equally fitly have been entitled _The Apotheosis of the Comma_.
I have, as I say, insufficient scientific talent to enter upon an
analytic criticism of this kind of poetry; and in this brief discourse I
have done little more than string quotations together. But that operation
is all that is needed to serve my present object—viz. the propagation of
the cult. Any one who has ever read the novel of Mrs. Amanda M’Kittrick
Ros knows how much sustenance the human spirit may derive from the byways
of literature; but it is very rarely that one meets, even amongst the
best-read of men, one who is conscious of the peculiar poetic treasures
that lie about in the publishers’ offices and on the second-hand
bookstalls simply imploring to be collected.
More Badness
My appeal for interesting specimens of bad verse has brought me a large
mass of material; but most of my correspondents seem not to realize that
merely feeble and meaningless verse is so common as not to be worth
preserving. The best single line I have received—sent me by a notorious
dramatist who has forgotten its place of origin—is:
_The beetle booms adown the glooms and bumps among the clumps;_
and what promised to be the best whole poem is one that begins by rhyming
“Atlantic” to “blanket.” But when I had got through it I found that my
correspondent had got it out of a visitors’ book in an hotel. I really
cannot count anything that has not been properly published; although I
confess to being tempted by such lines as:
_Farewell, farewell, bonny St. Ives,_
_May I live to see you again,_
_Your air preserves people’s lives_
_And you have so little rain._
So really the best acquisition I have made is the following, the author
of which I should like to discover:
_In this imperfect, gloomy scene_
_Of complicated ill,_
_How rarely is a day serene,_
_The throbbing bosom still!_
_Will not a beauteous landscape bright_
_Or music’s soothing sound,_
_Console the heart, afford delight,_
_And throw sweet peace around?_
_They may; but never comfort lend_
_Like an accomplished female friend!_
_With such a friend the social hour_
_In sweetest pleasure glides;_
_There is, in female charms a power_
_Which lastingly abides;_
_The fragrance of the blushing rose,_
_Its tints and splendid hue,_
_Will, with the seasons, decompose,_
_And pass as flitting dew;_
_On firmer ties his joys depend_
_Who has a faithful female friend!_
_As orbs revolve, and years recede,_
_And seasons onward roll,_
_The fancy may on beauties feed_
_With discontented soul;_
_A thousand objects bright and fair_
_May for a moment shine,_
_Yet many a sigh and many a tear_
_But mark their swift decline;_
_While lasting joys the man attend_
_Who has a polished female friend!_
My correspondent says that he received this from a friend (perhaps a
polished female friend), who did not tell him whence it was extracted.
I myself have seen two lines of it before—the last two of the second
stanza. They occurred in a letter I received some time ago from a
clerical acquaintance who was apologizing for having got engaged. He, on
inquiry, pretended (with a mendacity very rare amongst clergymen) that he
had written the lines himself; but I did not believe him. The poem bears
the marks of the earlier decades of the nineteenth century. Can it be by
Thomas Haynes Bayly?
One interesting thing I should like to trace is a metrical version of
Holy Writ containing such lines as these on Jonah:
_Three dreadful days beneath the deep,_
_In fish’s belly dark lay he._
_How terrible methinks his fate._
_May no such torment fall on me._
The most ingenious writer who contributes the “Observator” column to the
_Observer_ offers me a couple of specimens, one of which is new to me.
