A matre quando sum vocatus,
Begotten with some incuby,
Or with some freir infatuatus;
In faith I can nocht tell redely,
Unde aut ubi fui natus,
But in truth I trow trewely.
Quod sum diabolus incarnatus.
No author's name is given and we have had no time or opportunity to
make researches. But perhaps, as we have suggested, some of our readers
may be able to give us the information desired.
* * * * *
We were fortunate in recently securing a very fine copy of _Certaine
Learned and Elegant Workes of the Right Honourable Fulke Lord Brooke,
written in his Youth and familiar Exercise with Sir Philip Sidney_,
Henry Seyle, 1633. It is high time that a new edition of these very
interesting and, by moments, very great poems was published. Grosart's
reprint is faulty and is, furthermore, practically unprocurable. As a
matter of fact a new edition was, we understand, in process of being
prepared by a very able young scholar of Christ Church, when the war
broke out and the would-be editor was unhappily killed. Mr. Rose had,
we believe, made considerable researches and had even discovered a
certain amount of new material, but he had not committed the results
of his labours to paper; so that the possible new edition of Greville
has perished with him. If the rest of Greville's works could be edited
as well as his Life of Sidney has been by Mr. Nowell Smith we should be
very well pleased. But the prospect of getting any new edition at all
seems now extremely unlikely.
RECENT ADDITIONS TO LIBRARIES
Some early printed books of considerable interest have recently
been added to the Library of the British Museum, among them a copy
of Sannazaro's _Arcadia_, Venice, 1502, in a contemporary binding
of boards covered with designs printed from woodblocks. _Terentius:
Comediæ cum interpretatione Donati_, Baptista de Tortis, Venice,
1482. _Elegantiolae_, by Augustinus Datus, produced at Verona by
an unidentified printer in 1483. _Ptolemaeus, Liber quadripartit_,
Ratdolt, Venice, 1484. Maurice de Sully, Bishop of Paris: _Les
exposicions des euungilles en romant_, Antoine Neyret, Chambéry, 1484.
(Only four fully authenticated incunabula of Chambéry are known, of
which this is the earliest and rarest. It is printed in large Gothic
type and adorned with woodcuts. The Museum possesses specimens of
the second, third, and fourth Chambéry books, and this is a perfect
copy of the first.) _Jo: Balbus Januensis_: Catholicon, Jean du Pré,
Lyon, 1492. Several examples of early Spanish printing have also been
presented, as well as two first editions of Swinburne, _Laus Veneris_,
Moxon, 1866, and _Dolores_, Hotten, 1867, with "The Devil's Duel: a
letter to the editor of _The Examiner_," an attack on Robert Buchanan,
written by Swinburne under the pseudonym of Thomas Maitland, and
printed for private circulation in 1875.
ITEMS FROM THE BOOKSELLERS' CATALOGUES
With the present boom in seventeenth-century literature one is
unlikely, to judge from the catalogues of the better-known booksellers,
to pick up many bargains in Caroline literature in London. The
collector's only hope will be chance or the oversight or ignorance
of the vendor. We know of someone who recently had the good fortune
to find a copy of the extremely scarce _Lyric Poems_ of Philip Ayres
(1687) in a parcel of miscellaneous rubbish. But that was a stroke of
luck not likely to be repeated, and collectors must be prepared to pay
pretty heavily for their seventeenth century now. The following items
from various catalogues will indicate the current scale of prices for
early editions of Jacobean and Caroline books. We shall be interested
to see the prices fetched in the sale of the third portion of the late
Mr. W. J. Leighton's stock, at Messrs. Sotheby's in the last days of
October. The catalogue makes mention of many extremely interesting
seventeenth-century books as well as important manuscripts and early
printed books.
* * * * *
Messrs. Dobell offer eight first editions of Richard Brathwaite.
