Harold Mattingly read a paper on "The Republican Origins of the Roman
Imperial Coinage." His main contention was that the Imperial coinage
was the direct successor not of the Republican mint of Rome, but of
the coinage of the "Imperator" in the provinces, as issued from about
83 B.C. onwards. He traced the history of military coinages under the
Republic and brought evidence to show that it was not till about the
time of Sulla that the "Imperator" himself exercised the right of
striking coins. He then showed how out of this provincial coinage the
coinage of the triumvirs naturally developed, and again from that
coinage of Augustus. Augustus chose to found his system on this basis
in view of the failure of the triumvirs, following in the steps of
Julius Cæsar, to establish a personal coinage at the Republican mint of
Rome.
THE GEOLOGISTS' ASSOCIATION
This Association celebrated its sixtieth anniversary on December 7th,
1918, when a Lecture was delivered by Major Sir Douglas Mawson, in the
Architectural Theatre, University College, Gower Street, W.C.1, on
"The Glaciation of Antarctica." During 1919 several important papers
have been read, including the Annual Address by the President, Mr. J.
F. N. Green, B.A., F.G.S., on "The Vulcanicity of the Lake District"
and a paper on "Old Age and Extinction in Fossils," by Dr. W. D. Lang.
Three parts of the Proceedings for 1919 have already been published
containing a full report of Dr. Lang's paper, another paper by the
same authority on "The Evolution of Ammonites," and the Presidential
Address by the Past-President, Mr. George Barrow, F.G.S., on "Some
Future Work for the Geologists' Association," which is an interesting
and exhaustive study of the post-Eocene deposits of clays, sands and
gravels, older than the River Terrace deposits. The Proceedings also
contain accounts of the excursions made to certain places of geological
interest during the year. At Easter an excursion was conducted to the
Bristol District by Professor S. H. Reynolds and Mr. J. W. Tutcher, and
at Whitsuntide the Association visited the Isle of Wight, under the
guidance of Mr. G. W. Colenutt and Mr. R. W. Hooley. Llangollen was
selected as the district for the "Long Excursion" in August, and about
forty members spent a week in the study of the Ordovician, Silurian
and Carboniferous systems of the neighbourhood. Mr. L. J. Wills, M.A.,
F.G.S., was the Conductor. Excursions were also made to Sevenoaks,
Farnham, Berkhamstead, Codicote (Herts), St. George's Hill (Weybridge),
Box Hill, Headley Heath and Epsom. The first meeting of the Winter
Session was held at University College on November 7th, which was
followed by a conversazione. Many exhibits were made of Fossils and
Flint Implements. Mr. Llewellyn Treacher showed a fine specimen, one of
the largest known, of a flattened, pear-shaped late Chellean implement,
12½ inches long, recently found in the Maidenhead gravels; a slab of
shale studded with Graptolites, from the Tarannon of Peebleshire, was
exhibited by Mr. R. J. A. Eckford; and Mr. J. Francis showed many fine
examples of Jurassic Ammonites and Belemnites, illustrating chambers,
septa, siphuncles and sutures.
BIBLIOGRAPHIES OF MODERN AUTHORS
GEORGE SAINTSBURY
[_This list is a selection._]
A PRIMER OF FRENCH LITERATURE. Clarendon Press. 1866 (fourth edition,
revised, 1912).
JOHN DRYDEN. Macmillan. 1878. (English Men of Letters Series.)
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF LE SAGE. Privately printed,
London, 1881.
A SHORT HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE. Clarendon Press. 1882 (Current
edition, 1917).
FRENCH LYRICS. Kegan Paul. 1882. (Parchment Library.)
MARLBOROUGH. Long. 1885. (English Worthies.)
A HISTORY OF ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE. Macmillan. 1887 (ninth edition,
1907).
[The material in this volume deals with the larger "Elizabethan"
period from Wyatt and Surrey to the Restoration.]
MANCHESTER: A HISTORY OF THE TOWN. Longmans. 1887.
ESSAYS IN ENGLISH LITERATURE, 1780-1860. Percival. 1890.
THE EARL OF DERBY. Dent. 1890. Prime Ministers of Queen Victoria.
ESSAYS ON FRENCH NOVELISTS. Percival. 1891.
MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. Percival. 1892 (second edition, Rivington, 1895).
THE COOKERY OF THE PARTRIDGE. 1893. (Watson's Fur and Feather Series.)
THE COOKERY OF THE GROUSE. 1894. (Watson's Fur and Feather Series.)
CORRECTED IMPRESSIONS. Essays on Victorian Writers. Heinemann. 1895.
ESSAYS IN ENGLISH LITERATURE, 1780-1860. Second Series. Dent. 1895.
INAUGURAL ADDRESS AT EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY, October 15th, 1895.
Blackwood. 1895.
SIR WALTER SCOTT: A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. Walter Scott Co. 1896. (Famous
Scots Series.)
A HISTORY OF NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE, 1780-1895. Macmillan. 1896.
THE FLOURISHING OF ROMANCE AND THE RISE OF ALLEGORY. Blackwood. 1897.
(Periods of European Literature.)
A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. Macmillan. 1898.
MATTHEW ARNOLD. 1899. (Modern English Writers.)
HISTORY OF CRITICISM AND LITERARY TASTE IN EUROPE. From the earliest
texts to the present day. Three volumes. Blackwood. 1900-4.
THE EARLIER RENAISSANCE. Blackwood. 1901. (Periods of European
Literature.)
A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSODY FROM THE TWELFTH CENTURY TO THE PRESENT
DAY. Two volumes. Macmillan. 1906.
THE LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY. Blackwood. 1907. (Periods of European
Literature.)
HISTORICAL MANUAL OF ENGLISH PROSODY. Macmillan. 1910.
THE HISTORICAL CHARACTER OF THE ENGLISH LYRIC. 1912. (From
_Proceedings_ of the British Academy.)
A HISTORY OF ENGLISH PROSE RHYTHM. Macmillan. 1912.
THE ENGLISH NOVEL. Dent. 1913. (Channels of English Literature.)
A FIRST BOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 1914.
THE PEACE OF THE AUGUSTANS. A Survey of Eighteenth-Century Literature
as a place of rest and refreshment. G. Bell. 1916.
A HISTORY OF THE FRENCH NOVEL TO THE CLOSE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Macmillan. Vol. I., 1917. Vol. II., 1919.
LOCI CRITICI. Passages Illustrative of Critical Theory and Practice
from Aristotle downwards; selections, part translation, and
arrangement. Ginn. 1903.
CAROLINE POETS. Clarendon Press. Two volumes. (The complete works
of certain minor Caroline Poets with reproductions of first edition
title-pages, etc., and introductions to thirteen poets. A third volume
is in preparation.) 1905.
[Chamberlayne's _Pharonnida_, Ayres's works, and other rarities are
here to be found.]
THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK. _Maid Marian and Crotchet Castle_; _Melincourt_;
_Gryll Grange_; _Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey_; _Misfortunes of
Elphin and Rhododaphne_.
He has also edited various series: the works of Dryden, Fielding,
Goldsmith, Herrick, Montaigne, Racine, Donne (Poems), Longfellow,
Shadwell, Thackeray, Richardson, Smollett, Sterne, Swift, and numerous
collected or selected works of English and French authors.
He has written prefatory memoirs to _Pride and Prejudice_, _Merope_,
_A Calendar of Verse_, _Gil Blas_, J. B. B. Nichols' _Words and Days_,
Scott's _Lives of the Novelists_, Staël's _Corinne_, and various
separate works of Thackeray, and he contributed many chapters to the
_Cambridge History of English Literature_.
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
_Verse_
THE COLLECTED POEMS OF J. E. FLECKER. Edited with an introduction by J.
C. Squire. Secker. 1916.
[Contains several poems not published before Flecker's death.]
SELECTED POEMS. Secker. 1918.
* * * * *
THE BRIDGE OF FIRE. Elkin Mathews. 1908.
[In the Vigo Cabinet Series.]
THIRTY-SIX POEMS. Adelphi Press. 1910.
FORTY-TWO POEMS. Dent. 1911.
[A reissue of the last with additions.]
THE GOLDEN JOURNEY TO SAMARKAND. Goschen. 1913.
[This book, which contains Flecker's Parnassian preface, was
subsequently taken over by Martin Secker.]
THE OLD SHIPS. Poetry Bookshop. 1915.
[Published just after Flecker's death.]
THE BURIAL IN ENGLAND. 1915.
GOD SAVE THE KING. 1915.
[Each of these was privately printed in a very small edition by
Clement K. Shorter.]
_Prose_
THE LAST GENERATION. New Age Press. 1908.
[A short satire.]
THE GRECIANS: A DIALOGUE ON EDUCATION. Dent. 1910.
THE SCHOLAR'S ITALIAN GRAMMAR: An Introduction to the Latin origin of
Italian. D. Nutt. 1911.
THE KING OF ALSANDER: A NOVEL. Goschen. 1914.