The old one is the late Mr. Alfred Austin’s remark about Nature:
_She sins upon a larger scale_
_Because she is herself more large._
And the other, a touching narrative of a gipsy woman who fell ill, was a
discovery of Andrew Lang’s:
_There we leave her,_
_There we leave her,_
_Far from where her swarthy kindred roam,_
_In the Scarlet Fever,_
_Scarlet Fever,_
_Scarlet Fever Convalescent Home._
A Mystery Solved
Apparently the poem about “a polished female friend” is to be found in
one of Mr. E. V. Lucas’s books. It was written, it seems, by a parson
named Whur or Whurr, who flourished in Norfolk about a century ago. Whur
delighted in all calamities, and described a father, on the birth of a
child with no arms, exclaiming: “This armless child will ruin me.” No
one has yet brought to my notice any whole volumes of bad verse worth
acquiring, though various choice fragments have reached me. There is an
epithalamium ending:
_And never, never she’ll forget_
_The happy, happy day,_
_When in the church, before God’s priest,_
_She gave herself away._
There is an _in memoriam_ poem beginning:
_Dear Friends, we had a sudden Blast_
_Which came to us unexpected._
And there is a loyal song to their present Majesties in which occur the
lines:
_Our King and Queen are never proud_
_They mingle with the densest crowd._
But the most attractive new specimen is a poem on the late monarch’s
death. It was printed and sold as a broadsheet in London, and runs:
_The will of God we must obey._
_Dreadful—our King taken away!_
_The greatest friend of the nation,_
_Mighty monarch and protection!_
_Heavenly Father, help in sorrow_
_Queen Mother, and them to follow,_
_What to do without him who has gone!_
_Pray help! help! and do lead us on._
_Greatest sorrow England ever had_
_When death took away our Dear Dad;_
_A king was he from head to sole,_
_Loved by his people one and all._
_His mighty work for the Nation,_
_Making peace and strengthening union—_
_Always at it since on the throne:_
_Saved the country more than billion._
There are two more verses. Personally, I find this considerably more
interesting than any of Mr. Alfred Noyes’s various Coronation Odes.
Carrying the Alliance too far
Why is it that Japanese authors are allowed to write in English
newspapers any sort of barbarous jargon they like? Mr. Yoshio Markino
was the first to be licensed. To start with, one found his “delightfully
quaint” English amusing in a mild way, but with repetition his sedulously
cherished howlers became irritating. Still, he was only one; and
primarily a painter at that. But now Mr. Yone Noguchi has turned up, and
he is doing the same thing. Mr. Noguchi is considered in Japan—at least
so his friends tell us—the first poet of the day. Those who remembered
his last residence here assured us that on his return he would compel all
men—like Helen of Troy or Mr. Tagore. He comes. One is prepared to be
conquered. One turns to one’s _Westminster Gazette_ to read his works;
and one finds there columns of stuff, possibly inspired, but certainly
written in such pidgin-English that one cannot bother to read it.
Mr. Noguchi’s pidgin-English is not of quite so curious a breed as Mr.
Markino’s, but it is sufficiently bad. One does not blame him for that.
He writes English a great deal better than I do Japanese. But why on
earth cannot the newspapers who print his works translate them into
normal English? Is it that their sub-editors shrink from the task? Is it
that they fondly believe that we are all so fascinated by English of the
Noguchi-Markinesque brand that we had much rather have it than any other
sort; or is it that a tradition has been established that Anglo-Japanese
articles are not to be altered? If this is true, it is a thousand pities
that, for all their charm, Mr. Markino’s early productions were not
unmercifully damned. What should we say if newspapers began printing in
all their native crudity articles by Frenchmen and Germans imperfectly
acquainted with the tongue of this country? Suppose some journal came out
next week with an essay beginning:
“What sadly fall the leaves of automne! What of sadness tumble
on the heart because that the winter put his snows on all the
country. And sad also the spring, the spring who arouse the
love in the soul, and who make to think to all the springs of
the time past. My heart weep like a bird who have lose her
companion.”
Or suppose a German were allowed by the _Westminster_ to present its
readers with a political article opening:
“No Dutcher has the by Mr. Gamaliel Zoop, Amerikansh
postaltelegrafkommunikationdepartment minister on
politishekonomy famose lecture to a at Manchester
people-coming-together delivered recently without outerorderly
pleasure read.”
Obviously we should not tolerate it. Can it be that, even after the
war with Russia, even after Japanese professors have written works on
sociology, the superstition lingers here that a thing cannot possibly be
truly Japanese unless it has the odour of an old curiosity shop?
None of this, I may say, is meant to be discourteous to Mr. Noguchi.
I merely suggest that it would be better for him if he vetoed every
endeavour to print his English articles as he writes them. If he were
the Japanese Homer—indeed, he may be that for all I know—I should say
precisely the same thing. Can he be aware that even his faulty spelling
goes uncorrected?
May 1914
I write “these lines” just after arriving in Berlin. Not that I have
anything to say about that. I merely mention the fact. It may explain
my difficulties. The journey is really very dull. All those hundreds of
miles over the Great Plain of Europe with never a hill except the ridge
of Minden, very little water, nothing but endless flat fields sprinkled
with trees, church spires, and red farm-houses. There is simply nothing
to look at. If you put your head out of the window at Osnabrück, you may
see some coal; and at Münster you may, if you choose, speculate as to
which of the people on the platform are Anabaptists. That is not much
during a twelve-hour run from Flushing.
A pleasant travelling companion is an alleviation on such occasions. The
other occupant of my carriage had points about her. She was a young,
cheerful, and rather obese Jewess going home with a plethora of scarves
and wraps, several boxes, two lobsters (for her father), and a canary.
At Goch she was incensed to find that she had to pay a heavy duty on
the lobsters, so heavy that it would have paid her better to get the
creatures in Berlin and have a drink on the balance. This story might
make an illustration for one of Mr. Lloyd George’s homely speeches on
Free Trade. But there was no duty on the canary. In his little cage,
covered with a green curtain, the canary sat, non-dutiable but very
phlegmatic. At frequent intervals his mistress lifted the green curtain,
looked him in the eyes with a bewitching smile, and piped “Peep, Peep.”
The bird never replied, though perhaps he looked his response. The lady
then turned to me and said, “Is ’e not a nice bird? Is ’e not goot?” and
common politeness—leaving gallantry out of the question—compelled me to
reply always, “Yes, a beautiful little bird.” About twice an hour she
retired to the dining-car and came back exuding smiles and sighs “I half
joost ’ad a bifsteck. I dawn’t like steck.” How true it is that in life
we have to be content with second-bests! But I did not discuss the matter.
In intervals of silence I finished Mrs. Russell Barrington’s _Life of
Walter Bagehot_ (Longmans, 12s. 6d. net). It is a strange thing—and
unfortunate, since so much material has disappeared with the passage
of time—that Bagehot should have had to wait nearly forty years for a
biography. But now it has come it is an interesting one. The author
being Bagehot’s sister-in-law (daughter of James Wilson, who founded the
_Economist_), the work has rather a family air. Bagehot’s more obvious
virtues are a little too much insisted upon, and excessive importance is
attributed to irrelevant details. The long description of his ancestry
and birthplace, for instance, might have been curtailed. But the _Life_
is well written; it contains a great many interesting letters, and it
gives a really living picture of one whom Lord Bryce has called “the most
original mind of his generation.”
One would wish, however, for a supplement giving a fuller analysis of
Bagehot’s literary work. Mrs. Barrington gives little more than a list
of the titles of his essays. It is true that to most people Bagehot
is still primarily the political and economic writer. There are few
intelligent Englishmen to-day who have not been influenced by _The
English Constitution_ and, in a lesser degree, by _Physics and Politics_.
His _Economic Studies_ make the rudiments of political economy as simple
and even as entertaining as a good fairy-tale, and those who have read
_Lombard Street_ speak of it as a masterpiece. But the most extraordinary
thing about it is that this man, who knew all about currency, who was in
the confidence of Chancellors of the Exchequer, and who invented Treasury
Bills, was also one of the most illuminating and sympathetic literary
critics that England has ever produced. Personally I find his literary
essays inferior to those of no other English critic who was not himself
a poet, and I think that in some respects, though not in all, they are
better than Arnold’s.
Probably Bagehot’s celebrity as an economist militated for some years
after his death against the popularity of his literary work. Many
literary people, looking through the complete list of his works, and
seeing _Literary and Biographical Studies_ jostling shoulders with
works on money, may very pardonably have assumed that these Studies,
however able, must have been of a dry, hard character. They are very
far from that; no English criticism is more human than his, less coldly
intellectual; his temperament, naturally emotional and mystical, was most
valuably reinforced by the balance, the tolerance, the sanity that were
developed by his more mundane activities, but the temporal man in him
never overcame the eternal. Such essays as those on Hartley Coleridge,
on Shelley, on Dickens, on Cowper, on the _Edinburgh_ Reviewers, are
bound before long to be recognized as among the great classics of English
criticism. Naturally he was not impeccable; posterity may think, for
example, that he attached too much importance to his friend Clough. But
he is usually completely convincing. Take the following passage from the
comparison of Wordsworth and Jeffrey:
“A clear, precise, discriminating intellect shrinks at
once from the symbolic, the unfounded, the indefinite. The
misfortune is that mysticism is true. There certainly are
kinds of truths, borne in as it were instinctively on the
human intellect, most influential on the character and the
heart, yet hardly capable of stringent statement, difficult
to limit by an elaborate definition. Their course is shadowy;
the mind seems rather to have seen than to see them, more
to feel after than definitely apprehend them. They commonly
involve an infinite element which, of course, cannot be stated
precisely, or else a first principle—an original tendency
of our intellectual constitution, which it is impossible
not to feel, and yet which it is hard to extricate in terms
and words. Of this latter kind is what has been called the
religion of Nature, or more exactly, perhaps, the religion
of the imagination. This is an interpretation of the world.
Accordingly, to it the beauty of the universe has a meaning,
its grandeur a soul, and its sublimity an expression. As we
gaze on the faces of those whom we love; as we watch the light
of life in the dawning of their eyes, and the play of their
features, and the wildness of their animation; as we trace in
changing lineaments a varying sign; as a charm and a thrill
seem to run along the tone of a voice, to haunt the mind with a
mere word; as a tone seems to roar in the ear; as a trembling
fancy hears words that are unspoken; so in Nature the mystical
sense finds a motion in the mountain, and a power in the
waves, and a meaning in the long white line of the shore, and
a thought in the blue of heaven, and a gushing soul in the
buoyant light, an unbounded being in the vast void of air, and
_Wakeful watching in the pointed stars_
“There is a philosophy in this which might be explained, if
explaining were to our purpose. It might be advanced that there
are original sources of expression in the essential grandeur
and sublimity of Nature, of an analogous though fainter kind
to those familiar, inexplicable signs by which we trace in
the very face and outward lineaments of man the existence
and working of the mind within. But be this as it may, it is
certain that Mr. Wordsworth preached this kind of religion and
that Lord Jeffrey did not believe a word of it.”
The visionary and the epigrammatist are near allied, and both the
practical and the ideal in Bagehot are illustrated in his own phrase:
“If you would vanquish Earth, you must invent Heaven.” Bagehot, as he
appeared to ordinary people every day, is portrayed in another sentence.
“He left many,” it is said, “with the idea that he was a good fellow, yet
with no idea that he was a great man.” A great man can have no better
epitaph.
May 1914: The Leipzig Exhibition
Any one who imagines that the English can, or at all events do, compete
with the Germans in beauty of book-production had better go to Leipzig
this summer and visit the Buchgewerbe und Graphik Exhibition—or “Bugra,”
as it is universally called in Germany. The new railway station—the
finest in the world—is also worth going to see; but that, presumably,
will last after this year. In many respects the exhibition is like
all other big exhibitions. It is much too enormous to be capable of
thorough inspection. Leaving out of account the huge buildings devoted
to the mechanics of printing and so on, there are a palace (“The Hall
of _Kultur_,” of course), filled with engravings and photographs; a
colossal structure containing the exhibits of German publishers of books
and music; and pavilions for most of the other nations of the earth.
Even Corea has a building—though I did not see it—and Siam is well to
the fore. The exhibition grounds are very extensive; they contain (need
I say?) a “Street of Nations,” many fountains, and countless cafés.
There is a reproduction of Heidelberg Castle, full of drinking-cups and
the weapons with which German students put a little interest into each
other’s faces. There is a Bavarian Hall, where real peasant maidens bring
your beer and the latest and cheapest musical-comedy tunes are played
by real peasant musicians, with feathered hats and costume complete
down to the bare knees that they insist on retaining in the face of a
proclamation by the local Catholic hierarchs to the effect that such a
display of naked charms is grossly indecent. There is no wiggle-woggle,
but there is a waterchute and a shooting-gallery whose proprietors invite
you to come in and try your skill at “live objects.” The man who was
with me—he is a person who, like Mr. Galsworthy, would not touch a fly
“save” (as the old verse has it) “in the way of kindness,”—refused to
come in. Naïvely distrustful of aliens he was afraid, he said, that the
targets might be dogs. But he need not have been alarmed, for we were
afterwards informed that they were merely big game thrown on a screen by
a cinematograph. When you hit an animal it did not drop, but a red light
showed.
Naturally comparisons between the exhibits should be made very
cautiously; the exhibition is being held on German soil and the German
display is much larger than any other. In many respects England shows up
very well. The English section in the _Halle der Kultur_ is certainly as
good as any, and the etchings shown by Mr. Muirhead Bone, Mr. Charles
Shannon, Sir Charles Holroyd, and other British artists are possibly
the very best things in the place. The main English exhibit is housed
in a pleasant Tudor building with some beautiful rooms. The Shakespeare
exhibit of editions and portraits is most interesting for those who
like that sort of thing; a fine collection of original Beardsley
drawings has been lent by Mr. Lane; the Caxtons are coming; there are
admirable specimens of the works of the Kelmscott, Riccardi, Florence,
and other presses; there is a gallery of Medici prints unsurpassed by
any colour-reproductions in the exhibition (the print of the Dresden
Van Eyck triptych is the most completely satisfying colour-print I
have ever seen); and the elaborate bindings by Riviere’s, the Oxford
Press, and other establishments are not inferior even to the exquisite
leather bindings by Noulhac and R. Kieffer shown in the French building.
Everything our officials could have done has been done to perfection;
and the special exhibits have been very well chosen. Where we fall sadly
short is in the ordinary book of commerce.
I cannot but think that the English publishers who have taken
stalls—and, of course, the selection of exhibits here had to be left
to the publishers themselves—could have brought together a more
attractive-looking lot of books than they have done. Most of them—I
mention no names—seem to have bundled together their books without
any consideration either of the contents or of the appearance of the
volumes. Of course there are English publishers who have no fine books
and few decent-looking books on their lists; but some of the specimens
at Leipzig look almost like remnants which it is hoped to sell off to
visitors. But even if all the English publishers had shown all their
best books, and none of their worst, they would still have been put in
the shade by the Germans. Even the French publishers—whose achievements
in typography and in illustration have been great—are not now fit to be
mentioned in the same breath as the Germans.
The German exhibits are a revelation. The mid-Victorian tradition in
print and design—which was so tenacious in Germany—has now been almost
completely abandoned. I don’t suggest that all German books are more
presentable than English ones. Scientific works, theology, and shilling
fiction are equally ugly in both countries. But there are to-day in
Berlin, Leipzig, and Munich at least a dozen firms publishing for the
ordinary market books whose average of beauty is far higher than that
reached by the books of any considerable English publishing firm. Many
thousands of really beautiful new books are now being produced every
year in Germany; and of what can be done, especially in the way of
making cheap books look presentable, our own publishers have no idea.
There is, of course, a much larger educated reading public in Germany
than in England. In every bookshop you are confronted by volumes of
Dehmel, Hofmannsthal, and other writers who, were they Englishmen, would
never reach large circles of readers in their lifetimes. Anthologies of
contemporary German poets sell literally by tens of thousands; and you
can even get an infinite variety of doses of classical and modern authors
by dropping pennies into automatic machines on the stations. This much
may be admitted: that there is a larger literary public and more interest
in contemporary art, literary and pictorial. But, even granting all that,
the German publishers in meeting the market have shown a taste, and above
all an enterprise (sometimes reaching audacity, no doubt), which most of
our own publishers have never revealed in the slightest degree.
To give a full account of the show is beyond my ability, desire,
and space. But in looking at the latest products of commercial
colour-printing in the French pavilion I was struck by the extraordinary
divorce between craftsmanship and taste in modern industry. Here were
some of the vilest pictures (I don’t mean morally) ever moulded by the
mind of man; yet the experts were raving over them as being the last word
in their own kind of colour-process. Needless to say, the exhibition,
not being half over, is not yet completely ready. The Italian pavilion,
when I was at the exhibition, could not be entered at all, and there were
other lacunæ all over the place. This is the kind of thing that makes
the whole world kin.
Amongst the German authors whose portraits grace the walls of the
exhibition is Mr. George Bernard Shaw. They have naturalized him, like
Shakespeare, and the next thing will certainly be a statue at Weimar.