Books in General
_BOOKS OF ESSAYS_
THE MERRY-GO-ROUND
_by Carl Van Vechten_
MUSIC AND BAD MANNERS
_by Carl Van Vechten_
A BOOK OF CALUMNY
_by H. L. Mencken_
A BOOK OF PREFACES
_by H. L. Mencken_
PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES
_by H. L. Mencken_
PAVANNES AND DIVISIONS
_by Ezra Pound_
ALFRED A. KNOPF, _Publisher_
Books in General
By Solomon Eagle
[Illustration]
Alfred A Knopf
New York Mcmxix
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_ARTURO WAUGH_
Preface
These papers are selections from a series contributed weekly, without
intermission, to the _New Statesman_ since April 1913. I do not feel that
the responsibility for reprinting them rests on my shoulders; I trust
that where it does rest it will rest lightly. I shall have done all I
hope to do if I have produced the sort of book that one reads in, without
tedium, for ten minutes before one goes to sleep.
The pseudonym “Solomon Eagle,” I may explain, is not intended to posit
any claim to unusual wisdom or abnormally keen sight. The original bearer
of the name was a poor maniac who, during the Great Plague of London,
used to run naked through the street, with a pan of coals of fire on his
head, crying “Repent, repent.”
S. E.
Contents
Who’s Who, 13
Political Songs, 19
An Oriental on Albert the Good, 25
Epigrams, 31
An Eminent Baconian, 37
The Beauties of Badness, 42
More Badness, 54
A Mystery Solved, 58
Carrying the Alliance too far, 60
May 1914, 63
May 1914: The Leipzig Exhibition, 69
The Mantle of Sir Edwin, 75
“The Cattle of the Boyne,” 81
August 1914, 83
Mrs. Barclay sees it through, 88
A Topic of Standing Interest, 94
Was Cromwell an Alligator?, 99
The Depressed Philanthropist, 105
A Polyphloisboisterous Critic, 111
“Another Century, and then ...,” 115
Herrick, 121
The Muse in Liquor, 127
£5 Misspent, 133
Shakespeare’s Women and Mr. George Moore, 137
Moving a Library, 143
Table-Talk and Jest Books, 146
Stephen Phillips, 150
Gray and Horace Walpole, 155
A Horrible Bookseller, 161
The Troubles of a Catholic, 166
The Bible as Raw Material, 168
How to avoid Bad English, 172
Woodland Creatures, 177
Other People’s Books, 183
Peacock, 187
Wordsworth’s Personal Dullness, 189
Henry James’s Obscurity, 195
The “Ring” in the Bookselling Trade, 201
Music-Hall Songs, 207
More Music-Hall Songs, 213
Utopias, 218
Charles II in English Verse, 224
The Most Durable Books, 229
The Worst Style in the World, 234
The Reconstruction of Orthography, 240
Mr. James Joyce, 245
Tennessee, 251
Sir William Watson and Mr. Lloyd George, 254
Stranded, 259
Mr. Ralph Hodgson, 264
Double Misprints, 268
The History of Earl Pumbles, 270
On Destroying Books, 276
Who’s Who
Works of reference are extremely useful; but they resemble Virgil’s
Hell in that they are easy things to get into and very difficult to
escape from. Take the Encyclopædia. I imagine that my experience with
it is universal. I have only to dip my toe into this tempting morass
and down I am sucked, limbs, trunk and all, to remain embedded until
sleep or a visitor comes to haul me out. A man will read things in the
Encyclopædia that he would never dream of looking at elsewhere—things in
which normally he does not take the faintest interest. One may take up a
volume after lunch in order to discover the parentage of Thomas Nashe;
but one does not put it down when one has satisfied one’s curiosity. One
turns over a few pages and becomes absorbed in the career of Napoleon.
Thence one drifts to the article on Napier, which sends one to that on
Logarithms in another volume; and when night closes in and (as we used to
construe it) sleep brings rest to weary mortals, one still sits in one’s
chair, bending heavy-eyed over the book, with a dozen pressing duties
left undone and the last post missed. By that time one has reached,
perhaps, the abnormally complex diagrams which illustrate the article on
Metaphysico-theologico-cosmolo-nigology—of which science, the reader
will remember, Voltaire was the father and Herr Doktor Pangloss the first
professor.
_Who’s Who_ takes me in the same way. Ordinarily I have no particular
thirst for it. I should not dream of carrying it about in my waistcoat
pocket for perusal on the Underground Railway. But once I have allowed
myself to open it, I am a slave to it for hours. This has just happened
to me with the new volume, upon which I have wasted a valuable afternoon.
I began by looking up a man’s address; I then read the compressed
life-story of the gentleman next above him (a major-general), wondering,
somewhat idly, whether they read of each other’s performances and whether
either of them resented the possession by the other of a similar, and
unusual, surname. Then I was in the thick of it. There was nothing
especially exciting about most of the information that met my eye.
Generally speaking, the biographies were of people of whom I had never
previously heard, and whose doubtlessly reputable achievements had been
recorded in spheres as unfamiliar to me as the dark side of the moon.
What can it mean to me that Mr. J. Fitztimmins Gubb worked for five
years under Schmitt at Magdeburg and is now demonstrator in Comparative
Obstetrics at the Robson Institute? Or that the Bishop of the Cocos
Islands has been five times married and was educated at King Edward
VI Grammar School, Chipping Chester, and Pembroke College, Oxford? Yet
I read of some six or seven hundred such, and found it as difficult to
refrain from “Just one more” as would a wealthy dipsomaniac just parting
from an old friend in a public-house at five minutes before closing time.
I cannot easily account for the attraction. Something, I suppose, may
be put down to the fact that character comes out in a man’s account,
however bald, of himself; and that the _Who’s Who_ autobiographies, in
spite of their compression, exhibit many and diverse interesting traits
of character. But mainly, I think, it must be that we most of us have
collector’s mania in some form or another, and that one cannot resist the
temptation of collecting facts even when they are so irrelevant and of
so little importance to one that they slip through one’s fingers as soon
as one has gathered them. For I am sure that I do not know now whether
I have got the number of the Bishop’s wives right, or the sites of his
education, or even the name of his diocese.
I suppose that no one ever tells an untruth in _Who’s Who_. There is not
much scope for it, though it is conceivable that there may have been
exaggerations of the truth. The compilers are extremely capable; and the
contributors seem to be as uniform in their veracity as they are various
in their loquacity. Only in rare circumstances could any one hope to
impose on _Who’s Who_ without very rapid detection. An opportunity of
that nature did once occur to me. There is a compilation called the
_American Who’s Who_, published (if I remember correctly) in Chicago.
By some curious accident, which I have never been able to explain, its
conductors got hold of my name—I don’t mean “Eagle,” but the other. By
some accident more curious still they got the impression that I was an
American settled in London; and with admirable enterprise they sent
me, for two or three years in succession, yellow forms on which I was
requested to inscribe my age, antecedents, and accomplishments. Each year
I was dazzled by the idea of a joke which, I felt, would immensely amuse
me, and which could (so the Devil argued) hurt nobody. On each occasion I
filled the form exhaustively. I put down my name and address correctly;
but beyond that not a word of truth did I tell. I invented for myself a
career, a career not imposing enough to arouse suspicions, but far more
picturesque than my actual career has been. I described my parents as
being Homer E. —— and Anna P. ——, of St. Louis, Mo. I copied out of an
American minor poet’s autobiographical preface a list of academies at
which I had been educated; and then I launched out.
I had, I stated, left America for Europe at the age of nineteen. I had
written (I was cunning enough to put down the names of one or two of
my actual works) such and such books, including a Manual (for Schools)
on Political Economy and a small brochure on Polycarp. I had travelled
over four continents; my recreations were “all forms of sport, especially
big-game hunting”; I had gone through the Balkan War as a volunteer with
the Greek Army; and I possessed several decorations, including the Blue
Boar of Rumania, the St. Miguel and All Angels of Portugal, and the
fourth class of the Turkish Medjidie. Notice the fourth class; no common
liar would have thought of so convincingly modest a claim as that. Each
year, as I say, I lived laborious days in the delineation of an imaginary
pedigree and a supposititious career. Then I broke down. There was no
risk of punishment attached, and, I take it, small risk of discovery.
But my softer self began telling me that it was a scandalous thing to
hoax foreigners; that the trick was unworthy of an Englishman, or,
indeed, an adult of any nationality, down to the most backward of Nicobar
Islanders; and that the only fitting punishment for a person addicted to
such practices would be to have pins put upon his chair by his children
or his back chalked by infants in the street. I weakened and broke;
sentiment overcame reason; my heart gained the victory over my head. And
each year, with reluctant deliberation, I tore up the well-filled sheet
and destroyed again my other self, my American self, the romantic self
who had done the things I had never done, who had stalked the bear in
the snowy fastnesses of the Caucasus and won the gratitude of exotic
potentates. The forms have stopped coming now; but the memory of my
vision still burns with a melancholy yet tender brightness; and those
mythical progenitors, Homer E. —— and Anna P. ——, are to me all that his
Dream Children were to Charles Lamb.
Political Songs
If one goes up a mountain and surveys all the kingdoms of the world one
sees a good many horrible things. Few of them are worse, in their way,
than the modern political song. There have been bad political songs
in all ages. Cæsar’s soldiers used to sing some which were not merely
uninspiring but irrelevant, and _Lilli Burlero_ (or _Lillibulero_)
itself was no great shakes as a poem although its tune had a swing.
But there have never been any to equal in badness the kind of songs
that has been generated by the British party system. The only modern
politicians who ever manage to generate a good song are the Socialists.
Socialist song-books, in spite of their plenitude of hack phrases about
chains and freedom’s dawn, always have a good deal of tolerable poetry
in them. William Morris’s political songs are excellent, and some of
the modern foreign Socialist songs are really worthy expressions of the
movement. When their words are not good their tunes are: witness the
_Internationale_ and that stirring Italian labour song that is now, I
believe, prohibited by King Victor’s Government. But the kind of songs
that our good Liberals and Conservatives sing at their meetings are
gruesome.
I hold in my hand—as the saying goes—the _Liberal Song Sheet_ now being
used at big party meetings. One or two of the more facetious ditties show
some ingenuity, and there is a certain go about the first line of “Stamp,
stamp, stamp upon Protection”; but for the rest the only song the writer
of which would not get a birching in any properly constituted society is
Ebenezer Elliott’s _God Save the People_, which is generations old. “Let
who will make a nation’s laws as long as I make its songs,” said some
writer. One might add: “Let who will make a nation’s songs as long as
they are not done by the people who make its laws.” Caucus-provided laws
may be all right, but caucus-provided songs, written by party agents and
under-secretaries, are not successful.
The chief characteristic of the Liberal songs, apart from their metrical
and linguistic peculiarities, is their insistence upon incongruous
military image. Imagine Mr. Asquith donning bright armour and taking part
in the incidents depicted in these verses—to the tune of _Who will o’er
the Downs?_
_Our leaders, tried and trusted men,_
_Still love the ancient faith,_
_To Freedom and to Conscience true_
_In danger and in death._
_And they have donned their armour bright,_
_Their courage all aglow,_
_To lead the toilers of the land_
_Against the Tory foe._
_For years we’ve suffered pain and loss,_
_By privilege oppressed;_
_Our birthright has been filched from us_
_And left us sore distress’d._
_But now our leaders—trusted, tried—_
_Are keen to strike a blow,_
_And wrest our stolen acres from_
_The proud, disdainful foe._
It is not my business to discuss the justness of the judgments here
implied, but what on earth is the point of suggesting that Mr. Asquith,
Mr. George, Mr. Lulu Harcourt, Lord Haldane, and so on, are true “in
danger and in death”? They may have come unscathed through the fire of
Suffragette dog-whips, but nobody calls them to die for disestablishment.
There is here an utter lack of reality, a lack that must prevent these
songs from moving anybody to action, as good songs should do. They are as
conventionally false as the cheapest kind of leading article.
Here are some more extracts from the same source:
_We defend the right we won in ages past;_
_We demand the measures by the Commons passed,_
_Let no Lords presume to wreck the work at last,_
_For we go marching on._
_Freedom for our trade and nation_
_From all insolent vexation._
_For democracy’s salvation_
_We all go marching on._
_Peers and Tories may to wreck the work unite,_
_Britain’s sons for Britain’s freedom still shall fight;_
_None shall hinder us till triumph is in sight,_
_As we go marching on._
_Then up to the sky with your Hip-hip-Hooray!_
_For the unbeaten leader, who leads us to-day._
_For ASQUITH—to-day, after long, weary years,_
_Our victorious Captain o’er Tories and Peers._
_Then cheer with a will for the great deed is done;_
_Attacking the Veto, we’ve fought and we’ve won;_
_Henceforward these islands of ours are to be_
_Not the Land of the Peers but the Land of the Free._
_Long, long in shameful slavery_
_The emerald isle hath lain,_
_The victim of past knavery,_
_And Unionist disdain._
_But Freedom’s day is coming—_
_See how the foemen flee!_
_Home Rule is just_
_And come it must_
_To set old Ireland free!_
_One blow will end the matter!_
_Strike, strike it with a will!_
_The enemy we’ll scatter_
_And quickly pass our Bill._
_Our leaders are determined,_
_True followers are we,_
_Our arms are strong_
_To right the wrong_
_And set old Ireland free._
A curious thing is that almost universally in these songs the virtues
and actions of the party leaders get almost as much attention as the
political questions at issue. This is the mark of the caucus.
It is a very difficult thing to write a good propagandist song at all.
A first-rate tune will often cover up the most prosaic words, but
generally speaking political songs split on the rock of the specific.
It is the greatest mistake to expect to stir people with verses dealing
with a particular Bill. The spirit of freedom, the spirit of revolt, the
passion of love, or the passion of hate, may make good songs, but it is a
hopeless task to try to make poetry out of the taxation of land values or
an import duty on corn. A good Socialist song may deal with brotherhood
or service, but it cannot deal with “the nationalization of the means
of production, distribution, or exchange.” One should avoid the kind of
concrete details that produce a sense of anticlimax, and the kind of
personalities that sound false. The spirit of Liberty may appropriately
be depicted in a helmet, but it is silly to conjure up a picture of Mr.
Asquith with a suit of armour over his frock-coat. Even the fact that
a thing is glaringly true does not necessarily make it suitable for
metrical statement. It is true that there is an insufficient supply of
sanatoria and that the thought profoundly moves many people. But a song
emphasizing the fact must be a failure. Modern political songwriters fail
(1) because they are usually people who cannot write verse at all, (2)
because they try to make their songs like extra-rhetorical speeches or
articles. Probably the next Liberal song will deal with the ravages of
pheasants.
An Oriental on Albert the Good
The award of the Nobel Prize to Mr. Rabindranath Tagore is generally
approved. I do not entirely agree with those who think that Mr. Tagore’s
poems are masterpieces in English; for I find his English poetical
prose monotonous and without rhythmical beauty, although, in a sense,
immaculate. But those who know the Indian originals say that they are
really great, and that they have got a hold on the general population
unprecedented for centuries past.
I have just acquired a book by an Indian poet who was not so wise in his
choice of subjects as is Mr. Tagore. The book is an English version (made
in 1864 by the tutor of Sir J. Jeejeebhoy’s sons, and published by the
Bombay Education Society) of an Epic on the Prince Consort by the Parsee
poet “Munsookh.” The poem is enlivening if not inspiring.
It opens with the usual Oriental invocation to Heaven, ending “With
that remembrance alone will I fill the cup of my heart and sing new and
entertaining stories.” It then plunges straight _in medias res_ with a
first canto, “On the birth of Prince Albert, his education and arrival
at mature years; and his wish to marry Victoria.”
“There is a country of the world called Germany, the eminence
of which is known everywhere. In its interior is a large
district called the Dukedom of Gotha, about thirty-seven miles
in area, and containing about one hundred and fifty thousand
inhabitants. The air of this district is pleasant, dry, and
cool; and the water refreshing and pure. The land is good and
very fertile, and every article of food and clothing is cheap
there. In its neighbourhood is the city of Coburg, where the
richest blessings of Providence display themselves, near which
flows the river Itz, and where is a magnificent ducal castle,
having the appropriate name of Rosina, with a garden entirely
surrounding it. Here the birth of Albert took place.”
Prince Albert grew up wise and studious, and at last his preceptor
said to him: “My accomplished pupil, this is the one hope of my soul,
that thou make a hearty effort to be united to the worthy heiress
of the Kingdom of England, and if thou do this, thou wilt not be
disappointed.... Put in action therefore the effective dagger of
contrivance; engraft speedily the plant of love ... lose not thy time,
for if thou do thou wilt be considered a fool.”
Queen Victoria’s portrait was sent to Albert, the bearer telling him
that he was searching the world for a worthy, loving, and religious
prince. “Thou hast administered the medicine for my secret pain,” was the
reply, and the Prince wrote a letter acknowledging the present. “When I
would write thee a letter,” he said, “the water of my eyes flows from my
pen instead of the black ink.... In my feeling of love for thee I am mad:
I am a moth flying around a candle.... Though I swim always in a flood
of tears, my body is burning to a cinder.” When Victoria’s mother heard
about this she was glad, but said that “the hearts of the English people
are intoxicated with haughtiness; they despise a stranger and a foreigner
... nor will they consider it honourable that thou should be united in
love to a child of Germany.” Various letters passed, but Albert’s father
was astonished at his rashness. “Foolish boy, heretofore engrossed in
eating, drinking, and learning. Where didst thou get this information and
these notions?... A nation proud and haughty like the English will think
thee thoroughly mad.” But letters from England convinced the Duke; he
admonished his son as to his future behaviour; and the party sailed for
the port of London, where “Victoria immediately went upon the terrace.”
The lovers met and sang, and the Prince returned home to complete his
studies. “A little time after this occurrence the Queen again remembered
Albert; she caused a letter, official, and according to rule, to be
written to his father.”
“Albert’s father prepared himself at once, taking necessary provisions,
furniture, and money. Having sat in a boat Prince Albert went forward
accompanied by his family. The gallant vessel floated down the stream,
and did not leave her track on the way. From a distance she appeared
like an alligator, or like the moon of the second day sailing through
the heavens, or like a tree growing in the midst of deep waters, casting
its shadows as it moved in a hundred directions; or she was like a
horse leaping without feet, and bound only to the surface of the water,
so swift and lofty of mien that the sun from afar uttered a shout of
approbation. As a lover weeps on account of separation from his beloved,
so the ship beating her breast, filled her skirts with water. She
sometimes appeared from her motion tired and weary, and the bubbles about
her seemed like blisters on the feet. In body she was a strong negress,
but in speed lively; in her womb were hundreds of children, yet did she
never bear.”
“Albert thought the waves were like an infuriated elephant,” but he
arrived safely, and the marriage was celebrated amid general rejoicings.
“The voice of triumph arose from every side with guns and bells and
bands of music; in every house, too, arose the heart-charming sounds of
cornets, flutes, harps, pianos, and singing of various sorts; cannons
boomed from every fort—one making a whirring noise, another a noise
like thunder.... So pure became the waters of the Thames that one could
see in them the image even of the soul of his body. It was not a river,
but as it were a flower garden; and the bodies of the fishes glittered
like rose-leaves. Everywhere were clusters of variously decked boats;
the vessels were as shaking mountains, which made graceful motions like
peacocks coquetting in the garden of Paradise.”
A great banquet followed, and when “the reign of wine” was finished
the music began. “Trombones sounded so impressively that letters were
imprinted upon the face of the air.” Then came the dancing. “What shall
I say of the Mendozas and Polkas? for the philosophic and the pious lost
their peace of mind through them.... The Polka was kept up with such zest
and excitement that there was a stir among the angels of heaven.... In
short, the ball was gracefulness itself which made the stars bite their
own bodies with jealousy.” The dead rose up from the ground enamoured
of the dancing, and the lamps put their hands over their eyes. The
festivities over the royal pair retired and sang to each other.
Next year a princess was born, and all England was merry. Other children
followed, and for twenty years the royal pair lived in happiness. In 1843
the Queen and the Prince revisited his native country in a ship furious
as a leopard, that broke through hundreds of whales. Home awoke tender
thoughts in the Prince. “Collecting himself he sang” a chant comparing
himself to Joseph, and his bride to Zuleika—which indicates a somewhat
different view of the Potiphar’s wife episode from that prevalent in
Occidental circles. The rest of the work is mainly taken up with the
Great Exhibition, the Prince’s death, and numerous maxims for the use of
his son, such as:
“King must keep entirely aloof from several hurtful things as
... chess.
“A king’s country is like a beautiful woman, and the merchants
of that country are, as it were, the precious jewels and
ornaments of that woman; and the more these jewels and
ornaments are, the more heart-charming and beautiful she looks.”
This last aphorism is disputable.
Epigrams
Any one who reads Mr. R. N. Leonard’s charming little anthology of
English epigrams in the Oxford Garlands Series will regret that the
practice of writing poetical epigrams has died out. Until the Victorian
age almost all professional writers, as well as many amateurs, tried
their hands at epigram. If you had anything especially offensive to say
about any one—and especially about politicians, doctors, and ladies
unduly addicted to cosmetics—it was the natural thing to put it into a
couplet or a quatrain. Ministers and Privy Councillors used to compose
epigrams about each other; but who can imagine Sir Henry Dalziel writing
witty quatrains about Sir Alfred Mond, or _vice versa_? Why the habit has
died out I don’t profess to say. There may be some significance in the
fact that the great age of epigrams was the eighteenth century—the prose
age _par excellence_. There is probably more in the decay of knowledge
of Greek and Latin. When almost every educated man was familiar with the
Greek Anthology and the works of Martial—whence all kinds of epigrams,
elegiac, amatory, and satirical, descend—it was perhaps natural that the
temptation to continue the good work should be generally felt. It may
even be that a form so small is incapable of infinite variety and grows
exhausted. Johnson wrote a ludicrous burlesque epigram—
_If the man who turnips cries_
_Cry not when his father dies,_
_’Tis a proof that he had rather_
_Have a turnip than his father._
—and there is undoubtedly sound criticism in it. After a certain time the
making of epigrams may proceed almost on a formula. At all events, the
decline of the epigram is obvious. The well-meant effusions which the
late Sir Wilfrid Lawson used to waft across the benches of the House of
Commons were scarcely equal to the old level of our political quips; it
is very rarely that a tolerable metrical epigram appears in the Press;
and the poets have almost all abandoned the habit of attempting to get
their thoughts into so small a compass. The custom of composing epigrams
for private albums is virtually extinct. Every schoolgirl writes in every
other schoolgirl’s album that there is nothing Original in her excepting
Original Sin; and even that not very splendid _mot_ was constructed by
Thomas Campbell nearly a hundred years ago. The rest is silence.
The greater number of our epigrams are satirical, and Mr. Lennard’s
selection is mainly composed of these verses with stings in their tails.
One of the most taking of these is A. Evans’s on a Fat Man:
_When Tadlow walks the streets, the paviours cry_
_“God bless you, sir!” and lay their rammers by._
But that, perhaps, is not really stinging; if Mr. Tadlow was
good-tempered, he must have liked it himself. Good couplets like these
are few, but Coleridge’s on the Swan-Song is one:
_Swans sing before they die—’twere no bad thing_
_Should certain persons die before they sing._
The most brutal epigrams we have are Byron’s on Castlereagh’s suicide,
after that statesman had cut his throat. These are not very good, but
Mr. Lennard gives them; and, in fact, almost every famous epigram in the
language. He classifies them under headings: “Political,” “Professional
and Trading,” “Amatory,” and so on. Of the Literary epigrams one of the
best is Bishop Stubbs’s on two of his nineteenth-century contemporaries:
_Froude informs the Scottish youth_
_That parsons do not care for truth._
_The Reverend Canon Kingsley cries_
_History is a pack of lies._
_What cause for judgments so malign?_
_A brief reflection solves the mystery—_
_Froude believes Kingsley a divine,_
_And Kingsley goes to Froude for history._
Lord Erskine’s on Scott’s Waterloo Poem is good:
_On Waterloo’s ensanguined plain_
_Lie tens of thousands of the slain,_
_But none, by sabre or by shot,_
_Fell half so flat as Walter Scott._
Theodore Hook’s epigram suggesting that it would be impossible to find a
reader who would pay for the binding of _Prometheus Unbound_ now falls as
flat as Scott, owing to the utter falsification of the prophecy.
Mr. Lennard gives a fair number of epitaphs, including Evans’s well-known
one on Vanbrugh and Gay’s even better-known one on himself. But I don’t
think we have in English an epitaph so delightful as that written for his
own tomb by the obscene French poet Piron:
_Ci-gît Piron_
_Qui ne fut rien,_
_Pas même_
_Académicien._
Landor’s “I strove with none, for none was worth my strife,” however,
could not be surpassed by any serious epitaph. From Landor Mr. Lennard
has naturally had to draw freely for his more serious sections. Landor
came nearer than any English writers to rivalling the feats of the best
Greek epigrammatists. Many people would say that his _Dirce_ is the most
beautiful epigram in the language.
Mr. Lennard’s selection is, as I have said, a very good one. The only old
one I miss is Richard Bentley’s on German scholarship:
_The Germans in Greek_
_Are sadly to seek;_
_Not one in five score,_
_But ninety-nine more._
_All, all except Hermann—_
_And Hermann’s a German._
The omission is the stranger in that Landor’s greatly inferior epigram
on Germans is included. About the longest poem admitted is Clough’s
revised version of the Ten Commandments: it is flat in places, but
contains one famous couplet. Only when he comes to the moderns might
Mr. Lennard have cast his net wider. Browning, who wrote some neat
versicles, is unrepresented; and so is Mr. Watson, who, in his earlier
days, wrote epigrams, some of which, if not masterpieces, were as good
as some of Mr. Lennard’s old ones. And it would have been worth while to
collect a few of the miscellaneous modern ones that float about. There
are Limericks—and some Limericks will satisfy the narrowest definition
of an epigram—which would be worth preserving; and then there are odd
fragments like the effort alleged to have been written on the blackboard
by a Cheltenham schoolgirl:
_Miss Buss and Miss Beale_
_Cupid’s darts do not feel._
_How different from us_
_Miss Beale and Miss Buss._
Tolerable modern epigrams are so few that it would be worth while saving
all there are. Unfortunately the pleasantest personal ones that one
hears privately, though they would have been printed in a franker day,
must mostly remain unprinted in an age when direct satire is considered
ungentlemanly, and the law of libel is so easily invoked. I remember Mr.
——’s epigram on Lady —— and Mr. ——’s on Sir —— ——. Mr. Lennard cannot be
expected to publish these.
An Eminent Baconian
A very curious chapter in the history of the Bacon-Shakespeare
controversy closes with the death of Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence. Amid
all the strange multitude of retired judges, lawyers, astrologers, and
American ladies who have championed the cause of Lord Verulam there has
been no figure more singular than that of this affluent old ex-M.P., who,
after a lifetime spent in business, platform speaking, and the study of
modern mechanical improvements, suddenly plunged into the fight with
unprecedented enthusiasm and methods of argument never equalled in their
singularity. Setting out with the conviction that Shakespeare could not
possibly have written the plays, and that Bacon was the only man who
could have, Sir Edwin became so obsessed with the subject that he found
proofs of his contention everywhere, and gradually came to the conclusion
that Bacon wrote almost all the Elizabethan and Jacobean literature that
is worth reading. We have heard of the devout mystic who sees “every
common bush afire with God”: to Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence every common
bush was afire with Bacon. His outlook being of this character, it is
scarcely to be wondered at that his methods of reasoning and of research
were most surprising.
Most people who read his pamphlet, _The Shakespeare Myth_, must have
been astounded by the _naïveté_ of some of the “proofs” there contained.
The fact that Bacon was called Bacon—a name so easily interchangeable
with pig, hog, and rasher—was a great help; for where the application of
ciphers did not obtain one word it might obtain another. Bacon, according
to Sir Edwin, must have been at least as preoccupied with ensuring his
identification by posterity as with the writing of good verse, for he
would take great pains to work in such a word as “hang-hog,” or to
make three consecutive lines begin with words—such as Pompey, In, and
Got—out of the initials of which could be constructed the appellation
“pig.” Everything was pork that came to Sir Edwin’s net, and he would
by tortuous ratiocination get evidence from the most seemingly innocent
contemporary English and foreign engravings. For there was a secret
brotherhood at work carrying on the Baconian tradition, and the artist
who gave the portrait of Shakespeare two left sleeves (the confirmation
of this was, I think, obtained from the editor of the _Tailor & Cutter_)
had a subtle and profound intention. Sir Edwin collected a very large
library in connexion with his work, and the study of it was his passion;
but, save industry, he had none of the qualifications for his task.
I myself obtained in a strange way an amusing insight into his looseness
of procedure. He had been writing letters maintaining his thesis in a
contemporary weekly. Wondering whether he could be hoaxed, I sent to
the paper a letter over what might have seemed, to a man with any real
detective faculty, the suspicious signature “P. O. R. Ker.” In this
letter I called Sir Edwin’s attention to a quotation (which I had myself
invented and written in Elizabethanese) which I ascribed to one of the
best-known works of Greene. My “quotation” (I forget its wording, but
it contained phrases about “Shakescene” and “the semblance of a hogg”)
made it perfectly clear that Shakespeare was merely Bacon’s dummy. Any
man with the slightest qualifications for his work would have looked up
Greene for reference—and would not have found it. Not so Sir Edwin. He
wrote in at once (the editor, in order to spare his feelings, did not
print the communication) to say that the fact that Mr. Ker’s important
and convincing reference had been ignored by the Shakespeareans showed
their utter incompetence.
But the most striking thing about him was his detestation of Shakespeare.
There are people who hate Napoleon; there are people who object to
Torquemada; there are even people who feel a pronounced distaste for
Nero. But never has any one loathed and despised a dead man as the
really mild and amiable Sir Edwin despised and loathed Shakespeare. No
epithets were, he felt, too opprobrious for this rascal, who for three
hundred years had cheated another man out of his due fame. He denied
Shakespeare any virtue at all; he pointed out that there existed no proof
that Shakespeare could even read; and he habitually referred to him as
the “drunken, illiterate clown of Stratford,” “the sordid money-lender of
Stratford,” and “the mean, drunken, ignorant, and absolutely unlettered
rustic of Stratford.” So strong, indeed, were his feelings that when the
_Times_ says that “One cannot but feel that he was happy in not living
to see the celebrations which the British Academy and other friends of
literature are to hold in 1916, the third centenary of Shakespeare’s—not
Bacon’s—death,” it is not making a weak and untimely jest, but stating
the sober truth.
Who will now take on Sir Edwin’s mantle as the most conspicuous
Baconian? Mr. George Greenwood is _hors concours_ because, though an
anti-Shakespearean, he has doubts about Bacon; and we have heard nothing
lately about that romantic American doctor who a year or two ago began
digging for evidence in the bed of the sylvan Wye. That another ardent
combatant will soon appear is pretty certain; in fact, there will
probably be a continual succession of such for all time unless—which
is unlikely—somebody discovers documentary proofs of Shakespeare’s
authorship so irrefutable that no one could dream of challenging them.
For the examination of a mystery—if you can persuade yourself that there
is a mystery—is always fascinating, and the search for and application
of ciphers and hidden meanings produces such entertaining results that
it would be almost worth while becoming a Baconian for the fun of it.
Almost, but not quite.
The Beauties of Badness
The collector of amusingly bad poetry has never had such splendid
opportunities as to-day. The world is all before him where to choose.
Modern cheap production has made it easy for any one who can raise £20
to get a volume of poems printed; and of recent years the field has been
greatly enriched by the growing body of verse-writers in America and
the Colonies. There have always, of course, been poets who have given
unintentional rather than intentional pleasure. I have before me a volume
published (at Cambridge) in 1825, entitled _Original Poems in the Moral,
Heroic, Pathetic and other Styles, by a Traveller_, which contains poems
in the following style—amongst others:
INGRATITUDE
_My Muse, who oft recites on Love,_
_Or Heavenly Beatitude,_
_Her strains more melancholy move_
_Devoted to ~INGRATITUDE~._
_With thee, Dark Demon—what can charm?_
_Nor manners polish’d—chaste, or rude;_
_Nor Friendship’s hand—nor Safety’s arm_
_So vile art thou—~INGRATITUDE~!_
_Tho’ dear a Female’s face, or form;_
_Tho’ elegant her attitude;_
_We fly, as from the winged storm—_
_If she pours forth ~INGRATITUDE~._
But it is seldom that the collector comes across one of these delightful
relics from an older day. The greater part of any collection must be
formed of books published within the last forty years. Our age may
be—indeed, it is—deficient in some respects, but in the production of
unintentionally amusing writers no age, not even the Renaissance or the
great ages of Greece and Rome, can vie with it.
It might be possible for a man with the industry of a Herbert Spencer
exhaustively to classify the writers of whom I am speaking, and to
tabulate the qualities which give to their works their peculiar
virtues—incongruity of image, unfortunate use of colloquialisms, hopeless
slavery to the necessity of rhyme, and so on. I am no Spencer; indeed,
the only things I have in common with that philosopher are a taste for
billiards and the recollection of a single visit to the Derby. To me
there is a single broad division which connoisseurs may find useful in
arranging their collections: in one class we may put those poets who are
specifically cranky; in the other those (some silly, some quite sensible
people apart from their artistic proclivities) who (Macaulay’s Robert
Montgomery is the type) try to write poems like other people’s, but whose
total lack of poetic perception leads them into strange aberrations of
expression.
The first kind are comparatively rare, but there are some good examples
still going strong. There is, for instance, a gentleman (at one time a
distinguished scholar of Balliol) who describes himself as “The Modern
Homer,” and has written a number of epics, including _The Human Epic_,
_The Epic of London_, _The Epic of Charlemagne_, and _The Epic of God and
the Devil_. Preoccupation with his matter leads him to such phrases as:
_When Murder is on the ~tapis~_
_Then the Devil is happy._
But he, perhaps, is not so interesting as Mr. William Nathan Stedman,
who used to live in London, and now, I believe, is settled in Australia.
This gentleman is addicted to prefaces proving that Mr. Gladstone, “this
DIRTY OLD DEVIL,” “this sly old wizard, a protoplasm from the abyss of
nowhere,” was the Beast of the Revelations, and he has an aversion from
Mr. R. J. Campbell, whom he calls “moo-cow, kid-gloved Campbell.” It
is well worth while buying his _Sonnets, Lays and Lyrics_. The poems
themselves are not so amusing, though we sometimes came across such
ambiguous phrases as:
_And when upon your dainty breast I lay_
_My wearied head—more soft than eiderdown._
But the illustrations—wood-blocks from eminent artists like Albert Dürer
and Louis Wain—are charmingly irrelevant, and the prose passages are
unique. The poet refers to the Laureateship—“an office I refused after
Tennyson’s death, though made with the offer of a premier’s daughter
and £30,000”—and he is violently down on critics who have failed to see
the merits of a certain novelist whom he calls “Queen Marie,” “a woman
who did you no wrong, nor envied ye your bones and offal, but gave Most
Interesting Books for your betterment and education. Are ye not dirty
dogs and devils? Eh?” “Bull-browed bastards” is one of the mildest terms
he applies to the critics.
Difficult to place in either class are the poets who have some technical
faculty, who are not necessarily cranks, but who endeavour to put such
extraordinarily prosy things into verse that the result is as comic as
though they were. I have, for example, a book containing “a lyrical
romance in verse,” which tells a story, that might have gone quite well
in prose, of a man who falls in love with a girl and has long discussions
with her about politics. The author’s choice of a metrical form leads him
to pages and pages of this sort of thing:
_I ceased, and somewhat eagerly she asked:_
_“Then you would justify the Socialist,_
_Or Anarchist, the brute assassin, masked_
_As a reformer, him who has dismissed_
_All scruples, and himself or others tasked_
_To murder innocence? Can there exist_
_A reason to excuse Luccheni’s action,_
_Of life’s great rights most dastardly infraction?”_
_“Excuse it, no!” I said; “nor justify it;_
_But understand it yes!—I find confusion_
_In both your questions; and, your words imply it,_
_They have their base in popular illusion._
_In Socialism and Anarchism, deny it_
_Who will, there’s no imperative inclusion_
_Of violence. Each, aiming at reform,_
_Would lay life’s ever-raging life and storm.”_
The growth of the Socialist and Suffragist movements has led to a great
increase in this kind of argumentative verse; but the bad poems in the
Conservative or Militarist interests are generally very much worse, a
type-specimen being this:
_And so with foes about us_
_Just waiting for their chance_
_We must become a nation armed_
_Like Germany and France._
Another example of Imperialist verse is:
_I’m old John Bull of England,_
_My triumphs are in song._
_I’ve fought and won great victories_
_Which did not take me long._
_I’ve fought in many a battle_
_By sea as well as land._
_I’ve fought in Russia, Belgium,_
_Africa and India’s golden strand,_
which occurs in a work appealing for better treatment for British
Honduras.
But most of the best bad verse is not propagandist. Amongst the classics
of the kind the Works of Johnston-Smith rank high. These have been
published complete in one volume, but the best of them are to be found in
a smaller book entitled _The Captain of the Dolphin_. Mr. Johnston-Smith
had a great vocabulary and peculiar gifts of metaphor and of abrupt
conclusion. Here are some typical passages:
_A balminess the darkened hours had brought from out the South,_
_Each breaker doffed its cap of white and shut its blatant mouth._
_Strike, strike your flag, Sidonia,_
_And lessen death and pain;_
_“Strike,” “Fight” are but synonyma_
_For misery to Spain._
_On speedy wing the graceful sea-fowl follow fast—_
_They seem to me the souls of seamen drowned,_
_Who have for sailors, ships and ocean’s briny blast_
_Dumb love which they are yearning to propound._
_O’er the sea’s edge the sun, a dazzling disc,_
_In splendour hangs, preparing for his plunge;_
_Upon the heaven’s bright page he stamps an asterisk_
_Of yellow beams which Western things expunge._
_Reluctant I leave, like a lover who goes_
_From the side of the maid of his choice,_
_By whom he is held with a cord actuose_
_Spun out of her beauty and voice._
“Actuose” is very characteristic of this poet, who uses enormous numbers
of astonishing words of which he does not tell us the meaning, although
he gives us a glossary containing such definitions as:
_Derelict. An abandoned ship._
_Outward-bound. Sailing from home._
_Yo-heave-ho! A phrase used by sailors when two or more pull in
concert at the same rope._
One of his nicest surprises is the ending of:
_Where the sun circles round for the half of the year_
_And is cold—like a yellow balloon._
The kind of thrill produced by this unexpected ending is, of course,
common in verse. Some readers will be acquainted with the epitaph:
_Here beneath this stone at rest_
_Lies the dear dog who loved us best._
_Within his heart was nothing mean,_
_He seemed just like a human being._
But a University poet’s anticlimax on Actæon may not be so generally
known:
_His hands were changed to feet, and he in short_
_Became a stag...._
Nor this affecting stanza from a woman’s book recently published:
_What o’ the wind?_
_It hisses through a vessel’s spars._
_What o’ the wind?_
_It is in truth to mercy blind,_
_It surely from all rest debars,_
_And even frights the sturdy “tars.”_
_What o’ the wind?_
An equal bathos is sometimes produced by inappropriate metaphor. The
worst instance I know is found in the poems of quite a well-known writer
who describes roses:
_Aft before and fore behind_
_Swung upon the summer wind._
But the author of a recent drama of the Near East came pretty near it with
_... the diamond shaft of the fierce searchlight_
_From the lens of the crystal moon._
The chase after the unusual almost always means disaster. This is another
recent example:
_I have found thee, dear! on the edge of time,_
_Just over the brink of the world of sense;_
_In dream-life that’s ours, when with love intense_
_We function above, in a fairer clime._
_I have found thee there, in a world of rest,_
_In the fair sweet gardens of sunlit bliss,_
_Where the sibilant sound of an Angel’s kiss_
_Is the sanctioned seal of a Holy quest._
But nothing produced in this manner is so attractive as the merely
commonplace can be when carried to its farthest pitch. A year or two
ago a young American published a volume with a preface ending: “He was
apprised of the death of his invalid brother, whose remaining portion of
his grandfather’s legacy accruing to him facilitated the publication of
this book.” The epilogue ran as follows:
_Oh, the rain, rain, rain!_
_All the day it doth complain._
_On the window-pane, just near me,_
_How it sputters, oh, how dreary!_
_One becomes so awful weary_
_With the rain, rain, rain._
The difference between this and Verlaine’s _Il pleut sur la ville_ would
be hard to define, but there certainly is a marked difference.
Most of the poets quoted above have, at any rate, the gift of moving
with some freedom within their metres. But some people who publish verse
cannot even do that, however simple the forms they choose. They struggle
through their poems like flies in treacle. A good example may be taken
from a book (excellently produced) issued only a year ago by one of the
foremost publishers. Apart from its other qualities, it shows a most
extraordinarily revolutionary conception of the way in which lines may be
ended:
_A man’s home is a woman’s breast. There see_
_Him in infancy, and later, seeks he_
_Inspiration from the self-same source. ’Tis_
_His home, t’wards which, from cradle to the grave,_
_He doth gravitate, accomplishing his_
_Greatest works by aid of it. Man on the_
_Woman’s aid depends. Oft unconsciously_
_’Tis given, oft loyally the truth’s in_
_Loving breast safeguarded—less often ’tis_
_In cruelty withheld._
This supplies the only case I know of in which the article “the” has been
used as a rhyme. But for sheer struggle the poem does not excel parts of
this other one, which was published in a recent anthology:
_Along a marsh a hungry crane_
_With patient steps, his way did take_
_Each cranny of the rivage fain_
_To ransack with his slender beak,_
_When, suddenly, his watchful eye,_
_At but four paces distance, saw_
_A worm, that back, as suddenly,_
_To his subterranean hole did draw._
_Nathless the crane did, straight, begin_
_His beak, and claw, alike, to ply_
_And hoping the retreat be, in_
_The end, of the insect might destroy,_
_The turf did tear up, and dispel_
_The clods, and with such vigour strive_
_That he, at last, perceives his bill_
_At of the cave the depth arrive;_
_But lo! just when of all his toil,_
_The object he was nigh to get,_
_Beneath his very nib, a mole,_
_Without ado, devoured it!_
_Thus often, lurchers, onward who_
_Are prone by shady ways to creep_
_May the reward to those that’s due_
_Who, openly, have acted, reap._