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Why we should read--

by S. P. B. Mais · English · Gutenberg #41285 · 581,100 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Why we should read--

Author: S. P. B. Mais


        
Release date: November 4, 2012 [eBook #41285]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHY WE SHOULD READ-- ***

  WHY WE SHOULD READ----




  _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_


  A PUBLIC SCHOOL IN WAR TIME
  APRIL'S LONELY SOLDIER
  INTERLUDE
  REBELLION
  FROM SHAKESPEARE TO O. HENRY
  THE EDUCATION OF A PHILANDERER
  BOOKS AND THEIR WRITERS
  LOVERS OF SILVER
  A SCHOOLMASTER'S DIARY
  UNCLE LIONEL
  COLOUR-BLIND


  EDUCATIONAL

  A SCHOOL SHAKESPEARE (in 18 vols.)
  AN ENGLISH COURSE FOR ARMY CANDIDATES
  AN ENGLISH COURSE FOR SCHOOLS
  SEVEN PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE FOR SCHOOLS (in 1 vol.)
  AN ENGLISH COURSE FOR EVERYBODY




  WHY WE SHOULD
  READ----

  BY

  S. P. B. MAIS

  _Author of
  "Books and Their Writers"_

  [Illustration]

  "_He who first praises a book becomingly is
  next in merit to the author_"

  W. S. LANDOR


  LONDON
  GRANT RICHARDS LTD.
  ST MARTIN'S STREET
  1921


  PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED
  EDINBURGH


  TO
  MY WIFE




  CONTENTS


                                         PAGE

  INTRODUCTION      9


  PART I: SOME ENGLISH CLASSICS

  I. _TOM JONES_      15

  II. _WUTHERING HEIGHTS_      25

  III. CHARLES LAMB      32

  IV. JAMES BOSWELL      35

  V. WILLIAM HAZLITT      38

  VI. SAMUEL PEPYS      41

  VII. WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR      44

  VIII. JOHN DONNE      51

  IX. SUCH A BOOK AS _THE BEGGAR'S OPERA_      58


  PART II: SOME CONTEMPORARIES

  I. GEORGE SANTAYANA      65

  II. THE POEMS OF FRANCIS BRETT-YOUNG      76

  III. THE POEMS OF IRIS TREE      81

  IV. THE POEMS OF ALDOUS HUXLEY      88

  V. THE POEMS OF ROBERT GRAVES      97

  VI. J. D. BERESFORD      101

  VII. _NIGHT AND DAY_      105

  VIII. E. C. BOOTH      112

  IX. FORD MADOX HUEFFER      126

  X. _THE BALLAD OF THE WHITE HORSE_      139

  XI. E. M. FORSTER      152

  XII. SHEILA KAYE-SMITH      157


  PART III: BOOKS ON THE ENGLISH
  LANGUAGE

  I. _A HISTORY OF MODERN COLLOQUIAL ENGLISH_      171

  II. _THE ROMANCE OF WORDS_      179

  III. _THE ROMANCE OF NAMES_      182

  IV. _THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE_      185


  PART IV: CERTAIN FOREIGNERS

  I. MONTAIGNE      191

  II. NEKRASSOV      211

  III. PUSHKIN      226

  IV. LÈRMONTOV      241

  V. GOGOL      258

  VI. TURGENEV      263

  VII. GONCHAROV      270

  VIII. DOSTOIEVSKY      274

  IX. TOLSTOY      284

  X. TCHEKOV      292




INTRODUCTION


From reviews that I have read of earlier books of mine I have at last
learnt wisdom. It seems that I must be explicit about my intentions in a
preface in order to save the critics the trouble of reading the book
through.

Now it must be remembered that literary critics are men of intelligence
who have read everything and damned most things. Very few indeed are the
books which they allow to be worth the trouble that must have been taken
to write them.

And it is certainly true that we suffer from a flood of reading matter
which serves no more purpose than a packet of the cheapest cigarettes or
a cocktail.

We have not troubled to acquire a critical sense. We accept what we see
on the bookstalls and buy books almost entirely from the attractiveness
of their wrappers. But there ought to be a mean between a ferocious
disdain of all modern writing and a surfeiting on all that is published.
The majority of men and women are very much like myself, I imagine. They
read with equal interest a modern novel, say, of Sheila Kaye-Smith, an
exposition of the Relativity Theory like Eddington's _Space, Time and
Gravitation_, E. V. Lucas's essays, Henri Fabre and Trotter, and at the
same time keep harking back to reread _Don Quixote_, _Tristram Shandy_,
Shelley and other favourites among the classics.

Even so, they are apt to miss much that is readable ... and from my
correspondence I gather that I have many times been lucky enough to
introduce an author to a new reader, as a result of which an undying
friendship between the two has been caused.

Merely to turn over the following pages will not give the critic any
clue why I chose the writers and books that I have chosen.

In point of fact, it just happens that these are the people who have
attracted me sufficiently in my reading during the last year to jot down
not so much why I found them attractive as what I found attractive in
them.

It is quite by chance that there should be almost an equal number of
foreigners, contemporaries and native classics in my list. I suppose it
means that I devote about one-third of my reading hours to each.

With regard to my method of approach, it is no good reviling me for not
criticising each book or author according to a stereotyped plan, as if I
were a chemist analysing a compound. I am not analysing so much as
enjoying. My position is that of the not altogether successful cricketer
who yet takes a keen delight in watching great players bat. I do not
propose to sit down and lay emphasis on the chances given or the faulty
strokes: my object is rather to take as many enthusiasts of the game
with me as I can find and just lie down and watch an innings which I
know to be a good one.

To call this "gush" or "gusto," as some of my reviewers do, is merely
silly. I am not so mentally deficient as they would have people to
believe.

Merely to "slobber" over a book or a person is not one of my
characteristics. It is extremely easy to pick holes, to adopt a negative
attitude, to call down fire from heaven and make a show with the fists
when your enemy is merely an author. That is not my idea of honourable
action. If a book is bad (and I agree that most books are), let it die
by itself. Professional critics only too frequently remind me of
vultures: they crowd round the weak and the dying ready to devour.

The object of any man who enjoys life is to share his enjoyment with
others. If a book appeals to me I want as many people as possible to
derive the pleasure that I derived from it.

I would have my critics remember that this is not a book on "Why we
should _not_ Read----" (which would have been very easy to write), and
therefore is meant to be laudatory. I do demand sincerity in my authors
and at any rate a feeling for beauty.... Knowing full well as a novelist
myself how extremely hard these desiderata are to be obtained, I am
perhaps more lenient than some critics who have never tackled a creative
task, just as I am less inclined to decry another man's strokes at
cricket when I think of my own feeble efforts, but it is very
definitely worth pointing out that the severest critics of any sport are
always those who know nothing about it, and I am beginning to believe
that these modern critics who find no good in any work which comes under
their notice know nothing whatever about literature, but, like the
audiences at a Cup-tie, talk a wonderful jargon which is apt to deceive
all but the elect.

I feel that I have wasted too much time on the critics. They don't
really count for anything on either side.

To you for whom I have written this book there is perhaps just this to
say. Don't begin by looking for fresh light on authors that you already
know. My sole object is to introduce you to authors that you don't yet
know. This introduction was not written for you. You can leave it out.
The introduction was written for the critics, the book for you, and the
proportion of pages devoted to them set against the pages devoted to you
will give you an accurate idea of the proportion of favour that I want,
yours and the critics'.

Five of the shortest chapters in this book have been already published,
one in _To-Day_, the others in _John o' London's Weekly_; to the editors
of these journals I am indebted for permission to reprint.




PART I

SOME ENGLISH CLASSICS




I

_TOM JONES_


I suppose there is still somebody living who has not read _Tom Jones_:
it seems inconceivable that it should be so, but queer things of this
sort do happen. Only the other day I met a man who had never seen any
Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera. To say that Fielding possessed more
wit and humour and more knowledge of mankind than any other person of
modern times, except Shakespeare, ought to be sufficient to drive anyone
ignorant of his work at once to the nearest bookshop. "Since the days of
Homer," says one great critic, "the world has not seen a more artful
fable [than _Tom Jones_]. The characters and adventures are wonderfully
diversified; yet the circumstances are all so natural, and rise so
easily from one another, and co-operate with so much regularity in
bringing on, even while they seem to retard, the catastrophe, that the
curiosity of the reader is kept always awake, and instead of flagging,
grows more and more impatient as the story advances, till at last it
becomes downright anxiety. And when we get to the end, and look back on
the whole contrivance, we are amazed to find that of so many incidents
there should be so few superfluous; that in such variety of fiction
there should be so great probability, and that so complete a tale should
be so perspicuously conducted and with perfect unity of design."

We read and reread _Tom Jones_ in order to recapture some of that first
careless rapture which is so refreshing a point in Fielding's fiction,
to get away from the weary, meticulous self-analysis of the modern
novelist, to the full-blooded, honest attitude of the country-bred
Englishman of the eighteenth century. Here we have a tale told for the
sake of narrative, with incidents, the interest in which never for a
moment flags, characters all lively, true and fresh, dialogue full of
point, variety and suitability. It is a test of our interest that we
feel angry at the constant digressions and interruptions, but who would
do without those masterly initial chapters in each book?

As to the charge of coarseness which has been brought against him, we
feel that Fielding would have been dumbfounded with surprise. He states
explicitly, over and over again, that to recommend goodness and
innocence was always his sincere endeavour, and certainly no
higher-souled, purer heroine than Sophia Western ever walked. Even Tom
Jones himself, who was singularly unable to resist the importunity of
frail ladies, acts up to a code which is certainly not coarse.

"I do not pretend to the gift of chastity more than my neighbours," he
says to Nightingale. "I have been guilty with women, I own it, but am
not conscious that I ever injured any. Nor would I, to procure pleasure
to myself, be knowingly the cause of misery to any human being."

Allworthy, as his name suggests, is a model of what we should all like
to be, generous, pure, slow to believe evil, quick to forgive, a true
friend and a merciful judge.

"It hath been my constant maxim in life," he says to Blifil when he
hears of his sister's marriage, "to make the best of all matters that
happen."

Not that Fielding makes his characters impossibly good: there is none
that avoids some taint. Allworthy is altogether too credulous, and
Sophia's allegiance to her family passes the bounds of common sense,
while the rest of the characters have very much of the earthy in their
texture. The lovable Partridge is a coward, his wife a shrew,
Allworthy's sister and her husband hate each other like poison, Square
and Thwackum are eaten up with hypocrisy and deceit, young Blifil is an
unredeemed villain, Squire Western is an ignorant, blasphemous boor, and
his sister would be a thorn in any man's flesh. Square, with his eternal
harping on the natural beauty of virtue, and Thwackum, with his chatter
about the divine power of grace, are a pretty couple of scoundrels for
Fielding to lavish his irony on.

"Had not Thwackum too much neglected virtue, and Square religion, in the
composition of their several systems, and had not both utterly discarded
all natural goodness of heart, they had never been represented as the
objects of derision in this history," says the author.

But perhaps Fielding's greatest charm lies in his firm, masculine,
straightforward, even racy English. We may take as an example what the
ordinary author finds most difficult, the description of his heroine.

"Her shape was not only exact, but extremely delicate; and the nice
proportion of her arms promised the truest symmetry in her limbs. Her
hair, which was black, was so luxuriant that it reached her middle,
before she cut it to comply with the modern fashion, and it was now
curled so gracefully in her neck that few could believe it to be her
own.... Her eyebrows were full, even, and arched beyond the power of art
to imitate. Her black eyes had a lustre in them which all her softness
could not extinguish. Her nose was exactly regular, and her mouth, in
which were two rows of ivory, exactly answered Sir John Suckling's
description in those lines:

    'Her lips were red, and one was thin,
    Compared to that was next her chin.
        Some bee had stung it newly.'

Her cheeks were of the oval kind, and in her right she had a dimple,
which the least smile discovered."

Such is the girl who fell in love with Tom Jones in her teens and who
after an amazing series of misfortunes ultimately married him, in spite
of her knowledge of his many temporary intrigues with other women.
Indeed, if she followed after her father, she would have "liked him the
better for it."

"You have not the worse opinion of a young fellow," bellows the Squire
to Sophia, "for getting a bastard, have you, girl? No, no, the women
will like un the better for't."

Certainly Sophia did not seem to like Tom the worse for his amatory
adventure with Molly Seagrim, perhaps because she, like her creator, was
able to differentiate between real love and that "desire of satisfying a
voracious appetite with a certain quantity of delicate white human
flesh" which passes for love.

In other words, Fielding has made her human.

"We ... are admitted behind the scenes of this great theatre of nature,"
he proudly says in one of his prefaces "(and no author ought to write
anything besides dictionaries and spelling-books who hath not this
privilege)...." He is certainly admitted behind the scenes of the
country squire's household.

Sophia's aunt, with her political and philosophical analogies ("You are
to consider me, child, as Socrates, not asking your opinion, but only
informing you of mine"; and again, "The French shall as soon persuade me
that they take foreign towns in defence only of their own country as you
can impose on me to believe you have never yet thought seriously of
matrimony ..."); Sophia's father's relations with his wife ("His
conversation consisted chiefly of halloaing, singing, relations of
sporting adventures, bawdy, and abuse of women and of the Government:
these, however, were the only seasons when Mr Western saw his wife, for
when he repaired to her bed he was generally so drunk that he could not
see; and, in the sporting season, he always rose from her before it was
light") and his attitude to her after she died ("When anything in the
least soured him, as a bad scenting day, or a distemper among his
hounds, or any other such misfortune, he constantly vented his spleen by
invectives against the deceased, saying, 'If my wife was alive now, she
would be glad of this.'")--all these pictures are lightning strokes of
verisimilitude which prove how perfectly at home Fielding was in the
great theatre of nature.

When we come to the lower classes, to Mrs Honour, with her "Marry, come
up!" "Hoity toity!" prefaces to gossip, which is only rivalled and not
excelled by her counterpart in Shakespeare, Juliet's nurse; to
Partridge, with his pricelessly irrelevant tags from the classics:
"infandum, regina, jubes renovare dolorem," "hinc illæ lachrymæ,"
"tempus edax rerum," and so on, we can only give ourselves up
whole-heartedly to the enjoyment of them and wish that they may go on
talking for ever.

Then there is the surgeon whose talk might well be set for dictation in
schools: "I was once, I remember, called to a patient who had received a
violent contusion in his tibia, by which the exterior cutis was
lacerated, so that there was a profuse sanguinary discharge; and the
interior membranes were so divellicated that the os or bone very plainly
appeared through the aperture of the vulnus or wound. Some febrile
symptoms intervening at the same time (for the pulse was exuberant, and
indicated much phlebotomy), I apprehended an immediate mortification."

The fact is that Fielding, like the classical author he is so fond of
quoting, finds every_thing_ and particularly every_one_ in the world
amusing and interesting.

It was a stroke of genius to send Sophia and Tom wandering from inn to
inn, for in no other way than by making his characters take to the open
road could the author have introduced such a variety of characters or
such exciting episodes.

"For though every good author will confine himself within the bounds of
probability, it is by no means necessary that his characters, or his
incidents, should be trite, common or vulgar; such as happen in every
street, or in every house, or which may be met with in the home articles
of a newspaper. Nor must he be inhibited from showing many persons and
things, which may possibly have never fallen within the knowledge of
great part of his readers."

In one point Fielding certainly does strain the bounds of probability
beyond all bearing: there never was such a book for impossible
coincidences as _Tom Jones_. Everybody appears to know everybody else
and everybody else's business; people turn up in the most unexpected
places (especially bedrooms) at the most unfortunate moments. It is like
a musical comedy in this respect. There is much more of the surprising
than there is of the credible in _events_, not in the _people_, who are,
as I have said, only too natural.

It is not so much surprising that Partridge should read Erasmus, Ovid,
Pope's _Homer_, _The Spectator_, _Robinson Crusoe_ and Thomas à Kempis
as that he should have ever met Tom Jones as he did and when he did.

It is not at all surprising that a barber should quote Latin tags
irrelevantly, or that he should join Tom with the idea of fighting for
the Jacobites, but not be "over-nice" when he found out that he was
"booked" for the other side (though he was going to fight against his
own cause, yet he would not drink against it); but it is impossible to
believe that the same people should jump into and out of the story and
meet again after a score of years or more.

There are readers who object to the interpolation of the episode of the
Man of the Hill on the ground that it only retards the action. Such
people ought not to read _Tom Jones_. The true reader is in no hurry to
get on with the story, though he is thrilled with the intricacies of it;
he is ready to turn aside into any by-path which will shed more light on
the England of the eighteenth century. For after all it is from the Man
of the Hill that we hear that "he could not only hit a standing mark
with great certainty, but hath actually shot a crow as it was flying in
the air"; that there were gentlemen farmers of three hundred pounds a
year in 1657; that on five hundred pounds a year at Oxford a profligate
could keep his horses and his whore and obtain what credit he pleased;
that there were Justice Darlings even in those days ("I have travelled
the circuit these forty years and never found a horse in my life ...
thou art a lucky fellow ... for thou didst not only find a horse, but a
halter too, I promise thee"); how to leave a restaurant without paying
for one's food; how much more costly precious Burgundy used to be than
simple claret; how philosophy elevates and steels the mind ("Men of true
learning and almost universal knowledge always compassionate the
ignorance of others; but fellows who excel in some little, low,
contemptible art are always certain to despise those who are
unacquainted with that art"); how the sane Englishman of the time
regarded James II., and a thousand other things of equal interest.

And in spite of its apparent irrelevance, does not this episode develop
our appreciation of the hero? Set against the misanthropic Man of the
Hill, who sees marks of God's Power, Wisdom and Goodness everywhere but
in his fellow-man, Tom Jones acts as an admirable foil.

"I have lived," he says, "but a short time in the world, and yet have
known men worthy of the highest friendship, and women of the highest
love."

It is by virtue of contrasts such as this just shown that Fielding would
claim to be named among the geniuses.

"By genius I would understand that power, or rather those powers of the
mind which are capable of penetrating into all things within our reach
and knowledge, and of distinguishing their essential differences. These
are no other than invention and judgment...."

Added to this there must be "conversation."

"So necessary is this to the understanding the characters of men that
none are more ignorant of them than those learned pedants whose lives
have been entirely consumed in colleges and among books; for however
exquisitely human nature may have been described by writers, the true
practical system can be learnt only in the world."

He also requires of his ideal author "refinement, elegance and
liberality of spirit." He must have a good heart and be capable of
feeling. "The author who will make me weep," says Horace, "must first
weep himself. No man can paint a distress well which he doth not feel
while he is painting it.... I am convinced I never make my reader laugh
heartily but where I have laughed before him."

Who would deny the interest or importance of digressions like these when
they shed such a flood of light on to the author's attitude to his own
work?

The sergeant who resented the imputation against his character conveyed
by the words _non sequitur_ ("You are another," cries the sergeant, "an
you come to that. No more a sequitur than yourself. You are a pack of
rascals, and I'll prove it, for I will fight the best man of you all for
twenty pounds"); the lightning-like flash of inspiration which made Mrs
Waters repeat the cry, "Rape! Rape!" when she is discovered in bed with
Tom; the logic of the landlady of the inn ("So easy and good-humoured
were they that they found no fault with my Worcestershire perry, which I
sold them for champagne; and it, to be sure, is as well tasted, and as
wholesome, as the best champagne in the kingdom, otherwise I would scorn
to give it 'em; and they drank me two bottles. No, no, I will never
believe any harm of such sober, good sort of people")--all these touches
and thousands more are proofs of how much genius depends upon
"conversation," or a practical knowledge of the world, the power of
distinguishing essential differences.

Fielding seems to have distinguished these essential differences not
only in people but in the life of his time on every side. Realising full
well that posterity would read him, he also realised what were the
things that posterity would like to hear about it. So we get that
inimitable description of the puppet show where "The Provoked Husband"
displaced "Punch and Judy," by the throwing out of which "such idle
trumpery puppet-shows were," in the words of their master, "at last
brought to be a rational entertainment."

"I would by no means degrade the ingenuity of your profession," answered
Jones, "but I should have been glad to have seen my old acquaintance
Master Punch for all that; and so far from improving, I think, by
leaving him out and his merry wife Joan, you have spoiled your puppet
show"--a sentiment that many of us to-day will heartily endorse.

It is a rare treat to be shown a performance of _Hamlet_ in the
eighteenth century with Partridge as critic, preferring Claudius to the
rest of the actors because he spoke louder, and objecting to the
gravediggers because of their lack of skill. Then there is the gypsies'
wedding in the barn, with its sumptuous food and its Solomon-like
judgment delivered by the king on the cuckold: "Me do order dat you have
no money given you, for you deserve punishment, not reward; me do order,
therefore, dat you be de infamous gipsy, and do wear a pair of horns
upon your forehead for one month; and dat your wife be called de whore,
and pointed at all dat time; for you be de infamous gipsy, but she be no
less de infamous whore."

Running through it all is the delicious Partridge, resenting not at all
attacks upon his honour, but up in arms at once when Tom casts
aspersions on his parts of speech. "A child may sometimes teach his
grandmother to suck eggs. I have lived to a fine purpose, truly, if I am
to be taught my grammar at this time of day."

Truly Fielding invoked the comic spirit to some purpose: "Come, thou,
that hast inspired thy Aristophanes, thy Lucian, thy Cervantes, thy
Rabelais, thy Molière, thy Shakespeare, thy Swift, thy Marivaux, fill my
pages with humour; till mankind learn the good nature to laugh only at
the follies of others, and the humility to grieve at their own." The
creator of Partridge is worthy to hold his own in the kingdom of humour
with any of the octette.

No less successful is he when he leaves the broad highway and the rustic
inns of the west for the fashionable life of the metropolis. The
coquetry of Lady Bellaston and the gallantry of Lord Fellamar are as
well portrayed as the poachers and squires of Somerset. Indeed with
Hogarth on the one side and Fielding on the other as companions he must
be extremely dull-witted who fails to get right behind the scenes of
eighteenth-century England, when the devil was no longer believed in,
and ladies of fashion curtsied low to their male friends, when nobody's
manners were "over-nice," when a virtuous girl was almost as rare as a
road safe from highwaymen, where "the highest life is much the dullest,
and affords very little humour or entertainment" beyond "dressing and
cards, eating and drinking, bowing and curtsying," where a country
gentleman orders as a dinner for one at the Hercules' Pillars "a
shoulder of mutton roasted, a spare rib of pork and a fowl and egg
sauce," where the same country gentleman sends his daughter into the
arms of her lover with a "Yoicks!" and a "Tally-ho!": "To her, boy! to
her! Go to her! That's it, little honeys. O, that's it!" and a "Harkee,
Allworthy, I'll bet thee five pounds to a crown we have a boy to-morrow
nine months; but prithee tell me what wut ha'! Wut ha' Burgundy,
champagne, or what? For, please Jupiter, we'll make a night on't."

We read _Tom Jones_, then, first and foremost because it is a "rattling
good yarn" from start to finish, full of hair-breadth escapes, trials
of, and misunderstandings between, hero and heroine, ending, after
fickle Fortune has done everything in her power to prevent it, in the
complete happiness of their union; we read it because in the course of
our journey through it we make many new and life-long friends, find much
to laugh at; tenderness and pity are roused in us for the unhappy, mirth
at the discomfiture of the self-complacent hypocrites.

We read it in order to be transported to a healthier century than ours,
when neurasthenia was unknown and people were tortured by nothing worse
than colic and spleen; we read it to get away from people who think too
much and live not at all, to people who think not at all and live every
moment of their lives to the full, sinning, if they sin, splendidly,
like the pagans they were.

We read it because it was written by a man of genius possessed of a
fine, liberal-hearted spirit, a perfect command of his native tongue and
a great lover of humanity.

"And now, my friend, I take this opportunity of heartily wishing thee
well. If I have been an entertaining companion to thee, I promise thee
it is what I have desired."




II

_WUTHERING HEIGHTS_


We read and reread _Wuthering Heights_ because it is like no other book
in the world. The nearest approach to it is not English at all, but
Russian. Dostoievsky in _The Brothers Karamazov_ has characters in some
degree approximating to Heathcliff. In English fiction there is no one
in the least like him.

Emily Brontë with her love of life, her passionate adoration of the
earth, sweeps us off our feet. She plunges us into a world of elemental
lusts and hates and cruelties. Heathcliff is treated brutally and
revenges himself even more brutally. The frustrated passion of Catherine
for Heathcliff and of Heathcliff for Catherine is scarcely
distinguishable from hate; they repay each other with torture for
torture, pang for hopeless pang. Judged by his deeds, Heathcliff is as
much a monster of evil as Iago, but--and this is what makes Emily
Brontë's genius so amazing--we never for a moment judge him by his
deeds. The material event never seems to matter. In fact, so far as
material actions go, Heathcliff is completely inert. He lets things take
their course. His most striking, almost his only violent, action is his
running away with Isabella. He does nothing to prevent Catherine from
marrying Edgar Linton: his vengeance is completely removed from any
material sphere and once accomplished rouses in him no satisfaction: he
merely dies. The world of Heathcliff and Catherine is a world of
spiritual affinities, of spiritual conflicts and loves. The whole book
moves on a spiritual plane except for one lapse, the unwholesome
physical passion of Isabella for her husband. "No brutality disgusted
her," says Heathcliff. "I've sometimes relented, from pure lack of
invention, in my experiments on what she could endure and still creep
shamefully back."

Catherine is completely innocent when she gives her body to Edgar while
her soul belongs to Heathcliff. This is her unforgivable sin, the
attempt to sunder the body from the soul.

"Nelly," she cries, "I _am_ Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind:
not as a pleasure, any more than I am a pleasure to myself, but as my
own being."

But out of the raging discord that Emily Brontë creates in the
stupendous passion of Catherine and Heathcliff she wrings a strange and
terrible harmony. One cannot help but gasp at the quiet, peaceful
ending:

"I lingered round them under that benign sky: watched the moths
fluttering among the heath and hare-bells, listened to the soft wind
breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine
unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

In the union of the younger Catherine and the redeemed Hareton one is
expected to feel that the souls of the two giant characters are
appeased, but we are not interested in that. The deaths of Catherine and
Heathcliff matter no more than the death of Cæsar in the play. Catherine
is never so much in the picture as when she has passed out of it
physically for ever. The whole tragedy is conducted on an invisible and
immaterial plane: it is really all written round one line of Browning
inverted:

    "The passion that left the sky to seek itself in the earth."

We are introduced to it at the very beginning of the book when Lockwood
hears and feels the ghost of Catherine: it begins with Heathcliff's
passionate outburst at her death: "Oh, God, it is unbearable! I _cannot_
live without my life! I _cannot_ live without my soul!"

It continues without a break for eighteen years and by the side of it
any passion that we have read of in modern English fiction seems so puny
and frigid as to be almost laughable.

The fight of Catherine to get through to her lover, hampered by his
flesh, forms really the great struggle of the book.

"I looked round impatiently"--it is Heathcliff's poignant cry--"I felt
her by me--I could _almost_ see her, and yet I _could not_!... She
showed herself, as she often was in life, a devil to me! And since then,
sometimes more and sometimes less, I've been the sport of that
intolerable torture!... When I sat in the house with Hareton, it seemed
that on going out I should meet her; when I walked on the moors I should
meet her coming in. When I went from home, I hastened to return; she
_must_ be somewhere at the Heights, I was certain! And when I slept in
her chamber--I was beaten out of that. I couldn't lie there; for the
moment I closed my eyes, she was either outside the window, or sliding
back the panels, or entering the room, or even resting her darling head
on the same pillow as she did when a child; and I must open my lids to
see. And so I opened and closed them a hundred times a night--to be
always disappointed! It racked me!... It was a strange way of killing:
not by inches, but by fractions of hair-breadths, to beguile me with the
spectre of a hope through eighteen years."

It is on reading passages like this that one realises the futility of
trying to explain away genius. This could only have been written by one
who had been whirled in a maelstrom of passion, racked and tortured on
the wheel of life in a way that we know Emily Brontë was never called
upon to endure, or--it is the result of a divine inspiration vouchsafed,
one knows not how, irrespective of mortal experience.

This wearing down of the flesh by the lust of a remorseless spirit is
one of the most deeply tragic, most deeply moving ideas ever presented
to man.

"In every cloud," he says at the end of the drama, "in every
tree--filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object
by day--I am devoured with her image! The most ordinary faces of men and
women--my own features--mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is
a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have
lost her...."

Again: "I am too happy; and yet I'm not happy enough. My soul's bliss
kills my body, but do not satisfy itself...."

And again: "There is _one_ who won't shrink from my company! By God!
she's relentless. Oh, damn it! It's unutterably too much for flesh and
blood to bear--even mine."

No--the real ending of _Wuthering Heights_ does not lie in any
concluding words of benign skies and quiet earth.

The real end is the tale told by the shepherd whom Lockwood meets on the
moor after Heathcliff is dead.

"I was going to the Grange one evening--a dark evening, threatening
thunder--and, just at the turn of the Heights, I encountered a little
boy with a sheep and two lambs before him; he was crying terribly; and I
supposed the lambs were skittish and would not be guided.

"'What is the matter, my little man?' I asked.

"'There's Heathcliff and a woman, yonder, under t' Nab,' he blubbered,
'un' I darenut pass 'em.'"

There is no question of redemption or moral problems here. She reveals a
point of view above good and evil. In her artistry and technique she is
thorough. The minor characters all preserve their individuality from
Joseph, the bitter, ranting Calvinist, to Nelly Dean, the teller of the
tale. Emily Brontë's accuracy in transcribing the Yorkshire dialect is
astonishing. She certainly listened to those Haworth rustics to some
advantage, even if she rarely exchanged a word with them. She is as well
able to paint the civilised, over-refined type who inhabit Thrushcross
Grange as she is to depict the primitive, half-savage inhabitants of
Wuthering Heights.

The sensual sentimentalist Isabella rouses the devil in Catherine and
loathing in Heathcliff; the illusion of refinement in Edgar results in
the terrible divorce of Catherine's body from her soul.

In these two and many other instances we see an unerring psychology in
Emily Brontë. Heathcliff's one solitary human feeling, as Charlotte
Brontë realised, was not his love for Catherine, which was "a sentiment
fierce and inhuman," but his "half-confessed regard for Hareton
Earnshaw--the young man whom he has ruined."

Seldom has the spirit of a place brooded over a book as does the spirit
of the moors over _Wuthering Heights_. Emily Brontë's descriptions of
scenery are as famous as those of Thomas Hardy: they are even less
laboured.

"Gimmerton chapel bells were still ringing; and the full, mellow flow of
the beck in the valley came soothingly on the ear. It was a sweet
substitute for the yet absent murmur of the summer foliage, which
drowned that music about the Grange when the trees were in leaf. At
Wuthering Heights it always sounded on quiet days following a great thaw
or a season of steady rain."

Exactitude marks her time, her scene and her depiction of passions and
emotions.

Her faults are as glaring as her virtues. Probably there has never been
a worse-constructed tale. It has to be read many times before one can
grasp its great qualities. There is scene within scene, tale within tale
of extraordinary intricacy. It is hard enough to remember who is
speaking; it is trebly hard to remember who everyone is. But her genius
is so all-powerful that once you are gripped by the story you simply
don't notice the clumsiness or the creaking of the machinery.

Of a piece with her genius is her style. It is perfect in its
simplicity, strength and beauty, very different from that of Charlotte
with her "peruse" and "indite." Nor does Emily's dramatic instinct ever
fail her: her scenes of passion follow nature and always ring true.

The picture we get of her personality from Mrs Gaskell's _Life of
Charlotte Brontë_, the tall, the strong, the unconquerable, the lover of
the moors and the lover of animals, makes her stand out from that book
as of a heroic, lovable but altogether mysterious type.

It is to M. Maeterlinck, however, that we owe the last word on Emily
herself. To him she is the supreme instance of the self-sufficing soul,
independent and regardless of the material event. She shows the
insignificance of all "experience" as compared with the spirit.

"Not a single event," he writes, "ever paused as it passed by her
threshold; yet did every event she could claim take place in her heart,
with incomparable force and beauty, with matchless precision and detail.
We say that nothing ever happened, but did not all things really happen
to her much more directly and tangibly than with most of us, seeing that
everything that took place about her, everything that she saw or heard
was transformed within her into thoughts and feelings, into indulgent
love, admiration, adoration of life?...

"If to her there came nothing of all that passes in love, sorrow,
passion or anguish, still did she possess all that abides when emotion
has faded away."

And what, you may well ask, has Emily's personality got to do with us
who are concentrating our attention on _Wuthering Heights_? Let
Swinburne supply the answer:

"The book is what it is because the author was what she was; this is the
main and central fact to be remembered. Circumstances have modified the
details; they have not implanted the conception.... The love which
devours life itself, which devastates the present and desolates the
future with unquenchable and raging fire, has nothing less pure in it
than flame or sunlight. And this passionate and ardent chastity is
utterly and unmistakably spontaneous and unconscious. Not till the story
is ended, not till the effect of it has been thoroughly absorbed and
digested, does the reader even perceive the simple and natural absence
of any grosser element, any hint or suggestion of a baser alloy in the
ingredients of its human emotion than in the splendour of lightning or
the roll of a gathered wave. Then, as on issuing sometimes from the
tumult of charging waters, he finds, with something of wonder, how
absolutely pure and sweet was the element of living storm with which his
own nature has been for a while made one; not a grain in it of soiling
sand, not a waif of clogging weed."

We read _Wuthering Heights_ then for its exquisite purity of
description:--"The snow has quite gone down here, darling, and I only
see two white spots on the whole range of moors: the sky is blue, and
the larks are singing, and the becks and brooks are all brim full"--the
perfection of her style. "If she be cold, I'll think it is this north
wind that chills me, and if she be motionless, it is sleep," and "I
dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep by that sleeper, with my heart
stopped, and my cheek frozen against hers," the stark-naked grandeur of
its genius.

"_Wuthering Heights_," says Charlotte Brontë, "was hewn in a wild
workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The statuary found
a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw how from the
crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister; a form moulded
with at least one element of grandeur--power. He wrought with a rude
chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations. With time
and labour, the crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal,
dark and frowning, half statue, half rock: in the former sense, terrible
and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is
of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its
blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the
giant's foot."




III

CHARLES LAMB


Everything in the end comes back to a question of taste. Why should one
prefer a Corona cigar to a "gasper," a turkey to tripe, a magnum of Mumm
to a quart of "swipes," _crêpe de Chine_ and georgette to ninon, Gerald
du Maurier to a patter comedian in a suburban pantomime, Titian to
Kirchner, or a Savile Row suit to a "reach-me-down"?

It isn't only a question of expense or even of comfort; it's more a
question of palate; man needs must love the highest when he sees it. We
are most of us too dull of vision and too vitiated by gross familiarity
with the commonplace and the vulgar to "see" in the true sense of the
word.

There are few benefactors so admirable as those who effect an
introduction between our insignificant selves and some genius who has
the power to translate us into realms undreamt of in our puny
imagination.

Among these geniuses Charles Lamb stands out pre-eminently for one most
important reason: he wears no august cloak of ceremony to frighten us
away; of all great writers he is the most human and the most lovable.
Begin by listening to his preface prefixed to _The Last Essay of Elia_.
There you will hear from his own lips the kind of writing he undertakes
to give you--"a sort of unlicked, incondite things--villainously pranked
in an affected array of antique modes and phrases."

Of himself we read with a grin of delight that "he never cared for the
society of what are called good people" ... that "he herded always,
while it was possible, with people younger than himself" ... that "his
manners lagged behind his years. He was too much of the boy-man. The
_toga virilis_ never sate gracefully on his shoulders."

He is more honest about his weaknesses than any other man of a like
fame.

He was certainly not of the "unco' guid," which may have accounted
partially for his dislike of Scotsmen, and he affected no indifferences.
As a writer he matters just in so far as he felt "the difference of
mankind--to an unhealthy excess. I can look with no indifferent eye upon
things or persons. Whatever is, is to me a matter of taste or
distaste.... I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices ... the
veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies, antipathies."

The hatred with which he views death shows us how completely a lover of
life he was:

"I am not content to pass away 'like a weaver's shuttle.' Those
metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of
mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears
human life to eternity, and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny.
I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the
unspeakable rural solitudes and the sweet security of streets. I would
set up my tabernacles here. I am content to stand still, at the age to
which I am arrived.... I do not want ... to drop, like mellow fruit, as
they say, into the grave. Any alteration, on this earth of mine ...
puzzles and discomposes me ... a new state of being staggers me. Sun,
and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the
greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and
society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside
conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and _irony itself_--do
these things go out with Life?"

If you can resist this, which to me is perhaps the most beautiful piece
of English prose in existence, you must be a little less than human
yourself. So you ask me again why you should read Lamb, and I answer:
(1) because he has always something to say and conveys his thought
"without smothering it in blankets"; (2) because in antique fancy, quip,
oddity, whimsical jest, humour, wit and irony, rare gifts all, he is a
supreme master; (3) because his limitations and tragedies were, like
ours, many, but his courage in facing them, unlike ours, was cheerful
and invincible; the best dramatic and literary critic of his time, he
yet had no ear for music ("to read a book, _all stops_, and be obliged
to supply the verbal matter"). He was prevented from becoming an actor
by an impediment in his speech; drink went to his head at once and he
was fond of it; himself the shining example of the sanity of true
genius, his sister killed her father in a mad frenzy; holding women in
reverence more than any man, he yet failed to marry the girl of his
choice; designed by nature to be a scholar and an Oxford don, he was
denied a university education and condemned to thirty-six years of
drudgery in a city office ... the list of Life's little ironies in his
case can be piled mountain high, but the supreme irony is that this
sufferer at the hands of the malignant fates is our greatest humorist;
and (4) because he takes the homely and familiar for his subjects and
sheds fresh and beautiful light upon them, making even the most soured
among us reconsider life and its possibilities.




IV

JAMES BOSWELL


Boswell is essentially a book for the pocket, to be opened at random
while waiting for a train or a doctor or a dentist; busy men of affairs
like Lord Rosebery have recognised it as the finest "night-cap" in the
world. It is the fallacy of thinking that "skipping" is the sign of a
shallow mind that has led to the avoidance of what is really the most
absorbing study in the world, the revelation of the lives and characters
of men of fame. And of all subjects for biography Dr Johnson stands
easily first, because he embodies all the essential features of the
English character; we see in him "our own magnified and glorified
selves."

Furthermore, he has a genius for his biographer; as Sir Walter Raleigh
says: "The accident which gave Boswell to Johnson and Johnson to Boswell
is one of the most extraordinary pieces of good fortune in literary
history."

It is mainly by his conversations that his character is depicted, and it
is worth remembering that his _mots_ are famous not only for their good
sense and sound judgment, but for their freshness and unexpectedness.

"No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into
a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being
drowned ... a man in jail has more room, better food, and commonly
better company." "Men know that women are an overmatch for them, and
therefore they choose the weakest or most ignorant. If they did not
think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as
themselves." "Even ill-assorted marriages are preferable to cheerless
celibacy." "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his
hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done
at all." "A peace will equally leave the warrior and relater of wars
destitute of employment; and I know not whether more is to be dreaded
from streets filled with soldiers accustomed to plunder, or from
garrets filled with scribblers accustomed to lie." "I am always for
getting a boy forward with his learning ... I would let him at first
read _any_ English book ... because you have done a great deal when you
have brought him to have entertainment from a book." "Sir, young men
have more virtue than old men; they have more wit and humour and
knowledge of life than we had; but then the dogs are not so good
scholars."

Once started it is exceedingly difficult to avoid quoting extensively.
One feels in all that he says that Dr Johnson had at any rate cleared
his mind of cant and proved to the hilt the truth of his aphorisms. You
will have noticed how clear-cut and simple they are, clothed in language
poles removed from that which tradition has chosen to associate with the
"sesquipedalian lexicographer." What sanity of outlook and healthiness
of mind is expressed in such a robust sentence as "Every man has a right
to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock
him down for it"; or, "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of
life." What joy we feel in the thought that to appreciate such talk as
his we need not be literary: it is enough to be English. "Books without
the knowledge of life are useless; or what should books teach but the
art of living?" We can trust a man who talks like that.

But it is not only for his superb common sense that we love Dr Johnson;
it is for the complete portrait of a complex character, rich in virtue,
human in its failings and limitations, that we owe Boswell an unpayable
debt of gratitude. "Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fullness of his
fame and in the enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us
than any other man in history." How well do we all recall that exquisite
summing up of Macaulay. No novelist would dare to give us so paradoxical
a picture. Here is a man full of reverence and piety who yet touches the
posts as he walks to avert evil; a man notorious for his brusquerie and
lack of manners, who describes himself as "well-bred to a degree of
needless scrupulosity," and of whom Goldsmith said that he had nothing
of the bear but his skin; a man far more apprehensive of death than most
of us, who yet took the knife out of the surgeon's hands in order to
operate on himself; afflicted by terrible diseases, he was yet one of
the most jovial and sociable men of his age; by nature sluggish and
averse from work, he yet did more actual drudgery than any ten ordinary
mortals.

Practically starving himself, he yet clothed, housed and fed a multitude
of ingrates; the great literary dictator of his time, he failed almost
entirely to appreciate poetry, and (most paradoxical of all) the great
giant of letters of the eighteenth century he has yet left practically
nothing that the ordinary man ever reads. "This is the greatness of
Johnson, that he is greater than his works. He thought of himself as a
man, not as an author ... duties and friendships and charities were more
to him than fame and honour." But the wise man will not be content with
the greatness of the man; "the reader who desires to have Johnson to
himself for an hour, with no interpreter, cannot do better than turn to
the notes on Shakespeare. They are written informally and fluently; they
are packed full of observation and wisdom; and their only fault is that
they are all too few."

It is hard to imagine that anyone who has read the noble preface to the
_Dictionary_, the illuminating preface to and notes on Shakespeare, the
thrilling _Life of Richard Savage_, and a selection of the sage essays
in _The Rambler_ and _The Idler_ should rest content until he had read
Johnson from end to end. This, then, is why one should read Boswell; you
will get a full-length picture of the typical Englishman at his
greatest, a lesson on the art of life, and an appetite to read the works
of one of the sanest, "all-round" writers who ever lived.




V

WILLIAM HAZLITT


"I think W. H. to be, in his natural and healthy state, one of the
wisest and finest spirits breathing.... I think I shall go to my grave
without finding, or expecting to find, such another companion," writes
Charles Lamb to Robert Southey, but "I wish he would not quarrel with
the world at the rate he does."

We read Lamb and Johnson and Pepys for their lovableness; we read
Hazlitt for his intensity of passion, his vigorous hate, his sense of
glorious enjoyment, his unstudied ease of manner, his healthy attitude
to literature, his enduring freshness and his stimulating criticism.

There is little in his life history to endear him to us; he was
unfortunate in his relations with the three women who came into his
life: "I have wanted one thing only to make me completely happy, but
lacking that I lack all"; he was an impossible friend; he even managed
to quarrel with Lamb, and though he was an acute and brilliant lecturer,
there was little sympathy between him and his audience. The early part
of the nineteenth century was the worst possible time for a shy,
over-sensitive and easily irritated writer to work in; the obscenities
of the _Blackwood's Magazine_ clique have left an ineradicable
stain--but when they speak of Hazlitt "as rather an ulcer than a man,"
even after this lapse of time our gorge rises; one ceases to wonder at
the vitriolic bitterness which he wastes on his enemies.

We read and admire Hazlitt because they never brought him to his knees;
he was a born fighter, a true adventurer; he neither asked nor gave
quarter.

Most of us have wondered why a nation so sports-mad as we are should
have been content for so long with such inept accounts of mighty
conflicts by field and river as we get in our newspapers. Bernard Shaw
did his best to portray a boxing contest, but Hazlitt alone among
writers has succeeded in expounding the philosophy of sport and making
us live through every moment of a bygone fight as if we had actually
witnessed it:

"Neate just then made a tremendous lunge at him, and hit him full in the
face. It was doubtful whether he would fall backwards or forwards; he
hung suspended for a second or two, and then fell back, throwing his
hands in the air, and with his face lifted up to the sky. I never saw
anything more terrific than his aspect just before he fell. All traces
of life, of natural expression, were gone from him. His face was like a
human skull, a death's head spouting blood. The eyes were filled with
blood, the nose streamed with blood, the mouth gaped blood. He was not
like an actual man, but like a preternatural, spectral appearance, or
like one of the figures in Dante's _Inferno_."

It is worthy of notice that he dedicates this description to the ladies:
"nor let it seem out of character for the fair to notice the exploits of
the brave."

Hazlitt is pre-eminently a fresh-air man. His essay _On Going a
Journey_, as R. L. Stevenson said, "is so good that there should be a
tax levied on all who have not read it." "Give me the clear blue sky
over my head" (what joy it gives one merely to transcribe the well-known
words), "and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me,
and a three hours' march to dinner--and then to thinking! It is hard if
I cannot start some game on these lone heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I
sing for joy." He brings just this naïve, fresh-air, healthy enthusiasm
into all his critical work, and it is this quality that calls forth that
noble panegyric of Professor Saintsbury which shows once and for all the
reason for reading Hazlitt:

"To anyone who has made a little progress in criticism himself, to
anyone who has either read for himself or is capable of reading for
himself, of being guided by what is helpful and of neglecting what is
not, there is no greater critic than Hazlitt in any language ... he is
the critics' critic as Spenser is the poets' poet."

That this is a bare statement of truth can be seen in the opening
lecture on the English poets:

"Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions. It relates
to whatever gives immediate pleasure or pain to the human mind. It comes
home to the bosoms and businesses of men; for nothing but what so comes
home to them in the most general and intelligible shape can be a subject
for poetry. Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with
nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry cannot have much
respect for himself or for anything else ... it is not a branch of
authorship: it is 'the stuff of which our life is made.'"

These are brave words and, as we should expect from so alert a pugilist,
straight from the shoulder.

His _Characters of Shakespeare's Plays_ is studded with gems of
criticism. "It is the peculiar excellence of Shakespeare's heroines that
they seem to exist only in their attachment to others. They are pure
abstractions of the affections." He is the least derivative of all
critics and quotes from one authority alone, himself: hence his
conclusions are not those of the academic professors, and it delights
our hearts to listen to him trouncing Henry V., that false idol of the
mob, and extolling Falstaff at his royal master's expense: "Falstaff is
the better man of the two."

And so you again ask me in one sentence why we should read Hazlitt and
the answer is, in the words of George Sampson: "A fondness for Hazlitt
is a fondness for health in literature" ... and there is room for health
in the literature of to-day.

"Though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like
Hazlitt."

If you want to prove this, turn again to _The Ignorance of the Learned_.
If only we could write like that!




VI

SAMUEL PEPYS


All girls in their teens and most boys keep what they call a diary, just
as most undergraduates and all young unmarried women write what they
imagine to be a novel: the value of each of these forms of expression
would be considerably enhanced if the writers of either took any pains
to learn the technique of their art. Of the ideal diarist two things are
pre-eminently required: an all-round interest in life and a complete
self-candour which is poles removed from the anæmic sickness of
self-love and an effective antidote against it. No one should dare to
keep a diary before reading Pepys from end to end, and few people will
dare to do so after reading him.

The question is not why we should read Pepys, but why we cannot help
reading Pepys. The answer is simple: No novelist would have the audacity
to ask us to believe in a hero who was at the same time Secretary to the
Admiralty, regenerator of the navy, Master of the Trinity House, master
of a city company, Member of Parliament, President of the Royal Society,
the friend and counsellor of kings and princes, and yet spent his spare
time "picking up" girls in church or behind the counter, making love to
his own maids and actresses, hiding his gold in the garden and digging
it up again, expressing "mighty content" at the spectacle of men being
hanged, drawn and quartered, alternately sulking with his wife and
soothing her suspicions about his amours, continually making oaths not
to get drunk and breaking them, gloating over his clothes like a
peacock, lamenting every expense in the way of entertainment like a
miser, frightened to death by fear of ghosts, burglars and the plague,
chronicling the details of every delectable dinner that he ate, and
every delectable wench that he saw or kissed--in short, expressing all
the undignified weaknesses our flesh is heir to.

"No man," says the philosopher, "was ever written down but by himself."

Certainly no man ever wrote himself "down" more honestly than Pepys.
Arnold Bennett was only speaking the bare truth when he said that none
of us would ever have the pluck to lock ourselves in a room and commit
to paper exactly what we have said or done or felt during the whole of
one day, even if we knew that no eyes but our own should ever scan the
page and that the manuscript should be burnt as soon as it was written.
Compromise is an essential concomitant of civilisation: perfect
sincerity even with ourselves is impossible. This explains at once the
irresistible fascination of Pepys: here is a man who has actually
achieved the impossible. Nine-tenths of our staple food in conversation
is gossip, not only in suburban drawing-rooms and London clubs, but in
every department of life. Scandal-mongering is as much a part and parcel
of our life as it was in Lady Sneerwell's day.

These peeps behind the scenes in a man's private life make us much more
lenient in our judgment of our own peccadilloes: thousands of men have,
we feel, acted as he did and we have done, but only Pepys has had the
temerity to confess: there is no entertainment so diverting as that of
watching a man give himself away. Pepys does it on every page with an
unconscious humour which adds a thousandfold to our enjoyment:

"To the Strand, to my booksellers, and there bought an idle, rogueish
French book, which I have bought in plain binding, avoiding the buying
of it better bound, because I resolve, as soon as I have read it, to
burn it, that it may not stand in the list of books, nor among them, to
disgrace them if it should be found." ... "This day, not for want, but
for good husbandry, I sent my father, by his desire, six pair of my old
shoes, which fit him, and are good."

"To St Dunstan's church where ... I stood by a pretty, modest maid, whom
I did labour to take by the hand; but she would not, but got further and
further from me; and at last, I could perceive her to take pins out of
her pocket to prick me if I should touch her again--which, seeing, I did
forbear, and was glad I did spy her design. And then I fell to gaze upon
another pretty maid, in a pew close to me, and she on me; and I did go
about to take her by the hand, which she suffered a little, and then
withdrew."

Pretty good, this, for the Secretary to the Admiralty! We feel ourselves
mighty superior fellows when we read confessions like this, don't we?

"My wife being dressed this day in fair hair, did make me so mad, that I
spoke not one word to her, though I was ready to burst with anger ... in
my way home discovered my trouble to my wife, swearing several times,
which I pray God forgive me for, and bending my fist, that I would not
endure it. She, poor wretch, was surprised with it, and made me no
answer all the way home; but there we parted, and I to the office late,
and then home, and without supper to bed, vexed ... up (next day) and
by-and-by down comes my wife ... she promising to wear white locks no
more in my sight, which I, like a severe fool, thinking not enough,
begun to except against, and made her fly out to very high terms and
cry, and in her heat, told me of (my) keeping company with Mrs Knipp
(the actress), saying, that if I would never see her more--of whom she
hath more reason to suspect than I had heretofore of Pembleton--she
would never wear white locks more. This vexed me ... but to think never
to see this woman--at least, to have her here more; and so all very good
friends as ever."

"'And so to bed,' writes Mr Secretary Pepys a hundred times in his
diary, and we may be sure that each time he joined Mrs Pepys beneath the
coverlet he felt that the moment which marked the end of his wonderful
day was one deserving careful record." So writes "W. N. P. Barbellion,"
the only modern diarist possessed in any degree of Pepys' complete
self-candour, and, it is worthy of notice, the passage occurs in a book
called _Enjoying Life_.




VII

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR


Because he always wrote prose like an artist Walter Savage Landor is
worthy to be read at all times and in all moods.

    "And through the trumpet of a child of Rome
    Rang the pure music of the flutes of Greece."

We all know what Swinburne thought about him: the trouble has been that
so few people have taken any pains to go further and rediscover this
great, imaginative artist for themselves. He is one of those
unfortunates whose work we agree to take as read. If we only had a half
his feeling for the value and weight of words the English tongue would
be ten times richer than it is to-day, richer in harmony, richer in
preciseness, richer in simplicity. He had a very definite sense of a
writer's duty: "I hate false words, and seek with care, difficulty and
moroseness those that fit the thing." Surely when we find a man with so
wide a range of thought, so filled with imagination, so much in love
with heroism, beauty and freedom, with a prose style that is, of its
kind, unrivalled, it is incumbent upon us to sink our prejudice against
the classical and do the little extra work which is essential to a true
appreciation of that salutary, clear-cut, highly disciplined art. His
appeal is to the few who can enjoy the best literature for itself, but
there is no reason why this circle should not be far wider than it is.

In his determination not to say anything superfluous he did at times
fall into obscurity, but we forgive that in Browning: it is certainly
not an all-obtrusive fault in Landor, especially in that later work of
his, the _Imaginary Conversations_, on which his reputation now rests.
Whether in those short and stirring scenes of emotion and action, or in
the long and quiet ones of discussion and reflection, he shows an
admirable insight into character, a fine dignity and urbanity, a
mastery over delicate aphorisms on human nature, and a range of interest
running from the earliest times to his own era. Take a few of the titles
at random if you wish to gauge his range: "Peleus and Thetis," "Leofric
and Godiva," "Mahomet and Sergius," "Filippo Lippi and Pope Eugenius
IV.," "Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn," "Peter the Great and Alexis," "The
Dream of Boccaccio," "The Dream of Petrarca."

Who is there among the narrators of old-time legends capable of charming
us so much as the man who makes the slave-girl Rhodopè begin her life
story thus:

"Never shall I forget the morning when my father, sitting in the coolest
part of the house, exchanged his last measure of grain for a chlamys of
scarlet cloth fringed with silver. He watched the merchant out of the
door, and then looked wistfully into the corn-chest. I, who thought
there was something worth seeing, looked in also, and, finding it empty,
expressed my disappointment, not thinking, however, about the corn. A
faint and transient smile came over his countenance at the sight of
mine. He unfolded the chlamys, stretched it out with both hands before
me, and then cast it over my shoulders. I looked down on the glittering
fringe and screamed with joy. He then went out; I know not what flowers
he gathered, but he gathered many; and some he placed in my bosom, and
some in my hair...."

Godiva's one poignant cry to herself, "I hope they will not crowd about
me so to-morrow," strikes a more effective note than the whole of
Tennyson's poem on the same subject. Filippo Lippi's peerless
description of his adventures in Barbary in the service of the corsair
Abdul, where he met Almeida of the hazel eyes, Almeida, "cool, smooth
and firm as a nectarine gathered before sunrise," is too well known to
be quoted here, but is one of the first to be read by those who would
see Landor in his natural element of beauty. "The clematis overtopped
the lemon and orange trees ... white pigeons, and others in colour like
the dawn of day ..."--this passage in particular is a masterpiece of
descriptive writing. Not easily does one forget the pathetic figure of
the discarded Anne Boleyn confronted in prison by her drunken husband.
"Love your Elizabeth, my honoured Lord, and God bless you! She will
soon forget to call me; do not chide her; think how young she is. Could
I, could I kiss her, but once again! It would comfort my heart--or break
it."

His sense of the dramatic is nowhere better shown than in that dialogue,
though Spenser's announcement of his terrible loss to Essex goes near to
equal it in pathos as does the appearance of Fiammetta to Boccaccio in
his dream.

But to prove how absolutely the classical spirit can bring perfection to
our native language what need is there of quoting more than this:

"Laodameia died; Helen died; Leda, the beloved of Jupiter, went before.
It is better to repose in the earth betimes than to sit up late; better
than to cling pertinaciously to what we feel crumbling under us, and to
protract an inevitable fall. We may enjoy the present while we are
insensible of infirmity and decay: but the present, like a note in
music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is past, and what is to
come. There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave: there
are no voices, O Rhodopè, that are not soon mute, however tuneful: there
is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which
the echo is not faint at last."

The white heat of austere, restrained passion is here, it is the
sublimation of the Latin model. This surely is English as we would have
her written, that which is rightly said and therefore sounds rightly.
This is one of those certain occasions on which prose can bear a great
deal of poetry: indeed there is more real poetry latent in the cadences
of this paragraph than in many so-called poems of to-day.

Sir Sidney Colvin happily contrasts Landor's twilight with that more
famous one of Keats:

"Within how few minutes has the night closed in upon us! Nothing is left
discernible of the promontories, or the long irregular breakers under
them. We have before us only a faint glimmering from the shells in our
path, and from the blossoms of the arbutus."

"The presence of the twilight and its spell," he very justly comments,
"are in the work of Landor not less keenly felt and realised than in the
work of Keats, only they are felt and realised in a widely different
manner."

This difference is simply that which lies between the romantic and the
classical. Landor will never trust himself to go beyond a bare statement
of fact, but beauty is no less implicit in the architecture of straight
lines than in the architecture of adornments and embellishments. His
aphorisms have passed into our common speech and men call up many
beautifully coined phrases from the depths of their consciousness about
life and death, forgetful of their source, which are attributable to
Landor.

"To stand upon one's guard against Death exasperates her malice, and
protracts our sufferings"; "Goodness does not more certainly make men
happy than happiness makes them good"; "Those who are quite satisfied
sit still and do nothing; those who are not quite satisfied are the sole
benefactors of the world"; "We often hear that such or such a thing 'is
not worth an old song.' Alas! how very few things are! What precious
recollections do some of them awaken! What pleasurable tears do they
excite? They purify the stream of life; they can delay it on its shelves
and rapids; they can turn it back again to the soft moss amidst which
its sources issue."

"Friendship is a vase, which, when it is flamed by heat, or violence, or
accident, may as well be broken at once; it never can be trusted after.
The more graceful and ornamental it was, the more clearly do we discern
the hopelessness of restoring it to its former state. Coarse stones, if
they are fractured, may be cemented again; precious ones never."

Reading exquisite thoughts like these clothed in such a perfectly firm
manner, we are led to think of the values of phrases and words which,
like many of our blessings, lie unrecognised.

"How carelessly, for example, do we say, 'I am delighted to _hear from
you_.' No other language has this beautiful expression, which, like some
of the most lovely flowers, loses its charm for want of close
inspection."

The classical method, you will notice again, of getting close to the
object and keeping one's eyes on it, not moving away to such a distance
that all the beauty lies in the vagueness and mystery of the scene.
Just as in his dramatic and narrative conversations he springs easily
from age to age, shedding a flood of new light on historical episodes,
so in his reflective and discursive notes he touches on every topic of
human interest, religion, fame, death, love, manners, society, politics,
literature; as a critic he moves easily, with felicity of expression and
breadth of survey, "the herald of the gods," with a sure sense of what
is required of him.

"A perfect piece of criticism must exhibit _where_ a work is good or
bad; _why_ it is good or bad; in what degree it is good or bad; must
also demonstrate in what manner and to what extent the same ideas or
reflections have come to others, and if they be clothed in poetry, why,
by an apparently slight variation, what in one author is mediocrity, in
another is excellence."

"To be useful to as many as possible is the especial duty of a critic,
and his utility can only be attained by rectitude and precision. He
walks in a garden which is not his own; and he neither must gather the
blossoms to embellish his discourse, nor break the branches to display
his strength. Rather let him point to what is out of order, and help to
raise what is lying on the ground."

"When a writer is praised above his merits in his own times, he is
certain of being estimated below them in the times succeeding."

"To constitute a great writer the qualities are, adequate expression of
just sentiments, plainness without vulgarity, elevation without pomp,
sedateness without austerity, alertness without impetuosity."

As we should expect, he lays most stress upon the virtues of moderation
and composure. "Whoever has the power of creating has likewise the
inferior power of keeping his creations in order. The best poets are the
most impressive, because their steps are regular; for without regularity
there is neither strength nor state. Look at Sophocles, look at
Æschylus, look at Homer."

"There are four things requisite to constitute might, majesty and
dominion in a poet: these are creativeness, constructiveness, the
sublime, the pathetic. A poet of the first order must have formed, or
taken to himself and modified, some great subject. He must be creative
and constructive."

"It is only the wretchedest of poets that wish all they ever wrote to be
remembered: some of the best would be willing to lose the most."

When he descends to the particular we find the same strong, sane,
comprehensive attitude of criticism. What could be better than his note
on Addison?

"I have always been an admirer of Addison, and the oftener I read him, I
mean his prose, the more he pleases me. Perhaps it is not so much his
style, which, however, is easy and graceful and harmonious, as the sweet
temperature of thought in which we always find him, and the attractive
countenance, if you will allow me the expression, with which he meets me
upon every occasion. It is very remarkable, and therefore I stopped to
notice it, that not only what little strength he had, but even all his
grace and ease, forsake him when he ventures into poetry."

He defends the use of idiom ("Every good writer has much idiom; it is
the life and spirit of language") and attacks the use of quotation:
"Before I let fall a quotation I must be taken by surprise. I seldom do
it in conversation, seldomer in composition; for it mars the beauty and
unity of style; especially when it invades it from a foreign tongue. A
quoter is either ostentatious of his acquirements, or doubtful of his
cause. And, moreover, he never walks gracefully who leans upon the
shoulder of another, however gracefully that other may walk."

Of his verse epigrams all the world knows _Rose Aylmer_ and most people
his of himself:

    "I strove with none, for none was worth my strife,
    Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
    I warmed both hands before the fire of life,
    It sinks, and I am ready to depart."

It would be hard to improve upon the accuracy of that description or the
artistry with which it is expressed.

"I shall dine late; but the dining-room will be well lighted, the guests
few and select."

It is with the object of enticing you to join that group of eclectics
that I have attempted to show you what manner of man he is who invites
you to his table. The conversation will be rich, the viands delicious to
an Epicurean palate, but if you have no taste and your talk is vulgar
you will only be bored.




VIII

JOHN DONNE


Readers of Rupert Brooke will almost certainly have made the
acquaintance of Donne the poet, admirers of Mr Logan Pearsall Smith will
with equal certainty have dipped into the excellent selections which
that versatile writer has made of Dr Donne's sermons.

But to search for a reason why everyone should read Donne we need go no
further than George Saintsbury's words:

"For those who have experienced, or who at least understand, the
ups-and-downs, the ins-and-outs of human temperament, the alternations
not merely of passion and satiety, but of passion and laughter, of
passion and melancholy reflection, of passion earthly enough and
spiritual rapture almost heavenly, there is no poet and hardly any
writer like Donne."

Our appetite for Donne was probably first whetted by Izaak Walton, who
wrote so admirable a biography of him. His personality intrigues us from
the start, his Marlowesque thirst for experience, experience of the
intellect and experience of sensation, finds a sympathetic echo to-day
in the minds of most of us. He knew a good deal about medicine, law,
astronomy and physiology, as well as theology: he joined the expedition
of Essex to Cadiz in 1596: he was ever adventuring in science, in love
and in travel. At the age of forty-two, poverty-stricken and a failure,
he took Orders and became one of the greatest preachers we have ever
had. He poured his whole soul into his sermons, and held his
congregations spellbound with his gorgeous prose, "perhaps never
equalled for the beauty of its rhythm and the Shakespearean magnificence
of its diction": he dwelt mainly on the subject of Sin (about which he
knew a good deal from experience), Death, God, Heaven and Infinity.
Listen to this on Eternity: "And all the powerfull Kings, and all the
beautifull Queenes of this world, were but as a bed of flowers, some
gathered at six, some at seven, some at eight, All in one Morning, in
respect of this Day. In all the two thousand yeares of Nature, before
the Law given by _Moses_, and the two thousand yeares of Law.... In all
this six thousand, and in all those, which God may be pleased to adde,
... in this House of his Fathers, there was never heard quarter clock to
strike, never seen minute glasse to turne." Or this personal confession
(rarest of delights in sermons): "I throw my selfe downe in my Chamber,
and I call in, and invite God, and his Angels thither, and when they are
there, I neglect God and his Angels, for the noise of a Flie, for the
ratling of a Coach, for the whining of a doore; I talke on, in the same
posture of praying; Eyes lifted up; knees bowed downe; as though I
prayed to God; and, if God, or his Angels should aske me, when I thought
last of God in that prayer, I cannot tell; Sometimes I finde that I had
forgot what I was about, but when I began to forget it, I cannot tell. A
memory of yesterdays pleasures, a feare of to morrows dangers, a straw
under my knee, a noise in mine eare, a light in mine eye, an anything, a
nothing, a fancy, a Chimera in my braine, troubles me in my prayer. So
certainely is there nothing, nothing in spirituall things, perfect in
this world."

"If Donne," says Robert Lynd, "had written much prose in this kind, his
_Sermons_ would be as famous as the writings of any of the saints since
the days of the Apostles."

If only more sermons contained such human touches as the following, the
modern church-goers would be more plentiful:--

"I am not all here, I am here now preaching upon this text, and I am at
home in my Library considering whether S. Gregory, or S. Hierome, have
said best of this text, before. I am here speaking to you, and yet I
consider by the way, in the same instant, what it is likely you will say
to one another, when I have done, you are not all here neither; you are
here now, hearing me, and yet you are thinking that you have heard a
better sermon somewhere else, of this text before."

But as an example of his highest power of eloquence and impassioned
imagination I will quote a passage that can challenge any passage in the
whole range of English prose:

"The ashes of an Oak in the Chimney, are no Epitaph of that Oak, to tell
me how high or how large that was; It tels me not what flocks it
sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell. The dust of
great persons graves is speechlesse too, it sayes nothing, it
distinguishes nothing: As soon the dust of a wretch whom thou wouldest
not, as of a Prince whom thou couldest not look upon, will trouble thine
eyes, if the winde blow it thither; and when a whirle-winde hath blowne
the dust of the Church-yard into the Church, and the man sweeps out the
dust of the Church into the Church-yard, who will undertake to sift
those dusts again, and to pronounce, This is the Patrician, this is the
noble flowre, and this the Yeomanly, this the Plebeian bran...."

But it is Donne the poet, the Donne who wrote

              "Her pure and eloquent blood
    Spoke in her cheeks and so distinctly wrought,
    That one might almost say her body thought,"

the Donne of

    "I long to talk with some old lover's ghost,
    Who died before the God of Love was born,"

of

    "I wonder by my troth what thou and I
        Did till we loved?"

of the

    "Bracelet of bright hair about the bone,"

that attracts the ordinary man and woman of to-day.

In spite of repeated incentives to listen, we turn deaf ears to sermons:
towards poetry we are inclined to be perhaps too kind.

Donne is all the more important as a poet because he treats of the
universal passion of love in more phases than any other poet. He was the
complete experimentalist in love, both in actual life and in his work.
He is frankly in search of bodily experiences:

    "Whoever loves, if he do not propose
    The right true end of love, he's one that goes
    To sea for nothing but to make him sick."

He is brutal:

    "For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love."

He is inconstant:

    "I can love any, so she be not true."

He bewails the inconstancy of women:

    "Though she were true when you met her,
    And last till you write your letter,
              Yet she
              Will be
    False, ere I come, to two or three."

His passion for sheer ugliness carries him away time after time:

    "Had it been some bad smell, he would have thought
    That his own feet, or breath, that smell had wrought."

Or again:

    "And like a bunch of ragged carrots stand
    The short swollen fingers of thy gouty hand."

In his _Elegies_ he tells stories of his conquests dramatically, in full
detail, satirically, sensually. In _Jealousy_ we are given an exact
picture of the deformed husband who,

    "Swol'n and pampered with great fare,
    Sits down and snorts, cag'd in his basket chair"

--so that the poet and his mistress perforce have to "play in another
house," away from those "towering eyes, that flamed with oily sweat of
jealousy."

In _The Perfume_ we see the girl's "immortal mother, which doth lie
still buried in her bed, yet will not die," who, fearing lest her
daughter be swollen, embraces her and names strange meats to try her
longings: we see

    "The grim-eight-foot-high-iron-bound-serving-man
    That oft names God in oaths, and only then."

But the scent that the lover uses gives him away and so he is by her
"hydroptic father catechized."

There is a good deal of frank naturalism in the elegy entitled _To his
Mistress Going to Bed_, but it is healthily coarse, though scarcely
quotable even in these times, which is a pity.

    "There is no penance due to innocence."

But playing as he does on all the notes of all the different sorts of
love, Donne gives the impression of one who attained in the end an
abiding love for one person, Anne More, his wife.

In _The Ecstasy_ we see him crying out against passionate friendship:

    "But O alas, so long, so far,
    Our bodies why do we forbear?"

and makes an unanswerable point in this verse:

    "So must pure lovers' souls descend
    T'affections and to faculties,
    Which sense may reach and apprehend,
    Else a great Prince in prison lies.
    To our bodies turn we then, that so
    Weak men on love reveal'd may look;
    Love's mysteries in souls do grow
    But yet the body is the book."

And in _The Anniversary_ he retracts all that he had once said about
inconstancy:

    "Here upon earth we are Kings, and none but we
    Can be such Kings, nor of such subjects be.
    Who is so safe as we, where none can do
    Treason to us, except one of us two?
        True and false fears let us refrain;
    Let us live nobly, and live, and add again
    Years and years unto years, till we attain
    To write three-score: This is the second of our reign."

There are few lovelier lyrics than _Break of Day_:

    "Stay, O sweet, and do not rise;
    The light that shines comes from thine eyes;
    The day breaks not, it is my heart,
    Because that you and I must part.
    Stay, or else my joys will die
    And perish in their infancy."

Or, to take a complete poem, none shows Donne in truer, finer light than
_The Dream_:

    "Dear love, for nothing less than thee
    Would I have broke this happy dream;
            It was a theme
    For reason, much too strong for fantasy.
    Therefore thou waked'st me wisely; yet
    My dream thou brokest not, but continued'st it.
    Thou art so true that thoughts of thee suffice
    To make dreams truths, and fables histories;
    Enter these arms, for since thou thought'st it best,
    Not to dream all my dream, let's act the rest.

    As lightning, or a taper's light,
    Thine eyes, and not thy noise waked me;
            Yet I thought thee
    --For thou lovest truth--an angel, at first sight;
    But when I saw thou saw'st my heart,
    And knew'st my thoughts beyond an angel's art,
    When thou knew'st what I dreamt, when thou knew'st when
    Excess of joy would wake me, and earnest then,
    I must confess, it could not choose but be
    Profane, to think thee anything but thee."

There is enough nastiness, eccentricity, coarseness, roughness and
extravagance in Donne to put off many fastidious readers: but his faults
lie open to the sky: his beauties are frequently hidden, but they are
worth searching for.

And yet--a word of warning--let George Saintsbury give it: "No one who
thinks _Don Quixote_ a merely funny book, no one who sees in
Aristophanes a dirty-minded fellow with a knack of Greek versification
... need trouble himself even to attempt to like Donne."

We read Donne, then, for his fiery imagination, for his deep
and subtle analysis, for his humanity, for his passion, for his
anti-sentimentalism, for his eager search "to find a north-west passage
of his own" in intellect and morals, for the richness and rarity of the
gems with which all his work, both prose and poetry, is studded, for his
modernity and freshness. We read Donne as a corrective of lazy thinking:
he frees us from illusion.




IX

SUCH A BOOK AS _THE BEGGAR'S OPERA_


One imagines Nigel Playfair and Arnold Bennett suddenly starting hares
over their cigars after dinner. "What shall we do next?" asks N. P.
plaintively. "Aren't there any old plays that are really good that the
public knows nothing of?"

A. B. gets up wearily and turns over a Dodsley or a Nimmo. "We don't
want to cut into the preserves of the Phoenix," he grumbles. "_The
Duchess of Malfi_, _Volpone_, _All for Love_ ... do you mean that sort
of thing?"

"Good God, no," replies Nigel truculently. "I meant something
light--something with a 'zip' about it."

"_The Critic_ or _A Trip to Scarborough_?" queries A. B. He is getting
sleepy and is rather bored.

"This is for the Lyric, Hammersmith, _our_ Lyric, not the Tooting Bec
Hippodrome or the Moss Empires."

"Well, what about _The Beggar's Opera_?" answers A. B. so languidly that
Nigel doesn't hear. He repeats it.

"The Beggar's what?" asks Nigel. "Never heard of it."

"I'll sing you some of the songs in it," says Arnold, waking up.

"No, no, for God's sake, no. We'll take it as sung."

That, I truly believe, is how plays get played. At any rate this is how
plays get read.

There are dozens of things lying buried in your old library, but you
won't take the trouble to unearth them. But now, well, you've only got
to dine earlier and enter a detestable Tube and cross a more detestable
Broadway and you can see _The Beggar's Opera_ most exquisitely done for
you on the stage. You can read the more piquant bits of it during the
interval in a truly Martin Seckerish edition if your companion goes to
the bar; this is quite different from the play as one hears it. The eye
is not so easily shocked as the ear. But I am wandering from my point,
which is this: "Why we should read Such a Book as _The Beggar's Opera_"
is my heavily weighted heading to this chapter.

Read _The Beggar's Opera_, yes, and then see if you can't find some of
the scores of other neglected plays equally well worth playing, and make
such a fuss about them that soon Nigel and Arnold or some other lover of
the theatre is compelled to put them on.

There is no dearth of mirth-provoking material, which is still not quite
intellectually futile---- But I'm wandering again. Let me begin.

We read _The Beggar's Opera_ for much the same reason that we read
Fielding, because it is, as Maurice Baring says, English, as English as
a landscape by Constable, or eggs and bacon. It has this added advantage
to those who see it acted, that it is full of ravishing English music.
Written in the first place in ridicule of the musical Italian opera, we
now read it or see it to regain some of that atmosphere of London life,
of brilliant wit, of racy coarseness, of satiric richness, which marked
the healthy century that gave it birth.

A bigger set of rogues than we here meet with it would be impossible to
imagine, but _nos hæc novimus esse nihil_ and we laugh undisturbed for
once by any moral twinges. "All Men are thieves in love, and like a
woman the better for being another's property": that is the sort of
proverb we like to hear in such a play: the more we hear the merrier we
grow.

How amazingly appropriate too are the songs: when Mrs Peachum learns
that Polly is really married to Macheath one feels that there was no
other way for her but to burst out into song:

    "Our Polly is a sad Slut! nor heeds what we have taught her.
    I wonder any Man alive will ever rear a Daughter!
    For she must have both Hoods and Gowns, and Hoops to swell her Pride,
    With Scarfs and Stays, and Gloves and Lace; and she will have Men
      beside;
    And when she's drest with Care and Cost, all tempting, fine and gay,
    As Men should serve a Cowcumber, she flings herself away."

"Do you think your Mother and I should have liv'd comfortably so long
together, if ever we had been married?" roars Peachum in a fine frenzy.

"Can you support the Expence of a Husband, Hussy, in Gaming, Drinking
and Whoring? Have you Money enough to carry on the daily Quarrels of Man
and Wife about who shall squander most?... Why, thou foolish Jade, thou
wilt be as ill-us'd, and as much neglected, as if thou hadst married a
Lord," shrieks her mother.

Polly confesses that she loves her husband and Mrs Peachum faints at the
awful news; revived by a double dose of cordial, she joins her daughter
in one of the most delicious songs in the play.

    "O Polly, you might have toy'd and kist.
      By keeping Men off, you keep them on.

    POLLY

        But he so teaz'd me,
        And he so pleas'd me,
    What I did, you must have done."

Her father then suggests that Polly has Macheath "peach'd" at the next
Sessions, so that she can become a rich widow, and leaves her to digest
the unpalatable idea. Macheath comes in and Polly urges him to fly,
which he does.

Act II. opens with one of the finest choruses imaginable, sung by a gang
of pickpockets in a tavern near Newgate:

    "Fill every glass, for wine inspires us,
          And fires us
    With Courage, Love and Joy.
    Women and wine should Life employ.
    Is there ought else on Earth desirous?"

Macheath comes in and announces to the gang that he must go into hiding
for a week or two and is left alone to ruminate upon life:

"A Man who loves Money, might as well be contented with one Guinea, as I
with one Woman ..." and is immediately joined by a gang of lovely
ladies, by far the most attractive of whom is Jenny Diver.

"As prim and demure as ever! There is not any Prude, though ever so high
bred, hath a more sanctify'd Look, with a more mischievous Heart. Ah!
thou art a dear artful Hypocrite...." Jenny, who never drinks
"Strong-Waters" but when she has "the Cholic," who never goes "to the
Tavern with a Man, but in the View of Business." "I have other Hours,
and other sort of Men for my Pleasure." It is Jenny who sings one of the
sweetest songs in the play:

    "Before the Barn-door crowing,
      The Cock by Hens attended,
    His Eyes around him throwing,
      Stands for a while suspended.
    Then One he singles from the Crew,
      And cheers the happy Hen;
    With how do you do, and how do you do,
      And how do you do again."

It is Jenny who then blindfolds him and betrays him to Peachum and the
constables.

We accompany, loath as Macheath to part company with Jenny, the Captain
to Newgate, where Lucy Lockit appears to add to his discomfiture by
wishing to "be made an honest woman of."

The two jailers then come in and fight over a point of honour and
depart. Meanwhile Macheath endeavours to make Lucy free him and is on
the point of succeeding when Polly appears and the fat is properly in
the fire. The situation gives rise to the most famous song in the play:

    "How happy I could be with either,
    Were t'other dear charmer away!
    But while you thus teaze me together,
    To neither a word will I say:
    But tol de rol...."

As a result of which the two girls turn on each other and Peachum
enters, giving Macheath a chance to reassure Lucy of his love for her,
so she gets the keys and lets him escape.

We then have an exquisite passage between Peachum and Mrs Trapes,
beginning in an inimitable vein:

_Peachum._ One may know by your Kiss, that your Ginn is excellent.

_Trapes._ I was always very curious in my Liquors.... Fill it up--I take
as large Draughts of Liquor, as I did of Love.... I hate a Flincher in
either.

Lucy, finding that she has released Macheath, only to let him fly to
Polly, resolves to poison her with rat's-bane mixed in her gin, which
Polly refuses: "Brandy and men (though women love them ever so well) are
always taken by us with some Reluctance--unless 'tis in private."

Macheath is again captured, this time in a gaming-house, and sings a
great number of songs (one to the tune of _Sally in our Alley_) in the
"Condemn'd Hold" while he drowns his sorrows in drink. To send the
audience away in a good humour he is reprieved at the last moment and
rejoins his doxie in a dance.

Such is the substance of a play which few people took the trouble to
read before they were unexpectedly given the chance of seeing it acted
at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith.

But whether we read it or see it, there are certain points about it
which make it perennially worth reading and worth seeing.

It is free from sentimentality, it is full of robust sense, and clears
the air once and for all from the taint of prurience that has fallen
upon us. The irony of it is mirth-provoking and delicious. It is a racy
and true picture of human nature stripped naked. There is no savagery,
only rascally good humour, true gaiety and buoyant vitality. As an
antidote to depression or bad temper it would be hard to think of any
quicker cut back to the joy of life.

And the best of it is that there are dozens of other plays equally
enjoyable hidden away in the treasure-house of old English plays,
waiting for you to unearth and rediscover them.




PART II

SOME CONTEMPORARIES




1

GEORGE SANTAYANA


Mr Logan Pearsall Smith, for whom most of us have a deep admiration,
reads George Santayana because he finds in this philosopher "much
writing like that of the older Essayists on large human subjects, which
seemed ... more interesting and in many ways more important than
anything ... in the works of other contemporary writers ... it has been
his aim to reconstruct our modern, miscellaneous, shattered picture of
the world, and to build, not of clouds, but of the materials of this
common earth, an edifice of thought, a fortress or temple for the modern
mind, in which every natural impulse could find, if possible, its
opportunity for satisfaction, and every ideal aspiration its shrine and
altar."

In a word, then, we should read Mr Santayana because he has a definite
philosophy, a rational conception of the world and man's allotted place
in it. But what, you will ask, does a modern novelist want with a
general philosophy when he has made it his business merely to describe
what he observes in the particular lives of individual men and women? To
which I would reply that though the philosopher has his eyes steadily
turned to the infinite and contemplates eternal values in the round, by
the light of reason, the novelist at times likes to turn from
transcribing the trivial incidents of everyday life and from probing the
characters of men and women to join the philosopher in his serene
detachment. What is good for the novelist is good for every man.

Even the business man or the sportsman occasionally thinks of a future
life either vividly and with acute misery when he has suffered an
irreparable loss or loosely and vaguely when he attends the religious
rites of his church. To such men--that is, to all of us who are not
philosophers--such a passage as the following acts like a tonic or tests
our courage.

"To imagine a second career is a pleasing antidote for ill-fortune: the
poor soul wants another chance. But how should a future life be
constituted if it is to satisfy this demand, and how long need it last?
It would evidently have to go on in an environment closely analogous to
earth; I could not, for instance, write in another world the epics which
the necessity of earning my living may have stifled here, did that other
world contain no time, no heroic struggles, or no metrical language. Nor
is it clear that my epics, to be perfect, would need to be quite
endless. If what is foiled in me is really poetic genius and not simply
a tendency toward perpetual motion, it would not help me if in heaven,
in lieu of my dreamt-of epics, I were allowed to beget several robust
children. In a word, if hereafter I am to be the same man improved I
must find myself in the same world corrected."

In a moment we feel as if the windows were opened for the first time in
our minds and the pure air of Reason allowed to circulate in our weak
lungs. Such clarity of thought may kill us by its freshness; on the
other hand, it may restore us to real health. May not our pathetic
clinging to a belief in immortality be only a gross form of selfish
terror? The philosopher would raise us to a higher plane of thought.

"What a despicable creature must a man be, and how sunk below the level
of the most barbaric virtue, if he cannot bear to live and die for his
children, for his art, or for his country...." "Let a man once overcome
his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude itself is, in
one sense, overcome...." "Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live
on, to live on any how and in any shape: a spirit with any honour is not
willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is
not over-eager to live at all."

"While the primitive and animal side of man may continue to cling to
existence at all hazards and to find the thought of extinction
intolerable, his reason and finer imagination will build a new ideal on
reality better understood, and be content that the future he looks to
should be enjoyed by others...."

"The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who
have loved it."

So we are bidden to follow the advice of Horace:

"He lives happy and master over himself who can say daily, I have
lived."

