through a crisis. The qualities of original, free, and vigorous
creation which were the causes of success from Balzac to Maupassant
have become rare. The novel no longer produces those real and living
characters round whom, as Taine said, it is possible to walk. But it is
remarkable for qualities of intelligence.
Alphonse Daudet somewhere makes a distinction between creative
novelists and essayist novelists. The distinction is very just. We lack
to-day creative novelists, but we have a number of essayist novelists.
Our contemporary novelists are very intelligent persons, who are often
admirable in their knowledge of human nature, but who rarely succeed in
making it live. It is nevertheless probable that there is nothing to be
gained by retracing our steps. We shall no doubt reach something new by
continuing to the end this exercise of the intellect, by applying it
to an increasingly profound and refined psychological analysis. If we
take examples from the English novel, the sign-post of our French novel
of to-day would not be such a name as that of Dickens or of Eliot or
of Kipling but rather that of Meredith. This is what is indicated by
the great success now enjoyed by two complex and delicate writers, M.
Marcel Prevost and M. Jean Girandoux. _A l'Ombre de Jeunes Filles en
Fleur_ and _Simon le Pathétique_ are both novels of rich and fugitive
personalities, who are absorbed in the contemplation of themselves,
and who thus find a real world of inward adventures. It seems that the
French novel is now moving by choice in this direction, and that the
public is assisting the movement. This should not be astonishing in a
country which has always regarded psychological analysis as the supreme
goal of literature.
ALBERT THIBAUDET
LEARNED SOCIETIES, ETC.
SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES
Stonehenge was formally handed over to the nation on October 26th,
1918, and H.M. Office of Works at once made plans to secure some of the
standing stones in danger of cracking, and to excavate the entire area
without disturbing the monument. The archæological supervision of the
work was entrusted to the Society of Antiquaries, and the programme was
to have a season of about three months for several consecutive years on
the same lines as in 1901, when the great leaning stone was raised with
interesting results. Professor Gowland's health, however, prevented
his participation in the scheme, and his successor, Lieut.-Colonel
Hawley, unfortunately met with an accident, which, with a strike among
the contractor's men, prevented any but preliminary work being carried
out on the site this year. If funds are available--and the opportunity
of solving the riddle of Stonehenge must appeal to all interested in
antiquity--there is a good prospect of starting in earnest next summer,
without prejudice, it is hoped, to the society's enterprises at Old
Sarum and Wroxeter, the Roman town near Shrewsbury, on both of which
sites considerable progress had been made before the outbreak of war.
The recent death of Professor Haverfield is one of many severe losses
incurred by the society during the past summer.
SOCIETY FOR THE PROTECTION OF ANCIENT BUILDINGS
For years the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings has been
associated with the work of protesting against the destruction or
spoiling of good examples of the building art of the past. This year
it is developing the more constructive side of its activities. The
following instances will suffice to illustrate this development.
First, the Society is endeavouring to show that the humbler forms of
English architecture--the old cottages--should not only be saved, but
used, and how they can be made decently habitable, though much injured
by time and neglect. Works replete with old-time building lore should
not be permanently condemned because they lack damp courses, proper
ventilation, larders, or upstair fireplaces. Instead of building new
at £800 or so, the Housing Committees should acquire cottages of this
kind and repair them at, say, £250 or £300. To draw attention to this
subject the Society has issued a well-illustrated booklet (Batsford,
94 High Holborn; 2s.), which it hopes to follow by a practical
demonstration on a pair of old cottages, proving the possibility of
remedying common defects. It hopes to publish the results in a second
booklet which would in fact be a pictorial specification.
The second illustration of the Society's constructive activity is the
offer to give lectures on the objects and work of the Society, in which
special emphasis is to be laid on what may be learnt in matters of
economy and beauty, from old buildings.
THE ROYAL NUMISMATIC SOCIETY
The Royal Numismatic Society has removed from 22 Albemarle Street to
22 Russell Square, W.C.1, where meetings will be held and the library
is housed. On October 16th, Sir Henry Howorth, Vice-President, in
the Chair, Mr. Lawrence read a note on some of the difficulties of
distinguishing halfpence from farthings during the period between 1465
and 1523. Parliament in the latter year directed some alteration of
type of the farthings, as it was shown that halfpennies and farthings
were with difficulty distinguishable owing to both denominations having
been struck from the same "coin." A discussion was also raised on the
profile half-groats of Henry VII. bearing the mint-marks martlet and
rose. Some of these have keys below the shield on the reverse and
others are without the keys. The question raised was whether these
later coins were to be considered as having been struck at York in
consequence of the martlet mint-mark, previously only known at York,
or whether the absence of the keys denoted their issue at London. Mr.
