Chapter V: Front Matter (5)

The issue of the War has established more firmly than ever the predominance of the English language in the world. If our schools would rise to their opportunity and raise English into a culture worthy of its qualities there seems no reason why it should not become the universal medium of civilisation for the world. The richness and variety of its literature and the simplicity and flexibility of its structure render it, as a language, amply sufficient. Whether this is visionary or not, it is no longer safe for those who cherish the humanities in education to rely upon the old impregnable position of Latin and Greek. The world has received one of those secular shocks in which tradition crumbles to dust.

AN ARTICLE ON PARTICLES

By ALICE MEYNELL

"_Inconquerable_"--BACON

A general good habit might long ago have been ruled for our national literature in the use of two negatives--"un" or "in," and "less." A good rule once made known, long ago, would surely have lasted. We might set about it even yet, though with much to chastise. Let us try. The fault of "un" and "in" is of long standing. That of a misapplied "less" is probably quite modern. What I have to suggest is an obvious enough correction, but the offence is broadcast, therefore correction cannot surely be inopportune or importunate. For who is there who does not give the teutonic "un" to the Latin or Romance word, writing "unfortunate" or "ungracious"? Or who now is careful to write "inconquerable"? Any man to-day would certainly write "unconquerable." It may not be that Bacon is always consistent; nor is Landor, who had something--but that something has proved altogether ineffectual--to say on this question of good English. We must own the incorrect use of the German particle to be the commonest thing in the world, but the incorrect use of the Latin or Romantic derivative, on the other hand, does not occur.

The Teutonic "un" comes more readily to the English pen than the Latin "in," and thus is joined habitually to the wrong kind of adjective and verb and adverb. Not only, moreover, to the Romantic word, but also to the Greek. We have learnt to write "asymmetry," but not to avoid "unsymmetrical." There is also a very frequent jumble, so that "uncivil" appears in the same phrase with "incivility," and "unable" with "inability," "undigested" with "indigestible," "ungrateful" with "ingratitude"--but I need cite no more. It is worth noting that these confusions are not due to a kind of reluctance in the use of "un" for nouns. We have many nouns with the "un" (not otherwise to my purpose): "unrest," "unbelief," "unfaith," "unhappiness," "untruth," "unthrift," "unskilfulness," and so forth.

Now I know well that the reader has been courteously waiting until I should draw breath for a paragraph in order to say "_Undiscovered_: Shakespeare." It is all too true. I can only repeat, murmuring, "_Inconquerable_: Bacon."

There is nothing in English that we should prize more dearly than our right negative particles of both derivations, and especially our particle of German derivation in its right Teutonic place. That "un" implies, encloses so much, denies so much, refuses so much, point-blank, with a tragic irony that French, for example, can hardly compass. Compare our all-significant "unloved," "unforgiven," with any phrase of French. There are abysses, in those words, at our summons, deep calling to deep, dreadful or tender passion, the thing and its undoing locked together, grappled. But in order to keep these great significances the "un" should not be squandered as we squander it. And neither should the less closely embraced "in" be so neglected. It has its right place and dignity and is, as it were, more deliberate. It is worth while, furthermore, to enhance the value of both our negative particles (one of them, of course, shared with French) by considering how poor a negative that last-named tongue has often and often to use for lack of a better; not even a particle, but a thing unfastened, a weak separate word, a half-hearted denial--"_peu_." Let us try to keep our "un" in its right place by considering how, for instance, it makes of "undone" a word of incomparable tragedy, surpassing "defeated" and "ruined" and all others of their kind. "Undone" has the purely English faculty, moreover, of giving to a little familiar word a sudden greatness, such greatness as leaps to Lear's "every inch." This was found to be intranslatable when Rossi acted King Lear in Italian; he had to speak the phrase in English. Wonderfully well furnished as we are for all adventures, is it not then time that we reviewed and revised our habits, and restored to their proper lineage the great contemporary histories of our language by a right and left distribution of the "in" and the "un"? Our incorrect ways were never standardized, or they standardized themselves by precedent. No, it is all too late. We shall never undo the habit now, or cease to be "unconscious" in our custom.

But for the other particle--"the less"--there is hope or there might be, but for Shakespeare's strange and slightly ambiguous "viewless." We might at least check new coinings. "Less" is in the construction here to be considered, though not in other combinations, fairly equivalent to the Teutonic "without." It has great value. It also locks close meanings with its word. But that word should be a noun, and not a verb. Yet it is a verb at the present day, not only in hasty column after column, but in page by deliberate page, and especially in stanza by deliberate stanza. For no doubt the perfervid poets have spread that fashion. You will find "relentless" scattered in modern verse, and "quenchless" and "tireless" frequent. Keats, instigated indirectly if not directly by Leigh Hunt, has "utterless." The misuse of "less" is even somewhat more to be resisted than that of "un" because in the case first named the grammatical construction of our English words (and we have not too many laws of construction) is violated. And beautiful words that are neglected for "quenchless" and "relentless" pass out of use; the words that have "less" for their lawful negative are cheapened; and writers of talent learn to dash and as it were to gesticulate.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES AND NEWS

_Correspondence from readers on all subjects of bibliographical interest is invited. The Editor will, to the best of his ability, answer all queries addressed to him._

GENERAL NOTES

We are glad to see that the Clarendon Press has published Mr. Percy Simpson's edition of _Every Man in His Humour_, a pioneer volume to the complete edition of Ben Jonson's Works, which the same editor, in conjunction with Professor Herford, has been for many years preparing. Their edition should, we think, be definitive (we use Sir Eric's magical word with extreme caution for fear of provoking the National Union of Textual Editors to down books and refuse to continue their researches). A new edition of Ben Jonson's work is certainly needed: Gifford, re-edited by Cunningham, is sadly inadequate; the text is bad and the notes explain nothing that one wants to know. One walks darkling through the _Discoveries_. Take Ben's remarks about painting--they are Hermetic. What, for instance, does this mean? "Parrhasius was the first won reputation by adding symmetry to picture.... Eupompus gave it splendour by numbers and other elegancies." We shall indeed be grateful to the new editors if they can tell us exactly how Eupompus gave splendour to art by numbers--and other elegancies. The secret might be whispered along the galleries of Burlington House.

* * * * *

Another interesting book that should soon, though there is no news of its immediate arrival, be coming from the Clarendon Press is the third volume of Mr. Saintsbury's _Caroline Poets_. The first two volumes of this massive anthology opened up a whole province of literature hitherto almost unknown to the general reader. In the last this great work of excavation and exploration should be completed. With the exception of Chamberlayne and the Matchless Orinda the Carolines of Mr. Saintsbury's choice have been very obscure. In the last volume, we understand, he intends to soar to the dizzy heights of eminence on which Cleveland stands. A good critical edition of Cleveland will be welcomed by all lovers of seventeenth-century literature. The early editions of his works are a piratical sort of publication. Some of his poems were, even in his own life-time, attributed to other writers, notably his _Hermaphrodite_, which was fathered on Randolph, and which he claimed as his own in an amusing little poem appended, later on, to the stolen piece. And yet, in spite of Cleveland's claim to his own property, Carew Hazlitt, in his reprint of Randolph, continues to attribute the _Hermaphrodite_ to its wrongful owner. A very unnecessary and supererogatory blunder.

* * * * *

While we are on the subject of the Caroline Poets we would like to express a pious hope that some day, when we are all immensely rich, the Clarendon Press, or some other great publishing institution, will bring out a complete corpus of English poetry. More than a century has elapsed since Chalmers issued his _English Poets_, and the book, in spite of bad editing and very imperfect--indeed non-existent--critical apparatus, is still an extremely useful one. It contains a complete Gower, a complete Lydgate, a complete Hawes, and a complete Skelton. The text of these older poets is indeed atrocious; but the fact remains that they are there, reprinted and easily accessible in Chalmers's stout volumes. For any study of the eighteenth century Chalmers is invaluable; everything is in him, from the _Ruins of Rome_ to the _Pleasures of Digestion_--or is it the _Art of Preserving Health_? A well-edited Chalmers would be a work of immense value. And if the Clarendon Press would go on, in the same edition, from the Carolines to the Georgians and back, through the Elizabethans and Tudors as far as the Brutians (the contemporaries of our first Trojan king), we should be for ever grateful. But before that comes to pass we must all, as has already been hinted, be immensely rich

* * * * *

A rather battered Purchas's _Pilgrim_ minus its title-page came into our hands recently. It appears to be the second edition, but the only actual indication of date that we can discover is to be found in the following passage, on which by a happy chance we lighted while turning over the pages of the book. "Sultan Achmet is now, Anno 1613, five and twentie yeares old: of good stature, strong and active more than any of his Court. He hath three thousand Concubines." We cannot help believing that someone had been pulling the Reverend Samuel Purchas's leg on the subject of young Sultan Achmet's harem.

* * * * *

The other day we bought a charming little first edition of _Candide_ (1759). The title-page is amusing: "Candide, ou l'Optimisme, traduit de l'Allemand de Mr. le Docteur Ralph"; no publisher or place, but the date MDCCLIX. It was often Voltaire's custom not to acknowledge his publications till they were a success. _Zadig_ (1749) is similarly without author's or publisher's name.

* * * * *

Perhaps some of our readers may be able to throw some light on a curious and interesting book, _Specimens of Macaronic Poetry_, published by J. Richard Beckley in 1831. The volume contains epics written on a single letter, like that which begins:

Cattorum canimus certemina clara canumque,

Odes in this style:

Emma! fer chartam, calamos, et inkum,

And the old Scottish Testament of Mr. Andro Kennedy, of which the first stanza runs:

I Master Andro Kennedy,
A matre quando sum vocatus,
Begotten with some incuby,
Or with some freir infatuatus;
In faith I can nocht tell redely,
Unde aut ubi fui natus,
But in truth I trow trewely.
Quod sum diabolus incarnatus.

No author's name is given and we have had no time or opportunity to make researches. But perhaps, as we have suggested, some of our readers may be able to give us the information desired.

* * * * *

We were fortunate in recently securing a very fine copy of _Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes of the Right Honourable Fulke Lord Brooke, written in his Youth and familiar Exercise with Sir Philip Sidney_, Henry Seyle, 1633. It is high time that a new edition of these very interesting and, by moments, very great poems was published. Grosart's reprint is faulty and is, furthermore, practically unprocurable. As a matter of fact a new edition was, we understand, in process of being prepared by a very able young scholar of Christ Church, when the war broke out and the would-be editor was unhappily killed. Mr. Rose had, we believe, made considerable researches and had even discovered a certain amount of new material, but he had not committed the results of his labours to paper; so that the possible new edition of Greville has perished with him. If the rest of Greville's works could be edited as well as his Life of Sidney has been by Mr. Nowell Smith we should be very well pleased. But the prospect of getting any new edition at all seems now extremely unlikely.

RECENT ADDITIONS TO LIBRARIES

Some early printed books of considerable interest have recently been added to the Library of the British Museum, among them a copy of Sannazaro's _Arcadia_, Venice, 1502, in a contemporary binding of boards covered with designs printed from woodblocks. _Terentius: Comediæ cum interpretatione Donati_, Baptista de Tortis, Venice, 1482. _Elegantiolae_, by Augustinus Datus, produced at Verona by an unidentified printer in 1483. _Ptolemaeus, Liber quadripartit_, Ratdolt, Venice, 1484. Maurice de Sully, Bishop of Paris: _Les exposicions des euungilles en romant_, Antoine Neyret, Chambéry, 1484. (Only four fully authenticated incunabula of Chambéry are known, of which this is the earliest and rarest. It is printed in large Gothic type and adorned with woodcuts. The Museum possesses specimens of the second, third, and fourth Chambéry books, and this is a perfect copy of the first.) _Jo: Balbus Januensis_: Catholicon, Jean du Pré, Lyon, 1492. Several examples of early Spanish printing have also been presented, as well as two first editions of Swinburne, _Laus Veneris_, Moxon, 1866, and _Dolores_, Hotten, 1867, with "The Devil's Duel: a letter to the editor of _The Examiner_," an attack on Robert Buchanan, written by Swinburne under the pseudonym of Thomas Maitland, and printed for private circulation in 1875.

ITEMS FROM THE BOOKSELLERS' CATALOGUES

With the present boom in seventeenth-century literature one is unlikely, to judge from the catalogues of the better-known booksellers, to pick up many bargains in Caroline literature in London. The collector's only hope will be chance or the oversight or ignorance of the vendor. We know of someone who recently had the good fortune to find a copy of the extremely scarce _Lyric Poems_ of Philip Ayres (1687) in a parcel of miscellaneous rubbish. But that was a stroke of luck not likely to be repeated, and collectors must be prepared to pay pretty heavily for their seventeenth century now. The following items from various catalogues will indicate the current scale of prices for early editions of Jacobean and Caroline books. We shall be interested to see the prices fetched in the sale of the third portion of the late Mr. W. J. Leighton's stock, at Messrs. Sotheby's in the last days of October. The catalogue makes mention of many extremely interesting seventeenth-century books as well as important manuscripts and early printed books.

* * * * *

Messrs. Dobell offer eight first editions of Richard Brathwaite. _Barnabee's Journall_, published by John Haviland in 1638, is priced at £48, and _Ar't Asleepe Husband? A Boulster Lecture_, 1640, at £25. Two more copies of this last work are included among the books at the Leighton sale. The second edition of Carew's Poems (1642), in the original calf, is offered at ten guineas; and a first edition of Dekker's _Tragi-Comedy, called Match Mee in London_ (1631), at £14. A copy of the 1772 edition of Carew's Poems, originally the property of Mrs. Browning, with her maiden name and date, 1842, on the title-page, is on sale at the Serendipity Bookshop, price four guineas. Another book of Mrs. Browning's at the Serendipity Shop is Samuel Daniel's _History of the Civil Wars_, 1717. This is one of those odd reprints of Elizabethan poets that are to be found scattered up and down the eighteenth century. Perhaps the most unexpected of them is the folio _Works of Michael Drayton, Esq.; A celebrated Poet in the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth, King James I., and Charles I._, printed by J. Hughs and sold by R. Dodsley, 1748. Among other valuable seventeenth-century books at the Serendipity Shop are Crashaw's _Carmen Deo Nostro_ in the original vellum, printed at Paris, 1652, £40, a second edition of Herbert's _Temple_, and a first edition of _Hesperides, or the works, both Human and Divine, of Robert Herrick, Esq._, £140.

* * * * *

It is interesting to note what high prices the works of Surtees can always command. In Mr. Frank Hollings's catalogue a set of the Sporting novels, with Leech's illustrations, one of them a first edition and the others early issues, is offered for £37 10_s._

On the other hand, a first edition of _Friendship's Garland_ can be bought at Messrs. Dobell's for 10_s._ 6_d._, and a first edition of Buchanan's _Book of Orm_ for half-a-crown.

People still seem prepared to pay high prices for odds and ends from the nineties. Mr. Hollings has a complete Savoy at £7 10_s._ and two first editions of Oscar Wilde at nearly four pounds apiece.

A first edition of _Trilby_ (1895) can be purchased for 7_s._ 6_d._ at Messrs. Dobell's, and of _Daniel Deronda_ (1876) at 18_s._ _Evan Harrington_, in the twelve original parts of _Once a Week_, is offered at 25_s._ at the Serendipity Shop.

* * * * *

Mr. Everard Meynell has a curiosity of nineteenth-century literature for sale in the shape of Coventry Patmore's _Odes_, dated 1868, but never published, for the following reason: "Early in 1868 he had written nine odes, which in the April of that year he printed for private circulation. Afterwards, keenly mortified at the coldness of their reception by friends, he made a fire in the hall and cast on it (as he thought) all the copies remaining in his hand, while he calmly sat and watched them burn. A friend, who had heard of the intended bonfire, persuaded his daughter Emily to abstract a copy or two, and these, with the few which had been sent to friends, were all that remained of the edition." The price of this soul saved from the burning is £8 10_s._, and a first edition of _The Unknown Eros_ (1878), with inscription from the author to Richard Garnett, is priced £2 10_s._

* * * * *

Having recently picked up cheap a third edition (1872) of FitzGerald's _Omar Khayyám_ (Quaritch, 1872), we are interested to see that a copy of the fourth edition (1879) is for sale at three guineas. We suspect ourselves of having made a bargain, but are not yet quite sure.

* * * * *

Messrs. Dobell have an interesting collection of first editions of works by Victor Hugo, most of them presentation copies, with Hugo's autograph inscription, to Mademoiselle Louise Jung.

A. L. H.

CORRESPONDENCE

(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)

SIR,--On the assumption--I hope justified--that you propose to have a "Correspondence Column" in your paper, I write to plead that you should devote some of your attention to the subject of what is, I believe, called "book production." That your guidance as to the contents of books will be valuable I do not doubt; but I feel that an organ such as yours might be of considerable service if it would determine to devote some consideration to their physical form.

It may fairly be said, I think, that, as a body, English publishers produce their books as respectably as any publishers in the world. The Germans produce--or produced before the war--a larger number of agreeable-looking cheap books, and a larger number of finely-printed and bound editions _de luxe_, such as were specialised in by firms like Langen of Munich. But the ordinary German book of commerce was frequently very shoddy and the pseudo-romantic "Albert Memorial" tradition had never been entirely shaken off. The French presses issue many books which are a delight to possess. Their tradition is an old one. It can be traced through the delicate eighteenth-century editions, with their unequalled engravings, back to the Estiennes and the Torys, who were infinitely superior to the printers of their time. Throughout the last fifty years French publishers and "societies of bibliophiles" have issued editions of poetry and of old rarities exquisite in their taste: beautifully printed on the best paper and never eccentric. But the ordinary French novel or political book, printed in blunt unattractive type and "bound" in yellow paper covers, which fall in pieces at a touch, is certainly not a model that anyone would wish to copy. Much may be said against our wood-pulp paper and our common cloth bindings; but, on the whole, we certainly clothe most books in garments more durable than the books deserve; and the same thing holds good of America, though there the types and bindings are, as a rule, uglier than ours.

The fact remains that not one book out of twenty that we produce can be called beautiful, and that fifteen out of twenty are indisputably ugly. That the "public" will ever demand an improvement is a fantastic dream. The ordinary reader likes a nice book when he sees it, but will never make an "effective demand" on his own account. We have to rely on the initiative, largely disinterested, of (1) the publishers, (2) the authors, and (3) the critics.

Publishers, we know, must earn their living like other men; their chief attention must be given to procuring saleable "matter." But they have to get their books printed, and they have to get them bound; and while they are about it they would lose nothing, and we should all gain something, if they would see to it that the work was done by someone who cared about types and was anxious to make the best of the materials available at a specified price. Authors, again, may often be heard complaining that they do not like the look of their books; but does any author (except Mr. Bernard Shaw and a few bibliophiles who patently supervise the job themselves) ever take any steps to secure a "production" of which he would approve? Finally, though the critics occasionally praise a book for being "beautifully printed" or tastefully "bound," not one of them seems to make a regular practice of commenting on the physical design of books--which, after all, is an ingredient in our civilisation just as much as the design of cottages.

I should, as I say, be relieved to hear that the MERCURY, from which we all hope so much, intends to "do its bit" in this connection.--Yours faithfully,

ORIGINAL SUBSCRIBER.

[We think our correspondent is a little hard on English publishers. Some of them, though a minority, seldom produce an unattractive book; and the book-production of them all is on a higher average level than it was ten years ago, or has ever been in our time. But we agree that there is room for improvement, and scope for commendation or the reverse; and we purpose in our next issue to institute a regular page of "Book Production Notes," which we hope will give our correspondent satisfaction.--ED. L.M.]

BOOKS OF THE MONTH

POETRY

REYNARD THE FOX. By JOHN MASEFIELD. Heinemann. 5_s._ net.

It is an agreeable thing to find a man whose work has been overpraised writing better than he has ever done before. Mr. Masefield's earlier narrative poems were panegyrised for their vices: their unreal plots, their bad psychology, their sentimentality, their jog-trot metres. He; wiser in his generation, appears to have realised that the best parts of them were the "descriptions": details of vivid imagery, pictures of scenes and brief incidents; and that where he was dealing with a person he was at his best when the person was alone and in one self-centred mood. The picture of the widow alone in her cottage was worth all that incredible plot in the _Widow in the Bye Street_; the public-house scene and the birds following the plough remain in the memory when Saul Kane's spiritual struggles have faded away; Dauber was little more than a means of arriving at that peaceful entry when the ship trod the quiet waters of the harbour like a fawn; and landscapes were the only excuse for _The Daffodil Fields_. Mr. Masefield (who very likely realises that _Biography_, a poem that will not die, is the best thing he has done) seems to have discovered his bent. In _Reynard the Fox_ there is only one leading character, the fox, and he is shown in no complicated relationships. It is the description of a chase and of a fight for life, and we could not hope to see it better done. Mr. Masefield's faults of writing are still evident. Lines like

He, too (a year before), had had
A zest for going to the bad

might have come out of one of the numerous parodies which have been perpetrated at his expense; he is unscrupulous in rhyming, he takes pot-shots with words, and he is occasionally grossly sentimental. But none of these faults is bad enough in this poem to get in the way. It is a poem to read again as soon as one has forgotten it, and it will give equal enjoyment every time.

The opening section, which describes the meet, is a little too drawn out; too much time is taken up with describing a multitude of characters, once seen and then forgotten. But no Dutch painter ever gave a better idea of the bustle about an inn than Mr. Masefield does, and the approach of the Hunt is done deliciously. We would spare little of the long description of the hounds who come round the corner in front of the red-coats:

Intent, wise, dipping, trotting, straying,
Smiling at people, shoving, playing,
Nosing to children's faces, waving
Their feathery sterns and all behaving,

and then draw round Tom Dansey on the green in front of the Cock and Pye:

Arrogant, Daffodil, and Queen
Closest, but all in little space.
Some lolled their tongues, some made grimace,
Yawning, or tilting nose in quest,
All stood and looked about with zest,
They were uneasy as they waited.

Byron said the octosyllabic metre is the easiest to write. It is, unvaried, the most monotonous to read. Mr. Masefield, who breaks into anapæstic passages when hounds are in full cry, pulls it off all the way. It was not an easy thing to supply enough bite to descriptions of earth, tree, and sky, to invent enough novel incidents, to enable us to follow without fatigue a ten or fourteen miles chase across country. But it has been done, and Mr. Masefield has also succeeded in intensely interesting us in the fox without (as a rule) making him any less an animal. When he finds one earth and then another stopped the reader's feelings are what they are when a hero of romance walks blind along the plank, and it is with an immense relief that, in the end, we find the fox (at the expense of another) escapes. The final description of the rested fox's nocturnal hunt and the hounds going home is admirable fresh painting. Here is the close:

Then the moon came quiet and flooded full
Light and beauty on clouds like wool,
On a feasted fox at rest from hunting,
In the beech-wood grey where the brocks were grunting.

* * * * *

The beech-wood grey rose dim in the night,
With moonlight fallen in pools of light,
The long dead leaves on the ground were rimed,
A clock struck twelve and the church bells chimed.

It is just the end of such a day.

THE SUPERHUMAN ANTAGONISTS. By SIR WILLIAM WATSON. Hodder & Stoughton. 6_s._ net.

Nobody could accuse Sir William Watson of over-colloquialism, morbid violence, or carelessness. A slight infusion of those vices might do him good. He is determined to be as lofty and orotund as Milton, as grave as Matthew Arnold, as sage as Wordsworth, if he can manage it; and the result is often a cold and carven monument of respectable but uninspired verse akin to the better of the large tombs in Westminster Abbey. On every page of his title-poem (a debate between Ormuzd and Ahriman) we find lines like

Legible haply in that brow benign.
Rashnu and Vayu and great Mithra, sons
With the huge monster's dragon armature,
Out of the pregnant and parturient dust
Large hereditaments of bliss and woe,

sentences, however mighty their mould, which are to modern poetry what Lord Chaplin's speeches are to modern oratory. This much, however, can be said for Sir William, that his brain is always working in spite of his lordly panoply of words outworn, and he who can penetrate his language will arrive at some sort of argument. The shorter poems are also magniloquent, and, like the longer one, barely escape commonplaceness by a certain activity of mind. But the language would not have been poorer had none of them been written.

MORE TRANSLATIONS FROM THE CHINESE. By ARTHUR WALEY. Allen & Unwin. 3_s._ and 4_s._ 6_d._ net.

Mr. Waley's 170 _Chinese Poems_ (Constable) was one of the most memorable books of recent years; and, what is more, was instantly recognised as such. Even those of us (and we can certainly claim to be a majority) who do not know Chinese could tell at sight that they were accurate beyond the wont of translations. They were obviously beautiful poems in the original tongue, and they became beautiful English poems through Mr. Waley, who has handled unrhymed verse as skilfully as anyone alive or dead, with a variety of rhythm and a flow of sound correspondent to sense, which is amazing in translations. The new collection should not be missed by anyone who has the old one; those who have not should get the old one (which contains a historical sketch, and which, on the whole, covers better poems) before this one. In his second collection Mr. Waley still devotes most of his space to Po Chu'i, really a greater poet than Li Po, of whom we have heard so much. The poems from him are again very diverse in subject and mood; and the more we see of him the more his personality attracts us. We may quote two shorter examples. One is _The Cranes_, which has the terseness, the melancholy, the directness of the best of Verlaine:

The western wind has blown but a few days;
Yet the first leaf already flies from the bough.
On the drying paths I walk in my thin shoes;
In the first cold I have donned my quilted coat.
Through shallow ditches the floods are clearing away;
Through sparse bamboos trickles a slanting light.
In the early dusk, down an alley of green moss,
The garden boy is leading the cranes home.

Po Chu'i's mild humour is seen in _The Lazy Man's Song_ (A.D. 811):

I have got patronage, but am too lazy to use it;
I have got land, but am too lazy to farm it.
My house leaks; I am too lazy to mend it.
My clothes are torn; I am too lazy to darn them.
I have got wine, but I am too lazy to drink;
So it's just the same as if my cellar were empty.
I have got a harp, but am too lazy to play;
So it's just the same as if it had no strings.
My wife tells me there is no more bread in the house;
I want to bake, but am too lazy to grind.
My friends and relatives write me long letters;
I should like to read them, but they're such a bother to open.
I have always been told that Chi Shu-yeh
Passed his whole life in absolute idleness.
But he played the harp and sometimes transmuted metals.
So even _he_ was not so lazy as I.

The finest thing in the book is perhaps Ch'u Yuan's _The Great Summons_. That is too long to quote; but we cannot resist Mr. Waley's version of a brief lyric by Li Po, _Self-Abandonment_:

I sat drinking and did not notice the dusk,
Till falling petals filled the folds of my dress.
Drunken I rose and walked to the moonlit stream;
The birds were gone, and men also few.

These translations may be not without their influence on English poetry; and though the Chinese spirit is not ours, the example of their exactitude and economy will not be thrown away.

COLLECTED POEMS OF LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS. Secker. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.

In a note Lord Alfred Douglas observes that all great art is founded on morality; and that "good poetry is made up of two things: style and sincerity." These apophthegms are brief and unelaborate but indisputable. Unfortunately he proceeds to say that poetry has never sunk so low as now, and that "there is not a good poet among the lot," which suggests that he does not know where to look for poetry. He is out of touch with the time, and it is unfortunate for him. Again and again as we read his collection we feel that he is the last of the pre-Raphaelites, clothing genuine feelings in a faded vesture, and images and words gone stale. He has improved. His earliest poems might well have been left out; his latest include several sonnets (notably that beginning "I have been profligate of happiness") which have been, and deserve to be, in the anthologies. But the last exactitude of statement he seldom, as yet, has achieved; and his feelings about persons come out much more strongly and convincingly than his feelings about Nature or the eternal. This edition has a portrait.

FORGOTTEN PLACES. By IAN MACKENZIE. Chapman & Hall. 3_s._ 6_d._ net.

In the last four years many young men have died who would have helped to make our age--as it will in any case be--glorious in song. Brooke and Flecker and Edward Thomas had at least partly expressed themselves; others, such as Wyndham Tennant and Julian Grenfell, had written one or two perfect poems and justified the muse; but there were some, whose talents only their friends knew, who might have ranked with the first of these, and died before they had outgrown their boyhood. Ian Mackenzie was one of these. He was in the H.L.I.; had a breakdown in England (he had outgrown his strength) and died of pneumonia on Armistice night, after hearing that peace had come. He was just twenty.

The present volume (his second) gathers up what was left over from his first, and is prefaced by a memoir by Arthur Waugh, every word of which will be echoed by those who knew Mackenzie, one of the handsomest, sunniest, most candid boys in the world. He was twenty; and as yet too young to hammer into form the large visions of his precocious imagination, and the queer thoughts that engaged his intellect. The reader who knew him will see in every line the promise of a great maturity; the reader who did not know him will probably fail to see more than a tumble of confused thoughts and images obscurely worded in rhythms that are often ungainly. But even he may be arrested here and there by a phrase beyond the common range of eighteen or nineteen. There are several such in _Eyes_:

Eyes swim out like strange blue fishes
Recovering beauty from the dark.

And several also in the poem which arises out of the childlike reflection:

What a strange marvel is the telephone.

The whole of the second section of _Friends_ is clear and passionate, and there are lines at the beginning in which he makes the comparison of a thinker with a child looking at pebbles in a pool, which are of the last simplicity and completeness. He oscillated between an extreme analytical habit and a profound love for ordinary things. The first mood may be illustrated by his strange poem on Words:

I watch you talking, catching mouthfuls of air,
Which you twist around till you throw them out
In various shapes, such that each is clear.
Patterns of sound: some soft, some you shout;
Some are round and soft or dimpled and thin,
Some writhe and quiver fantastic about,
Some slip through the lips, and turn whispering in,
Till the waves of silence shut them out.
So, if we could not hear any sound,
But could see air moving like waves in a pond,
And the shape of every word had been found
Till they faded away in the air beyond,
And words came twisted in breaths of air,
You could tell each one by a careful stare.

The other is naïvely expressed in his phrase:

There is as much of beauty in one breath
As there could be upon the largest star!

He was immature; but he need not have troubled to cross-examine himself about

These three last years of fraudulent
Subconscious plagiarism,

For there never was a person so unable to be anything but natural.

A CHALLENGE. By MAITLAND HARDYMAN, Lt.-Col., D.S.O., M.C. Allen & Unwin. 2_s._ 6_d._ net.

Col. Hardyman was a young civilian soldier who believed in peace, was on the committee of the Union of Democratic Control, and died at twenty-three at the head of his regiment. "I have never seen or heard of a man," says Mr. N. H. Romanes, in his introduction, "to whom not merely a lie, even a harmless one, but any kind of misrepresentation, was so abhorrent." He wrote his own epitaph thus: "He died as he lived, fighting for abstract principles in a cause which he did not believe in." The verse of the man described here cannot but be interesting. But it would be an affectation to call it poetry. Genuine feeling often comes through, but in an amateur way. The nearest thing to good poetry in the book is _Via Crucis_, which begins:

Lord Jesus of the trenches,
Calm, 'midst the bursting shell,
We met with Thee in Flanders,
We walked with Thee in hell;
O'er Duty's blood-soaked tillage
We strewed our glorious youth;
Yes, we indeed have known Thee,
For us the Cross is Truth.

POEMS OF THE DAWN AND THE NIGHT. By HENRY MOND. Chapman & Hall. 3_s._ 6_d._ net.

"Youth's a stuff will not endure," and in a year or two Mr. Mond will probably not be talking of storming the battlements of Heaven, and will not care to begin a poem with

An aged filthy hag, with bloated face,
Upon her haunches, wrapped in bloody rags,
There squats Bellona--splashed with entrails--

--words which do not really horrify us, and did not really horrify him. He shows certain gifts. There is observation at the end of _The Silver Corpse_, and in parts of _The Fawn_. But he strains after effects and misses them. Honest vision and honest feeling may be later discoveries. He would do well, for a time, to subject himself to a strict discipline formally.

NAPOLEON. By HERBERT TRENCH. Oxford University Press. 2_s._ 6_d._ net.

This is a cheap reprint of Mr. Trench's play, previously published at 10_s._ 6_d._ net, and recently acted by the Stage Society. With the exception of _The Requiem of the Archangels_ and one or two other poems it is certainly the finest thing he has done. Unfortunately the finest things in it are probably those which are least suitable to the theatre.

ATHENIAN DAYS. By F. NOËL BYRON. Elkin Mathews. 2_s._ 6_d._ and 1_s._ 6_d._ net.

Mr. Byron seems to have read the classics, and is obviously fond of Greece. The unfortunate moon has been compared to many things; this time it is a beckoning courtesan. There are few notable blemishes about Mr. Byron's poems; but he never ends them properly, and it is seldom clear why he begins them.

ANY SOLDIER TO HIS SON. By GEORGE WILLIS. Allen & Unwin. 1_s._ net.

A volume of lively verses, some of them in the military vernacular. The speaker in the title poem, after long service in the trenches, sums up his feats thus:

I never kissed a French girl and I never killed a Hun,
I never missed an issue of tobacco, pay, or rum,
I never made a friend and yet I never lacked a chum;
I never borrowed money, and I never lent--but once.

Not a bad record. The conventional poems at the end are competently written; "Bed" has something of the neatness, and something of the allusiveness, of Prior.

THE STATION PLATFORM AND OTHER POEMS. By MARGARET MACKENZIE. Sands, 2_s._ 6_d._ net.

"These Verses are not all sad--indeed, I hope that in a very real sense none of them are that." They are poems of sorrow and consolation, decently worded and written with a sincerity and simplicity that is sometimes moving. The author has a habit of being _too_ simple. It takes some time to recover from a beginning like "I think maybe the souls of men are bulbs."

ECHOES FROM THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY. By J. G. LEGGE. Constable. 2_s._ 6_d._ net.

Mr. Legge has long been known as one of the most competent and comprehensive of the many who in our time have tried their hands on the Epigrams of the Greek Anthology. This selection is based on that given in Mr. Mackail's excellent little book. Mr. Legge says that many of his versions were made on the top of a municipal tram. He must be a self-possessed man. He never touches the level of inspiration reached in Lang's or in Shelley's few translations from the Anthology, but no translator, so far as we know, has done so many so well. He is always smooth, neat, perspicuous; his principal lack is music. He gives what is perhaps the best extant version of the epitaph on the dead of Thermopylæ.

NOVELS

JEREMY. By HUGH WALPOLE. Cassell. 7_s._ net.

THE YOUNG PHYSICIAN. By F. BRETT YOUNG. Collins. 7_s._ net.

POOR RELATIONS. By COMPTON MACKENZIE. Secker. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.

THE TENDER CONSCIENCE. By BOHUN LYNCH. Secker. 7_s._ net.

SEPTEMBER. By FRANK SWINNERTON. Methuen. 7_s._ net.

TIME AND ETERNITY. By GILBERT CANNAN. Chapman & Hall. 7_s._ net.

RICHARD KURT. By STEPHEN HUDSON. Secker. 7_s._ net.

The literary arena of England is at this moment strewn with the forms of discouraged novelists who were hailed as coming great men and who have never yet been able to make any adequate reply to the hail. The arrival of Mr. Conrad, Mr. Wells, and Mr. Bennett, as writers concerning whom, in whatever tenor, our questions are answered, is within recent memory. Soon after that event a new generation rose. Henry James stooped from Olympus to examine them; and there was a good deal of excitement abroad as to their future performance. But where are they now? Mr. Walpole's latest book carries the history of a child up to his first departure from school. Mr. Compton Mackenzie shows us a popular dramatist struggling for life in the midst of a farcical crowd of relations. Mr. Swinnerton produces punctually one book a year in time for the autumn publishing season. But meanwhile what is happening to the English novel? Is anything happening to it?

It is certainly true that there is no perceptible curve of development or change. There are fashions. Two of the books before us illustrate one of the most popular of them, a fashion begun and now abandoned by Mr. Mackenzie. Mr. Walpole pushes the novel of adolescence to its extreme, or beyond the extreme, by the tender age at which he takes his hero. Mr. Brett Young goes through with it in conventional fashion, conducting Edwin Ingleby from early years at school to his final medical examination and the beginning of life. Mr. Walpole's _Jeremy_ is a very faithful and exact record, and yet it is not easy to say why he should have written it.

Mary, however, was there, and in the very middle of her game,
searching for him, as she was always doing, she found him desolate
under the shadow of the oak. She slipped away, and, coming up to him
with the shyness and fear that she always had when she approached
him, because she loved him so much and he could so easily hurt her,
said:

"Aren't you coming to play, Jeremy?"

"I don't care," he answered gruffly.

"It isn't any fun without you." She paused and added: "Would you mind
if I stayed here too?"

"I'd rather you played," he said; and yet he was comforted by her,
determined, as he was, that she should never know it!

"I'd rather stay," she said, and then gazed with that melancholy
stare through her large spectacles, that always irritated Jeremy, out
across the garden.

"I'm all right," he said again; "only my stocking tickles, and I
can't get at it--it's the back of my leg. I say, Mary, don't you hate
the Dean's Ernest?"

A not too exigent reader might still fail to be surprised or delighted by that passage or by a hundred like it, and of such passages the book is made up. If Mr. Walpole continues the child's career on the same scale his followers will groan; and yet perhaps as Jeremy grew older he might grow more interesting. For it is unlikely that, except in rare cases, a grown man will remember enough of childhood to make the material of a long novel. And the character of even the most remarkable child is not, after all, sufficiently broad, sufficiently varied, to bear the weight of this exhaustive description.

Mr. Brett Young's less unusual design gives him better opportunities for the use of his talent, but not often the opportunities his talent deserves. He came into notice a little later than that younger generation which we have mentioned, and in some ways his gifts are superior to those of any novelist of his own age. But it is a matter for doubt whether they are strictly the gifts of a novelist. In the row of his books, all sincere, all well written, all with obvious merits, the best is undeniably his account of the East African Campaign, _Marching on Tanga_, the second his collection of poems, _Five Degrees South_. In these two, landscape and his delight in it had an uncontested supremacy. In his novels up to now that supremacy has been contested by the characters, who have, however, faded away in the end against the background like puffs of smoke. This certainly allowed the author's best talent to be displayed at advantage, and yet it is a doubtful recommendation of a novel to say that the persons in it can hardly be noticed.

In _The Young Physician_ the persons are not so unobtrusive, and the hero, if we had not been aware of him before, would have forced himself on our attention by committing manslaughter in the last pages of the book. He does, however, live and move before that, and the characters around him at home, at school, at the university where he studies medicine, are living and moving human beings. But the more clearly we see Edwin and his surroundings the less, very unfortunately, we see of those poetical qualities to which we have grown accustomed in Mr. Brett Young. Certain of the human relations are indeed very well drawn. Edwin's love for his mother and his grief at her death make moving passages. The episode in which he is drawn closer to his lonely father is excellently done. But the second part of the book, where Mr. Brett Young voluntarily confines himself in North Bromwich, is not, on the whole, a distinguished piece of work. Here the author is without his hills, trees, and clouds, and is compelled to exert himself in the observation and delineation of character. But though he does his work here cleanly and honestly, as we have a right to expect from him, he does it lifelessly and without enthusiasm. "W. G.," Boyce, even Rosie Beaucaire are alive and credible, but it is hard for the reader not to suspect that Mr. Brett Young takes but little interest in them and impossible, with that suspicion in his mind, to take much interest in them himself. Much the best part of the book is the description of the journey made by Edwin and his father to the deserted mining village in the Mendips, which had been the father's home. Here Mr. Brett Young has his opportunity for description and uses it well in a dozen passages.

And, from a final crest, the road suddenly fell steeply through the
scattered buildings of a hamlet. An inn, with a wide space for carts
to turn in, stood on a sort of platform at the right-hand side of
the highway, and in front of the travellers lay the mass of Mendip:
the black bow of Axdown with its shaggy flanks, the level cliffs of
Callow, and a bold seaward spur, so lost in watery vapours that it
might well have claimed its ancient continuity with the islands that
swam beyond in the grey sea. In the light of his new enthusiasms
Edwin found it more impressive than any scene that he remembered;
more inspiring, though less vast in its perspective, than the dreamy
plain of the Severn's upper waters that he had seen so many times
from Uffdown. For these hills were very mountains, and mightier in
that they rose sheer from a plain that had been bathed in water
within the memory of man. And more than all this ... far more ...
they were the home of his fathers.

This quotation does not indicate, a dozen such could not exhaust, the grace and charm of the episode in the Mendips. Here, perhaps, for a moment in the midst of an unsatisfactory book Mr. Brett Young has attained a higher level of achievement than ever before. His persons do not here fade into the landscape, but rather blend with it into one picture, of which they are as essential a part as the hills and clouds. There is still, it must be confessed, a certain lack of vigour in the presentation, but if the author could compose a whole book in this manner it would be a very fine and remarkable performance. Perhaps he may still do so. It would be very rash to decide at this moment that the novel is not the form of art which he ought to pursue. But even if we reserve judgment on this point, there can be no doubt that the scheme of _The Young Physician_ is in any case not well adapted to his particular gifts.

Mr. Compton Mackenzie, however, who invented and popularised this kind of novel, has, in his latest production, thought fit to drop it. It was indeed desirable, after the unfortunate affair of _Sylvia and Michael_, that he should attempt to break new ground; but we think that many of his admirers will read _Poor Relations_ in a mood of pleasure mingled with dismay. One critic observed of _Guy and Pauline_ that the future of the English novel was, to a quite considerable extent, in Mr. Mackenzie's hands. But the future of the English novel does not really lie in the direction of rattling books for railway journeys, where humour is derived from cows, comic clergymen, and an overwhelming hair-wash. Those who fixed Mr. Mackenzie with solemn expressions of expectation on the ground of _Carnival_ and _Sinister Street_ will probably be hard put to it to know what to make of this romping and boisterous piece of work. It contains little more of what the author has been praised for than his vitality--which was much diminished in _Sylvia and Michael_--and his verbal ingenuity. But it does show high spirits and an eye not blind to those obvious humorous effects, such as bad wine, mischievous and inquisitive children, the nervous author with his secretary, and so forth, which when they are whole-heartedly embraced are, after all, still humorous. If the future of the English novel really is in Mr. Mackenzie's hands and if he continues in his present mood, the English novel is going to have a queer time of it. But if he has done nothing else, he has proved himself free of priggishness.