_Barnabee's Journall_, published by John Haviland in 1638, is priced
at £48, and _Ar't Asleepe Husband? A Boulster Lecture_, 1640, at
£25. Two more copies of this last work are included among the books
at the Leighton sale. The second edition of Carew's Poems (1642), in
the original calf, is offered at ten guineas; and a first edition of
Dekker's _Tragi-Comedy, called Match Mee in London_ (1631), at £14. A
copy of the 1772 edition of Carew's Poems, originally the property of
Mrs. Browning, with her maiden name and date, 1842, on the title-page,
is on sale at the Serendipity Bookshop, price four guineas. Another
book of Mrs. Browning's at the Serendipity Shop is Samuel Daniel's
_History of the Civil Wars_, 1717. This is one of those odd reprints
of Elizabethan poets that are to be found scattered up and down the
eighteenth century. Perhaps the most unexpected of them is the folio
_Works of Michael Drayton, Esq.; A celebrated Poet in the Reigns of
Queen Elizabeth, King James I., and Charles I._, printed by J. Hughs
and sold by R. Dodsley, 1748. Among other valuable seventeenth-century
books at the Serendipity Shop are Crashaw's _Carmen Deo Nostro_ in
the original vellum, printed at Paris, 1652, £40, a second edition of
Herbert's _Temple_, and a first edition of _Hesperides, or the works,
both Human and Divine, of Robert Herrick, Esq._, £140.
* * * * *
It is interesting to note what high prices the works of Surtees can
always command. In Mr. Frank Hollings's catalogue a set of the Sporting
novels, with Leech's illustrations, one of them a first edition and the
others early issues, is offered for £37 10_s._
On the other hand, a first edition of _Friendship's Garland_ can be
bought at Messrs. Dobell's for 10_s._ 6_d._, and a first edition of
Buchanan's _Book of Orm_ for half-a-crown.
People still seem prepared to pay high prices for odds and ends from
the nineties. Mr. Hollings has a complete Savoy at £7 10_s._ and two
first editions of Oscar Wilde at nearly four pounds apiece.
A first edition of _Trilby_ (1895) can be purchased for 7_s._ 6_d._
at Messrs. Dobell's, and of _Daniel Deronda_ (1876) at 18_s._ _Evan
Harrington_, in the twelve original parts of _Once a Week_, is offered
at 25_s._ at the Serendipity Shop.
* * * * *
Mr. Everard Meynell has a curiosity of nineteenth-century literature
for sale in the shape of Coventry Patmore's _Odes_, dated 1868, but
never published, for the following reason: "Early in 1868 he had
written nine odes, which in the April of that year he printed for
private circulation. Afterwards, keenly mortified at the coldness of
their reception by friends, he made a fire in the hall and cast on it
(as he thought) all the copies remaining in his hand, while he calmly
sat and watched them burn. A friend, who had heard of the intended
bonfire, persuaded his daughter Emily to abstract a copy or two, and
these, with the few which had been sent to friends, were all that
remained of the edition." The price of this soul saved from the burning
is £8 10_s._, and a first edition of _The Unknown Eros_ (1878), with
inscription from the author to Richard Garnett, is priced £2 10_s._
* * * * *
Having recently picked up cheap a third edition (1872) of FitzGerald's
_Omar Khayyám_ (Quaritch, 1872), we are interested to see that a copy
of the fourth edition (1879) is for sale at three guineas. We suspect
ourselves of having made a bargain, but are not yet quite sure.
* * * * *
Messrs. Dobell have an interesting collection of first editions of
works by Victor Hugo, most of them presentation copies, with Hugo's
autograph inscription, to Mademoiselle Louise Jung.
A. L. H.
CORRESPONDENCE
(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)
SIR,--On the assumption--I hope justified--that you propose to have a
"Correspondence Column" in your paper, I write to plead that you should
devote some of your attention to the subject of what is, I believe,
called "book production." That your guidance as to the contents of
books will be valuable I do not doubt; but I feel that an organ such as
yours might be of considerable service if it would determine to devote
some consideration to their physical form.
It may fairly be said, I think, that, as a body, English publishers
produce their books as respectably as any publishers in the world.
The Germans produce--or produced before the war--a larger number of
agreeable-looking cheap books, and a larger number of finely-printed
and bound editions _de luxe_, such as were specialised in by firms
like Langen of Munich. But the ordinary German book of commerce was
frequently very shoddy and the pseudo-romantic "Albert Memorial"
tradition had never been entirely shaken off. The French presses issue
many books which are a delight to possess. Their tradition is an old
one. It can be traced through the delicate eighteenth-century editions,
with their unequalled engravings, back to the Estiennes and the Torys,
who were infinitely superior to the printers of their time. Throughout
the last fifty years French publishers and "societies of bibliophiles"
have issued editions of poetry and of old rarities exquisite in their
taste: beautifully printed on the best paper and never eccentric.
But the ordinary French novel or political book, printed in blunt
unattractive type and "bound" in yellow paper covers, which fall in
pieces at a touch, is certainly not a model that anyone would wish to
copy. Much may be said against our wood-pulp paper and our common cloth
bindings; but, on the whole, we certainly clothe most books in garments
more durable than the books deserve; and the same thing holds good of
America, though there the types and bindings are, as a rule, uglier
than ours.
The fact remains that not one book out of twenty that we produce can
be called beautiful, and that fifteen out of twenty are indisputably
ugly. That the "public" will ever demand an improvement is a fantastic
dream. The ordinary reader likes a nice book when he sees it, but will
never make an "effective demand" on his own account. We have to rely on
the initiative, largely disinterested, of (1) the publishers, (2) the
authors, and (3) the critics.
Publishers, we know, must earn their living like other men; their
chief attention must be given to procuring saleable "matter." But they
have to get their books printed, and they have to get them bound; and
while they are about it they would lose nothing, and we should all
gain something, if they would see to it that the work was done by
someone who cared about types and was anxious to make the best of the
materials available at a specified price. Authors, again, may often
be heard complaining that they do not like the look of their books;
but does any author (except Mr. Bernard Shaw and a few bibliophiles
who patently supervise the job themselves) ever take any steps to
secure a "production" of which he would approve? Finally, though the
critics occasionally praise a book for being "beautifully printed" or
tastefully "bound," not one of them seems to make a regular practice
of commenting on the physical design of books--which, after all, is an
ingredient in our civilisation just as much as the design of cottages.
I should, as I say, be relieved to hear that the MERCURY, from which we
all hope so much, intends to "do its bit" in this connection.--Yours
faithfully,
ORIGINAL SUBSCRIBER.
[We think our correspondent is a little hard on English publishers.
Some of them, though a minority, seldom produce an unattractive book;
and the book-production of them all is on a higher average level than
it was ten years ago, or has ever been in our time. But we agree that
there is room for improvement, and scope for commendation or the
reverse; and we purpose in our next issue to institute a regular page
of "Book Production Notes," which we hope will give our correspondent
satisfaction.--ED. L.M.]
BOOKS OF THE MONTH
POETRY
REYNARD THE FOX. By JOHN MASEFIELD. Heinemann. 5_s._ net.
It is an agreeable thing to find a man whose work has been overpraised
writing better than he has ever done before. Mr. Masefield's earlier
narrative poems were panegyrised for their vices: their unreal plots,
their bad psychology, their sentimentality, their jog-trot metres. He;
wiser in his generation, appears to have realised that the best parts
of them were the "descriptions": details of vivid imagery, pictures of
scenes and brief incidents; and that where he was dealing with a person
he was at his best when the person was alone and in one self-centred
mood. The picture of the widow alone in her cottage was worth all that
incredible plot in the _Widow in the Bye Street_; the public-house
scene and the birds following the plough remain in the memory when Saul
Kane's spiritual struggles have faded away; Dauber was little more than
a means of arriving at that peaceful entry when the ship trod the quiet
waters of the harbour like a fawn; and landscapes were the only excuse
for _The Daffodil Fields_. Mr. Masefield (who very likely realises
that _Biography_, a poem that will not die, is the best thing he has
done) seems to have discovered his bent. In _Reynard the Fox_ there is
only one leading character, the fox, and he is shown in no complicated
relationships. It is the description of a chase and of a fight for
life, and we could not hope to see it better done. Mr. Masefield's
faults of writing are still evident. Lines like
He, too (a year before), had had
A zest for going to the bad
might have come out of one of the numerous parodies which have been
perpetrated at his expense; he is unscrupulous in rhyming, he takes
pot-shots with words, and he is occasionally grossly sentimental. But
none of these faults is bad enough in this poem to get in the way. It
is a poem to read again as soon as one has forgotten it, and it will
give equal enjoyment every time.