Brooke and Col. Morrieson urged that these coins were _sede vacante_
issues of York.
Mr. H. Mattingly read a paper entitled "A. Vitellius Imp. Germanicus,"
in which he attempted to determine the reasons for the variations
in Vitellius's obverse legends, between the forms _Imp. Germ._ and
_Germ. Imp._ After distinguishing clearly the class of coins on which
these titles appear, he brought evidence to show that the title _Imp.
Germanicus_ is characteristic of the non-Roman coins of Vitellius
and of the early period of the reign before the victory over Otho.
It implied a definite challenge thrown out by the German armies to
the rest of the Empire, and in consequence when Vitellius became
constitutional Emperor at Rome the title was deftly deprived of offence
by inversion to _Germanicus Imp._, a normal form of title already borne
by Claudius and Nero.
THE LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
The forty-second annual meeting of the Library Association was notable,
not by reason of its bibliographical or literary interest, for either
was to seek, but as marking a definite cleavage between librarians
and the Board of Education upon a matter of national importance. Were
it not that education in this country has always been the province of
the amateur, one might say that the cleavage was between amateur and
professional opinion. The third interim report of the Adult Education
Committee to the Ministry of Reconstruction proposed to hand over
the control of the Public Library to the Local Education Authority;
the Library Association, as a body possessed of a charter for the
support and advancement of the public library movement, opposed the
main recommendations of that report and returned to the Minister of
Education a memorandum of counter argument. The four points of the
memorandum were: (1) "That, with the already heavy responsibilities
of the Education Authority, an additional duty--problems requiring
detached consideration--will result in the convenient relegation of
the library to a mere appendage of the school; (2) that, although
co-operation between school and library does exist, the initiative
has come almost wholly from the latter, and that assimilation by the
comparatively untried and empirical "1918 model" education will be
fatal to its general usefulness; (3) that the interest of the public is
the main interest of the library, and that this is subordinated by the
Adult Education Committee to the special interest of the school; (4)
that the recommendations upon the provision of technical and commercial
books were unduly extravagant and wasteful as regarding the first, but
unduly parsimonious and wrongly conceived in the case of the second. To
this document, beyond a bare acknowledgment, no reply has been given.
Its form and tenor were unanimously approved by the Association at
Southport.
THE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
The Bibliographical Society opens its 28th Session on November 17th,
with a paper by Mr. R. F. Sharp, of the British Museum, on "Travesties
of Shakespeare's Plays." The Society has not only kept up its normal
output of books during the war, but has produced some volumes of
exceptional importance, notably Mr. Gordon Duff's wonderfully complete
record of _English Fifteenth-Century Books_, with facsimiles of all
the types used in them; Mr. E. F. Bosanquet's illustrated Monograph
on _English Printed Almanacks and Prognostications_; the first volume
of Professor Carleton Brown's _Register of Middle-English Religious
Verse_; and two exceptionally interesting volumes of _Transactions_. _A
Bibliography of Landor_, by Mr. Stephen Wheeler and Mr. T. J. Wise,
will shortly be issued, and the second volume of Professor Carleton
Brown's _Register_ should be ready early next year. The books of the
Society are only printed for its own members, and until 1914 it was
a close corporation, with an English and American membership limited
to 300. In the January before the war it opened its ranks in order to
obtain a hundred additional members and further increase its output.
It is still open to book lovers to join at the old subscription of
a guinea, but unless the Annual Meeting in January next decides
otherwise, the roll of the Society is due to be closed on the third
Monday of the new year. That the Society has done so well during the
war is largely due to its genial President, Sir William Osler, who has
held office longer than any of his predecessors and is soon further to
help the Society by producing for it a Monograph on the Medical books
published by the earliest printers, _i.e._ not later than 1480. Among
the earlier presidents were Dr. Garnett and Mr. Fortescue, of the
British Museum, the late Earl of Crawford, Mr. H. B. Wheatley, and Mr.
A. H. Huth, owner of the splendid library which has already furnished
material for eight sales at Sotheby's. Mr. A. W. Pollard, the present
Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum, has been its Hon.
Secretary since 1893, and was given some years ago a notable partner in
Mr. R. B. McKerrow, the Editor of Nashe.
THE FOLKLORE SOCIETY
During the war the Folklore, like other societies, has suffered by
the absence of some of its most active members on service, but the
work of the Society has not been interrupted, its meetings have been
regularly held, many valuable contributions have been received, and
the attendance has been well maintained. _Folk-lore_, the quarterly
Proceedings, has retained its position as one of the leading
authorities on popular beliefs and superstitions of races in the lower
stage of culture. Its principal function is to publish papers read by
members at the Society's meetings, and to review the more important
literature on subjects in which it is interested. But it also welcomes
from the general public notes and queries on British and foreign
folklore and beliefs. The foundations have been laid for two important
works which, it is hoped, will soon be ready for publication. As
regards the folklore of these islands, the leading authority is the
_Observations on Popular Antiquities_, by John Brand, subsequently
edited by Sir H. Ellis. Large collections have been made under the
supervision of Miss S. C. Burne, an ex-president of the society and
author of a valuable book on the folklore of Shropshire, with a view
to the compilation on the basis of Brand's work of a cyclopedia of
British folklore. The second work now in progress is a general index to
the long series of special books and Proceedings issued by the society
since its foundation, the work of compilation having been entrusted to
Mr. A. R. Wright.
THE SOCIETY OF PURE ENGLISH
The Society of Pure English, which was founded shortly before the war,
and which during the war was temporarily suspended, has now begun to
carry out its original purpose, and probably before this note appears
its first two pamphlets will have been published. Pamphlet No. 1 will
contain a list of the members of the Society and a reprint of the
original prospectus, which was privately printed in 1913, and which
contains a statement of the Society's aims in general terms. Pamphlet
No. 2 will consist of a discussion by the Poet Laureate of a curious
and hitherto almost unnoticed phenomenon of contemporary speech, the
great increase, namely, of homophones, or words of the same sound but
different meanings, in the English language. As the original prospectus
shows, the Society does not in the least aim at the absurd project of
"fixing" the language--its conception is rather that, since all living
languages change and must change as life changes, an attempt should
be made to guide this necessary process by acknowledged principles of
tradition and taste.
DRAMA
A LIVING CORPSE
This section opens amid a furore for improving the Drama in this
country. Leagues have sprung up, with imposing committees of enormous
length, and are canvassing for money and members with considerable
success. A Conference of the Theatre, lasting a fortnight, was held in
the summer at Stratford-upon-Avon for the first time in history, at
which actors, dramatic critics, trade unionists, authors, publishers,
newspaper proprietors, theatrical managers, voice trainers, poets,
scenic artists, school teachers, clergymen, and one bishop expressed
day after day their intense determination to have more drama and
better drama than we have ever had in England before. This assemblage
of people, whom as one of them I may perhaps be permitted to call
without offence fanatics, may have appeared to the detached onlooker
to have been of very little use. The Conference melted away, leaving
the British Drama League and the Arts League of Service still without
sufficient money to do any of the practical things without which the
gathering of conferences and the sitting of committees are merely
occasions for the ventilation of private grievances.
But the Conference could never have been held if there were not,
widespread through the country, a genuine passion for the theatre
far more extensive and far stronger than it had ever been in England
during the whole of the nineteenth century. There are no statistics
available to give us the percentage of the population who were regular
theatre-goers during the last century, but it was certainly very small,
and everyone knows that it has increased enormously during the last
ten years, and has probably even doubled again during the war. This
is a fact which is generally overlooked, but which really provides us
with the soundest basis for hope. What is the matter with the theatre
in England is mainly that there is not enough of it. Nearly all its
faults and shortcomings may be put down to deficiencies of _matériel_,
both structural and human. _There are not enough theatres_, those in
existence are obsolete, cranky, ill-ventilated, absurdly constructed,
badly placed buildings, an eyesore to passers-by, a hell of discomfort
for 90 per cent. of the audience, a death-trap for actors. Only a
fanatical human passion for the theatre could drive people into such
places away from the comparative comfort of their own firesides. _There
are not enough actors_, and those that survive the barbaric tortures
of rushing week by week from one cold and slatternly apartment-house
to another, always arriving in their next provincial town on the
dismallest of Sundays, generally find that they are the one spark of
life in the place, and end, like Sir Henry Irving, by expiring in their
miserable and draughty dressing-rooms. The English provincial town in
its dreariness and dirt awaits the coming of the actor much as the
Esquimaux in winter await the coming of the sun, but the actor during
the day when he is free wanders through its streets as Virgil wandered
by the banks of the Styx--forlorn, and like a man among shadows who
have no commerce with him, but belong to another world. It is no wonder
that they become more and more divorced from their fellow-creatures,
more and more inefficient, more and more lacking in zest for experiment
and enterprise, until neglected and isolated the profession sinks, with
bright exceptions, to a level of illiteracy, incompetence, and sloth
that lately even in London moved a commercial manager like Mr. Cochran
to express his astonishment.
But the municipal councils, which are the civic committees of the
townspeople entrusted with organising their social life, cannot remain
for ever indifferent to their duty in face of a growing popular demand
for the theatre; that is why I point to the enormous increase in the
number of habitual theatre-goers as our strongest basis of hope. Or if
they do so persist private enterprise will inevitably step in, as it
did in the case of so many electric-lighting, tramway, gas, and water
undertakings, build up a profitable theatrical business, mulct the
town annually of thousands of pounds in profits, and ultimately will
have to be bought out by the municipality at an inflated price. As Mr.
Granville Barker pointed out in an extraordinarily able speech at the
Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, the people's greatest need is to become
articulate. Art means nothing if it does not mean giving speech to
the people, and the art of the Drama is the most democratic, the most
popular, the most wide-reaching, the most easily understood, and the
most stimulating, because the most social of all the arts. There was
a time, and it is not so very long ago, when primary education in its
most rudimentary, that is to say, its school form, was left to private
enterprise, and if private enterprise could have done it at all it
might possibly have done it better than the nation; but every argument
that can be used in favour of teaching everyone to read and write
applies still more forcibly to giving the people a real education. It
is far too important and too urgent to be left to the chance provision
of speculators out merely to make profits for themselves, and it is
to enlighten public opinion on the subject that these leagues have
primarily been founded. But let me not be mistaken. There can be no
intention of priggishly educating the people in the "higher drama." We
must carefully discriminate between advocating for theatres--municipal,
if possible, but if not, private--and advocating for the performance of
plays by any dramatist or school or coterie of dramatists. The Drama is
a much bigger thing than Mr. Shaw, Ibsen, Chekhov, or anyone else, and
what has always prevented these movements from gaining popular sympathy
has been their lack of breadth, their curious fascination for pedants
and cranks. Almost every decent, sane human being will appreciate and
support a demand for a theatre to enlighten the dismal misery and
boredom of the winter evenings of his native town and to take him out
of the narrow groove into which he will inevitably stick if left alone
with his books and his relations; but he will not support a scheme to
ram down his throat obvious propaganda.
The Calvinists of the Drama
I have sat for hours in the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square,
watching the people. The most heterogeneous collection of persons
imaginable assemble there. Washerwomen, soldiers, artisans, clerks,
clergymen, navvies, all classes and ages. Some wander aimlessly about,
some stand petrified before one picture for a quarter of an hour, some
look only at portraits, others search for familiar landscapes, others
again are attracted by historical interest. There is hardly one of them
that would not probably earn the contempt of Mr. Clive Bell if he were
to give Mr. Bell the reason of his enjoyment; but I assert with all the
emphasis I can command that there is not one of them who has not gained
by even ten minutes within that building something impossible to value
and precious, beyond estimation. Can any human being go out of the
dirt, the indignity, the ugliness, the noise, the formlessness of the
modern city into the serenity, the colour, the dignity, the peace, and
the beauty of the rooms of the National Gallery without a quickening of
the spirit, however imperceptible? What is there in Trafalgar Square
apart from the National Gallery which in any degree witnesses that man
is more than an animal? True, there is St. Martin's Church, but the
associations of the church--irrelevant if you will--adulterate and
weaken its spiritual influence on men's minds to-day. But the National
Gallery exerts a completely catholic and irradiating power on all who
enter.
So does the theatre, even exactly as it stands to-day. I am in profound
disagreement with those who raise up their hands in horror at the
present state of the theatre where it exists. What causes me to join
the chorus of Jeremiahs is the scarcity of theatres, their complete
and utter absence in hundreds of large towns where they should exist,
and the smallness of their numbers in our largest cities. My mention
of Mr. Clive Bell in connection with the National Gallery was doubly
relevant, for there is a set of high-brows connected with the theatre
who have set their eyes so fixedly on an unreal and abstract perfection
that they have become blind. They talk about Serious Drama in the
same solemn, pompous and hopeless way that the Calvinists used to
talk about salvation, and the mass of the people, cheerfully ignoring
them, continues to go tranquilly to perdition. Ask anyone of these
apostles of Serious Drama to show you one serious drama, and the odds
are that they will say, _Man and Superman_ or _Ghosts_ or _Justice_.
Well, there is something to be said for the authors of these three
plays, although not one of them is a really first-rate dramatist, the
equal of Shakespeare, Sophocles, Euripides, or even Racine, but for
their followers--the dealers in the doleful realism of Manchester,
Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow, and the London suburbs--there is in
the main nothing to be said whatever. Their works are for the most
part immeasurably inferior to the average London Revue, and to accuse
the theatre of sinking into degradation because it prefers the wit,
humour, beautiful dressing, vivacious dancing, and high spirits of an
Ambassador's, Vaudeville, Pavilion, or Alhambra Revue to a serious,
machine-made play by Mr. Sutro or two hours of mechanical dulness from
someone I had better not name is simply to accuse it of preferring life
to the undesirable "seriousness" of the tomb.
Influence of the Existing Theatre