[Now published by Allen & Unwin.]
DRAMA
THE POETIC DRAMA
The question, Is there or is there not a future for poetic drama?--that
is to say, drama wholly or principally in verse--is very much like
the question, Is there a future for sport? There are times when
everybody seems to be talking about sport, times when even bookworms
begin to play ping-pong; there are other periods--one thinks of
the novels of George Eliot and Thackeray--when the world seems to
have been without sport, and in the England of Jane Austen and the
Brontës (contemporaries of Chopin) the sportswoman-composer, the
"horsy" musician revealed in the pages of Miss Ethel Smyth's recent
_Memoirs_ is a figure less conceivable than the Phœnix. But through the
darkest of ages sport has persisted, often as nothing more than the
eccentricity of a few cranks, who in the eyes of the world about them
have neglected serious affairs "idly to knock about a ball."
It was characteristic of a utilitarian age that sport and the poetic
drama should have been abandoned together for what the unhappy people
of that time, caught in an unimaginative and rigid scientific theory,
thought to be "real life." The spirit of the age was like the sudden
seriousness that seizes a young man when he first realises that he has
great ability and that he must improve the universe. It is a state of
mind that rests upon the conviction that one knows everything, and
that what ought to be done is always as plain as a pikestaff. Once the
bottom is knocked out of that omniscient self-confidence the whole
policy and fabric of the time crumbles to pieces, and that is exactly
what happened towards the beginning of the twentieth century when the
scientists, like the decent fellows they are, began to realise that the
great clarity and understanding which had fallen upon the middle of
the nineteenth century was in reality a thick fog. But the old mental
attitude persisted well into the present century, and is by no means
yet dead. Owing to the way in which it brought the young intellectuals
into practical affairs and set them studying economics and political
policy, chiefly under the influence of that great spiritual survival of
the nineteenth century, Mr. Bernard Shaw--who happened by a freak of
nature which suggests the comic chuckle of an all-seeing God, to have
a passion for writing plays--that utilitarian influence continued to
pervade the drama when it had almost faded from the rest of literature.
Mr. Shaw's plays are really a sort of inverted Smiles' _Self-Help_,
and might well be called _Plays for Paralysing the Puny Emotions_--all
emotions being puny to Mr. Shaw and Mr. Samuel Smiles compared with
the necessity of getting on--with the job! With Mr. Smiles the job
is one's own career, with Mr. Shaw the career of the universe--that
is the only difference. The young intelligentsia of to-day, having
almost all of them become materialists under the influence I have just
mentioned, have at last, however, begun to realise that the universe
is not only not going to have the career planned for it by Mr. Shaw
or any other group of thinkers, but also that to plan a career for
the universe is like planning an "occupation" for the Sun. To imagine
that in a Daylight Saving Bill you have set the course of the Sun is
to imagine exactly what this social-political school of realists has
imagined in its programme for the universe! Naturally, when one knows
what the world ought to be, and knows one has the power to produce that
ideal, one has no time to spare for sport or for letting one's feelings
interfere with one's business. Supermen, like self-made men, have no
time for sentiment. It is here that we find the link--which might
escape the superficial glance--between Samuel Smiles and Nietzsche, who
has had such an influence on the Shavian school. It explains, also, why
this school was so largely "pacificist" during the war, for really its
intellectual sympathies were with the Prussians, whose philosophic
justification was that they alone had the right conception--the
conception of an efficient world--and that it was their task, in
fact, their duty, to bring this conception forcibly into being. Such
ideas always bring in their train a morality wholly opposed to sport
and to poetry--a morality whose essence is the duty of preaching to
the unenlightened. The drama became suddenly useful as a vehicle for
intellectual propaganda.
The Intellectual Drama
The young intellectuals began to go to the theatre for the pleasure of
hearing their theories preached at a public unable to answer back or
easily to walk out, but dumbly conscious that it had paid its money to
be entertained, and was having its head punched. It is no wonder that
the drama suddenly became so popular with the intelligentsia. Here was
an end to crying in the wilderness, to preaching your world panacea in
dull tracts and essays! They had hit upon a method of getting the man
in the street actually to pay to be instructed in the true doctrine,
thinking that he was going to see the drama of the modern Shakespeare
or of one who was "greater than Shakespeare." This, of course, was
hailed as a great dramatic revival, and in so far as it brought the
intellectuals back to the theatre which they had deserted, it was
a revival. That is to say, it was a revival of the intellectuals,
not of the theatre. You do not revive the drama by pouring into it
a mass of sociological or philosophical theories, any more than you
could be said to have revived poetry by suddenly writing verses about
machines. One of the chief objects of art is to keep alive in our minds
the realisation of the extraordinary depth and complexity of life.
All the greatest dramatists do this; that is why people write books
called _The Problem of Hamlet_; but the characteristic of this modern
school of realists is not only that they are propagandists--that is
to say, expounders of a certain point of view--but that they really
believe that they understand the world. With that amazing certainty
which is the hall-mark of the materialistic mind, the mind to which
everything presents a hard, distinct superficies, they have no doubts
about anything, and they display a set of characters who, to use a
horrible but expressive phrase, are "all there." These characters
are worthy inhabitants of the world as it appears to their creators.
A world whose stupidity and wrong-headedness is so extraordinarily
obvious--a world in which it is always so patent what ought to be done,
that when one lives in it for the space of two or three hours during
the play's performance one feels like a higher mathematician with a
child's problem out of Euclid. This outrageous simplification and
externalising of life is an intellectual mania fatal to great drama.
It is the antithesis of poetry, just as we have seen war become the
antithesis of sport, thereby offending the soundest instincts of the
English people who, though they could find no arguments against the
Prussian intellectual logic, yet felt dumbly but intensely that this
simplification of war to something which shut out all ethics and all
play made war damnable and finally unendurable.
We find now the war is over that this drama, whether written to get
slums abolished, to expose prostitution, to draw attention to our
prison laws, to expound socialism, to influence our marriage customs,
to kill conventions, to explain strikes, or merely to be witty at the
stupidity of mankind, is no longer in demand. There will always be a
place for comedy, however bitter, savage, and loveless, and all the
subjects named are traditional and excellent for the comic dramatist;
but a comedy which is cold at heart, a comedy in which there is no
love, occupies a very insignificant position in dramatic literature. At
this moment the stage is mainly held by the stage play, which is little
more than the bare bones of drama, the actors' device for entertaining
an audience, resembling conjuring and the displays of acrobats. This
kind of thing will always be more plentiful than poetic drama, for the
simple reason that it is easier to obtain and easier to appreciate.
Mr. Sutro's _The Choice_, as well as _The Voice from the Minaret_, by
Mr. Robert Hichens, and Mr. Arnold Bennett's _Sacred and Profane Love_
belong to this category. I find them often much more entertaining than
the drama of ideas which to-day lives on the first ghost of its former
self, in such a play as Mr. Maltby's _A Temporary Gentleman_, which
has naturally won the approval of no less a person than Mr. William
Archer. Mr. Archer has lately had the courage to declare that he has no
use for the poetic drama of the Elizabethans (Shakespeare excepted).
This is not surprising. Mr. Archer has been the champion of the school
of modern English dramatists gathered around Ibsen and Mr. Shaw. It
is natural to most Scotsmen to prefer argument to poetry, and Mr.
Archer's animadversions on the Elizabethans only reveal Mr. Archer's
limitations. But he will find that whereas a quarter of a century ago
what he wanted to say was exactly what the young men and women wanted
to hear, now nobody has the slightest interest in discussing social
problems on the stage, and _A Doll's House_ and _Man and Superman_
are more absolutely dead than Tennyson's _Becket_. It is amazing to
feel the change. I was at Oxford a short time ago, and I found that
the forthcoming performances by the newly-formed Phœnix Society of
Webster's _Duchess of Malfi_ and other Elizabethan plays aroused the
same interest and excitement there as I had felt myself. It is evident
that the last wave of Victorian materialism is rapidly ebbing. The Age
of Drains is past. This does not mean that we shall sink back into the
diphtheric state from which the Victorians rescued us; it is simply
that after two or three decades during which the young intellectuals
have been annually sucked into a frenzied enthusiasm for social reform
there has come a reaction in which we have suddenly had quite another
vision of life--a vision far more profound and closer to reality than
the one concentrated in the famous saying: "What is the matter with the
poor is their poverty"--which has been the social slogan of the last
decade.
Materialism and Poetry
It is important to stress this connection of the drama with life,
because if we are going to have, as I believe, poetic drama in the near
future, it will be because it is the best dramatic form for expressing
what we feel, and as the demand must come in the first place from the
intellectuals--since in them alone are the common desires sufficiently
conscious--it was impossible to get a flowering of poetic drama until
the intelligentsia had recovered from the epidemic of materialism,
and had begun to feel the need of something more satisfying than
glittering theories of reforming mankind by pure economics. The leaders
of materialistic thought have always been uncomfortable about art,
and have never been completely honest. In their uneasiness as to its
practical value they have explained it on the ground that art develops
and trains the senses--pictures train the eye, music trains the ear,
drama presumably trains both.
To knock the bottom out of this ridiculous nonsense one has only to
ask: What drama would you give a man in order to train him to pick up
pins in the dark? Is it any wonder that the leaders of this precious
substitute for thought could not appreciate Shakespeare, and is it any
wonder that under their influence poetic drama has been extinct? The
deadening influence of this utilitarian materialism has not only been
felt in drama, it has been present in the whole life of the community;
but the masses have been less subject to it than the intelligentsia,
that is why the masses on the whole have stayed away from the
intellectual theatre and have patronised the purely sporting, purely
poetic, utterly useless Revue, Musical Comedy, and Farce. And their
instinct has been sound, as sound as it is when they ignore the offer
from the same quarter of a social millennium to be obtained merely by
the exercise of logic. But the result has been a wider cleavage between
the people and the intelligentsia than has ever existed before, and
most of the dissatisfaction with the present state of the theatre is
due to this fact.
It is a curious thing, but Mr. Herbert Trench, in his fine play
_Napoleon_, which was produced last month at the Stage Society, and
made a strong impression, occasionally touches on the very idea I have
been setting forth. His _Napoleon_ is a type of the materialistic
intellectual who has a routine plan for the universe, and he harps
continually on "order," as if "order" were something simple, something
he had invented to enable the universe to run smoothly: "Your tide-work
taught you poetry. I seek order," he says to Wickham--and it sounds
like Mr. Shaw or some intellectual dramatist speaking. I will quote
one passage from the central scene--the scene between Napoleon and
Wickham--which really puts the case against the intellectuals:
_Wickham:_ . . . . . . .
Because you have no love you have no eyes;
Your naked energy, working lovelessly,
Be it balanced like a planet is not wise.
* * * * *
How we have suffered from you, ghosts of Cæsar,
Suffered through concentrations of our hope,
Age after age about your glittering figures,
That have polarized and crystallized and chained
Awake! Rome left our tribes one great bequest,
Her law. That's in our blood, absorbed for ever.
But is then Europe's many-fountained forest
Bubbling with ten thousand springs of life--clans, nations,
Coloured by the ruddy soils from whence they spring,
Is this multi-coloured, insuppressible world
To be controll'd from one centre? Not again!
To be twice Roman'd? Never!
The grass will lift you as it lifts the stone.
Mr. Trench's play is a beginning. If we had--what is an elementary
requirement of civilisation--a National Theatre, we would certainly see
Mr. Trench's play there, and I should not be in the least surprised to
find it a popular success. The public will never demand Mr. Trench's
play; but then the public never demanded compulsory education, much as
it needed it. I have little doubt but that what the public needs in the
theatre to-day is poetic drama.
* * * * *
The Phœnix Society produced Webster's _The Duchess of Malfi_ on
November 23rd. The performance will be noticed next month. The date of
the production of Dryden's _Marriage à la Mode_ has not yet been fixed.
* * * * *
A series of French Classical _Matinées_ is being given by Mlle. Gina
Palerme at the Duke of York's Theatre on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at
2.30. The plays will be produced as at La Comédie Française, with
original music by Lully and other old masters. The list of plays is as
follows: _Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme_ (Molière), _Le Malade Imaginaire_
(Molière), _Les Précieuses Ridicules_ (Molière), _Le Barbier de
Seville_ (Beaumarchais), _Les Romanesques_ (Rostand), _Le Voyage de Mr.
Perrichon_ (Laliche).
DRAMATIC LITERATURE
BEN JONSON'S EVERY MAN IN HIS HUMOUR. Edited by PERCY SIMPSON.
Clarendon Press. 6_s._
This is a pioneer volume to a complete edition of Ben Jonson's works,
projected by Professor C. H. Herford and Mr. Percy Simpson, and its
excellence is such that it is fervently to be hoped that we shall not
have to wait long for the companion volumes. When these appear nothing
more will be needed, and it will be possible for the ordinary person to
read Jonson without floundering hopelessly among the maze of queries
which the text at present available raises, and which its paucity of
notes does nothing to explain. Mr. Simpson's admirable introduction
deals with the quarto and folio texts, the date of the play's revision,
and the general question of the portraiture of humours. It contains
some excellent criticism of Jonson's revisions, and Mr. Simpson comes
to the conclusion that Jonson began preparing the folio edition in
1612, and his reasons are, on the whole, convincing. There are sixty
pages of notes.
SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE. By ARNOLD BENNETT. Chatto & Windus. 3_s._ 6_d._