were recently yelping at Mr. Bridges for having written nothing about the war.

NOVELS

CHILDREN OF NO MAN'S LAND. By G. B. STERN. Duckworth. 7_s._ net,

SIR LIMPIDUS. By MARMADUKE PICKTHALL. Collins. 7_s._ net.

NIGHT AND DAY. By VIRGINIA WOOLF. Duckworth. 7_s._ net.

THE POWER OF A LIE. By JONAS BOJER. Hodder & Stoughton. 7_s._ net.

GOLD AND IRON. By JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER. Heinemann. 7_s._ net.

The question how far the novel can be, or should be, a criticism of society, not of life in Arnold's sense, but of the forms in which life manifests itself at given times and places, is one that has been discussed but is never likely to find a general settlement. There will always be purists, of the "art for art's sake" order, who will maintain that the discussion or even the exposition, as such, of practical social problems is out of place in fiction. There will always be those who maintain, as did Mr. H. G. Wells some years ago, that "if the novel is to be recognised as something more than a relaxation, it has ... to be kept free from the restrictions imposed upon it by the fierce pedantries of those who would define a general form for it"--writers and critics, in fact, who, like Mr. Wells himself, are prepared to use the novel as a means to any practical end, whether transient or eternal, of which at the moment it seems capable. Nor is it particularly desirable that any such settlement should be arrived at; but the dispute suggests a distinction which has some usefulness. Mr. Wells has picked up, with the forceps of fiction, and examined by turns politics, religion, education, and the relations between the sexes. Mr. Bennett, portraying modern society of all kinds no less closely, has no special suggestion to make to this age or this civilisation: his lesson, if his books contain one, is of universal applicability. Mr. Conrad, so unlike him in all else, is with him in this. Mr. Conrad, the novelist, has no views on the treatment of subject races or the reform of the merchant marine. These two are of the older tradition: for the novel dealing with social questions is a thing of comparatively recent growth. Formerly only one artist was allowed, and even expected, to be didactic--that artist in whom to-day preaching is most bitterly resented, namely, the poet. He was the bard, the seer, the prophet, who thundered out of a cloud and instructed the nation. The dramatist and the novelist were by comparison mere providers of entertainment and were required at most to give their work a flavour of good morals as a proof of decent intentions. The drama led the way; and, in the hands of Ibsen and his disciples, it became an instrument for the examination of topical problems. The novel soon followed suit, so that we are now confronted with a category of works of fiction in which the divided aim by no means destroys all artistic interest.

Such a book, in a high degree, is Miss Stern's _Children of No Man's Land_, which examines alternately the position of naturalised Germans and their families in England during the war and the position of those members of the younger generation who have been left by parental indulgence to drift between the enforced morality, which is spared them, and the easy immorality, from which their instincts withhold them. In both cases the meaning of No Man's Land is perfectly clear. It is the barren and abhorred territory in which wander those who are rejected by both the contending nations; and it is the land of the _demi-vierges_ or, as Miss Stern somewhat awkwardly calls them, "the demi-maids." Both problems are clearly presented and examined; but it is not obvious what purpose is served by thus combining them and giving to them a common symbolism, or by making a brother suffer in one tract, while his sister strays in the other. They are not problems in the same category or on the same plane; and their alternate treatment here hardly conduces to continuity or clarity of thought.

But it must be admitted that Miss Stern, having thus handicapped herself, carries the unnecessary burden with great dexterity. The whole book is written with a hard, brilliant cleverness that never flags and is conducted through a remarkable variety of incidents and with the help of a remarkable variety of characters. The study of the behaviour of the "half-English" during the war has an inherent air of reality and moderation. But it is not on this that Miss Stern lavishes her fullest powers of description and reasoning. She is actually more concerned with the development of Deb Marcus, the beautiful Jewish girl, who is discovered at the opening of the book being kissed by a middle-aged and unattractive German whom she does not like but whom her fear of seeming foolish forbids her to repulse. We leave her in comfortable wedlock declaring that her daughter will be brought up "As strictly as I can, right and wrong, good and bad ... signposts wherever she may stop and wander. I'm going to superintend her morals; I'm going to say 'don't,' and I'm going to ask questions, and forbid her things. And be shocked whenever it's necessary I should be shocked----" "You little reactionary!" her friend replies; and this, in fact, is the plain moral of Miss Stern's book, that modern laxity has rendered reaction necessary. But the moral lesson, however just it may be, would not be acceptable unless it were supported by sound observation or palatable without good writing. Miss Stern provides both these necessities, and her pictures of both the half-worlds are extremely convincing and entertaining. She makes real and keeps distinct a great variety of characters, who, as one thinks over the book, reappear unmistakably in the mind--Manon, the marketable _ingénue_, daughter of an operatic singer; Antonia Verity, a Diana whose virginity is almost imperceptibly changing into spinsterhood; Winnie, stupid, sluggish and greedy, in whom inconsistent but rigid conventions have quite taken the place of morals, "a jumble of puritanism and prejudice and incurious sensuality," and a host of others. Her men are equally well done, but perhaps with a care less intense and less from the inside. But it is a sign of Miss Stern's thoroughness that both men and women should be there in such numbers, so delicately differentiated, so intricately taking their places in her prolonged and exhaustive argument. If, of course, she had done no more than provide a gallery of typical portraits to prove a thesis, her work would hardly be worth discussing at so much length. But she has managed to avoid the pitfall of the social critic in fiction, and, without ever losing sight of her main purpose, to compose a book in which no passage is mere argument. The story proceeds levelly through all its multifarious scenes, continuing to present incident and character as a novel must do. The skill is perhaps even too great. The reader's attention is sometimes diverted by it; and it must be said that juggling with cups invites praise rather of the juggling than of the china. But, in one way and another, Miss Stern keeps interest vividly alive through a long book, the theme of which is by no means wholly pleasant. Her wit and vivacity are really remarkable; and the conversations of her persons are unusually animated. She is without great depth of feeling or perception. The types with which she deals are shallow; and it is noticeable that the less shallow they are the more she tends to deal with them from the outside. But _Children of No Man's Land_ is nevertheless an admirable performance in a difficult kind.

_Sir Limpidus_, by Mr. Marmaduke Pickthall, is another essay in social criticism, for which the author has somewhat disappointingly deserted the Levant. His hero is a member of the ruling classes, the son of a wealthy baronet, who is trained from early youth to follow the code of his peers, in evil-doing and well-doing alike. This leads him, by way of public-school and university, one entanglement and another, including a breach of promise case and a suitable marriage, to a seat in the Cabinet and the reverence of his fellow-countrymen. On the last page:

Suddenly he was recalled to London. There was war in Europe and
England might at any moment be involved in it. How would the people
take it? was the question of the hour. Sir Limpidus was of the
opinion that war just then would be a godsend. It would rouse the
ancient spirit of the people and dispel their madness. They would
once more rally to their natural leaders, who, for their part, would
throw off the mantle of frivolity. Even defeat as a united nation
would be better than ignoble peace with the anarchic mob supreme.

But Mr. Pickthall's final verdict on Sir Limpidus occurs earlier than this, and is put into the statesman's own mouth or rather mind. Sir Limpidus has delivered an address at his old school, and is told by his disappointed son that "the fellows ... wanted you to talk about yourself, the things you've done, in Parliament and foreign countries, and all that."

"I've not done anything to make a speech about," said Sir Limpidus,
after a moment's hesitation.

His triumph as a statesman was not one of doing. It was the natural
consequence of being what he was. If it came to doing, he had fought
a duel in his youth, and in Albania had assisted to burn down a
village. Those incidents in his career were not fit subjects for a
speech to schoolboys; and besides them in the way of doing there was
nothing but pursuit of women and field sports. So it was with a smile
over the double meaning of the words that he repeated: "I've done
nothing to make a speech about."

The headmaster, following his distinguished guest, happened to
overhear this mild disclaimer, and he laughed aloud, calling his
colleagues round him to enjoy the classic joke.

These two extracts will serve better than any analysis to explain both the direction and the method of Mr. Pickthall's satire. It has the doubtful merit (in a satire) of being consistently moderate; and Sir Limpidus, who is never quite a figure of truth, also misses ever being quite a figure of fun. Social criticism on these lines may put forward quite adequately the author's point of view; but unless it has some imaginative vigour it cannot be said to justify the form in which it is cast. Mr. Pickthall's book is a presentation, by means of characters instead of by abstract arguments, of certain lines of thought regarding politics, education, and other questions; and in so far it is an essay in the same _genre_ as Miss Stern's novel. Where it differs is in the fact that the lines of thought have remained to the author incomparably more interesting than the means of their presentation. These figures are painted in the flat: they have little imaginative life: and, as a work of creative fiction, the book must be regarded as a failure.

With the remainder of the books on our list, we return to the older tradition of the novel, the tradition which seeks to produce a work of art, the lessons deducible from which (if any) are, roughly, applicable to human nature in general. In this sort, Mrs. Virginia Woolf has written a very extraordinary story. Katharine Hilbery, after much hesitation, engages herself to William Rodney, a precise Civil Servant, who writes plays in verse. He develops doubts of their love simultaneously with hers, and is not sure whether he is not in love with her cousin, Cassandra, as, after some curious experiments in emotionalism, he discovers himself to be. He therefore disengages himself from Katharine and engages himself to Cassandra. Meanwhile Ralph Denham, a brilliant and more vital, if less polished, young man, in love with Katharine, seeing her given to William, proposes to Mary Datchet, who loves him but refuses him. When Katharine is free he proposes to her and is accepted. This story Mrs. Woolf tells in nearly five hundred-and-fifty pages of fairly close print.

The taste for her writing is decidedly an acquired one; and, as we have proved by experiment, it is possible to read some two hundred pages without acquiring it. But when a certain saturation point is reached, a remarkable change takes place in the reader's sensibility; and what before he thought amazingly tedious and thin-spun he then finds delightful--delightful enough for it to be worth while turning back to the beginning and reading again the two hundred pages which wearied him at the first attempt. Mrs. Woolf has indeed proved a truth which undoubtedly exists but which few writers are capable of establishing, namely, that no character, properly ascertained and portrayed, can ever be uninteresting. It is not by vivacity or humour that she maintains the readableness of her innumerable scenes and conversations. Perhaps the most vivacious passage in the book is the description of Cassandra, as she appears in William's memory:

Cassandra Otway had a very fine taste in music, and he had charming
recollections of her in a light fantastic attitude, playing the flute
in the morning-room at Stogdon House. He recalled with pleasure the
amusing way in which her nose, long like all the Otway noses, seemed
to extend itself into the flute, as if she were some inimitably
graceful species of musical mole. The little picture suggested very
happily her melodious and whimsical temperament.

Mrs. Woolf is not a satirist, not even so much as was Jane Austen; and she avoids humour for its own sake, not so much because she is not capable of it as because that is not here her concern. The outstanding quality of her book is its consistent wealth of minute and accurate observation, both of behaviour and of states of mind, by means of which the persons are at length fully revealed. Extracts from work of this sort are unfortunately, as a rule, not very convincing: it is like a liquid which has no colour when it is seen in a tea-spoon and a great deal when it is seen in a bucket. But a specimen may be given. Here Katharine and Rodney, sitting together in silence, are considering for the first time the possibility of breaking their engagement:

She would have spoken, but could not bring herself to ask him for
signs of affection which she had no right to claim. The conviction
that he was thus strange to her filled her with despondency, and
illustrated quite beyond doubt the infinite loneliness of human
beings. She had never felt the truth of this so strongly before. She
looked away into the fire; it seemed to her that even physically they
were now scarcely within speaking distance, and spiritually there
was certainly no human being with whom she could claim comradeship;
no dream that satisfied her as she was used to be satisfied; nothing
remained in whose reality she could believe, save those abstract
ideas--figures, laws, stars, facts, which she could hardly hold to
for lack of knowledge and a kind of shame.

When Rodney owned to himself the folly of this prolonged silence and
the meanness of such devices, and looked up ready to seek some excuse
for a good laugh or opening for a confession, he was disconcerted by
what he saw. Katharine seemed equally oblivious of what was bad or
of what was good in him. Her expression suggested concentration upon
something entirely remote from her surroundings. The carelessness
of her attitude seemed to him rather masculine than feminine. His
impulse to break up the constraint was chilled, and once more the
exasperating sense of his own impotency returned to him. He could not
help contrasting Katharine with his vision of the engaging, whimsical
Cassandra; Katharine undemonstrative, inconsiderate, silent, and yet
so notable that he could never do without her good opinion.

She veered round upon him a moment later, as if, when her train of
thought was ended, she became aware of his presence.

This is woven of gossamer threads, and so indeed is the whole novel; but these threads make together a consistent, flexible, and beautiful fabric. There is one further observation that is perhaps worth making. Writers who go so deeply into the minutenesses of psychology and behaviour as Mrs. Woolf commonly tend to obscurity not only in their material but also in their presentation of it. In the pages of this book there is not one thought or one sentence that is not impeccably lucid.

_The Power of a Lie_, by Mr. Jonas Bojer, a Norwegian author, whose book, _The Great Hunger_, has already attracted attention, is preceded by an introduction by Sir Hall Caine; and indeed the farmers and peasants with which it deals do a little recall the Manxmen of that writer's early work. But there the suitability of this sponsorship ends; and we must enter a protest against the practice of handicapping a book with a preface by a critic who is evidently incapable of understanding it or of expressing himself intelligently upon it. The story is sufficiently simple. Knut Norby, a wealthy, simple, good-hearted, irascible old farmer, has allowed himself in a weak moment to be cajoled into backing a bill for Wangen, who is an unbalanced, incompetent, and rather unamiable person. Wangen fails; and Norby is reduced to panic terror by the thought of what his wife will say when she hears of his folly. He therefore puts off the moment of confession by speaking so evasively as to give the impression that he denies having signed the bond, and Fru Norby, indignant against the man who has sought to defraud her husband, takes the matter into her own hands and lays a charge of forgery against Wangen. The innocent man, who is guilty enough in other particulars, having brought many persons who trusted him to destitution, is elevated into a condition of excessive self-righteousness by this unjust accusation. Norby struggles for some time to put matters right, but his courage always fails him at the point of confession; and gradually he comes to regard Wangen as a wicked man and as the tool of unscrupulous persons. Wangen, always weak and shifty, at length forges a letter to prove his case, which he cannot do otherwise, as the only witness to the signature is dead. His forgery is detected, and he is sentenced to a year's hard labour. Meanwhile Norby has argued himself out of the truth and back into the condition of benevolent justice, which is his natural state. The book ends with a banquet given to him by his neighbours to show their sympathy with him in his trials.

On this very remarkable composition Sir Hall Caine has the following observations to make:

This book says, if I do not misunderstand it, that the sense of
innocence in an innocent man may be corrupting and debasing; that
to prove himself guiltless a man may make himself guilty, and that
nearly every good and true impulse of the heart may be whittled away
by the suspicion and abuse of the world.

I confess, though I am here to introduce this book to English
readers, and do so with gladness and pride, that this is teaching of
which I utterly disapprove. It conflicts with all my experience of
life to think that a man may commit forgery, as Wangen does, to prove
himself innocent of forgery, and that a man may become unselfish, as
Norby becomes unselfish, by practising the most selfish duplicity.
If I had to believe this I should also have to believe that there
is no knowledge of right and wrong in the heart of man, no sense of
sin, that conscience is only a juggling fiend, and that the presiding
power in the world not only is not God, but is the devil.

This passage is worth quoting because it suggests what Mr. Bojer has avoided. Sir Hall Caine demands, to all intents and purposes, a book like one of his own, in which there are definite and distinguishable categories of good men and bad men, in which virtue is ranged uncompromisingly against vice. But Sir Hall Caine's books, as this preface would suggest, even if we had never seen one of them, are, since the very earliest of them, negligible both artistically and morally. Mr. Bojer has attempted something different and has succeeded in writing a most unusual and interesting novel. He makes the perennial discovery that good and bad are mixed in all men and he adds the discovery that the sufferings of bad men are not always the results of, or proportionate to, their sins. He has done these things in a story which astonishes the reader by its straightforwardness and simplicity. The characters are presented by means of the barest lines; and no incident or theme is elaborated beyond a few pages. Nevertheless the central idea is adequately worked out, and the whole novel leaves a distinct and vivid impression on the mind.

In Mr. Joseph Hergesheimer discriminating English readers found over a year ago an American novelist whom, alone of his generation, they were able to admire and to consider seriously. This may have been partly because he has learnt something, but not so much as to seem ridiculous, from English models, and because he writes with a restraint, moderation, and detachment which are rare in his literary compatriots. But there was certainly also a definite and individual virtue in him to which critical opinion in this country responded. He had a lively and exact visual gift and a power of rendering great passion without risk of bombast; and these qualities were rightly held to redeem many faults and weaknesses in _The Three Black Pennys_. In _Java Head_, published in the middle of last year, the first of these qualities was still perceptible, but, as regarded the second, Mr. Hergesheimer's avoidance of rant appeared to have become a paralysing inhibition. We do not know quite what to make of his third book, _Gold and Iron_. In the absence of any information to the contrary it would be natural to suppose that it is a later work than the other two; but this seems to us almost impossible and, if indeed it be so, decidedly regrettable. It consists of three _nouvelles_ or "long-short stories," of which the first, _Wild Oranges_, describing the rescue of a girl from a household living in isolation and terrorised by a homicidal man-servant, is, except for a few passages of description, a negligible piece of the magazine order. In the second and third we do discover traces of the Mr. Hergesheimer whose talents excited us in 1918. One deals with the resuscitation, by a cold, contained, and determined man, of a deserted blast-furnace and his attempt to establish himself as a magnate. The other describes the return of a gold-miner, rich but with hands reddened in one of the incidents of Forty-Nine, from California to his prim and sleepy native village on the coast of Massachusetts. In both of these Mr. Hergesheimer's object is to discover to the reader the interior passions of intense but reserved and hardly articulate personalities. This is an ambition worthy of a novelist of the first rank; and indeed, both in setting himself such a task and in his methods of approaching it, Mr. Hergesheimer reveals himself as a writer of more than common powers. But it can hardly be said to be successfully accomplished here. In glimpses both Alexander Hulings and Jason Burrage are grasped and shown as living men. Hulings comes vigorously and convincingly to life in his duel with Partridge Sinnox, the dangerous gentleman from New Orleans; it is possible to see Burrage, smoking a cheroot, feet up on the brass rail of the hearth, with the refined and yet original Honora Canderay beside him, at his first visit to her. But between such glimpses as these both figures disappear, as though in a moving mist, behind Mr. Hergesheimer's attempt to describe them. He will describe them only in the precise and rigid way which he has chosen, a way which involves omissions, reticences, and silences, subtle appeals to the reader's understanding; and, in these stories at least, he has by no means mastered it. It was used with much more success in _The Three Black Pennys_ and in _Java Head_, and is probably capable of much further development. If we are right in our surmise that these stories are early work, there is a possibility that Mr. Hergesheimer may yet show himself to be a very remarkable novelist indeed.

BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM

THE LETTERS OF CHARLES SORLEY. Cambridge University Press. 12_s._ 6_d._ net.

The value set on irony by the Greeks might well be studied by us moderns. A proper sense of irony teaches both humility and patience, and it will not lead to cynicism unless the basis of the soul be cynical. It teaches, above all, proportion, which is the lesson needed most, perhaps, by modern artists and sociologists, philanthropists and theologians, business men and politicians. These letters of Charles Sorley's, the letters of a young, eager, cultivated boy, are rendered ironical by circumstance. After the ordinary life of a public schoolboy at Marlborough he went, in 1914, before going to Oxford, for an educational holiday in Germany. He stayed in a German family, he was enthusiastic about German things and German people as compared with the English, and he reached England only just in time to escape being a prisoner of war in Germany. The letters are lively, intelligent rather than terse, good-humoured, shrewd and full of that enthusiasm which was Charles Sorley's great natural talent. It is not, however, the essays on Masefield and Housman which give the book its interest. It is the pages on his life in Germany and a few passages on life in the Army which make the volume one of the most remarkable records of the young England which bore the brunt of the war.

How delightful is this passage on the German supper--Sorley lodged in an academic household at Schwerin:

The people come at seven, and talk about the rise in the price of
butter till 8. From 8 till 9.30 they eat and drink and talk about the
niceness of the victuals, and ask the hostess their cost. From 9.30
to 10.30 they talk about the scarcity of eggs. From 10.30 to 11 they
drink beer and cross-examine me about the Anglo-German crisis. From
11 till 12 they make personal remarks and play practical jokes on one
another. From 12 to 12.30 they eat oranges and chocolate and declare
they must be going now. From 12.30 to 1 they get heavy again and sigh
over the increased cost of living in Schwerin. At 1 they begin to
scatter. By 2 I am in bed.

That is not the only passage which takes the reader straight into the atmosphere of the Caravaners. There is this anecdote, too:

A friend of sorts of the Bilders died lately; and, when the Frau
attempted to break the news to Karl at table, he immediately said,
"Don't tell me anything sad while I'm eating."

Charles Sorley remarks on this that an exact parallel may be found in the Odyssey where the gentleman expostulates οὐ γαρ ἐγώ γε τερπομ' ὀδυρόμενος μεταδόρπιος {ou gar egô ge terpom' oduromenos metadorpios}--I hate being forced to grieve in the middle of supper.

The letters are full of casual literary criticism, and provide a curious contrast to the letters of Lionel Johnson recently published. Charles Sorley strikes one as having a far clearer idea of the position of literature in life than had Johnson, but he shows little sign of that fine critical intelligence which mark Johnson's best judgments. Sorley passes passionately from Masefield to Housman, from Housman to Hardy, from Hardy to Ibsen and Goethe. It seems odd that a boy of his temperament should think _Faust_ greater than anything of Shakespeare's, and by implication greater than _Peer Gynt_; elsewhere he passes a really witty judgment on Goethe: "If Goethe really died saying 'More light,' it was very silly of him: what _he_ wanted was more warmth."

His life in the Army was not long. After a hard training in England he left for France in May, 1915, and was killed by a sniper on October 13th. The books he had over there were _Faust_ and Richard Jefferies. To some of us Jefferies is chiefly lovable and remarkable because of the men who have loved him; and that he could charm Sorley and bring to him, amid the disgust of the battlefield, something of the English countryside, gives him an additional claim on our gratitude:

I read Richard Jefferies to remind me of Liddington Castle and the
light green and dark green of the Aldbourne Downs in summer.

The book is edited by Professor and Mrs. Sorley, and Mrs. Sorley contributes a brief biographical chapter. There are one or two references to living persons which would, perhaps, be better away, though we cannot imagine any person of humour objecting to the fun of this high-spirited, generous boy. Incidentally, in its picture of Marlborough and Sorley's literary activities, the letters provide a useful counterpoise to the rather reckless attacks made on the uncultured public schools of England.

ESSAYS ON ART. By A. CLUTTON-BROCK. Methuen. 5_s._ net.

Shall we ever have a satisfactory æsthetic? Sometimes, in moments of hopefulness, one believes that there may be a few points of agreement in ethics, in politics, in metaphysics, even in economics: but to read a new book on æsthetic is to wonder again whether we shall ever get beyond the old tag, that it's a mere waste of time arguing about taste. Certainly Mr. Clutton-Brock's book, interesting, acute, and charmingly written as it is, does not show us how to reconcile, let us say, Tolstoy's _What is Art?_ with Whistler's _Ten o'Clock_: or either with the great and unjustly-despised body of criticism to be found in Ruskin's works. His essays are provocative: at times he appears to clear up certain matters, and then the reader finds himself wondering.

In the very first essay Mr. Clutton-Brock discourses on nature and art. "There is one beauty of nature and another of art." "Nothing kills art so certainly as the effort to produce a beauty of the same kind as that which is perceived in nature. In the beauty of nature, as we perceive it, there is a perfection of workmanship which is perfection because there is no workmanship. Natural things are not made, but born; works of art are made. There is the essential difference between them and between their beauties." Now is there any truth in those statements? Take, for instance, the simplest kind of beauty, the beauty which appeals to touch: is there any essential difference between the sensations of beauty given by stroking a sable and stroking a piece of exquisite silk velvet? Again, is the beauty conveyed by the sight of Cader Idris really different in kind from the beauty conveyed by the sight of Amiens Cathedral? Is a singer's appeal fundamentally different from the appeal of the nightingale?

Mr. Clutton-Brock goes on to say that "all great works of art show an effort, a roughness, an inadequacy of craftsmanship which is the essence of their beauty, and distinguishes it from the beauty of nature." That sentence betrays what seems to us his saddest error. He is confusing, we think, art and craft. It simply is not true that a work of art must show "inadequacy of craftsmanship." What is essential is that the artist should not seem to be satisfied with his mere technical skill of craft. He should, somehow, convey to us that he knows there is a beauty which no craft can render perfectly. He must, in short, be humble. For lack of that humility Blake refused to call Rubens a great artist. Yet Rubens, superb craftsman as he was, was not the superior of Velasquez, who yet preserves in all his work that sense of something desired yet unachieved--unachieved not because Velasquez's craft was inadequate, but because his vision was interpretative rather than imitative. It is important that the distinction between craft and art should be recognised, otherwise Mr. Clutton-Brock's perfectly sound contention that the beauty of art "is produced by the effort to accomplish the impossible" will be made a mere excuse for slovenly workmanship. This sort of discussion, however, is unsuitable for a review; even where space is, for practical purposes, infinite (_e.g._ in a conversation), it seldom leads to agreement. We can only say (what everybody knows) that Mr. Clutton-Brock is the sanest of all professional art-critics and that to differ from him is to doubt one's own opinions.

UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS. By LORD DUNSANY. Elkin Matthews. 5_s._ net.

Lord Dunsany's fancy can generally be trusted to discover many odd prettinesses for our pleasure, but as in old Battersea enamel the prettiness is liable to chip off and show the dull metal beneath; and in these twelve sketches there is little of fancy. They were written "to show," so the Preface tells us, "something of the extent of the wrongs that the people of France had suffered," and the cultivated lack of vigour in style does serve, somehow, to illustrate the desolation of towns laid waste, and--which more peculiarly touches Lord Dunsany's sympathy--gardens. The monotony of the scene is, too, well typified by the same quality in description. Frequently, as in _The Real Thing_, when he sets out to be fantastic he is merely trivial; and throughout he draws from a wealth of ingenious but ungainly metaphor. However, the author well understands that the utmost terror of desolation can be inspired by the sound (rather than the sight) of man-made things gone to rust. Out in the dead land, where villages are to be conjectured from scattered heaps of stones, he was much impressed--for he refers to it again and again--by the "mournful sound of iron flapping on broken things," and--"this was the sound that would haunt the waste for ever." On the other hand, in _Bermondsey versus Wurtemburg_, he observed that a German soldier had chalked up the name of his regiment on a wall--the 156th Wurtemburgers. Subsequently a British soldier had prefaced this with "Lost by," and added after "retaken by the Bermondsey Butterflies." This might have served to point the less serious moments of a special correspondent to one of the lighter newspapers, but it scarcely warrants preservation in an admirably printed book with a strong binding in excellent taste.

THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON. By ISABEL SAVORY. T. Fisher Unwin. 25_s._ net.