prettinesses for our pleasure, but as in old Battersea enamel the
prettiness is liable to chip off and show the dull metal beneath; and
in these twelve sketches there is little of fancy. They were written
"to show," so the Preface tells us, "something of the extent of the
wrongs that the people of France had suffered," and the cultivated lack
of vigour in style does serve, somehow, to illustrate the desolation
of towns laid waste, and--which more peculiarly touches Lord Dunsany's
sympathy--gardens. The monotony of the scene is, too, well typified by
the same quality in description. Frequently, as in _The Real Thing_,
when he sets out to be fantastic he is merely trivial; and throughout
he draws from a wealth of ingenious but ungainly metaphor. However, the
author well understands that the utmost terror of desolation can be
inspired by the sound (rather than the sight) of man-made things gone
to rust. Out in the dead land, where villages are to be conjectured
from scattered heaps of stones, he was much impressed--for he refers to
it again and again--by the "mournful sound of iron flapping on broken
things," and--"this was the sound that would haunt the waste for ever."
On the other hand, in _Bermondsey versus Wurtemburg_, he observed that
a German soldier had chalked up the name of his regiment on a wall--the
156th Wurtemburgers. Subsequently a British soldier had prefaced
this with "Lost by," and added after "retaken by the Bermondsey
Butterflies." This might have served to point the less serious moments
of a special correspondent to one of the lighter newspapers, but it
scarcely warrants preservation in an admirably printed book with a
strong binding in excellent taste.
THE ROMANTIC ROUSSILLON. By ISABEL SAVORY. T. Fisher Unwin. 25_s._ net.
"The thought of 'the picturesque' repels me," writes Miss Savory in
extenuation of her offence in the kind of sightseeing which less
sophisticated tourists, for whom she accuses Nature of "touting,"
joyfully regard as inevitable. But though from time to time she is
careful lest the reader should associate her with the organisations
of Cook and Lunn, this superiority to the obvious is not always
implicit. Whether the ideal book of travels should satisfy us by our
own firesides or should merely stimulate us to go and see things for
ourselves is a question that Miss Savory has not helped to decide. Her
vision is uneven, but on the whole she provokes and does not satisfy
curiosity. The book is a record of an exhaustive (and one would say
exhausting) exploration of the Eastern Pyrenees, with Perpignan,
Ille-sur-Tet, Estagel, and other places as centres for radiating
expeditions, and "we did many wanders at Salses," she says. She climbed
high mountains, and admired the views; she visited forgotten villages,
and raked up their history; she lingered--none too long--under groined
roofs and in panelled _salles_. But in her frank delight in good wine
and food there is real vitality and emphatic, if unconscious, art.
"We picked bunch after bunch (of grapes) hot in the sun, buried our
faces in the warmness of them ... bit not one but mouthfuls, sweet and
juicy...." And then she goes on to tell us that at the same moment
there would be a "little sad, sour, tight bunch not a quarter grown"
on a house in Gower Street, and that nobody was ever quite so dead as
Queen Anne.
However, Miss Savory need not fear lest we should fail to recognise her
appreciation of the beautiful things she saw, more especially as many
of them--carvings, chateaux, plaster-work--are admirably reproduced as
illustrations in collotype from the drawings of Miss M. L. MacKenzie:
but our recognition would have been quicker if she had been at less
pains to impress us with her originality.
JACOPONE DA TODI. By EVELYN UNDERHILL. Dent. 16_s._ net.
In the preface to her life and letters of this remarkable man,
Miss Underhill says: "Three types of mind should find pleasure in
Jacopone's work and personality. First, those interested in Christian
mysticism.... Next, lovers of poetry.... Last, those who care for the
Italy of St. Francis and his descendants." The last two aspects of an
arresting personality will doubtless make the wider appeal, admirably
as his biographer has traced and explained the spiritual development of
the man she calls the first great Italian religious poet.
So sympathetically has Miss Underhill treated the religious experiences
of Jacopone that in the light of her exposition, extravagance,
futility, seeming madness even, seem to take their rightful place in
the spiritual history of a man who expresses that history in strangely
beautiful poems. Born probably about 1230, soon after the death of St.
Francis, Jacopone da Todi followed very closely in the steps of his
more famous master. Like St. Francis, he belonged to a noble Umbrian
family; like St. Francis, he turned from a gay worldly existence to the
worship of Lady Poverty. His conversion, however, compared with that
of the founder of the Franciscan rule, was a late one. St. Francis was
only twenty-four, Jacopone was nearly forty when he left the world and
its ways to begin the quest for perfection.
A legend (not perhaps entirely legendary, since it is in some respects
supported by the self-revelations of his _laude_) grew up about his
name, and was embodied, years later, in the so-called _Vita_, a
manuscript of the fifteenth century.
Here it is related that Ser Jacomo--to give him his worldly title--was
passionately devoted to his young wife, who was ascetic at heart, yet
to please her husband wore the rich clothes he gave her, and took
part in all the gaieties of the town. A tragic ending to Ser Jacomo's
happiness was brought about when, on the occasion of a marriage
festival, his beautiful Vanna was killed by the fall of a balcony.
"And when" (says the _Vita_) "they took off those garments of vanity
which she had upon her in order to make her ready for the grave they
found at last, next to her bare flesh, a harsh shirt of hair."
The legend goes on to relate that the shock of his wife's death,
together with the discovery of her pious fraud, led first to madness
and then to the conversion of Jacopone. Nowhere in his subsequent poems
is there to be found a reference to his marriage. But this in itself
is no proof of the falsity of the story, for, as with most mediæval
penitents, the casting off of his old life meant to him the abjuration
of earthly ties and memories. Jacopone the saint remains nevertheless
Ser Jacomo the passionate lover. No songs in praise of an adored wife
or mistress could be more fervid, more palpitating with emotion than
those addressed to his Saviour.
It is by means of these religious poems--_laude_, as they were
called--that the successive stages in the progress of the mystic may
be traced. But leaving the mystic aside, we may feel grateful to Miss
Underhill for having placed the poet before us. Many of his _laude_, in
the English translation of Mrs. Theodore Beck, are given at length in
this book, and very beautiful they are. To forget their theme and to
consider only their form and imagery is to be reminded of secular Italy
of the thirteenth century--its troubadours, its Court poets, its Courts
of Love. For nearly forty years after all Jacopone had lived in the
world, enjoying its laughter, its gaiety, its sunshine, and the poems
of the saint, indicate that he had not forgotten all he learnt as a
sinner--that is as an ordinary man of the class to which he originally
belonged. "_O Queen of all Courtesy_," he begins in an address to the
Blessed Virgin--and we are immediately transported in thought to a fair
garden and a lover with his lute.
HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY
THE RIDDLE OF THE RUTHVENS AND OTHER STUDIES. By WILLIAM ROUGHEAD. With
thirteen Illustrations. William Green & Son Ltd., Edinburgh. 25_s._ net.
Whether we may consider the reading of criminal annals a profitable
occupation or otherwise, it is an unquestionable fact that they often
possess a human interest, for the imaginative person at all events,
far in excess of the records of the intrigues and policies of kings,
statesmen, generals, and priests. And there is a well-nigh unique and
special interest attaching to Scottish _causes célèbres_ which places
them in importance far above the general run of the great trials of all
the other nations of Europe. This is accounted for by the strangely
complex psychology of the average and typical Scotsman. He is a being
in whom the emotions are strictly subordinated to the government of his
reason. He is deeply metaphysical, and there is a powerful forensic
strain in his composition. It is seldom indeed that a Scotsman pleads
guilty to any charge, even when he has been caught red-handed. To do
so would simply spoil for him all the pleasure of the trial, and there
is probably no one in court who follows the evidence and pleadings
more carefully or with greater zest than the prisoner himself. Were it
possible for him to be closeted with the jury, it is quite conceivable
that he should be found arguing the pros and cons of the case as
forcibly and with as great detachment as any "good man and true" among
them. But there is a fatal flaw in the character of the Scot which
detracts to a large extent from the interest that one feels in his
other traits, namely, the theological tendency which in persons of
evil life at last degenerates into pure cant. The condemned prisoner
on the scaffold exhorting the multitude "to avoid the heinous crime of
disobedience to parents, inattention to Holy Scriptures, of being idle
and disorderly, and especially of Sabbath-breaking," is by no means
an edifying spectacle. The existence and prevalence of this trait is
all the more curious when one considers that the Scot generally is not
lacking in a keen sense of humour.
The special value of this collection of historic criminal trials and
other juridical studies by Mr. Roughead, however, lies in the fresh
light he has been able to throw upon the respective characters of King
James the Sixth of Scotland (First of England), the most despicable
poltroon that ever disgraced a British throne; and of Lord Braxfield,
the prototype of Robert Louis Stevenson's _Weir of Hermiston_. An old
Edinburgh University Professor of Constitutional Law and History used
to say that Charles II. was the most iniquitous ruler that England
ever had, but James II. was still worse. It was badly expressed, but
there was something in it. Its special application was Constitutional,
however, although it might easily be extended to apply universally
if we allow the addition of the proviso that James I. was the worst
of all. He was a liar, a coward, and a hypocrite, full of pedantry
and cant. This is conclusively demonstrated in _The Riddle Of the
Ruthvens_, and in other sketches that deal with the witchcraft
prosecutions that were conducted with such a degree of vindictiveness
and fury throughout the whole of his reign. But perhaps the greatest
service of all that Mr. Roughead has done in the cause of truth
and justice is his vindication of the respective characters of the
much-maligned Lord Braxfield and Robert Fergusson the poet from so
many of the absurd eccentricities which have been attributed to them
by incompetent biographers and unscrupulous scandalmongers, and have
in course of time, by constant repetition, become traditional. It is a
far cry from the Gowrie Conspiracy to "Antique" Smith, the forger of
the autograph letters of great literary and historical personages, who
is still well remembered in Edinburgh, but these are Mr. Roughead's
limits, and between them there is such a mass of history and criminal
psychology as the student of either will delight in, while the curious,
or merely general, reader will find it very good entertainment.
GEORGE BUBB DODINGTON: PATRON AND PLACE-HUNTER. By LLOYD SANDERS. John
Lane. 1919. 16_s._ net.
Here is a case of book-making of a somewhat explicit kind, since there
is little to say, and nothing to print, of Dodington which he has not
said of himself. There is, of course, no more harm in making books than
there is in making bricks; but if the one wants straw, as Moses says it
did, the other wants humanity. God made Bubb Dodington, and therefore
let him pass for a man. In his own day he passed for a coxcomb; in
ours, which is more censorious, he would certainly have passed for a
rascal. In either aspect, if he is to be treated at all, he requires a
more philosophical study than Mr. Sanders has been able to supply.
Of mean origin, some ability and unbounded impudence, Dodington
inherited both money and land. With the land there accrued to him
Parliamentary interest--to wit, in some four seats in Dorset and
Somerset, which he spent the rest of his life in hawking from faction
to faction with a flagrancy and success which even his own age found
shocking. From first to last--and he lived a long time--there were no
illusions about him. Pope scoffed at him until he found metal more
attractive, and changed "Bubo" for "Bufo"; Walpole remarked to Lord
Hervey upon "the second time that worthy has proposed to rise by
treading on my neck"; Hervey himself, who seldom had a good word for
anybody, never had a worse than for him. Hanbury Williams, who was
never malevolent, wrote of him that he was
To no one party, no one man,
Nor to his own self tight;
For what he voted for at noon
He rail'd against at night.
Horace Walpole called him a political journalist, meaning by that that
he was daily in the market-place, and for the highest-bidder. Lord
Chesterfield thought that "God made Dodington the coxcomb he is; mere
human means could not have brought it about. He is a coxcomb superior
to his parts, though his parts are superior to almost anybody's." These
are Bubb Dodington's best credentials except those which he supplied
for himself. With those, with colossal impudence and four boroughs, he
set up in trade, and did pretty well. He miscalculated the odds more
than once: first on the accession of George II., when he dropped Sir
Robert for Spencer Compton; next when Frederick Prince of Wales enticed
him over to Carlton House for the second time, and promptly died. Slips
like those kept him out in the cold until near the end of the reign.
Just in the nick of time he made friends with Lord Bute, and on the
accession of George III., a year before his own death, was made a peer.
There is evidence that he died a contented and complacent man.
Mr. Sanders proposes to "explain" Dodington, but fails for lack of
matter. There is really nothing to explain. There would have been a
good deal to expose had not the creature done it for himself in his
egregious _Diary_. That to be sure is an unexampled document. Men,
before it and since, have written themselves down rogues and peasant
slaves of various kinds, some for amusement, some for edification.
But few--I think no others--have written themselves down in the act
and intention of writing themselves up. Casanova occurs to the mind;
but Casanova neither wrote himself up nor down, whereas Dodington's
complacency in the act to be a scoundrel is his most remarkable
feature.
"I desired Lady Aylesbury to carry you Lord Melcombe's _Diary_. It
is curious indeed; not so much from the secrets that it blabs, which
are rather characteristic than novel, but from the wonderful folly
of the author, who was so fond of talking of himself that he tells
all he knew of himself, though scarce an event that does not betray
his profligacy; and (which is still more surprising that he should
disclose) almost every one exposes the contempt in which he was held,
and his consequential disappointments and disgraces!"
That is Horace Walpole, writing to Conway in 1784, when the _Diary_
was out. Lord Hervey, long before it was written, gave him a pungent
paragraph. "Mr. Dodington," he says, "whilst some people have the
_je ne sais quoi_ in pleasing, possessed the _je ne sais quoi_ in
displeasing in the strongest and most universal degree that ever
any man was blessed with that gift.... His vanity in company was so
overbearing, so insolent, and so insupportable that he seemed to exact
that applause as his due which other people solicit, and to think
that he had a right to make every auditor his admirer." And so indeed
it is, in this _Diary_ of his dealings between the Prince of Wales
and the Administration, that he solemnly records all his disgustful
traffickings of himself and his boroughs, as if they were negotiations
between high contracting powers, and in every page declares himself
both knave and fool in a way which would afford pleasant reading if
it were not so long and so dull. It is enlivened by one delicious,
but entirely unconscious, gleam. In April, 1754, he went down to
Bridgewater to an election, having done his best to sell the seat
to the Duke of Newcastle. He spent £2500 on it, and he lost it. The
fourteenth and two following days, he records, "were spent in infamous
and disagreeable compliance with the low habits of venal wretches."
Those wretches naturally were burgesses whom it was necessary that he
should buy in order that he might afterwards sell himself. It is the
only good thing in the book, but it is good enough. The next best thing
is the naïve excuse of its editor of 1784 for publishing it, that by
its means politicians might be advised how not to conduct their and the
country's affairs!
Mr. Sanders has done his part of the business with industry and
candour. He says the best he can for his subject, and has left nothing
of importance out, either for or against him, except the account of
the trouncing which he received in the House of Commons for his speech
against Sir Robert in 1742. It is told by Horace Walpole, with gusto,
as is only natural, but with obvious accuracy. Mr. Sanders should
not have let him off the chastisement of an insolence and hypocrisy
paralleled only by Disraeli's attack upon another Sir Robert. On the
credit side of the account he rightly selects the defence of Admiral
Byng as the most disinterested action of Dodington's long career. Add
to that that Lady Hervey really liked him, and that he used a steel
machine with which to pick up his handkerchief.
AN OXFORD SCHOLAR: INGRAM BYWATER, 1840-1914. By W. W. JACKSON, D.D.
Clarendon Press. 1917. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
There are probably a good many people who know something about Jowett
and have read several works of Gilbert Murray's, and yet could not even
guess who was the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford who bridged the
gap. It was Bywater. Between two great popular influences the pendulum
took a swing towards scholarship in the strictest sense, and from 1893
to 1908 the chair was filled by one of the most learned Hellenists of
his day in any land, a man less great indeed than Scaliger and Bentley
and the present Professor of Latin at Cambridge, but assuredly of their
type. Those three rank even higher, not so much because they are more
"brilliant" as because their interest in the classics is primarily
the literary one. They apply their criticism and interpretation to
the more purely literary authors, and their style has a quality not
relevant to scientific scholarship, however welcome there--it has the
creative writer's _zest_. Bywater's learning ranged, certainly, over
the whole field of Greek prose and poetry; he had, moreover, a keen
interest in literature as such, read the chief contemporary poets and
novelists, and had views about them; he was master of an admirable
Latin style; but his ruling passion was not literature so much as
knowledge, and it was in the philosophic writers that he found his
special field. For that reason his most characteristic work may be said
to be his edition of Aristotle's _Ethics_, published in 1890. At the
same time, that by which he is deservedly best known is an edition of a
work on the borderland between philosophy and literature, Aristotle's
_Poetics_, to which he supplied, in 1909, an English paraphrase and a
fully explanatory commentary, both the best things of their kind for
any student of that work; and as these will always be many, the book's
future seems assured.
"Bywater," writes a relative, "was always studying"; and again, in
words of insight, "but if he were not actually a genius he was far from
being merely a learned man." His enlightenment and humanity are brought
out in Dr. Jackson's admirable little biography, which, as the story
of a scholar who died soon after the European War began, seems worth
commending now. Though he disliked what we know as Liberalism, the word
is the right one for his educational views; he supported the abolition
of University religious tests, and was against compulsory Greek.
Further than that it is not applicable; he was a Tariff Reformer. As an
undergraduate he belonged to the famous "Old Mortality Club." He was
a friend and disciple of Mark Pattison, and, like him, married a lady
who was an excellent scholar and at the same time humane and charming.
Of Walter Pater he was a friend and no disciple; "his style I do not
like: it seems to me affected and pretentious and often sadly wanting
in lucidity." In congenial company one of the most sociable of men, he
showed much kindness to promising young scholars. Some of the _mots_
ascribed to him are rather donnish, but not all: "I often think that
modern education is a conspiracy on the part of schoolmasters and dons
to keep men babies until they are four-and-twenty" is profounder than
it looks; and he realised that "those who care for manuscripts _per se_
are usually dull dogs."
All through his life he was a great bibliophile, and even in this
respect happily mated. Few wives would pack their husbands off to Paris
immediately after breakfast to inspect a copy of the _editio princeps_
of Homer, and when they returned with it the following evening give
it to them for a birthday-present. But he possessed something even
more remarkable than that (for of Homer there are, after all, other
editions); in his copy of Melanchthon's _De Anima_ was an autograph of
Rabelais.
SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY LIFE IN THE COUNTRY PARISH. By ELEANOR TROTTER,
M.A. Cambridge University Press. 10_s._ net.
This book has one serious fault: there is not enough of it. Miss
Trotter gives a feast of good things, suggests so many interesting
happenings of the period, that she might have expanded almost every
page into three, and still we might ask for more. It is, however,
confined strictly to showing how the ordinary business of government
was carried on during this troubled century. Readers will find good
exercise for the imagination in filling in the outlines. Take this for
example: "The beadle's chief work was of a punitive nature; he was
expected to help the constable in apprehending and punishing rogues; he
wore a special dress, and carried a whip or wand in his hand with which
he drove the dogs out of church." A footnote says: "In 1887 at Wensley
Church the wands were still to be seen. They were six in number, and
were attached to the front of the churchwardens' high pews." The vestry
book at Pittington, page 104, shows this entry: "Maie 3, 1646, John
Lazing was appointed to be bedel for driving doggs out of the church
in time of public worship, and other necessary dutys." The office of
church-warden was then of great importance, and carried with it the
dignity of a special "high pew," a matter of moment when the seating
arrangements in church almost created a table of precedence. But why
did the dogs of those days show such a church-going disposition? The
beadle's office to-day would be a sinecure, for during many years of
regular attendance the writer has only twice seen a dog in church.
The next page refers to "Rogue Money," the colloquial term for a
contribution not exceeding 6_d._ or 8_d._ a week levied on Sunday on
the parish for the maintenance of poor prisoners in the county gaol.
A further levy of not less than 20_s._ per annum from the whole North
Riding was made for the relief of poor prisoners of the King's Bench
and Marshalsea. Even taking into account the greater value of money
then, this would not go far among destitute prisoners, but it is
somewhat surprising to find that any provision at all was made in those
hard days.