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THE LONDON
MERCURY
_Editor_--J. C. SQUIRE _Assistant-Editor_--EDWARD SHANKS
Vol. I No. 3 January 1920
EDITORIAL NOTES
The first whole year of peace has ended, and it is natural to throw a
backward look upon its literary production. It is certain that to the
historian it will be a year in which various tendencies continued to
act; it is possible that his eye, in long retrospect, will observe in
it the appearance, the sudden appearance, of new literary developments
and important personalities. But it is, as a rule, only in long
retrospect that such portents are recognised as such; and though we
think that during the year certain movements which have been for some
years in existence have been continued, that there are drifts which
are easier to perceive than to analyse, we cannot persuade ourselves
that 1919 added more than the normal amount to the existing volume
of good English literature. It was, in fact, as a literary year very
much like one of the war years. Perhaps it should properly be regarded
itself as a war year. The principal physical factor which, in our
present relation, operated during the war was the absence on service
of the great majority of those young men who would have been beginning
to write. These were, with rare exceptions, precluded by sheer force
of outer circumstances from literary enterprises of a sustained kind;
and, as most of those who survived have left the Army within the last
year, we could scarcely expect so soon as this to find them producing
large and ambitious books. It may also reasonably be argued that the
war-atmosphere still prevails. Peace has come--and it has not yet come
universally or conclusively--not suddenly but with the slowness of a
northern dawn. Problems from which even the most self-sufficing mind
cannot escape harass the intellect and weigh on the spirit of the
civilised world. We are not yet in a position to estimate post-war
literature, for we have not yet got post-war literature.
* * * * *
The opinions of intelligent men may differ to some extent as to which
were the most remarkable novels of 1919; that they were very few is,
we conceive, a matter of general agreement. Of the older novelists,
Mr. Conrad produced in _The Arrow of Gold_ (a work begun long ago and
recently completed) a book which, though not among his masterpieces,
was worthy of him. Mr. Wells, in _The Undying Fire_, a modernisation
of the Book of Job, wrote an imaginative, an exciting, and an eloquent
book. It was much better shaped and trimmed than has lately been usual
with his books, and, for the first time since he abandoned scientific
romance, he concentrated entirely on doing what he can do better than
other people instead of trying to do what he cannot do. The other elder
novelists did nothing that was unexpected and little that was good; and
their successors have not appeared. A Fielding or a Dickens is a rare
product; but we see no young novelists of whom it can be predicted with
any assurance that ten years hence they will occupy places such as are
now occupied by Mr. Wells and Mr. Bennett. It seems certain that they
will not be found amongst that pre-war group whose merits Henry James
examined with such generous consideration, whose defects he indicated
with such delicate diffidence, in a famous article which "betrayed"
rather than stated his alarm, even his pity, for the English Novel.
There have been a few books which have attracted attention by their
qualities of construction and detail or by touches of original genius;
but of most of their authors we could not be sure that they will
become even habitual, much less great, novelists. The book which more
than any other appeared to us to be notable, both for its workmanship
and for its imaginative power, was Mr. Joseph Hergesheimer's _Java
Head_--and Mr. Hergesheimer is an American. It was not so good a
book (we think _Java Head_ was the earlier written) as _The Three
Black Pennys_; but the two books are certainly the work of a born
novelist. Miss Romer Wilson, whose _Martin Schuler_ (1918) was a vivid,
vigorous, and original book, published another, and a dull, novel,
_If All These Young Men_, the subject and setting of which offered
less scope to her peculiar gifts: but she is clearly capable of doing
something surprising. Miss Dane's _Legend_ was a remarkable technical
achievement; and Mr. Cournos's _The Mask_, Miss Macaulay's fantasia,
_What Not_, and Mr. Brett Young's _The Young Physician_ were all, in
their degrees, notable for a poetic quality.
* * * * *
Mr. Beerbohm's _Seven Men_ could scarcely be classed with novels. It
was Mr. Beerbohm's best book, than which those who appreciate him
could pay no higher compliment; but Mr. Beerbohm is an artist who
stands outside contemporary movements, literary and other, and one of
whose charms arises from that very detachment. "W. N. P. Barbellion's"
_Journal of a Disappointed Man_ was a full and poignant record
which will probably continue to be read in a narrow circle as Marie
Bashkirtseff's memoirs are read; his posthumous essays, _Enjoying
Life_, are even more convincing evidence of what their author might
have done had he not been stricken by disease. Amongst works of
critical and miscellaneous literature those which will continue to be
enjoyed, or--in some cases--used, are Mr. Festing-Jones's _Life of
Samuel Butler_, Professor Gregory-Smith's _Ben Jonson_, Mr. Gosse's
_Diversions of a Man of Letters_, the late George Wyndham's _Essays
in Romantic Literature_, certain books on the old Drama (Swinburne's
_The Contemporaries of Shakespeare_, and Mr. J. M. Robertson's study of
Hamlet especially), and Miss Ethel Smyth's _Impressions that Remained_.
This last is one of the best autobiographies that have appeared in our
time, and Dr. Smyth during a long and active life as a composer has
been nursing a rich and racy English style.
* * * * *
The department--it is difficult in making such a summary to avoid
the language of the catalogue--in which life has been healthiest has
certainly been poetry. Several of the best and most promising of our
living poets published no book in 1919, but what is incontestably a
revival has continued. Several poets of established reputation have
done better work than ever before. Mr. Hardy has published little, but
his _Collected Poems_, now published, establish once and for all--and,
old as he is, he belongs as a poet to this generation--his right to a
place among the great poets. Mr. Masefield's _Reynard the Fox_ is as
certainly his finest book, as Mr. Herbert Trench's play _Napoleon_,
whatever its defects on the stage, is Mr. Trench's. There is the
largeness about this long and ambitious piece that there was about
some of his earlier and shorter poems, and supremely in his _Requiem
of Archangels_. Mr. Binyon's _The Four Years_ was a collection of the
verses its author had written concerning the war. It contained several
poems made beautiful by the straightforward utterance of a noble and
suffering spirit. Mr. Yeats's _The Wild Swans at Coole_ it would be
affectation to describe as equal in interest to his earlier volumes,
but there were one or two lyrics in it which would adorn any anthology
of English verse; and in Mr. Kipling's _The Years Between_ there were
also flashes of genius. From Mr. Yeats and Mr. Kipling, however, we do
not now expect the unexpected. It is in the hands of the young that
the immediate future of our literature lies. The most notable volumes
by young poets have been (we are tempted to add Mr. Waley's _More
Translations from the Chinese_) Mr. Brett Young's _Poems_ and Mr. John
Freeman's _Memories of Childhood_. But in periodicals and anthologies
there has appeared much new and genuine work. A great deal is to be
found in the fourth volume of _Georgian Poetry_, which was reviewed in
our last number. Mr. de la Mare's latest poems show that his thought
is steadily deepening, whilst he is losing none of that delicacy of
music and beauty of phrase that made his early lyrics as lovely as any
in the language; and both Mr. Sassoon and Mr. Nichols have done work
which makes their future a matter for profound curiosity. Scattered
about in other volumes there have been many single good poems: and it
is the characteristic of a prolific lyrical age that a few good things
are written by many men. We would mention as especially interesting,
in that it is one of the few long successful narrative poems of
recent years, Mr. Aldous Huxley's _Leda_; the myth was difficult and
dangerous, the versification often ungainly, but the poem contained
passages of great strength and beauty. We may add finally Captain
Scott-Moncrieff's fine translation of the _Song of Roland_.
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