bill.
Of the more serious poems some are a trifle stale; the glorification
of one's county, with place-names rhymed, might be given a rest.
_Requiescat_ is a moving poem, and the tenuity and familiarity of the
idea does not prevent _Song_ from lingering in the memory more than
anything else in the volume:
Sweetness of birdsong shall fall upon my heart,
Shall fall upon my heart;
Nor will I strive to mimic
The beauty that I find,
But lie in a dream and open wide my heart
And let the song of the birds sink down into my mind.
This song is all of a piece, a musical sigh.
NOVELS
THE CLINTONS AND OTHERS. By ARCHIBALD MARSHALL. Collins. 7_s._ net.
PETER JACKSON, CIGAR MERCHANT. By GILBERT FRANKAU. Hutchinson. 7_s._
6_d._ net.
PRELUDE. By BEVERLEY NICHOLS. Chatto & Windus. 7_s._ net.
LIMBO. By ALDOUS HUXLEY. Chatto & Windus. 5_s._ net.
Mr. Archibald Marshall is, we dare to say, one of the good writers
most neglected by contemporary critics. He has brought nothing new to
the development of the novel. If a general description were necessary,
he might be most briefly and accurately classified as a descendant of
Anthony Trollope. But his talent in his own generation is unique; and
no person who enjoys or studies the fiction of this age can afford
to neglect it. In some ways his latest volume is the climax of his
performance and displays at their height his peculiar method and
gifts. It consists of six stories. One, perhaps the least interesting,
describes how John Clinton, a prosperous city merchant in the time
of the Regency, rescued the family estates from his elder brother,
the prodigal Beau Clinton. The second deals with a scientific peer,
innocent and absorbed, who very nearly married a woman scientist, of
origin much lower than his own, who was attracted to him only by his
wealth and position. The hero of the third is a speculative builder.
The fifth narrates the misfortunes of a patient and gentle clerk. The
sixth is a story of old Squire Clinton's reactions to the war and
of how he was reconciled to the different reactions of those about
him. The fourth, which we have removed from its place, tells how Ann
Sinclair, a day-pupil at Miss Sutor's school, was sent to Coventry by
her companions because she was unjustly suspected of having damaged
in malice Mary Polegate's illuminated chart of the kings of Juda and
Israel. This is the longest story in the book, occupying over one
hundred pages. The principal characters are all school-girls of various
ages, and no extraneous interests are introduced. It seems almost
impossible with this material to hold a reader's keen attention for
twenty odd thousand words, and yet this is what Mr. Marshall has done.
All the persons are vividly alive and convincing; and there is a whole
range of them, each individualised and given a real personality. The
story is an especially good example of what Mr. Marshall can do and how
he does it. His narrative is extraordinarily quiet and unemphasised,
and shows by its restraint the author's complete confidence in the
interest of his subject and in the adequacy of his method. In all these
tales events more or less moving take place or are referred to; but the
teller never raises his voice or gesticulates. He has no tricks. His
characters reveal themselves in speech or action; but if they do not
he has no modern prejudices against telling the reader what are their
motives and what is going on in their minds. His explanations are so
quiet and so straightforward that they immediately carry conviction.
When old Squire Clinton was passing through Paris with his daughter to
see her husband, wounded and interned in Switzerland, he was displeased
that his other daughter should take them to lunch in a restaurant:
He would not have objected to exactly the same meal served in her
apartment. He would have eaten and drunk whatever had been set
before him, and enjoyed it in spite of his always strongly expressed
preference for English food and English cooking. The wine he might
have noticed and commented on, because he knew about wines, and
because you pleased your host by approving of his taste in them.
But this ordering of your meal in public, in consultation with your
guests, with a _maître d'hôtel_ standing at your elbow and booking
your orders, not without advice of his own, struck him as very like
taking part in a mistress's consultation with her servants--almost
an indecency. The restaurant habit was, in fact, entirely unknown to
him. In his expansive youth it had been unheard of. The nearest he
had ever come to it had been in giving luncheons or dinners at one of
his clubs--meals as elaborate as this and as carefully arranged, but
arranged beforehand, so that the guests should get the right flavour
of hospitality, and accept the good things set before them as they
would have accepted them at his own table. Neither Joan nor Nancy
divined that half his displeasure, which he could not hide, was at
being obliged, under Inverell's hospitable pressure, to express his
preference for this or that luxury, with the price of it staring him
in the face on the menu, when indulgence in any sort of luxury was so
far from his mood.
So delicate and exact and truthful is this delineation of a small
tract in the old man's character that it would be almost possible to
reconstruct the whole without any other guide, as is done in the case
of louder roaring monsters than Mr. Marshall's creations.
Mr. Gilbert Frankau's _Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant_, presents
a curious contrast to the method of Mr. Marshall. Mr. Marshall's
virtues are so quiet and unobtrusive that it is possible to overlook
them altogether. Mr. Frankau's defects are so vociferous that they
tend to obscure his real merits. He paints in violent colours. He
paints his sentimental passages with a yard broom. His style, as Mr.
Arnold Bennett once observed of somebody else, is such that even in
Carmelite Street the sub-editors would yearn to correct it. He has
almost entirely eliminated the conjunction from his own version of the
English language: the "ands" and "buts" omitted from this book would,
if they were restored, increase its length by a hundred pages or so.
Their absence gives the reader the impression that Mr. Frankau is in
an enormous hurry and is very short of breath. All these defects are
closely woven into the texture of one of the most strident novels ever
written; and it is quite impossible to escape from them. Nevertheless
this tale of a business man who became a gunner is one of the most
lively and credible pictures of the war which we have yet had. It
matters little in the end that, whether he is describing the purchase
of a cigarette-factory or a love-scene or the battle of the Somme,
the author scores exclusively for brass and big drums. This method
certainly eliminates the love-scene, but it is not inappropriate to
the other subjects; and in his accounts both of war and of business
Mr. Frankau produces a huge, crowded chaotic picture which stuns and
bewilders the reader, but at the same time convinces him that he is
seeing at least one aspect of the truth. Mr. Frankau's high level of
verisimilitude and interest in such passages as the description of the
Battle of Loos depends to a very great extent on his peculiar power of
packing much detail into a small space; and it is to this perhaps that
we owe the somewhat regrettable lack of "the smaller parts of speech."
Mr. Beverley Nichols's book is another of the triumphs of precocity--a
novel describing the Public School system by a writer with very
recent experience of it. And, like other novels on this subject, it
is a novel with a thesis. Mr. Nichols is far from disapproving of the
system. He sets out, on the other hand, to show that it is capable
of receiving and making comfortable the most eccentric of boys if he
will only make the least effort of adjustment to his environment that
can be reasonably expected of a human being in any circumstances. His
hero, Paul Trevelyan, has in an extreme form all the characteristics
of the heroes of such books. He has been coddled, he has unusual
tastes, he cares nothing for games. But, very refreshingly, Mr. Nichols
treats with a firm hand both his characteristics and his sufferings.
Paul undergoes just such discomforts as are required to rid him of
effeminacy and priggishness, and mould him into a boy capable of
taking a place in human society with satisfaction to himself and his
companions. The thesis of the book appears to be that the Public School
system does not necessarily deprive those who come under it of their
individuality, does not necessarily crush or torture those who depart
from the normal, does act as a civilising agent on those who are in
need of it. As a piece of evidence, the book is interesting and useful.
As a novel it is less remarkable than Mr. Waugh's _Loom of Youth_.
That book was not only a contribution to a dispute; it was also a work
of fiction astonishingly well put together for its author's years and
experience. Its characters and many of its incidents were extremely
well observed and drawn. Mr. Nichols fails as a writer of fiction.
His characters are vague and unconvincing: they have no fundamental
individuality. The construction of his novel is extremely loose and
uneven; and the passages of reflection are introduced with a very
clumsy hand. Whether he will succeed in correcting these faults it is
impossible to predict; but he clearly has gifts which ought to come to
something. Precocity in the things he lacks is not always a certain
indication of success in maturity.
Mr. Huxley, alone among these writers, betrays traces of exotic
influence. The last story in his book, _The Death of Lully_, might
have come from the _Contes Cruels_, perhaps, in one way, has come
thence. Others of the collection show less definite resemblances to
French models and are less evenly and carefully composed; but there are
in most of them traces of an alien exactitude and an alien wit. Mr.
Huxley, as we know already from his verse, can _write_ brilliantly.
His defect here, as there, lies in a deficiency of feeling caused by
an excess of self-consciousness. This self-consciousness does not
make him awkward or effusive. He is far too clever to betray it thus
rudely. As in the behaviour of some persons, it manifests itself in
his work by an iron rigidity of attitude, an immovable equability of
tone. When he invents characters he does not so much describe their
actions or let them act as criticise them; he is led to adopt the pose
of the satirist more consistently than perhaps he intends. Reaction
follows fast on action; and the springs of his writing are laid bare in
an extraordinarily ingenious dialogue, called _Happy Families_, where
he exposes the triple personalities, inciting, betraying, checking
one another, of a young man and a young woman sitting out together
at a dance. This piece, which seems to have unnecessarily puzzled a
number of Mr. Huxley's critics, means nothing if it does not express
his opinion that in every human being there is a stratum of the animal
which is to be distrusted and restrained. But, here and elsewhere,
one wonders whether his watchfulness over this stratum has not led
him into exaggerating its extent and distrusting things which, to a
less suspicious eye, do not look in the least like it. And in another
story, so fast are his reactions, we find him mocking the shuddering
and ascetic revulsion from the purely animal in man. This is the
behaviour not merely of the critic dominant over the artist, but of the
critic who leads towards Nihilism by discrediting all human impulses,
instead of arranging them in order. Mr. Huxley has, however, too much
of the poet for this to be fundamental in him, too much appreciation of
bright and vivid things and bright and vivid phrases. And it would be
gravely unjust to convey the impression that it spoils his book. _The
Farcical History of Richard Greenow_ is an admirable invention, full
of possibilities for bitter comedy, most, if not all, of which have
been worked out; _Cynthia_ is a good joke, though its title betrays
the climax a little too early; and _The Bookshop_ is more human in
feeling than its companions. But the important point to notice is that,
whatever may be the perversities or the affectations of his thought,
Mr. Huxley always writes well, with a style that is never shabby or
shoddy, never flamboyant or flat.
BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM
THE MEASURES OF THE POETS. By M. A. BAYFIELD, M.A. Cambridge University
Press. 5_s._ net.
A STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE'S VERSIFICATION. By M. A. BAYFIELD, M.A.
Cambridge University Press. 16_s._ net.
LESSONS IN VERSE-CRAFT. By S. GERTRUDE FORD. Daniel. 3_s._ 6_d._ net.
Mr. Bayfield's _Measures of the Poets_ is meant to be revolutionary.
He finds existing systems of prosody neither complete nor sound, and
would sweep them away in order to install his own trochaic scheme.
Practically every work of a predecessor is ignored, and the author
himself regrets that Lanier's _Science of English Verse_, published
forty years ago, did not come to his notice until the present book
was written. He does not mention Professor Saintsbury's _History_ or
_Manual of English Prosody_, nor (among other writings, by recent or
living metrists) the essays of Patmore and Mr. Robert Bridges. A great
deal of contention is thus avoided, but the probabilities of conversion
are also reduced. He asserts that the normal foot of English verse is
trochaic, and that the iambus cannot form a metrical foot, because
the stressed syllable does not come first; while Professor Saintsbury
declares that the iambic is the staple foot of English verse and is
common to almost all prosodies.
How, then, let us ask the challenger, is the application of the
trochaic system justified? In Mr. Bayfield's scheme the plain norm of
the "full blank" verse line is an eleven-syllable arrangement of which
the first is a "short," followed by five trochees; and the following
line (quoted in his second book, which takes up the subject anew) is
given as specimen:
I ⁝ come to | bury | Cæsar, | not to | praise him.‖
But the full line does not happen to be the common form, owing to its
feminine ending, and so he admits that the prevailing type is the
"checked" form:
To ⁝ sleep; per | chance to | dream: ay | there's the | rub.∧‖
The anacrusis or up-beat, marked off by ⁝, is an integral part of the
new system; in reality it is the device by which the author changes
iambic to trochaic movement. Here, indeed, is the crucial point of the
dispute between iambic and trochaic. Under the first, this up-beat or
take-off is neither very frequent nor very rare; under the second, it
is common. Mr. Bayfield's idiosyncratic use of it is illustrated by
himself thus:
My ⁝ heart | aches, and a | drowsy numbness pains,
and--
Or emptied some dull | opiate | to the drains,
and by--
But ⁝ being too | happy in thine happiness;
the reader being left to discover for himself the reason for the
difference of prosodic interpretation. If the ear should be satisfied
with this difference (and Mr. Bayfield admits that the ear is judge
and jury), what might its verdict be as to the validity of a double
up-beat, leaving only semi-syllables for the rest of the line?
And thy ⁝ mouth | shúddering | like a | shót | bírd.‖
Here let it be remarked that his system acknowledges monosyllabic feet,
but he is not well informed in denying them a place in the iambic
system. He complains of "ragtime scansions," in referring to the fact
that the iambic system admits trochees whenever it would break down by
refusing them, and seems to deplore a resulting loss of "continuity of
rhythm." Yet he himself does not scruple to write of one of his own
illustrations: "A striking contrast in _rhythm_ may be noted here. That
of the first line and a half ... is markedly trochaic; the other line
and a half fall into an equally marked iambic rhythm." He has not, in
fact, escaped from the difficulties and inconsistencies which beset the
prosodist. He does little more than prove that the music of the poets
cannot be defeated or disguised by either system. He gives this as
containing a quinquesyllabic foot:
Well, ∧ | Juliet, I will | lie with thee to-night,
and dubiously suggests "hire" as a disyllable in:
And ⁝ hire | post-horses; | I will hence to-night.
He is aware that an alternative scansion may in some cases be correct,
but does not sufficiently realise that any prosodic system is but an
artificiality, formed to explain, and not dictate, the infinitely
variable rhythms of poetry. His own particular system, for all its
ingenuities, appears more artificial and arbitrary than the iambic.
It is interesting to note that his examples are largely drawn from
Shakespeare, Tennyson, Swinburne, and Shelley, all fruitful ground;
while Milton and Coleridge, Campion and Keats are much less used
or left alone altogether. Might not these fascinating and delusive
excursions into the mysteries of rhythm be extended to certain living
poets--at least to Mr. Hardy and Mr. Bridges?
_Shakespeare's Versification_ is a larger book, in which Mr. Bayfield
inquires into the validity of the early texts. His purpose is:
First to give an intelligible and consistent account of the structure
and characteristic features of his dramatic verse, the essential
principles of which appear to have been wholly misconceived hitherto,
and secondly to show that there are many thousands of lines of it
that are given in modern texts not as their author intended them to
be delivered, but clipped and trimmed to a featureless uniformity
that he would have abhorred.
He finds in _Antony and Cleopatra_ the ideal of verse at which
Shakespeare was always aiming, and denounces the depravity of the
text as it stands--in this as in many other of the plays. The book
has a cumulative, even a dramatic interest, for setting out to prove
one thing, Mr. Bayfield frankly ends by proving another. With immense
care and patience he has examined and compared Quartos and First
Folio, and noted quite innumerable places at which the contraction and
condensation of words and lines have distorted or ruined the rhythm;
and he contends that if the verse is to be presented as the author
meant it to be delivered, these must be expanded into their full forms.
He begins by considering Shakespeare's use of the "resolved" foot--that
is, a foot of more than two syllables--and discovers a constant
tendency to reduce these "resolutions" by abbreviation; the result
being, for example, that violent becomes vi'lent, desolate des'late,
Demetrius Demetr'us, etc. He contends that from the outset Shakespeare
employed resolved rhythms more freely than his contemporaries, and
gradually increased the proportion with his later plays; and it is,
of course, perfectly true that the growing liberation of style which
in Shakespeare expresses a psychological development, is equally
noticeable in later poets.
Now in comparing the Quartos with the First Folio Mr. Bayfield finds
that of all the differences the most conspicuous is the elimination
of resolutions, the tendency shown by the Quartos in this direction
being aggravated in the Folio. The position is made clear in a Table
relating to fourteen Quarto plays, which shows, _e.g._, that in
_Othello_ the Folio eliminates eighty-six resolutions found in the
Quarto, and the latter eliminates fourteen which the Folio displays;
while a third figure, 84, "_enumerates cases where, guided by the
whole investigations and the revelations afforded by the first two
columns_ [figures], I believe that a resolution should be restored."
His deduction is that the Folio is a metrical reactionary; if it is
unsound to prefer its revision to the Quartos, it is equally unsound
to rely upon the Folio for the plays not included in the Quartos. He
strengthens his argument by showing that the prose (of _Julius Cæsar_,
for instance), which has no metrical obligations, is far more immune
from illicit contractions, although prose, being nearer to ordinary
speech, might be expected to show very free colloquial abbreviations.
We are not prepared to follow Mr. Bayfield blindly; his trochaic
passions, hitched to his resolution to "resolve," do not compel
unquestioning obedience; we are not convinced by a line like, "From ⁝
Syria to Lydia and to Ionia," when the received text reads:
From Syria
To Lydia and to Ionia, whilst----
and his resort to "Cross Accent" for the scansion of such lines as
Her dowry shall weigh equal with a queen
is yet farther from persuading us, and seems, like so many of his
arguments and instances, to be the mere expression of his hatred of
the iambic. Nevertheless, his abundant recital of divergencies from
the Quartos' resolved lines--to consider only that which is a matter
of simple enumeration--can be taken quite apart from the soundness or
unsoundness of his metrical prepossessions; and what we have called
the cumulative interest of this treatise is most plainly felt in the
development of this theme as play after play is examined.
It is in the chapter called "Conclusions" that the interest suddenly
becomes dramatic. Mr. Bayfield has been arguing that Shakespeare is
not printed as he should be printed--that is, with "the clear and
uncramped enunciation of trisyllabic and quadrisyllabic feet"--and
that the mangling of these was done for and by the players in order
to reduce the verse to the common disyllabic type which alone they
could comfortably manage. But now he derives a "flood of light" from
the 1616 Jonson folio, the proofs of which are presumed to have been
corrected by Jonson himself. From the printing of _Sejanus_ he finds
that Jonson's resolutions are abridged even where the line makes their
full enunciation essential to the rhythm. Space will not permit the
tracing of the new argument here, but Mr. Bayfield at length concludes
that what he has supposed in the first three hundred pages of his book
to be attributable to the perversities of the Press, are after all
merely recognised contractions which were never meant to suggest the
clipped pronunciations given to them. His charge, in fact, is no longer
levelled against the early texts from which his affluence of instances
is drawn, but against the interpretation of them; the very apostrophe
(with division) being in reality but a signal calling attention to the
resolution which generations of editors, readers, and players have
supposed it was meant to abolish. The dramatic interest is complete.
Mr. Bayfield claims for his books the authority justly due from
forty-five years' application of prosodic principles to English verse.
We can but conclude with wishing _Shakespeare's Versification_ a fuller
index and a wide study, and suggest to the author that those who are
concerned with verse as writers and not as teachers have not always
failed to give the full syllabic value to the common abbreviations of
the text.
Miss Ford's book is a "practical" treatise and might have been a
valuable one. The first sentence tells us that many of her examples of
verse-forms are from her own pen, while Mr. Bayfield has at any rate
been content with Shakespeare. Why should she write four stanzas in
imitation of _Love in the Valley_? She thinks it too well known to make
quotation advisable, yet gives us the commonest things of Wordsworth
and Shelley and Coleridge. She misprints Shakespeare and Wordsworth
shamefully, thinks that Professor Saintsbury is dead, and, sparing
only four pages for "the lyric," devotes twenty-seven to such forms as
roundel, ballade, etc. Her book, we think, has been spoiled by haste;
yet she has such enthusiasm and brightness as tempt us to regret that
haste and to hope for better work.
ROUSSEAU AND ROMANTICISM. By IRVING BABBITT. Houghton Mifflin Company.
17_s._ net.