It is this fierce determination to face the truth of things and not to
take refuge in comfortable superstitions that endears the philosopher to
us and makes us sympathise with his scorn for the irrationality of
Browning.

"It [Browning's "philosophy"] is in spirit the direct opposite of the
philosophic maxim of regarding the end, of taking care to leave a
finished life and a perfect character behind us. It is the opposite,
also, of the religious _memento mori_, of the warning that time is short
before we go to our account. According to Browning, there is no account:
we have an infinite credit ... his notion is simply that the game of
life, the exhilaration of action, is inexhaustible ... but it is
unmeaning to call such an exercise heaven ... it is a mere euphemism to
call this perpetual vagrancy a development of the soul."

Closely related to his thoughts on Immortality are Mr Santayana's
caustic comments on fame.

"The highest form of vanity is love of fame. It is a passion easy to
deride but hard to understand, and in men who live at all by imagination
almost impossible to eradicate. The good opinion of posterity can have
no possible effect on our fortunes, and the practical value which
reputation may temporarily have is quite absent in posthumous fame....
What comfort would it be to Virgil that boys still read him at school,
or to Pindar that he is sometimes mentioned in a world from which
everything he loved has departed?" ... But yet the ancients "often
identified fame with immortality, a subject on which they had far more
rational sentiments than have since prevailed.... Fame consists in the
immortality of a man's work, his spirit, his efficacy, in the perpetual
rejuvenation of his soul in the world."

The whole essence of Mr Santayana's teaching on this point is that we
become a portion of that loveliness which once we made more lovely. It
is a wholesome, sanative doctrine this ... it leads us to the belief
that if we are butterflies, we have a real immortality in that we have
added something to the eternal beauty of the world: if we are beetles
... and are squashed, I take it that one more piece of beastliness is
suppressed at our extinction and we ought to be glad at that.
Consequently, if we accept his theory of the finitude of life, we are
braced up to do our part while we can. We strive to round off each day
with the phrase, "I have lived," and we see our immortality in our
oneness with the Universe, not in the endless projection of our own
feeble personality.

And after the philosophy of life we turn naturally to thoughts on Love.

"Not to believe in love is a great sign of dulness," we read. "It is a
true natural religion ... it sanctifies a natural mystery ... it
recognises that what it worshipped under a figure was truly the
principle of all good. The loftiest edifices need the deepest
foundations. Love would never take so high a flight unless it sprung
from something profound and elementary.... When the generative energy is
awakened all that can ever be is virtually called up and made
consciously potential; and love yearns for the universe of values.... As
a harp, made to vibrate to the fingers, gives some music to the wind, so
the nature of man, necessarily susceptible to woman, becomes
simultaneously sensitive to other influences, and capable of tenderness
toward every object."

And after love, religion.

He adds an all-important corollary to Bacon's well-known axiom that "a
little philosophy inclineth men's minds to atheism, but depth in
philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion."

"When Bacon penned the sage epigram," he continues, "he forgot to add
that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far
from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them. It
would be pitiful indeed if mature reflection bred no better conceptions
than those which have drifted down the muddy stream of time, where
tradition and passion have jumbled everything together."

I suppose that though most of us have had to listen to an amazing amount
of nonsense about immortality and love, on the subject of religion we
have rarely been taught anything that was not nonsense. Mr Santayana
clears the ground as with a hatchet. We feel after reading him as if we
were able to see clearly for the first time.

In _Prosaic Misunderstandings_ he makes us realise precisely what we
mean by religion.

"Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretensions to be
dealing with matters of fact.... The excellence of religion is due to an
idealisation of experience which, while making religion noble if treated
as poetry, makes it necessarily false if treated as science.... The mass
of mankind is divided into two classes--the Sancho Panzas who have a
sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for
ideals, but mad. The expedient of recognising facts as facts and
accepting ideals as ideals, although apparently simple enough, seems to
elude the normal human power of discrimination."

"A god is a conceived victory of mind over nature. A visible god is the
consciousness of such a victory momentarily attained. The vision soon
vanishes, the sense of omnipotence is soon dispelled by recurring
conflicts with hostile forces: but the momentary illusion of that
realised good has left us with the perennial knowledge of good as an
ideal. Therein lies the essence and the function of religion."

Christianity conquered the world because it proclaimed a new poetry, a
new ideal and a new God. "The moving power was a fable ... it carried
the imagination into a new sphere ... it was a whole world of poetry
descended among men."

The Christian drama, he tells us, is a magnificent poetic rendering of
the fact that what is false in the science of facts may be true in the
science of values: while the existence of things must be understood by
referring them to their causes, which are mechanical, their functions
can only be explained by what is interesting in their results: in other
words, by their relation to human nature and to human happiness ... so
the whole of Christian doctrine is thus religious and efficacious only
when it becomes poetry.

Christian fictions beguiled the intellect but they enlightened the
imagination: they made man understand the pathos and nobility of his
life, the necessity of discipline, the possibility of sanctity.

And though Mr Santayana would have us accept his dictum that matters of
religion should never be matters of controversy, he does not hesitate
to become controversial himself over what he calls Protestantism (which
he would doubtless say is not a matter of religion at all). He lashes
out in no uncertain tones: "It is sentimental, its ritual is meagre and
unctuous, it expects no miracles, it thinks optimism akin to piety and
regards profitable enterprise and practical ambition as a sort of moral
vocation."

It is not surprising in view of what he has to say about the world of
politics and religion to find that he expresses relief at being able to
turn from them to almost any art, "where what is good is altogether and
finally good and what is bad is at least not treacherous: ... how doubly
blessed it becomes to find a sphere where limitation is an excellence,
where diversity is a beauty, and where every man's ambition is
consistent with every other man's and even favourable to it ... with an
artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colours of a child's
eyes." But he ponders upon the rarity of æsthetic feeling. "Men are
habitually insensible to beauty ... moralists are much more able to
condemn than to appreciate the effects of the arts ... and beauty (in
which he finds a hint of happiness) is something indescribable ... it is
the clearest manifestation of perfection, and the best evidence of its
possibility. Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the
soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the prevalence of
the good."

So we find that in his eyes the value of all art lies in making people
happy " ... to discriminate happiness is the very soul of art, which
expresses experience without distorting it." The queer thing is that
though men ought to pursue happiness, they seldom do so ... by happiness
Mr Santayana means friendship, wealth, reputation, power, and influence
added to family life. "If, then, artists and poets are unhappy, it is,
after all, because happiness does not interest them; they cannot
seriously pursue it, because its components are not components of
beauty, and being in love with beauty, they neglect and despise those
unæsthetic social virtues in the operation of which happiness is found."
On the other hand, those who pursue happiness conceived in terms of
money, success, respectability and so on miss more often than not that
real and fundamental part of happiness which flows from the senses and
imagination. "This element is what the love of beauty can add to life:
for beauty can also be a cause and a factor of happiness. Yet the
happiness of loving beauty is either too sensuous to be stable, or else
too ultimate, too sacramental, to be accounted happiness by the worldly
mind."

When he descends to particularise upon the arts we are surprised to find
that he has nothing to say about painting, and begins with music, music
which he calls "essentially useless, as life is: but both lend utility
to their conditions ... pure music is pure art. Its extreme abstraction
is balanced by its entire spontaneity, and while it has no external
significance, it bears no internal curse ... it is the chosen art of a
mind to whom the world is still foreign ... it serves to keep alive the
conviction that perfection is essentially possible; it reminds us that
there are worlds far removed from the actual which are yet living and
very near to the heart ..." and so while it is "the purest and most
impressive of the arts, it is the least human and instructive of them."

Literature, according to his theory, takes a middle course between music
and science and tries to subdue music, which for its purposes would be
futile and too abstract, into conformity with general experience, making
music thereby significant. Literature "looks at natural things with an
incorrigibly dramatic eye, turning them into permanent unities (which
they never are) and almost into persons. The literary man is an
interpreter and hardly succeeds, as the musician may, without experience
and mastery of human affairs. His art is half genius and half fidelity.
He needs inspiration ... yet inspiration alone will lead him astray, for
his art is relative to something other than its own formal impulse; it
comes to clarify the real world, not to encumber it."

He rightly differentiates between the philosopher and the poet when he
says that the philosopher in his best moments is a poet, while the poet
"has his worst moments when he succeeds in being a philosopher."

"Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it
is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's-length.... The first
element which the intellect rejects in forming its ideas of things is
the emotion which accompanies the perception; and this emotion is the
first thing the poet restores. He stops at the image, because he stops
to enjoy.... Poetry takes every present passion and every private dream
in turn for the core of the universe." He finds that the prosaic
rendering of experience has a greater value, if only the experience
covers enough human interests: youth and aspiration indulge in poetry
... for "youth, being as yet little fed by experience, can find volume
and depth only in the soul; the half-seen, the supra-mundane, the
inexpressible, seem to it alone beautiful and worthy of homage....
Mature interests centre on soluble problems and tasks capable of
execution ... to dwell, as irrational poets do, on some private
experience, on some emotion without representative or ulterior value,
seems a waste of time. Fiction becomes less interesting than affairs,
and poetry turns into a sort of incompetent whimper, a childish
foreshortening of the outspread world."

On the other hand, Mr Santayana finds in the abstractness of prose its
great defect. It must convey intelligence, but intelligence clothed in a
language that lends the message an intrinsic value and makes it
delightful to apprehend apart from its importance in ultimate theory or
practice. It is in that measure a fine art ... a poetry "pervasively
representative." In a most stimulating little essay on _The Supreme
Poet_ the philosopher propounds his ideal for literature. "It might be
throughout a work of art. It would become so not by being ornate, but by
being appropriate: and the sense of a great precision and justness would
come over us as we read or write. It would delight us; it would make us
see how beautiful, how satisfying, is the art of being observant,
economical, and sincere."

Furthermore, life has a margin of play which might become broader....
"To the art of working well a civilised race would add the art of
playing well. To play with nature and make it decorative, to play with
the over-tones of life and make them delightful, is a sort of art." The
new poet of this double insight would "live in the continual presence of
all experience, and respect it: he would at the same time understand
nature, the ground of that experience; and he would also have a
delicate sense for the ideal echoes of his own passions, and for all the
colours of his possible happiness." It is sad to think that this supreme
poet is in limbo still, but now that the path has been so clearly
indicated for him, are we not justified in thinking that Mr Santayana is
merely the herald of his great dawn?

Just as he sees no great poet even in embryo, so he laments the death of
all great men:

"A great man need not be virtuous nor his opinions right, but he must
have a firm mind, a distinctive, luminous character ... greatness is
spontaneous ... simplicity, trust in some one clear instinct, are
essential to it; but the spontaneous variation must be in the direction
of some possible sort of order ... how should there be any great heroes,
saints, artists, philosophers or legislators in an age when nobody
trusts himself ... in an age when the word _dogmatic_ is a term of
reproach? Greatness has character and severity, it is deep and sane, it
is distinct and perfect. For this reason there is none of it to-day....
A great imaginative apathy has fallen on the mind. One-half the learned
world is amused in tinkering obsolete armour, as Don Quixote did his
helmet; deputing it, after a series of catastrophes, to be at last sound
and invulnerable. The other half, the naturalists who have studied
psychology and evolution, look at life from the outside, and the
processes of Nature make them forget her uses."

These are hard words, but who can say that they are undeserved?

Not less scornful is he over our contempt for the intellect. "The degree
of intelligence which this age possesses makes it so very uncomfortable
that it asks for something less vital, and sighs for what evolution has
left behind. In the presence of such cruelly distinct things as
astronomy or such cruelly confused things as theology it feels _la
nostalgie de la boue_." Instead of freeing their intelligence, our
enslaved contemporaries elude it. They cannot rise to a detached
contemplation of earthly things; they revert to sensibility: having no
stomach for the ultimate, they burrow downwards towards the primitive.
"To be so preoccupied with vitality is a symptom of anæmia."

Yet Mr Santayana is not the sort of man to indulge in sweeping
denunciations. There is a reverse to this picture of the modern world.

"Without great men and without clear convictions this age is
nevertheless very active intellectually: it is studious, empirical,
inventive, sympathetic. Its wisdom consists in a certain contrite
openness of mind; it flounders, but at least in floundering it has
gained a sense of possible depths in all directions."

But our poetry is the poetry of barbarism, because this age has no sense
for perfection; its ideals are negative and partial, its moral strength
is a blind vehemence. So we get no total vision, no grasp of the whole
reality, no capacity for a sane and steady idealisation. In his little
essays on Materialism and Morals we find this outspoken philosophy on
the subject of war:

"There are panegyrists of war who say that without a periodical bleeding
a race decays and loses its manhood. Experience is directly opposed to
this shameless assertion. It is war that wastes a nation's wealth,
chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies,
condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny,
deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation. Internecine war,
foreign and civil, brought about the greatest set-back which the life of
reason has ever suffered; it exterminated the Greek and Italian
aristocracies. Instead of being descended from heroes, modern nations
are descended from slaves: and it is not their bodies only that show
it.... To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling
debauchery the soil of love."

But we read a philosopher mainly, I take it, to see how he himself
reached his serene height of detached interest in the universe. We who
have no philosophic bent fondly imagine that it is only after despairing
of instinctive happiness that the philosopher turns his back on the
struggle of life with his shout of "Sour Grapes." Reading Mr Santayana
will correct this delusion.

"We cannot venerate anyone in whom appreciation is not divorced from
desire. And this elevation and detachment of the heart need not follow
upon any great disappointment; it is finest and sweetest where it is the
gradual fruit of many affections now merged and mellowed into a natural
piety. Indeed, we are able to frame our idea of the Deity on no other
model.... There is perhaps no more frivolous notion than that a good,
once attained, loses all its value.... We turn from a beautiful thing,
as from a truth or a friend, only to return incessantly, and with
increasing appreciation."

This, then, is the reason why we should read Mr Santayana, that we
should clarify our aims, readjust our standards, and increase our
capacity for appreciating the beautiful, for this is the royal road to
the only happiness which is true, steadfast and eternal.




II

THE POEMS OF FRANCIS BRETT-YOUNG


Read but this one song:

    "Why have you stolen my delight
    In all the golden shows of spring
    When every cherry-tree is white
    And in the limes the thrushes sing,

    O fickler than the April day,
    O brighter than the golden broom,
    O blyther than the thrushes' lay,
    O whiter than the cherry-bloom,

    O sweeter than all things that blow ...
    Why have you only left for me
    The broom, the cherry's crown of snow,
    And thrushes in the linden-tree?"

Is there any need of further reason?

One concedes to that at once a word not often unlocked from one's
vocabulary; loveliness is implicit in it, music, harmony, beauty are all
there. Alas! that we should have to search among so many heaps of rubble
for one rich gem, but this at any rate is well-nigh flawless: for the
rest, Mr Brett-Young has approached excellence, achieved haunting lines
and oftentimes failed to arouse any emotional feeling at all. He talks
of the lovely words that wander through his brain, but they frequently
refuse to leave their refuge. He is at his best when he is most simple,
as here:

    "High on the tufted baobab-tree
    To-night a rain-bird sang to me
    A simple song, of three notes only,
    That made the wilderness more lonely;

    For in my brain it echoed nearly,
    Old village church bells chiming clearly:
    The sweet cracked bells, just out of tune,
    Over the mowing grass in June--

    Over the mowing grass, and meadows
    Where the low sun casts long shadows,
    And cuckoos call in the twilight
    From elm to elm, in level flight.

    Now through the evening meadows move
    Slow couples of young folk in love,
    Who pause at every crooked stile
    And kiss in the hawthorn's shade the while:

    Like pale moths the summer frocks
    Hover between the beds of phlox,
    And old men, feeling it is late,
    Cease their gossip at the gate,

    Till deeper still the twilight grows,
    And night blossometh, like a rose
    Full of love and sweet perfume,
    Whose heart most tender stars illume.

    Here the red sun sank like lead,
    And the sky blackened overhead;
    Only the locust chirped at me
    From the shadowy baobab-tree."

I don't deny that this trick of contrasting unpleasant existing
conditions with pleasant conditions that surrounded one's past some time
before was part of the stock-in-trade of every so-called war poet. I am
not at all concerned to defend, nor am I interested in, the contrast. I
merely chronicle the æsthetic pleasure that I derive from verses four
and five, though neither of these even approaches perfection. But I do
maintain that both the poems I have quoted are worth reading. I do
maintain that Mr Brett-Young has the instinct of all true poets: he
realises that "Beauty is an armour against fate," "that a lovely word
is not an idle thing": he is a true lover of Beauty: listen to his
confession of faith:

    "Beauty and love are one,
    Even when fierce war clashes:
    Even when our fiery sun
    Hath burnt itself to ashes,
    And the dead planets race
    Unlighted through blind space,
    Beauty will still shine there:
    Wherefore, I worship her."

He is, moreover, most successful when he invokes her:

    "Whither, O my sweet mistress, must I follow thee?
    For when I hear thy distant footfall nearing,
        And wait on thy appearing,
    Lo! my lips are silent: no words come to me.

    Once I waylaid thee in green forest covers,
    Hoping that spring might free my lips with gentle fingers;
        Alas! her presence lingers
    No longer than on the plain the shadow of brown kestrel hovers.

    Through windless ways of the night my spirit followed after;--
    Cold and remote were they, and there, possessed
        By a strange unworldly rest,
    Awaiting thy still voice heard only starry laughter.

    The pillared halls of sleep echoed my ghostly tread.
    Yet when their secret chambers I essayed
        My spirit sank, dismayed,
    Waking in fear to find the new-born vision fled.

    Once indeed--but then my spirit bloomed in leafy rapture--
    I loved; and once I looked death in the eyes:
        So, suddenly made wise,
    Spoke of such beauty as I may never recapture....

    Whither, O divine mistress, must I then follow thee?
    Is it only in love ... say, is it only in death
        That the spirit blossometh,
    And words that may match my vision shall come to me?"

It is because of these simple short poems that I like Mr Brett-Young's
work: in his more ambitious and longer poems like _Thamar_ he leaves me
untouched. He cannot convey in words the mysterious mingled effect that
the combined colour, music and movement of the Russian ballet produces
on the mind.

Let him remain content with the soft, sweet simplicity of Prothalamion
and we shall love him the more:

    "When the evening came my love said to me:
    Let us go into the garden now that the sky is cool,
    The garden of black hellebore and rosemary,
    Where wild woodruff spills in a milky pool.

    Low we passed in the twilight, for the wavering heat
    Of day had waned, and round that shaded plot
    Of secret beauty the thickets clustered sweet;
    Here is heaven, our hearts whispered, but our lips spake not.

    Between that old garden and seas of lazy foam
    Gloomy and beautiful alleys of trees arise
    With spire of cypress and dreamy beechen dome,
    So dark that our enchanted sight knew nothing but the skies.

    Veiled with soft air, drench'd in the roses' musk
    Or the dusky, dark carnation's breath of clove;
    No stars burned in their deeps, but through the dusk
    I saw my love's eyes, and they were brimmed with love.

    No star their secret ravished, no wasting moon
    Mocked the sad transience of those eternal hours:
    Only the soft, unseeing heaven of June,
    The ghosts of great trees, and the sleeping flowers.

    For doves that crooned in the leafy noonday now
    Were silent; the night-jar sought his secret covers,
    Nor even a mild sea-whisper moved a creaking bough--
    Was ever a silence deeper made for lovers?

    Was ever a moment meeter made for love?
    Beautiful are your closed lips beneath my kiss;
    And all your yielding sweetness beautiful--
    Oh, never in all the world was such a night as this!"




III

THE POEMS OF IRIS TREE


Iris Tree is worth reading for her vivacity, her hatred of shams, her
intellectual fireworks, her simple love of the beautiful, her youthful
rebellion, her sense of colour, her harmony, her humour, but most of all
for this:

    "Many things I'd find to charm you,
    Books and scarves and silken socks,
    All the seven rainbow colours,
    Black and white with 'broidered clocks.
    Then a stick of polished whalebone
    And a coat of tawny fur,
    And a row of gleaming bottles
    Filled with rose-water and myrrh.
    Rarest brandy of the 'fifties,
    Old liqueurs in leather kegs,
    Golden Sauterne, copper sherry
    And a nest of plovers' eggs.
    Toys of tortoise-shell and jasper,
    Little boxes cut in jade;
    Handkerchiefs of finest cambric,
    Damask cloths and dim brocade,
    Six musicians of the Magyar,
    Madness making harmony;
    And a bed austere and narrow
    With a quilt from Barbary.
    You shall have a bath of amber,
    A Venetian looking-glass,
    And a crimson-chested parrot
    On a lawn of terraced grass.
    Then a small Tanagra statue
    Found anew in ruins old,
    Or an azure plate from Persia,
    Or my hair in plaits of gold;
    Or my scalp that like an Indian
    You shall carry for a purse,
    Or my spilt blood in a goblet ...
    Or a volume of my verse."

If this doesn't make you rush out and buy her poems, nothing will. It is
the topmost level of her achievement, and it is an achievement that even
so musical a poet as Walter de la Mare would not be ashamed of having
written. Where, I would know, has the love of little material things
been so deliciously, so naïvely confessed by any other poet? Listen to
her in rebellious mood:

    "You preach to me of laws, you tie my limbs
    With rights and wrongs and arguments of good,
    You choke my song and fill my mouth with hymns,
    You stop my heart and turn it into wood.

    I serve not God, but make my idol fair
    From clay of brown earth, painted bright with blood,
    Dressed in sweet flesh and wonder of wild hair
    By Beauty's fingers to her changing mood.

    The long line of the sea, the straight horizon,
    The toss of flowers, the prance of milky feet,
    And moonlight clear as grass my great religion,
    And sunrise falling on the quiet street.

    The coloured crowd, the unrestrained, the gay,
    And lovers in the secret sheets of night
    Trembling like instruments of music, till the day
    Stands marvelling at their sleeping bodies white."

Here, surely, is that love of beauty, finely expressed, which is the
first thing we look for in any true poet. She invokes the aid of her
"three musketeers of faithful following," Love, Humour and Rebellion,
and these three stalwarts never desert her, and one finds oneself
wishing that some other poets had had the good sense to recruit the
services of such helpful henchmen.

Especially pleasant is it to find that she has not yet outgrown her
youthful pessimism: once youth has passed, time cries for
self-expression in other ways than these:

    "There are songs enough of love, of joy, of grief:
    Roads to the sunset, alleys to the moon:
    Poems of the red rose and the golden leaf,
    Fantastic faery and gay ballad tune.

    The long road unto nothing I will sing,
    Sing on one note, monotonous and dry,
    Of sameness, calmness and the years that bring
    No more emotion than the fear to die.

    Grey house, grey house and after that grey house,
    Another house as grey and steep and still:
    An old cat tired of playing with a mouse,
    A sick child tired of chasing down the hill."

There are nothing like enough songs of love or of joy, and no one knows
that better than Iris Tree, but Youth loves to drench itself in hopeless
greyness, if only to run through the whole gamut of human emotions,
"just for fun." It is like a child's dressing up in a myriad different
costumes:

    "I see myself in many different dresses ...
    I see myself the child of many races,
    Poisoners, martyrs, harlots and princesses;
    Within my soul a thousand weary traces
    Of pain and joy and passionate excesses...."

Much more significant of maturity is her bizarre _Sonnet for Would-be
Suicides_ (that is my title for it, not hers):

    "How often, when the thought of suicide
    With ghostly weapon beckons us to die,
    The ghosts of many foods alluring glide
    On golden dishes, wine in purple tide
    To drown our whim. Things danced before the eye
    Like tasselled grapes to Tantalus: the sly
    Blue of a curling trout, the battened pride
    Of ham in frills, complacent quails that lie
    Resigned to death like heroes--July peas,
    Expectant bottles foaming at the brink--
    White bread, and honey of the golden bees--
    A peach with velvet coat, some prawns in pink,
    A slice of beef carved deftly, Stilton cheese,
    And cups where berries float and bubbles wink."

One at least of her faithful musketeers has served her to excellent
purpose in this eminently philosophical poem. Uncle Max's eyes must
twinkle with sheer merriment every time he reads this: it must be
pleasant to have a niece so capable of profiting by his genius. Another
friend of the family, Rupert Brooke, must have appreciated the panegyric
on Worms. He may have directly inspired it:

    "Mouth of the dust I kiss, corruption absolute,
    Worm, that shall come at last to be my paramour,
    Envenomed, unseen wanderer who alone is mute,
    Yet greater than gods or heroes that have gone before.

    For you I sheave the harvest of my hair,
    For you the whiteness of my flesh, my passion's valour,
    For you I throw upon the grey screen of the air
    My prism-like conceptions, my gigantic colour.

    For you the delicate hands that fashion to make great
    Clay, and white paper, plant a tongue in silence,
    For you the battle-frenzy, and the might of hate,
    Science for giving wounds, and healing science.

    For you the heart's wild love, beauty, long care,
    Virginity, passionate womanhood, perfected wholeness,
    For you the unborn child that I prepare,
    You, flabby, boneless, brainless, senseless, soulless!"

More childishness, but how delightful, how exactly in the spirit of
Donne.

One string on which she continually harps is found most lucidly
expressed in this stanza:

        "Loneliness I love,
    And that is why they have called me forth into the streets.
        Loneliness I love,
    But the crowd has clutched at me with fawning hands ...
        My spirit speaks
    In the scented quietness of a divine melancholy
        Murmuring the tunes
    For which my dreams are the delicate instruments.
        The shadowy silences
    Have made me beautiful and dressed me in velvet dignities,
        And that is why
    The noise of the tambourines has maddened my soul into dancing,
        And I am clad
    In the lust-lipped whispering of future caresses,
        Holiness I love,
    And touching the virginal pierced feet of martyrs,
        The crucified feet
    Nestled among lilies and hallowing candles.
        Holiness I love
    And the melodious absolution falling on my sins.
        But that is why
    Blasphemous priests have forced my hands to tear
        The vesture of secrecy
    Which hides the human nakedness of God."

That is a very definitely true cry from the depths and it is
oft-repeated.

"To fashion for my love one perfect song" has been ever her aim, but her
generation has been too much for her.

    "Subconscious visions hold us and we fashion
    Delirious verses, tortured statues, spasms of paint,
    Make cryptic perorations of complaint,
    Inverted religion, and perverted passion."

This may not be good poetry, but it is an admirably concise epitaph of
the age.

Sometimes she escapes into riotous, wanton imagery as a refuge:

    "Moonlight flows over me,
    Spreads her bright, watery hair over my face,
    Full of illicit, marvellous perfumes
    Wreathed with syringa, and plaited with hyacinths;
    Hair of the moonlight falling about me,
    Straight and cool as the drooping tresses of rain."

But in the end she comes back, gloriously sure of herself, in a poem
which is worthy to stand by the one I first quoted:

    "I know what happiness is--
    It is the negation of thought,
    The shutting off
    Of all those brooding phantoms that surround
    As dank trees in a forest
    Cutting the daylight into rags,
    Caging the sun
    In rusted prison bars.
    Happiness loves to lie at a river's edge
    And make no song,
    But listen to the water's murmuring wisdom,
    The kissing touch of leaves wind-bowed together,
    The feathery swish of cloud wings on a hill:
    Opening wide the violet-petalled doors
    Of every shy and cloistered sense,
    That all the scent and music of the world
    May rush into the soul.
    And happiness expands
    The rainbow arch for a procession of dreams,
    For moth-like fancies winged with evening,
    For dove-breasted silences,
    For shadowy reveries
    And starry pilgrims ...
    I know what happiness is--
    It is the giving back to Earth
    Of all our furtive thefts,
    The lurid jewels that we stole away
    From passion, sin and pain,
    Because they glittered strangely, luring us
    With their forbidden beauty.
    Because our childish fingers curiously
    Crave the pale secrets of the moon
    And grope for dangerous toys.
    Happiness comes in giving back to Earth
    The things we took from her with violent hands,
    Remembering only
    That her dust is our garment,
    Her fruits our endeavour,
    Her waters our priestess,
    Her leaves our interpreters to God,
    Her hills our infinite patience."

That is a brave cry: "I know what happiness is." Happy indeed is the man
or woman who has found this elixir of life--thrice happy is the poet who
not only has found it, but is able to give exact and musical expression
to the discovery. Iris Tree has matured: we watch her in the process of
discarding her childish things.... When next we read her we shall find a
full-fledged poet. There is earnest already of great things to come.
That is why we should read her now. To watch a poet try her wings, soar
and fall, only to soar again, is to be counted one of life's finer
joys.




IV

THE POEMS OF ALDOUS HUXLEY


We read Aldous Huxley because we see in his work another real poet in
embryo, but a poet working in as different a medium from that in which
Iris Tree works as it is possible to imagine. He has been called the
"neurasthenic Rabelais of 1920," and in so far as this connotes a
perversity of intellect it is an accurate label. For there is no getting
away from the cleverness of Mr Huxley: he is almost too intellectual.
His brain, which helps him so admirably in his short stories, acts as an
obstruction in his pursuit of beauty.

"The problem which the most authentic modern poetry is endeavouring to
solve is to give beauty a fuller content by exploring unfamiliar paths
of sensation and perception," but Mr Huxley most nearly approximates to
beauty when he is most familiar. It is perhaps permissible to doubt
whether these new, unfamiliar paths can lead anywhere but to cul-de-sac
or cesspool.

At any rate, in Mr Huxley's opinion, "Your centaurs are your only
poets." He finds beauty "no far-fetched, dear-bought gem; no pomander to
be smelt only when the crowd becomes too stinkingly insistent: it is not
a birth of rare oboes or violins, not visible only from ten to six by
state permission at a nominal charge, not a thing richly apart, but an
ethic, a way of belief and of practice, of faith and works, medieval in
its implication with the very threads of life." He desires "no Paphian
cloister of pink monks. Rather a rosy Brotherhood of Common Life,
eating, drinking; marrying and giving in marriage; taking and taken in
adultery; reading, thinking, and when thinking fails, feeling
immeasurably more subtly, sometimes perhaps creating."

So much for his theory: in practice he has given us many tentative
exercises which reek of the intellectual, are rich in humour, deadly in
their irony, and one long poem, _Leda_, which has much beauty (though it
has been called the beauty of self-indulgence rather than that pure
beauty of self-discipline), and passages of surprising ugliness.
Whenever a poet seeks to retell a well-known story, like Keats in
_Endymion_ and _Hyperion_, we invariably find ourselves comparing the
effect with that which a parson gives when he translates a Biblical
fable into the modern jargon which passes for English prose in the
pulpit.

In the latter case we shiver with disgust; in the former it is the test
of the poet's genius that we are uplifted and find the original vastly
improved by the fresh treatment.

Mr Brett-Young does nothing to improve our impression of Thamar, Mr
Huxley infuses into the old story of _Leda_ a thousand new concepts. Let
your mind dwell on this picture:

    "The tunic falls about her feet, and she
    Steps from the crocus folds of drapery,
    Dazzlingly naked, into the warm sun.
    God-like she stood; then broke into a run,
    Leaping and laughing in the light, as though
    Life through her veins coursed with so swift a flow
    Of generous blood and fire that to remain
    Too long in statued queenliness were pain
    To that quick soul, avid of speed and joy.
    She ran, easily bounding, like a boy, ...
    Narrow of haunch and slim and firm of breast.
    Lovelier she seemed in motion than at rest,
    If that might be, when she was never less,
    Moving or still, than perfect loveliness."

Small wonder that Jove, scourged by his libido with itching memories of
bliss, should turn his sickened sight from the monstrous shapes that met
his eyes in Africa (this is the passage of surpassing ugliness) where

    "Among unthinkable flowers, they pause and grin
    Out through a trellis of suppurating lips,
    Of mottled tentacles barbed at the tips
    And bloated hands and wattles and red lobes
    Of pendulous gristle and enormous probes
    Of pink and slashed and tasselled flesh"

to young Leda where she stood, poised on the river-side. Straightway his
heart held but one thought: he must possess that perfect form or die.
Have her he must:

            "Gods, men, earth, heaven, the whole
    Vast universe was blotted from his thought
    And nought remained but Leda's laughter, nought
    But Leda's eyes. Magnified by his lust,
    She was the whole world now; have her he must, he must...."

He goes to Aphrodite to plan the rape

                                    " ... While she,
    Who was to be their victim, joyously
    Laughed like a child in the sudden breathless chill
    And splashed and swam, forgetting every ill
    And every fear and all, save only this:
    That she was young, and it was perfect bliss
    To be alive where suns so goldenly shine,
    And bees go drunk with fragrant honey-wine,
    And the cicadas sing from morn till night,
    And rivers run so cool and pure and bright ...
    Stretched all her length, arms under head, she lay
    In the deep grass, while the sun kissed away
    The drops that sleeked her skin. Slender and fine
    As those old images of the gods that shine
    With smooth-worn silver, polished through the years
    By the touching lips of countless worshippers,
    Her body was; and the sun's golden heat
    Clothed her in softest flame from head to feet
    And was her mantle, that she scarcely knew
    The conscious sense of nakedness. The blue,
    Far hills and the faint fingers of the sky
    Shimmered and pulsed in the heat uneasily,
    And hidden in the grass, cicadas shrill
    Dizzied the air with ceaseless noise, until
    A listener might wonder if they cried
    In his own head or in the world outside."

Lazily she looks up into the sky and sees there the conflict between the
eagle and her lovely, hapless swan. Pity (the mother of voluptuousness)
is roused in Leda's heart and she opens her arms to receive the
transformed god.

                        "Crouched on the flowery ground
    Young Leda lay, and to her side did press
    The swan's proud-arching opulent loveliness ...
    Closer he nestled, mingling with the slim
    Austerity of virginal flank and limb
    His curved and florid beauty, till she felt
    That downy warmth strike through her flesh and melt
    The bones and marrow of her strength away....
    And over her the swan shook slowly free
    The folded glory of his wings, and made
    A white-walled tent of soft and luminous shade
    To be her veil and keep her from the shame
    Of naked light and the sun's noonday flame.

    Hushed lay the earth and the wide, careless sky.
    Then one sharp sound, that might have been a cry
    Of utmost pleasure or of utmost pain,
    Broke sobbing forth, and all was still again."

There is a sensuous beauty in this poem which makes it altogether
lovely. Certainly in thinking of the fable of Leda in the future our
minds will first fly back to Mr Huxley's poem and that is probably the
highest tribute we can pay it. But the rest of his poems aim at
something very different from the simple, sensuous and passionate and
are on a different plane.

He deals cynically with the transitory nature of human passions, he
laughs at Jonah as he sits praying and singing on "the convex mound of
one vast kidney" of the whale that swallowed him; in his philosophers'
songs he likes to sing of man as "a poor degenerate from the ape" and of
God as a fool.

    "If, O my Lesbia, I should commit,
    Not fornication, dear, but suicide,
    My Thames-blown body (Pliny vouches it)
    Would drift face upwards on the oily tide
    With the other garbage, till it putrefied.

    But you, if all your lovers' frozen hearts
    Conspired to send you, desperate, to drown--
    Your maiden modesty would float face down,
    And men would weep upon your hinder parts.
    'Tis the Lord's doing. Marvellous is the plan
    By which this best of worlds is wisely planned.
    One law he made for woman, one for man:
    We bow the head and do not understand."

This is certainly not poetry, but it is funny. The man with the wry face
gets his laugh, even if we feel that to be facetious it is not necessary
to be blasphemous.

He is happier in his rôle of Ninth Philosopher: he here attains a true
expression of what is happening in the world of modern art.

    "Beauty for some provides escape,
    Who gain a happiness in eyeing
    The gorgeous buttocks of the ape
    Or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying."

But _Frascati's_ shows him at his normal level of intellectual irony:

    "Bubble-breasted swells the dome
    Of this my spiritual home,
    From whose nave the chandelier,
    Schaffhausen frozen, tumbles sheer.
    We in the round balcony sit,
    Lean o'er and look into the pit
    Where feed the human bears beneath,
    Champing with their gilded teeth.
    What negroid holiday makes free
    With such priapic revelry?
    What songs? What gongs? What nameless rites?
    What gods like wooden stalagmites?
    What stream of blood or kidney pie?
    What blasts of Bantu melody?
    Rag-time.... But when the wearied Band
    Swoons to a waltz, I take her hand.
    And there we sit in blissful calm,
    Quietly sweating palm to palm."

This is the vein which he expands in what Middleton Murry regards as his
best poem, _Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt_, an attempt to "fish up a
single day" from a dead friend's forgotten existence. John Ridley, as
he calls him, wakes from a dream among his familiar books and pictures--

    "Real as his dream? He wondered. Ten to nine.
    Thursday. Wasn't he lunching at his aunt's?
    Distressing circumstance.
    But then he was taking Jenny out to dine,
    Which was some consolation. What a chin!
    Civilised ten thousand years, and still
    No better way than rasping a pale mask
    With imminent suicide, steel or obsidian:
    Repulsive task!
    And the more odious for being quotidian.
    If one should live till eighty-five ...
    And the dead, do they still shave? The horrible dead, are they
      alive?...
    Nine o'clock. Still in bed. Warm, but how lonely!
    He wept to think of all those single beds,
    Those desperate night-long solitudes,
    Those mental salons full of nudes.
    Shelley was great when he was twenty-four.
    Eight thousand nights alone--minus, perhaps,
    Six, or no! seven, certainly not more.
    Five little bits of heaven
    (Tum-do-rum, de-rum, de-rum),
    Five little bits of heaven and one that was a lapse,
    High-priced disgust: it stopped him suddenly
    In the midst of laughter and talk with a tingling down the spine
    (Like infants' impoliteness, a terrible infants' brightness),
    And he would shut his eyes so as not to see
    His own hot blushes calling him a swine."

At last he throws the nightmare of his blankets off, gets up and goes
into the bathroom--

                            "Pitiable to be
    Quite so deplorably naked when one strips.
    There was his scar, a panel of old rose
    Slashed in the elegant buff of his trunk hose;
    Adonis punctured by his amorous boar,
    Permanent souvenir of the Great War.
    One of God's jokes, typically good,
    That wound of his. How perfect that he should
    Have suffered it for--what?"

He dresses, goes down to breakfast, letters and _The Times_: he reads
some of his old work ...

    "Yes, he had genius, if he chose to use it;
    If he chose to--but it was too much trouble,
    And he preferred reading. He lit his pipe,
    Opened his book, plunged in and soon was drowned
    In pleasant seas ... to rise again and find
    One o'clock struck and his unshaven face
    Still like a record in a musical-box,
    And Auntie Loo miles off in Bloomsbury."

Mr Huxley wastes much satire on avuncular energies in war-time and makes
his hero escape from his verbose relatives to walk the streets. Tired of
this, he enters the inevitable café of the intellectual young novelist
and moralises on the nightmare oppressiveness of profane love. He then
sits out in the gardens of Leicester Square and finds comfort in
regarding each hair and every pore on his hand. This palls soon enough,
as one might expect, and then--

    "Action, action! Quickly rise and do
    The most irreparable things; beget,
    In one brief consummation of the will,
    Remorse, reaction, wretchedness, regret.
    Action! This was no time for sitting still.
    He crushed his hat down over his eyes
    And walked with a stamp to symbolise
    Action, action--left, right, left;
    Planting his feet with flabby beat,
    Taking strange Procrustean steps,
    Lengthened, shortened to avoid
    Touching the lines between the stones--
    A thing which makes God so annoyed."

Action translates itself into spending three pounds on a book which he
didn't want and pulling the bell of a chance house. He turns into a
cinema house, goes to sleep, wakes at eight o'clock and so keeps "dear
Jenny" waiting.

This dinner with Jenny is the most effective part of the poem, as we
might expect:

    "Food and drink, food and drink:
    Olives as firm and sleek and green
    As the breasts of a sea-god's daughter,
    Swimming far down where the corpses sink
    Through the dense shadowy water.
    Silver and black on flank and back,
    The glossy sardine mourns its head.
    The red anchovy and the beetroot red,
    With carrots, build a gorgeous stair--
    Bronze, apoplexy and Venetian hair--
    And the green pallor of the salad round
    Sharpens their clarion sound....
    Golden wine, pale as a Tuscan primitive,
    And wine's strange taste, half loathsome, half delicious:
    Come, my Lesbia, let us love and live....
    'Jenny, adorable--' (what draws the line
    At the mere word 'love'?) 'has anyone the right
    To look so lovely as you look to-night,
    To have such eyes, such a helmet of bright hair?'
    But candidly, he wondered, do I care?"

The night goes on, comes the time to part--

    "'Good-night,' the last kiss, 'and God bless you, my dear.'
    So, she was gone, she who had been so near,
    So breathing-warm--soft mouth and hands and hair--
    A moment since. Had she been really there,
    Close at his side and had he kissed her? It seemed
    Unlikely as something somebody else had dreamed
    And talked about at breakfast, being a bore."

The first thing we feel tempted to say about this poem is that we should
vastly prefer to be possessed of an Olympian libido for Leda than to be
burdened with John Ridley's "feebly sceptical, inefficient, profoundly
unhappy" emotion for Jenny. Jove was, at any rate, healthy in his lusts:
there is something terribly anæmic about our modern love-making, with
our one eye on the intellect lest we should do anything without a
reason. I am fully aware that this is not criticism: it is merely making
a note of the feeling that is uppermost in our minds on finishing the
poem. But that is one of the reasons why we should read Aldous Huxley:
he is not lacking in daring: what he sees and feels he shows: he is very
boyish in his desire to shock: in these days one would have thought that
there was no one left to shock except the undergraduate, and those who
preserve the callowness of the undergraduate through life. He
exaggerates the importance of material joys and miseries: he is easily
disgusted: his fastidious intellect rebels at many things that most of
us accept complacently ... but it is to his credit that he makes us feel
that we ought to be more fastidious, that we ought to think more, that
we ought to accept less. At present he is engaged in the process of
destruction, a joyous, youthful pastime: when he grows up he will give
us something constructive. At present we rejoice in his vitality, energy
and alertness. The rest will come. Above all, he is generously endowed
with the comic spirit: that alone would make him readable in such an age
of dullness.




V

THE POEMS OF ROBERT GRAVES


There are not many reasons why we should read Robert Graves, but one
reason is of such outstanding importance that it overshadows the want of
many. While Siegfried Sassoon and Osbert Sitwell have vented their
vitriol on the old, Mr Graves in _Country Sentiment_ has run away into
the land of nursery rhymes as an escape from the haunting horrors of our
post-war era. There are strong men of little imagination who have wiped
off the memory of the war from their minds like chalk-marks off a slate:
there are others who will be haunted by it for the rest of their lives.
Robert Graves is one of the latter:

    "Gulp down your wine, old friends of mine,
    Roar through the darkness, stamp and sing
    And lay ghost hands on everything,
    But leave the noonday's warm sunshine
    To living lads for mirth and wine.

    I met you suddenly down the street,
    Strangers assume your phantom faces,
    You grin at me from daylight places,
    Dead, long dead, I'm ashamed to greet
    Dead men down the morning street."

That is why he prays that

    "[But may] the gift of heavenly peace
    And glory for all time
    Keep the boy Tom who tending geese
    First made the nursery rhyme."

Only in the contemplation of childish toys can he regain repose. But
nursery rhymes and childish toys are as flimsy as gossamer, the latter
too easily get broken, the former are too often patently absurd.

There is a gnat-like thinness even in this delicious little song:

    "Small gnats that fly
    In hot July
    And lodge in sleeping ears,
    Can rouse therein
    A trumpet's din
    With Day-of-Judgment fears.

    Small mice at night
    Can wake more fright
    Than lions at midday.
    An urchin small
    Torments us all
    Who tread his prickly way.

    A straw will crack
    The camel's back,
    To die we need but sip,
    So little sand
    As fills the hand
    Can stop a steaming ship.

    One smile relieves
    A heart that grieves
    Though deadly sad it be,
    And one hard look
    Can close the book
    That lovers love to see."

He listens to the pale-bearded Janus, who urges him to

    "Sing and laugh and easily run
    Through the wide waters of my plain,
    Bathe in my waters, drink my sun,
    And draw my creatures with soft song;
    They shall follow you along
    Graciously with no doubt or pain."

So he extols the simple rhymes that we learnt in childhood's days and
seeks to add to them.

    "So these same rhymes shall still be told
    To children yet unborn,
    While false philosophy growing old
    Fades and is killed by scorn."

Unfortunately it is not given to any modern to imitate with any degree
of success either the ballads our ancestors loved or the nursery rhymes
which all children have learnt: this age is too sophisticated and this
avenue of escape is denied to Mr Graves: one of the lessons that we find
most painful in the learning is that we are the product of our own age
and cannot get away from it. Mr Graves anticipates his reviewers in his
_L'Envoi_ when he says:

    "Everything they took from my new poem book
    But the fly-leaf and the covers."

But there are one or two other things I should leave inside the
singularly attractive covers, and one of them is this:

    "Restless and hot two children lay
    Plagued with uneasy dreams,
    Each wandered lonely through false day
    A twilight torn with screams.

    True to the bed-time story, Ben
    Pursued his wounded bear,
    Ann dreamed of chattering monkey men,
    Of snakes twined in her hair ...

    Now high aloft above the town
    The thick clouds gather and break,
    A flash, a roar, and rain drives down:
    Aghast the young things wake.

    Trembling for what their terror was,
    Surprised by instant doom,
    With lightning in the looking-glass,
    Thunder that rocks the room.

    The monkey's paws patter again,
    Snakes hiss and flash their eyes:
    The bear roars out in hideous pain:
    Ann prays and her brother cries.

    They cannot guess, could not be told
    How soon comes careless day,
    With birds and dandelion gold,
    Wet grass, cool scents of May."

This is no nursery rhyme, but it is a very important parable. Mr Robert
Graves is by nature a poet, but his vision has become blurred, his
senses distorted, his nerves jangled by the war. Can no one tell him of
the approach of careless day, of birds and dandelion gold, wet grass,
cool scents of May? Surely the nightmare of his soul is nearly over, and
he can creep out from under the soft quilt of nursery rhymes to the
clear light of day and sing us the golden songs that we know are in him,
as yet unexpressed.




VI

J. D. BERESFORD


A common criticism levelled against novelists is that when they depict
failures we find it unnecessary to turn to the last page to prove these
failures successes. No novelist except Gissing has dared to write the
story of a failure who remained a failure till the end. Mr J. D.
Beresford's art is frankly autobiographical, and the very fact of his
having a novel published proves that he at any rate has ceased to be a
failure, and yet the fact is that Jacob Stahl at each stage of his life
looks upon himself as a failure; the truth of the matter is that Mr
Beresford, like his hero, fully realises that "virtue lies only in the
continual renewal of effort; the boast of success is an admission of
failure." Jacob never boasts of success.

In _W. E. Ford_ Mr Beresford talks of his architectural experiences, his
unfortunate first marriage, his temporary inhibitions and his ultimate
literary success; his hero in the trilogy is just such a man as Mr
Beresford declares himself to be. Jacob Stahl was lame, Mr Beresford
suffers from a like physical disability. At every point in these three
books we feel convinced that he is setting down the facts of his own
struggle, and if it needed proof that genius does not necessarily
manifest itself through the imagination, but through a careful selection
of actual autobiographical experiences, we should get that proof in
these remarkable novels. He even goes so far as to interpolate into the
body of his novels the actual eulogistic criticism that his own early
works received from the reviewers. We know that he was actually employed
by W. H. Smith & Son to do much the same work as Jacob Stahl is called
upon to do for Price & Mallinson.

A conversation with Meredith that Jacob has on the subject of literary
art is equally illuminating as descriptive of Beresford's own theories.
"Why shouldn't a novelist describe life as he sees it?... I simply don't
understand all that stuff about art," replied Jacob. "Method,
technique, yes. You have got to find words to express what you've seen."
He agreed that the essential thing was the accurate representation of
the commonplace, and realised when it was put to him that he had put a
piece of life under the microscope and not related it to the whole; we
feel, furthermore, that Mr Beresford was thinking solely of himself when
he impressed upon us the importance of realising that at the end of his
struggle Jacob Stahl "could never rest content with any such attainment
as was provided by the comfort of his wife's love ... in the care of his
three children, or, least of all, by such satisfactions as come to him
from his modest achievements in the world of letters; he is ever at the
beginning of life reaching out towards those eternal values that are
ever beyond his grasp ... and that earnest search of his for some aspect
of permanent truth keeps his spirit young." Mr Beresford is
pre-eminently among the novelists of to-day a candidate for truth.
Surely no one has been so completely honest over his relations with the
other sex; it is true that in _God's Counterpoint_ Philip is so
puritanically distorted in his attitude towards sex as to become as vile
and disgusting as the most degenerate physical profligate, and we feel
that a more normal man than Mr Beresford's hero (the shadow of himself)
in the trilogy would not have taken Madeline so seriously or have
believed in, much less have married, such a woman as Lola so casually,
or have caused such a perfect type of womanhood as Betty so many
heart-burnings. Anyone but Jacob would have seen through Mrs Latimer in
half-an-hour. It would have served Jacob right if she had made him marry
her. At the same time a more normal man than Mr Beresford would have
been quite unable to make such people not only live but actually
interesting, not so much for what they do as for what they are as
betrayed in their conversations; an underbred clerk, a temporarily
reclaimed drunkard of a curate, a courtesan countess, a saviour of
souls, a self-sacrificing aunt, a pedantic successful brother, a woman
of the streets, whist-playing inhabitants of a boarding-house, literary
giants, omniscient commercial travellers, pretty typists, truculent
compositors, Cornish villagers, flit in and out of the pages of the
trilogy, who, once met, can never be forgotten. They are all flesh and
blood. These two perfect cameos of psychological analysis may be taken
as typical:

"When Laurence's brain grew dull and futile after a period of clean
living and close application, he could find no stimulus for it save by a
concession to the brute in him. When the brute was tired by excess, it
found rest and the means of recovery during the activity and temporary
dominance of the spirit.... If he had lived for the spirit he would have
died in a madhouse, as it was the brute gradually absorbed him."

Again, of Cecil Barker: "Truly, the man was honest when he was not
fishing (for the souls of men). He could beget love for himself in the
mind of man or woman; and he could reject it without compunction when
offered--a far harder thing.... He was only selfish in the rigour of his
self-denial ... he was a superman who worked for no rewards here, and
none ever heard him speak of any hope of reward hereafter.... Even those
who--like Jacob Stahl--suffered bitterly at his hands, still remembered
him in after years with admiration and love."

The fact is that in common with all true artists Mr Beresford (like his
hero) was extraordinarily impressionable, and therefore saw further into
the hearts of men than most of us, even if, as he says of himself, he
resembled rubber rather than wax in that he was only impressed
momentarily. But his resilience is opposed to the woodenness of ordinary
writers in exactly the same proportion as his protagonists have as much
likeness to life as theirs have none.

One of the most pleasing traits in Mr Beresford's work comes from what
he calls his "scattered education"; there is always in his work a
pleasing absence of mere cleverness which endears him to all those who
regard life as less of an intellectual problem than something which
every man has to live for himself; we are shown in one page of absorbing
interest how books affected the life of Jacob Stahl; from standard
novels of which _Robert Elsmere_ may be taken as a typical example he
rises to the _Origin of Species_, works on biology, physics and
philosophy; only after his life with the swearing mission parson, Cecil
Barker (an exquisitely drawn character), does he realise the
shortcomings of orthodox Christianity and the fact that experience is
the only school that matters; he feels quite honestly ignorant in the
presence of his brother as he does in the presence of all so-called
"well-read" men. He owed more to his financial and marital disasters
than to anything else in his life except the influence of Betty; by
inclination he was tempted to deny God through his foolish tendency to
immolate himself. Only when he got clear of cant, from a morality that
depended on repression to one that depended upon the liberation of
impulse, did he achieve freedom and success. Mr Beresford, it will be
seen at once, by presenting us with a slice of life (unconsciously
perhaps) teaches us how to live. Like Wells, he becomes more and more
interested as life goes on in linking up science, religion and art; the
unity of life, the beauty of truth, the truth of beauty, these are the
things at which he aims; the methods by which he would attain them are
best presented to us in his educational experiment, _W. E. Ford_. There
in the shortest possible compass we get the trend of his teaching, for
like all great artists he is first and foremost a teacher; and if his
own observations have taught him nothing else, they have at any rate
taught him "that a positive immorality (as we now regard it) is a far
more admirable thing than a negative virtue." It would be hard to ask a
man to give a more convincing proof than the results of his own
observations, especially when he can express them, as Mr Beresford does,
with subtle irony, genial humour and an uncanny knowledge of the motives
which govern human action.




VII

_NIGHT AND DAY_


There is one thing that Virginia Woolf demands of all her readers before
she can be appreciated at her true worth, and that is leisure. Try to
read _Night and Day_ at the rate you read W. J. Locke and you will hear
a faint buzz of conversation amid an interminable rattle of tea-cups ...
and nothing more. For it is certainly true that people in this novel
rarely stop talking, and it is equally true that when they do stop it is
usually to have another cup of tea with a thin slice of lemon in it. It
treats on the one side of a type that one finds "at the tops of
professions, with letters after their names"; sitting "in luxurious
public offices, with private secretaries attached to them"; writing
"solid books in dark covers, issued by the presses of the two great
universities"; and "when one of them dies the chances are that another
of them writes his biography."

The heroine's mother spent her life in making phrases and adding to the
monumental biography of her poet father, while Katherine, the daughter,
rose early in the morning or sat up late at night to work at
mathematics, a subject that appealed to her solely because it was
opposed to literature.

As a foil to Katherine is Mary Datchet, the twenty-five-year-old
parson's daughter living alone in London, enjoying Emerson and the
darning of stockings, while earning her own living in a suffrage office
in Russell Square. The two main male characters are also sharply
differentiated.

There is William Rodney, who reads papers on the Elizabethan use of
metaphors, irresistibly ludicrous in appearance, with his nervous,
impulsive manners and immaculate clothes. "By profession a clerk in a
Government office, he was one of those martyred spirits to whom
literature is at once a source of divine joy and of almost intolerable
irritation. Not content to rest in their love of it, they must attempt
to practise it themselves, and they are generally endowed with very
little facility in composition." This man is engaged to Katherine though
ten years her senior and "with more of the old maid in him than poet."

Ralph Denham, the other man of importance, is a rough-tongued, poor
solicitor with an uncanny power of making people do what he wanted
(especially the two girls in the novel), who lived in a very different
style from that to which Katherine was accustomed. Here is a delightful
description of the Hilbery _ménage_:

"They were all dressed for dinner, and, indeed, the prettiness of the
dinner-table merited that compliment. There was no cloth upon the table,
and the china made regular circles of deep blue upon the shining brown
wood. In the middle there was a bowl of tawny red and yellow
chrysanthemums, and one of pure white, so fresh that the narrow petals
were curved backwards into a firm white ball. From the surrounding walls
the heads of three famous Victorian writers surveyed this entertainment,
and slips of paper pasted beneath them testified in the great man's own
handwriting that he was always yours sincerely or affectionately or for
ever"--from which it appears that Virginia Woolf is one of those writers
who, interested in every thing, observe and note every detail in their
work. "Daily life in a house where there are young and old is full of
curious little ceremonies and pieties, which are discharged quite
punctually, though the meaning of them is obscure, and a mystery has
come to brood over them which lends even a superstitious charm to their
performance." Every evening, for instance, we hear of Katherine reading
aloud while her mother knitted scarves intermittently on a little
circular frame, and her father read the newspaper, "not so attentively
but that he could comment humorously now and again upon the fortunes of
the hero and the heroine."

Her father spent his days editing his review or "placing together
documents by means of which it would be proved that Shelley had written
'of' instead of 'and,' or that the inn in which Byron had slept was
called the 'Nag's Head' and not the 'Turkish Knight,' or that the
Christian name of Keats's uncle had been John rather than Richard."

He represents the opposite pole from Ralph Denham, the seemingly hard
and self-sufficient young man with the queer temper, consumed with a
desire to get on, unpopular both in the office and at home.

One of the charms of the book lies in the setting. We are swept from
Lincoln's Inn Fields and Kensington to country rectories and manor
houses in Lincolnshire where everything is reminiscent of the Middle
Ages. It is in this country that the main characters find themselves.
Ralph finds himself in love with Katherine; Katherine finds herself out
of love with Rodney, to whom she is engaged, and in love with Ralph;
Mary finds herself in love with Ralph; Rodney finds that nobody loves
him: there are incomprehensible confusions in the minds of all the
characters about love: but most of them are honest enough not only to
realise their confusions, but to confess them. They begin to doubt their
loves when they are in each other's presences, and be certain of them
when they are again alone.

It is this finding of themselves that makes them interesting, for they
are not, on the whole, lovable characters. One feels sorry for them,
yes, and it is probable that Virginia Woolf herself loves them, but we
feel that they are all shut away in a world which is far from ours. Over
and over again we find ourselves enveloped in a Jane Austenish
atmosphere, partly induced, no doubt, by the extreme deliberation of the
writer. Virginia Woolf is in no hurry to arrive at any conclusion.
Perhaps it is a virtue in her that we feel that reason will always
triumph over the heart in these people. Perhaps it should, but it surely
depends on the height of the passion to which the heart is capable of
rising. In none of these characters is there any very explosive
property.

Katherine's attempt to reconcile the world of reality with the dream
world is not fairly portrayed, for the simple reason that her dream
world is always such a thin one. Ralph Denham embodies for her the lover
on the great horse riding by the seashore and the leaf-hung forests, but
beyond the fact that he paces up and down the streets outside her
windows for two nights he gives no indications of the great lover. The
truth is that we are never allowed to see at all clearly into
Katherine's or Ralph's dream world. Virginia Woolf may have found
herself incapable of taking us into its recesses: in the world of
reality she is wonderful. It gives the whole of the book away when we
find that we are more interested in the purely ineffective characters,
like Mrs Hilbery, than in Katherine, who ought to have been a tragic
character. "It's life that matters, nothing but life--the process of
discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process," quotes Katherine to
herself, "not the discovery itself at all." When one of Hugh Walpole's
heroines begins to say things like that to herself we know that she is
going to suffer incredible anguish in the process, but Katherine suffers
nothing worse than having to listen to the gossip of an aunt who tells
her that her _fiancé_ (with whom she is not in love) has been flirting
with another girl. Katherine ought to have been a discarded mistress at
least. We feel cheated.

But we don't feel cheated when we listen to the author describing
trivial people or a beautiful scene. Just as she is able to see and
describe whatever emotions and ideas flit through the souls of her
characters, so she can see and describe with equal skill and beauty and
exactness the country fields of Lincolnshire, Kew Gardens, London by
night, the river and interiors of houses.

We do feel cheated when Katherine has visions such as the following ...
and nothing comes of them:--

"She was walking down a road in Northumberland in the August sunset; at
the inn she left her companion, who was Ralph Denham, and was
transported, not so much by her own feet as by some invisible means, to
the top of a high hill. Here the scents, the sounds among the dry
heather-roots, the grass-blades pressed upon the palm of her hand, were
all so perceptible that she could experience each one separately. After
this her mind made excursions into the dark of the air, or settled upon
the surface of the sea, which could be discovered over there, or with
equal unreason it returned to its couch of bracken beneath the stars of
midnight, and visited the snow valleys of the moon. These fancies would
have been in no way strange, since the walls of every mind are decorated
with some such tracery, but she found herself suddenly pursuing such
thoughts with an extreme ardour, which became a desire to change her
actual condition for something matching the conditions of her dream."

Unfortunately there is nothing in Ralph Denham to make him the object of
such an ardour, unless his brusque way of trying to bully people of less
mental calibre than himself makes him a heroic figure.

"I suppose I'm in love," he says to Mary, who is herself madly in love
with him and he knows it. "Anyway, I'm out of my mind. I can't think, I
can't work, I don't care a hang for anything in the world. Good heavens,
Mary! I'm in torment! One moment I'm happy; next I'm miserable. I hate
her for half-an-hour; then I'd give my whole life to be with her for ten
minutes; all the time I don't know what I feel, or why I feel it; it's
insanity, and yet it's perfectly reasonable."

Whatever he felt he had no right to talk to her of all women like that.
This is no rider from the sea on a great horse, but as ineffectual and
contemptible a creature as the pedant, Rodney. He actually sets before
him on his table a note from Katherine, a flower he had picked for her,
a photograph of a statue of a Greek goddess which (if the lower part
were concealed!) had often given him the ecstasy of being in her
presence and then sets himself to visualise her.

No, Ralph Denham is not calculated to inspire our affection, respect or
love. It is more pleasant to dwell on the reality of his home than of
himself. Katherine visits his mother and finds her sitting at a large
dining-room table "untidily strewn with food and unflinchingly lit up by
incandescent gas," bending over an unsatisfactory spirit-lamp.

"The unsparing light revealed more ugliness than Katherine had seen in
one room for a very long time. It was the ugliness of enormous folds of
brown material, looped and festooned, of plush curtains, from which
depended balls and fringes, partially concealing bookshelves swollen
with black school texts. Her eye was arrested by cross scabbards of
fretted wood upon the dull green wall, and wherever there was a high
flat eminence, some fern waved from a pot of crinkled china, or a bronze
horse reared so high that the stump of a tree had to sustain his
forequarters."

That is excellent writing and invaluable for the creation of a proper
atmosphere.

It is in this sense of atmosphere that Virginia Woolf most clearly shows
her great gifts. The broad green spaces, the vista of trees, the ruffled
gold of the Thames in the distance at Kew, the Strand which makes
Katherine think in terms of mathematics, and the Embankment which sent
her back to her dream forest, the ocean beach, the leafy solitudes, the
magnanimous hero, are delicately but surely made to serve their turn in
the unravelling of the story. "Strange thoughts are bred in passing
through crowded streets should the passenger, by chance, have no exact
destination in front of him, much as the mind shapes all kinds of forms,
solutions, images when listening inattentively to music."

So walking down the Charing Cross Road Katherine wonders if she would
mind being run over by a motor-bus or having "an adventure with that
disagreeable-looking man hanging about the entrance of the Tube
station," and her mind answers, No. She could not conceive fear or
excitement.

So Ralph Denham's mind is filled with a sense of the actual presence of
Katherine when in Lincolnshire he sees "laid out on the perfectly flat
and richly green meadow at the bottom of the hill a small grey manor
house, with ponds, terraces and clipped hedges in front of it, a
farm-building or so at the side, and a screen of fir-trees rising
behind, all perfectly sheltered and self-sufficient. Behind the house
the hill rose again, and the trees on the farther summit stood upright
against the sky, which appeared of a more intense blue between their
trunks."

So Mrs Hilbery in her consciousness of the running green lines of the
hedges, the swelling ploughland, the mild blue sky finds a pastoral
background to the drama of human life.

So Ralph associates Mary with the mist of winter hedges and the clear
red of the bramble leaves: so Mary with regard to Ralph. "Her thoughts
seemed even to take their colour from the street she happened to be in.
Thus the vision of humanity appeared to be in some way connected with
Bloomsbury and faded distinctly by the time she crossed the main road;
then a belated organ-grinder in Holborn set her thoughts dancing
incongruously; and by the time she was crossing the great misty square
of Lincoln's Inn Fields she was cold and depressed and horribly
clear-sighted."

Mary, by the way, is nearer our conception of a likeable person than
anyone else in the book. She has at any rate attained to the standpoint
that life is full of complexity and must, in spite or because of that,
be loved to the last fibre of it.

And so it is with us: we carry away, after putting _Night and Day_ down
for the last time, an atmosphere of a room full of deep shadows,
firelight, unwavering silver candle flames, and empty spaces to be
crossed before reaching the round table in the middle of the room, with
its frail burden of silver trays and china tea-cups, red parrots
swinging on the chintz curtains and arm-chairs warming in the blaze.

And so we come to read _Night and Day_ in a mood very different from
that which sends us to _Tom Jones_ or _Wuthering Heights_: there is no
full-blooded narrative full of incident or wild, insatiable passion. It
is a penetrating, shrewd comedy wherein many feckless people are
portrayed to the life. It is essentially modern in so far as there is no
attempt to make us fall in love with the hero or heroine: we are never
on the verge of tears through pity of their fate, though we are
interested by their confused states of mind.

We are never unable to put the book down: on the other hand, there are
few that we are more inclined to pick up and read for the _n_th time.
There is a rich harvest of beauty on almost every page; there is true
satirical humour; there is brilliance of intellect, clarity of aim and
complete fearlessness: above all, there is strangeness and
individuality, and the reader who turns away from _Night and Day_
because the atmosphere has failed to ensnare him in the first three
hundred or so pages deserves our pity. He has missed a real treat, both
emotional and intellectual.




VIII

E. C. BOOTH


There are many people whose taste in fiction is so fastidious that the
sight of dialect in a novel makes them refuse to read it. To such people
Mr Edward C. Booth makes no appeal. Both in _The Cliff-End_ and _Fondie_
(his two great books) well-nigh every character speaks in a broad
Yorkshire accent. They are stories of the soil, of people who move in a
world very different from that which Mr Stephen M'Kenna has annexed as
his own. His novels move in a most leisurely manner, like the people in
them: anyone who reads novels for their plots alone may omit Mr Booth's
name from his library list. Neither in _The Cliff-End_ nor _Fondie_ does
the actual plot matter much. In point of fact, the basic idea in each is
rather stupid. Pamela is so sweet a girl that the Spawer would never
have hesitated at all in real life; Blanche in reality would never have
drowned herself for so little a reason as one illegitimate child.

No: we read _The Cliff-End_ for its spaciousness, its freshness, its
rippling current of humour, its myriad living characters, its beautiful
setting and its picture of love. For it is first and last a rattling
good love romance.

You can test your appreciation of Mr Booth by his opening chapters. If
the description of Tankard's Bus fails to charm you, don't read on. Such
fare is not for you. But there are many of us who can be sufficiently
grateful for such a beginning as this:

"Tankard's Bus is the most beautiful bus in the world--the biggest,
blandest, noblest, longest, good-naturedest, most magnanimous ... no
fewer than five steps swing at its tail-end to two yards out, with
balustrades of real brass. Five steps form the complement of a
full-grown flight of stairs in Ullbrig--as many, indeed, as take most of
us up to bed ... only to take one sacramental sniff of its cushions is
to be filled as a perfumed vase with the breath and spirit and sympathy
of the district; is to divine the soul of the soil, the heart of the
heavy-headed corn, a-flush to the cliff-edge; the sensuous sway of the
barley in ceaseless stir of mystic communion; the stillness of turnips;
the rustle of oats; the grateful green of pasture, traversed slowly here
and there with streaks of dun and white-and-tan, and the fleecy grey
blots of nibbling sheep; the murmur of many waves; the rippling cadence
of the reaper; the busy hum of the threshing-machine, in indefatigable
ascent and descent of its three semitones ... it is timed to leave the
Market Arms at three o'clock. To make quite sure of a corner seat you
would do well to be sitting in it by four o'clock at the latest...." All
the way through the first chapter we watch this 'bus filling and
emptying like a bee-hive, threading its way at last out of Hunmouth,
away into the country-side ... "and so on and so on and so on, along the
dusty hedge-lined road, homeward in the slanting beams of gold, with the
sun spinning dizzily behind and the great elongated shadow of Tankard
and his colleagues thrown far away out before, till that last moment
when the mill spreads its mighty arms to the left-hand window in welcome
of home-coming, and the squat, square-towered church stares stolidly
through the other with its unwinking blue-diamond clock eye, and the
little red roofs gathered round its midway give warm greeting over the
latticed hedges in the mellowed evening light."

Not only has Mr Booth observed accurately and with the eye of an artist
this corner of East Yorkshire scenery, but he has made himself complete
master of the vernacular.

"''Ev ye 'eard 'ow Mester Jenkison' mother' sister-in-law's gettin' on,
Steg?'

"'Ay,' says Steg.

"''Ow is she then?'

"'She's deead.'

"'Nay! Is she an' all? Poor owd woman!'

"'She is that!' says Steg, warming with a sense of triumph to the work,
as though he had the credit of her demise. 'She deed ti morn at aif-past
six.'

"'An' when's t' buryin'? Did y'ear?'

"'Ay, they telt me,' says Steg.

"'It'll be o' Thosday, Ah's think.'

"'Nay, bud it weean't. Wensday. There's ower much thunder about for
keepin'.'"

A man who can make his yokels talk like this has got little to learn.

In Father Mostyn Mr Booth has created one of the most glorious parsons
in fiction.

"'Ha! The vicar's lobster if you please. Not out of the window there; I
won't have lobster out of the window. The sunlight has a peculiar
chemical action upon the tin, liberating certain constituents of the
metal exceedingly perilous to the intercostal linings.'"

Nothing that goes on in the village is hidden from him, so we see him at
once making friends with the Spawer, the stranger who comes to Cliff-End
to compose his music in quiet. "The house stands endwise to the sea, set
deep in a horse-shoe of trees; a big, hearty, whitewashed building under
bronze-red tiles; two storeys high in front, that slope down backward
over the dairy toward the stack-garth till they touch its high
nettles.... The kitchen takes up the whole end of the house, facing two
ways. The first window watches the lane across the red tile path and the
little unclassified garden; the second comes on to the broadside front
of the house, facing south, where the sun is a gorgeous nuisance after
mid-morning in summer, ... dipping below the sunk stone wall and the dry
nettle-grown ditch in which the ball buries itself instinctively
whenever you hit it, is the big grass field for cricket, with the
wickets always standing. And beyond this, sweeping away in every
direction ... go the great lagoons of corn, brimming up to their green
confines ... and the dim Garthstone windmill turning its listless sails
over in dreamy soliloquy across three miles of fattening grain and green
hedge and buttercupped pasture ... and the celestial sound of the sea,
two fields off, tipping the lonely shore ... and the stirring of lazy
leaves, the chick of poultry, the soothing grunt of distant pigs ... the
solaceful shutting of unseen gates...."

God forbid that we should hurry amid surroundings such as these. Readers
of _The Cliff-End_, fully to enjoy it, must imitate our village youths
who prop themselves up by the wall of the bridge every Sunday afternoon
and watch the water flow underneath in complete content for six hours
at a time.

We are content to dawdle with the Spawer in his little, faded,
old-world, out-of-the-world room, with its choir of pink roses on the
walls and his own books scattered indiscriminately about: Daudet,
Tolstoi, Turgenev, Molière, Swinburne and so on.

By the time we reach chapter eight we have forgotten to wish that
anything should happen ... and immediately something does. A sudden
human sob breaks in upon the Spawer as he plays Chopin at midnight.

"Outside, the world lay wrapped in a great breathing stillness. Night's
ultramarine bosom was ablaze with starry chain of mail. From the far
fields came faint immaterial sounds, commingled in the suspended
fragrance of hay, in warm revelations of ripening corn, in the aromatic
pungency of nettles, and all the humid suffocation of herbs that open
their moist pores at even. Distant sheep, cropping in ghost-like
procession across misty, dew-laden clover, contributed now and again
their strange, cutting, human cough." The night calls him and he jumps
out of the window: he hears garments in swift full stir, the rending of
a frock ... and at last sees, "struck in fugitive stoop to stone, the
dim, motionless figure of a girl." In a voice that had "the rare mellow
sweetness of blown pipes about it" she explains that she couldn't resist
coming to hear him play. "He noted the wide generous forehead, the big
consuming eyes, burning deep in sorrowing self-reproach and giving him a
moment's gaze over the uplifted tumbler; the dispassionate narrow nose,
sprinkled about its bridge ... with a pepper-castor helping of freckled
candour; the small lips, the long, sleek cheeks; the slender,
pear-shaped chin; the soft, supple neck of russet tan, spliced on to a
gleaming shaft of ivory; the quick-throbbing throat and the burning
lobes of red, like live cinders, in her hair ... she wore a shabby pale
blue tam-o'-shanter...." And this vision turns out next morning to be
the post-girl. He learns her history from the Vicar. "'Pamela, you mean!
I knew we should come to that before long. She's not like the rest of
us; comes of a different class altogether.... Take note of her when she
laughs ... she covers the whole diapason. Ullbrig doesn't laugh like
that. Ullbrig laughs on one note, as though it were a plough furrow.'"
He weaves a fantastic story out of the little that he knows about her: a
mother dying of a broken heart, having married beneath her, come to
Ullbrig to escape the world, leaving Pamela, who "can do everything in
the world except kill chickens." She can bake bread, paper-hang, paint,
milliner and dress-make and plays the organ in church. She lives with
John William Morland, who combines the office of postmaster with the
trade of cobbler.

"'Stop a bit,'" the stern voice of the postmaster would tell you when
you laid the penny and the boots on the counter together, and shot out
your dual request for a "'stamp an' these 'ere solin'.'" "'Let's 'ave
one thing at a time. Stamps 'as nowt to do wi' shoes, an' shoes 'as nowt
to do wi' stamps. Tek yer boots off'n counter, or 'appen Ah s'll be
slippin' 'em away by parcel post, an' then where sewd we be?... Noo;
stamps fost; let's know what ye want.'"

Which point being settled and the penny rung into the till, he would
suddenly cast his Governmental mask under the counter, throw the
austerity out of his voice, and catch up the shoemaker's smile all at
once in a quick-change act marvellous to behold.

The Vicar arranges a feast which Pamela prepares for and of course
shares with him and the Spawer. And the collation is described as
Dickens would describe it, to make your mouth water:

"There was a chicken-pie in a Mother Hubbard frill, with its crust as
brown as a hazel-nut, and just nicely large enough to feed half-a-dozen,
which is a capital size for three; and a noble sirloin of beef, fringed
with a hoary lock of horse-radish, and arching its back in lonely
majesty on an oval arena of Spode, ... and there was a salad, heaped up
high under the white and yellow chequer of sliced eggs, and a rosy
tomato comb, in a glorious old oaken bowl as big as a kettle-drum, ...
and there were some savoury eggs, deliciously embowered in their
greenery of mustard and cress ... and a tinned tongue ... and some
beetroot ... and whipped creams, and a trifle pudding, all set out on
snowy white damask amid an arctic glitter of glass and silver and
cutlery. Except the cheese, which was a Camembert, and went by itself
on the grained side-cupboard."

After the olives and the herrings Father Mostyn approaches the beef with
a terrible "'Ha! I see you've not forgotten what I told you. The
exterior albumen's duly coagulated for the preservation of the nutritive
juices, and there's a fine osmazonic smell that bodes well for the
flavour.'"

Who wants to go on to the love episode when he can stay and refresh
himself with a feast like this? Not I, for one. The longer I can stay
with "the little tongues of crimson ham and grey-brown purple buttons of
mushrooms" the better so long as Pamela is there. I want as many
helpings as possible of the stewed plums, the custard, the trifle
pudding, the port-wine jellies, the whipped creams and the cheese. Time
enough for love. There is the music to follow: the A flat Prelude twice,
the Black Study, bits of Beethoven, the 111, snatches of Brahms ... and
to Pam as to us "there seemed not more happiness in Heaven."

All too quickly even that night the shadows fall: Pam goes home and
encounters the village schoolmaster, a fellow-lodger at the Morlands',
the veins in whose forehead stood out always, a thin, frail consumptive,
who tortures himself with love of her. This night he waits up for her
and makes her try to care for him, as so many others have in the past.
Out of pity for him she could not bring herself to deal the one smart
blow that the moment required: the strength was lacking, and so she
prepares for herself terrible consequences. The plot thickens. The
Spawer sees more and more of Pam, he teaches her music, but he is
already engaged to a girl in Switzerland of whom Pam knows nothing. He
screws up his courage to tell her on one notable day when he goes with
her to take dainties and administer comfort to an old dying man. The
description of this one afternoon and evening takes up many chapters of
the book, and the gradual leading up to the crisis where the Spawer has
to tell Pam is wonderfully done.

Exactly at the moment when she acknowledges her sorrow at his departure
the schoolmaster emerges out of the blackness and takes her away: she
discovers now the Spawer is going that she is in love with him. "'He
likes me,'" she says to the accusing consumptive, "'but he doesn't love
me. I wish he did.... But I'm not good enough for him. There has never
been any question of his loving me. He is engaged to marry somebody else
... and he may leave Ullbrig any day. When he told me he was going ... I
was so unhappy that I began to cry. I couldn't help it. I didn't think
he would notice ... but he did ... and tried to comfort me. And
then--and then--you were there and saw. And I love him--I love him--I
love him and I tell you....'"

She is fated to take the letter to her lover which she imagines will
summon him away from her ... and she fails to deliver it. The
schoolmaster discovers her crime, gets it from her and makes her promise
to marry him before he will restore it (this is where the actual story
becomes unbearably silly--people don't do these things). She decides to
run away; the same night the Spawer walks along the cliffs late, and the
schoolmaster, who has discovered Pam's flight, shadows him, so clumsily
that the Spawer discovers him: they argue on the cliff edge and the
Spawer falls over: Pamela hears his scream and goes to the rescue, and
the two discover their love for each other at death's door. They are cut
off from help by the rising tide.

"'I want to ask you ...'" he said. "'You know why I was going back. The
other letter was--from Her. She asks me to set her free. If there hadn't
been--been any other one in the case, and I'd asked you ... to marry me
... would you have married me?'"

In an instant the girl's arms were about the man's neck, and her lips
upon his lips, as though they would have sucked the poor remaining life
out of his body into her own ... yea--though Death stood by their side
... yet could he not arrest this moment.

"'Oh--my love, my love!' the girl wept through the wet lips that clung
to him. 'What do I care about dying now? I would rather a thousand times
die to learn that you had loved me--than live and never know it. Promise
me--you will not--let go of me--when the time comes.... Don't let me go.
I want to die with you.'

"And there being nothing else to do, they stood and waited for
death...."

But this is a love romance: it could not be allowed to end like that.
Drunken Barclay, having missed Tankard's Bus that night, hears Pam's
calls for help and saves them both and gives us and Mr Booth a fuller
chance to revel in a regular orgy of love. The Spawer was glad to be
thus helpless on his back, for the glory of being cradled in such a
love, and learning his love over again, from the lips and looks and
actions, the dear, large-hearted A B C Primer of Pam. "Her very love of
him, issuing towards him from every pore of her body, fertilised the
girl's own beauty, like the sap in the lush hedgerows at spring. Her
soft, velvet eyes ... darkened and deepened ... till they were beyond
all plumb of mortal gaze. Her lips ... coloured now to a deeper, clearer
carmine, with little pools of love visible lurking in the corners of
them ... her lashes ... grew black as ebony ... her freckles ... more
purely golden.

"And Pam stooped over him as she was always doing, and slipped her
linked fingers under his neck, and looked into his face first, and
kissed him ... and buried her face by his, and lifted it to look at him
once more, and kissed him again.... Who should stop her now from telling
him she loved him, loved him, loved him?"

Yes, there is no doubt about it: Mr Booth, whose gift for seeing things
is so remarkably acute, can describe the passion of love with the best
of them. Not easily does one forget those dear, kissable, candid
freckles, powdered in pure gold-dust about the bridge of the nose and
the brows ... the great round eyes with the blacky-brown velvety
softness of bulrushes ... the rapt red lips ... the big beneficence of
hair ... the oaten-tinted cheeks ... the little pink lobes ... the
tanned russet neck ... and the pale blue tam-o'-shanter of our beloved
Pam. She is one of the most alive heroines in fiction, and the man who
doesn't find himself a good deal more in love with her than the Spawer
was is not to be envied.

_Fondie_ is a novel of quite another sort. It is the grim tragedy of a
flirtatious daughter of an impoverished country parson who gets "let
down" by an undergraduate and drowns herself.

It has the same excellent qualities that so distinguish _The Cliff-End_,
in that it is leisurely, the dialect is wonderfully reproduced, the
scenery painted with an exquisite sense of colour and exactness, the
characters all live ... and there is Fondie the wheelwright, Fondie the
foolish, who "never used bad language even when unprovoked," who was not
a bit of good among the girls, who did his best work when he was not
being paid for it, who was always respectfully in love with the girl,
Blanche, and offered to marry her when she had already got into trouble
with the other man. "'Lad's fond,'" said his father, who was as
"laughterless as Jehovah and as summary. 'He'll do owt onnybody tells
him.'"

There are many inimitable anecdotes scattered irrelevantly through these
pages, the best of which is perhaps that of the black bull which coughed
grass and spittle all down the back of Bless Allcot's neck while he was
engaged in fervent prayer in the chapel: "'Thoo's best not ti pray
public of a Sunday or two, Bless Allcot, till thoo's had a chance ti
pray private,'" shouts Fondie's father to the prayer ... and an
altercation starts during divine service which nearly develops into a
fight.

An example of Mr Booth's humour may be seen in his description of the
installation of the harmonium in the chapel:

"There were two grand services ... and the cobbler from Sproutgreen
walked all the way over to Whivvle in a parson's hat and a white tie, to
tell folk what a sinful life he had led in his younger days and how, but
for the Living Word, he might probably have been wearing a grey coat and
coloured kerchief to this day, and been even as the other sinners whom
he had met this morning bicycling along the road to Hell. And Bless
Allcot's eyes were as wet as cut lemons ... and at both services he
prayed in the key of G flat minor for absent Brethren."

Fondie's father, who in old days had scraped his fiddle-strings so
frenziedly in that chapel that he had to give the fiddle a rest for one
verse in three, "to cool her bearings and prevent her from firing,"
naturally hated the innovation, but went to the chapel to shame the
others ... "he went, casting the chapel into such a hush as if he had
been his own corpse, so that the praying went as dry as a duck-pond in
August ... and Bless Allcot's daughter let the wind out of the harmonium
time after time and lost all her faculty for counting how many verses
there were in each hymn" ... and Fondie's father returns home
triumphant:

"'Aye. It's been a judgment on 'em. Lord's visited 'em.'"

Fondie, like the Spawer in _The Cliff-End_, "could bide music as long as
a sow could bide scratching," and Blanche made him play the organ for
her in church, but because he wouldn't kiss her, altered the figures in
the hymns, making threes into eights and ones into sevens so that he
would play his worst, which he did.

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