All earthly life's a winding funeral--
And though I never wept,
But into the dark coach stept,
Dreaming by night to answer the blood's sweet call,
She who stood there, high-breasted, with small, wise lips,
And gave me wine to drink and bread to eat,
Has not more steadfast feet,
But fades from my arms as fade from mariners' eyes
The sea's most beauteous ships.
And others no doubt will appear who are now no more thought of than
were Mr. Nichols or Mr. Graves or Mr. Turner in 1912.
At least this movement--we do not use the word in the sense of
"organised movement" or "school"--has had the luck of early recognition
and careful fostering. There are faults to be found with this as with
the three earlier volumes of the series, but, in a world which has
produced no faultless anthology, we ought not to expect the first to be
a collection of contemporary verse. No one will be able to look through
the book without objections rising to his lips. Every reader will want
this or that poet omitted, this or that included. There are few readers
of anthologies who do not find, on mature consideration, that they
could have done the work better themselves, and this would be just if,
in fact, anthologists worked only for themselves. But to E. M. we must
assign the credit of having carried through an exceedingly difficult
task with as few mistakes as could be thought possible. He has the
extra distinction of having foreseen seven years ago the beginning of a
"liveliness" which has justified him by enduring until at this moment
it shows no signs of recession. He would be no doubt the last person to
claim the invention, or even the discovery, of the "Georgian" movement.
But he might reasonably claim, and, if he does not, the honour must be
thrust upon him, to have provided it with a means of growing naturally
and without undue extravagance.
NEW POEMS. By IOLO ANEURIN WILLIAMS. Methuen. 3_s._ 6_d._ net.
Mr. Williams' first book of poems, published four years ago, was a
quite little book, noticeable for some polished little songs with a
Caroline or Queen Anne air. His tastes have remained the same; his
capacity for writing has developed; he paints miniatures, and his
ingenuity expends itself on the elaboration and variation of the
frames. The frontier between success and non-success is narrow in
this kind of work; a slight flaw ruins all, and Mr. Williams does
not always escape collapse. But _Alice_ and _Song_ are of a neatness
and completeness which would do credit to the best of the Queen Anne
practitioners. _The Country Songs_ is a fragment of what may become
a really excellent celebration of our folk-songs, and _Rocks_ and
_Astronomy_, though still with something of the song in them, let
delicate plummets into deeper waters. The image of the rock, doomed to
decay, yet
The lizard's immortal friend,
And deathless to the flower,
is happy _Astronomy_ we quote in full:
Jupiter may be that or this
Of stars that shine in heaven,
Neptune a mere hypothesis,
And Saturn one of seven.
They will not make the dark less bright,
For names I do not know;
Nameless the stars across the night
In nameless beauty go.
Over my head their vault is bent--
A mirror and a screen--
An ever fresh prefigurement
Of glory past the seen.
It is an unambitious and uneven but very pleasant little book.
THE WAR POEMS OF SIEGFRIED SASSOON. Heinemann. 3_s._ 6_d._ net.
This volume contains fifty-two poems selected from Mr. Sassoon's
previous volumes, and twelve new ones. The former are far too well
known to need description at this date; but we think that even in
these, and still more in the new poems, there is ground for the
conjecture that those who think of Mr. Sassoon primarily as a savage
realist and satirist are likely in the future to be surprised. It was
a genuine and profound sensibility, tenderness, and a cheated passion
for beauty that produced his war poetry; not an innate predilection for
violence, vituperation, or caricature. Now the storm has gone over he
seems to be becoming more and more a poet of nature. The transition is
perhaps symbolised in the most beautiful of the new poems here printed.
It is called _Everyone Sang_, and concludes the book, so full of blood
and corpses, rats, evil smells, and all the turmoil and _débris_ of war:
Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark green fields; on; on; and out of sight.
Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted,
And beauty came like the setting sun.
My heart was shaken with tears and horror
Drifted away.... O but every one
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be
done.
The book contains much that, however sincere, can only be described
as journalism _in excelsis_, but it is all inextricably mixed with
genuine poetry, and the collection as a whole, we suspect, will have
a permanent interest and value. Better than from a hundred histories
posterity will get from these poems a picture of how men felt and
looked in that world of
Sad, smoking, flat horizons, reeking woods,
And foundered trench-lines volleying doom for doom.
Their merits are never more clearly displayed than when they are
compared to the poems of the imitators who have sprung up like
mushrooms since Mr. Sassoon began publishing. These have taken his
brutal words, his more obvious attitudes, and the senile and complacent
objects of his satire; but in the copies the life is lacking.
ARGONAUT AND JUGGERNAUT. By OSBERT SITWELL. Chatto & Windus 5_s._ net.
At first sight this book looks like a revolutionary manifesto. Its
title is vehement and original, and its paper "jacket" is decorated
with the photograph of a negro head surmounted with a towering and
tapering wickerwork structure. It has no bearing on the contents, and
we can only assume that the author put it there because he liked it
or to arrest attention. Attention having been arrested, expectation
is disappointed. It is true that Mr. Sitwell often writes in _vers
libres_, and that he opens with a challenge and hearty proclamation in
the key of
Let us prune the tree of language
Of its dead fruit.
Let us melt up the clichés
Into molten metal;
Fashion weapons that will scald and flay
Let us curb this eternal humour
And become witty.
Let us dig up the dragon's teeth
From this fertile soil;
Swiftly,
Before they fructify.
And that, at a later stage, he observes that
The world itself
Dances
To make us dance
In cosmic frenzy.
But his frenzies have a very calculated air; he has not got rid of
those clichés, and that wit does not emerge. He cannot really play
the revolutionary with gusto, so, as Queen Victoria said, "We are not
amused": and when he lapses into more ordinary forms and more connected
statements he is revealed as an ordinary immature writer of verses. He
has some gift of observation which he will waste unless he treats it
more conscientiously, but observation will not make a poet.
CARMINA RAPTA. By GRIFFYTH FAIRFAX. Elkin Mathews. 3_s._ 6_d._ and
2_s._ 6_d._ net.
Mr. Fairfax's volume consists of "Verse translations from the French,
Spanish, Italian, German, Greek, Latin, with a few Arabic, Japanese,
and Armenian renderings from French prose versions." Mezzofanti and the
monk Calepino, in another sphere, must be alarmed for their linguistic
laurels. Some of Mr. Fairfax's translations are neat; but we hope those
from the Armenian--our Armenian wants rubbing up--are nearer the spirit
of the originals than are some of those from European languages. He
is at his neatest in some brief poems from the Spanish. His versions
of Hérédia and Baudelaire are especially lifeless; and he inflicts an
additional injury upon the latter by attributing the famous _Don Juan
in Hell_ to Hérédia.
THE CLOWN OF PARADISE. By DORMER CRESTON. Heath Cranton. 3_s._ net.
We notice this volume merely in order to record a neologism which we
commend to the notice of the editors of the _Oxford Dictionary_. It is
found in this passage:
My tearful soul did slip into those silver pools,
And, bathing in that stillness,
Was oned with God.
In the Court of Sir Henry Duke, we may continue, people are twoed.
NOVELS
COUSIN PHILIP. By MRS. HUMPHRY WARD. Collins. 6_s._ net.
SAINT'S PROGRESS. By JOHN GALSWORTHY. Heinemann. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
IF ALL THESE YOUNG MEN. By ROMER WILSON. Methuen. 7_s._ net.
MADELEINE. By HOPE MIRRLEES. Collins. 6_s._ net.
LEGEND. By CLEMENCE DANE. Heinemann. 6_s._ net.
THE MASK. By JOHN COURNOS. Methuen. 6_s._ net.
It seems probable that a long time must elapse before the novel escapes
altogether from the spell of the war; and the reasons why this should
be so are fairly obvious. It is not only that the novelists, like
all of us, have received in their minds an indelible impress of that
great event. We must recognise that the last five years have made a
gulf between us and preceding time only comparable to a long interval
of history. The manners and habits of 1913 are not connected in an
imperceptibly changing fabric with our own. They are already a matter
of archæological interest, and definitely to place the action of a
novel in that year requires a course of archæological research--say
among old numbers of _Punch_. In 1919 the war is still so vivid a
thread in the web of our minds that we are constantly influenced by
it, constantly referring to it, in our actions, our conversations,
and our thoughts. When we meet a character, whether in a novel or a
drawing-room, it is still our instinct to enquire where he has been,
what he has been doing since August, 1914, and the present moment.
This is natural indeed; but its tendency in the novel is to produce
ephemeral work. The tidal wave may have subsided, but it has left the
mental waters exceedingly muddy.
Mrs. Humphry Ward's novel, _Cousin Philip_, is an excellent example of
the work which this state of affairs elicits from even the most serious
authors. It is a study, careful and detailed, of the sort of young
woman who has emerged from the war. Helena Pitstone, aged nineteen,
arrives at the house of her guardian, Lord Buntingford. She looks like
Romney's Lady Hamilton; but "the beautiful head was set off by a khaki
close cap, carrying a badge, and the khaki uniform, tunic, short skirt,
and leggings, might have been specially designed to show the health
and symmetry of the girl's young form"--all this though she has been
demobilised. She naturally begins her stay with Lord Buntingford by
quarrelling with him over one of her men friends, whom he refuses to
allow her to invite to his house. This gentleman had run away with the
wife of a friend, not for any base motive--"He didn't mean anything
horrid," says Helena--but "for a lark," and to show her husband that
she was not to be bullied. In the end Helena marries a politician, who
says to her, "Are you mine--are you mine at last?--you wild thing!"--a
remark which has been made by other lovers in other novels. In between
these two points lies Mrs. Humphry Ward's study of the girl of the
period, in order to make which, it may be supposed, she wrote this
novel. An idea of its quality and usefulness may be gained from the
following specimen of Helena's conversation:
"The chauffeur here is a fractious idiot. He has done that
Rolls-Royce car of Cousin Philip's balmy, and cut up quite rough when
I spoke to him about it."
"Done it what?" said Mrs. Friend faintly.
"Balmy. Don't you know that expression?" Helena, on the floor, with
her hands under her knees, watched her companion's looks with a grin.
"It's _our_ language now, you know--English--the language of us young
people. The old ones have got to learn it as we speak it."
Mrs. Ward would no doubt be shocked by a writer who delivered his, or
her, views on the French people with an obvious ignorance of the French
language. She would despise the affectation of an author who used
Latin tags incorrectly. But it is only fair to say that her views on
the younger generation are rendered slightly ridiculous by her obvious
ignorance of its idioms. She would perhaps have been better employed
in a detailed picture of the manners of 1913, a period to which she
doubtless looks back as to a lost paradise of decorous behaviour.
Mr. Galsworthy's _Saint's Progress_ suffers less from insufficient
documentation. His heroine Noel, with her short hair, is the daughter
of a clergyman, and follows the course gloomily foretold for so many
young girls during the war-period to the predestined end of bearing
a war-baby. She and her sister Gratian are forced by the pressure of
events to think and act for themselves. Gratian, safely married to a
doctor, delivers herself as follows:
"Dad," said Gratian suddenly, "we can only find out for ourselves,
even if we do singe our wings in doing it. We've been reading James's
_Pragmatism_. George says the only chapter that's important is
missing--the one on ethics, to show that what we do is not wrong till
it's proved wrong by the result. I suppose he was afraid to deliver
that lecture."
But, while Mr. Galsworthy is much superior to Mrs. Ward in the accuracy
of his information, he can hardly be said to be superior to her in
the justice and clearness of his presentation. The traits of his
persons are correctly observed and generalised, but they are not shown
through the medium of living individuals. We feel of Noel that many
girls of such a disposition found themselves in such circumstances and
behaved thus; and so far, regarded as a sociological study, the book
is deserving of praise. But what we never feel is that the individual
girl, Noel, ever existed; and by the deficiency it is condemned as a
novel. This book will be a serious disappointment to those who imagined
from _Five Tales_ that Mr. Galsworthy had recovered the original
freshness of his talent and was about to begin a new and a sincerer
period.
But perhaps the desire to depict, and to comment on, phenomena so fresh
and living in the mind as these, which has been fatal to experienced
craftsmen of the order of Mrs. Ward and Mr. Galsworthy, is one which
will ruin any novel in which it is attempted. Miss Romer Wilson has
not the experience of either; but as her first book, _Martin Schuler_,
demonstrated, she has really extraordinary natural gifts. These
gifts are still obvious in her second book, which is nevertheless
disappointing and all but a complete failure. It describes a circle
of non-combatants during the last year of the war, young people, of
whom Mrs. Ward has hardly heard, who sway between cynical disgust with
the world around them and cynical disgust with their own natures. No
man, it has been wisely said, is uninteresting, and these persons,
regarded from a sane and tolerantly humorous point of view, might have
been the theme for a good book. But since the thoughts, or actions,
the manners through which they manifest themselves not being genuine
or spontaneous, are important neither for good nor evil, the method
of treating them seriously results in making them appear thin and
tedious. Affectations, except in the rare event of their producing
serious consequences, are a topic only for satire; and here the loves
of Josephine and Sebastian, of James Blanchard and Susan and Amaryllis,
are expressed purely by affectations, which overlie and conceal
whatever genuine feelings these persons may have possessed. This type
has had in recent years a curious attraction for young novelists, who
have as a result produced many books which are not worthy of attention.
But the author of _Martin Schuler_ must sin deeply before we can refuse
to read any book of hers, however unwillingly we may persevere in it.
And even here her special qualities are altogether beyond mistake. She
can still, even in this dreary and pointless tale of people we should
prefer not to meet, astonish us with vivid and enchanting fragments
of pictorial beauty. A couple of these passages, which are all that
redeems the book from dullness, may be given as specimens:
... At the turn of the night it began to rain, and at daybreak the
whole country was grey with driving rain, which spluttered against
the bedroom window and beat upon the thatch. The noisy sparrows
under the eaves shook themselves angrily and fluttered up and down
in the garden after worms. The tom cat, who had been out all night,
gathered himself up on the doorstep and brooded there with one eye on
the sparrows, waiting for the door to be opened. The draught under
the door made his paws cold, so he blew himself out and crouched
down with his paws folded up underneath him. He was angry and tired,
and his fur was covered with minute drops of water that in places
had penetrated to his skin, but he sat there patiently dosing and
dreaming for two hours until half-past eight, when the bolts were
drawn. At the sound of the bolts being shot back he at once stood
up and mewed, and the door was hardly opened before he ran into the
kitchen, where a stick fire roared in the grate and a frying-pan gave
out an odour of frying fat.
... The people came out of the house door, mysterious in the fading
light like a procession of Boccaccio's women and a clerk of the
Decameron seen through the romantic distance of seven hundred
years. They lit the candles in the dark garden-room and sat down
as if waiting for somebody to begin a story. Overhead the blue sky
gleamed through the gathering darkness, and in the west a rosy glow
spread up behind the delicate aspens and maples and acacias of the
little plantation above the yew garden. Up in the mazy blue sky the
transparent half moon and a few bright planets gleamed beneath the
outermost heavens, where faint white constellations began to appear
as the darkness quickly gathered upon the earth.
We do not quote these descriptive passages as proving Miss Wilson's
aptitude for the novelist's multifarious task. They represent only one
of the many gifts of which she must dispose; and they are themselves in
several details open to criticism. They do moreover represent almost
everything in this book which can be distinguished for commendation.
They suggest, however, that Miss Wilson possesses one of the most
important gifts of the novelists, namely, a sense of the scene; and
it remains for time to show whether she can imagine persons and a
situation worthy of her background.
It is a relief to recede from the tangled epoch, which has spoilt and
hindered all these writers, into the seventeenth century in France.
Miss Mirrlees has written, not a wholly satisfactory or very agreeable,
but a very strange book, one far removed from the historical romance of
commerce. She has combined what appears to be a close knowledge of her
period, of the time of the Jansenists, the Précieuses, and Mademoiselle
de Scudéry, with a desire to study a curious case of mental pathology.
Madeleine, her heroine, is a provincial girl who removes to Paris
with her family and is consumed by an intense longing to enter that
fantastic circle of elegance and _galanterie_ which revolved round
Mademoiselle de Scudéry and was depicted by her in _Le Grand Cyrus_.
But her awkward shyness forbade that this longing should ever be
satisfied; and when she sought to pacify it by the familiar device of
the "endless story," she exacerbated it into madness. This is a brief
and inadequate account of a most unusual composition, but it will
serve to show how Miss Mirrlees has loaded the historical novel with
a heavier freight than that ornamental craft is accustomed to carry.
But she has not developed either the psychology or the descriptive
detail at the expense of the other. She dissects Madeleine's mind with
almost morbid closeness and makes of it a terrifying spectacle, but at
the same time she has contrived to make her setting in time and place
convincing. Her picture of mind and manners may or may not be strictly
accurate; but it is certainly not conventional, it is original, it
_bites_. There are certain crudities apparent both in the style and in
the construction of the book, as well as in the choice and development
of subject; but it will be very interesting to see the next production
of a mind so unusual.
Miss Clemence Dane's _Legend_ touches Miss Mirrlees' work fleetingly at
one point. It too describes a literary "circle," dominated by women,
of the sort which draws weaker characters into it and causes them to
deteriorate. But it interests not so much as a study of this particular
phenomenon as in that it is an extraordinary attempt, the only one
among these books, to carry on the history of the novel, to give that
form a new task, to enlarge its range and its adaptabilities. It
consists of one long conversation; and the principal character, Madala
Grey, makes no appearance, unless the regrettable introduction of her
ghost towards the end be counted as such. Madala is a woman-novelist
who has contracted what seems to her friends an inexplicable marriage
with a dull country doctor. She is in child-bed; and her circle meets
to await news, hears of her death, and discusses her. Their views,
all mistaken, are reported by the one person present who had never
seen her and who deduces the true and simple explanation--that she
was actually in love with her husband. This is, it may be objected,
merely jumping through a series of hoops; and in a sense the objection
has its justification. For, when the story should reach its climax,
when Madala herself begins to emerge from the mists of misjudgment
and misinterpretation, she is revealed as being only a lay figure.
This does not mean that Miss Dane's singular device in the end misses
its aim. On the contrary she accomplishes what she set out to do with
perfect precision. Nevertheless, the fact remains that she has locked
in a very complicated cabinet, and thence extracted again by very
subtle means, not a living woman but a doll. Hence her book is not the
masterpiece it might have been. But we are almost brought to overlook
this fact by the amazing skill with which she manages her invention;
and her jumping through hoops, whether it be regarded as an unrelated
exhibition of agility or as an experiment in a new method of progress,
deserves all attention even though it leads only to disappointment at
the end. Miss Dane's first novel, _Regiment of Women_, was much praised
not long ago; her second, _First the Blade_, did not receive so much
notice. This reveals in her originality, daring and ingenuity which
could hardly have been predicted from her earlier work; and there is no
doubt that it will be widely discussed, since it is in fact rare for
any really remarkable display of these qualities to miss its reward.
But Miss Dane has yet some distance to advance if she is to do more
than win fame as a conjuror or open up paths for other novelists.
For an artist capable of so distinguished a conception her style is
strangely flat and undistinguished; and the introduction of some very
bad and banal passages from the works of Madala Grey is a curious lapse
of tact.