Fund (to which we referred in our December number) was given at the
rooms of the Royal Society at Burlington House on January 23rd, by
Professor T. Eric Peet. The subject of the lecture was "El Amarna, the
City of Egypt's Heretic King." The lecturer said that from the evidence
of the mummy generally supposed to be his, Amenhotep IV. appears to
have been little more than a boy when his father died. Nevertheless,
as early as the fourth year of his reign, he introduced the worship of
the Aton, the Disk of the Sun, and did his utmost to establish it as
the State religion, and to suppress the worship of Amon and all other
Egyptian gods. The new religion was purely monotheistic in character,
for the Aton was regarded as the creator, not of Egypt only, but of
the world. The new deity was represented in the art of the period by a
picture of the disk of the sun, from which emanated numerous rays, each
terminating in human hands, some of which are holding out the sign of
life to the worshippers. The king changed his own name from Amenhotep
("Amon is content") to Akhenaton ("The Disk is pleased"), and he
shifted his capital from Thebes to El Amarna.
Excavations at El Amarna have brought to light remains of a temple
dedicated to the Aton, and a palace erected for the use of the king,
with beautifully painted floor, fragments of which show a freedom of
drawing and lack of convention which distinguish this period from most
other Egyptian art. The remains of many private houses have also been
discovered, and from these it is comparatively easy to gather the
size, design, and general construction of the houses of the nobles of
that time. Most of them seem to have been built on the same plan, and
comprise a central hall, with small apartments surrounding and leading
from it. Some of these smaller rooms were used as workrooms, and in
one house excavated a number of plaster casts were found, obviously
taken from living models, proving that the Egyptians of this period
were experts in this work. There were also many finished and unfinished
statues of the Royal family, some of which were in very natural
positions, quite unlike the usual Egyptian statues of other sites.
The tombs of the officials of the Court were discovered in the cliffs
behind the town, their walls being covered with sculptured scenes
depicting the everyday life of the capital.
At the close of the lecture the Chairman, Colonel H. G. Lyons, F.R.S.,
pointed out the extreme importance of systematic and scientific
excavations in Egypt and other countries, and the gains which might
accrue to science.
THE GEOLOGISTS' ASSOCIATION
At the meeting held at University College, Gower Street, W.C.1, on
Friday, December 5th, 1919, the following lecture was delivered:
"Geological Work on the Western Front," by W. B. R. King, B.A., F.G.S.
A short description was given of the geology of that part of Belgium
and France over which military operations were conducted by the British
Armies between 1915 and the summer of 1918. It was mainly confined to
the lithological divisions and did not deal with the palæontological
side of the subject. The main physical features were taken, showing
how they are connected with the geological structure. The effect of
the geology and geological structure on certain questions of military
operations was dealt with, notably with regard to water supply and
military mining and dug-out construction. Particular attention was
paid to the problem of obtaining water from boreholes in the Landenien
(Thanet) sands, the causes and effect of the seasonal variation of
water-level in the chalk, and the problem of the military mines near
Messines, Givenchy-les-la-Bassée, and Souchez. The lecture ended with
a description of certain maps which were prepared for the armies in
France, and notes on several other problems which had to be dealt with
by the geologists attached to General Headquarters.
On Friday, January 2nd, 1920, Dr. A. E. Trueman, F.G.S., read a paper
on "The Liassic Rocks of the Cardiff District." The author said that
the greater part of South Glamorganshire, from Cardiff westwards to
beyond Bridgend, consists of lower Liassic rocks (Hettangian and Lower
Sinemurian), which are well seen in some 20 miles of magnificent cliff
sections. Only meagre descriptions of these rocks have been hitherto
published. A detailed study has been undertaken, first because nowhere
else in this country are such continuous sections of these rocks
available, and, secondly, because the normal deposits consisting of
limestones and shales seen near Cardiff, when traced westwards, pass
into a littoral facies of massive limestones and conglomerates. In
the present communication an account of the normal Liassic rocks of
the Cardiff district is given, as this will form a basis for the
correlation of the modified deposits further west. The lecture was
illustrated by lantern-slides and specimens.