The opening section, which describes the meet, is a little too
drawn out; too much time is taken up with describing a multitude of
characters, once seen and then forgotten. But no Dutch painter ever
gave a better idea of the bustle about an inn than Mr. Masefield does,
and the approach of the Hunt is done deliciously. We would spare little
of the long description of the hounds who come round the corner in
front of the red-coats:
Intent, wise, dipping, trotting, straying,
Smiling at people, shoving, playing,
Nosing to children's faces, waving
Their feathery sterns and all behaving,
and then draw round Tom Dansey on the green in front of the Cock and
Pye:
Arrogant, Daffodil, and Queen
Closest, but all in little space.
Some lolled their tongues, some made grimace,
Yawning, or tilting nose in quest,
All stood and looked about with zest,
They were uneasy as they waited.
Byron said the octosyllabic metre is the easiest to write. It is,
unvaried, the most monotonous to read. Mr. Masefield, who breaks into
anapæstic passages when hounds are in full cry, pulls it off all the
way. It was not an easy thing to supply enough bite to descriptions of
earth, tree, and sky, to invent enough novel incidents, to enable us to
follow without fatigue a ten or fourteen miles chase across country.
But it has been done, and Mr. Masefield has also succeeded in intensely
interesting us in the fox without (as a rule) making him any less an
animal. When he finds one earth and then another stopped the reader's
feelings are what they are when a hero of romance walks blind along
the plank, and it is with an immense relief that, in the end, we find
the fox (at the expense of another) escapes. The final description of
the rested fox's nocturnal hunt and the hounds going home is admirable
fresh painting. Here is the close:
Then the moon came quiet and flooded full
Light and beauty on clouds like wool,
On a feasted fox at rest from hunting,
In the beech-wood grey where the brocks were grunting.
* * * * *
The beech-wood grey rose dim in the night,
With moonlight fallen in pools of light,
The long dead leaves on the ground were rimed,
A clock struck twelve and the church bells chimed.
It is just the end of such a day.
THE SUPERHUMAN ANTAGONISTS. By SIR WILLIAM WATSON. Hodder & Stoughton.
6_s._ net.
Nobody could accuse Sir William Watson of over-colloquialism, morbid
violence, or carelessness. A slight infusion of those vices might do
him good. He is determined to be as lofty and orotund as Milton, as
grave as Matthew Arnold, as sage as Wordsworth, if he can manage it;
and the result is often a cold and carven monument of respectable but
uninspired verse akin to the better of the large tombs in Westminster
Abbey. On every page of his title-poem (a debate between Ormuzd and
Ahriman) we find lines like
Legible haply in that brow benign.
Rashnu and Vayu and great Mithra, sons
With the huge monster's dragon armature,
Out of the pregnant and parturient dust
Large hereditaments of bliss and woe,
sentences, however mighty their mould, which are to modern poetry what
Lord Chaplin's speeches are to modern oratory. This much, however, can
be said for Sir William, that his brain is always working in spite
of his lordly panoply of words outworn, and he who can penetrate his
language will arrive at some sort of argument. The shorter poems
are also magniloquent, and, like the longer one, barely escape
commonplaceness by a certain activity of mind. But the language would
not have been poorer had none of them been written.
MORE TRANSLATIONS FROM THE CHINESE. By ARTHUR WALEY. Allen & Unwin.
3_s._ and 4_s._ 6_d._ net.
Mr. Waley's 170 _Chinese Poems_ (Constable) was one of the most
memorable books of recent years; and, what is more, was instantly
recognised as such. Even those of us (and we can certainly claim to
be a majority) who do not know Chinese could tell at sight that they
were accurate beyond the wont of translations. They were obviously
beautiful poems in the original tongue, and they became beautiful
English poems through Mr. Waley, who has handled unrhymed verse as
skilfully as anyone alive or dead, with a variety of rhythm and a flow
of sound correspondent to sense, which is amazing in translations. The
new collection should not be missed by anyone who has the old one;
those who have not should get the old one (which contains a historical
sketch, and which, on the whole, covers better poems) before this one.
In his second collection Mr. Waley still devotes most of his space to
Po Chu'i, really a greater poet than Li Po, of whom we have heard so
much. The poems from him are again very diverse in subject and mood;
and the more we see of him the more his personality attracts us. We
may quote two shorter examples. One is _The Cranes_, which has the
terseness, the melancholy, the directness of the best of Verlaine:
The western wind has blown but a few days;
Yet the first leaf already flies from the bough.
On the drying paths I walk in my thin shoes;
In the first cold I have donned my quilted coat.
