of all these books, though it is not so dazzling and exciting as
_Legend_, is one which has very little to say to the development of
the novel. We generally reckon it impertinent to see in any book not
avowed as such the autobiography of the author; but in this story of
a Jewish boy in Russia and America, without knowing anything of Mr.
Cournos, we are forced to make the inference. Its tone and flavour are
those of autobiography; and its softened reminiscences of things not
always pleasant give it its peculiar charm. It reveals, at all events,
more than most novels, a temperament; and this temperament, whatever
turn the story may take, is always agreeable and gracious. Vanya
Gombarov, the little boy, was brought up in Russia by a stepfather,
who wasted all his money in mechanical researches and was obliged to
emigrate with his family to America. Here Vanya added to the family
income by selling papers, and in other ways, and saw many horrible
things. The family experienced many misfortunes; and at the end Mr.
Cournos abruptly leaves it moving from one house to another. We have
here no pyrotechnics of construction; nor does such a book offer any
opportunities for them to the author. But he is able to show himself
an artist in the softening veil which his narrative throws over his
incidents without in any way distorting them.
BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM
SEVEN MEN. By MAX BEERBOHM. Heinemann. 7_s._ net.
It is a common ground of complaint against Mr. Max Beerbohm that he
publishes too little. But the very fastidiousness which makes him,
compared with the word-fountains of our time, so notable an example
of limitation of output is what makes the work he does print so
surpassingly good. Economy is a word freely used and much abused. It
is sometimes applied to writers whose only claim to it is that they
use short sentences or that they omit everything except inessentials.
But Mr. Beerbohm deserves more than any artist of our time the epithet
"economical." Always, and increasingly so with the passage of time, he
has taken pains to print no sentence and no word that does not help
his effect; and the five stories in this book, even were their other
merits less than they are, might serve as models of simple and exact
expression, the cunning accumulation of telling detail, the complete
avoidance of detail which does not tell.
Of the five stories one, _James Pethel_, is a study of the gambling
temperament localised in an attractive but terrifying man, and one, _A.
V. Laider_, is an astonishingly clever fantasia on the theme of lying.
The other, and more ambitious, three are studies, we might almost call
them historical studies, of literature, literary men, and "the literary
life." They all relate to that remote period, now faded and therefore a
little charming, "the nineties"; they give us types of writers, second
or third or tenth rate, whose reputations die, but who are interesting
enough to be celebrated as types, if not as individuals. Savonarola
Brown--the obscure man who spent his life on an unfinished tragedy on
the best blank-verse models--is the most slightly sketched of them;
but here what the portrait lacks--perhaps that shadowy figure offered
no more lines for the pencil to seize--is more than made up for by the
best parody that even Mr. Beerbohm has written. Remove the burlesque,
the comic stage directions, the juxtapositions of Lucrezia Borgia, St.
Francis, Andrea del Sarto and Pippa (who "passes" in her own inimitable
way), and the more extravagant convolutions of the plot, and you will
see that Mr. Beerbohm could quite easily have manufactured a play
better than most modern poetic dramas, and written in verse at once so
fluent and so reminiscent of the best masters as to command the respect
of the reviewers, and possibly a production (for a few nights) by some
manager ambitious to show that he desired to reunite Literature and the
Stage. At times we forget that we are reading a burlesque:
POPE. Of this anon.
[_Stands over body of Gaoler._]
Our present business
Is general woe. No nobler corse hath ever
Impressed the ground. O let the trumpets speak it!
[_Flourish of trumpets._]
This was the noblest of the Florentines.
His character was flawless, and the world
Held not his parallel. O bear him hence
With all such honours as our State can offer.
He shall interred be with noise of cannon,
As doth befit so militant a nature.
Prepare these obsequies.
[_Papal Officers lift body of Gaoler._]
Did Mr. Beerbohm write this? Or was it Brown, fresh from _The Duchess
of Malfi_ or _The Broken Heart_?
The two stories that remain are more elaborate. In _Enoch Soames_ we
are given the picture of the kind of sepulchral, costive, dedicated,
fame-gluttonous minor poet who has haunted the by-ways of literature
in all ages; we are given, as well, a realistic picture of what those
by-ways were twenty years ago, and a plot (which races between the
future and the past) the intricacies of which are followed with equal
ingenuity and imperturbability. But there can be little dispute that
_Maltby and Braxton_ is the great achievement of the volume. These two
were rivals who had a brief vogue in the nineties; the very scent of
the time comes back with the titles of their masterpieces, _Ariel in
Mayfair_ and _A Faun in the Cotswolds_. Maltby in a weak moment cheated
Braxton out of a week-end at the Duchess of Hertfordshire's, and when
the hapless Maltby got to Keeb Hall Braxton's ghost haunted him,
driving him into perpetual solecisms and misadventures. There is the
background: the gossiping coteries of London, the fleeting fashions of
literature, the first vogue of the bicycle, the dabbling great dames,
the house-parties, soirées, dinners, church-goings. And in front of it
the most comic of tragedies, the most tragic of comedies is played. The
story is written with such skill that the cruelty is never quite cruel,
the laughter never quite flippant, the extravagances always anchored
to reality: at the end, in spite not only of the caricature but of the
"tallest" fiction about a ghost that we remember, we feel that we have
been reading a plain statement of fact. And this is what, at bottom,
the story is: it is more realistic than any naturalist novel: it is
the work of one who, for all his fantastic invention and wit, has a
prodigiously keen pair of eyes and a profound understanding of human
nature. We hope, by the way, that Mr. Beerbohm's passage about literary
fauns will finally expel these overworked creatures from our midst.
DONNE'S SERMONS: SELECTED PASSAGES WITH AN ESSAY. By LOGAN PEARSALL
SMITH. Milford. 6_s._ net.
Donne's reputation as a poet, very high for some time after his death,
sank almost to nothingness for two centuries. In the last thirty years
he has, by virtue partly of his occasional splendours of passion,
imagery, and even music, partly of a modernity in him which is attuned
to the spirit of our own time, regained his old position. Much has
been written of him; Mr. Gosse has written his _Life_ in two volumes,
Professor Grierson has edited him in one of the most exhaustive and
scholarly of the Oxford editions of poets; he has exercised a traceable
influence on men now writing. But the revival has been confined to his
poems. His prose, contained in three huge folios and several small
pamphlets, has remained unread; and it is significant that until a few
years ago he who wished to possess (for none thought of perusing) the
Dean's sermons was likelier to find them at a theological bookseller's
than in one of those shops which cater for the collector of fine
literature. The neglect was doubly explicable. Not only were Donne's
Sermons sermons, and therefore liable to fall into the disregard into
which the sermons of South and Tillotson, and even those of Jeremy
Taylor, have fallen, but they were sermons so voluminous as to be
terrifying to the most insatiable reader, and (for the most part) so
involved, so stuffed with scholasticism, theological hair-splitting,
debate about texts and about commentaries on texts, that a first
attempt at perusal might have made the bravest quail. But the few who
have dared the darkness of the great mine have never been disappointed;
all over it, sparkling magnificently to the explorer's touch, are great
jewels of imagination cut with the craft of a master of language.
Mr. Pearsall Smith, performing for his readers the labour they would
have shirked, has gone through the whole of Donne's Sermons and
extracted a hundred-and-fifty passages, short and long, illustrating
his character and his genius. Not quite the whole of the ground is
covered; the editor has chosen nothing of which the principal claim
to distinction was that it conveyed, with great justice or great
force, a doctrine of the Church or an edifying lesson. He has made
his anthology as a poet and a student of character would make it;
and the result is a volume of passages which exhibit that strange
vehement man of genius more clearly than could any biography, and
which substantiates his claim to be considered as being, at his best,
a writer of English prose that has never been surpassed for music and
richness. His greatest passages--and this holds good of all English
prose--are those in which he is contemplating large elemental things.
A roll like the roll of the prophetic books comes into his voice
when he speaks of the majesty of God, the powers of Death and of
Evil, the passage of time, the justice that waits for sin, and the
decay that will overtake beauty; when he stands in the attitudes and
assumes the voice of adoration, of accusation, or of grief. But even
in his dialectics the restless intellectual in him was continually
striking out sparks of wit; the insatiable observer in him was noting
small things, sticks, straws, and insects, puddles and ponds; the
insuppressible poet pouring out images copious enough to furnish out
a hundred minor men. This is a long-needed book, done with competence
and exquisite taste. His greatest, loveliest things are as good as Sir
Thomas Browne's; his grandest are grander than Jeremy Taylor's. There
is probably no sentence in our language so long as that in which he
depicted Eternal Damnation, yet it swells and swells, never breaking
its back, always borne up by the mighty mind of his spirit. Hell is
deprivation of God. "That God," begins this great passage,
that God should let my soule fall out of his hand, into a bottomlesse
pit, and roll an unremoveable stone upon it, and leave it to that
which it finds there (and it shall finde that there, which it never
imagined, till it came thither) and never think more of that soule,
never have more to doe with it. That of that providence of God, that
studies the life of every weed, and worme, and ant, and spider, and
toad, and viper, there should never, never any beame flow out upon
me; that that God, who looked upon me, when I was nothing, and called
me when I was not, as though I had been, out of the womb and depth of
darknesse, will not looke upon me now, when, though a miserable, and
a banished, and a damned creature, yet I am his creature still, and
contribute something to his story, even in my damnation....
so it proceeds in tremendous crescendo describing, or failing to
describe, what it must mean "to fall out of the hands of the living God
... a horror beyond our expression, beyond our imagination"; and this
is but the sublimest of many sublime utterances in these sermons of the
greatest of the Church's poets. We commend Mr. Pearsall Smith's book,
and shall return to it and its subject at length in an early number.
SOUTH SEA FOAM. By A. SAFRONI-MIDDLETON. Methuen. 6_s._ net.
The sub-title of this book, "The Romantic Adventures of a Modern Don
Quixote in the Southern Seas," gives the clue to a quality in Mr.
Safroni-Middleton that might repel a fastidious reader. He is a little
too effusive, a little too self-conscious in his adventurousness. But
the reader who is repelled early will miss something; for with all its
defects _South Sea Foam_ is a full and exciting and often beautiful
book. Mr. Middleton has not the technique of the artist; he does not
write well. But he has the artist's sensibility, and his writing is at
its most vivid when the greatest demands are made upon it. "My greatest
literary effort in the following pages," he says, "has been to keep
to the truth of the whole matter, even though such frankness should
leave me, at the end of this volume, with a blackened name." He need
not be anxious about his name; but if this book is all true he has had
adventures as wild and strange as any man alive. His book is a medley
of Polynesian legends, and the most extraordinary events on the ocean
and among the islands; storms, moonlight dances, abductions of "dusky
maidens" from chiefs' palaces, orgies in saloons, chases and shots,
canoes, sharks, and love-songs: a great flood of brightly-coloured
reminiscence tumbled out in language which is never quite "right" but
always picturesque. At any page one is liable to come across some
passage that thrills or deeply touches; and occasionally there is an
episode narrated so well that criticism is silent. Such an episode is
that of the old dog Moses, which falls overboard on a murky night.
He barks amid the waves to guide the boat; but there comes a scream
that means a shark and no more is heard. Next night the old bearded
sailor-men sit on their chests in the fo'c'sle puffing out smoke,
drinking rum in silence, brooding over the dog: and no scene could
be more vividly painted. The last adventure (in a castaway boat with
a brown girl), which we should call incredible were it not for Mr.
Middleton's assurance, is the loveliest and most terrible of all. We
think that anyone who reads this book once will make a habit of reading
it.
RUPERT BROOKE AND THE INTELLECTUAL IMAGINATION: A LECTURE. By WALTER DE
LA MARE. Sidgwick & Jackson. 2_s._ 6_d._ net.
The lecture here printed was delivered before Rugby School on the
occasion of the unveiling of a memorial there to Rupert Brooke.
Mr. de la Mare, as he recalls, was chosen to go to America as Mrs.
Brooke's representative to receive the first presentation of the
Howland Memorial Prize, the posthumous award of which to Brooke was an
act of international courtesy and generosity, too little noticed in
this country at the time. It was fitting that Mr. de la Mare should
be again associated with the dead poet; and in this short paper he
outlines his character and his achievement with as much affection as
discernment. Brooke, he is insistent to make plain, was a happy man,
a vigorous, healthy creature, who found the world teeming with food
for his multifarious appetites. It is with this fact in mind that
all his poems, not omitting those which are "disquieting to read at
meals," must be judged. He desired truth at all costs; and "if, unlike
Methuselah, he did not live long enough to see life whole, he at least
confronted it with a remarkably steady and disconcerting stare." "The
theme of his poetry," says Mr. de la Mare, "is the life of the mind,
the senses, the feelings, life here and now, however impatient he may
be with life's limitations. Its longing is for a state of consciousness
wherein this kind of life shall be possible without exhaustion,
disillusionment, or reaction." This essay is short, but it is full both
of wise judgments and beautiful sayings. It conveys a sense not only of
the value of Brooke's poetry but also of the charm of his personality.
More, much more, will be written about him; and we shall have his
character carefully examined and defined, both by those who knew him
and those who did not. But this brief study, at once an exposition and
a ceremonial and moving eulogy, will retain its place in the literature
collecting around his name.
SOME SOLDIER POETS. By T. STURGE MOORE. Grant Richards. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
This volume contains short essays on the poems of Julian Grenfell,
Rupert Brooke, Robert Nichols, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, R.
E. Vernède, Charles Sorley, Francis Ledwidge, Edward Thomas, F. W.
Harvey, Richard Aldington, and Alan Seeger: with a paper on "The Best
Poetry" at the end. A casual student of the list of contents might make
several hasty criticisms. He might suppose that he was going to find
here a series of short lives, manufactured because of an accidental
connection between them. He might be fortified in this suspicion by
the fact that one or two poets are in the list who have no claim to
rank with the others. But he need only begin to read the book to
remember that Mr. Sturge Moore is a poet, a sound critic, and a writer
incapable of hackwork. There is one obvious defect; he has omitted a
few poets (Edward Wyndham Tennant is an example) who had better claim
to admission than some in his list. But there is little else that can
be urged against him. Mr. Sturge Moore wastes no space over biography.
He takes, _seriatim_, the books of these young poets and confronts them
in a generous but not an undiscriminating mood, asking himself what is
their spirit, what their technical qualities and defects and which are
their best poems. These essays are not (even when their subjects are
unworthy of effort) facile journalism; they are considered criticism
written in the prose of a poet, prose rich with novel and beautiful
images and embodying the results of profound reflection upon life and
art.
Mr. Sturge Moore's essay on Brooke is too brief to be a final
estimate; the main fault of all his essays is that they are not
long enough to include sufficient quotations; otherwise they would
certainly be of permanent value. But it is a penetrating essay,
full of interesting _obiter dicta_, such as the statement that "the
fallacy of impressionism" has tainted modern æsthetic thought, and
the more disputable statement that "failure in love and war is much
more inspiring to the poet than success; when the real world has
rejected a man he feels freer in the Muses' house; he no longer has
any interests that conflict with theirs." Julian Grenfell's _Into
Battle_ he describes (and we think he is right) as the best poem of
the war. Of three poets commonly linked together, he says that "Those
who shall gaze back a century hence may discern rather in Nichols than
in Sassoon or Graves the poet's mind that is independent of time and
approaches all human circumstance with the kinsman's joy and pain,"
though he admits that the race has only just begun, and another runner
may outstrip the others. He is admirable on Sorley, whom many think
the greatest loss to literature of all who fell in the war, and he has
found--and no one before has, we believe, so celebrated this poem--in
Mr. Harvey's _The Bugler_ something like an isolated great poem. The
one chapter which we find relatively inadequate is that which deals
with Edward Thomas. "Every time I read them I like them better," he
says; and he quotes in full Thomas's superb welcome to death; but
the reader misses here all the rest of the poet's most beautiful
poems and passages. They are even yet not known as they should be;
we wait for a collected volume to reveal to most English readers how
profuse, in his last two years, Thomas was of exquisite poems crowded
with characteristic English landscape, and often profoundly moving
by their sincere expression of universal emotions. He died resigned,
and fulfilled at last. In Mr. Moore's words, "Our house was not well
ordered; he should not have had to write hastily for his own and his
children's bread; we have lost the chance of using him to the best
advantage; yet he leaves us more than we deserved, something that
will be treasured by posterity for ever. As his body fell, its cloak
melted off the soul and we caught a glimpse which confounded our poor
recollections of the man, and words of his still tolling round our ears
make us aware that for him this dark casualty had a different meaning."
A BOOK OF R. L. S. By GEORGE BROWN. Methuen. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
This work is really a Stevenson Encyclopædia reminiscent of that
colossal Browning Cyclopædia which still goes into new editions. Mr.
Brown arranges, in alphabetical order, the names of Stevenson's books,
characters, friends, critics, dwelling-places, etc. We have tested him
with several questions and not found him to fail. He gives more than
the facts he might be expected to give; for example, when a book is
under notice he enters the latest prices paid for its first edition
in the sale-room. He also lightens his pages with compact but pungent
comments. For instance, he describes Mr. Swinnerton's able but hostile
study of Stevenson as "the kind of study which it can be imagined Dr.
Clifford would write of Ignatius Loyola." A good book of its kind and
one that should be bought by everyone who has a Collected Stevenson.
The illustrations do not greatly add to its charms.
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY
FIFTY YEARS OF EUROPE, 1870-1919. By C. D. HAZEN. Bell. 14_s._ net.
Professor Hazen ends his survey of the last fifty years of European
history with the words: "The evil that men do lives after them."
The remark is not original, but it is none the less historically
true and melancholy. Upon page 414 of this book it refers to Wilhelm
Hohenzollern, but as the final note struck in a text-book of European
history it has a wider significance. After reading Professor Hazen one
is tempted to ponder the question whether the good men do is interred
with the bones of history, and only the evil done by them lives after
them and their time. Here is the story of fifty years in 414 pages,
and indisputably the story is concerned far more with the evil that
men have done than with the good. What is the reason of this? The
question is extraordinarily difficult to answer, and, though the
reviewer _ex cathedra_ is officially supposed not to admit anything but
infallibility, we confess to be at a loss for a prompt and unhesitating
answer. The cause may be subjective rather than objective: the
historians may look at history from a wrong angle, so that the shadows
are exaggerated or intensified. On the other hand, it may really be,
as Shakespeare seemed to think, that the effects of evil are actually
more permanent than those of good. And there is a third alternative
which the philosophical historian and the historical philosopher cannot
dismiss out of hand: history is the tale of men's communal actions,
and it may be that man is so incompletely a political animal that his
communal actions are more often evil than good.
We cannot answer these questions, but they rise naturally from a
consideration of Professor Hazen's volume. The first question which a
reviewer has to put to himself is "What is the object of this book?"
The object of Professor Hazen's is obvious: it is a text-book, a rapid
survey of a period of history which, as he rightly says, possesses
"a unity that is quite exceptional among the so-called 'periods' of
history." As a text-book it has great merits; it is accurate and
brief, it runs with great rapidity through all the more important
facts of its "period," and the author's opinions and prejudices are
severely repressed. It has some obvious faults: the author seems to us
ill-advised to have added his last chapter in the form and size adopted
by him. This chapter deals with the actual events of the world war, and
occupies nearly a quarter of the entire book. This throws the whole
of his book out of shape. The war in itself had, of course, enormous
importance, but the details of its progress are of little importance
in a survey like this. In the previous pages we have been whirled from
the Balkan question to the Irish, from the Irish question to the rise
of Japan, from the rise of Japan to the Russian internal struggle,
and many of these immense complicated problems have necessarily been
dismissed in a few pages. There is no room in a book on this scale for
a description of the campaigns of the war, and Professor Hazen's volume
loses rather than gains by his attempt to deal with them. But as a
text-book it has merits above the average. One great merit is inherent
in it--it looks at history not from a national but a European or world
angle. We are inclined to believe that for use in schools no histories
of "France," "England," or other individual countries should be
tolerated, that all history should be either of Europe, Asia, of some
continent or era, or of the world. And then, perhaps, historians might
be able to deal a little more with the good that men do communally than
with the evil.
THE TANK CORPS. By MAJOR CLOUGH WILLIAMS-ELLIS, M.C., and A.
WILLIAMS-ELLIS. With an Introduction by MAJOR-GENERAL H. J. ELLES,
C.B., D.S.O. _Country Life._ 10_s._ 6_d._ net.