awakes in us a feeling of pleasure. Mr. Graves has a _flair_ for
titles. We remember his _Beside the Brazier_ and _Fairies and
Fusiliers_ with a sense that the author has always succeeded in getting
a suggestion of his individual quality into the names of his books. In
the volume before us Mr. Graves repeats some of his former successes.
The poem _A Frosty Night_ is a good example of that dialogue form which
Mr. Graves uses with great skill, and in which we may see the influence
of the old ballads:
MOTHER.
Alice, dear, what ails you,
Dazed and white and shaken?
Has the chill night numbed you?
Is it fright you have taken?
ALICE.
Mother, I am very well,
I felt never better.
Mother, do not hold me so,
Let me write my letter.
It is a quiet beginning, and it looks very easy to do, but that
appearance is deceptive. To write with economy and in an almost
conversational tone without becoming flat and banal is extremely
difficult, but Mr. Graves's hand rarely loses its cunning in those
awkward passages of low emotional pitch which are unavoidable in any
sort of narrative verse. When the pitch rises he has a remarkably sure
touch and can give us a vivid picture without any of the elaborate,
detailed word-painting which is the bane of so much modern poetry. What
could be finer, for example, than the stanzas that follow those already
quoted:
MOTHER.
Sweet, my dear, what ails you?
ALICE.
No, but I am well;
The night was cold and frosty,
There's no more to tell.
MOTHER.
Ay, the night was frosty,
Coldly gaped the moon,
Yet the birds seemed twittering
Through green boughs of June.
Soft and thick the snow lay,
Stars danced in the sky.
Not all the lambs of May-day
Skip so bold and high.
Your feet were dancing, Alice,
Seemed to dance on air,
You looked a ghost or angel
In the starlight there.
Your eyes were frosted starlight,
Your heart fire and snow.
Who was it said, "I love you"?
ALICE.
Mother, let me go!
Mr. Graves resembles Mr. W. H. Davies in the quiet freshness of his
best work. If he has a fault it is that he is rather too apt to point
a moral. He may have caught this--along with much of his rhythmic
subtlety--from his study of nursery rhymes, but there is very little
of it in the present book, which is full of the most charming fancy.
Perhaps Mr. Graves's most characteristic work is to be found in such a
poem as _Vain and Careless_, which begins:
Lady, lovely lady,
Careless and gay!
Once when a beggar called
She gave her child away,
and which continues in a quaint fantasy of thought and expression that
is entirely Mr. Graves's own, and is an original contribution to modern
poetry. One of the best poems in the book is called _Thunder at Night_,
and it describes two children into whose dreams the real thunderstorm
outside their house enters. The boy is dreaming of a bear, the girl of
monkeys and snakes. The hot, confused feeling of the night is vividly
suggested and then the poem suddenly ends with a stanza that is a
complete change in temperature and beautifully suggests the approaching
dawn:
They cannot guess, could not be told
How soon comes careless day,
With birds and dandelions gold,
Wet grass, cool scents of May.
The book is well named _Country Sentiment_, for it has much of the
beauty and the fragrance of the countryside.
LINES OF LIFE. By HENRY W. NEVINSON. Allen & Unwin. 3_s._ 6_d._
THE PEDLAR, AND OTHER POEMS. By RUTH MANNING-SANDERS. Selwyn & Blount.
3_s._ 6_d._
SKYLARK AND SWALLOW. By R. L. GALES. Erskine Macdonald. 5_s._
Of the authors of these three books of verse Mr. Henry W. Nevinson is
the only one who has made a reputation as a prose-writer, and it is not
surprising that his work should show the widest range of thought and
expression. His poems maintain a high level of accomplishment; here,
for example, is a sonnet:
A GERMAN WINTER.
On leagues of solid land the snow lies deep,
The snow falls crumbling from the leaden sky;
All but the fir is white; with timorous eye
Strange little birds in at the window peep,
From frozen forests come; black rivers creep,
Shrunk with the cold till half their bed is dry,
Along the ice-hung ozier reeds, and by
The wooden villages with gables steep,
Huddled around their spires.
Oh, far away
A purple mountain rises from the sand
The golden sand beneath the golden day;
Down the bright steep the waterfall plunges free
From ledge to radiant ledge, and on the strand
Sounds the long murmur of the eternal sea!
But it is the accomplishment of a sensitive and highly-trained mind,
accustomed to literary expression rather than the work of an original
poet; none the less it reveals sympathies and perceptions which the
author has not been able to put into his prose.
Mr. R. L. Gales is an old hand who has written a great deal of charming
verse, which has been widely enjoyed by those who can appreciate
smoothness and sweetness better than music, colour, and imaginative
power. Mr. Gales has a genuine vein of feeling and real skill, as the
following extract will show:
Long ago
In their towers
The clocks struck
Old hours
That went so slow
Long ago
In George Hubert's parsonage
The wood-fire of old apple-trees
It flamed and flared and flickered so.
Long ago
At Hampton Court in the mild sun
In the tall limes great clumps were hung
Of mistletoe
* * * * *
Long ago
Peace has fallen upon the pain
The grief, the madness of these twain,
Lovely lovers by Love slain,
Long ago.
In some ways Miss Ruth Manning-Sanders' work is more ambitious than
Mr. Nevinson's or Mr. Gales'; but if she essays more, she performs, if
anything, less. There is evident in her work an ardent searching of
the spirit and a philosophical tendency that are worthy of praise, but
nowhere are her emotions and thoughts transmuted into poetry's gold by
any magical touch. We have, in other words, much of the raw material
of poetry spread out before us, but not poetry itself. Nevertheless,
there is a distinctive quality in her work which has affinities with
some seventeenth-century poems; it is present in the poem entitled
_Emotions_, which begins thus:
Spirits to whom my lady's little world
Is but a tree of rest,
Whence birdlike free, ye rise and soar
Each on your several quest
Above the heavy hills that close around
My strip of ground,
but does not keep at that level.
It may be that Miss Ruth Manning-Sanders will achieve considerably more
than she has so far succeeded in doing.
KOSSOVO: HEROIC SONGS OF THE SERBS. Translated from the original by
HELEN ROOTHAM. Introduction by MAURICE BARING. Historical Preface by
JANKO LAVRIN. Frontispiece by TOMA ROSANDIĆ. Blackwell. 4_s._ 6_d._ net.
The frontispiece of this volume is as crowded with names as a modern
theatre programme; we looked at the top for "licensee" and "lessee."
But, unlike the plays, the book is good. Serbia, which has several
great cycles of epic-ballads, is the one country where the creation
of poetry on primitive lines still flourishes; a cycle seems to be
developing out of the retreat through Albania. The greatest group of
all, however, is the group which grew out of the defeat (in 1389)
by the Turks on the "Field of Blackbirds." The originals (and Miss
Rootham's versions) are all in trochaic decasyllabics. They deal with
one group of figures: the Tsar Lazar, who was killed; his wife Militsa;
the hero Milosh Obilish, who stabbed the victorious Sultan in his tent;
Jug Bogdan, his ten sons, and the traitor Vuk Brankovitch. The warriors
march off, they are defeated, they die: ravens or other messengers
carry the news to the stricken Tsaritsa in her tower: teamsters
years after find the Tsar's head, still preserved in a well, and it
miraculously joins the body. All a nation's sorrow is in these songs,
all the great memories and defiant resolve, that kept the race alive
and proud, and led the recapturers of Kossovo, in our own day, to fall
to their knees on the sacred ground. The translation seems very good;
the fire remains in the whole, but the magic has inevitably escaped
from the parts. We can only quote a specimen at random:
To his feet leaps Milosh, that great warrior,
To the black earth bows himself, and answers:
"Tsar Lazar, for this thy toast I thank thee,
Thank thee for the toast and for the goblet,
But for those thy words I do not thank thee.
For--else may the truth be my undoing--Never,
Tsar Lazar, was I unfaithful,
Never have I been, and never will be.
And to-morrow I go to Kossovo
For the Christian faith to fight and perish.
FLEURS-DE-LYS. A Book of French Poetry freely translated into English
verse. By WILFRID THORLEY. Heinemann. 6_s._ net.
We may heartily congratulate Mr. Thorley upon his ambition and his
industry. He conceived the prodigious idea of giving English versions
of poems by all the representative French poets from the earliest
age until our own time. He has translated three hundred, and he has
increased his labours by doing the earlier ones into archaic English.
For example, his first specimen (twelfth century) is entitled _The Twa
Systres_, and begins:
The mirk did fa' lang syne, lang syne,
When twa fond systres wi' hands that twine
Went down to bathe whaur the waters shine.
And Villon's most famous ballade opens:
O tell me where and in what lande
Is Flora and the Roman lass?
He knows his ground, and his selection of originals is admirable. But
his versions usually take the bloom off. Baudelaire's
O Mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps, levez l'ancre
becomes
Haul up the anchor, captain old, O Death, for it is time:
which is the same thing with a difference. Sometimes he even fails to
get essential parts of the sense. In recommending his book, therefore,
to those many to whom such a survey in English would be useful, we
warn them that the translations at best are graceful versifying. Mr.
Thorley, happily, is usually on his own highest level, and the book can
be read with very little annoyance and a certain amount of edification.
THE PATHS OF GLORY. A Collection of Poems written during the War,
1914-1919. Edited by BERTRAM LLOYD. Allen & Unwin. 4_s._ 6_d._ and 3_s._
The title of this anthology is presumably ironical. He who would have
a comprehensive selection of war poems reflecting the sentiments of
the mass of our people, and most of the British soldiers, must go to
Miss Jacqueline Trotter's _Vision and Valour_ (Longmans'), which we
shall review in our next issue. This collection is a collection with an
avowedly propagandist aim. It contains poems exposing the cruelty and
filth of War in general, which were inspired by the late War. It is not
yet complete. For instance, Major Brett-Young's _Bête Humaine_ might
suitably have been included. But most of the poems included are genuine
and well written. Amongst the authors "covered" are "A. E.," Paul
Bewsher, Geoffrey Dearmer, Walter de la Mare, Wilfrid Gibson, Laurence
Housman, Margaret Sackville, Siegfried Sassoon, Dora Sigerson, and Alec
Waugh.
NOVELS
AN IMPERFECT MOTHER. By J. D. BERESFORD. Collins. 7_s._ 6_d._ net.
ELI OF THE DOWNS. By C. M. A. PEAKE. Heinemann. 7_s._ net.
THE BANNER. By HUGH F. SPENDER. Collins. 7_s._ net.
ROAST BEEF, MEDIUM. By EDNA FERBER. Methuen. 6_s._ net.
In _An Imperfect Mother_ Mr. J. D. Beresford has set himself the
extraordinarily difficult and delicate task of describing a mother's
unorthodoxy as seen by her grown-up children. Of Mr. Beresford it
can generally be said that he is quite fearless of the troubles he
makes for himself. Yet in this particular instance some doubt might
be left in the reader's mind as to whether his designing of the book
was hurried or certain obvious issues deliberately shirked. Some
compromise may be arrived at between the two alternatives when we
consider the overwhelming evidence of this author's sincerity and his
inflexible allegiance to his art. Here the reader cannot fail to ask
himself--what would I do--what could I say, if my mother had run off
with someone?--well knowing that in an enormous preponderance of cases
such a question is comfortably absurd. It is even indecent to put such
a question to yourself, is it not? It is the defilement of a sacred
place? Exactly. So is the book condemned at the very outset because its
theme is "disagreeable" or "delicate" or "unusually unpleasant"? That
is where one's first doubts of Mr. Beresford's complete fearlessness
are bred. In his treatment of that disagreeable idea there is nothing
disagreeable. You feel that there should be. Mr. Beresford has gilded
his pill with a sugar of a too vigorous refinement. He has been at
pains too great to disguise the fact of its nastiness.
What did these children think and do? The boy Stephen, just leaving
school, is the only one that counts for much, though his two sisters,
sketchy as is their appearance in the story, are excellently
considered. Before the actual crash comes they whisper together about
their mother's goings on, try to make their father speak of what
they believe should be uppermost in his mind, and insist on a full
discussion with Stephen. One of them was a school teacher, the other
subsequently married an elderly chemist. In a way they enjoy the
scandal; you feel that some excitement has come into their dull lives,
with the piquancy of self-righteousness added to outraged innocence.
They want to make the most of it. They are not genuinely ashamed.
Emily turned the embarrassment of her steady gaze immovably upon her
father.
"I don't know what's come to mother lately," she said.
Mr. Kirkwood began to fidget with his sparse little beard. "She's a
little out of sorts, perhaps," he hazarded feebly.
"Well, oughtn't we to _do_ something, father?" Emily continued, still
pinning him with her stare.
"Oh! What _can_ you _do_?" put in Stephen irritably....
Emily turned herself about and focused her attention upon her
brother. "If she's out of sorts she ought to see a doctor," she said.
"_That_ wouldn't be any good," Stephen returned without hesitation.
"Well, but why wouldn't it?" Emily inquired, with a meaning in her
tone that could not be mistaken.
"No good asking me," was Stephen's evasion.
"Well, I think it's time something was done," Emily said, sharpening
the point of her now obvious intention.
"I don't know what you mean, Emily," little Kirkwood put in nervously.
Emily knew, they all three knew, that their father's remark had
been intended as a reminder that any open discussion of a mother's
failings was impossible between father and children; but Emily had
made up her mind that the time had come when they must, in her own
phrase, "face the facts."
"I don't think it's _right_ for us to let things go on and not make
any effort to stop them," she said in a low but determined voice.
"I don't see the good of our going on pretending, when we all know
perfectly well what's happening. Do you, Hilda?"
"No, I don't," Hilda emphatically agreed.
But with Stephen it is different. He really cares very little about
appearances, though he dreads facing his schoolfellows. He is wounded
because his mother prefers another man to his father and himself. And
there is an occasion when he might have changed his mother's decision
had he known. Does he really want her, does he need her? she asks
herself. And just on that very day Stephen had been smiled upon by
the little daughter of his headmaster. She is fourteen, he seventeen.
Impossible dreams fill his mind. He has said nothing to his mother, but
she knows. As though she had seen the whole of the little trifling play
enacted--for it was no more than one bright smile cast over a dainty
shoulder; no word had been spoken--she knew that another interest
had come, since yesterday, into the boy's life. He doesn't need her
any more. His protestations would have been passionate had they been
genuine. She goes.
The view of the children towards the problem must depend entirely upon
their upbringing and the degree of sensitiveness in their relation to
their mother. In regard to Cecilia Kirkwood's family, Mr. Beresford has
expected a good deal of our faith in him. They were born and bred in a
small cathedral town, their father was a bookseller, their degree was
humble but respectable. Yet from beginning to end Stephen can only find
it in his heart to think of his mother's flight as a callous desertion.
He appears to be completely oblivious of the moral involved and of
all that is implied by his mother's running away with the handsome
organist. A closer scrutiny would have been horrible! Yes: but would
not Stephen have made it, and, unpleasant or not, should there not be
in the story some indication that he did make it?
To speak of a "handsome organist" is, in passing, liable to
misconstruction, for Dr. Threlfall was not only good-looking but clever
and accomplished in manner; not only an organist, for when he left
Medboro' he gave up playing the organ for the composition of light
opera, and became an emphatic success. Taking Cecilia for granted, we
can well imagine that she would run away with Threlfall, and would do
all the other things that Mr. Beresford makes her do, and talk as she
does. But it is hard for the reader to take her for granted, just as
it was hard for her neighbours in Medboro'. Cecilia's father was a
philosophic tuner of pianos. He had been against her marriage in the
first instance, but he rather approves of her adultery ... but it is
understood that the nature of piano-tuners is warped.
Cecilia was an amazing wife for a country bookseller, and she tries,
one sometimes thinks, to be _grande dame_ in conversation, setting the
whole of the little provincial town by the ears with her outlandish
brilliance and daring, making it grovel at her feet because of her
beauty and amiability.
Can a lady kiss her toe?
Yes; she might--she might do so--sang another novelist, who indulged in
rhyme. So it is with Cecilia; she might, she might have done so, but
Mr. Beresford has failed to make it inevitable of her.
Old Kirkwood, the father, dies insane, and Stephen, adopted by a
rich builder who was sympathetic because his own wife was a little
difficult, works hard and finally superintends the erection of a big
newspaper office in London. There he falls in with his mother once
more, and with the schoolmaster's daughter who had smiled upon him
long ago. The old tussle is re-enacted. The mother is jealous of the
girl. She sees her son blundering in his courtship, and she only has to
hold her tongue to keep him by her side, a devoted slave. She is not
happy. Her organist-composer is jovial, but unfaithful. She longs for
the fealty of Stephen. At this point Mr. Beresford introduces a little
Freudian interest in the explanation of what was, for all he says about
it, a matter of secondary importance to Stephen--his disgust at his
mother's hysterical and untimely laughter, and we feel that, whilst he
was about it, he might have examined Cecilia's psyche a little more
thoroughly. There were one or two dark places in her character and
disposition upon which a more searching light might, with some profit
to the story, have been thrown. There is much enjoyable reading in _An
Imperfect Mother_, but on the whole, coming from Mr. Beresford, it is a
little disappointing.
In _Eli of the Downs_ Mr. C. M. A. Peake introduces himself to the
public with a distinguished piece of work. He has been content to
make his own variation of the archetype of great stories--the joys
and sorrows at home, the adventures, and, finally, the return of the
wanderer. This is the story of Eli Buckle, as gleaned by the teller
from Eli himself, and from his old friend and neighbour Anne Brown, and
it is the story of a perfectly simple and sincere man, a shepherd, who
is perfectly happy in the remote solitudes which his calling entails
upon him, with the wild flowers which arouse feelings his creator does
not try to make him express. He is proud and happy when as a boy of
twenty-one he has saved five pounds. These facts are simply stated,
and yet there is not the least hint of sentimentality or of bathos. He
marries the girl of his heart, and unexpectedly the knowledge comes
to him of what he has been in need. "Oh, Mary, my dear, my dear!" he
whispered. "You won't never know how lonely I've a-been." A little
while goes by and he is lonely again, for while he is out in the night
in the lambing season Mary falls from a chair, and by the time Eli gets
home she and the child that should have been born to them are dead.
After that, in sheer desperation, Eli leaves his old home and goes away
to sea. His is the old quest of a wounded man for the purpose which
lies behind all events. Once before, when Mary had told him that he
could be a preacher if he had the ambition, he had for a moment found
his voice.
"... I believe I could study fast enough, and I know I could preach.
I could make them listen to me; aye, have 'em all gaping after me
like a nest of young thrushes, if I chose. But I'd have to tell 'em
what they wanted to hear, an' dress it up the way they likes, which
is what they mean by the Gospel and the Truth. But that I won't do,
for I'm not sure that their Gospel is my Gospel, or their Truth any
Truth at all for the matter o' that. And about God, my dear. Whether
He is, or whether He isn't, what folks say, I can't testify till I
know, know of my own knowledge, and not because I read it in a book
or someone told me."
Occasionally the narrator of the story makes a little confidence to
the reader which, apart from its humorous candour, serves a definitely
useful purpose.
Now the scenes of Eli's childhood were the scenes I lived among when
I too was a child, and the land where he spent the years of his
middle age I knew and loved, as youth and man, but though I have
crossed many waters, I am no sailor, and I cannot see the ocean as a
mariner sees it.
In the course of his life as a sailor Eli has many adventures, which
are wonderfully told, dramatic without one word of melodrama. Here
the author who can lovingly describe the wild flowers in the lost
corners of the Downs excels again, for in a few words he can truthfully
describe how a particular species of liar describes himself, or how
nervousness passes into wild terror in the eyes of a San Francisco
crimp who is discovered trying to drug his victims. But well as Mr.
Peake describes the rascalities of the adventurous life, he is more at
home with the kindlinesses of the countryside and the gentle wisdom of
Cathay. This is a novel, uneven in quality to be sure, but touching at
certain points real beauty.
Mr. Hugh F. Spender in _The Banner_ describes a revolution in England,
organised by the League of Youth, backed by the People's Army, and
inspired by Helen Hart, daughter of a millionaire, who has a bias
against the landed gentry. Most elderly people in the book come in
for a good deal of facetiousness directed against their ponderously
old-fashioned views. One young lordling, deaf and dumb from shell
shock, has his senses restored by the mere sight of the new Joan of
Arc, and falls in love with her. She refuses him at first because she
is vowed to The Cause.... "For a moment she resisted, resisted almost
fiercely, and then she lay passively like a child in his arms." Mr.
Spender has invented a young man who willingly throws up both title and
title-deeds at the call of the People and becomes plain Citizen; but it
is a pity that the author in creating another peer should have given
him an existing name. Regarded either as fiction or as propaganda this
is a poor book.
_Roast Beef, Medium_ is the curious title that Miss Edna Ferber has
given to the Business Adventures of Emma McChesney. This American
authoress, who writes vivaciously in her own language, gives bright and
cheerful expression to her belief that people should be earnest and
good and that Roast Beef (not too underdone is conveyed by "medium")
should as a staple diet take precedence of flaked crab meat with
Russian sauce. These business adventures are certainly not _caviare_.
Emma McChesney is a bagwoman, representing T. A. Buck's Featherloom
Petticoats. Rivals make love to her and try to get the better of her
alternately, and she has a young cub of a son to support. Very sick of
hotel life, she longs for a house of her own--especially a kitchen.
In the last chapter she gets them. The book is full of homely advice.
Emma was fresh and wholesome in appearance, though not so young as the
picture on the wrapper deceitfully indicates. But she was a good sort
and refused to Marry T. A. Buck himself because she didn't love him.
She was, in fact, a "worth-while" woman.
BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM
AN INTERPRETATION OF KEATS'S "ENDYMION." By H. CLEMENT NOTCUTT. Printed
for the Author by the S.A. Printing Co., Capetown.