Chapter C: A. Tait (12)

Let us, for a moment, ignore the things which might be done--such as the subsidisation of a National Theatre--and think of a few of the things which have been done, or are habitually done. At this moment a Government department is supervising, or preparing to supervise, the erection of hundreds of thousands of houses. These houses will materially affect the architectural landscape. Design, the suitability of materials to local features and traditions, these things are of immense importance; what is done depends upon the competence, the information, the industry, the numerical sufficiency, and the domestic influence within the Department of the Ministry of Health's experts. Many departments build, or arrange for building to their own designs, numerous large public structures, or exercise, or could exercise, a determining pressure upon the design of buildings erected by local authorities. You cannot go many miles along the English coast without finding a barracks, and when you find it you will not like it. We have a complex of public museums which are the particular care of no Minister. We have an immense Government printing business which is directly under the Treasury; it is no powerful person's concern to see that its publications are well produced. Our Mint produces coins, our Post Office produces stamps, our War Office produces medals. The most important medal ever produced by the British Government is the large memorial bronze plaque which is to be given to the next-of-kin of nearly a million fallen. The last, word as to the nature of this, and the process by which it should be made, rested first (we believe) with the Contracts Branch of the War Office, which has been incorporated in the Ministry of Munitions. We have mentioned but a few typical illustrations of the confused, haphazard way in which the State is in operative contact with the Arts; and even then we have not mentioned the most recent and striking instances, the commissioning of a large number of war pictures by a "Minister of Information" who happened to want to see contemporary art well represented in the Imperial War Museum, and the employment of both British plays and British drawings as "propaganda abroad"--the _Salome_ incident may be recalled.

* * * * *

Is there not an overwhelmingly strong case for a Ministry of Fine Arts? We know there are always those who, when the suggestion is made, drop the curtain in their minds at once with contemptuous remarks about "official art." What they ignore is that we are bound to have "official art," that it could not conceivably be worse than it is, and that proper organisation would at least give an occasional intelligent Minister a chance. Design at present is everybody's business and nobody's business. It is not to be expected that even the most æsthetic of War Ministers should much preoccupy himself with the "elevations" of barracks, that the best of Ministers for Education should devote his days to the physical appearance of schools and training colleges, that the First Lord of the Admiralty should mind what his Stores look like, or that even new Government buildings in the middle of London, though they do engage serious attention sometimes, should be anything but bad. The Office of Works itself, which actually builds, is principally concerned with seeing that So-and-so gets so many rooms and So-and-so has his partition pulled down. There is no specialist authority in engraving or metal work. Ministers and officials sometimes consult experts, but it is a matter of chance what sort of experts they will consult. In no capital, not even in Berlin, are there uglier Public Offices than there are in Whitehall, or more pretentious ones. As for the immense amount of War Office building, the Guards Barracks at Chelsea may stand as a type. We commend them as a medicine for anyone who suspects himself of exaggerated national vanity. Our museums are starved. Readers will remember the ridiculous cheeseparing at Bloomsbury early in the war which, combined with the ruthless occupation and closing of museums and galleries, reduced many able and devoted public servants almost to despair. Had these institutions been under the control of a Minister whose prime concern they were, they would have had a higher status in Whitehall and he could have fought for them, as it was no one's interest or business to fight for them.

* * * * *

We believe that in many regards a Minister of Fine Arts would preserve us from the worst infamies, and that a good Minister of Fine Arts would have great opportunities of doing more than that. For certain things he should be directly and solely responsible to Parliament: the art galleries and those museums which are not first and foremost technological. It should rest with his department at least to sanction all designs for public buildings erected by the central authorities, and it might act in consultative capacity to other authorities. His staff should include men capable of originating, obtaining, or vetoing designs for any other department doing work in which design is important. For the Stationery Office, though it be primarily a (not very well run) publishing business, we do not see why that should not be bodily transferred to him. The "format" of most Government publications is disgraceful, both from the point of view of appearance and from that of convenience, and were they better produced they might be better marketed. We are not under the illusion that any Minister of Fine Arts would initiate great revolutions in Art, but he could certainly greatly increase our facilities and add to the comfort of our walks abroad. And, where a subsidy for some definite object such as the National Theatre is wanted, he would be as the mouthpiece of the State and a Minister amongst Ministers far more likely to be able to do something than Mr. Fisher or any other existing Minister. We hope shortly to return to the subject, one of the few at all impinging on politics with which we feel entitled to deal.

Several correspondents have written drawing our attention to the prices paid at the sale of Lord Foley's library and to _Truth's_ comments on them. The facts in brief are these. The Ruxley Lodge library was sold locally; there were few, if any, bidders for the important books, except a number of London booksellers, and the sums fetched were deplorably small. All four Shakespeare Folios (the third imperfect) were there. They fetched £100, £46, £28, and £20 respectively. Two months ago the Britwell copy of the first brought in £2300 at Sotheby's. Thirteen first editions of Shelley fetched £52 the lot, and Keats's _Endymion_ and _Lamia_ volumes produced £7 between them. Some valuable books were lumped in with bundles of miscellaneous books and went for a song; it is likely that, with such cataloguing, many rare and valuable works may have escaped mention except as "and others": our contemporary goes so far as to say that "there is every probability that in this way old books worth hundreds, even thousands, of pounds were disposed of for a few shillings."

* * * * *

It is really deplorable that owners, or their executors and legatees, should suffer thus. Nobody grudges dealers their fair profits, nor does any one deny that a dealer, like anybody else, is entitled to pick up bargains because he knows what the other side doesn't know. But for dealers to combine at an auction in order to prevent a vendor from having more than a tithe of the known market value of his goods is another matter. We make no direct allusion to this particular sale. We did not see the catalogue or the goods, and it is--at any rate for the purposes of argument--conceivable that the best books may have been in very bad condition. Nor do we suggest that there are not dealers in London who keep outside rings and do not take part in "knock-outs." But everybody knows that there are rings in all the important collectors' trades, and that these rings frequently put up at auctions--and the country auction gives them their best chance--the merest simulacrum of competition bidding and retire to share out the loot among themselves. In the new volume of Mr. Wilfrid Blunt's Diary there is an account of the beginnings of the late Sir Hugh Lane's career, given to Mr. Blunt by Sir Hugh's aunt, Lady Gregory:

She apprenticed him to Colnaghi at a hundred a year, where he learnt
his business of picture-dealing. He began his fortune, she tells me,
by an accident. He happened to hear of a picture which was for sale
in some remote country place, and travelled down to look at it, but,
having no money to buy, although there was almost no bidding, he was
obliged to let it go for a very small price. When the sale was over,
the bidders, who were all professional dealers, went to a public
house, and he with them, and it then turned out that they had been
standing in together not to bid, and they held a private sale of the
picture among themselves, dividing the price realised between them,
and as Lane was known to belong to Colnaghi's he was included in it,
and got £160 as his share.

We have heard, we remember, that the picture was a Hals; at all events this illustrates the sort of thing that happens. Not long before the war there was a considerable disturbance about the operations of an alleged ring at Christie's; there were rumours of knock-outs in which picture-dealers shared out enormous sums. It was widely argued that this sort of operation should be legally defined as fraudulent and legally punished. That nothing came of the agitation, in the light of the fact that every honest man (which includes dealers who have been forced into rings) sympathised with the agitators, suggests that investigation opened up more difficulties than had been suspected.

* * * * *

People are again urging a legal remedy. It appears to us that it would be impossible to enforce a law preventing rings and knock-out auctions. Nobody can compel men to bid against each other if they have an agreement--verbal and private--not to, and though large gatherings for a knock-out might occasionally be detected (but proof of guilt would be difficult), two or three are entitled innocently to gather together and can easily do so for purposes not entirely innocent. An occasional bad sale in London is bound to occur so long as rich private buyers continue their modern practice of not attending sales. We don't think anybody complained about prices when the Huth Library or Lord Vernon's rarities were sold, and we have been to many quite ordinary sales in Chancery Lane or Bond Street at which scarcely anything went for less than the owners had probably paid for it a few years ago. There are usually quite enough outsiders present to keep prices up, and it is only by accident that an agreeable little collection sometimes goes at a sacrifice. Moreover a private buyer, if he bids, is not harried as he is in some minor rooms where other commodities are sold; and some of the biggest dealers, if present, act entirely on their own. Such as the conditions in London are we cannot see much hope of change, unless and until (as we said) there is a return to the days when peers of the realm bid against each other for the jewels of the Roxburgh Library and their friends stood by them betting on the results. But the most calamitous occurrences, those which take place away from London, might easily be avoided if owners or executors would have a little sense. It is hardly conceivable that Lord Foley took really expert advice about his books; it is certain that if he knew anything about the market in old books he would never have had his put up at a local auction. Persons disposing wholesale of valuables, books, pictures, or china, from country houses should never allow them to be sold in the country. At Messrs. Sotheby's or Hodgson's, though a bad patch may now and then be struck, books would never go for the prices fetched at Ruxley Park; and when a really important collection comes up the big American buyers are almost invariably present, and the only comment likely to be made on prices is that there seems no end to their possible inflation.

* * * * *

Last month we stated in this place that we had recovered a few copies of No. 1 of THE LONDON MERCURY. These are now exhausted. We shall have no more copies, and if people send us money for No. 1 we shall only be at the pains of returning it. We would advise those who are anxious to get No. 1 to take steps to secure it privately, by advertisement or through secondhand booksellers. We have still a certain stock of No. 2, and new subscriptions may still begin as from that issue. We repeat our invitation to readers who will be wanting binding cases for Vol. I. to let us know.

LITERARY INTELLIGENCE

The death, recently reported from Germany, of Dr. Richard Dehmel at the age of fifty-six removes after a long interval the second of the two poets who were admiringly regarded by their contemporaries as rivalling the literary partnership which once existed between Goethe and Schiller. The Freiherr Detlev von Liliencron, who died in 1909, was one of the initiators of a new movement in German literature; and of this movement his much younger friend was often proclaimed the most distinguished ornament. Dehmel was the son of a forest official in the Mark of Brandenburg, and it has been speculated, without obvious results, whether there was not some Slavonic admixture in his blood which was reflected in his work. But there is little in his career which requires further brought explanation than the conditions of its time and place. He was educated at the University of Leipzig, where he took his doctor's degree with a thesis on a point in the business of insurance, and he worked for some years as secretary to an insurance company, a period of his life which he regarded as having profitably taught him discipline and orderliness of mind. He developed late as a poet. He himself said that he wrote nothing worth having till his twenty-sixth year, and many of the pieces in his first volume, _Erlösungen_, published when he was twenty-eight, were afterwards discarded or altered. His works consist of several collections of poems, which he continually shuffled and regrouped with every new edition (he was inclined to rebuff critics who wished to trace the development of his powers); _Die Verwandlungen der Venus_, a series of poetical visions of all types of love from the highest to the lowest; _Zwei Menschen_, a novel in verse, describing the elopement of a librarian with his employer's wife; _Der Mitmensch_, a modern play in prose, to which he himself attached great importance; an elaborate wordless play called _Lucifer; Michel-Michael_, a political tract in dramatic form; a collection of short stories; a collection of essays; and a collection of tales and verses for children. Like most of his generation he was subject to many exotic influences, ranging from Verlaine to Przybyszewski and from Shakespeare to Pierre Louys; and his works contain many admirable translations, those from Verlaine being among the best in the German language. His own poetry is pre-eminently didactic and he preaches consistently, in allegory, in direct narrative, and in direct precept, the doctrine of self-control and of the full utilisation of all human faculties. He had passion and vigour, a not always active power of psychological discernment and an occasional perception of beauty. He is justly reproached with a certain brutality and vulgarity and, one might add, with strange lapses of humour. His courage and determination are beyond question; but in his erotic, as well as in his mystical, rhapsodies (which are often combined) there is too frequently a disagreeable element of frigid calculation. His obscurity is sometimes tiresome and unnecessary, and many of his allegories and symbols are incomprehensible without an external key to their meaning. Some of his lyrics, however, are extremely beautiful: there are passages of insight and dramatic force in _Zwei Menschen_; some of his epigrams and aphorisms are wise and terse; and a strain of earnest sincerity runs through all his preaching. In August, 1914, though his class was not called up, he volunteered for service, and, possibly as a reward for a great deal of patriotic poetry, he received the Iron Cross. He died at Blankenese, near Hamburg, where he had lived for several years before the war.

* * * * *

Those many who knew the late Edward Thomas, who fell in France in 1917, will be glad to hear that a memorial is being prepared of an admirable poet and essayist. It will take the form of a volume, biographical and appreciative, of prose and verse, and the contributors will include, amongst others, Messrs. W. H. Davies, Walter de la Mare, V. Locke Ellis, Edward Garnett, James Guthrie, E. S. P. Haynes, and Edward Rhys. Extracts are given from Thomas's letters to Mr. W. H. Hudson. The book is being printed by Mr. Guthrie, whose beautiful work as draughtsman and painter in _Root and Branch_ has not yet had the full recognition it deserves. It will be a quarto, set in Caslon Old Face type, and bound in dark green cloth, with a device in gold by Mr. Guthrie, who has also designed a frontispiece, title-page, and initial letters. The price is to be ten shillings, and prospective subscribers should apply to the Secretary, Pear Tree Press, Flansham, Bognor.

* * * * *

Lady Burne-Jones, widow of the painter, died early last month. She was the author of one of the most readable and delightful biographies in the language. Her "Life" of her husband was written vivaciously rather than brilliantly, and it revealed in Lady Burne-Jones no notable gift for literary creation. But her two volumes contained no dull page, few slipshod sentences, and a life-like portrait of one of the most lovable of men.

* * * * *

The next number of THE LONDON MERCURY will contain the first of two long contributions by Mr. Edmund Gosse embodying his reminiscences of Henry James and an article by Sir George Henschel on Interpretation in Singing. Either in that or the next number we hope also to publish a first instalment of the last diary of the late W. N. P. Barbellion.

POETRY

_The Senses_

Lo, as a garden-wandering bee,
The soul seeks out her immortality
From all the growths and blossoms manifold
Which in this life men hold
As things material: plying busy rounds,
From the world's odours, sights, and sounds
To fill her honied stores.

From the perfume acrid-sweet of dead leaves burning
When autumn sunsets into dusk are turning:
From the breath of damp stone floors
And paraffin, pervading the cool porches
And aisles of village churches:
From the tepid, flat, mechanic exhalations
Of desolate tube-stations:
From woody savours stirred when children wrench
Tufts out of deep moss-beds: from the subtle stench
Of bad cigars and household slops, begetting
Delighted memory
Of sunny towns in France and Italy:
From the stronger, tawnier stink of dust and sweat
And camel-dung which haunts the glaring East;
And the heavy, sweet, heart-piercing odours breathed
From pale large lilies and narcissus wreathed
Round some dear head deceased.

Such smells as these, and of the sights,
The gleam on blue May nights
Of the young moon in high ancestral boughs
Among the scant young leaves:
And in the wake of the moving ploughs
The shining earth that, as the straight share cleaves,
Turns flowingly over: and the half-seen sweep
Of the high circles and the looming hollow
Of the dark opera-house, where through the leap
And lapse of the music unseen hundreds follow
The curtain's slow ascent:
And the rosy apple-blossom on the bent
And knotted bough, against the blue of heaven:
And the sudden rainbows riven
By the salt breeze from the billows many-leaping
In the sunny Mediterranean.

And of things heard,
The cooling whisper of summer breezes sweeping
The grey-green barley-fields: and the echoes stirred
By music interwoven in some dim-lighted
Cavernous cathedral: and the eighteen-pounders'
Buoyant drum-beats and hisses and whoops united
In a hurricane-barrage: and the clear laughter and shouting
Of girls in old green gardens playing rounders:
And the ripple of fountains spouting
Over marble nymphs and dolphins drenched and cool
To the sun-splashed fountain-pool,
Where golden in the Tuscan sun
The age-worn palace sleeps.

But deep in all the immortal Spirit leaps
Unquenchably, the Imperishable One
To whom through all this multiplicity
Of scattered universes longingly
The Soul, world-wandering mendicant, upreaches
Imploring hands, and as an alms beseeches
The humble coin which buys that one small treasure
Beyond all worldly measure.

MARTIN ARMSTRONG

_The Coming of Green_

Here like flame and there like water leaping
Green life breaks out again; in sunlight gleaming,
Small bright emerald flames through grey twigs creeping,
Little freshets of leafage shyly streaming
Among dark tangles. And sunlight grows serener
Daily, and wider extends the leafy awning,
And the green undying lawn beneath grows greener--
Greener and lovelier with lights and shadows dawning
Alternate, many-toned, born of the trooping
Of clouds o'er sun. Assembled Planes are bending
Long festoons high-hung and heavily drooping
From domes of luminous greenness. Willows are sending
Their fountains live and many-shafted swooping
Skyward, and lazily backward coolly showering.

Like tongues of flame, like water showering, dripping,
Green life slides down the branch, from bushes shaking
A verdant dew, or, out on a long curve slipping,
At the far extreme to a shivering soft foam breaking.

A spring in the desert, a fire in the darkness leaping,
Greenness comes transparently roofing and walling
Garden ways with an indolent downward-sweeping,
Or mounded high ... aspiring ... airily falling,
Or leaning fan over fan. A green and golden
Lucent cave enfolds us, cunningly vaulted,
With delicate-screened high chambers to embolden
Birds to flutter and sing or nest exalted
In swaying sanctuaries, and the lime-tree's clustering
Flowers to blow that the leafy ways be fragrant.

A dancing flood, a wild fire strengthening, mustering,
Over the gardens the young green life runs vagrant.

MARTIN ARMSTRONG

_The Modern Hippolytus_

Not, like poor monks, with fasting and the rod
To mortify the flesh for fear of God:
Not, like Sir Galahad, to run to waste
In sentimental worship of the chaste:
Not, like the Puritan, to hug disgust
And feast on others' sins to quench his lust:
Not, like the saint, with dreams of future bliss,
Lost in a fancied world, this world to miss.
But, like Hippolytus, in pride to make
The body servant for the body's sake;
Spurning the Cytheræan's toils, who craves
With servile heart the passion of her slaves,
Freely to render homage unto Her
Who, being free, desires no worshipper:
To render soul for soul, without pretence,
Not wooing sense through soul, nor soul through sense:
To shun the twilight of the world's mistrust
Where Lust for Love's mistaken, Love for Lust,
And seek Diana's cold and hueless light
That knows no difference save of dark and bright:--
There lay the man's will: but the unborn child
Cried in the darkness, and the old world smiled.

KENWORTH RUSHBY

_Nature's Fruitfulness_

This summer on our yard-wall there does swing
A groundsel-bush from one seed last year sown.
A burnet moth, sun-wakened in the Spring,
Flew out and laid its hundred eggs thereon.

An hundred seeds each blossom on it gives,
An hundred caterpillars eat its leaves.

Its plumed seeds scattered by the wind now fall
Into our yard on water and on stone.
Here too the caterpillars over blown
Gyrate and starve, for few can climb the wall.

Next year again there will be one of both:
One bush of groundsel and one burnet moth.

FRANCIS BURROWS

_Almswomen_

At Quincey's moat the squandering village ends,
And there in the almshouse dwell the dearest friends
Of all the village, two old dames that cling
As close as any trueloves in the spring.
Long, long ago they passed three-score-and-ten,
And in this doll's house lived together then;
All things they have in common being so poor,
And their one fear, Death's shadow at the door.
Each sundown makes them mournful, each sunrise
Brings back the brightness in their failing eyes.

How happy go the rich fair-weather days
When on the roadside folk stare in amaze
At such a honeycomb of fruit and flowers
As mellows round their threshold; what long hours
They gloat upon their steepling hollyhocks,
Bee's balsams, feathery southernwood and stocks,
Fiery dragons'-mouths, great mallow leaves
For salves, and lemon plants in bushy sheaves,
Shagged Esau's Hands with five green finger-tips!
Such old sweet names are ever on their lips.
As pleased as little children where these grow
In cobbled pattens and worn gowns they go,
Proud of their wisdom when on gooseberry shoots
They stuck egg-shells to fright from coming fruits
The brisk-billed rascals; waiting still to see
Their neighbour owls saunter from tree to tree
Or in the hushing half-light mouse the lane
Long-winged and lordly.
But when those hours wane
Indoors they ponder, scared by the harsh storm
Whose pelting saracens on the window swarm,
And listen for the mail to clatter past
And church clock's deep bay withering on the blast;
They feed the fire that flings a freakish light
On pictured kings and queens grotesquely bright,
Platters and pitchers, faded calendars
And graceful hour-glass trim with lavenders.

Many a time they kiss and cry, and pray
Both may be summoned in the selfsame day,
And wiseman linnet tinkling in his cage
End too with them the friendship of old age,
And all together leave their treasured room
Some bell-like evening when the May's in bloom.

EDMUND BLUNDEN

1920.

_Intimacy_

Since I have seen you do those intimate things
That other men but dream of; lull asleep
The sinister dark forest of your hair
And tie those bows that stir on your calm breast
Faintly as leaves that shudder in their sleep:
Since I have seen your stocking swallow up,
A swift black wind, the pale flame of your foot
And deemed your slender limbs so meshed in silk
Sweet mermaid sisters drowned in their dark hair:
I have not troubled overmuch with food
And wine has seemed like water from a well;
Pavements are built of fire, grass of thin flames;
All other girls grow dull as painted flowers,
Or flutter harmlessly like coloured flies
Whose wings are tangled in the net of leaves
Spread by frail trees that grow behind the eyes.

EDGELL RICKWORD

_The Soldier Addresses His Body_

I shall be mad if you get smashed about,
We've had good times together, you and I;
Although you groused a bit when luck was out
And women passionless, and we went dry.

Yet there are many things we have not done;
Countries not seen, where people do strange things,
Eat fish alive, and mimic in the sun
The solemn gestures of their stone-grey kings.

I've heard of forests that are dim at noon,
Where snakes and creepers wrestle all day long;
Where vivid beasts grow pale with the full moon,
Gibber and cry, and wail a mad old song;

Because at the full moon the hippogriff
With ivory-pointed snout and agate feet,
With his green eye will glare them cold and stiff
For the coward wyvern to come down and eat.

Vodka and kvas, and bitter mountain wines
We have not drunk, nor snatched at bursting grapes
To pelt slim girls among Sicilian vines
Who'd flicker through the leaves, elusive shapes.

Yes, there are many things we have not done,
But it's a sweat to knock them into rhyme.
Let's have a drink, and give the cards a run
And leave dull verse to the dull peaceful time.

EDGELL RICKWORD

_Night Rapture_

_For Florence Lamont_

How beautiful it is to wake at night
When over all there reigns the ultimate spell
Of complete silence, darkness absolute,
To feel the world, tilted on axle-tree,
In slow gyration, with no sensible sound,
Unless to ears of unimagined beings,
Resident incorporeal or stretched
In vigilance of ecstasy among
Ethereal paths and the celestial maze,
The rumour of our onward course now brings
A steady rustle as of some strange ship,
Darkling with soundless sail all set and amply filled
By volume of an ever-constant air,
At fullest night, through seas for ever calm,
Swept lovely and unknown for ever on!

How beautiful it is to wake at night,
Embalmed in darkness, watchful, sweet, and still
As is the brain's mood flattered by the swim
Of currents circumvolent in the void,
To lie quite still and to become aware
Of the dim light cast by nocturnal skies
On a dim earth beyond the window-ledge,
So, isolate from the friendly company
Of the huge universe which turns without,
To brood apart in calm and joy awhile
Until the spirit sinks and scarcely knows
Whether self is or if self only is
For ever....

How beautiful to wake at night
Within the room grown strange and still and sweet
And live a century while in the dark
The dripping wheel of silence slowly turns,
To watch the window open on the night,
A dewy silent deep where nothing stirs,
And, lying thus, to feel dilate within
The press, the conflict and the heavy pulse
Of incommunicable sad ecstasy
Growing until the body seems outstretched
In perfect crucifixion on the arms
Of a cross pointing from last void to void
While the heart dies to a mere midway spark!

All happiness thou holdest, happy night,
For such as lie awake and feel dissolved
The peaceful spice of darkness and the cool
Breath hither blown from th' ethereal flowers
That mist thy fields! O happy, happy wounds,
Conditioned by existence in humanity,
That have such powers to heal them!--slow sweet sighs
Torn from the bosom, silent wails, the birth
Of such long-treasured tears as pain his eyes
Who, waking, hears the divine solicitudes
Of midnight with ineffable purport charged.

How beautiful it is to wake at night,
Another night, in darkness yet more still
Save when the myriad leaves on full-fledged boughs,
Filled rather by the perfumes' wandering flood
Than by dispansion of the still sweet air,
Shall from the furthest utter silences
In glimmering secrecy have gathered up
An host of whisperings and scattered sighs
To loose at last a sound as of the plunge
And lapsing seeth of some Pacific wave
Which, risen from the star-thronged outer troughs,
Rolls in to wreath with languorous foam away
The flutter of the golden moths that haunt
The star's one glimmer daggered on wet sands!

So beautiful it is to wake at night
Imagination, loudening with the surf
Of the midsummer wind among the boughs,
Gathers my spirit from the haunts remote
Of faintest silence and the shades of sleep
To bear me on the summit of her wave
Beyond known shores, beyond the mortal edge,
Of thought terrestrial, to hold me poised
Above the frontiers of infinity,
To which in the full reflux of the wave
Come soon I must, bubble of solving foam,
Borne to those other shores--now never mine
Save for an hovering instant, short as this
Which now sustains me, ere I be drawn back,
To learn again and wholly learn I trust
How beautiful it is to wake at night.

ROBERT NICHOLS

The Black Mountains, 1919

_Elsie Inglis_

Who is it lies here
Betwixt the wind and the water,
Whom all Scotland mourns
As a mother for her daughter?

"I was Elsie Inglis
When I trod the ground;
Now I am lying here
In a long sleep and sound."

What did you do, Elsie Inglis,
To prove your heart's worth?
"I laboured all my life long
To serve women on earth."

And what was it you did
Earned you this requiem?
"When men went out to fight,
I went out with them."

What could a woman do
In such unholy revel?
"Men fought with each other,
And I fought with evil."

When men fought with men
What foe could you hold?
"The foe they left behind them.
Fever, Famine, and Cold."

Which was the bitterest
Of all you saw fight?
"My foe slew blindly,
But men in broad light.

"My foe slew blindly,
The children with the mother:
My foe slew men,
But men slew each other."

MAURICE HEWLETT

_Sorrowing for Childhood Departed_

Who is there among us who has found the key
Of the treasure that is locked in the hearts of men?
Only the poet lonely in his chamber
Or the man remembering his childhood again.

Hearing gay voices, my heart is hollow,
An empty room with bright colours on the walls;
The speech of my brother is no more than a traffic
That remote and coldly on my dull brain falls.

I am deaf to the song in the speech of my fellows,
I have outwitted my childhood's desires;
And where have I travelled that to the far horizon
Dead in the landscape are earth's bright fires?

Didst thou ever murder, Macbeth, thy sorrow,
Didst thou ever murder thy soul's young joy,
Thou hadst never flinched from the life of another,
Thou hadst but with laughter stol'n from him a toy!

Would that a Spirit had stolen from me
The glittering baubles of my cunning mind,
And left me the sweet forest of my wondering childhood,
Its transparent water in tall trees enshrined.

Then was I happy. Love was my companion;
I was in communion with star and stream;
With bird and with flower I was linked in rapture,
We stared at each other--the valley's dream.

Out of the mountains we were carven,
Birds and flowers, stream, rock and child--
O but I belong there! I am torn from my body,
In that far-away forest it lies exiled!

There falls the water transparently shining,
Hangs there a flower that blooms in my eyes.
Long have I been ready! let me go thither,
And unloosen my limbs to those dream-coloured skies.

O that it were possible! but that land has vanished;
The magic of that valley has crumbled away;
Bright crowds are there only, the mind's cold idola;
And my footprints on the dead ground startle the day.

W. J. TURNER

SERVANTS

By MAX BEERBOHM

It is unseemly that a man should let any ancestors of his rise from their graves to wait on his guests at table. The Chinese are a polite race, and those of them who have visited England, and gone to dine in great English houses, will not have made this remark aloud to their hosts. I believe it is only their own ancestors that they worship; so that they will not have felt themselves guilty of impiety in not rising from the table and rushing out into the night. Nevertheless, they must have been shocked.

The French Revolution, judged according to the hope it was made in, must be pronounced a failure: it effected no fundamental change in human nature. But it was by no means wholly ineffectual. For example, ladies and gentlemen ceased to powder their hair, because of it; and gentlemen adopted simpler costumes. This was so in England as well as in France. But in England ladies and gentlemen were not so nimble-witted as to be able to conceive the possibility of a world without powder. Powder had been sent down from heaven, and must not vanish from the face of the earth. Said Sir John to his Lady, "'Tis a matter easy to settle. Your maid Deborah and the rest of the wenches shall powder their hair henceforth." Whereat his Lady exclaimed in wrath, "Lud, Sir John! Have you taken leave of your senses? A parcel of Abigails flaunting about the house in powder--oh, preposterous!" Whereat Sir John exclaimed "Zounds!" and hotly demonstrated that since his wife had given up powder there could be no harm in its assumption by her maids. Whereat his Lady screamed and had the vapours and asked how he would like to see his own footmen flaunting about the house in powder. Whereat he (always a reasonable man, despite his hasty temper) went out and told his footmen to wear powder henceforth. And in this they obeyed him. And there arose a Lord of the Treasury, saying, "Let Powder be taxed." And it was so, and the tax was paid, and powder was still worn. And there came the great Reform Bill, and the Steam Engine, and all manner of queer things, but powder did not end, for custom hath many lives. Nor was there an end to those things which the Nobility and the Gentry had long since shed from their own persons--as, laced coats and velvet breeches and silk hose; forasmuch as without these powder could not aptly be. And it came to pass that there was a great War. And there was also a Russian Revolution, greater than the French one. And it may be that everything will be changed, fundamentally and soon. Or it may be merely that Sir John will say to his Lady, "My dear, I have decided that the footmen shall not wear powder, and not wear livery, any more," and that his Lady will say "Oh, all right." Then at length will the Eighteenth Century vanish altogether from the face of the earth.

Some of the shallower historians would have us believe that powder is deleterious to the race of footmen. They point out how plenteously footmen abounded before 1790, and how steadily their numbers have declined ever since. I do not dispute the statistics. One knows from the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers that Mr. Horne Tooke, dining _tête-à-tête_ with the first Lord Lansdowne, had counted so many as thirty footmen in attendance on the meal. That was a high figure--higher than in Rogers' day, and higher far, I doubt not, than in ours. What I refuse to believe is that the wearing of powder has caused among footmen an ever-increasing mortality. Powder was forced on them by their employers because of the French Revolution, but their subsequent fewness is traceable rather to certain ideas forced by that Revolution on their employers. The Nobility had begun to feel that it had better be just a little less noble than heretofore. When the news of the fall of the Bastille was brought to him, the first Lord Lansdowne (I conceive) remained for many hours in his Study, lost in thought, and at length, rising from his chair, went out into the hall and discharged two footmen. This action may have shortened his life, but I believe it to be a fact that when he lay dying, some fifteen years later, he said to his heir, "Discharge two more." Such enlightenment and adaptability were not to be wondered at in so eminent a Whig. As time went on, even in the great Tory houses the number of retainers was gradually cut down. Came the Industrial Age, hailed by all publicists as the Millennium. Looms were now tended, and blast-furnaces stoked, by middle-aged men who in their youth had done nothing but hand salvers, and by young men who might have been doing just that if the Bastille had been less brittle. Noblemen, becoming less and less sure of themselves under the impact of successive Reform Bills, wished to be waited on by less and less numerous gatherings of footmen. And at length, in the course of the great War, any Nobleman not young enough to be away fighting was waited on by an old butler and a parlourmaid or two; and the ceiling did not fall.

Even if the War shall have taught us nothing else, this it will have taught us almost from its very outset: to mistrust all prophets, whether of good or evil. Pray stone me if I predict anything at all. It may be that the War, and that remarkable by-product, the Russian Revolution, and the whole spirit of the age, have so worked on the minds of Noblemen that they will prefer to have not one footman in their service. Or it may be that all those men who might be footmen will prefer to earn their livelihood in other ways of life. It may even be that no more parlourmaids and housemaids, even for very illustrious houses, will presently be forthcoming. I do not profess to foresee. Perhaps things will go on just as before. But remember: things were going _on_, even then. Suppose that in the social organism generally, and in the attitude of servants particularly, the decades after the War shall bring but a gradual evolution of what was previously afoot. Even on this mild supposition must it seem likely that some of us will live to look back on domestic service, or at least on what we now mean by that term, as a curiosity of past days.

You have to look rather far behind you for the time when "the servant question," as it is called, had not yet begun to arise. To find servants collectively "knowing their place," as the phrase (not is, but) was, you have to look right back to the dawn of Queen Victoria's reign. I am not sure whether even then those Georgian notice-boards still stood in the London parks to announce that "Ladies and Gentlemen are requested, and Servants are commanded" not to do this and that. But the spirit of those boards did still brood over the land: servants received commands, not requests, and were not "obliging" but obedient. As for the tasks set them, I daresay the footmen in the great houses had an easy time: they were there for ornament; but the (comparatively few) maids there, and the maid or two in every home of the rapidly-increasing middle-class, were very much for use, having to do an immense amount of work for a wage which would nowadays seem nominal. And they did it gladly, with no notion that they were giving much for little, or that the likes of _them_ had any natural right to a glimpse of liberty or to a moment's more leisure than was needed to preserve their health for the benefit of their employers, or that they were not in duty bound to be truly thankful for having a roof over their devoted heads. Rare and reprehensible was the maid who, having found one roof, hankered after another. Improvident, too; for only by long and exclusive service could she hope that in her old age she would not be cast out on the parish. She might marry meanwhile? The chances were very much against that. That was an idea misbeseeming her station in life. By the rules of all households, "followers" were fended ruthlessly away. Her state was sheer slavery? Well, she was not technically a chattel. The Law allowed her to escape at any time, after giving a month's notice; and she did not work for no wages at all, remember. This was hard on her owners? Well, in ancient Rome and elsewhere, her employers would have had to pay a large-ish sum of money for her, down, to a merchant. Economically, her employers had no genuine grievance. Her parents had handed her over to them, at a tender age, for nothing. There she was; and if she was a good girl and gave satisfaction, and if she had no gipsy strain, to make her restless for the unknown, there she ended her days, not without honour from the second or third generation of her owners. As in ancient Rome and elsewhere, the system was, in the long run, conducive to much good feeling on either side. "Poor Anne remained very servile in soul all her days; and was altogether occupied, from the age of fifteen to seventy-two, in doing other people's wills, not her own." Thus wrote Ruskin, in _Praeterita_, of one who had been his nurse, and his father's. Perhaps the passage is somewhat marred by its first word. But Ruskin had queer views on many subjects. Besides, he was very old when, in 1885, he wrote _Praeterita_. Long before that date, moreover, others than he had begun to have queer views. The halcyon days were over.

Even in the 'sixties there were many dark and cumulous clouds. It was believed, however, that these would pass. _Punch_, our ever-quick interpreter, made light of them. Absurd that Jemima Jane should imitate the bonnets of her mistress and secretly aspire to play the piano! _Punch_ and his artists, as you will find in his old volumes, were very merry about her, and no doubt his readers believed that his exquisite ridicule would kill, or his sound good sense cure, the malady in her soul. Poor misguided girl!--why was she flying in the face of Nature? Nature had decreed that some should command, others obey; that some should sit imperative all day in airy parlours, and others be executive in basements. I daresay that among the sitters aloft there were many whose indignation had a softer side to it. Under the Christian Emperors, Roman ladies were really very sorry for their slaves. It is unlikely that no English ladies were so in 'sixties. Pity, after all, is in itself a luxury. It is for the "some" a measure of the gulf between themselves and the "others." Those others had now begun to show signs of restiveness; but the gulf was as wide as ever.

Anthony Trollope was not, like _Punch_, a mere interpreter of what was upmost in the average English mind: he was a beautifully patient and subtle demonstrator of all that was therein. Reading him, I soon forget that I am reading about fictitious characters and careers; quite soon do I feel that I am collating intimate memoirs and diaries. For sheer conviction of truth, give me Trollope. You, too, if you know him, must often have uttered this appeal. Very well. Have you been given _Orley Farm_? And do you remember how Lady Mason felt after confessing to Sir Peregrine Orme that she had forged the will? "As she slowly made her way across the hall, she felt that all of evil, all of punishment, had now fallen upon her. There are periods in the lives of some of us--I trust but few--when with the silent inner voice of suffering"--and here, in justice to Trollope, I must interrupt him by saying that he seldom writes like this; and I must also, for a reason which will soon be plain, ask you not to skip a word--"we call on the mountains to fall and crush us, and on the earth to gape open and take us in--when with an agony of intensity, we wish our mothers had been barren. In these moments the poorest and most desolate are objects to us of envy, for their sufferings can be as nothing to our own. Lady Mason, as she crept silently across the hall, saw a servant girl pass down towards the entrance to the kitchen, and would have given all, all that she had in the world, to change places with that girl. But no change was possible to her. Neither would the mountains crush her, nor the earth take her in. This was her burden, and she must," etc., etc.

You enjoyed the wondrous bathos? Of course. And yet there wasn't any bathos at all, really. At least, there wasn't any in 1862, when _Orley Farm_ was published. Servants really were "most desolate" in those days, and "their sufferings" were less acute only than those of gentlewomen who had forged wills. This is an exaggerated view? Well, it was the view held by gentlewomen at large, in the 'sixties. Trust Trollope.

Why to a modern gentlewoman would it seem so much more dreadful to be crushed by mountains and swallowed by earthquakes than to be a servant girl passing down towards the entrance to the kitchen? In other words, how is it that servants have so much less unpleasant a time than they were having half-a-century ago? I should like to think this amelioration came through our sense of justice, but I cannot claim that it did. Somehow, our sense of justice never turns in its sleep till long after the sense of injustice in others has been thoroughly aroused, nor is it ever up and doing till those others have begun to make themselves thoroughly disagreeable; and not even then will it be up and doing more than is urgently required of it by our convenience at the moment. For the improvement in their lot, servants must, I am afraid, be allowed to thank themselves rather than their employers. I am not going to trace the stages of that improvement. I will not try to decide in what year servants passed from wistfulness to resentment, or from resentment to exaction. This is not a sociological treatise, it is just an essay; and I claim an essayist's privilege of not groping through the library of the British Museum on the chance of mastering all the details. I confess that I did go there yesterday, thinking I should find in Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb's _History of Trade Unionism_ the means of appearing to know much. But I drew blank. It would seem that servants have no trade union. This is strange. One would not have thought so much could be done without organisation. The mere Spirit of the Time, sneaking down the steps of areas, has worked wonders. There has been no servant's campaign, no strategy, nothing but an infinite series of spontaneous and sporadic little risings in isolated households. Wonders have been worked, yes. But servants are not yet satiated with triumph. More and more, on the contrary, do they glide--long before the War they had begun gliding--away into other forms of employment. Not merely are the changed conditions of domestic service not changed enough for them: they seem to despise the thing itself. It was all very well so long as they had not been taught to read and write, but--There, no doubt, is the root of the mischief. Had the governing classes not forced those accomplishments on them in 1872--But there is no use in repining. What's done can't be undone. On the other hand, what must be done can't be left undone. Housework, for example. What concessions by the governing classes, what bribes, will be big enough hereafter to get that done?

Perhaps the governing classes will do it for themselves, eventually, and their ceilings not fall. Or perhaps there will be no more governing classes--merely the State and its swarms of neat little overseers, male and female. I know not whether in this case the sum of human happiness will be greater, but it will certainly--it and the sum of human dullness--be more evenly distributed. I take it that under any scheme of industrial compulsion for the young a certain number of conscripts would be told off for domestic service. To every family in every flat (houses not legal) would be assigned one female member of the community. She would be twenty years old, having just finished her course of general education at a municipal college. Three years would be her term of industrial (sub-sect. domestic) service. Her diet, her costume, her hours of work and leisure, would be standardised, but the lenses of her pince-nez would be in strict accordance to her own eyesight. If her employers found her faulty in work or conduct, and proved to the visiting inspector that she was so, she would be penalised by an additional term of service. If she, on the other hand, made good any complaint against her employers, she would be transferred to another flat, and they be penalised by suspension of their licence to employ. There would always be chances of friction. But these chances would not be so numerous nor so great as they are under that lack of system which survives to-day.

Servants would be persons knowing that for a certain period certain tasks were imposed on them, tasks tantamount to those in which all their coevals were simultaneously engaged. To-day they are persons not knowing, as who should say, where they are, and wishing all the while they were elsewhere--and mostly, as I have said, going elsewhere. Those who remain grow more and more touchy, knowing themselves a mock to the rest; and their qualms, even more uncomfortably than their demands and defects, are always haunting their employers. It seems almost incredible that there was a time when Mrs. Smith said "Sarah, your master wishes----" or Mr. Smith said "Sarah, go up and ask your mistress whether----" I am well aware that the very title of this essay jars. I wish I could find another; but in writing one must be more explicit than one need be by word of mouth. I am well aware that the survival of domestic service in its old form depends more and more on our agreement not to mention it.