Chapter C: A. Tait (16)

SIR,--Mr. Robert Lynd in his very readable essay on _Donne_ in your last number has inadvertently fallen into the old error of saying that Donne was in 1612 "making use of his legal knowledge in order to help the infamous Countess of Essex to secure the annulment of her first marriage." It is true that Donne wrote an Epithalamium for the Countess's second marriage, and that is mortifying enough without any further charge. But Professor Grierson pointed out some time since that it was Dr. Daniel Donne (or Dun) who drew up the paper referred to (Grierson's _Donne_, ii. 94). If further evidence were needed, it might be supplied from MS. Rawlinson 1386 in the Bodleian. On page 201 is the autograph _Daniel Dun_, and someone, probably Rawlinson, has added "Sr. Daniel Dr of Civil Lawes concern'd in Somerset's Divorce."

Mr. Lynd very rightly insists that John Donne is "the supreme example of a Platonic lover among the English poets." But he implies that the impassioned logic of _The Ecstasy_ is not quite consistent with Platonism. What is Platonism? It is customary to develop a system of philosophy of love from a few famous pages of the _Symposium_, ignoring the rest, and this more or less hypothetical or mythical Platonism has caused many people to forget Plato's real teaching. A careful study of the _Symposium_ will, I think, show Donne to be much more truly in the genuine Platonic tradition than were some of the poetical Platonists who preceded him. Mr. Lynd is quite right on this point, and I think he might have put it even more strongly.--Yours, etc.,

BEN CROCKER CLOUGH.

Oxford, February 13th.

DOGS

(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)

SIR,--Your reviewer in his notice of that interesting book _Seventeenth Century Life in the Country Parish_, referring to the "dog-whipper," says, "But why did the dogs of those days show such a church-going disposition?" I would remind him that the dog-whipper's office was not created in the seventeenth century, but in those remoter times when no gentleman appeared anywhere in public without his hawk on his wrist and his hound at his heel. In Barclay's _Shippe of Fools_ (1509) he writes:

One time the hawkes bells jangleth hye

* * * * *

And now the houndes barking strikes the skye

* * * * *

They make of the Church for their hawkes a mewe,
And canell for their dogges, which they shall after rewe.

It was the custom to supply a pew (or pen) for the dogs of the Lord of the Manor--the hall-dogs' "pew"--and as people worshipped (in their hats) with the church doors standing open, I suppose the hounds of the lesser gentry and inimitative yeomen would run in and fight and distract attention.

Though in the seventeenth century the hawk had ceased to be an integral part of a gentleman's equipage, the dogs had inherited the tradition of taking their masters to church, maybe. And as the worshipper, even in the seventeenth century, went from Divine service to a bull or bear-baiting, he would like to have his dogs on the spot. And no doubt all the curs of the village would want to follow them into church and ask the news of high life.--Yours, etc.,

G. I. WHITHAM.

Lyneham Cottage, Chudleigh, S. Devon, February 13th.

LEARNED SOCIETIES, ETC.

THE SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES

Interest in the Near East is maintained, and a useful lead was given in 1913 by the Cyprus Government, who entrusted Professor Myres, assisted by the Keeper of the Cyprus Museum and Mr. L. H. D. Buxton, with a good round sum to conduct excavations in the island. The results were described at length and illustrated on the screen, the most notable discovery being a ruined sanctuary containing a collection of stone statues with many of the painted surfaces in brilliant preservation, ranging in date from the seventh century B.C. to Greco-Roman times. Elsewhere many antiquities of the Bronze Age were brought to light, but at present there are few, if any, traces of a Stone Age in the island. The first stratified series of Cypriote pottery was provided by a complete section of the Bamboula Hill at Larnaca, and the situation is full of promise.

A marble statuette, now in the Ashmolean Museum, was the text of Professor Langdon's discourse, and gave scope for surmise as well as scholarship. It was found by the 14th Sikh Regiment when entrenching before the battle of Istabalat, eight miles below Samara on the Tigris. The object originally carried on the head has disappeared, but the standing figure still holds a "boomerang" or sceptre, and the dress was made in imitation of the fleece, a fashion to which Aristophanes is supposed to refer in the _Wasps_, perhaps three thousand years later. Various prehistoric specimens from England exhibited to the Society have an interest of their own, but cannot compete with relics from the cradle of civilisation, and at present the watch-word is _Ex oriente lux_.

THE EGYPT EXPLORATION FUND

The third of a series of lectures arranged by the Egypt Exploration Fund (to which we referred in our December number) was given at the rooms of the Royal Society at Burlington House on January 23rd, by Professor T. Eric Peet. The subject of the lecture was "El Amarna, the City of Egypt's Heretic King." The lecturer said that from the evidence of the mummy generally supposed to be his, Amenhotep IV. appears to have been little more than a boy when his father died. Nevertheless, as early as the fourth year of his reign, he introduced the worship of the Aton, the Disk of the Sun, and did his utmost to establish it as the State religion, and to suppress the worship of Amon and all other Egyptian gods. The new religion was purely monotheistic in character, for the Aton was regarded as the creator, not of Egypt only, but of the world. The new deity was represented in the art of the period by a picture of the disk of the sun, from which emanated numerous rays, each terminating in human hands, some of which are holding out the sign of life to the worshippers. The king changed his own name from Amenhotep ("Amon is content") to Akhenaton ("The Disk is pleased"), and he shifted his capital from Thebes to El Amarna.

Excavations at El Amarna have brought to light remains of a temple dedicated to the Aton, and a palace erected for the use of the king, with beautifully painted floor, fragments of which show a freedom of drawing and lack of convention which distinguish this period from most other Egyptian art. The remains of many private houses have also been discovered, and from these it is comparatively easy to gather the size, design, and general construction of the houses of the nobles of that time. Most of them seem to have been built on the same plan, and comprise a central hall, with small apartments surrounding and leading from it. Some of these smaller rooms were used as workrooms, and in one house excavated a number of plaster casts were found, obviously taken from living models, proving that the Egyptians of this period were experts in this work. There were also many finished and unfinished statues of the Royal family, some of which were in very natural positions, quite unlike the usual Egyptian statues of other sites.

The tombs of the officials of the Court were discovered in the cliffs behind the town, their walls being covered with sculptured scenes depicting the everyday life of the capital.

At the close of the lecture the Chairman, Colonel H. G. Lyons, F.R.S., pointed out the extreme importance of systematic and scientific excavations in Egypt and other countries, and the gains which might accrue to science.

THE GEOLOGISTS' ASSOCIATION

At the meeting held at University College, Gower Street, W.C.1, on Friday, December 5th, 1919, the following lecture was delivered: "Geological Work on the Western Front," by W. B. R. King, B.A., F.G.S. A short description was given of the geology of that part of Belgium and France over which military operations were conducted by the British Armies between 1915 and the summer of 1918. It was mainly confined to the lithological divisions and did not deal with the palæontological side of the subject. The main physical features were taken, showing how they are connected with the geological structure. The effect of the geology and geological structure on certain questions of military operations was dealt with, notably with regard to water supply and military mining and dug-out construction. Particular attention was paid to the problem of obtaining water from boreholes in the Landenien (Thanet) sands, the causes and effect of the seasonal variation of water-level in the chalk, and the problem of the military mines near Messines, Givenchy-les-la-Bassée, and Souchez. The lecture ended with a description of certain maps which were prepared for the armies in France, and notes on several other problems which had to be dealt with by the geologists attached to General Headquarters.

On Friday, January 2nd, 1920, Dr. A. E. Trueman, F.G.S., read a paper on "The Liassic Rocks of the Cardiff District." The author said that the greater part of South Glamorganshire, from Cardiff westwards to beyond Bridgend, consists of lower Liassic rocks (Hettangian and Lower Sinemurian), which are well seen in some 20 miles of magnificent cliff sections. Only meagre descriptions of these rocks have been hitherto published. A detailed study has been undertaken, first because nowhere else in this country are such continuous sections of these rocks available, and, secondly, because the normal deposits consisting of limestones and shales seen near Cardiff, when traced westwards, pass into a littoral facies of massive limestones and conglomerates. In the present communication an account of the normal Liassic rocks of the Cardiff district is given, as this will form a basis for the correlation of the modified deposits further west. The lecture was illustrated by lantern-slides and specimens.

THE MODERN HUMANITIES RESEARCH ASSOCIATION

The January number of the _Bulletin_ of the Modern Humanities Research Association contains a summary of the Presidential Address delivered in October, 1919, by M. Gustave Lanson, the famous French scholar and critic. The Association, which, though founded only in June, 1918, numbers nearly 500 members, is now penetrating to some of the remoter quarters of the globe; among the last candidates to be elected were some from Czecho-Slovakia, the Malay States, New Zealand, and Western Canada, and most of these were at once put into touch with members at home belonging to subject groups representing their particular interests. The Hon. Secretary (Mr. E. Allison Peers, 24 Beaufort Road, Kingston-on-Thames) writes in the _Bulletin_ of proposals submitted to the Association that it should produce a comprehensive Bibliographical Annual, a task which a body with so wide a membership seems peculiarly fitted to attempt.

The Modern Humanities Research Association is fulfilling another obligation which rests upon all who speak the English language in its efforts to bridge the Atlantic and unite those on both sides who are engaged in higher studies in Modern Languages and Literatures. Its membership is growing in the United States so rapidly that an American Secretary (Professor M. Blakemore Evans, of the Ohio State University) has been appointed. At its most recent London meeting, on January 6th, too, Professor Carleton Brown, of Minnesota, was among the speakers on "Conditions of Postgraduate Study." Such interchange of help and information as the Association brings about between England and America can have none but good effects.

Among the Vice-Presidents of the Association, prominent names are those of Sir Sidney Lee (its first President), Dr. Walter Leaf, Sir A. W. Ward, M. Jusserand, Signor Farinelli, Professor Jespersen, Professor Oliver Emerson, and Sr. Menéndez Pidal.

THE ROYAL NUMISMATIC SOCIETY

At the January meeting of the Royal Numismatic Society the Rev. E. A. Sydenham read a paper on the "Coinages of Augustus." He began by giving a chronological summary of the various series and groups of coins under Augustus. There were seven species of mints: (_a_) the Senatorial Mint of Rome; (_b_) Military Mints; (_c_) Mints in Senatorial Provinces; (_d_) Mints in Imperial Provinces; (_e_) Autonomous Mints (issuing bronze only); (_f_) the "Imperatorial Mint"; (_g_) the Imperial Mint. After brief notes on the Senatorial Mint (43-36 B.C.), the military coinage of Octavius in Gaul and Italy (41-39 B.C.), incidentally attributing the S.C. coins to camp mints of Northern Italy, Mr. Sydenham proceeded to discuss the Asiatic coinages (28-15 B.C.) and the Imperatorial Mint (21-15 B.C.). Besides coins generally attributed to Asiatic mints the reader proposed to give the undated silver and gold with CAESAR DIVI F to Asia rather than Rome, and criticised Laffranchi's attribution of certain coins to Phrygia and Gabrici's to Athens. The CA bronze coins he attributed to Asia reading the CA as _Commune Asiæ_. The coins attributed to the "Imperatorial" Mint are very distinctive in style and were probably issued under direct control of Augustus. These coins had been attributed by Grueber to Rome and by Laffranchi to Spain. Mr. Sydenham gave cogent arguments against these views and added reasons for considering them a distinct Imperatorial issue. A theory on which a good deal of the argument turns is that in 28 B.C. Augustus made a formal surrender of his triumviral office and the extraordinary powers pertaining to it. Included in the powers was probably the right of coinage. The surrender of this right was merely an act of policy which Augustus did not regard as permanently binding. But he held to it to this extent that for five or six years he issued no coins of any sort on his own authority, and even down to the end of his reign he issued no coins in Rome. After an experimental coinage through P. Carisius in Spain (24-22 B.C.) he inaugurated his "Imperatorial" Mint, but confined its operations to the provinces. Finally he fixed the Imperial Mint at Lugdunum (14 B.C.).

THE SOCIETY OF GENEALOGISTS OF LONDON

The Society of Genealogists of London is collecting lists of books, articles, deeds, MSS., and documents generally in reference to specific families and places. It has many such lists and references to documents, as well as collections of documents themselves, and wishes to add to them to facilitate research. Readers kindly supplying such lists, long or short, are assured that they are filed at once by the Society in such a manner that they are immediately available for reference. An excellent example of the form such lists might take is provided in Mr. Walter Rye's _Norfolk Topography_. Communications should be addressed to 5 Bloomsbury Square, W.C.1.

BOOKS OF THE MONTH

POETRY

MANSOUL, OR THE RIDDLE OF THE WORLD. By CHARLES M. DOUGHTY. Selwyn & Blount. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.

We imagine that there is no difference of opinion, amongst those who have read it, about Mr. Doughty's prose book, now a generation old, _Wanderings in Arabia Deserta_. It was one of the great prose works of the nineteenth century, a book which (the geographers assure us) was astonishingly accurate as a record of exploration, and which repeatedly soared into passages of description and meditation unsurpassed for muscularity and grandeur. Even that book, however, was the work of a man odd in temperament and outlook and possessing peculiar ideas as to the use of the English language. In the volumes of poetry which he has been producing so rapidly in his old age his eccentricities have been projected very much farther. We should not be surprised to hear that he had never read (barring perhaps Shakespeare and Milton) any poet later than Spenser; we are certain that he habitually reads no one later than Spenser, and the poet with whom a comparison most frequently leaps to the mind is someone earlier still, namely, Langland. There are those, a very few, who swallow Mr. Doughty whole, who enjoy his archaisms, real and "pseudo," who think _The Dawn in Britain_ the greatest poetical work of our time, and will hear nothing against even the topical passages of his poem about the German war. There are more who find him frankly unreadable in bulk, but are willing to turn over his pages for the sake of the occasionally lovely passages of description that they find on them; whilst the average intelligent reader would probably run from any page of any of his poetical works, so stony is the way that the disciple must tread and so vigorous the discipline to which he must subject himself.

For ourselves, we read Mr. Doughty through as in duty bound, and we perceive even in his knottiest and even in his naïvest passages the workings of a powerful and original mind, the observations of an eye which looks at history and the material world as though they had never been looked at before, the strivings of a heart that has always been acutely aware of the world behind the seen. Nevertheless, not even this compensates us fully for a cumbrousness of style, a malformation of shape, and a guttural obscurity of speech hard to equal in all the annals of literature; and we are, we fear, to be most sympathetic to that second class of readers who look to Mr. Doughty only for occasional flowers and remember, out of all they have read of his, only stray images, as of a shepherd on a hill or swallows circling over the fresh meadows in the dawn of the world. _Mansoul_ is all of a piece with the others; we almost think that in a few months it will, in our own memories, have amalgamated with the others. It opens in the familiar mode, the "grand manner," but just a little awry:

As chanced I sate on terrace of an house,
In summer season, after sickness past;
And fell, surprised my sense, into deep trance;
Wherein meseemed, much musing in my thought,
I cogitations heard, of many hearts;
That came and went, in MANTOWN'S market-place
Whereon I looked. And in my spirit I asked;
What were indeed right paths of a man's feet;
That lacking light, wont stumble in world's murk.

There can be heard the grave voice, there seen the something like majesty of port, there noticed a little of Mr. Doughty's obscurity and some of his, we daresay even unconscious, fads such as the avoidance of particles and the refusal to use the apostrophe 's. Thus it continues for two hundred pages of contortion and clouds with flashes of sunshine coming through them. At one moment we are wondering why on earth Mr. Doughty should call Tigris and Euphrates "Digla" and "Frat" if he has to translate these terms in a footnote; at another we are giving up an unusually dark passage in despair; at another we are wondering whether perhaps his best things do not actually gain something from the mannerisms that normally make our heads ache. The narrative is very hard to follow. The singer, accompanied by Mansoul and one Minimus, peregrinates through the under world, surveys past civilisations, and converses with (amongst others) Nebo, Zoroaster, Socrates, and St. Stephen. The Kaiser (we conceive) is, in anticipation, interviewed:

One crowned, cast lately down unto this place

a Warmonger and a coxcomb whose "werewolfs face" is now blotted by "a loathly leprosy"; and there is a pagan to the soul of all things at the end, the Muse of Britain and Colin (presumed Spenser) being intermittently in mind throughout. Yet at any time Mr. Doughty is liable to break, without the least awareness of writing a purple patch, into a packed passage full of feeling and sweet to the memory. Take one such:

I stayed, where pleasant grassy holms depart;
Those streaming waters, bordered all along;
With daphne and willow herb, sweep sedge, laughing robin;
With woodbind garlanded and sweet eglantine,
And azure-hewed in creeky shallows still
Forget-me-nots lift our frail thoughts to heaven.
Broods o'er those thymy eyots drowsy hum;
Bourdon of glistering bees, in mails of gold.
Labouring from sweet to sweet, in the long hours
Of sunny heat; they sound their shrill small clarions.
And hurl by booming doors, gross bee-fly kin;
(Broadgirded, diverse hewed, in their long pelts;)
That solitary, whiles there light endureth,
In summer skies, each becking clover-tuft haunt.

We do not think that Mr. Doughty should be ignored by anyone who wishes to be familiar with all the good work done in poetry in our time. But, in recommending him, we warn readers that they should approach him almost as they would approach _Piers Plowman_ itself; Chaucer is distinctly more easy and modern.

IMAGES OF WAR. By RICHARD ALDINGTON. Allen & Unwin. 3_s._ 6_d._ net.

WORMS AND EPITAPHS. By H. W. GARROD. Blackwell. 3_s._ 6_d._ net.

The first of these small books seems to have been written on active service, the second on return to Oxford after active service. That Mr. Richard Aldington's verse should have a larger content than before is natural; his pre-war verse, to the non-Imagist eye, consisted largely of sweet nothings starred with Greek names. We have here emotional experiences of a less tenuous kind; the poet is coming nearer a comprehension of Keats' remark that poets should express what all men feel. This in _Trench Idyll_, _Time's Changes_, _Reverie_, and other poems he does; and sometimes he conveys the emotion through the medium of a careful picture, as clear in its way as one of Mr. Kennington's drawings. Here is _Picket_:

Dusk and deep silence ...
Three soldiers huddled on a bench
Over a red-hot brazier,
And a fourth who stands apart
Watching the cold rainy dawn.

Then the familiar sound of birds--
Clear cock-crow, caw of rooks,
Frail pipe of linnet, the "ting! ting!" of chaffinches,
And over all the lark
Outpiercing even the robin....

Wearily the sentry moves
Muttering the one word: "Peace."

Here there is more of a rhythm than usual. But the defect of Mr. Aldington and his Imagist friends is that, although they are quite right, though not original, in emphasising the need for concrete language, they do for the most part lack that rhythm that makes poetry what it is and rememberable. It is not that they write in free verse. Rhyme is no necessary part of verse, and nobody in the world ever contended that all the lines of a poem should be of standard lengths. But a poem in free verse--it is this which chiefly distinguishes Whitman's good from his bad poems--should have a continuous rhythm other than that of prose, and _will_ have it if it is written by a man who is strongly moved and has the gift of musical expression. Mr. Aldington may have that gift, but if so he represses it.

Mr. Garrod's volume bears a picture of a graveyard: therein the tombstones of Messrs. Lloyd George and Balfour, Lords Haldane, Northcliffe and Birkenhead, and Sir Edward Carson. This looks sweeping, but on reference to his epigrammatic epitaphs, one finds that he admires the Old "Gang" and deplores the New. His verses are neat but slight. The best are those on Rupert Brooke, on the new invaders of Oxford who vainly attempt to emulate the dead, and on Reconstruction:

O soon you'll build the world again
With other and with better men;
And I and plenty more will sit,
And sit, and see you doing it.
In a large West-end hotel
Rich non-combatants will dwell;
Well-paid hands will ply the art
Of binding up the broken heart,
A special sub-department deal
With the wounds that never heal,
Deputy-Controllers pour
Government oil on every sore,
And a civilian Soldier's Friend
Furnish us forms world-without-end
God! does a man like me want _tape_?
I've wounds, man, here, that gape, that gape.

We note that Lord Derby is described as _vir teres atque rotundus_.

SELECTED POEMS. By LADY MARGARET SACKVILLE. Constable. 6_s._ net.

VERSES. By VIOLA MEYNELL. Secker. 2_s._ 6_d._ net.

Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, in a lively introduction to the first of these volumes--in the course of which he suggests, provocatively, that blank verse is merely "a dignified kind of prose, pompous in recitation and for common reading dull"--says that "Lady Margaret Sackville is the best, in my opinion, of our English poetesses, at least of the younger generation." It is a good thing that he added the qualification, for, apart from the fact that Mrs. Woods has written poems better than anything that Lady Margaret has yet done, there is Mrs. Meynell, whose too exiguous volume of verse competes for quality with the best work of her generation. If there are scarcely any more exceptions to make we feel that the deduction is that women are at present doing very little in poetry, though there are vast numbers of them who write it. In the Victorian age when Christina Rossetti and Mrs. Browning, both of whom did immortal work, were writing together there was a general impression that these were the first fruits of women's emancipation and that future ages would see women becoming more and more prominent in poetry. But the wind bloweth where it listeth, and the fact that, at a time when an unusually large number of young men are writing sincerely and strongly, not one young poetess should have won prominence has now led to a general opinion that the peculiar qualities of passion and thought that make poets are, and will always be, more normal in men than in women. Lady Margaret Sackville has a reasonable technical equipment: a fair vocabulary, facility with metre. She never says quite stupid things, she sometimes says pretty things, and at times (as in her war poems) she reveals a certain depth of feeling. But usually she is first and foremost derivative; sometimes from Swinburne direct, more often generally derivative. You feel that she is giving a thin version of something else, even when you cannot say exactly what; and her poems, whether dramatic poems about Dionysus and Pan, or dreams, streams, Springs and things, are just saved from being ordinary verse by the fact that she has a brain and a heart which infuse the bare minimum of reality into them. The only things to be said in her favour is that she is young and that her latest verses are her best.

Something of what we lack in Lady Margaret is present, if intermittently, in the small, charmingly-produced book by Miss Viola Meynell. Her work is uneven, and her handling sometimes awkward, but she has, sometimes, force; she sees vividly, thinks strongly, feels strongly, imagines strongly. The point of view of the whale that swallowed strongly was a remarkable thing to try to adopt, but her poem on this subject, despite a weak ending, contains verses with more bite in them than any in Lady Margaret's book; if she has read Donne she has not read him to her hurt. _The Maid in the Rice Fields_ is charming, and _Poppy-seeds sent from the East_ is more than that:

Travelled here in winter sleep
The young wild Eastern poppies keep
Their eyelids closed. They nothing know
Where is this land they lie in now.

The opening is delightful, and the theme is developed with craft and passion.

DUCKS AND OTHER VERSES. By F. W. HARVEY. Sidgwick & Jackson. 3_s._ net.

Mr. Harvey's first book, _A Gloucestershire Lad_, appeared when he was in France; his second when he was a prisoner in Germany; this is his third. The sequence has been too rapid to show much development; both his merits and his faults are what they were. He is only occasionally a good workman, and he has not yet succeeded in getting himself naturally and forcibly into his work. This is explicable. He loves his country; he wants to celebrate the old traditional simplicities of a healthy country life and (as propagandist) to restore what we have lost of them; he stands, he says, for Romance, Laughter, and the capacity for innocent Wonder. There is no pretence about this, but when a man feels that he must defend the natural there is comprehensibly an air of awkwardness and self-consciousness about him. The drinking-songs (Mr. Harvey also praises ale) of modern singers are examples: the roysterers always have an eye on the neighbouring teetotaller who they know is watching them and whose opposed philosophy they wish to unseat in the affections of their fellows. Mr. Harvey is best when he is forgetting the general principles for which he stands and simply enjoying himself; and the superiority of his more whimsical verses suggests that his bent, like that of Mr. Graves (with whom he has much else in common), lies more in that direction than towards large utterance or solemnity. The title of his book suggests that he realises this: the poem from which it is taken is certainly his most successful. It is really a close study of ducks made with infinite relish of their quaintness:

From troubles of the world
I turn to ducks,
Beautiful comical things,
Sleeping or curled,
Their heads beneath white wings
By water cool.
Or finding curious things
To eat in various mucks
Beneath the pool,
Tail uppermost, or waddling
Sailor-like on the shores
Of ponds, or paddling.

He sketches the main outlines of a duck's varied life by barn, stable, and stack:

They wander at their will,
But if you go too near
They look at you through black
Small topaz-tinted eyes
And wish you ill.

On the whole, he thinks the duck was the best of God's jokes:

And he's probably laughing still at the sound that came out of his
bill.

Of the more serious poems some are a trifle stale; the glorification of one's county, with place-names rhymed, might be given a rest. _Requiescat_ is a moving poem, and the tenuity and familiarity of the idea does not prevent _Song_ from lingering in the memory more than anything else in the volume:

Sweetness of birdsong shall fall upon my heart,
Shall fall upon my heart;
Nor will I strive to mimic
The beauty that I find,
But lie in a dream and open wide my heart
And let the song of the birds sink down into my mind.

This song is all of a piece, a musical sigh.

NOVELS

THE CLINTONS AND OTHERS. By ARCHIBALD MARSHALL. Collins. 7_s._ net.

PETER JACKSON, CIGAR MERCHANT. By GILBERT FRANKAU. Hutchinson. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.

PRELUDE. By BEVERLEY NICHOLS. Chatto & Windus. 7_s._ net.

LIMBO. By ALDOUS HUXLEY. Chatto & Windus. 5_s._ net.

Mr. Archibald Marshall is, we dare to say, one of the good writers most neglected by contemporary critics. He has brought nothing new to the development of the novel. If a general description were necessary, he might be most briefly and accurately classified as a descendant of Anthony Trollope. But his talent in his own generation is unique; and no person who enjoys or studies the fiction of this age can afford to neglect it. In some ways his latest volume is the climax of his performance and displays at their height his peculiar method and gifts. It consists of six stories. One, perhaps the least interesting, describes how John Clinton, a prosperous city merchant in the time of the Regency, rescued the family estates from his elder brother, the prodigal Beau Clinton. The second deals with a scientific peer, innocent and absorbed, who very nearly married a woman scientist, of origin much lower than his own, who was attracted to him only by his wealth and position. The hero of the third is a speculative builder. The fifth narrates the misfortunes of a patient and gentle clerk. The sixth is a story of old Squire Clinton's reactions to the war and of how he was reconciled to the different reactions of those about him. The fourth, which we have removed from its place, tells how Ann Sinclair, a day-pupil at Miss Sutor's school, was sent to Coventry by her companions because she was unjustly suspected of having damaged in malice Mary Polegate's illuminated chart of the kings of Juda and Israel. This is the longest story in the book, occupying over one hundred pages. The principal characters are all school-girls of various ages, and no extraneous interests are introduced. It seems almost impossible with this material to hold a reader's keen attention for twenty odd thousand words, and yet this is what Mr. Marshall has done. All the persons are vividly alive and convincing; and there is a whole range of them, each individualised and given a real personality. The story is an especially good example of what Mr. Marshall can do and how he does it. His narrative is extraordinarily quiet and unemphasised, and shows by its restraint the author's complete confidence in the interest of his subject and in the adequacy of his method. In all these tales events more or less moving take place or are referred to; but the teller never raises his voice or gesticulates. He has no tricks. His characters reveal themselves in speech or action; but if they do not he has no modern prejudices against telling the reader what are their motives and what is going on in their minds. His explanations are so quiet and so straightforward that they immediately carry conviction. When old Squire Clinton was passing through Paris with his daughter to see her husband, wounded and interned in Switzerland, he was displeased that his other daughter should take them to lunch in a restaurant:

He would not have objected to exactly the same meal served in her
apartment. He would have eaten and drunk whatever had been set
before him, and enjoyed it in spite of his always strongly expressed
preference for English food and English cooking. The wine he might
have noticed and commented on, because he knew about wines, and
because you pleased your host by approving of his taste in them.
But this ordering of your meal in public, in consultation with your
guests, with a _maître d'hôtel_ standing at your elbow and booking
your orders, not without advice of his own, struck him as very like
taking part in a mistress's consultation with her servants--almost
an indecency. The restaurant habit was, in fact, entirely unknown to
him. In his expansive youth it had been unheard of. The nearest he
had ever come to it had been in giving luncheons or dinners at one of
his clubs--meals as elaborate as this and as carefully arranged, but
arranged beforehand, so that the guests should get the right flavour
of hospitality, and accept the good things set before them as they
would have accepted them at his own table. Neither Joan nor Nancy
divined that half his displeasure, which he could not hide, was at
being obliged, under Inverell's hospitable pressure, to express his
preference for this or that luxury, with the price of it staring him
in the face on the menu, when indulgence in any sort of luxury was so
far from his mood.

So delicate and exact and truthful is this delineation of a small tract in the old man's character that it would be almost possible to reconstruct the whole without any other guide, as is done in the case of louder roaring monsters than Mr. Marshall's creations.

Mr. Gilbert Frankau's _Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant_, presents a curious contrast to the method of Mr. Marshall. Mr. Marshall's virtues are so quiet and unobtrusive that it is possible to overlook them altogether. Mr. Frankau's defects are so vociferous that they tend to obscure his real merits. He paints in violent colours. He paints his sentimental passages with a yard broom. His style, as Mr. Arnold Bennett once observed of somebody else, is such that even in Carmelite Street the sub-editors would yearn to correct it. He has almost entirely eliminated the conjunction from his own version of the English language: the "ands" and "buts" omitted from this book would, if they were restored, increase its length by a hundred pages or so. Their absence gives the reader the impression that Mr. Frankau is in an enormous hurry and is very short of breath. All these defects are closely woven into the texture of one of the most strident novels ever written; and it is quite impossible to escape from them. Nevertheless this tale of a business man who became a gunner is one of the most lively and credible pictures of the war which we have yet had. It matters little in the end that, whether he is describing the purchase of a cigarette-factory or a love-scene or the battle of the Somme, the author scores exclusively for brass and big drums. This method certainly eliminates the love-scene, but it is not inappropriate to the other subjects; and in his accounts both of war and of business Mr. Frankau produces a huge, crowded chaotic picture which stuns and bewilders the reader, but at the same time convinces him that he is seeing at least one aspect of the truth. Mr. Frankau's high level of verisimilitude and interest in such passages as the description of the Battle of Loos depends to a very great extent on his peculiar power of packing much detail into a small space; and it is to this perhaps that we owe the somewhat regrettable lack of "the smaller parts of speech."

Mr. Beverley Nichols's book is another of the triumphs of precocity--a novel describing the Public School system by a writer with very recent experience of it. And, like other novels on this subject, it is a novel with a thesis. Mr. Nichols is far from disapproving of the system. He sets out, on the other hand, to show that it is capable of receiving and making comfortable the most eccentric of boys if he will only make the least effort of adjustment to his environment that can be reasonably expected of a human being in any circumstances. His hero, Paul Trevelyan, has in an extreme form all the characteristics of the heroes of such books. He has been coddled, he has unusual tastes, he cares nothing for games. But, very refreshingly, Mr. Nichols treats with a firm hand both his characteristics and his sufferings. Paul undergoes just such discomforts as are required to rid him of effeminacy and priggishness, and mould him into a boy capable of taking a place in human society with satisfaction to himself and his companions. The thesis of the book appears to be that the Public School system does not necessarily deprive those who come under it of their individuality, does not necessarily crush or torture those who depart from the normal, does act as a civilising agent on those who are in need of it. As a piece of evidence, the book is interesting and useful. As a novel it is less remarkable than Mr. Waugh's _Loom of Youth_. That book was not only a contribution to a dispute; it was also a work of fiction astonishingly well put together for its author's years and experience. Its characters and many of its incidents were extremely well observed and drawn. Mr. Nichols fails as a writer of fiction. His characters are vague and unconvincing: they have no fundamental individuality. The construction of his novel is extremely loose and uneven; and the passages of reflection are introduced with a very clumsy hand. Whether he will succeed in correcting these faults it is impossible to predict; but he clearly has gifts which ought to come to something. Precocity in the things he lacks is not always a certain indication of success in maturity.

Mr. Huxley, alone among these writers, betrays traces of exotic influence. The last story in his book, _The Death of Lully_, might have come from the _Contes Cruels_, perhaps, in one way, has come thence. Others of the collection show less definite resemblances to French models and are less evenly and carefully composed; but there are in most of them traces of an alien exactitude and an alien wit. Mr. Huxley, as we know already from his verse, can _write_ brilliantly. His defect here, as there, lies in a deficiency of feeling caused by an excess of self-consciousness. This self-consciousness does not make him awkward or effusive. He is far too clever to betray it thus rudely. As in the behaviour of some persons, it manifests itself in his work by an iron rigidity of attitude, an immovable equability of tone. When he invents characters he does not so much describe their actions or let them act as criticise them; he is led to adopt the pose of the satirist more consistently than perhaps he intends. Reaction follows fast on action; and the springs of his writing are laid bare in an extraordinarily ingenious dialogue, called _Happy Families_, where he exposes the triple personalities, inciting, betraying, checking one another, of a young man and a young woman sitting out together at a dance. This piece, which seems to have unnecessarily puzzled a number of Mr. Huxley's critics, means nothing if it does not express his opinion that in every human being there is a stratum of the animal which is to be distrusted and restrained. But, here and elsewhere, one wonders whether his watchfulness over this stratum has not led him into exaggerating its extent and distrusting things which, to a less suspicious eye, do not look in the least like it. And in another story, so fast are his reactions, we find him mocking the shuddering and ascetic revulsion from the purely animal in man. This is the behaviour not merely of the critic dominant over the artist, but of the critic who leads towards Nihilism by discrediting all human impulses, instead of arranging them in order. Mr. Huxley has, however, too much of the poet for this to be fundamental in him, too much appreciation of bright and vivid things and bright and vivid phrases. And it would be gravely unjust to convey the impression that it spoils his book. _The Farcical History of Richard Greenow_ is an admirable invention, full of possibilities for bitter comedy, most, if not all, of which have been worked out; _Cynthia_ is a good joke, though its title betrays the climax a little too early; and _The Bookshop_ is more human in feeling than its companions. But the important point to notice is that, whatever may be the perversities or the affectations of his thought, Mr. Huxley always writes well, with a style that is never shabby or shoddy, never flamboyant or flat.

BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM

THE MEASURES OF THE POETS. By M. A. BAYFIELD, M.A. Cambridge University Press. 5_s._ net.

A STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE'S VERSIFICATION. By M. A. BAYFIELD, M.A. Cambridge University Press. 16_s._ net.

LESSONS IN VERSE-CRAFT. By S. GERTRUDE FORD. Daniel. 3_s._ 6_d._ net.

Mr. Bayfield's _Measures of the Poets_ is meant to be revolutionary. He finds existing systems of prosody neither complete nor sound, and would sweep them away in order to install his own trochaic scheme. Practically every work of a predecessor is ignored, and the author himself regrets that Lanier's _Science of English Verse_, published forty years ago, did not come to his notice until the present book was written. He does not mention Professor Saintsbury's _History_ or _Manual of English Prosody_, nor (among other writings, by recent or living metrists) the essays of Patmore and Mr. Robert Bridges. A great deal of contention is thus avoided, but the probabilities of conversion are also reduced. He asserts that the normal foot of English verse is trochaic, and that the iambus cannot form a metrical foot, because the stressed syllable does not come first; while Professor Saintsbury declares that the iambic is the staple foot of English verse and is common to almost all prosodies.

How, then, let us ask the challenger, is the application of the trochaic system justified? In Mr. Bayfield's scheme the plain norm of the "full blank" verse line is an eleven-syllable arrangement of which the first is a "short," followed by five trochees; and the following line (quoted in his second book, which takes up the subject anew) is given as specimen:

I ⁝ come to | bury | Cæsar, | not to | praise him.‖

But the full line does not happen to be the common form, owing to its feminine ending, and so he admits that the prevailing type is the "checked" form:

To ⁝ sleep; per | chance to | dream: ay | there's the | rub.∧‖

The anacrusis or up-beat, marked off by ⁝, is an integral part of the new system; in reality it is the device by which the author changes iambic to trochaic movement. Here, indeed, is the crucial point of the dispute between iambic and trochaic. Under the first, this up-beat or take-off is neither very frequent nor very rare; under the second, it is common. Mr. Bayfield's idiosyncratic use of it is illustrated by himself thus:

My ⁝ heart | aches, and a | drowsy numbness pains,

and--

Or emptied some dull | opiate | to the drains,

and by--

But ⁝ being too | happy in thine happiness;

the reader being left to discover for himself the reason for the difference of prosodic interpretation. If the ear should be satisfied with this difference (and Mr. Bayfield admits that the ear is judge and jury), what might its verdict be as to the validity of a double up-beat, leaving only semi-syllables for the rest of the line?

And thy ⁝ mouth | shúddering | like a | shót | bírd.‖

Here let it be remarked that his system acknowledges monosyllabic feet, but he is not well informed in denying them a place in the iambic system. He complains of "ragtime scansions," in referring to the fact that the iambic system admits trochees whenever it would break down by refusing them, and seems to deplore a resulting loss of "continuity of rhythm." Yet he himself does not scruple to write of one of his own illustrations: "A striking contrast in _rhythm_ may be noted here. That of the first line and a half ... is markedly trochaic; the other line and a half fall into an equally marked iambic rhythm." He has not, in fact, escaped from the difficulties and inconsistencies which beset the prosodist. He does little more than prove that the music of the poets cannot be defeated or disguised by either system. He gives this as containing a quinquesyllabic foot:

Well, ∧ | Juliet, I will | lie with thee to-night,

and dubiously suggests "hire" as a disyllable in:

And ⁝ hire | post-horses; | I will hence to-night.

He is aware that an alternative scansion may in some cases be correct, but does not sufficiently realise that any prosodic system is but an artificiality, formed to explain, and not dictate, the infinitely variable rhythms of poetry. His own particular system, for all its ingenuities, appears more artificial and arbitrary than the iambic. It is interesting to note that his examples are largely drawn from Shakespeare, Tennyson, Swinburne, and Shelley, all fruitful ground; while Milton and Coleridge, Campion and Keats are much less used or left alone altogether. Might not these fascinating and delusive excursions into the mysteries of rhythm be extended to certain living poets--at least to Mr. Hardy and Mr. Bridges?

_Shakespeare's Versification_ is a larger book, in which Mr. Bayfield inquires into the validity of the early texts. His purpose is:

First to give an intelligible and consistent account of the structure
and characteristic features of his dramatic verse, the essential
principles of which appear to have been wholly misconceived hitherto,
and secondly to show that there are many thousands of lines of it
that are given in modern texts not as their author intended them to
be delivered, but clipped and trimmed to a featureless uniformity
that he would have abhorred.

He finds in _Antony and Cleopatra_ the ideal of verse at which Shakespeare was always aiming, and denounces the depravity of the text as it stands--in this as in many other of the plays. The book has a cumulative, even a dramatic interest, for setting out to prove one thing, Mr. Bayfield frankly ends by proving another. With immense care and patience he has examined and compared Quartos and First Folio, and noted quite innumerable places at which the contraction and condensation of words and lines have distorted or ruined the rhythm; and he contends that if the verse is to be presented as the author meant it to be delivered, these must be expanded into their full forms. He begins by considering Shakespeare's use of the "resolved" foot--that is, a foot of more than two syllables--and discovers a constant tendency to reduce these "resolutions" by abbreviation; the result being, for example, that violent becomes vi'lent, desolate des'late, Demetrius Demetr'us, etc. He contends that from the outset Shakespeare employed resolved rhythms more freely than his contemporaries, and gradually increased the proportion with his later plays; and it is, of course, perfectly true that the growing liberation of style which in Shakespeare expresses a psychological development, is equally noticeable in later poets.

Now in comparing the Quartos with the First Folio Mr. Bayfield finds that of all the differences the most conspicuous is the elimination of resolutions, the tendency shown by the Quartos in this direction being aggravated in the Folio. The position is made clear in a Table relating to fourteen Quarto plays, which shows, _e.g._, that in _Othello_ the Folio eliminates eighty-six resolutions found in the Quarto, and the latter eliminates fourteen which the Folio displays; while a third figure, 84, "_enumerates cases where, guided by the whole investigations and the revelations afforded by the first two columns_ [figures], I believe that a resolution should be restored." His deduction is that the Folio is a metrical reactionary; if it is unsound to prefer its revision to the Quartos, it is equally unsound to rely upon the Folio for the plays not included in the Quartos. He strengthens his argument by showing that the prose (of _Julius Cæsar_, for instance), which has no metrical obligations, is far more immune from illicit contractions, although prose, being nearer to ordinary speech, might be expected to show very free colloquial abbreviations. We are not prepared to follow Mr. Bayfield blindly; his trochaic passions, hitched to his resolution to "resolve," do not compel unquestioning obedience; we are not convinced by a line like, "From ⁝ Syria to Lydia and to Ionia," when the received text reads:

From Syria
To Lydia and to Ionia, whilst----

and his resort to "Cross Accent" for the scansion of such lines as

Her dowry shall weigh equal with a queen

is yet farther from persuading us, and seems, like so many of his arguments and instances, to be the mere expression of his hatred of the iambic. Nevertheless, his abundant recital of divergencies from the Quartos' resolved lines--to consider only that which is a matter of simple enumeration--can be taken quite apart from the soundness or unsoundness of his metrical prepossessions; and what we have called the cumulative interest of this treatise is most plainly felt in the development of this theme as play after play is examined.

It is in the chapter called "Conclusions" that the interest suddenly becomes dramatic. Mr. Bayfield has been arguing that Shakespeare is not printed as he should be printed--that is, with "the clear and uncramped enunciation of trisyllabic and quadrisyllabic feet"--and that the mangling of these was done for and by the players in order to reduce the verse to the common disyllabic type which alone they could comfortably manage. But now he derives a "flood of light" from the 1616 Jonson folio, the proofs of which are presumed to have been corrected by Jonson himself. From the printing of _Sejanus_ he finds that Jonson's resolutions are abridged even where the line makes their full enunciation essential to the rhythm. Space will not permit the tracing of the new argument here, but Mr. Bayfield at length concludes that what he has supposed in the first three hundred pages of his book to be attributable to the perversities of the Press, are after all merely recognised contractions which were never meant to suggest the clipped pronunciations given to them. His charge, in fact, is no longer levelled against the early texts from which his affluence of instances is drawn, but against the interpretation of them; the very apostrophe (with division) being in reality but a signal calling attention to the resolution which generations of editors, readers, and players have supposed it was meant to abolish. The dramatic interest is complete.

Mr. Bayfield claims for his books the authority justly due from forty-five years' application of prosodic principles to English verse. We can but conclude with wishing _Shakespeare's Versification_ a fuller index and a wide study, and suggest to the author that those who are concerned with verse as writers and not as teachers have not always failed to give the full syllabic value to the common abbreviations of the text.

Miss Ford's book is a "practical" treatise and might have been a valuable one. The first sentence tells us that many of her examples of verse-forms are from her own pen, while Mr. Bayfield has at any rate been content with Shakespeare. Why should she write four stanzas in imitation of _Love in the Valley_? She thinks it too well known to make quotation advisable, yet gives us the commonest things of Wordsworth and Shelley and Coleridge. She misprints Shakespeare and Wordsworth shamefully, thinks that Professor Saintsbury is dead, and, sparing only four pages for "the lyric," devotes twenty-seven to such forms as roundel, ballade, etc. Her book, we think, has been spoiled by haste; yet she has such enthusiasm and brightness as tempt us to regret that haste and to hope for better work.