books produced during the war by men on active service. Its imaginative
quality and the charm of its style were no surprise to those who knew
his early novels, of which _The Dark Tower_ was the most notable. It
has been succeeded by two other prose works, _The Crescent Moon_,
an African story, the melodrama of which is veiled by the beautiful
descriptive writing, and _The Young Physician_, a more naturalistic
essay which was noticed in our first number. Unobtrusively, amid these
other activities, he published two or three years ago a little book of
verses, _Five Degrees South_; and in this new volume are gathered the
contents of that book and the poems that their author has written more
recently.
The volume is characteristically Georgian. There are hints, here
and there, of musings which may develop into a general conception
of the universe and of man; there are points of contact with the
problems which vex the reflective spirit. But, generally speaking,
Mr. Brett Young is content to sing, briefly and with deep feeling,
of a few things securely loved: and those points of contact are
points of departure. He writes of England--friends, landscapes, and
a woman--before he leaves England. When he is in Africa the blood
and struggle, the fell tropical scenery, seem but to make acuter the
response to the England that is lost; and when he comes home again he
sings again of home recovered and loved with a new intensity. _The
Gift_ gives the keynote of the book:
Marching on Tanga, marching the parch'd plain,
Of wavering spear-grass past Pangani River,
England came to me--me who had always ta'en
But never given before--England, the giver,
In a vision of three poplar-trees that shiver
On still evenings of summer, after rain,
By Slapton Ley, where reed-beds start and quiver
When scarce a ripple moves the upland grain.
Then I thanked God that now I had suffered pain,
And, as the parch'd plain, thirst, and lain awake
Shivering all night through till cold daybreak.
In that I count these sufferings my gain,
And her acknowledgment. Nay, more, would fain
Suffer as many more for her sweet sake.
That is from Africa, where he rides through marshes swarming with cruel
life and admires the sickly beauty of the fever tree, but always as an
alien. Then he returns:
I saw a thrush light on a hawthorn spray,
One moment only, spilling creamy blossom,
While the bough bent beneath her speckled bosom,
Bent, and recovered, and she fluttered away.
The branch was still; but in my heart, a pain
Than the thorn'd spray more cruel stabbed me, only
Remembering days in a far land and lonely,
When I had never hoped for summer again.
All his deepest feelings--patriotism, love, friendship--are interwoven
with natural beauty. In _Testament_ he leaves to his friend the
common memory of a summer in the Cotswolds: sunlight on the gables
of Evesham, a boat on the cool water of Avon, sunsets over Bredon,
evening stocks and the scent of hay; and in the most eloquent close,
putting the most beautiful scenes of earth behind him to sing of
spiritual beauty, he lingers on them to describe them. But his
descriptions are always prompted and suffused by emotion: like Brooke
in _The Happy Lover_ and Mr. Masefield in _Biography_, he catalogues
the scenes, the fields, trees, flowers, and faces that live sweetly
in his memory, and his affection is communicated. He is poles away
from the "careful nature poet" who makes a neat drawing of anything
that at all interests him. Emotion selects his subjects; he does
not manufacture. He writes clearly too and unaffectedly. Except in
_Thamar_--the most ambitious poem in the book, but promising a greater
success than it achieves--he is never obscure for a moment. And his
simplicity of expression conceals a good deal of technical effort. The
longer pieces--such as _The Leaning Elm_--are elaborately musical, and
an examination of the first poem quoted above will reveal studied,
though not obtrusive, assonances and internal rhymes which show that
Mr. Brett Young (it might be deduced elsewhere from his metres) has
not read his Bridges in vain. There is scarcely a bad poem in the
book, or one without an interest peculiar to itself. Several beyond
those we have mentioned--the best are the exquisite _Prothalamion_ and
_Invocation_--are to be found in the recent Georgian book. The poem on
prehistoric remains on the battlefield might well have been added, and
_Bête Humaine_:
Riding through Ruwu swamp, about sunrise,
I saw the world awake; and as the ray
Touched the tall grasses where they dream till day,
Lo, the bright air alive with dragonflies,
With brittle wings aquiver, and great eyes
Piloting crimson bodies, slender and gay.
I aimed at one, and struck it, and it lay
Broken and lifeless, with fast-fading dyes.
Then my soul sickened with a sudden pain
And horror, at my own careless cruelty,
That where all things are cruel I had slain
A creature whose sweet life it is to fly:
Like beasts that prey with bloody claw: Nay, they
Must slay to live, but what excuse had I?
This is a book which excites great curiosity about its author's future;
but at present his verse, beautiful as it is, lacks energy.
COLLECTED POEMS OF THOMAS HARDY. Macmillan. 8_s._ 6_d._ net.
RUDYARD KIPLING'S VERSE: INCLUSIVE EDITION, 1885-1918. Three vols.
Hodder & Stoughton. 63_s._ net.
It is always a satisfaction to have in one volume--or in two or three
uniform volumes--the verses of a poet which we have previously had to
search for in self-contained books. The publication of a collected
edition of Mr. Hardy's poems is welcome for another reason. In the last
few years his reputation as a poet--quite apart from the fact that he
has continued, right up to his eightieth year, to produce novel and
beautiful work--has greatly increased. Critics may now be found who
even hold that Mr. Hardy's chief claim to greatness will rest, in the
eyes of posterity, upon his poems (including _The Dynasts_) rather
than upon those novels which in themselves made him one of the two or
three most conspicuous writers of his generation. But even now we do
not think that his stature as a poet is widely realised, the volume
and quality of his poetical work generally known: and there will
probably be many who, in perusing this "collected" volume, will be
struck for the first time with the fact that here alone, leaving all
the prose out of the question, is work sufficient, and sufficiently
good, to place its author among the greatest English writers of the
last century. There are hundreds of pages of short poems, some of them
exquisitely beautiful, and all of them so direct and fresh that even
the most faulty are worth having. Faults--though we might rather call
them idiosyncrasies--Mr. Hardy certainly has. His language is sometimes
bald and sometimes cumbrous; his consistent pessimism sometimes leads
him, in the dramatic poems, to extremes of deliberate gloom. But can we
regret a sad philosophy which has enabled a sweet and sensitive spirit
to shine with such uninterrupted brightness amid that gloom? And can
we regret a habit of phraseology which has enabled Mr. Hardy to win
some of his greatest technical triumphs (for he makes music out of
scientific or journalistic words which would ruin an ordinary lyrist)
and which will probably have direct results in the way of enlarging
the poetic vocabulary, which is in constant need of oxygenation? It is
inevitable that a collected edition in one volume should be printed in
smaller type than is entirely comfortable, and the text of this edition
is not so attractive as that of the separate volumes. But it is all
here, and when the reader compares the volume to some of its companion
Macmillan collections (Clough, for instance, falls into nothingness) he
comprehends that in the history of English literature Mr. Hardy will
rank above many of the supposedly established classics. He is a great
poet.
The Kipling collection is luxuriously got up, but unfortunately
the covers are not all they might be, and the reader is irritated
throughout by the presence on the top of every right-hand page of
"Inclusive Edition" in large black capitals. Mr. Kipling would show up
far better in a selection than in a complete edition, so much of his
verse is at best vigorous journalism. Were a good selection made we
believe that some of those who depreciate him would admit for the first
time that he has a fine poet in him; a collected edition merely shows
that he does not know the poet in him from the rhymer. The greater
one's admiration for his best work the greater the irritation one
sustains when reading through the great body of his jingling journalism
and pompous sermonising. Had he written nothing but the _Ballad of
East and West_, the songs from Puck and a few more he would be as well
remembered as he will be now with all this mass of versification to his
name.
WHEELS 1919: A FOURTH CYCLE. Blackwell. 6_s._ net.
The end-papers of this volume bear a charming design of athletes
throwing darts at targets, and it is to be observed that no one of
them as yet has hit the bull's-eye. We do not know if the symbolism
was deliberate, but it is apt, for the volume is full of potshots so
wayward that we are usually uncertain as to which target these erratic
slingers wish to hit. Music at least is not desired: most of the verses
consist of strings of statements--if they are not disconnected the
connections between them are not apparent to us--interesting neither
severally nor jointly, and entirely without beauty of sound. Miss Edith
Sitwell's verses, though incomprehensible, contain a good deal of vivid
detail, pleasant because it reminds us of bright pictures. There is one
poem by the late Wilfred Owen (_Strange Meeting_) which has a powerful,
sombre beginning:
It seemed that out of the battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped,
Through granites which Titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall.
With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached here from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
"Strange, friend," I said. "Here is no cause to mourn."
"None," said the other. "Save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also."
There are several other poems by him which have all the earnestness,
and much of the force, of Mr. Sassoon's illustrations of the beastly
cruelty of war. But the one poet included who is always arousing
interest and curiosity is Mr. Aldous Huxley. Mr. Huxley, when these
poems were written (though, in _Leda_, he seems already to be partly
recovering), seems to have been in the same sort of revulsion against
sentimentality as Rupert Brooke was in when his first book was being
composed. He is anxious that we should not overlook the facts that
there are noisome smells in the world, that many people are disgusting
to see, and that even the most touching episode may be interrupted by
an eructation: though, unlike Brooke, he does not usually even try to
sing. There is something very familiar about the restaurant poem:
What negroid holiday makes free
With such priapic revelry?
What songs? What gongs? What nameless rites?
What gods like wooden stalagmites?
What reeking steam of kidney pie?
What blasts of Bantu melody?
Ragtime ... but when the wearied band
Swoons to a waltz, I take her hand,
And there we sit in blissful calm,
Quietly sweating palm to palm.
There is always strength about Mr. Huxley's epithets: he observes
accurately and his language is hard, clear, and original. He conveys
his unpleasing ruminations with such force that in several places
we were incommoded by a rising in our gorge. But it is not in order
to obtain sensations of that kind that we read poetry, and we shall
not in idle hours beguile our leisure by repeating over and over the
much-loved syllables of _The Betrothal of Priapus_. Mr. Huxley can see
things with his own eyes, and has a powerful intelligence, and when he
has discovered something to write about he may become a very good poet.
GENERAL WILLIAM BOOTH ENTERS INTO HEAVEN, AND OTHER POEMS. By NICHOLAS
VACHEL LINDSAY. With an Introduction by ROBERT NICHOLS. Chatto &
Windus. 5_s._ net.
Mr. Vachel Lindsay is best known as the author of poems, notably poems
inspired by negro camp-meetings, which are meant for recitation; they
have intoxicating rhythms and the language full of gusto. _The Congo_,
_The Daniel Jazz_, and others should certainly be introduced to the
British public, and perhaps Messrs. Chatto propose to follow up this
volume with another containing Mr. Lindsay's later work. It is a pity,
however, that the present collection should have come first, for it
contains little that is characteristic of Mr. Lindsay at his best, and
little, therefore, that will show readers here how good he can be. The
title-poem, though not as good as some of its successors, is the only
one now published which shows what Mr. Lindsay can do. It describes the
entrance of the late General Booth into Paradise at the head of the
motley army whom he has saved:
Booth led boldly with his big bass drum--
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
The Saints smiled gravely and they said "He's come--
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
Walking lepers followed, rank on rank,
Lurching bravoes from the ditches dank,
Drabs from the alleyways and drug fiends pale--
Minds still passion-ridden, soul-powers frail:
Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath,
Unwashed legions with the ways of Death--
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
The other poems are far more ordinary in form and banal in language.
Mr. Lindsay, at this stage, was writing like other people, and his
verse was redeemed from commonplaceness only by its sincerity and
high spirits. He is an "uplifter" who is as jovial as Falstaff; he is
probably the only poet on record, except Shelley, to be a teetotaller,
and certainly the only one to take an active part in an anti-Saloon
campaign. The second best poem in this book is an elegy, in couplets,
on O. Henry; an elegy both romantic and truthful. Of the others an
address to the U.S. Senate is decidedly racy. A senator whom Mr.
Lindsay regarded as undesirable was elected. His verses on the occasion
begin:
And must the Senator from Illinois
Be this squat thing, with blinking, half-closed eyes?
This brazen gutter idol, reared to power
Upon a leering pyramid of lies?
That is what met the eyes of the newly-elected when he opened his local
paper on the morning after the poll.
A TREASURY OF WAR POETRY, BRITISH AND AMERICAN POEMS OF THE WORLD WAR:
1914-1919. Edited by GEORGE HERBERT CLARKE. Hodder & Stoughton. 10_s._
6_d._ net.
If this be a treasury it contains not merely gold and silver, but
copper, nickel, Britannia metal, brass, and lead. Even if all the
good poems inspired by the war were brought together they would not
make a book of over four hundred closely-printed pages. Mr. Clarke is
Professor of English in the University of Tennessee. His collection,
amongst those who are sufficiently undiscriminating to like it, may
promote Anglo-American friendship; if it does it will have justified
its existence. Otherwise its only value consists in its reproduction
of certain poems which are not, we think, to be found elsewhere. We
believe that the Poet Laureate's _Wounded_ (which appeared in the
_Times_) is one of these. It is a very lusty poem inspired by Trafalgar
Square in sunshine: wounded lads lolling by the lions and Nelson
standing above. It ends:
The gentle unjealous Shakespeare, I trow,
In his country grave of peaceful fame,
Must feel exiled from life and glow,
If he thinks of this man with his warrior claim,
Who looketh on London as if 'twere his own
As he standeth in stone, aloft and alone,
Sailing the sky, with one arm and one eye.
This poem--it is not the only one--was overlooked by those who were
recently yelping at Mr. Bridges for having written nothing about the
war.
NOVELS
CHILDREN OF NO MAN'S LAND. By G. B. STERN. Duckworth. 7_s._ net,
SIR LIMPIDUS. By MARMADUKE PICKTHALL. Collins. 7_s._ net.
NIGHT AND DAY. By VIRGINIA WOOLF. Duckworth. 7_s._ net.
THE POWER OF A LIE. By JONAS BOJER. Hodder & Stoughton. 7_s._ net.
GOLD AND IRON. By JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER. Heinemann. 7_s._ net.
The question how far the novel can be, or should be, a criticism of
society, not of life in Arnold's sense, but of the forms in which
life manifests itself at given times and places, is one that has been
discussed but is never likely to find a general settlement. There will
always be purists, of the "art for art's sake" order, who will maintain
that the discussion or even the exposition, as such, of practical
social problems is out of place in fiction. There will always be those
who maintain, as did Mr. H. G. Wells some years ago, that "if the novel
is to be recognised as something more than a relaxation, it has ...
to be kept free from the restrictions imposed upon it by the fierce
pedantries of those who would define a general form for it"--writers
and critics, in fact, who, like Mr. Wells himself, are prepared to
use the novel as a means to any practical end, whether transient
or eternal, of which at the moment it seems capable. Nor is it
particularly desirable that any such settlement should be arrived at;
but the dispute suggests a distinction which has some usefulness. Mr.
Wells has picked up, with the forceps of fiction, and examined by turns
politics, religion, education, and the relations between the sexes. Mr.
Bennett, portraying modern society of all kinds no less closely, has
no special suggestion to make to this age or this civilisation: his
lesson, if his books contain one, is of universal applicability. Mr.
Conrad, so unlike him in all else, is with him in this. Mr. Conrad,
the novelist, has no views on the treatment of subject races or the
reform of the merchant marine. These two are of the older tradition:
for the novel dealing with social questions is a thing of comparatively
recent growth. Formerly only one artist was allowed, and even expected,
to be didactic--that artist in whom to-day preaching is most bitterly
resented, namely, the poet. He was the bard, the seer, the prophet, who
thundered out of a cloud and instructed the nation. The dramatist and
the novelist were by comparison mere providers of entertainment and
were required at most to give their work a flavour of good morals as a
proof of decent intentions. The drama led the way; and, in the hands of
Ibsen and his disciples, it became an instrument for the examination
of topical problems. The novel soon followed suit, so that we are now
confronted with a category of works of fiction in which the divided aim
by no means destroys all artistic interest.
Such a book, in a high degree, is Miss Stern's _Children of No Man's
Land_, which examines alternately the position of naturalised Germans
and their families in England during the war and the position of those
members of the younger generation who have been left by parental
indulgence to drift between the enforced morality, which is spared
them, and the easy immorality, from which their instincts withhold
them. In both cases the meaning of No Man's Land is perfectly clear.
It is the barren and abhorred territory in which wander those who are
rejected by both the contending nations; and it is the land of the
_demi-vierges_ or, as Miss Stern somewhat awkwardly calls them, "the
demi-maids." Both problems are clearly presented and examined; but it
is not obvious what purpose is served by thus combining them and giving
to them a common symbolism, or by making a brother suffer in one tract,
while his sister strays in the other. They are not problems in the
same category or on the same plane; and their alternate treatment here
hardly conduces to continuity or clarity of thought.
But it must be admitted that Miss Stern, having thus handicapped
herself, carries the unnecessary burden with great dexterity. The whole
book is written with a hard, brilliant cleverness that never flags and
is conducted through a remarkable variety of incidents and with the
help of a remarkable variety of characters. The study of the behaviour
of the "half-English" during the war has an inherent air of reality and
moderation. But it is not on this that Miss Stern lavishes her fullest
powers of description and reasoning. She is actually more concerned
with the development of Deb Marcus, the beautiful Jewish girl, who is
discovered at the opening of the book being kissed by a middle-aged
and unattractive German whom she does not like but whom her fear of
seeming foolish forbids her to repulse. We leave her in comfortable
wedlock declaring that her daughter will be brought up "As strictly as
I can, right and wrong, good and bad ... signposts wherever she may
stop and wander. I'm going to superintend her morals; I'm going to
say 'don't,' and I'm going to ask questions, and forbid her things.
And be shocked whenever it's necessary I should be shocked----" "You
little reactionary!" her friend replies; and this, in fact, is the
plain moral of Miss Stern's book, that modern laxity has rendered
reaction necessary. But the moral lesson, however just it may be,
would not be acceptable unless it were supported by sound observation
or palatable without good writing. Miss Stern provides both these
necessities, and her pictures of both the half-worlds are extremely
convincing and entertaining. She makes real and keeps distinct a great
variety of characters, who, as one thinks over the book, reappear
unmistakably in the mind--Manon, the marketable _ingénue_, daughter of
an operatic singer; Antonia Verity, a Diana whose virginity is almost
imperceptibly changing into spinsterhood; Winnie, stupid, sluggish and
greedy, in whom inconsistent but rigid conventions have quite taken the
place of morals, "a jumble of puritanism and prejudice and incurious
sensuality," and a host of others. Her men are equally well done, but
perhaps with a care less intense and less from the inside. But it is
a sign of Miss Stern's thoroughness that both men and women should be
there in such numbers, so delicately differentiated, so intricately
taking their places in her prolonged and exhaustive argument. If,
of course, she had done no more than provide a gallery of typical
portraits to prove a thesis, her work would hardly be worth discussing
at so much length. But she has managed to avoid the pitfall of the
social critic in fiction, and, without ever losing sight of her main
purpose, to compose a book in which no passage is mere argument. The
story proceeds levelly through all its multifarious scenes, continuing
to present incident and character as a novel must do. The skill is
perhaps even too great. The reader's attention is sometimes diverted
by it; and it must be said that juggling with cups invites praise
rather of the juggling than of the china. But, in one way and another,
Miss Stern keeps interest vividly alive through a long book, the theme
of which is by no means wholly pleasant. Her wit and vivacity are
really remarkable; and the conversations of her persons are unusually
animated. She is without great depth of feeling or perception. The
types with which she deals are shallow; and it is noticeable that the
less shallow they are the more she tends to deal with them from the
outside. But _Children of No Man's Land_ is nevertheless an admirable
performance in a difficult kind.
_Sir Limpidus_, by Mr. Marmaduke Pickthall, is another essay in social
criticism, for which the author has somewhat disappointingly deserted
the Levant. His hero is a member of the ruling classes, the son of a
wealthy baronet, who is trained from early youth to follow the code
of his peers, in evil-doing and well-doing alike. This leads him, by
way of public-school and university, one entanglement and another,
including a breach of promise case and a suitable marriage, to a seat
in the Cabinet and the reverence of his fellow-countrymen. On the last
page: