Chapter IX: Front Matter (9)

We have as yet received no great number of detailed criticisms or suggestions for improvement. But there have been some, both in the Press and in the letters from our correspondents. Some of the suggestions that have been made we shall adopt; some we shall not; one or two of the most interesting are based on a misunderstanding. The most noticeable of these derive from the notion that the LONDON MERCURY was intended to be an exact analogue of the _Mercure de France_, and borrowed its title from that excellent paper. We may as well explain, once and for all, that the similitude with the _Mercure de France_, happy though it may be, was reached by accident; our own title was derived directly from the Mercuries which were the earliest products of the English periodical Press; and for our scheme we are indebted to no paper, British or foreign. A Scottish critic observes that "Belgian literature owed its notable capture of Europe largely to its [the _Mercure's_] whole-hearted welcome, and the new movement in Germany associated with the names of Rilke and Zweig found its first foreign recognition in its pages. Moreover, it surveyed the whole field of human intellectual achievement--philosophy, science, religion--in its articles.... The name of M. Davray at the foot of a _Mercure_ article has made more than one British writer's reputation in Paris, and Europe would have been entirely ignorant that there was a new and rich literature in Spanish-America had not the _Mercure_ discovered it and blazoned forth its merits." We might, if we would, make some remark on the detail of this. Rilke is not a major poet; Zweig is an unimportant, over-exuberant critic who tried, in vain, to persuade the late Emile Verhaeren that he was a German; the fame of Spanish-American literature, trumpeted though it may have been by the _Mercure_, has not yet reached London. But we prefer to concentrate on the more important point, and that is that our functions, as we conceive them, are not those of the _Mercure de France_. We have already published letters from French and American correspondents; we shall shortly publish letters from Italian, Russian, and German correspondents; we shall from time to time publish fuller articles about recent developments in foreign countries. But there _are_ certain limits to our space, and there _is_ a centre in our plans. It is an admirable thing to disseminate the works of good Belgian and Spanish-American authors, and we hope that we shall not overlook anything really important that comes from any quarter of the globe. But our principal object is to assist people to read the good English authors of the past, and to stimulate the popularity of good English authors of the present. There are those to whom any foreigner, writing in some mysteriously wonderful language, like French or Polish or Spanish-American, is a portent; but we are not amongst them. We desire to keep the British public in touch with all foreign developments that may be considered likely to be of special interest to the British public; but we certainly do not intend to devote to the study of foreign authors space that might more profitably be given to the examination of a dead or living man who has written in our own tongue. The _Mercure_ bestows a great deal of attention on foreign authors; it publishes political articles; it concerns itself largely with problems of philosophy and religion. Some of these questions will be ignored by the LONDON MERCURY. Some it will discuss; regarding some its functions will be purely that of a recorder. But it does not propose to deflect from its original purpose, which was to publish the best contemporary "creative work" that it could obtain, to criticise new books and old, and to minister to the other needs of the British reader and the British book-collector. It is just as well that this should be clear.

* * * * *

In the present number one or two slight changes are to be observed. There is a minor, but not insignificant, typographical change, and two new, and we hope welcome, "features" have been added. These had already been premeditated, but we made them with all the more satisfaction in that several correspondents had recommended--we had almost said demanded--them. We hope, in an early issue, to add to these a section on Architecture, similar to the sections on Art, Music, and the Theatre.

* * * * *

Several correspondents have written to ask us whether we propose to devote any attention to the economics of authorship, and two of them (persons whom we conceive to have a direct and immediate interest in the subject) make special reference to the question of American copyright. To all of them we can reply that, although economics in general, like politics in general, come within the sphere of our self-abnegation, we shall throw what light we can on the economics of authorship, just as we shall hold ourselves free to trespass on politics when politics touch art. American copyright, as a fact, we had already marked out as one of the matters to which we intend to return again and again until America puts her laws straight. The British copyright laws are now, so far as they affect the author, on a very satisfactory footing. The principal countries of the world have signed the Berne Convention, and even Russia, had there been no Revolution, would by this time have agreed that the works of British authors should be automatically copyrighted in Russia. The more widely the civilised custom spreads the more glaring becomes what, without offence, we may call the offence of America. There only--and it is the largest English-speaking and English-reading community in the world--is the British author defenceless, there only may he be robbed with impunity of the fruits of his labour.

* * * * *

Let us recapitulate the elements of the American copyright law as they at present stand. Copyright in America is defined by a law of 1909. That Act lays down that a book, to secure legal protection, must be manufactured in the United States of America; the stipulation was carried on from an earlier statute. A book published in the English language may obtain interim protection for one month from the date of publication if a copy is forwarded to an office in Washington; but at the end of the month protection lapses. Copyright is lost unless a book (or a newspaper contribution) has been "set up" in the States and issued there within a month of its publication in Great Britain.

* * * * *

Now we have no hesitation in describing the present copyright arrangements as between England and America as immoral and unjust. They do not greatly handicap authors of international reputation, so far as their new books are concerned. If--he will forgive us for using his name as an illustration--Mr. Rudyard Kipling has written a new book, he will have no difficulty whatever in getting an American publisher to put it into type in America and issue it at a date approximate to that of the English publication. But even the eminent and the "arrived" are put to some trouble and expense by the necessity of "securing copyright," and on those who are not so eminent the law presses very hardly indeed. There are famous English authors whose early books are not copyright in America; there are young English authors who have to go through the anguish of seeing American copyright expire whilst some American publisher is debating whether or not he shall take "sheets" of a book from England; and "first books" of any character published in England can virtually never be copyrighted in America. It may, and should, be granted that as a body American publishers are more just and generous than their laws. We know of many cases in which the English authors of non-copyright books have obtained from American publishers precisely the same royalties as they have obtained from their English publishers. We know also of cases--relatively few, we gladly admit--in which the works of English authors have been pirated by American editors and publishers without sanction, thanks, or payment. But the mere fact that in most instances American publishers are ashamed to take advantage of the law, and that in other instances they do the handsome thing in order to secure "favours to come," is no palliation of the law. It is a harsh and a selfish law; a law unworthy of a great nation, a nation which is second to none in its professions and in its intentions with regard to the welfare of humanity at large.

* * * * *

The state of the law is commonly ascribed to the typographical unions. "Protection for Printers": books should have no rights in America unless American typographers have been employed upon them. Beneath this argument lies the naked, brutal fact that at present, America having not yet produced the great universal literature that she is destined to produce, America imports much more from us than we do from her. If "sheets" were copyright, whenever sent, we should get the better of the exchange; we produce ten Masefields for one O. Henry, and England would print far more for America than America would for England. This may determine the printers' attitude; though even the printers might realise that a time might come when the boot would be on the other leg, and British publishers will be in a position to squeeze American authors to any extent, and British printers will insist on printing books which might more conveniently and economically be printed in America. But surely, in a matter like this, the law ought not to be dictated by the selfish and shortsighted conceptions of a trade. We have never met an English author who has had, or who has contemplated, relations with America who has not been bitterly contemptuous of the American attitude towards the copyright law. We have never spoken to an American author or publisher who has not admitted that it was a disgrace to America. Authors may be a small body, but they are as entitled to their rights as anybody else; these, also, are God's creatures. President Wilson himself, for all we know, may under the present regime have lost English copyright in his early works; and the irony of the law is that it presses most hardly on those who have still their fortunes to make, for the celebrated, or their agents, can successfully cope with it.

* * * * *

These lines will, as we are happy to know, meet the eyes of many Americans who write and many who do not. We appeal to them to agitate for a change in their law. That the American copyright law should be placed on precisely the same basis as the English copyright law we do not ask, and have no right to ask. But that English authors should automatically enjoy in the United States the same privileges as are enjoyed by native authors is a reasonable proposition. Cannot somebody move the Legislature?

* * * * *

We shall return to this subject at greater length. Meanwhile, if we may hark back for a moment to the point from which our digression started, may we say that we shall welcome any suggestions our readers may make as to the development of the paper within the limits we have defined? Particularly we desire to hear--though we should not be human if we pretended to enjoy--objections, provided they are conceived in a friendly spirit, to anything in our present arrangements which may strike readers as unsatisfactory. It was another god who sprang, perfect and in full panoply, from the head of Jove.

LITERARY INTELLIGENCE

The death of Mr. Bruce Cummings on October 22nd, at the age of thirty, brought to an end a literary career which was singular alike in its character and in its brevity. He did not expect to live to see the publication of his book, _The Journal of a Disappointed Man_, and himself inserted the last and the only falsity in it, except the name he gave himself: "Barbellion died on December 31st." But he did actually witness its remarkable success on its appearance in the early part of this year; and it is impossible not to feel that this must, to some extent, have alleviated his disappointment. He was remarkable, not only in his personality and his gifts, but also in the fact that he was fully and frankly conscious, at all events for some years before his death, that his journal would be published and would be examined as a literary composition. He compared it with the journals which were already famous, he speculated on the reception it would have, he experienced a thrill in discovering a sister-soul in Marie Bashkirtseff. And it is hardly doubtful that his expectations will be realised. His career was one of struggle under almost overwhelming difficulties. His earliest ambition was to be a naturalist; and without training or assistance of any kind he had almost achieved it, when the breakdown of his father compelled him to earn a more substantial, though still meagre, living as a reporter on the staff of a provincial newspaper. He struggled out of this pit, and eventually succeeded in obtaining a position at South Kensington, which, in view of the obstacles in his way, was an extraordinary performance. Through all this battle against odds he was handicapped by an ill-health which seems to have affected almost every organ in his body--a weak heart, susceptible, if not actually tubercular, lungs, dyspepsia, and disordered nerves; and these ailments were accompanied and intensified by a perpetual brooding over his health which, had it had no basis, might have been called acute hypochondria. But it was only after his marriage that he discovered, by a dramatic and extraordinary accident, that he was already condemned to death by a more terrible malady than any of these. Under the rapidly-approaching shadow of this end, he continued his work and his journal as long as his strength permitted, and survived, though but for a little and in a state of complete collapse, the success which had been so persistently denied him before. His journal tells an extraordinary story and reveals an extraordinary person. Its confessions are frank, quiet, and obviously truthful; and neither his introspective habit of mind nor his belief that his journal would be published seems ever to have vitiated his powers of observation and notation. But he was something more than a remarkable personality and a veracious reporter of himself. He was also a writer and a critic of great ability. His notes on literature and music, here and there through the diary, show considerable penetration and judgment; and his descriptions of persons and places are vivid, fascinating, and often humorous. A volume of his remains has just been issued under the title, _Enjoying Life, and Other Essays_; and this includes the paper on the great journal-writers to which he alludes more than once in his diary.

* * * * *

As a token of their admiration for a master in their craft, a number of poets recently united to make a presentation to Mr. Thomas Hardy, O.M., on the occasion of his entering his eightieth year. Their tribute took the form of a manuscript volume in which each of the poets wrote one of his own pieces and which was prefaced by an address written, it is understood, by the Poet Laureate, with whom are joined in the volume the Hon. Maurice Baring, Mr. Hilaire Belloc, Mr. Laurence Binyon, Mr. G. K. Chesterton, Mr. W. H. Davies, Mr. Walter de la Mare, Mr. Austin Dobson, Mr. Edmund Gosse, Mr. Maurice Hewlett, Mr. Ralph Hodgson, Mr. A. E. Housman, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, Mr. John Masefield, Mrs. Alice Meynell, Mr. Sturge Moore, Professor Gilbert Murray, Sir Henry Newbolt, Mr. Alfred Noyes, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Mr. G. W. Russell ("A. E."), Mr. Arthur Symons, Mr. Herbert Trench, Sir William Watson, Mr. W. B. Yeats, and many of their younger fellows. A sentence from the address, "We would thank you for the pleasure and increasing delight that your art has given us," explains the purpose of the gift and supplies a text on which a discourse might be pronounced. For if it is a delight for an established master to receive the homage of his juniors, it should be, and is, an especial delight for them to be able to offer it. We think it probable that some of the younger contributors to this volume will live to remember with wonder and gratitude the fact that they were able, while he still lived, to express their gratitude to one of the greatest of modern English poets.

* * * * *

Mr. Edmund Gosse, the doyen of English critics, celebrated his seventieth birthday in September, and, through Lord Crewe, a presentation was made to him accompanied by a memorial of almost unexampled length and distinction. Each of the signatories has since received a beautifully printed "memento." Those who saw Mr. Gosse's paper on George Eliot will not need to be told that his powers seem, if anything, to increase with age. Great and diverse as have been his services to literature since his first book was (when he was in his early twenties) published, his finest work, both "original" and critical, has appeared in recent years; and it is easily conceivable that the decade between his seventieth and his eightieth birthdays will be his most productive. A man of letters can be paid no higher compliment: Mr. Gosse has retained, and will retain to the end, the energy and the freshness of youth, whilst his knowledge and experience, in the natural course of things, broaden and deepen.

* * * * *

The death of Leonid Andreef removes the most savage pessimist of all the pessimists who have come out of modern Russia. But the author of _The Life of Man_, _The Seven that Were Hanged_, and _The Red Laugh_ was not a pessimist for pessimism's sake: he suffered and he expressed his suffering sincerely. One of his short stories--that which tells of a student and his girl who were overtaken by a band of ruffians in a wood--is perhaps the most ghastly story that has ever been written; yet the most revolted reader could not suppose that the author had been less revolted than himself. Andreef had refused enormous offers to work for the Bolsheviks, and died, in great poverty, from shock induced by a rain of Bolshevik bombs near his house.

POETRY

_Ishak's Song_[5]

[5] _This song comes from Flecker's unpublished drama
_Hassan_, which those who have seen it consider
immeasurably the finest thing that he ever wrote. It
has remained in manuscript since his death, awaiting
stage production. His _Yasmin_ is another song from
the play, and his well-known _Golden Journey_ to
_Samarkand_ is its epilogue. Ishak is the Court poet
of Haroun-al-Raschid._

Thy dawn, O Master of the World, thy dawn,
The hour the lilies open on the lawn,
The hour the grey wings pass beyond the mountains,
The hour of silence when we hear the fountains,
The hour that dreams are brighter and winds colder,
The hour that young love wakes on a white shoulder,
O Master of the World, the Persian dawn!

This hour, O Master, shall be bright for thee:
Thy merchants chase the morning down the sea,
The braves who fight thy fight unsheath the sabre,
The slaves who toil thy toil are lashed to labour,
For thee the waggons of the world are drawn--
The ebony of night, the red of dawn!

JAMES ELROY FLECKER

_The Buzzards_

When evening came and the warm glow grew deeper,
And every tree that bordered the green meadows
And in the yellow cornfields every reaper
And every corn-shock stood above their shadows
Flung eastward from their feet in longer measure,
Serenely far there swam in the sunny height
A buzzard and his mate who took their pleasure
Swirling and poising idly in golden light.

On great pied motionless moth-wings borne along,
So effortless and so strong,
Cutting each other's paths together they glided,
Then wheeled asunder till they soared divided
Two valleys' width (as though it were delight
To part like this, being sure they could unite
So swiftly in their empty, free dominion),
Curved headlong downward, towered up the sunny steep,
Then, with a sudden lift of the one great pinion,
Swung proudly to a curve, and from its height
Took half a mile of sunlight in one long sweep.

And we, so small on the swift immense hillside,
Stood tranced, until our souls arose uplifted
On those far-sweeping, wide,
Strong curves of flight--swayed up and hugely drifted,
Were washed, made strong and beautiful in the tide
Of sun-bathed air. But far beneath, beholden
Through shining deeps of air, the fields were golden
And rosy burned the heather where cornfields ended.

And still those buzzards wheeled, while light withdrew
Out of the vales and to surging slopes ascended,
Till the loftiest-flaming summit died to blue.

MARTIN ARMSTRONG

_The Moon_

_(To Maurice Baring)_

1

I waited for a miracle to-night.
Dim was the earth beneath a star-swept sky,
Her boughs were vague in that phantasmal light,
Her current rippled past invisibly.
No stir was in the dark and windless meadows,
Only the water, whispering in the shadows,
That darkened nature lived did still proclaim.
An hour I stood in that defeat of sight,
Waiting, and then a sudden silver flame
Burned in the eastern heaven, and she came.

2

The Moon, the Summer Moon, surveys the vale:
The boughs against the dawning sky grow black,
The shades that hid those whispering waters fail,
And now there falls a gleaming, lengthening track
That lies across the wide and tranquil river,
Burnished and flat, not shaken by a quiver.
She rises still: the liquid light she spills
Makes everywhere quick sparkles, patches pale;
And, as she goes, I know her glory fills
The air of all our English lakes and hills.

3

High over all this England doth she ride;
She silvers all the roofs of folded towns,
Her brilliance tips the edge of every tide,
Her shadows make soft caverns in the downs;
Even now, beyond my tree serenely sailing,
She clothes far forests with a gauzy veiling,
And even as here, where now I stare and dream,
Standing my own transfigured banks beside,
On many a quiet wandering English stream
There lies the unshifting image of her beam.

4

Yes, calm she mounts, and watching her, I know
By many a river other eyes than mine
Turn up to her; and, as of old, they show
Their inward hearts all naked to her shine:
Maids, solitaries, sick and happy lovers,
To whom her dear returning orb discovers
For each the gift he waits for: soft release,
The unsealing of imagination's flow,
Her own sweet pain, or other pain's surcease,
The friendly benediction of her peace.

5

I gaze as they: as kind she is, as fair,
As when long since a younger heart drank deep
From that sweet solace, while, through summer air,
Her lucid fingers hushed the world to sleep.
O as I stand this latest moon beholding,
Her forms unresting memory is moulding;
Beneath my enchanted eyelids there arise
Visions again of many moons that were,
Fair, fleeting moons gathered from faded skies.
Greeted and lost by these corporeal eyes.

6

Unnumbered are those moons of memory
Stored in the backward chambers of my brain:
The moons that make bright pathways on the sea,
The golden harvest moon above the grain;
The moon that all a sleeping village blanches,
The woodland moon that roves beyond the branches,
Filtering through the meshes of the green
To breast of bird and mossy trunk of tree;
Moons dimly guessed-at through a cloudy screen
The bronze diffusion shed by moons unseen;

7

Moons that a thin prismatic halo rings,
Looking a hurrying fleecy heaven through;
The fairy moons of luminous evenings,
Phantoms of palest pink in palest blue;
Large orange moons on earth's grey verge suspended,
When trees still slumber from the heat that's ended,
Erect and heavy, and all waters lie
Oily, and there is not a bird that sings.
All these I know, I have seen them born and die,
And many another moon in many a sky.

8

There was a moon that shone above the ground
Where on a grassy forest height I stood;
Bright was that open place, and all around
The dense discovered treetops of the wood,
Line after line, in misty radiance glistened,
Failing away. I watched the scene and listened;
Then, awed and hushed, I turned and saw alone.
Protruding from the middle of the mound,
Fringed with close grass, a moonlight-mottled stone,
Rough-carven, of antiquity unknown.

9

A night there was, a crowd, a narrow street,
Torches that reddened faces drunk with dreams;
An orator exultant in defeat;
Banners, fierce songs, rough cheering, women's screams;
My heart was one with those rebellious people,
Until along a chapel's pointing steeple
My eyes unwitting wandered, and I found
A moon, and clouds a swift and ragged sheet;
And in my spirit's life all human din
Died, and eternal Silence stood within.

10

And once, on a far evening, warm and still,
I leant upon a cool stone parapet.
The quays and houses underneath the hill
Twinkled with lights; I heard the sea's faint fret;
And then above the eastern cape's long billow
Silent there welled a trembling line of yellow,
A shred that quickened, then a half that grew
To a full moon, that moved with even will.
The night was long before her, well she knew,
And, as she slowly rose into the blue,

11

She slowly paled, and, glittering far away
Flung on the silken waters like a spear,
Her crispèd silver shaft of moonlight lay.
The lighthouse lamp upon the little pier
Burned wanly by that radiance clear and certain.
Waiting I knew not what uplifted curtain,
I watched the unmoving world beneath my feet
Till, without warning, miles across the bay,
Into that silver out of shadows beat,
Dead black, the whole mysterious fishing-fleet.

12

These moons I have seen, but these and every one
Came each so new it seemed to be the first,
New as the buds that open to the sun,
New as the songs that to the morning burst.
The roses die, each day fresh flowers are springing,
Last year it was another blackbird singing,
Thou only, marvellous blossom, whose pale flower
Beyond mankind's conjecture hath begun,
Retain'st for ever an unwithering power
That stales the loveliest stranger of an hour.

13

But O, had all my infant nights been dark,
Or almost dark, lit by the stars alone,
Had never a teller of stories bid me hark
The promised splendours of that moon unknown:
How perfect then had been the revelation
When first her gradual gold illumination
Broke on a night upon the conscious child:
My heart had stopped with beauty, seeing her arc
Climbing the heavens, so far and undefiled,
So large with light, so even and so mild.

14

Most wondrous Light, who bring'st this lovelier earth,
This world of shadows cool with silver fires,
Drawing us higher than our human birth:
To whom our strange twin-natured kind suspires
Its saddest thoughts, and tenderest and most fragrant
Tears, and desires unnameable and vagrant:
Watcher, who leanest quietly from above,
Saying all mortal wars are nothing worth:
Friend of the sorrowful, tranquil as the dove,
Muse of all poets, lamp of all who love.

15

Alone and sad, alone and kind and sweet,
But always peaceful and removed and proud,
Whether with loveliness revealed complete,
Or veiling from our vision in a cloud:
Our souls' eternal listener, could we wonder
That men who made of sun and storm and thunder
The awful forms of strong divinity,
Heard in each storm the noise of travelling feet,
Should, gazing at thy face with hearts made free,
Have felt a pure, immortal Power in thee?

16

Selene, Cynthia, and Artemis,
The swift proud goddess with the silver bow,
Diana, she whose downward-bending kiss
One only knew, though all men yearned to know;
The shepherd on a hill his flock was keeping,
The night's pale huntress came and found him sleeping:
She stooped: he woke, and saw her hair that shone,
And lay, drawn up to cool and timeless bliss
Lapt in her radiant arms, Endymion,
All the still night, until the night was gone.

17

By many names they knew thee, but thy shape
Was woman's always, transient and white:
A flashing huntress leaving hinds agape,
A sweet descent of beauty in the night:
Yet some, more fierce and more distraught their dreaming,
Brooded, until they fashioned from thy seeming,
A lithe and luring queen with fatal breath,
A witch the man who saw might not escape,
A snare that gleamed in shadowy groves of death,
The tall tiaraed Syrian Ashtoreth.

18

And even to-night in African forests some
There are, possessed by such a blasphemy;
Through branching beams thy fevered votaries come
To appease their brains' distorted mask of thee.
There in the glades the drums pulsate and languish,
Men leap and wail to dim the victim's anguish
In the sad frenzy of the sacrifice.
They are slaves to thee, made mad because thou art dumb,
And dumb thou lookest on them from the skies,
Above their fires and dances, blood and cries.

19

So these; but otherwhere, at such an hour,
In all the continents, by all the seas,
Men, naming not the goddess, feel thy power,
Adoring her with gentler rites than these:
The thoughts of myriad hearts to thee uplifted
Rise like a smoke above thine altars drifted,
Perpetual incense poured before thy throne
By those whom thou hast given thy secret dower,
Those in whose kindred eyes thy light is known,
Whom thou hast signed and sealed for thine own.

20

For thee they watch by Asian peaks remote,
Where thy snows gleam above the pointing pines;
Entranced on templed lakes is many a boat
For thee, where clear thy dropt reflection shines;
On the great seas where none but thou is tender
Rising and setting, unto thee surrender
All lonely hearts in lonely wandering ships;
And, where their warm far-scattered islands float,
Through forests many a flower-crowned maiden slips
To gaze on thee, with parted burning lips.

21

O thus they do, and thus they did of old;
Our hearts were never secret in thy sight;
Ere our first records were thy shrine was cold
That speechless eyes went seeking in the night;
Beyond the compass of our dim traditions
Thou knewest of men the pitiful ambitions,
Their loves and their despair; within thy ken
All our poor history has been unrolled;
Thou hast seen all races born and die again,
The climbing and the crumbling towers of men.

22

Black were the hollows of that Emperor's eyes
Who paced with backward arms beyond his tents,
Lone in the night, and felt above him rise
The ancient conqueror's sloping, smooth, immense,
Moon-pointing Pyramid's enduring courses,
Heard not his sentries, nor his stamping horses,
But thought of Egypt dead upon that air,
Fighting with his moon-coloured memories
Of vanished kings who builded, and the bare
Sands in the moon before those builders were.

23

Restless, he knew that moon who watched him muse,
Had seen a restless Cæsar brood on fame
Amid the Pharaohs' broken avenues.
And, circling round that fixed monition, came
Woven by moonlight, random, transitory,
Fragments of all the dim receding story:
The moonlit water dripping from the oars
Of triremes in the bay of Syracuse;
The opposing bivouacs upon the shores,
That knew dead Hector's and Achilles' wars.

24

He saw fall'n Carthage, Alexander's grave,
The tomb of Moses in the wilderness,
The moonlight on the Atlantean wave
That covered all a multitude's distress:
Cities and hosts and emperors departed
Under the steady moon. And sullen-hearted
He turned away, and, in a little, died,
Even as he who hunted from his cave
And struck his foe, and stripped the shaggy hide
Under the moon, and was not satisfied.

25

For in the prime, thy influence was felt;
When eyes first saw, thy beauty was as this;
Thy quiet look bade hope, fear, passion melt
Before men dreamed of empire. The abyss
Of thought yawned through their jungle then, as ever
Dark past, dark future, menaced their endeavour:
Yet, on thy nights, stood some by hill and sea
Naked; and blind impulsive spirits knelt,
Not questioning why they knelt, feeling in thee
Thought's strangest, sweetest, saddest mystery.

26

Still Moon, bright Moon, compassionate Moon above,
Thou shinedst there ere any life began,
When of his pain or of his powerless love
Thou heardest not from heart of any man;
Though long the earth had shaken off the vapour
Left by the vanished gleams of fire, the shaper,
Old, old, her stony wrinkled face did grow
Ere aught but her blind elements did move;
Dumb, bare, and prayerless thou saw'st her go,
And afterwards again shalt see her so.

27

A time there was when Life had never been,
A time will be, it will have passed away;
Still wilt thou shine, still tender and serene,
When Life which in thy sister's yesterday
Had never flowered, will have drooped and faded;
Passed with the clouds that once her bosom shaded.
She will be barren then as not before,
Bared of her snows and all her garments green;
No darkling sea by any earthly shore
Will take thy rays: thy kin will be no more.

28

Pale satellite, old mistress of our fires,
Who hast seen so much and been so much to men,
Symbol and goal of all our wild desires,
Not any voice will cry upon thee then;
Dreamer and dream, they will have all gone over,
The sick of heart, the singer and the lover,
An end there will have been to all their lust,
Their sorrow, and the sighing of their lyres;
O all this Life that stained Earth's patient crust,
Time's dying breath will have blown away like dust.

29

Gone from thine eye that brief confusèd stir,
The rumours and the marching and the strife;
Earth will be still, and all the face of her
Swept of the last remains of moving life;
The last of all men's monuments that defied them,
Like those his valiant gestures that denied them,
Into the waiting elements will fade,
And thou wilt see thy fellow traveller,
A forlorn round of rocky contours made,
A glimmering disk of empty light and shade,

30

Ah, depth too deep for thought therein to cast;
The old, the cold companions, you will go,
Obeying still some long-forgotten past,
And all our pitiful history none will know;
Still shining, Moon, still peaceful, wilt thou wander,
But on that greater ball no heart will ponder
The thought that rose and nightingale are gone,
And all sweet things but thou; and only vast
Ridges of rock remain, and stars and sun;
O Moon, thou wilt be lovely alone for none.

31

And so, pale wanderer, so thou leavest me,
Passing beyond imagination's range,
Away into the void where waits for thee
Thy inconceivable destiny of change;
And after all the memories I have striven
To paint, this picture that thyself hast given
Lives, and I watch, to all those others blind,
Thy form, gliding into eternity,
Fading, an unconjectured fate to find,
The last, most wonderful image of the mind.

32

Moon, I have finished, I have made thy song,
I have paid my due and done my worship, Moon;
Yet, though I truly serve and labour long,
Thou givest not, nor do I ask, one boon;
That peace which clings around thee where thou goest,
Which many seek from thee and thou bestowest,
Did never this most faithful heart invest;
Even now thou shinest clear and calm and strong,
And I, and I, the heart within my breast,
Troubled with beauty, Moon, and never at rest.

J. C. SQUIRE

MISADVENTURES

By L. PEARSALL SMITH

_At Solemn Music_

I sat there, hating the exuberance of her bust and her high-coloured wig. And how could I listen to the music in the close proximity of those loud stockings?

Then our eyes met: in both of us the enchanted chord was touched; we both looked through the same window into Heaven. In that moment of musical, shared delight--these awful things will happen--our souls joined hands and sang like the morning stars together.

_The Platitude_

"It's after all, the little things in life that really matter!" I exclaimed, to my own surprise and the general consternation. I was as much chagrined as they were flabbergasted by this involuntary outbreak; but from my reading of the Chinese mystics, and from much practice in crowded railway carriages, I have become expert in that Taoist art of disintegration which Yen Hui described to Confucius as the art of "sitting and forgetting." I have learnt to lay aside my personality in awkward moments, to dissolve this self of mine into the All Pervading; to fall back, in fact, into the universal flux, and sit, as I now sat there, a blameless lump of matter, rolled on, according to the heaven's rolling, inert and unconcerned, with rocks and stones and trees.

_The Communion of Souls_

"So of course I bought it! How could I help buying it?" Then lifting the conversation, as with Lady Hyslop one always lifts it, to a higher level, "This notion of free will," I went on, "the notion, for instance, that I was free to buy or not to buy that rare edition, seems, when you think of it--at least to me it seems--a wretched notion really. I like to think I must follow the things of desire as--how shall I put it?--as the tide follows the moon; that my actions are due to necessary causes; that the world inside isn't a meaningless chaos, but a world of order, like the world outside, governed by beautiful laws, as the Stars are governed."

"How I love the Stars!" murmured Lady Hyslop. "What things they say to me! They are the pledges of lost recognitions--the promise of ineffable mitigations."

"Mitigations?" I gasped, feeling a little giddy. But it didn't matter: always when we meet Lady Hyslop and I have the most wonderful conversations. And is not their greatest charm precisely the fact that neither of us understands a word the other says?

_Disenchantment_

Life, I often thought, would be so different if I only had one; but in the meantime I went on fastening scraps of paper together with pins.

Opalescent, infinitely desirable, tinged with all the rainbow hues of fancy, inaccessible in the window of a stationer's shop around the corner, gleamed the paste-pot of my day-dreams. Every day I passed it, but every day some inhibition paralyzed my will; or my thoughts would be distracted in a golden dream or splendid disenchantment, some metaphysical perplexity, or giant preoccupation with the world's woe.

So time rolled on; the seasons followed in each other's footsteps. Empires rose and fell; and still that paste-pot hung, a dragon-guarded fruit of the Hesperides, in the window I walked by every day.

Then one morning, one awful morning, my pins gave out. I met this crisis with manly resolution: I was the master of my fate! Summoning all the forces of my moral nature, I put on my hat and went calmly out and bought that paste-pot. I bought three paste-pots, and carried them with me calmly home. At last the countercharm was found, the spell was broken, and the Devil finally defeated--but, oh, at what a cost! In the reaction, which immediately followed, I sat, facing those pots of nauseating paste, unnerved and disenchanted, beyond the reach of consolation, with nothing to wait for now but Death.

_The Listener_

The topic was one of my favourite topics of conversation, but I didn't at all feel on this occasion that it was I who was speaking. No, it was the Truth shining through me; the light of the Revelation which I had been chosen to proclaim and blazon to the world. No wonder they were all impressed by my moving tones and gestures; no wonder even the fastidious lady whom it was most difficult to please kept watching me with almost ecstatic attention.

As in an eclipse the earth's shadow falls upon the moon, or as a cloud may obscure the sun in his glory, so a shadow fell, so from some morass of memory arose a tiny mist of words to darken my mind for a moment. I brushed them aside: they had no meaning. Sunning myself in the lovely mirror of those eyes, never, for a moment, could I credit that devil-suggested explanation of their gaze.

And anyhow--thus I laughed away the notion--how could she do it anyhow, even if she tried? Other people perhaps--but me? No, that phrase I had heard, I had heard, was a nonsense phrase; the words, "She mimics you to perfection," could be nothing but a bit of unintelligible jabber. For who can turn the rainbow or the lightning-flash into ridicule, make fun of the moon's splendour, or mimic the Daystar in his shining?

_Shrinkage_

Sometimes my soul floats out beyond the constellations, then all the vast life of the universe is mine. Then again it evaporates, it shrinks, it dwindles, and of all that flood of thought which over-brimmed the great Cosmos there is hardly enough now left to fill a teaspoon.

_The Lift_

What on earth had I come up for? I stood out of breath in my bedroom, having completely forgotten the errand, which, just as I was going out, had carried me upstairs, leaping two steps at a time.

Gloves! Of course it was my gloves which I had left there. But what did gloves matter, I asked myself, in a world bursting with misery, as Dr. Johnson describes it?

O stars and garters! how bored I am by this trite, moralizing way of regarding natural phenomena--this crying of vanity on the beautiful manifestation of mechanical forces. This desire of mine to appear out of doors in appropriate apparel, if it can thus defy and overcome the law of gravitation--if it can lift twelve stone of matter thirty or forty feet above the earth's surface; if it can do this every day, and several times a day, and never get out of order, is it not as remarkable and convenient in the house as a hydraulic lift?

_The Danger of Going to Church_

As I came away from the Evening Service, walking home from that Sabbath adventure, some neighbours of mine passed me in their motor laughing. Were they laughing at me? I wondered uneasily; and as I sauntered across the fields I vaguely cursed those misbelievers, remembering some maledictions from the Prophets, and from the Psalms we had sung that evening. Yes, yes, their eyes should be darkened, and their lying lips put to silence. They should be smitten with the botch of Egypt, and a sore botch in the legs that cannot be healed. All the teeth should be broken in the mouths of those bloody men and daughters of backsliding; their faces should become as flames, and their heads be made utterly bald. Their little ones should be dashed to pieces before their eyes, and brimstone scattered upon their habitations. They should be led away with their buttocks uncovered; they should stagger to and fro as a drunken man staggereth in his vomit.

But as for the Righteous Man who kept his Sabbaths, his should be the blessings of those who walk in the right way. "These blessings"--the words came back to me from the Evening Lesson--"these blessings shall come upon thee and overtake thee." And suddenly, in the mild summer air, it seemed as if, like a swarm of bees inadvertently wakened, the blessings of the Old Testament were actually rushing after me. From the hot, remote, passionate past of Hebrew history, out of the Oriental climate and unctuous lives of that infuriate people, gross good things were coming to reward me with benedictions for which I had not bargained. Great oxen and camels and concubines were panting close behind me, he-goats and she-goats and rams of the breed of Bashan. My barns should burst their doors with plenty, and all my paths drop fatness. My face should be smeared with the oil of rejoicing; all my household and the beasts of my household should beget and bear increase; and as for the fruit of my own loins, it should be for multitude as the sands of the sea and as the stars of heaven. My sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters to the third and fourth generation, should rise up and call me blessed. My feet should be dipped in butter, and my eyes stand out with fatness; I should flourish as the Cedar of Lebanon that bringeth forth fruit in old age.

My Prayer Book began to smoke in my hand from the hot lava embedded in it; the meadow was scorched by the live coals of cursing and still more awful benediction I had so thoughtlessly raked out of the church furnace and brought down in a hot shower on myself and my neighbours.

_The Wrong Word_

We were talking of the Universe at tea, and one of our company declared that he at least was entirely without illusions. He had long since faced the fact that Nature had no sympathy with our hopes and fears, and was completely indifferent to our fate. The Universe, he said, was a great mechanism; man, with his reason and moral judgments, was the chance product of blind forces, which, though they would so soon destroy him, he must yet despise. To endure this tragedy of our fate with passionless despair, never to wince or bow the head, to confront a hostile universe with high disdain, to fix with eyes of scorn the Gorgon face of Destiny, to stand on the brink of the abyss, hurling defiance at the icy stars--this, he said, was his attitude, and it produced, as you can imagine, a very powerful impression on the company. As for me, I was completely carried away by my enthusiasm. "By Jove, that is a stunt!" I cried.

_Interruption_

"Life," said a gaunt widow, with a reputation for being clever--"life is a perpetual toothache."

In this vein the conversation went on: the familiar topics were discussed of food-restrictions, epidemics, cancer, and so on.

Near me there sat a little old lady who was placidly drinking her tea, and taking no part in the melancholy chorus. "Well, I must say," she remarked, turning to me and speaking in an undertone, "I must say I enjoy life."

"So do I," I whispered.

"When I enjoy things," she went on, "I know it. Eating, for instance, the sunshine, my hot-water bottle at night. Other people are always thinking of unpleasant things. It makes a difference," she added, as she got up to go with the others.

"All the difference in the world," I answered.

It's too bad that I had no chance for further conversation with that wise old lady. I felt that we were congenial spirits, and had a lot to tell each other. For she and I are not among those who fill the mind with garbage: we make a better use of that divine and adorable endowment. We invite Thought to share, and by sharing to enhance, the pleasures of the delicate senses; we distil, as it were, an elixir from our golden moments, keeping out of the shining crucible of consciousness everything that tastes sour. I do wish that we could have discussed at greater length, like two Alchemists, the theory and practice of our art.

_The Rationalist_

Occultisms, fairyisms, incantations, glimpses of the Beyond, intimations from another world--all kinds of supernaturalisms are most distasteful to me; I cling to the world of science and common sense and explicable phenomena; and I was much put out, therefore, to find this morning a cabalistic inscription written in letters of large menace on my bath-room floor. TAM HTAB--what could be the meaning of these cryptic words, and how on earth had they got there? Like Belshazzar, my eyes were troubled by this writing, and my knees smote one against the other; till majestic Reason, deigning to look downward from her contemplation of eternal causes, spelt backwards for me, with a pitying smile, the homely, familiar, harmless inscription on the BATH MAT, which was lying there wrong side up.

_Justification_

Well, what if I did put it on a little at that luncheon-party? Do I not owe it to my friends to assert now and then my claims to consideration; ought I always to allow myself to be trampled on and treated as dirt? And how about the Saints and Patriarchs of the Bible? Didn't Joseph tell of the dream in which his wheatsheaf was exalted, and Deborah sing without blame how she arose a mother in Israel? And didn't David boast of his triumph over the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear? Nay, in his confabulations with His chosen people, does not the Creator of the universe Himself take every opportunity of impressing on those Hebrews His importance, His power, His glory?

Was I not made in His image?

_Day-dream_

"Yes, as you say, life is so full of disappointment, disillusion! More and more I ask myself, as I grow older, what is the good of it all? We dress, we go out to dinner," I went on, "but surely we walk in a vain show. How good this asparagus is! I often think asparagus is the most delicious of all vegetables. And yet I don't know--when one thinks of fresh green peas. One can get tired of asparagus as one can of strawberries--but tender green peas and peaches I could eat for ever. And there are certain pears, too, that taste like heaven. It's one of my favourite day-dreams for my declining years to live alone, a formal, greedy, selfish old gentleman, in a square house, say, in Devonshire, with a square garden, whose walls are covered with apricots and figs and peaches; and there are precious pears, too, of my own planting, on espaliers along the paths. I shall walk out with a gold-headed cane in the autumn sunshine, and just at the right moment pick a delicious pear. However, that isn't at all what I was going to say----"

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY

By GEORGE SAINTSBURY

(_A paper based on, but not identical with, a discourse delivered at what may be called the headquarters of the subject--the Pump Room, Bath, October 1st, 1919_)

The effect of convincing anyone against his will is sufficiently familiar, but it may be questioned whether there is not another state of mind which is still more insusceptible of real conviction, which it is still more of a labour of Sisyphus to convince. In this state there is too much mere inertia for the word "will" to come in. There is no intention of relapsing into the same opinion; there is indeed no need of any, for the opinion is never disturbed. The attempts at convincing need not be resisted or contemned; they may even be listened to and enjoyed like a very pleasant song, but they are at once forgotten.

Something of this sort, it may be feared, is the case with the subject of this present paper. People have made up their minds that there was _no_ eighteenth-century poetry or, at best, that such as there was was not properly eighteenth-century poetry at all, but merely a survival or an anticipation. The present writer had a perhaps accidental but certainly curious illustration of the fact in reference to the origin of this very paper; for having expressed his intention of discussing "eighteenth-century _poetry_," he found the subject announced at first as "eighteenth-century _verse_." In face of such a popular attitude--let us be bold and give it its proper name: such a vulgar error--it may not be quite idle to make a fresh attempt against it. I am not sure that in some of the versions of the Pagan Apocrypha it is not recorded that Sisyphus _did_ get that stone lodged at last. At any rate it is worth trying, even at the risk, which is almost a certainty, of the very illogical suspicion that if you like eighteenth-century poetry, you _don't_ like--or don't sufficiently understand--seventeenth and nineteenth. On that point the present writer may, he thinks, slap his sword home and decline duello with any man. But he will take the liberty firstly, in order to confine the matter within reasonable limits, of leaving Pope almost entirely out. Obviously the famous and much-argued question, "Was Pope a poet?" can be answered, even in the negative, without deciding our general point here.