And grieved, lest from her care I roam,
She kissed me through her tears, and set
On high this spangling comb.
_Mirage_ is lovelier still, and far more slender in its origins; how
Mr. de la Mare's imagination can fill out an outline that really is
given is shown in his delicious poem of _Master Rabbit_. There is a
charming sketch: a rabbit, and nothing more. But to the poet a whole
scene comes up, country scents, green grasshoppers talking:
And wings like amber,
Dispread in light,
As from bush to bush
Linnet took flight.
He sees the rabbit looking out from the shadow-rimmed mouth of his
shady cavern at sunset. Rabbit sees him:
Snowy flit of a scut,
He was into his hole;
And--stamp, stamp, stamp,
Through dim labyrinths clear--
The whole world darkened,
A human near.
This is an extra number to _Peacock Pie_, and the poems as a whole
make us once more impatient for a collected volume of Mr. de la Mare's
work which will show the bulk and the quality of the performance of
one of the most exquisite artists in words who has ever contributed to
the unequalled treasury of our English lyrics. Nevertheless it must be
admitted that his average level is higher when he is not writing verses
to a series of pictures.
SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH VERSE, 1616-1660. Edited by H. J.
MASSINGHAM. Macmillan. (Golden Treasury Series.) 3_s._ 6_d._ net.
Mr. Massingham collects here four hundred poems written, with few
exceptions, in the forty-four years that followed the death of
Shakespeare. It may not be correct to describe this period as the
most neglected period of English literature. It is true that many of
the authors and most of the poems to be found in Mr. Massingham's
collection have been ignored by anthologists, and are utterly unknown
to the reading public; but we suspect that the periods of Anne and the
Georges have been even less thoroughly searched, though they would not
yield results so rich as those which have come from the claim that
Mr. Massingham has staked out. There were great poets in that period;
it left us many poems by Milton, Herrick, Herbert Vaughan, Cowley,
Crashaw, Lovelace Suckling, and Carew which are familiar to every
reader at all interested in English poetry. Had the obvious best been
always selected Mr. Massingham would have found himself crowded out
with stock pieces before he began. He has therefore--since he desired
mainly to give publicity to the unfamiliar--left Milton and Herrick
out altogether and excluded some of the best-known poems of their
nearest rivals. This has given him room for everybody, or at least for
a hundred and more poets, for Nabbes and Festel, as well as for the
poets above mentioned, for Donne, and for such other respectable poets
as Brome, Bunyan, Cartwright, Corbet, Davenant, Denham, the Fletchers,
Habington, Bishop King, Massinger, Jasper Mayne, Quarles, Randolph,
Shirley, T. Stanley, Traherne, Waller, Wither, and Wotton. It is an
imposing array; contemplating it one realises that if that age could
not vie with the Elizabethan in the number of great works produced, it
actually beat it in the number of men it produced who wrote a few, or
many, good short poems. And it had, as Mr. Massingham rightly says, a
quality of its own. It may be difficult to deduce "tendencies" from
this mass of metaphysical, amorous, graceful, jocular, scholarly,
tripping verse. But at least the age was no mere afterglow. There are
very few poems in this fine selection which could have been mistaken
for products of any other generation, and there are few which are mere
degenerate imitations of the songs of an earlier race. There was, under
Charles and Cromwell, a distinct civilisation with a colour and a mind
of its own; less passionate (save, in some quarters, in the matter of
religion) than the last; less certain in its music; more self-conscious
in all its ways: but genuine and, temperately, ardent, cheerful,
chivalrous, genial, often tender. From the one pole of
What a dainty life the milkmaid leads!
to the other of
I saw Eternity the other night,
it covered, in its manner, the whole range of poetic experience and
expression, and it did many things perfectly. Herrick and Vaughan were
its typical products, and neither, in his sphere, has an equal.
We find no material fault in this most admirable and enjoyable
anthology. We may, however, make in passing a few unimportant
comments. Mr. Massingham, as we have said, has covered the ground more
exhaustively than we had any right to expect; and for most of his
important omissions he accounts satisfactorily on the ground that he
does not want to reprint poems which everyone already knows. There are,
however, a few things which he might have included. The selection would
have been more thoroughly represented had it contained more of the
controversial element. "I suppose," he says, "that my political temper
would urge me to declare for the Parliament in the Civil War. But a
bruising disunion of feeling would arise were such a choice forced upon
me. Before the Civil War the middle and upper classes in England were
highly educated and passionately drawn to music. Turning over these
old Song-books, printed fifty years after their Elizabethan prototypes,
one feels a horror at the men who violated the temples of song and
learning. For the Puritans killed the musical soul of England and paved
the way for our doom--the triumph of the business sense." That is as
may be: at all events he who regarded Royalism as the devil would have
to admit that, not forgetting Milton and Marvell, the devil had most
of the best tunes; and there is a lilt about many of the Rump songs
that equals anything in English polemic verse. Cleveland, in fancy,
might have been more freely drawn on. Politics apart, there are things
missing. A selection from Joseph Beaumont is given, but where is that
beautiful poem about the "sweet fury" of Mary Magdalen? One poem of
the mysterious Anne Collins (it is only, we think, one edition of her
works of which a unique copy is supposed to exist; there was a second)
is given, but not the best. Orinda is done scant justice; and another
woman (not a genius, but as good as some of Mr. Massingham's men) who
deserved quotation, however brief, is Anne Bradstreet, the Tenth Muse,
the Female Homer and what not, of New England. The admission of Philip
Ayres, who was twenty years out of date, is not really justifiable.
Granted that he was old-fashioned in style and spirit, the same might
be said of some of his Restoration contemporaries. Dr. Walter Pope's
celebrated poem, for instance, would not have been out of place in a
volume which contains Thomas Jordan and might have contained Martin
Parker. A few of Mr. Massingham's copious and highly entertaining notes
invite controversy. It is cruel of him, so tender as a rule towards
small poets who have patches of goodness, to describe Flatman as a
poetaster; it is rash of him to declare that a good Alexandrine _must_
have a noticeable cæsura; and it must surely have been a moment of
aberration which led him to detect "a superb freedom of imagination" in
the ordinary tropes of Lord Herbert's _Elegy_:
Doth the sun now his light with yours renew?
Have waves the curling of your hair?
Did you restore unto the sky and air
The red and white and blue?
Have you vouchsafed to flowers since your death
That sweetest breath?
These things, however, matter little.
We note, by the way, that Mr. Massingham, like his predecessors, is
unable to contribute anything new to the discussion concerning one of
the noblest of the poems that come under his survey. We refer to "Yet
if His Majesty our Sovereign Lord," which was discovered by Mr. Bullen
in Christ Church Library. Mr. Bullen conjectured Vaughan as author. Mr.
Massingham, with all deference, says that Mr. Bullen is wrong. We agree
with Mr. Massingham; but we should greatly like this problem to be
cleared up.
A MISCELLANY OF POETRY--1919. Edited by WILLIAM KEAN SEYMOUR. Palmer &
Hayward. 5_s._ net.
This miscellany "is issued to the public as a truly catholic anthology
of contemporary poetry." We do not quite gather what the author means
by this. He has restricted the range of his selection by printing only
poems which have not yet appeared "in book form," and he certainly
cannot suppose that he has even half of the best living poets in his
volume, or even half of the best poets of the younger generation. Mr.
Chesterton appears, but not Mr. Belloc; Mr. Binyon, but not A. E. or
Mr. Yeats; Mr. Davies, but not Mr. de la Mare; Mr. Sturge Moore, but
not Mr. Freeman; Mr. Nichols, but not Mr. Sassoon, Mr. Graves, or Mr.
Turner. Possibly the suggestion is that Mr. Seymour has consulted other
people's tastes as well as his own; this might explain the presence
here of poets who are not known to have written anything of any merit
and who certainly contribute nothing of merit to this collection.
However, the good things make the book worth having. Chief among
them is a long epistle by Mr. Sturge Moore, which contains pictures
as clean-cut and vivid as those which made his _Micah_ so peculiarly
rich a poem. Mr. Chesterton's _Ballad of St. Barbara_ has glorious
lines, and the spirit is the spirit of _The White Horse_, but ballads
should not be obscure, and this one is. There is no obscurity in Mr.
Chesterton's _Elegy in a Country Churchyard_:
The men that worked for England
They have their graves at home,
And bees and birds of England
About the cross can roam.
But they that fought for England,
Following a fallen star,
Alas, alas, for England
They have their graves afar!
And they that rule in England
In stately conclave met,
Alas, alas, for England,
They have no graves as yet!
The series of lyrics by Mr. Davies are, as usual, delicious, and there
is less of rotundity than usual, and more exactness and feeling, in
Mr. John Drinkwater's _Malediction_. Mr. Gibson contributes a series
of descriptive war-sonnets, adjectival but interesting; and Mr.
Gerald Gould eight sonnets very skilfully written and full of good,
if reminiscent, phrases, which are unfortunately not as intelligible
as they look. The editor's _Fruitage_ is too much like the more
pontifical octosyllabics of Mr. Drinkwater, but his _Siesta_ gives a
hot coloured picture vividly. Of the other contributors Mr. Binyon,
Miss Macaulay, Mr. Theodore Maynard, and Mr. Charles Williams (whose
_Poems of Conformity_, difficult but sinewy, should be better known
than they are) are interestingly represented. To these we may add Mr.
F. V. Branford, who has almost made a good poem out of mathematics. It
concludes:
For here and hence I sail
Alone beyond the pale,
Where square and circle coincide,
And the parallels collide,
And perfect pyramids flower.
Obscurity is more excusable in this poem than in his others. The
discriminating reader who has read this book once will probably mark
the poems he wants to read a second time; there are many here by
authors who need not be specified which have given us an uncompensated
headache. If the editor means to follow the volume up he would be well
advised next time in being less "catholic" in this regard; an anthology
of contemporary verse has to be almost uniformly good to serve any
useful purpose.
NOVELS
INTERIM. By DOROTHY RICHARDSON. Duckworth. 7_s._ net.
VALMOUTH. By RONALD FIRBANK. Grant Richards. 7_s._ net.
FULL CIRCLE. By MARY AGNES HAMILTON. Collins. 7_s._ net.
INVISIBLE TIDES. By BEATRICE SEYMOUR. Chapman & Hall. 7_s._ net.
Miss Richardson's novel is her fifth volume in the same manner and
about the same person; and a sixth volume is announced. She has
apparently in effect only one novel to write and only one manner in
which to do it. It is a manner distinctively her own, and yet not an
isolated phenomenon. This kind of thinking and this kind of writing
seem to be abroad at the moment. There are deep and genuine analogies
between Miss Richardson's style and the style of Mr. James Joyce;
there is a much more superficial resemblance between her work and the
_fumisterie_ of Mr. Ronald Firbank. She has influenced (but in this
case it was a conscious discipleship) the method of Miss May Sinclair.
It would not be difficult to find in her traits which she has in common
with the more sincere exponents of Futurist poetry and with the theory
an attempt to embody which was made in Futurist paintings. She is,
in fact, an individual member of a school which is mostly posing and
pretence, and which tends to discredit its very few genuine exponents.
But that Miss Richardson is genuine, whether we like reading her books
or not, is a question beyond dispute. She writes as she does because
she must, because it is the way in which it has been given her to write.
It is her object to translate the memories of sensations into words
directly and with as little change as possible. This is a specimen:
Miriam pulled up in front of a large oil-painting over the sofa; its
distances--where a meadow stream that was wide in the foreground
with a stone bridge and a mill-wheel and a cottage half hidden under
huge trees, grew narrow and wound on and on through tiny distant
fields until the scene melted in a soft-toned mist--held all her
early visits to the Brooms in the Banbury Park days before they had
discovered that she did not like sitting with her back to the fire.
She listened eagerly to the busy sounds of the Brooms. Someone had
bolted the hall-door and was scrooping a chair over the tiles to get
up and put out the gas. Dust-sheets were still being flountered in
the room behind her. Grace's arm came round her waist.--I'm so glad
you've come, sweet, she said in her low, steady, shaken tones.--So
am I, said Miriam.--Isn't that a jolly picture.--Yes. It's an
awfully good one, you know. It was one of papa's.--What's O'Hara
doing in the kitchen?--Taking Grace by the waist, Miriam drew into
the passage, trying to prance with her down the hall. The little
kitchen was obscured by an enormous clothes-horse draped with airing
linen. She's left a miserable fire, said Mrs. Philps from behind the
clothes-horse. She hasn't done the saucepans, aunt, scolded Florrie
from the scullery.--Never mind, we can't have er down now. It's
nearly midnight.
This is the reconstitution of a moment and, for what it is worth,
Miss Richardson makes the moment live again. But minds which observe
and record in her close, literal fashion are not normal minds; and
therefore her impressions of life, coloured as they are by her acute
introspectiveness, cannot correspond to life as normal persons see
it. The normal person simplifies life, not merely when, if ever, he
describes it, but also when he perceives it. The world is not to him
the fragmentary incoherent whirl of feelings and events which it is
to Miss Richardson. Nevertheless, it is obvious that this _is_ how
the world appears to her; and here, again for what it is worth, is
her description of it. With such a book, a document rather than a
novel, the ordinary attitude of the critic of fiction is naturally
unsuitable and inapplicable. He cannot assume the conventional position
of judgment from a definite and unalterable standard. He can, in fact,
do no more than explain what is the book before him and leave it at
that. We attempt to do no more. We do, however, think it worth while
to establish the fact, if possible, that Miss Richardson's "novels"
are the real expression of a real personality. On some readers they
may have absolutely no effect; on some a small or a transitory effect;
some, we know, appreciate them enormously. But they are genuine; they
are not "stunts." When the series is finished, it may, of course,
appear that Miss Richardson has given to the life of Miriam Henderson
an artistic shape and moulding, instead of making it merely an endless
film. But this does not at present suggest itself. What we have now is
the record of a particular mind in various states, a mind which is not
normal, but is not possessed to an abnormal degree of either beauty or
power. That, we confess, is all we are able to say.
That Miss Richardson's method is native and genuine may be seen by a
comparison of it with that of Mr. Ronald Firbank, whose _Valmouth_ is
worth noticing here in order to make the point. Here, again, a random
specimen is necessary:
Depositing his scrip in the outhouse, the cowherd glanced around:
"Where's Thetis got?" he asked, addressing the small boy, who,
brandishing a broken rhubarb leaf, was flitting functionarily about.
"Thetis?... She's," he hopped, "standing in the river."
"What's she standing there for?"
"Nothing."
"... Must I thrash you, Billy Jolly?"
"Oh, don't, David."
"Then answer me quick."
"When the tide flows up from Spadder Bay she pretends it binds her
to the sea. Where her sweetheart is. Her b-betrothed.... Away in the
glorious tropics."
"'Od! You're a simple one, you are!"
"Me?"
"Aye, you."
"Don't be horrid, David, to me ... you mustn't be. It's bad enough
quite without."
"'Od."
Throughout this curious book we have again an attempt at an incoherent
and bewildering style, a picture of a world which disintegrates into
a thousand pieces as we regard it. It is indeed in some sort that
deliquescence of language and thought of which a certain school
of French writers once dreamed. But it expresses not a native, if
unusual, way of seeing, so much as a perverse, deliberately assumed
attitude. Mr. Firbank has clearly talents and ingenuity enough to
prevent any nonsense he may write being thrown away as pure nonsense.
But it is also clear that his aim is to write nonsense rather than
sense and perhaps to put forward under a film of absurdity a certain
natural perversity which would not be welcomed if it were more
lucidly expressed. He has a certain gift for inconsequence and highly
etherealised frivolity; but this may be inextricably connected with his
demerits, in which case it would be useless to ask him to change. If
he does not, he will remain a curiosity, mildly amusing a few readers,
deluding a few into a belief that they have found a super-genius and
boring or displeasing the great majority.
These two books taken together suggest an aspect from which it may be
profitable to consider Mrs. Hamilton's _Full Circle_. Neither of them
tells a story, in the sense in which the miraculous inventors of the
_Arabian Nights_ told stories. Miss Richardson has no "astonishing
history" to recount. She rather describes than tells: though her
heroine moves chronologically, one has yet the sense rather of movement
in space than of movement in time. Mr. Firbank tells some story or
other, but it is not possible to discern it under his incessant
saltimbanqueries. Mrs. Hamilton tells a definite tale. Certain persons
enter into relations, find themselves in a situation, resolve it:
there is an introduction, a complication, and a dénouement. It is,
however, the story that we miss when we look back on the book.
Mrs. Hamilton has observed or imagined certain persons of various
characters and, in order to exhibit them, has invented the shocks
and clashes between them which carry on her narrative. But, while
the persons are clearly observed or imagined, the book suggests that
nothing more than invention was used for the bringing forth of the
incidents. The writer might easily have been content to describe her
characters without showing them in motion. The Quihamptons, Iris
Mauldeth and Wilfrid Elstree, are vivid and real, portrayed in the
round. We should know them if we met them; and, from their presentation
here, we can make such estimates of and guesses about them as we make
in ordinary life--they are no less real than that. But in Wilfrid's
affair with Bridget Quihampton, in his disappearance and return, in
Roger's marriage and destiny, it is impossible not to discern a certain
lassitude and want of interest. The incidents are not improbable or
ill-drawn; but Mrs. Hamilton cannot have felt very much about them
as incidents. Though the people have undoubtedly come to life in her
hands, they have not proceeded to do anything of their own initiative;
except in one instance, we feel the hand of the author jogging their
elbows and ruling their fates. When two of them, when Bridget and
Wilfrid, are involved in an emotional situation, the author's interest
continues to reveal itself in Bridget and in Wilfrid, not in the
situation which the clash of their individualities has produced. A
tale need not deal with the marvellous and fantastic, with genies in
bottles and young princes transformed into calves, in order to exhibit
the special gift of the story-teller. It may concern itself with themes
as slight as those of _The Spoils of Poynton_ or _What Maisie Knew_.
But it must at least deal not with isolated personalities but with
that which is produced by the fusion, whether in love or hate or some
other emotion, of two or more personalities, or by the impact of events
on a single personality or more. We do not mean to suggest that Mrs.
Hamilton's novel is deficient in this essential: we mean only that on
this side of her work there are traces of what appeared to us to be
lack of interest, even traces of boredom. In one situation only, in
the subtly and mysteriously hinted conflict between Wilfrid Elstree,
the brilliant, untrammelled egoist, and Iris Mauldeth, the pretty girl
whose commonplace character is as rigid as iron, are these traces
absent; and here the novelist's work is done so exceedingly well as to
make the deficiencies of the rest especially noticeable.