THE MODERN HUMANITIES RESEARCH ASSOCIATION
The January number of the _Bulletin_ of the Modern Humanities Research
Association contains a summary of the Presidential Address delivered
in October, 1919, by M. Gustave Lanson, the famous French scholar and
critic. The Association, which, though founded only in June, 1918,
numbers nearly 500 members, is now penetrating to some of the remoter
quarters of the globe; among the last candidates to be elected were
some from Czecho-Slovakia, the Malay States, New Zealand, and Western
Canada, and most of these were at once put into touch with members
at home belonging to subject groups representing their particular
interests. The Hon. Secretary (Mr. E. Allison Peers, 24 Beaufort Road,
Kingston-on-Thames) writes in the _Bulletin_ of proposals submitted to
the Association that it should produce a comprehensive Bibliographical
Annual, a task which a body with so wide a membership seems peculiarly
fitted to attempt.
The Modern Humanities Research Association is fulfilling another
obligation which rests upon all who speak the English language in its
efforts to bridge the Atlantic and unite those on both sides who are
engaged in higher studies in Modern Languages and Literatures. Its
membership is growing in the United States so rapidly that an American
Secretary (Professor M. Blakemore Evans, of the Ohio State University)
has been appointed. At its most recent London meeting, on January 6th,
too, Professor Carleton Brown, of Minnesota, was among the speakers
on "Conditions of Postgraduate Study." Such interchange of help and
information as the Association brings about between England and America
can have none but good effects.
Among the Vice-Presidents of the Association, prominent names are those
of Sir Sidney Lee (its first President), Dr. Walter Leaf, Sir A. W.
Ward, M. Jusserand, Signor Farinelli, Professor Jespersen, Professor
Oliver Emerson, and Sr. Menéndez Pidal.
THE ROYAL NUMISMATIC SOCIETY
At the January meeting of the Royal Numismatic Society the Rev. E. A.
Sydenham read a paper on the "Coinages of Augustus." He began by giving
a chronological summary of the various series and groups of coins under
Augustus. There were seven species of mints: (_a_) the Senatorial Mint
of Rome; (_b_) Military Mints; (_c_) Mints in Senatorial Provinces;
(_d_) Mints in Imperial Provinces; (_e_) Autonomous Mints (issuing
bronze only); (_f_) the "Imperatorial Mint"; (_g_) the Imperial Mint.
After brief notes on the Senatorial Mint (43-36 B.C.), the military
coinage of Octavius in Gaul and Italy (41-39 B.C.), incidentally
attributing the S.C. coins to camp mints of Northern Italy, Mr.
Sydenham proceeded to discuss the Asiatic coinages (28-15 B.C.) and
the Imperatorial Mint (21-15 B.C.). Besides coins generally attributed
to Asiatic mints the reader proposed to give the undated silver and
gold with CAESAR DIVI F to Asia rather than Rome, and criticised
Laffranchi's attribution of certain coins to Phrygia and Gabrici's to
Athens. The CA bronze coins he attributed to Asia reading the CA as
_Commune Asiæ_. The coins attributed to the "Imperatorial" Mint are
very distinctive in style and were probably issued under direct control
of Augustus. These coins had been attributed by Grueber to Rome and by
Laffranchi to Spain. Mr. Sydenham gave cogent arguments against these
views and added reasons for considering them a distinct Imperatorial
issue. A theory on which a good deal of the argument turns is that
in 28 B.C. Augustus made a formal surrender of his triumviral office
and the extraordinary powers pertaining to it. Included in the powers
was probably the right of coinage. The surrender of this right was
merely an act of policy which Augustus did not regard as permanently
binding. But he held to it to this extent that for five or six years
he issued no coins of any sort on his own authority, and even down to
the end of his reign he issued no coins in Rome. After an experimental
coinage through P. Carisius in Spain (24-22 B.C.) he inaugurated his
"Imperatorial" Mint, but confined its operations to the provinces.
Finally he fixed the Imperial Mint at Lugdunum (14 B.C.).
THE SOCIETY OF GENEALOGISTS OF LONDON
The Society of Genealogists of London is collecting lists of books,
articles, deeds, MSS., and documents generally in reference to
specific families and places. It has many such lists and references
to documents, as well as collections of documents themselves, and
wishes to add to them to facilitate research. Readers kindly supplying
such lists, long or short, are assured that they are filed at once
by the Society in such a manner that they are immediately available
for reference. An excellent example of the form such lists might take
is provided in Mr. Walter Rye's _Norfolk Topography_. Communications
should be addressed to 5 Bloomsbury Square, W.C.1.
BOOKS OF THE MONTH
POETRY
MANSOUL, OR THE RIDDLE OF THE WORLD. By CHARLES M. DOUGHTY. Selwyn &
Blount. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
We imagine that there is no difference of opinion, amongst those who
have read it, about Mr. Doughty's prose book, now a generation old,
_Wanderings in Arabia Deserta_. It was one of the great prose works of
the nineteenth century, a book which (the geographers assure us) was
astonishingly accurate as a record of exploration, and which repeatedly
soared into passages of description and meditation unsurpassed for
muscularity and grandeur. Even that book, however, was the work of a
man odd in temperament and outlook and possessing peculiar ideas as to
the use of the English language. In the volumes of poetry which he has
been producing so rapidly in his old age his eccentricities have been
projected very much farther. We should not be surprised to hear that he
had never read (barring perhaps Shakespeare and Milton) any poet later
than Spenser; we are certain that he habitually reads no one later than
Spenser, and the poet with whom a comparison most frequently leaps to
the mind is someone earlier still, namely, Langland. There are those, a
very few, who swallow Mr. Doughty whole, who enjoy his archaisms, real
and "pseudo," who think _The Dawn in Britain_ the greatest poetical
work of our time, and will hear nothing against even the topical
passages of his poem about the German war. There are more who find him
frankly unreadable in bulk, but are willing to turn over his pages for
the sake of the occasionally lovely passages of description that they
find on them; whilst the average intelligent reader would probably run
from any page of any of his poetical works, so stony is the way that
the disciple must tread and so vigorous the discipline to which he must
subject himself.
For ourselves, we read Mr. Doughty through as in duty bound, and we
perceive even in his knottiest and even in his naïvest passages the
workings of a powerful and original mind, the observations of an eye
which looks at history and the material world as though they had never
been looked at before, the strivings of a heart that has always been
acutely aware of the world behind the seen. Nevertheless, not even
this compensates us fully for a cumbrousness of style, a malformation
of shape, and a guttural obscurity of speech hard to equal in all the
annals of literature; and we are, we fear, to be most sympathetic
to that second class of readers who look to Mr. Doughty only for
occasional flowers and remember, out of all they have read of his,
only stray images, as of a shepherd on a hill or swallows circling
over the fresh meadows in the dawn of the world. _Mansoul_ is all of a
piece with the others; we almost think that in a few months it will,
in our own memories, have amalgamated with the others. It opens in the
familiar mode, the "grand manner," but just a little awry:
As chanced I sate on terrace of an house,
In summer season, after sickness past;
And fell, surprised my sense, into deep trance;
Wherein meseemed, much musing in my thought,
I cogitations heard, of many hearts;
That came and went, in MANTOWN'S market-place
Whereon I looked. And in my spirit I asked;
What were indeed right paths of a man's feet;
That lacking light, wont stumble in world's murk.
There can be heard the grave voice, there seen the something like
majesty of port, there noticed a little of Mr. Doughty's obscurity and
some of his, we daresay even unconscious, fads such as the avoidance of
particles and the refusal to use the apostrophe 's. Thus it continues
for two hundred pages of contortion and clouds with flashes of sunshine
coming through them. At one moment we are wondering why on earth Mr.
Doughty should call Tigris and Euphrates "Digla" and "Frat" if he
has to translate these terms in a footnote; at another we are giving
up an unusually dark passage in despair; at another we are wondering
whether perhaps his best things do not actually gain something from the
mannerisms that normally make our heads ache. The narrative is very
hard to follow. The singer, accompanied by Mansoul and one Minimus,
peregrinates through the under world, surveys past civilisations, and
converses with (amongst others) Nebo, Zoroaster, Socrates, and St.
Stephen. The Kaiser (we conceive) is, in anticipation, interviewed:
One crowned, cast lately down unto this place
a Warmonger and a coxcomb whose "werewolfs face" is now blotted by
"a loathly leprosy"; and there is a pagan to the soul of all things
at the end, the Muse of Britain and Colin (presumed Spenser) being
intermittently in mind throughout. Yet at any time Mr. Doughty is
liable to break, without the least awareness of writing a purple patch,
into a packed passage full of feeling and sweet to the memory. Take one
such:
I stayed, where pleasant grassy holms depart;
Those streaming waters, bordered all along;
With daphne and willow herb, sweep sedge, laughing robin;
With woodbind garlanded and sweet eglantine,
And azure-hewed in creeky shallows still
Forget-me-nots lift our frail thoughts to heaven.
Broods o'er those thymy eyots drowsy hum;
Bourdon of glistering bees, in mails of gold.
Labouring from sweet to sweet, in the long hours
Of sunny heat; they sound their shrill small clarions.
And hurl by booming doors, gross bee-fly kin;
(Broadgirded, diverse hewed, in their long pelts;)
That solitary, whiles there light endureth,
In summer skies, each becking clover-tuft haunt.
We do not think that Mr. Doughty should be ignored by anyone who wishes
to be familiar with all the good work done in poetry in our time.
But, in recommending him, we warn readers that they should approach
him almost as they would approach _Piers Plowman_ itself; Chaucer is
distinctly more easy and modern.
IMAGES OF WAR. By RICHARD ALDINGTON. Allen & Unwin. 3_s._ 6_d._ net.
WORMS AND EPITAPHS. By H. W. GARROD. Blackwell. 3_s._ 6_d._ net.
The first of these small books seems to have been written on active
service, the second on return to Oxford after active service. That Mr.
Richard Aldington's verse should have a larger content than before is
natural; his pre-war verse, to the non-Imagist eye, consisted largely
of sweet nothings starred with Greek names. We have here emotional
experiences of a less tenuous kind; the poet is coming nearer a
comprehension of Keats' remark that poets should express what all men
feel. This in _Trench Idyll_, _Time's Changes_, _Reverie_, and other
poems he does; and sometimes he conveys the emotion through the medium
of a careful picture, as clear in its way as one of Mr. Kennington's
drawings. Here is _Picket_:
Dusk and deep silence ...
Three soldiers huddled on a bench
Over a red-hot brazier,
And a fourth who stands apart
Watching the cold rainy dawn.
Then the familiar sound of birds--
Clear cock-crow, caw of rooks,
Frail pipe of linnet, the "ting! ting!" of chaffinches,
And over all the lark
Outpiercing even the robin....
Wearily the sentry moves
Muttering the one word: "Peace."
Here there is more of a rhythm than usual. But the defect of Mr.
Aldington and his Imagist friends is that, although they are quite
right, though not original, in emphasising the need for concrete
language, they do for the most part lack that rhythm that makes poetry
what it is and rememberable. It is not that they write in free verse.
Rhyme is no necessary part of verse, and nobody in the world ever
contended that all the lines of a poem should be of standard lengths.
But a poem in free verse--it is this which chiefly distinguishes
Whitman's good from his bad poems--should have a continuous rhythm
other than that of prose, and _will_ have it if it is written by a
man who is strongly moved and has the gift of musical expression. Mr.
Aldington may have that gift, but if so he represses it.
Mr. Garrod's volume bears a picture of a graveyard: therein the
tombstones of Messrs. Lloyd George and Balfour, Lords Haldane,
Northcliffe and Birkenhead, and Sir Edward Carson. This looks sweeping,
but on reference to his epigrammatic epitaphs, one finds that he
admires the Old "Gang" and deplores the New. His verses are neat but
slight. The best are those on Rupert Brooke, on the new invaders of
Oxford who vainly attempt to emulate the dead, and on Reconstruction:
O soon you'll build the world again
With other and with better men;
And I and plenty more will sit,
And sit, and see you doing it.
In a large West-end hotel
Rich non-combatants will dwell;
Well-paid hands will ply the art
Of binding up the broken heart,
A special sub-department deal
With the wounds that never heal,
Deputy-Controllers pour
Government oil on every sore,
And a civilian Soldier's Friend
Furnish us forms world-without-end
God! does a man like me want _tape_?
I've wounds, man, here, that gape, that gape.
We note that Lord Derby is described as _vir teres atque rotundus_.
SELECTED POEMS. By LADY MARGARET SACKVILLE. Constable. 6_s._ net.
VERSES. By VIOLA MEYNELL. Secker. 2_s._ 6_d._ net.
Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, in a lively introduction to the first of these
volumes--in the course of which he suggests, provocatively, that blank
verse is merely "a dignified kind of prose, pompous in recitation and
for common reading dull"--says that "Lady Margaret Sackville is the
best, in my opinion, of our English poetesses, at least of the younger
generation." It is a good thing that he added the qualification, for,
apart from the fact that Mrs. Woods has written poems better than
anything that Lady Margaret has yet done, there is Mrs. Meynell, whose
too exiguous volume of verse competes for quality with the best work of
her generation. If there are scarcely any more exceptions to make we
feel that the deduction is that women are at present doing very little
in poetry, though there are vast numbers of them who write it. In the
Victorian age when Christina Rossetti and Mrs. Browning, both of whom
did immortal work, were writing together there was a general impression
that these were the first fruits of women's emancipation and that
future ages would see women becoming more and more prominent in poetry.
But the wind bloweth where it listeth, and the fact that, at a time
when an unusually large number of young men are writing sincerely and
strongly, not one young poetess should have won prominence has now led
to a general opinion that the peculiar qualities of passion and thought
that make poets are, and will always be, more normal in men than in
women. Lady Margaret Sackville has a reasonable technical equipment:
a fair vocabulary, facility with metre. She never says quite stupid
things, she sometimes says pretty things, and at times (as in her war
poems) she reveals a certain depth of feeling. But usually she is first
and foremost derivative; sometimes from Swinburne direct, more often
generally derivative. You feel that she is giving a thin version of
something else, even when you cannot say exactly what; and her poems,
whether dramatic poems about Dionysus and Pan, or dreams, streams,
Springs and things, are just saved from being ordinary verse by the
fact that she has a brain and a heart which infuse the bare minimum of
reality into them. The only things to be said in her favour is that she
is young and that her latest verses are her best.
Something of what we lack in Lady Margaret is present, if
intermittently, in the small, charmingly-produced book by Miss Viola
Meynell. Her work is uneven, and her handling sometimes awkward, but
she has, sometimes, force; she sees vividly, thinks strongly, feels
strongly, imagines strongly. The point of view of the whale that
swallowed strongly was a remarkable thing to try to adopt, but her poem
on this subject, despite a weak ending, contains verses with more bite
in them than any in Lady Margaret's book; if she has read Donne she has
not read him to her hurt. _The Maid in the Rice Fields_ is charming,
and _Poppy-seeds sent from the East_ is more than that:
Travelled here in winter sleep
The young wild Eastern poppies keep
Their eyelids closed. They nothing know
Where is this land they lie in now.
The opening is delightful, and the theme is developed with craft and
passion.
DUCKS AND OTHER VERSES. By F. W. HARVEY. Sidgwick & Jackson. 3_s._ net.
Mr. Harvey's first book, _A Gloucestershire Lad_, appeared when he was
in France; his second when he was a prisoner in Germany; this is his
third. The sequence has been too rapid to show much development; both
his merits and his faults are what they were. He is only occasionally
a good workman, and he has not yet succeeded in getting himself
naturally and forcibly into his work. This is explicable. He loves his
country; he wants to celebrate the old traditional simplicities of a
healthy country life and (as propagandist) to restore what we have lost
of them; he stands, he says, for Romance, Laughter, and the capacity
for innocent Wonder. There is no pretence about this, but when a man
feels that he must defend the natural there is comprehensibly an air of
awkwardness and self-consciousness about him. The drinking-songs (Mr.
Harvey also praises ale) of modern singers are examples: the roysterers
always have an eye on the neighbouring teetotaller who they know is
watching them and whose opposed philosophy they wish to unseat in the
affections of their fellows. Mr. Harvey is best when he is forgetting
the general principles for which he stands and simply enjoying himself;
and the superiority of his more whimsical verses suggests that his
bent, like that of Mr. Graves (with whom he has much else in common),
lies more in that direction than towards large utterance or solemnity.
The title of his book suggests that he realises this: the poem from
which it is taken is certainly his most successful. It is really a
close study of ducks made with infinite relish of their quaintness:
From troubles of the world
I turn to ducks,
Beautiful comical things,
Sleeping or curled,
Their heads beneath white wings
By water cool.
Or finding curious things
To eat in various mucks
Beneath the pool,
Tail uppermost, or waddling
Sailor-like on the shores
Of ponds, or paddling.
He sketches the main outlines of a duck's varied life by barn, stable,
and stack:
They wander at their will,
But if you go too near
They look at you through black
Small topaz-tinted eyes
And wish you ill.
On the whole, he thinks the duck was the best of God's jokes: