panoramas. In all three the author depended on succulent or flamboyant
“purple patches” for his effects, descriptions too full of redundant
metaphor and violent outbursts of picturesque but too flimsy rhetoric.
There was little characterization in them, the persons were puppets in
the hands of the contriver of stage spectacles: they were carried off
by brilliant and exotic scenery and costumes, by the romantic language,
and by the real and skilful, if conventional, melody of the verse. All
the best qualities of Stephen Phillips, the qualities that gave people
a thrill they were unaccustomed to in the theatre of his time, are
quintessentialized in Herod’s megalomaniac speeches and in the oratorical
Marlowesque remark that one of the suitors in _Ulysses_ made to Penelope:
_Thou hast caught splendour from the sailless sea_
_And mystery from the many stars outwatched._
His defects were observed by few when he was a popular dramatist: but
those readers who only know him by his later work will misjudge him if
they think that he never had more power than he showed in that. His
more recent volumes, written in ill-health, would never have got him a
reputation. Here and there the old bravura appeared, and there is a short
lyric in the volume of 1913 which is certainly equal to anything in the
early book of poems with which he made his name—and in which he showed
signs of contact with the “movement” of the ’nineties. But from most of
these later poems the life had gone, leaving the imitative structure
naked to the eye. His last volume, _Panama and other Poems_, was issued
just before he died by his original publisher, Mr. John Lane; and the way
in which he had succumbed to his influences was very evident. Lines on
the Canal such as
_Chagres by Dam stupendous of Gatun_
not merely remind one of Milton but are exact mechanical reproductions of
Milton.
Incidentally the difficulties of literary biography are illustrated
by his obituary notices. _My Daily News_ gave his age as forty-nine,
my _Times_ gave it as fifty-one; and looking into the _Encyclopædia
Britannica_ to see which of these estimates it would confirm, I found
that it alleged him to be forty-seven. _The Encyclopædia_ says that he
was at Queens’ College, Cambridge, when he joined Mr. Benson’s company;
the _Times_ that he was cramming at Scoones’. When we have this conflict
of evidence about a contemporary who was known personally to hundreds of
people in London, where are we with Elizabethans and Romans? Personally
I believe that, in the matter of birth-dates, nothing is really
reliable—not even a man’s own statement—except public registers.
Gray and Horace Walpole
If a gentleman in Calabria digs up with a spade a hitherto unknown
fragment of the obscure Latin historian P. Pomponius Fatto there is
great excitement about it, and research congratulates itself upon its
achievements. I can quite appreciate the feeling. All treasure-trove
is exciting. The smallest recovery from the long-buried past is worth
having; it may, in itself, fill a gap somewhere and encourages the hope
of greater finds. But why not make just as much of a palaver about Dr.
Paget Toynbee’s disinterment of nearly a hundred “new” letters by the
poet Gray? The new letters are included in _The Correspondence of Gray,
Walpole, West, and Ashton_ (Oxford University Press, 2 vols.); and
they were found in the collection of Captain Sir F. E. Waller, who was
recently killed in action, and to whose memory the volume is dedicated.
Gray, Horace Walpole, Richard West, and Thomas Ashton formed a “Quadruple
Alliance” at Eton. West went on to Oxford, the other three to Cambridge.
We get first of all an exchange between all four; then West dies, in his
twenties; then, years afterwards, relations with Ashton are broken; and,
finally, there is a long series that passed between Walpole and Gray up
to the time of the poet’s death in 1771. In all there are 248 letters;
of these 153 were written by Gray, eighty-nine of which have never been
published before. Others have never before been printed in full, and few
have escaped maltreatment by previous editors. Their errors ranged from
deliberate alteration, truncation, and blending to bad transcription and
unintelligent acceptance. How easily the most comic errors may creep into
a text where each editor neglects to use, or has not access to, original
sources may be shown by the history of a single word. Gray wrote a Latin
poem about the god of Love in which one line began “Ludentem fuge.”
This was printed by Miss Berry as “Sudentem fuge”; and this has been
“corrected” by subsequent editors into “_Sudantem fuge_”!
The characters of the correspondents come out very clearly. Even when,
just after they have left school, they are all writing rather affectedly
(and with a plethora of classical quotation), Ashton is obviously the one
fundamentally insincere member of the group. He is hyperself-conscious,
nastily artificial. Later on he even refers in Joseph Surface’s very own
words to his “noble sentiments”: this was clearly the man to make, by
his double-dealing, the temporary breach between Gray and Walpole, and,
ultimately, to compel Walpole to cast him off by his incivility when
Walpole was no longer useful to him. Richard West, son of an Irish Lord
Chancellor, has no apparent defect save excessive seriousness. There is
a touch of the priggish mixed with the high-mindedness and generosity
of this able young invalid; but one can understand Gray’s devotion to
him. Some of the poetry of his here given (he appeared in Dodsley’s
_Miscellany_ by the way) is surprisingly good. He was the Arthur Hallam
of the eighteenth century.
The Walpole letters are, as always, unsurpassable of their kind. His
undergraduate letter (in parody of Addison’s descriptions of Italy)
relating a journey from London to Cambridge, is admirable; but the
letters describing his continental tour with Gray are better, and
those, still later, about the _beau monde_ of Paris are perfect. There
is a peculiar charm too about the correspondence with Gray as to the
details and publication of his works, the half-solemn, half whimsical
concentration on the tiny antiquarian details to which each was addicted,
the eager little controversies and explorations, the odd little jokes.
But though Gray, taking his correspondence as a whole, considering both
volume, range, and formal excellence, cannot contest Walpole’s position
as the greatest of English letter-writers, there is a flavour about his
letters that makes them peculiarly delightful. Walpole writes fully
dressed, though with exquisite manner; Gray writes naturally, and without
obvious reserve sometimes even gambolling. There may be people, familiar
with Gray only through his elevated and sombre verse, who fancy him an
exceedingly self-contained and formal man, who feel (like the person
who greatly amused him by addressing him as “The Rev. T. Gray”) that he
simply _must_ have been a divine. There were certainly contemporaries
of his who met him and got the impression that he was constitutionally
grave, reticent, aloof. His letters show that he was anything but that
to his friends. The author of the _Elegy_ habitually “played the goat.”
There are a whole string of skit letters here: in one he writes to
Walpole as “Honner’d Nurse,” addressing the illiterate screed “to mie
Nuss att London”; in another he wallows in Oriental imagery about the dew
of the morning; in another he applies to stagnant Cambridge a whole long
passage from Isaiah describing deserted Babylon, the home of dragons and
haunt of screech-owls. He had a great habit of ending his letters with
something openly idiotic. Once he bursts out with “Pray, did you ever see
an elephant?”; another time his peroration is:
“The Assizes are just over. I was there; but I a’nt to be
transported. Adieu!”
and another excursion concludes with a ludicrous burlesque of the type of
commonplaces usually to be found in letters:
“There is a curious woman here that spins Glass, and makes
short Aprons and furbelow’d petticoats of it, a very genteel
wear for summer, & discover’s all the motions of the limbs to
great advantage. She is a successour of Jack, the Aple dumpling
Spinner’s: my Duck has eat a Snail &c.: & I am—yours sincerely
T. G.”
Those who think of poets as persons without humour who live in a
permanent exaltation and are quite unlike reasonable beings will be
shocked with Gray’s remarks when he had, to the publisher’s alarm,
withdrawn a poem from his forthcoming small volume:
“but to supply the place of it in bulk, lest my work should
be mistaken for the works of a flea or a pismire, I promised
to send him an equal weight of poetry or prose: so, since my
return hither, I put up about two ounces of stuff: viz. The
Fatal Sisters, The Descent of Odin ... with all this I shall be
but a shrimp of an author.”
On a night nine years before this, General Wolfe, as his boat crept
towards the Quebec bank of St. Lawrence, had recited the _Elegy_ to his
companions and told them that he had rather have written that poem than
take Quebec.
Gray’s judgments on other authors (though he was unjust to the more
fermentative kind of Frenchman) were uniformly good. He suspected
Ossian, but hoped he was a fraud for the sake of the jest. If, he
said, Macpherson had done it all to hoax fools, “I would undertake a
journey into the Highlands only for the pleasure of seeing him.” He read
Boswell’s early book on Corsica and almost prophetically observed:
“The pamphlet proves what I have always maintained, that any
fool may write a most valuable book by chance, if he will only
tell us what he heard and saw with veracity.”
In politics he was interested only mildly, but he liked to gossip about
them. “Do oblige me,” he writes to Walpole,
“with a change in the Ministry: I mean, something one may tell,
that looks as if it were near at hand; or if there is no truth
to be had, then a good likely falsehood for the same purpose. I
am sorry to be so reduced.”
“A good likely falsehood”: is it not in perpetual demand?
A Horrible Bookseller
People often complain that booksellers know too little about the goods
they sell. If only, the argument is, books were sold by men of taste,
familiar with their contents, the public would buy more good literature:
as things are, the blind bookseller leads the blind customer. There is
something in this. An educated bookseller can actually educate other
people. Many intelligent young persons reach the age of twenty-one
without having met a single person with the habit of good reading, and
do not “get on to” literature because it has never been suggested to
them that they will like it. Booksellers may act as teachers. There are
booksellers, though not many, who make a practice of “nursing” promising
young customers, gradually cultivating their taste until they become
confirmed book-lovers and book-buyers. One such complained to me not long
ago that he had had scores of likely colts taken away from him by Lord
Kitchener, and did not know how many of them would come back. That is an
ideal sort of man for the trade in modern literature. One might say, in
fact, that in a perfect world (from the book-buyer’s point of view) the
dealers in new books would know everything about books, and the dealers
in old books would know nothing whatever about them. The point of this
last subsection is obvious, but the other day I had an experience that
greatly fortified my view. I had often met the second-hand bookseller
whose learning prevented one from buying anything cheap from him; I have
now encountered one whose interest in his subject prevented one from
buying anything at all.
He was not so much a really learned man as a man with what is called
“an inexhaustible fund of information.” It is quite possible that if
he had had a real rarity in his shop he would have known nothing about
it. But about the promiscuity of his reading there was no doubt. When I
entered the shop he was seated at a table absorbing something that looked
as if it might be the Travels of Livingstone or Speke. His spectacles
were on his forehead, his elbows on the table, his hands in his hair;
and his beard almost touched his book. “Do you mind if I go through?”
I said. “Sairtainly,” he said, betraying his origin. “And what may you
be interested in?” “Oh ... books,” I replied vaguely. “That is a verra
conseederable category,” he observed. Was it poetry I liked? he went
on. I murmured “Yes,” and he led me to the place where he kept it. But
before I had got my fingers on a book he made it evident that it was he
and not I that was going to have the “look round.” Here, for example,
was a volume of Kirke White. Had I ever read him? How wonderful was that
hymn (quoted at length) of his! What a career! He was a butcher’s son
and a lawyer’s clerk. He had a gift for mathematics, and they gave him a
sizarship at Cambridge. He would have been one of the greatest figures in
English literature had he lived. Was I interested in Italian books? Well,
then, perhaps I would like a good copy of (!!!) _I Promessi Sposi_. It
was extraordinary the number of copies of that book which must have been
printed. But there was no supply without a demand.
I tried in vain to check the torrent with some sort of remark which,
though polite, might, nevertheless, have an air of finality. It was no
good. My fingers never got beyond touching the back of a book before he
had taken down another, pulled me round, and fixed me with a glittering
eye for which the Ancient Mariner himself would have been tempted to
offer a large sum. Godwin, now. Did I like _Caleb Williams_? Yes, of
course! But had I read his History of England? It was by way of being
a reply to Clarendon. Clarendon was a great writer. But he was not
impartial. And the worst of it was that he seemed to be impartial when
he was most unfair. When he was sacrificing everything for his King he
little thought how his loyalty would be rewarded. He was too moral for
Charles II; but, what was worse, he kept the purse-strings too tight.
He would not give him money for one of his mistresses. Was it Barbara
Palmer? No, it was not Barbara Palmer, and it was not Nelly Gwyn. At any
rate, it was one of them. And when, in the end, the grant was made to
her, she died before she got the money!
This appeared to amuse the old man. When he had laughed himself out,
it was to resume with some work, dated 1784, which contained a recipe
for making a Prime Minister: the chief ingredients being hypocrisy,
mendacity, corruption, and cant. This opened up a large field of
speculation. Who was Premier in 1784? Why, of course, it was young Billy
Pitt! (“Yes,” I said.) No, it was Rockingham. (“Yes,” I said.) No, it
wasn’t; it was Bute. So it proceeded. I spent, in all, two hours in
that shop; in the course of which time I had stolen glances at about
six worthless books. For all I know it was as full of gems of purest
ray serene as are the dark unfathomed caves of ocean. I left without
making a single purchase, and the proprietor seemed quite hurt at this
unfriendly response to his attentions. How that old man earns his living
I don’t know. I think he must have private means. But in future I shall
have a warmer feeling than ever for the sort of red-nosed second-hand
bookseller, now, unfortunately, not very common, who knows only the
outsides of books, and who sits smoking on a heap of rubbish in the
corner of his shop with the air of a tramp resting on a roadside pile of
stones.
The Troubles of a Catholic
Being at the moment in bed with influenza, I was at once incapable of
intellectual effort and in need of spiritual sustenance. I had therefore
been reading a little Theology. The more modern works of the kind in
my possession are at once too profound in thought and too arid in
phraseology, so I worked rapidly backwards. One never knows what one is
going to come across, and in the beginning of _A Just Discharge to Dr.
Stillingfleet’s Unjust Charge of Idolatry Against the Church of Rome with
a Discovery of the Vanity of his late Defense in his Pretended Answer
to a Book Entitled Catholicks No Idolaters By way of Dialogue Between
Eunomius, a Conformist, and Catharinus, a Nonconformist_, I struck a
very pathetic thing. The work was written, I believe, by the Catholic
controversialist Godden, and published in 1677. At that time it was
difficult for Catholics to get anything out in England, and this work was
published at Paris. Hence the unhappy author’s statement about “Errata”:
“The English Press being watch’d of late, as the Orchard of
the Hesperides was of old, and a necessity arising from thence
of making use of a Paris Printer, who understands not a word
of English, the Reader will have no cause to wonder, if he
sometimes meet with _ant_ for _and_, _bu_ for _but_, _te_ for
_the_, _is_ for _it_, _tit_ for _tis_, _wish_ for _with_, etc.,
and oftentimes with false Pointings, words unduly joined, and
syllables un-artificially divided at the end of lines, as
_Ro-me_, _appropria-te_, and the like. I can assure him, the
Correction of the Press cost little less pains than the writing
of the Treatise.”
In that century a great many English books were printed on the Continent,
at Paris, Douai, and elsewhere; and the situation thus candidly explained
must have been a common one. A collection of English books printed
abroad, which would be interesting for other reasons, might also have an
added interest as a repository of comic misprints. But my disease must
have brought me very low that I can spend my time thinking of that.
The Bible as Raw Material
Mr. George Moore’s new novel, _The Brook Kerith_, is a Biblical story.
Mr. Moore has adopted the legend which says that Our Lord survived the
Crucifixion. He is taken away alive and joins a colony of the Essenes,
complications afterwards arising with St. Paul. The book is named after
the site of the Essene settlement; Mr. Moore personally toured the Holy
Land looking for a really eligible position. The story opens with a
description of the boyhood of Joseph of Arimathea: a beginning which at
least avoids the reproach of being obvious.
One might almost say that literature about Biblical personages can only
hope to be good if its writers either deal with episodes that are not
related in the Bible or if they tell the Bible stories from an entirely
novel and unconventional point of view. Anatole France’s story about
Pontius Pilate, _The Procurator of Judaea_, has this last quality, and
owes its success mainly to the odd and unexpected angle from which the
subject is approached. The unusual angle we may at least expect from
Mr. George Moore. Attempts at covering the same ground as the Bible, at
amplifying an already fine thing, are almost predestined to failure. One
can understand the temptation. A modern writer comes across a noble story
or a fine lyric passage, and thinks, “What a scandal that this should
be buried away out of sight in the Old Testament! It is just the theme
for me.” The lure is so strong that one contemporary poet has attempted,
and failed (through not ignominiously), to rewrite David’s Lament for
Jonathan, and another has endeavoured to adapt the dramatic poem _Job_ to
the modern stage. It was a lamentable affair, redeemed only from complete
inconspicuousness by a highly incongruous chorus inspired by Swinburne
and by an arresting entry of Satan with the salutation:
_Ho Job! How goes it?_
No modern—but I have not thoroughly ransacked my memory—has really
succeeded in rewriting a Bible story. The most striking of recent efforts
was Mr. Sturge Moore’s _Judith_. Mr. Robert Trevelyan’s poem, _The
Foolishness of Solomon_ (a title that, for some vague reason, I always
resent), belonged to the other class of works dealing with Biblical
personages (though he brought in a Chinese mandarin as well), but not
on the Biblical lines. The most recent effort at elaborate treatment of
the New Testament story was, I suppose, Maeterlinck’s _Mary Magdalene_.
But in spite of its unorthodoxy and the novelty (at least as far as the
Bible is concerned, for some of it was borrowed from a German) of the
incidents, that play scarcely competed, in point of dialogue or dramatic
force, with the more old-fashioned narratives of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and
John.
Milton is the one English writer who has done anything with Biblical
materials on a large scale. It will be observed, however, that in
_Paradise Lost_ he enormously elaborated the story in Genesis; that his
Adam and Eve are somewhat colourless; and that the finest parts of his
poem are not directly concerned with “man’s first disobedience and the
fruit,” but deal with regions into which the author of Genesis did not
penetrate. In _Samson Agonistes_ he did take a story from the Bible and
make out of it a work of art equal to almost anything in our language.
Byron’s _Cain_ might mostly have been about Nietzsche for all the
connexion it has with the Bible: but it is not very good. Almost every
fine subject in the Scriptures must have been attacked at one time or
another. There have been a few good short Biblical poems, like Browning’s
_Saul_. But the only other really reputable Biblical poem on a large
scale that I can think of is Charles Wells’s _Joseph and His Brethren_,
which has strength as a story and some passages of fine imagery. Wells
belonged to the generation of Keats and lived on into our own time. He
was an engineer, stopped writing when young, and was admired by Rossetti
and Swinburne. His poem, however, cannot really be considered such good
reading as the Bible account of the same story. One of the episodes
that came within his purview, that of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, has
been a subject for poets in all ages. The last endeavour that I can
recall to make something out of it was a somewhat bejewelled one of
Sir Edwin Arnold’s. The longest, I should think, is Joshua Sylvester’s
intolerably tedious series of couplets entitled _The Maiden’s Blush_.
Why he conferred that title upon such a poem I don’t know, unless he was
thinking of what might happen to the less robust of his female readers.
Those parts of Holy Writ which are of purely historical interest have not
been freely drawn on by English writers. I don’t remember that much has
been done with the Maccabees, and the chronicles of the Kings of Israel,
which supplied Racine with a subject for his _Athalie_, have left English
writers cold. Jehu drove furiously, Jeroboam the son of Nebat made Israel
to sin, and Rehoboam afflicted his people with scorpions instead of
whips; but their violence does not seem to fire the poetic imagination as
does that of Herod, about whom we know very little more. But Herod, of
course, was fond of the Russian ballet; which brings him closer to us.
How to avoid Bad English
Good books on the practice of writing are rare. Sir A. Quiller-Couch’s
_On the Art of Writing_ is extraordinarily good. It contains the lectures
he delivered at Cambridge just before the war; and even readers who do
not desire to write at all will find Sir Arthur’s jokes very amusing
and his criticisms, general and particular, sound and (what is more
unusual) new. He touches a great variety of subjects, though always in
some relation to the main theme. He is especially illuminating on the
Authorized Version, and on Homer’s skill in dealing with the “Primary
Difficulty of Verse”—that is to say, the difficulty of filling up the
interstices between highly emotional passages without lapsing into dull
prosiness. His most diverting chapter is that on what he calls “Jargon,”
which he distinguishes from Journalese. The distinction he draws may
be appreciated if I concoct examples of both commodities. Writing in
“Jargon” I might say:
“In the case of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch I am proud and happy
to associate myself in the fullest sense with a work of this
useful, elevating, instructive, and educative character.”
Writing in Journalese, as he defines it, I might say:
“‘Q.’s brilliant book goes to the root of the matter. It
strikes home. He is out to slay the dragons of bad writing.
He burns them with the fire of his passion. He lashes them
with the scourge of his invective. He tears them to shreds and
tatters with the shrapnel of his ridicule. He will not sheathe
the sword until ...”