Through shallow ditches the floods are clearing away;
Through sparse bamboos trickles a slanting light.
In the early dusk, down an alley of green moss,
The garden boy is leading the cranes home.
Po Chu'i's mild humour is seen in _The Lazy Man's Song_ (A.D. 811):
I have got patronage, but am too lazy to use it;
I have got land, but am too lazy to farm it.
My house leaks; I am too lazy to mend it.
My clothes are torn; I am too lazy to darn them.
I have got wine, but I am too lazy to drink;
So it's just the same as if my cellar were empty.
I have got a harp, but am too lazy to play;
So it's just the same as if it had no strings.
My wife tells me there is no more bread in the house;
I want to bake, but am too lazy to grind.
My friends and relatives write me long letters;
I should like to read them, but they're such a bother to open.
I have always been told that Chi Shu-yeh
Passed his whole life in absolute idleness.
But he played the harp and sometimes transmuted metals.
So even _he_ was not so lazy as I.
The finest thing in the book is perhaps Ch'u Yuan's _The Great
Summons_. That is too long to quote; but we cannot resist Mr. Waley's
version of a brief lyric by Li Po, _Self-Abandonment_:
I sat drinking and did not notice the dusk,
Till falling petals filled the folds of my dress.
Drunken I rose and walked to the moonlit stream;
The birds were gone, and men also few.
These translations may be not without their influence on English
poetry; and though the Chinese spirit is not ours, the example of their
exactitude and economy will not be thrown away.
COLLECTED POEMS OF LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS. Secker. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
In a note Lord Alfred Douglas observes that all great art is founded
on morality; and that "good poetry is made up of two things: style
and sincerity." These apophthegms are brief and unelaborate but
indisputable. Unfortunately he proceeds to say that poetry has never
sunk so low as now, and that "there is not a good poet among the lot,"
which suggests that he does not know where to look for poetry. He is
out of touch with the time, and it is unfortunate for him. Again and
again as we read his collection we feel that he is the last of the
pre-Raphaelites, clothing genuine feelings in a faded vesture, and
images and words gone stale. He has improved. His earliest poems might
well have been left out; his latest include several sonnets (notably
that beginning "I have been profligate of happiness") which have
been, and deserve to be, in the anthologies. But the last exactitude
of statement he seldom, as yet, has achieved; and his feelings about
persons come out much more strongly and convincingly than his feelings
about Nature or the eternal. This edition has a portrait.
FORGOTTEN PLACES. By IAN MACKENZIE. Chapman & Hall. 3_s._ 6_d._ net.
In the last four years many young men have died who would have helped
to make our age--as it will in any case be--glorious in song. Brooke
and Flecker and Edward Thomas had at least partly expressed themselves;
others, such as Wyndham Tennant and Julian Grenfell, had written one
or two perfect poems and justified the muse; but there were some,
whose talents only their friends knew, who might have ranked with the
first of these, and died before they had outgrown their boyhood. Ian
Mackenzie was one of these. He was in the H.L.I.; had a breakdown
in England (he had outgrown his strength) and died of pneumonia on
Armistice night, after hearing that peace had come. He was just twenty.
The present volume (his second) gathers up what was left over from his
first, and is prefaced by a memoir by Arthur Waugh, every word of which
will be echoed by those who knew Mackenzie, one of the handsomest,
sunniest, most candid boys in the world. He was twenty; and as yet
too young to hammer into form the large visions of his precocious
imagination, and the queer thoughts that engaged his intellect. The
reader who knew him will see in every line the promise of a great
maturity; the reader who did not know him will probably fail to see
more than a tumble of confused thoughts and images obscurely worded
in rhythms that are often ungainly. But even he may be arrested here
and there by a phrase beyond the common range of eighteen or nineteen.
There are several such in _Eyes_:
Eyes swim out like strange blue fishes
Recovering beauty from the dark.
And several also in the poem which arises out of the childlike
reflection:
What a strange marvel is the telephone.
The whole of the second section of _Friends_ is clear and passionate,
and there are lines at the beginning in which he makes the comparison
of a thinker with a child looking at pebbles in a pool, which are of
the last simplicity and completeness. He oscillated between an extreme
analytical habit and a profound love for ordinary things. The first
mood may be illustrated by his strange poem on Words: