Chapter C: A. Tait (9)

Miss Bianco is twelve years old--at least she was when these drawings were made. There is a sameness about them. Almost all of them contain a rather languishing female face, with something of a primitive Madonna about it and something (if we dare suggest it) of the sophisticated 'nineties. In the coloured and in the more elaborate of the black-and-white pictures the faces are framed in setting of conventional but charming flowers, with, as Tennyson would put it, here and there a rabbit. The drawings are unreservedly amazing for a girl of Miss Bianco's age; if her future progress were to be on a par with her present precocity she would become one of the greatest artists in the world. We cannot assume that; nor, on the other hand, need we rummage in our notebooks for ancient generalisations about the fate of ancient prodigies. Miss Bianco is remarkable now; and she will be what she will be. If we _were_ predicting we should say that she would become a very skilful and charming decorator, a more complicated Kate Greenaway.

She has at least performed one great feat already: she has provided little platforms from which Mr. de la Mare's Pegasus has sprung into the æther. We can imagine nothing which could more finally illustrate how small suggestions may germinate in a poet's mind than the verses which Mr. de la Mare has written to these so slight, so purely decorative pictures. His imagination has been coloured and excited by every smallest hint of a mood; and where, to the passing observant eye, Miss Bianco has left nothing more to be said to the little she has stated herself, anything, a droop of the eyelids, an indicated detail in the background, serves to send Mr. de la Mare off dreaming into remote fairylands. Behind one of Miss Bianco's damsels, slit-eyed and straight-fingered, is a path leading to a small crude building. The wind bloweth where it listeth. On this small thing, missing girl and child and leafy tree, Mr. de la Mare's eye has rested. The outlines have filled in, atmosphere has trembled in, sounds and lights; and the outcome is something of which Miss Bianco never dreamed:

Is it an abbey that I see
Hard by that tapering poplar-tree,
Whereat that path hath end?
'Tis wondrous still
That empty hill,
Yet calls me, friend.

Smooth is the turf, serene the sky,
The timeworn, crumbling roof awry;
Within that turret slim
Hangs there a bell
Whose faint notes knell?
Do colours dim

Burn in that angled window there,
Grass-green, and crimson, azure rare?
Would from that narrow door
One, looking in,
See, gemlike, shine
On walls and floor

Candles whose aureole flames must seem--
So still they burn--to burn in dream?
And do they cry, and say,
"See, stranger; come!
Here is thy home;
No longer stray"?

The poem _Suppose_, which appeared in our first number, starts on its fantastic flight from a face with eyes of wonderment in it; and from another head--a head crowned, a neck girdled--comes _The Comb_, perfect in itself without any picture:

My mother sate me at her glass;
This necklet of bright flowers she wove;
Crisscross her gentle hands did pass,
And wound in my hair her love.

Deep in the mirror our glances met,
And grieved, lest from her care I roam,
She kissed me through her tears, and set
On high this spangling comb.

_Mirage_ is lovelier still, and far more slender in its origins; how Mr. de la Mare's imagination can fill out an outline that really is given is shown in his delicious poem of _Master Rabbit_. There is a charming sketch: a rabbit, and nothing more. But to the poet a whole scene comes up, country scents, green grasshoppers talking:

And wings like amber,
Dispread in light,
As from bush to bush
Linnet took flight.

He sees the rabbit looking out from the shadow-rimmed mouth of his shady cavern at sunset. Rabbit sees him:

Snowy flit of a scut,
He was into his hole;

And--stamp, stamp, stamp,
Through dim labyrinths clear--
The whole world darkened,
A human near.

This is an extra number to _Peacock Pie_, and the poems as a whole make us once more impatient for a collected volume of Mr. de la Mare's work which will show the bulk and the quality of the performance of one of the most exquisite artists in words who has ever contributed to the unequalled treasury of our English lyrics. Nevertheless it must be admitted that his average level is higher when he is not writing verses to a series of pictures.

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH VERSE, 1616-1660. Edited by H. J. MASSINGHAM. Macmillan. (Golden Treasury Series.) 3_s._ 6_d._ net.

Mr. Massingham collects here four hundred poems written, with few exceptions, in the forty-four years that followed the death of Shakespeare. It may not be correct to describe this period as the most neglected period of English literature. It is true that many of the authors and most of the poems to be found in Mr. Massingham's collection have been ignored by anthologists, and are utterly unknown to the reading public; but we suspect that the periods of Anne and the Georges have been even less thoroughly searched, though they would not yield results so rich as those which have come from the claim that Mr. Massingham has staked out. There were great poets in that period; it left us many poems by Milton, Herrick, Herbert Vaughan, Cowley, Crashaw, Lovelace Suckling, and Carew which are familiar to every reader at all interested in English poetry. Had the obvious best been always selected Mr. Massingham would have found himself crowded out with stock pieces before he began. He has therefore--since he desired mainly to give publicity to the unfamiliar--left Milton and Herrick out altogether and excluded some of the best-known poems of their nearest rivals. This has given him room for everybody, or at least for a hundred and more poets, for Nabbes and Festel, as well as for the poets above mentioned, for Donne, and for such other respectable poets as Brome, Bunyan, Cartwright, Corbet, Davenant, Denham, the Fletchers, Habington, Bishop King, Massinger, Jasper Mayne, Quarles, Randolph, Shirley, T. Stanley, Traherne, Waller, Wither, and Wotton. It is an imposing array; contemplating it one realises that if that age could not vie with the Elizabethan in the number of great works produced, it actually beat it in the number of men it produced who wrote a few, or many, good short poems. And it had, as Mr. Massingham rightly says, a quality of its own. It may be difficult to deduce "tendencies" from this mass of metaphysical, amorous, graceful, jocular, scholarly, tripping verse. But at least the age was no mere afterglow. There are very few poems in this fine selection which could have been mistaken for products of any other generation, and there are few which are mere degenerate imitations of the songs of an earlier race. There was, under Charles and Cromwell, a distinct civilisation with a colour and a mind of its own; less passionate (save, in some quarters, in the matter of religion) than the last; less certain in its music; more self-conscious in all its ways: but genuine and, temperately, ardent, cheerful, chivalrous, genial, often tender. From the one pole of

What a dainty life the milkmaid leads!

to the other of

I saw Eternity the other night,

it covered, in its manner, the whole range of poetic experience and expression, and it did many things perfectly. Herrick and Vaughan were its typical products, and neither, in his sphere, has an equal.

We find no material fault in this most admirable and enjoyable anthology. We may, however, make in passing a few unimportant comments. Mr. Massingham, as we have said, has covered the ground more exhaustively than we had any right to expect; and for most of his important omissions he accounts satisfactorily on the ground that he does not want to reprint poems which everyone already knows. There are, however, a few things which he might have included. The selection would have been more thoroughly represented had it contained more of the controversial element. "I suppose," he says, "that my political temper would urge me to declare for the Parliament in the Civil War. But a bruising disunion of feeling would arise were such a choice forced upon me. Before the Civil War the middle and upper classes in England were highly educated and passionately drawn to music. Turning over these old Song-books, printed fifty years after their Elizabethan prototypes, one feels a horror at the men who violated the temples of song and learning. For the Puritans killed the musical soul of England and paved the way for our doom--the triumph of the business sense." That is as may be: at all events he who regarded Royalism as the devil would have to admit that, not forgetting Milton and Marvell, the devil had most of the best tunes; and there is a lilt about many of the Rump songs that equals anything in English polemic verse. Cleveland, in fancy, might have been more freely drawn on. Politics apart, there are things missing. A selection from Joseph Beaumont is given, but where is that beautiful poem about the "sweet fury" of Mary Magdalen? One poem of the mysterious Anne Collins (it is only, we think, one edition of her works of which a unique copy is supposed to exist; there was a second) is given, but not the best. Orinda is done scant justice; and another woman (not a genius, but as good as some of Mr. Massingham's men) who deserved quotation, however brief, is Anne Bradstreet, the Tenth Muse, the Female Homer and what not, of New England. The admission of Philip Ayres, who was twenty years out of date, is not really justifiable. Granted that he was old-fashioned in style and spirit, the same might be said of some of his Restoration contemporaries. Dr. Walter Pope's celebrated poem, for instance, would not have been out of place in a volume which contains Thomas Jordan and might have contained Martin Parker. A few of Mr. Massingham's copious and highly entertaining notes invite controversy. It is cruel of him, so tender as a rule towards small poets who have patches of goodness, to describe Flatman as a poetaster; it is rash of him to declare that a good Alexandrine _must_ have a noticeable cæsura; and it must surely have been a moment of aberration which led him to detect "a superb freedom of imagination" in the ordinary tropes of Lord Herbert's _Elegy_:

Doth the sun now his light with yours renew?
Have waves the curling of your hair?
Did you restore unto the sky and air
The red and white and blue?
Have you vouchsafed to flowers since your death
That sweetest breath?

These things, however, matter little.

We note, by the way, that Mr. Massingham, like his predecessors, is unable to contribute anything new to the discussion concerning one of the noblest of the poems that come under his survey. We refer to "Yet if His Majesty our Sovereign Lord," which was discovered by Mr. Bullen in Christ Church Library. Mr. Bullen conjectured Vaughan as author. Mr. Massingham, with all deference, says that Mr. Bullen is wrong. We agree with Mr. Massingham; but we should greatly like this problem to be cleared up.

A MISCELLANY OF POETRY--1919. Edited by WILLIAM KEAN SEYMOUR. Palmer & Hayward. 5_s._ net.

This miscellany "is issued to the public as a truly catholic anthology of contemporary poetry." We do not quite gather what the author means by this. He has restricted the range of his selection by printing only poems which have not yet appeared "in book form," and he certainly cannot suppose that he has even half of the best living poets in his volume, or even half of the best poets of the younger generation. Mr. Chesterton appears, but not Mr. Belloc; Mr. Binyon, but not A. E. or Mr. Yeats; Mr. Davies, but not Mr. de la Mare; Mr. Sturge Moore, but not Mr. Freeman; Mr. Nichols, but not Mr. Sassoon, Mr. Graves, or Mr. Turner. Possibly the suggestion is that Mr. Seymour has consulted other people's tastes as well as his own; this might explain the presence here of poets who are not known to have written anything of any merit and who certainly contribute nothing of merit to this collection.

However, the good things make the book worth having. Chief among them is a long epistle by Mr. Sturge Moore, which contains pictures as clean-cut and vivid as those which made his _Micah_ so peculiarly rich a poem. Mr. Chesterton's _Ballad of St. Barbara_ has glorious lines, and the spirit is the spirit of _The White Horse_, but ballads should not be obscure, and this one is. There is no obscurity in Mr. Chesterton's _Elegy in a Country Churchyard_:

The men that worked for England
They have their graves at home,
And bees and birds of England
About the cross can roam.

But they that fought for England,
Following a fallen star,
Alas, alas, for England
They have their graves afar!

And they that rule in England
In stately conclave met,
Alas, alas, for England,
They have no graves as yet!

The series of lyrics by Mr. Davies are, as usual, delicious, and there is less of rotundity than usual, and more exactness and feeling, in Mr. John Drinkwater's _Malediction_. Mr. Gibson contributes a series of descriptive war-sonnets, adjectival but interesting; and Mr. Gerald Gould eight sonnets very skilfully written and full of good, if reminiscent, phrases, which are unfortunately not as intelligible as they look. The editor's _Fruitage_ is too much like the more pontifical octosyllabics of Mr. Drinkwater, but his _Siesta_ gives a hot coloured picture vividly. Of the other contributors Mr. Binyon, Miss Macaulay, Mr. Theodore Maynard, and Mr. Charles Williams (whose _Poems of Conformity_, difficult but sinewy, should be better known than they are) are interestingly represented. To these we may add Mr. F. V. Branford, who has almost made a good poem out of mathematics. It concludes:

For here and hence I sail
Alone beyond the pale,
Where square and circle coincide,
And the parallels collide,
And perfect pyramids flower.

Obscurity is more excusable in this poem than in his others. The discriminating reader who has read this book once will probably mark the poems he wants to read a second time; there are many here by authors who need not be specified which have given us an uncompensated headache. If the editor means to follow the volume up he would be well advised next time in being less "catholic" in this regard; an anthology of contemporary verse has to be almost uniformly good to serve any useful purpose.

NOVELS

INTERIM. By DOROTHY RICHARDSON. Duckworth. 7_s._ net.

VALMOUTH. By RONALD FIRBANK. Grant Richards. 7_s._ net.

FULL CIRCLE. By MARY AGNES HAMILTON. Collins. 7_s._ net.

INVISIBLE TIDES. By BEATRICE SEYMOUR. Chapman & Hall. 7_s._ net.

Miss Richardson's novel is her fifth volume in the same manner and about the same person; and a sixth volume is announced. She has apparently in effect only one novel to write and only one manner in which to do it. It is a manner distinctively her own, and yet not an isolated phenomenon. This kind of thinking and this kind of writing seem to be abroad at the moment. There are deep and genuine analogies between Miss Richardson's style and the style of Mr. James Joyce; there is a much more superficial resemblance between her work and the _fumisterie_ of Mr. Ronald Firbank. She has influenced (but in this case it was a conscious discipleship) the method of Miss May Sinclair. It would not be difficult to find in her traits which she has in common with the more sincere exponents of Futurist poetry and with the theory an attempt to embody which was made in Futurist paintings. She is, in fact, an individual member of a school which is mostly posing and pretence, and which tends to discredit its very few genuine exponents. But that Miss Richardson is genuine, whether we like reading her books or not, is a question beyond dispute. She writes as she does because she must, because it is the way in which it has been given her to write.

It is her object to translate the memories of sensations into words directly and with as little change as possible. This is a specimen:

Miriam pulled up in front of a large oil-painting over the sofa; its
distances--where a meadow stream that was wide in the foreground
with a stone bridge and a mill-wheel and a cottage half hidden under
huge trees, grew narrow and wound on and on through tiny distant
fields until the scene melted in a soft-toned mist--held all her
early visits to the Brooms in the Banbury Park days before they had
discovered that she did not like sitting with her back to the fire.
She listened eagerly to the busy sounds of the Brooms. Someone had
bolted the hall-door and was scrooping a chair over the tiles to get
up and put out the gas. Dust-sheets were still being flountered in
the room behind her. Grace's arm came round her waist.--I'm so glad
you've come, sweet, she said in her low, steady, shaken tones.--So
am I, said Miriam.--Isn't that a jolly picture.--Yes. It's an
awfully good one, you know. It was one of papa's.--What's O'Hara
doing in the kitchen?--Taking Grace by the waist, Miriam drew into
the passage, trying to prance with her down the hall. The little
kitchen was obscured by an enormous clothes-horse draped with airing
linen. She's left a miserable fire, said Mrs. Philps from behind the
clothes-horse. She hasn't done the saucepans, aunt, scolded Florrie
from the scullery.--Never mind, we can't have er down now. It's
nearly midnight.

This is the reconstitution of a moment and, for what it is worth, Miss Richardson makes the moment live again. But minds which observe and record in her close, literal fashion are not normal minds; and therefore her impressions of life, coloured as they are by her acute introspectiveness, cannot correspond to life as normal persons see it. The normal person simplifies life, not merely when, if ever, he describes it, but also when he perceives it. The world is not to him the fragmentary incoherent whirl of feelings and events which it is to Miss Richardson. Nevertheless, it is obvious that this _is_ how the world appears to her; and here, again for what it is worth, is her description of it. With such a book, a document rather than a novel, the ordinary attitude of the critic of fiction is naturally unsuitable and inapplicable. He cannot assume the conventional position of judgment from a definite and unalterable standard. He can, in fact, do no more than explain what is the book before him and leave it at that. We attempt to do no more. We do, however, think it worth while to establish the fact, if possible, that Miss Richardson's "novels" are the real expression of a real personality. On some readers they may have absolutely no effect; on some a small or a transitory effect; some, we know, appreciate them enormously. But they are genuine; they are not "stunts." When the series is finished, it may, of course, appear that Miss Richardson has given to the life of Miriam Henderson an artistic shape and moulding, instead of making it merely an endless film. But this does not at present suggest itself. What we have now is the record of a particular mind in various states, a mind which is not normal, but is not possessed to an abnormal degree of either beauty or power. That, we confess, is all we are able to say.

That Miss Richardson's method is native and genuine may be seen by a comparison of it with that of Mr. Ronald Firbank, whose _Valmouth_ is worth noticing here in order to make the point. Here, again, a random specimen is necessary:

Depositing his scrip in the outhouse, the cowherd glanced around:

"Where's Thetis got?" he asked, addressing the small boy, who,
brandishing a broken rhubarb leaf, was flitting functionarily about.

"Thetis?... She's," he hopped, "standing in the river."

"What's she standing there for?"

"Nothing."

"... Must I thrash you, Billy Jolly?"

"Oh, don't, David."

"Then answer me quick."

"When the tide flows up from Spadder Bay she pretends it binds her
to the sea. Where her sweetheart is. Her b-betrothed.... Away in the
glorious tropics."

"'Od! You're a simple one, you are!"

"Me?"

"Aye, you."

"Don't be horrid, David, to me ... you mustn't be. It's bad enough
quite without."

"'Od."

Throughout this curious book we have again an attempt at an incoherent and bewildering style, a picture of a world which disintegrates into a thousand pieces as we regard it. It is indeed in some sort that deliquescence of language and thought of which a certain school of French writers once dreamed. But it expresses not a native, if unusual, way of seeing, so much as a perverse, deliberately assumed attitude. Mr. Firbank has clearly talents and ingenuity enough to prevent any nonsense he may write being thrown away as pure nonsense. But it is also clear that his aim is to write nonsense rather than sense and perhaps to put forward under a film of absurdity a certain natural perversity which would not be welcomed if it were more lucidly expressed. He has a certain gift for inconsequence and highly etherealised frivolity; but this may be inextricably connected with his demerits, in which case it would be useless to ask him to change. If he does not, he will remain a curiosity, mildly amusing a few readers, deluding a few into a belief that they have found a super-genius and boring or displeasing the great majority.

These two books taken together suggest an aspect from which it may be profitable to consider Mrs. Hamilton's _Full Circle_. Neither of them tells a story, in the sense in which the miraculous inventors of the _Arabian Nights_ told stories. Miss Richardson has no "astonishing history" to recount. She rather describes than tells: though her heroine moves chronologically, one has yet the sense rather of movement in space than of movement in time. Mr. Firbank tells some story or other, but it is not possible to discern it under his incessant saltimbanqueries. Mrs. Hamilton tells a definite tale. Certain persons enter into relations, find themselves in a situation, resolve it: there is an introduction, a complication, and a dénouement. It is, however, the story that we miss when we look back on the book. Mrs. Hamilton has observed or imagined certain persons of various characters and, in order to exhibit them, has invented the shocks and clashes between them which carry on her narrative. But, while the persons are clearly observed or imagined, the book suggests that nothing more than invention was used for the bringing forth of the incidents. The writer might easily have been content to describe her characters without showing them in motion. The Quihamptons, Iris Mauldeth and Wilfrid Elstree, are vivid and real, portrayed in the round. We should know them if we met them; and, from their presentation here, we can make such estimates of and guesses about them as we make in ordinary life--they are no less real than that. But in Wilfrid's affair with Bridget Quihampton, in his disappearance and return, in Roger's marriage and destiny, it is impossible not to discern a certain lassitude and want of interest. The incidents are not improbable or ill-drawn; but Mrs. Hamilton cannot have felt very much about them as incidents. Though the people have undoubtedly come to life in her hands, they have not proceeded to do anything of their own initiative; except in one instance, we feel the hand of the author jogging their elbows and ruling their fates. When two of them, when Bridget and Wilfrid, are involved in an emotional situation, the author's interest continues to reveal itself in Bridget and in Wilfrid, not in the situation which the clash of their individualities has produced. A tale need not deal with the marvellous and fantastic, with genies in bottles and young princes transformed into calves, in order to exhibit the special gift of the story-teller. It may concern itself with themes as slight as those of _The Spoils of Poynton_ or _What Maisie Knew_. But it must at least deal not with isolated personalities but with that which is produced by the fusion, whether in love or hate or some other emotion, of two or more personalities, or by the impact of events on a single personality or more. We do not mean to suggest that Mrs. Hamilton's novel is deficient in this essential: we mean only that on this side of her work there are traces of what appeared to us to be lack of interest, even traces of boredom. In one situation only, in the subtly and mysteriously hinted conflict between Wilfrid Elstree, the brilliant, untrammelled egoist, and Iris Mauldeth, the pretty girl whose commonplace character is as rigid as iron, are these traces absent; and here the novelist's work is done so exceedingly well as to make the deficiencies of the rest especially noticeable.

Mrs. Beatrice Seymour's novel is also distinguished by one remarkable incident. It is, we are informed, a first work, and as such it deserves praise for its smoothness and competence. But in nine parts out of ten it seems to be the attempt of a quite clever writer to sum up in short space what Mr. Bennett did in the three volumes of the Clayhanger series, and what Mr. Compton Mackenzie has not yet finished doing in the four volumes of the Sylvia and Michael series. It describes, that is to say, the separate childhood and youth of a young man and young woman and then their union, which in this case is illicit and which is terminated by the war. Much of it is a great deal too up-to-date to have any depth. Hilary Sargent is a painter, calls Helena Morden "Deirdre" as soon as he sees her, and, one day when they were together on the Downs, "he read to her things she knew and things she didn't from de la Mare, Drinkwater, Gould, Hodgson, and (most appropriately) Hilaire Belloc. And there was Flecker and Brooke and Frances Cornford and Lady Margaret Sackville; and Dora Sigerson whom Helena loved." No wonder that, as the reader easily foresees, they lost the last train home; they had confused their minds with too many styles, and had far too many books to carry. This kind of modernity is too superficial and too easy of achievement: it is presenting the reader with false coin. For the rest the book has the slickness and the clicking regularity which, though they are by no means common in novelists, cannot be of great interest, except to the subscribers to circulating libraries who are wont to ask for a novel which will enable them to support the tedium of the week-end. But in one chapter Mrs. Seymour surprisingly faces and masters a real and a painful situation--that of a shallow girl who, having rejoiced that her husband at the front enables her to be in the fashion, collapses under the news that he has been made hideous by injuries received in the trenches. This is a thing which has undoubtedly happened; it is unspeakably agonising to contemplate; and, so far as we know, no novelist has hitherto attempted it. But there is no reason why it should not be used for purposes of art if the novelist has the requisite skill and tact and, above all, the requisite courage. Mrs. Seymour looks the basilisk in the eyes and reduces it to her service. The conversation between Helena and Pamela Sand--it occupies less than eight pages--in which the whole affair is begun and ended, projects violently out of the book, makes the rest of it look rather emptier than it really is, and testifies unmistakably to the genuine powers which Mrs. Seymour has not elsewhere employed. One scene does not make a novel, much less a novelist; but one such scene as this in a first book persuades us to look hopefully to Mrs. Seymour's future.

THE CHORUS GIRL AND OTHER STORIES. By ANTON TCHEHOV. Chatto & Windus. 3_s._ net.

In the title-story of this volume the injured wife of Nikolay Petrovitch Kolpakov calls suddenly at the house of Pasha, a chorus-girl, with whom he is accustomed to spend his time, and Kolpakov, who is there, goes into hiding. He has been ruined by his extravagances and is on the point of being arrested for embezzlement. His wife demands the return of the gifts he has lavished on Pasha, in order that the missing sum may be made up and dishonour averted, but Pasha has had no gifts from him. The wife refuses to believe it, repeats her demand, and then, without altering her attitude of contemptuous hatred, implores and entreats. Pasha at last gives her the presents she has received from more generous admirers. She declares these are not enough and asks for more, and Pasha gives her everything she has. When his wife has gone, Kolpakov comes out of his retirement and, expressing his angry remorse that she should have had to kneel to a "low creature," pushes the girl aside and leaves her. Then

Pasha lay down and began wailing aloud. She was already regretting
her things which she had given away so impulsively, and her feelings
were hurt. She remembered how three years ago a merchant had beaten
her for no sort of reason, and she wailed more loudly than ever.

This synopsis suggests, more accurately than any analysis we could attempt in the space at our disposal, why we should welcome the eighth volume of Mrs. Constance Garnett's admirable rendering of the tales of Tchehov into English. An extended study might discover many traits in this author which would be worthy of observation. There is, for example, the peculiar acuteness of his sense of smell. "The air was full of the smell of freshly scrubbed floors." ... "As I mounted the soft carpeted stairs there was, for some reason, a strong smell of india-rubber" ... a house "was half dark and mysterious and smelt of mushrooms"--these are sentences taken at random from two or three stories in the present volume. A minute examination would reveal other characteristics by which a formal criticism could distinguish Tchehov from other writers of the short story. But it is doubtful whether any study could come nearer to defining the nature of his genius than by naming the qualities which are immediately obvious in _The Chorus Girl_. He has precision, economy, detachment, and, for all his gloom and squalor, charm also. He stoops as it were from an ineffable height, picks up a situation, describes it in the smallest possible number of words, and lets it fall back into the welter of human lives. It is not likely that any English author will imitate him, nor would it be desirable, but his qualities, if they cannot be learnt, can at least be used to correct excesses. And, apart from that, these eight volumes are a monument of narrative and (for with Mrs. Garnett's translation one can say so much) of style.

BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM

THE LONDON VENTURE. By MICHAEL ARLEN. Heinemann. 4_s._ net.

It is a little hard to know under what classification this book ought to be considered, whether fiction, biography, or belles-lettres. The same difficulty has occasionally arisen with the works of Mr. George Moore. But since the author is alluded to in it by the name which he acknowledges to be his own, we have decided that it cannot be fiction. For a reason which has sometimes occurred to the critics of Mr. George Moore, we beg to be excused from treating it as biography. There remains nothing but belles-lettres.

And Mr. George Moore's name occurs here very appropriately, for not he, not even Mr. Max Beerbohm, has written anything so characteristically Moore-ish as some of these pages. Observe how it is done:

But this letter has seemed strange to me because, perhaps, I shall
never again receive a letter whose writer is dead, and who, when
writing it, dreamt of all material things but death. Were I Oscar
Wilde I might wonder now if Englishwomen who die in America come back
to London; for there is much of London in the letter: "I should like
to be in London to-day--Bloomsbury London, Mayfair London, Chelsea
London, London of the small restaurants and large draughts of wine,
London of the intellectual half-lights, drone of flippant phrases and
racy epigrams, with a thin fog outside." ...

... Out of the silence of two years at last came a letter from her.
I found it when I came in very late one night, and for a long time I
stood in my little hall and examined the Eastern stamp and postmark;
and the writing on the envelope was so exactly the same as on the
last note she had sent me before leaving England that I had to smile
at the idea of Shelmerdene, in the rush of her last pursuit of her
perfect fate, laying in a sufficient store of her own special nibs
to last her for the lifetime she intended to spend abroad; for when
I opened the letter I found that, as I had guessed, she would never
come back to England, saying, "I am a fugitive branch which has at
last found its parent tree.... I have run my perfect fate to earth,
Dikran! more perfect than any dream, more lasting than the most
perfect dream." ...

Here is the very attitude, here the very cadences of the original; and the adventures are not dissimilar. Now Mr. Moore has acquired his style by long labour, and it is a little amusing to see the flower of it culled by a writer who has neither dug nor watered. But Mr. Arlen will not in so close a discipleship make the best of the talents which the very closeness of his discipleship shows him to possess. An author who can copy so exactly the manner of another ought to be able to evolve a manner of his own; and we look forward to seeing a book in which Mr. Arlen shall have done this.

IN THE GARRET. By CARL VAN VECHTEN. Knopf.

Mr. Van Vechten is an American critic, rather of the type of the ingenious Mr. Huneker. He is quite as fluent, not quite so versatile. No art or aspect of life presents itself to Mr. Huneker as superior to any other; but Mr. Van Vechten has a great deal more to say about music than about anything else. He touches the theatre a great deal, literature a little, and music most of all; and he gulps down greedily all he touches. One name is as good as another to him and he knows a great many names of all sorts. "George Moore," he says, apropos of Mr. Moore's suggestion that _Robinson Crusoe_ ought to be rewritten, "has rewritten many of his own books. Henry James rewrote all of his novels and tales that he cared to preserve for the definitive edition. On the other hand, Ouida believed (and expressed this belief in a paper published in her _Critical Studies_) that once a book was given to the public it became a part of life, a part of history, and that its author had no right to tamper with it." Mr. Ernest Newman likes the operas of Isaac Albéniz, but Mr. Marliave does not share his enthusiasm. On two opposite pages we discovered the names of the following persons: Mr. Cabell, Mr. Arthur Machen, George Sand, M. Maeterlinck, Mr. Cecil Forsythe, Monet, Leonardo, Homer, Rabelais, Cervantes, Remy de Gourmont, Dickens, Huysmans, and Mr. Havelock Ellis. This is lively enough in all conscience, and Mr. Van Vechten is able to keep it up without flagging and to support it with an equal vivacity of style, as when he remarks that the art of the musician "deals with clang-tints." Modern English criticism is sometimes reproached with being a little too heavy. Here we have a critic so volatile that he bounces like a child's balloon from the name of one great man to another.

AMONG ITALIAN PEASANTS. By TONY CYRIAX. Collins. 12_s._ 6_d._ net.

The brush rather than the pen is evidently the medium of expression for Mrs. Tony Cyriax. The pictures in her book convey an infinitely better impression of the life of the peasant in an Italian mountain-village than all she says about it in writing, which is rather crude and colourless. But the pictures are delightful, and are sufficiently praised in an appreciative Introduction by Mr. Muirhead Bone.

The best chapters in the book are those dealing with the tending of silkworms in peasant cottages, and the greatly dreaded hailstorm which, despite the prayers of the priest, religious processions, and the ringing of church bells, destroys in an hour the labour of months and brings the villagers to the verge of starvation.

Such a storm as the writer describes will recall vividly to the memory of any one who has stayed in an Italian hillside village the pathetic anxiety of the natives when a thunderstorm is brewing. All around stretch the vineyards, which from dawn till dusk have been the care of people to whose toil the day's work of an English agricultural labourer is child's play. Will the hailstones utterly ruin the vines? If so, the villagers will be faced with semi-starvation, and yet more bread-winners, in despair, must emigrate to America, that refuge for the Italian destitute.

Pathetic, too, is an account of weeks of unceasing toil in connection with the cottage silkworm industry. The _cavalleri_ (as the peasants call the silkworms), remorseless in their greed for mulberry leaves and their demands for the right temperature, will keep a whole family working for them from morning till night.

Here, as given by Mrs. Tony Cyriax, is the result of the labour of one such household:

"The work from start to finish had covered forty days, and Rosina's cocoons had weighed fifty-six kilograms ... so Rosina had earned exactly 224 lire, which is all but £9."

As a record of the hard existence that may be passed in the midst of Nature's graciousness and beauty _Among Italian Peasants_ is not without value.

SUSSEX IN BYGONE DAYS: Reminiscences of Nathaniel Paine Blaker, M.R.C.S. Hove, Combridges. 1919. 5_s._

The recorders of Sussex must have a shelf to themselves by this time, and there are many reasons for it. Sussex has not only individual quality, amenity and interest: all counties have them. But it is accessible, and it is the fashion. Not to go back to Dallaway and his likes, the best of the moderns are Mr. Lucas and Mr. Halsham, and the better of them Mr. Lucas, as we think. He has the mellower outlook, a benevolent, postprandial regard. Mr. Halsham is more pedagogical; he regrets much, and seldom approves. He cannot praise a landscape without reminding us how much better it was before old What's-his-name cut down those trees. Taken at some length--indeed, taken in series--he becomes tiresome. Nevertheless, he wrote a novel once, called _Kitty Fairhall_, which contains more of the essence of the Sussex peasant than Mr. Lucas himself is likely to apprehend.

Mr. Nathaniel Blaker, the latest chronicler, earns a place upon the shelf the rather because it need only be a little one. Our quarrel with him would be that it did not ask a larger. He has lived long and served his county honourably in an honourable profession; but he has not much to say. That is a pity. He has stored his mind, but cannot load his page. He remembers mail-coaches, he remembers the ox-teams, he remembers the days of reaping with the sickle, the foot-high stubbles, the threshing with a flail. To some of us those memories have a savour so sharp that, with the wind, one might catch and transfigure it in words. To Mr. Blaker they are as the primrose was to Mr. Bell, and one feels that he puts them down rather because that is the kind of thing one does put down in books of this sort than because they import a perfume which it is luxury to distil upon the page. Lacking gusto, Mr. Blaker tantalises his reader. The beautiful names which he strews about him--Selmesten, Steyning, Hurstpierpoint, Ringmer, Fulking--flicker like a mirage. He tells us, for example, that Steyning Fair in the old days "was a scene of great excitement and confusion, and probably as much iniquity as could be crowded into so small a space." We dare say so; but we are athirst for the iniquities, and he gives us none to drink of. One wishes to get Mr. Blaker by the fire with a matured cigar, and ply him with questions. Gypsies now. Obviously he knows a great deal about them. He says, "I well recollect, very many years ago, one rainy afternoon, which prevented them working, watching a family of gypsies in a barn. I think the family must have consisted of the father and mother and several children, one daughter nearly grown up, and two or three acquaintances. They all sat or lay about upon the straw, doing absolutely nothing, while one or two girls kept singing a peculiarly plaintive and monotonous but soothing and agreeable tune in a language, I believe, I did not know, for I could not catch a single word." That is the sort of thing Mr. Blaker will do with a pen in his hand--give us the materials of a picture and leave us burning. His "broken hinted sights" do but sting the mind.

Of course he tells us--he can't help it--some interesting things. One of them is "a common saying that Sussex girls had such long legs because they stretched them by pulling them out of the mud." That must have been in the Weald--but we did not know that feature of Sussex girls. Cobbett knew, and so do we, that they are remarkable for their good looks. Mr. Blaker does not say so. We regret his Peter Bell attitude to life. His best chapters are upon the horse and the birch, with both of which he is evidently acquainted. "It used to be considered," he says, "a great joke when a lady's first baby arrived to send her a carefully packed parcel containing a small birch rod, with a label, 'To be used when required.'" That is what we want. And, again, he says that "it was the custom when the cloth was laid for dinner in the middle of the day, for the cane, which was kept over the mantel ... to be placed with the carving-knife and steel on papa's right hand." Excellent. These scraps show what a handsome sack of oddments Mr. Blaker must have. He should have shaken it more liberally over his book.

A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE AFTER ITS DELIVERANCE. By JOHN FINLEY. Chapman & Hall. 10_s._ net.

Of Mr. Finley's sincerity and enthusiasm there can be no question: of his taste there is a good deal to be said. Many books have been written about the Holy Land; but surely none before which deliberately puts the history and the personages of Palestine into the background of a picture whose foreground is occupied with the events of the recent campaign. Mr. Finley has no hesitation in viewing sacred history _sub specie temporis hodierni_. For him Allenby's battle at Armageddon is "the beginning of the end of the battle with the Beast." The German is not, however, only Anti-Christ: he is also Judas. Here are Mr. Finley's meditations over the Holy City:

I was an ashamed spectator, standing there at the Gethsemane Gate,
feeling that we had been sleeping when we should have been watching,
when we should have been preparing for defence against the German
Judas who had professed devotion to the teachings of Him who spoke
the Sermon on the Mount. Did not the great German Hospice stand most
conspicuously on the Mount, that its pilgrims might dip their bread
in the very sop of the Master's dish? And do not the towers of the
German churches stand out most prominently (and offensively) in the
Inner City?

Most of his book is like that: and if you cannot see history in quite the startling black-and-white of Mr. Finley's imagination you had better leave the book unread. Mr. Finley was with the American Red Cross, and he tells one happy story of himself, which it is only fair to quote. He was worshipping in the Russian Church of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives:

A woman of sharp, eager face, as of a zealot, with a grey shawl over
her head, seeing me standing near the door, approached me and said,
in rather sharp voice, "Quelle croix?" I did not at first understand
the import of her inquiry, though I realised that she was putting to
me an all-important question: "Quelle croix?--grecque ou latine?" ...
My answer was "La Croix Rouge."

If the soil of Palestine be favourable for legends, no doubt a tale will arise of a strange religion whose devotees cross themselves neither in the Western or Eastern manner, but in some strange, "red" mode which Mr. Finley's zealot was probably eager to see.

ADDRESSES IN AMERICA. By JOHN GALSWORTHY. Heinemann. 6_s._ net.

Generalisation, which used to be a philosophy, is rapidly becoming little more than a hobby. During the war it was a hobby savagely or amiably ridden by those who sought to explain the mentality of the Allies or the Enemy. Gradually individuals learnt that not every Belgian was Belgium, nor every German Germany: but for propaganda purposes we still used great typical figures. It saved thought, and it flattered either our own pride or that of our friends. The propagandists' most delicate task was always to explain Great Britain to the United States of America: and certainly it was a wise thing to send Mr. Galsworthy across the Atlantic. Surely he, if anyone, might be able to justify the ways of the country house to Boston and New York, to Washington and even to Chicago. Here we have his addresses delivered during 1919 in the United States. In his paper on America and Britain he takes the line that by words we are saved:

The tie of language is all-powerful--for language is the food
formative of minds. Why a volume could be written on the formation of
character by literary humour alone.

It sounds not unconvincing, until one remembers that French is not the language of Alsace; that English is spoken by most of the inhabitants of Ireland; or, to go further back, that the possession of a common language did not prevent Athens and Sparta from indulging in the Peloponnesian War.

We like Mr. Galsworthy better when he leaves his generalisations and tells stories. In the paper "Tallary at Large" he displays that sweet-naturedness, that mellowed irony which never lapses into satire, that humour which is always aware that a sense of pity is invaluable in comedy. Here is the true Galsworthy:

In the fifth year of the war two men sat alone in a railway carriage.
One pale, young, and rather worn, had an unlighted cigarette in his
mouth. The other elderly, prosperous, and of a ruddy countenance,
was smoking a large cigar. The young man, who looked as if his days
were strenuous, took his unlighted cigarette from his mouth, gazed at
it, searched his pockets, and looked at the elderly man, and said,
... "Could you give me a light, sir?" The elderly man regarded him
for a moment, dropped his eyelids, and murmured: "I've no matches."
The young man sighed, mumbled the cigarette on his watering lips,
then said very suddenly: "Perhaps you'll very kindly give me a light
from your cigar, sir." The elderly man moved throughout his body as
if something very sacred had been thrilled within him. "I'd rather
not," he said, "if you don't mind." A quarter of an hour passed,
while the young man's cigarette grew moister, and the elder man's
cigar shorter. Then the latter stirred, took it from under his grey
moustache, looked critically at it, held it out a little way towards
the other with the side which was least burned-down foremost, and
said: "Unless you'd like to take it from the edge."

And there are people who are surprised that the returned soldier occasionally commits acts of violence.

THOUGHTS IN MIDDLE LIFE. By G. LOCKER LAMPSON. Humphreys. 3_s._ 6_d._ net.

This book is beautifully printed on admirable paper, and is priced very low. Unfortunately Mr. Locker Lampson has reached middle life without learning that most platitudes are better unwritten. "No man is a hero to his own valet, and the same principle may be applied as in part the cause of our invidious comparisons between the men of yesterday and those of to-day." "He alone has a right to be called successful who has led a happy life." Sometimes he will enliven his platitude by a pleasing derangement of metaphors. "Autobiographies are of little value in extending the personality of their authors. We may get an occasional glimpse below the surface, but the waters are generally agitated by all kinds of subsidiary motives, and the eye cannot pierce them." The one sentence which explains the author is to be found in the essay _One's Own Company_: "No man, then, need ever be bored by himself, although he cannot avoid being bored by others."

DOMUS DOLORIS. By W. COMPTON LEITH. The Bodley Head. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.

In the unornamental language, from which even the loftiest intelligence may extract apt expression for itself, this little book may be called a collection of thoughts in hospital from a patient's standpoint, and an impression of the various nurses who attended him. And yet such a description is unjust and utterly beside the point. The publisher's note upon the cover tells us that Mr. Leith has "a rare sense of the value of words and the beauty of phrases," and there is no doubt of it. But the value to literature and humanity of phrases which are but the vehicles of their own intrinsic beauty is to be questioned. The whole essay is precious in the last degree.

"Oblivion flowed up like evening gloom. Life moved with it to the edge of a great deep; it was drawn over; it floated down and down, wound in the arms of sleep."

"A faint awareness stole into being, like the grey of morning; then a sense of movement; but whether it was a coming up and forth, or a declining, there was no power to tell."

This sort of thing, exquisite as it may be sometimes, constantly reminds us, however, and with relief, that Henley, with simplicity and humour, covered the same ground in verse. From time to time an unpretentious passage comes to us with a shock, and we ask ourselves again and again, if, as it seems, the writer has opinions to air, observations about life and death to make, what especial virtue there is in the high-falutin obscurity of his expression. One of the chief and most necessary concealments of art lies in a well-simulated nonchalance to the more obvious kind of purple patch. Here the entire robe is of purple, though certainty of a royal shade. There were voices, Mr. Leith tells us on the first page (and it was not until the fifteenth that we knew where the voices came from), which "kept thought strained after a meaning." A light strain is no doubt good for thought; but in reading this book it is not light: and it is hard to say which strain is the more severe--the student's for meaning or the author's for effect.

A CHILDHOOD IN BRITTANY EIGHTY YEARS AGO. By ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK. Arnold. 10_s._ 6_d._ net.

Nowhere in England, nor even in Ireland or Scotland, could the life pictured in this book be paralleled. Feudalism has lingered, but not in delicate or decorative ways: in the Brittany of which Miss Sedgwick tells us, the beauty, the generous abundance, and the sincere brotherliness of life almost overcome one's distaste for the feudal system which formed its basis. The lady whose childhood is shown us was of a noble Breton family; her father seems to have been the only Republican she knew among the company of Royalists; life was still so ordered that the country people, coming to Mass, would bow to the lord and lady of the manor, after paying their respects to the altar. Yet one is left with a sense of fraternity as genuine as that one feels in reading Chaucer, as the story witnesses: