them. Always the sage is a bland and upright man; the _mens conscia
recti_ typified. But never a sign of eloquence or fire; of the
magnificent oratory of his great passages, of the music and profound
tenderness which are so profuse in his poetry. Not a sign of stress;
not a mark of any but the most complacent vicarage thought; no passion,
no enthusiasm, no challenge, and no response. It is not to be explained
away, as Professor Harper attempts to explain it away, by saying that
the myth of “Daddy Wordsworth” (as FitzGerald called him) is based on a
disproportionate view of his life. Professor Harper thinks that far too
little attention has been paid to his early revolutionary period, when
the ideals of the French Revolution gripped him, and far too much to his
later period of orthodoxy and respectability. Professor Harper himself
attempts to redress the balance. He gives as full an account as he can of
the earlier Wordsworth and of his relations with Revolutionary France.
But, as Wordsworth’s French friends would have said (provided they were
not ashamed of using such a worn-out tag) _plus ça change plus c’est la
même chose_. The early Wordsworth may have been a different being; but
Professor Harper certainly does not prove that he was. From birth to
death in this biography he appears as the same high-minded, staid, sober,
solemn monument. He joined in the Revolution not so much a “kid-glove
revolutionary” as a woollen-glove and warm comforter revolutionary. Had
he stayed in France he might have made even the Terror respectable.
On myself and on others Wordsworth’s portraits and his biographies always
leave this sort of impression: the impression of an old bore to whom
one would not be rude simply and solely because one would not willingly
hurt the feelings of a person so worthy. And then one goes back to his
poetry—and his prose—and hears a voice of almost unsurpassed grandeur
speaking the deepest of one’s unexpressed thoughts, appealing to and
drawing out all the divinest powers in man’s nature. Of his greatness
surely no rational and unbiassed being could entertain the slightest
doubt. He is not so popular or so frequently read as some poets, and that
is not difficult to explain. His absence of humour, or an equivalent
vivacity, is not in itself an explanation; but the accompanying general
absence of any luxurious appeal to the senses is. He speaks direct to the
labouring intellect and the sensitive heart; and the enjoyment of him, if
great, is usually enjoyment of the austerer kind, like mountain-climbing.
There is nothing soft or enervating or luxurious which can make reading
him an æsthetic debauch. He does not often sing to a tune which gives
one pleasure even if one does not attend to the words. Without being in
the least obscure he demands an effort from the reader parallel to his
own. That, at least as much as the tediousness of many of his writings
(and his irritating classification of them), is the reason of his
comparative lack of popularity. But ...
Henry James’s Obscurity
Henry James’s last work was his essay on Rupert Brooke, written as an
introduction to _Letters from America_. Mr. James’s essay is a personal
appreciation, and not in any way a biographical memoir. Such a memoir, by
another hand, will follow. Mr. James left unfinished two novels, and a
third volume of the series begun with _A Small Boy and Others_ and _Notes
of a Son and Brother_.
Presumably the public (which might well make a start with the short
stories of which Mr. Secker has already published eight half-crown
volumes, very pleasant to the eye) will at last begin to buy James’s
novels. They have certainly not bought them in the past. He was, in
critical circles, almost universally recognized as one of the three or
four greatest of English writers living a week ago. But some of his books
had not even gone into a second edition. He was intermittently talked
about in the Press. Fifteen years or so ago he had a boom of the sort;
then there was a period of comparative newspaper obscurity; in the last
three or four years he suddenly and silently, like a star appearing from
behind a cloud, took his unchallenged place in the firmament as one of
the established great. But he was not widely read. _Daisy Miller_, ever
so many years ago, had a fairly general success; _The Golden Bowl_, also,
I should think, sold well. But many people who paid lip homage to him
were very unfamiliar with his work.
In no case would a man with his interests, his approach, his subtlety and
avoidance of the grosser excitements, his restraint and delicacy, have
sold by the hundred thousand. But his appeal was still further limited
by the legend of his style. I remember reading an old novel written
in the days when Robert Browning was an Incomprehensible studied by a
Cult. The heroine of it gave herself away rather by remarking, “Oh,
Mr. Browning! I’ve never been able to understand a single thing that
he has written. That is why I have never tried.” One feels that there
were persons who were in the same position as towards Henry James. They
had heard that he was a hard nut to crack; they had seen perhaps—it was
always a great temptation to a reviewer to extract—specimens of his more
elaborate discursions, complicated arabesques of sentences, parenthesis
after parenthesis wandering from comma to comma like barbed wire tangled
around its supports. And they thought therefore that he was an obscure
eclectic as difficult as Jacob Behmen or Swedenborg and lacking their
excuse of religious inspiration. Certainly he was sometimes difficult.
But it was a unique kind of obscurity. There is an obscurity produced
when a man, eagerly tumbling along an argument, writes down only a
sort of fitful shorthand, a language which leaves things out and which
resembles the stray pieces of disconnected paper in gutter or hedge which
merely indicate the course that the runner has taken. There is another
and commoner kind of obscurity of speech which derives from mistiness of
mind; for a man cannot write clearly down what he does not clearly think.
And there is a kind of obscurity which is produced by mere inaptitude for
writing: the awkwardness of the cow handling a rifle. James’s obscurity
was the direct product of his passion for clarity. He detested the
slipshod sentence which, compact as it may look as a piece of grammar,
is a mere pot-shot as a piece of representation. He wanted to make no
statement which did not embody precisely what he wanted to say; what,
that is to say, he saw as Truth. He would have taken, for example, that
last sentence of mine and, endeavouring to give it a more exact shape,
have made of it something like the following:
“He wanted, when, that is, he experienced anything so definite
or, shall we put it, so positively energetic, as a want, to
make no statement, none at any rate which might be taken by
even the least perceptive of his hearers as a _delivered_,
and, as it were, final testimony of his reaction to things as
he saw them, which did not precisely embody what he wanted
(when, once more, he coherently desired anything, as we have
it, ‘higher’ than the elementary physical) to say; what, that
is to say, he saw, at the moment of speech, be it understood,
for the eye of the watcher changes, as what, in the absence of
a happier name, it has pleased us to ennoble with the majestic
name of Truth.”
I don’t suggest that I myself have added anything to my own sentence
by this addition of the pomp and circumstance of parenthesis and
circumlocution. I have merely turned a short platitude into a long one.
But it may serve to show the method by which Henry James arrived at
his more tortuous pages. The method has its disadvantages. The man who
employs it is sometimes like a man working with a pickaxe in a cave.
The more he digs away the larger the unattacked expanse which invites
his strength; or, as one might say, the bigger the hole he is in. But
when this method is employed by a man with the analytical powers, the
sensitiveness to fine shades, material and spiritual, of Henry James,
the result is a “product” (the kind of word that James would always have
put in actual or implied inverted commas) which never stales and from
which one gets more and more enjoyment each time one reads. In the last
resort novels live by the richness of their detail; and James’s detail is
exquisite and inexhaustible.
Few modern writers have exercised so strong an influence over those who
have surrendered themselves to him. He is, I should say, more infectious
than any writer since (what a strange collocation!) Lord Macaulay. A man
with a formed style can usually read and enjoy Carlyle, Jeremy Taylor, de
Quincey, or George Meredith without showing the least tendency (unless
deliberate) to imitate them. But when one has (I don’t speak only for
myself) been reading James one finds for a time that one is tempted to
write even one’s private letters in a style which shows plainly that one
has set him as a seal upon one’s arm. Even now, when I am merely thinking
about him, I feel the pressure of that stern artistic conscience, and can
only with an effort resist the demand that I should guard myself here,
qualify myself here, and elucidate myself there. He was irresistible,
like one of those stammerers or persons with other attractive or
unattractive vocal idiosyncrasies whom one cannot help imitating when one
is with them. A person of any force gets through this and the permanent
effect of a subjugation to James was always good. A too marked echo of
him would be painful: but his example was salutary. It may be possible
to grumble with him for this and that. He did write mainly about persons
with incomes (though these also are God’s creatures); he did occasionally
behave (as Mr. Wells very wittily put it) like a hippopotamus picking
up a pea; and he did annoy some enthusiasts by refusing to place his
pen habitually at the service of the Great Forces of Our Time and other
things whose capital importance is of custom indicated by capital
letters. But in an age of sloppy writing he stood for accuracy of
craftsmanship; and even men whose subjects are Invisible Exports of
the Parthenogenesis of Plants might learn from him how to use to more
advantage their intellects and their pens.
The “Ring” in the Bookselling Trade
A bibliophile writes the following complaint: “At the recent sale of
Swinburne’s library, certain lots, chiefly signed presentation copies,
fetched extravagantly high prices. But the outsider is generally puzzled
at the extreme variation in the prices, a variation which passing
fashions in taste do not explain. There is an explanation, as one
would-be purchaser was made somewhat rudely aware. He wanted a book by
a modern poet, a poet of delicate talent and little recognition; and he
asked a bookseller to bid for the lot. He was willing to spend between
ten and thirteen shillings on it. The agent who was to bid arrived late,
and another bookseller bought the lot for five shillings. So the would-be
purchaser asked his bookseller to approach the man who had bought the
lot, and find out if he would sell it. The book was cheap at five and
would be rather dear at ten shillings. When approached, the purchaser
informed his colleague that ‘he had had to pay a good deal more for the
lot than the price given in the rooms, and that he could not part with it
for less than eighteen shillings.’ Such are the blessings of the ‘ring’
at Sotheby’s.
“The ring consists of some of the largest and best-known members of the
bookselling trade—all honest men—and their plan is this: they never
bid against each other, except for show; lots go at small prices, thus
robbing owners and executors of their right profit; and subsequently
these cheap lots are put up again and resold among the members of the
ring. The auctioneers can, of course, do nothing to stop the practice—and
it is as legal as it is dishonourable. At times an outsider with a
big banking account gives the ring a good deal of trouble; but it has
survived all private attacks, and is likely to—though a private buyer
with a confident manner and a quick power of decision can occasionally
get a great deal of amusement by running lots up, and so forcing the ring
to pay exorbitant prices for things they do not want.”
It is true. There exists among the second-hand booksellers precisely
such a ring as gave rise to so much discussion a few years ago when the
scandal of the art-dealers’ “knock-out” was widely discussed. For some
time I myself have been trying to get information about it. But it is not
easy. You can find out from booksellers who are not in the ring (few of
these lone wolves are important) who the booksellers are who are in the
ring, but that is about all. But the method is simple. The attendance
at book sales is not large. Private collectors are lazy people; it is
not now fashionable—as it was in the Duke of Roxburghe’s day—for the
Old Nobility to crowd the salerooms, bidding desperately amid groans of
anguish and cheers of triumph. The result is that very often one will
attend a sale and be the only private person there, and it is a matter of
chance (especially when the sale is a comparatively small one) whether
any one at all is there except the members of the ring. The ring, _pro
forma_, will run a book up to about a third of its value and leave
it at that. At the close of the proceedings its members will adjourn
somewhere—I don’t know where, but let us say a back room in the Charing
Cross Road—and hold a “knock-out” auction of the books they have bought.
The difference between the sums paid here and the sums paid at Sotheby’s
or Hodgson’s will be pooled and divided, so as to equalize the spoil;
and the owners of the libraries sold will have got only, perhaps, a half
of what they really ought to have got considering the prices that the
ultimate purchasers are willing to pay.
But I don’t see what is to be done about it. As my correspondent
remarks, the auctioneers can’t stop it. They also must suffer as their
work is done on a commission basis. It must not be assumed that all the
booksellers like the system, but the minority cannot help themselves.
I remember that one very well known bookseller, now dead, tried for
several years to keep out of it; but in the end, by co-ordinated bidding
against him, he was forced in. There the thing is; the dealers find it
profitable; it is not easy to keep out of it unless you are a prince of
the trade, with rich customers and great resources, or a person with
special knowledge who is after a special kind of book and will be let
alone; and there is no short cut to reform. How can Parliament interfere?
If one dealer who buys a book can sell it to another after the sale, how
can six or a dozen dealers be prevented from exchanging their purchases
similarly. It would be all very well to make the “knock-out” illegal,
but how many does it take to make a ring and how many detectives could
be spared? The only conceivable remedy is for persons who habitually
buy old books to make a point (when the war is over and they are
released from their present occupations) of turning up at the salerooms
and bidding against the pros. Even at that the remedy would only be
efficacious as long as it was actively applied. It might be worth a
guinea a box, but you would have to take a box every day; there would be
no permanent cure. Directly the strangers slacked off again the ring and
the “knock-out” would revive, and my unfortunate friend (for I presume
that the disconsolate buyer he refers to is himself) would have once more
to pay for his books much more than the price recorded at the rooms.
“There is no cure for this disease,” as Mr. Belloc’s poem puts it, unless
auction-frequenting again becomes a popular form of amusement.
But, if I may digress, I must say that, for persons of a bookish turn
of mind, there is nothing more amusing than an occasional visit to
Wellington Street or Chancery Lane. I shouldn’t care to do it every day;
the combined mustiness of books and booksellers is a bit overpowering.
But it is exciting to bid occasionally, and the books that come into the
London auction-rooms are of such quality that sometimes you might almost
as well go to Sotheby’s as to the Exhibition Rooms (now shut up so as to
pay for two minutes of the war) of the British Museum. The bindings that
great collectors put on their books are in themselves wonderful. And the
booksellers, rich and poor, glossy and seedy, as they nod to the rostrum
and paw the goods, are a sight to which only Balzac could do justice.
They all wear looks of settled gloom as though they were on the verge of
bankruptcy; they all (if one speaks to them) swear that “it is impossible
to get anything to-day as everything is going so dear”; and they all have
a sovereign indifference to everything but the commercial value of the
books they deal in. I say all: there are exceptions; but the crowd as a
whole is utterly depressed and completely free from the remotest concern
with literature. But possibly when they get in that back room somewhere
and assess the margin between what executors have got for books and what
they ought to have got for them, their morose countenances may brighten.
For all I know, every “knock-out” auction may end with the circulation
of the punch-bowl, jolly songs, and toasts to the damnation of all the
idiots who waste their money on rotten old books unfit to read and
thereby keep in affluence a set of honest men who read the _Daily Mail_
in the morning and never a line for the rest of the day.
Music-Hall Songs
Mr. William Archer contributes to the _Fortnightly_ an attack on the
music-hall. He says that it is the home of vulgarity and inanity; that
the audiences, as a rule, would enjoy much better stuff than they are
given; and that “the music-hall seems to have killed a genuine vein of
lyric faculty in the English people.” With all that I don’t think that
any one but a poseur could disagree. Mr. Archer makes an extraordinary
slip when he puts forward _Sally in our Alley_ as a folk-product of
which neither the composer nor the author is known to fame: both words
and music being by Henry Carey, who was scarcely an obscure person in
his day and is not entirely forgotten now. He concludes, too, with a
somewhat vague suggestion of a remedy which has no bearing whatever upon
the improvement of music-hall songs, and which one suspects to spring
from his perennial desire to induce the public to go and see Ibsen.
But his case as a whole is irrefutable. The nation’s songs since the
industrial revolution have been immeasurably worse than at any other time
in its history. They are almost all commercial products manufactured by
half-wits.
Mr. Archer’s case being so sound, it is all the more a pity that he
overdoes it. It is true that almost all these songs are vile rubbish, and
that the songs of the _Villikins and his Dinah_ and _Champagne Charlie_
periods were even more fatuous than those of the present day. But it is
exaggeration to say that
“what is certain is that the whole music-hall movement has
produced not one—literally not one—piece of verse that can rank
as poetry of the humblest type, or even as a really clever bit
of comic rhyming,”
for such songs turn up fairly frequently. Possibly Mr. Archer’s horror
of the “red-nosed comedian” prevents him from ever listening to his
words: certainly one gets from Mr. Archer’s article the impression
that the critic is only acquainted with a few of the most famous of
music-halls songs. But although I heartily support his general case and
would willingly consent to the execution of all music-hall managers and
versifiers and most music-hall artists, I must protest that “really
clever bits of comic rhyming” do turn up occasionally.
I wish I had a better verbal memory. But I can at least refer Mr.
Archer to a few songs of which, if he cares to spend a month in the
Museum with old volumes of Francis, Day and Hunter’s song-books and
other collections, he can find the full words. For instance, there is
Mr. Harry Lauder’s _It’s Nice to get up in the Morning_. As I remember
them (and here and elsewhere I don’t guarantee that my quotations are
literally accurate) the words of the chorus are:
_Oh, it’s nice to get up in the morning when the sun begins to shine,_
_At four or five or six o’clock in the good old summer time;_
_But when the snow is falling, and it’s murky overhead,_
_It’s nice to get up in the morning—but it’s nicer to stay in bed._
Of course the tune helped it. But it is quite well turned and it springs
clean out of popular experience. It is folk-poetry even if the folk
didn’t write it. It is not the folk-poetry of the seventeenth century,
but it is distinctly the folk-poetry of modern commercial and urban
England. _We sat upon the Baby on the Shore_ I’m not sure about; it
didn’t, I suspect, have a music-hall origin, though I do not know. But
_A Little Bit off the Top_ was quite comic in places; so were _The Four
Horse Charabanc_, _Right in the Middle of the Road_, _Whitewash_, and _’E
dunno where ’e are_. I wish I could recall the words of the song which
had a chorus beginning:
_More work for the undertaker,_
_Another little job for the tombstone-maker;_
but even that high-spirited couplet shows their quality. These
mock-tragic songs are often quite good. The best known was _His Day’s
Work was done_, which was undeniably a comic conception well carried out.
Did Mr. Archer ever hear _If it wasn’t for the Houses in Between_? The
one fragment that sticks in my mind both dates it and shows that it was a
“clever bit of comic rhyming”:
_If the weather had been finer_
_You’d have seen the war in China—_
_If it wasn’t for the Houses in Between._
And what about _Waiting at the Church_?—
_There was I waiting at the church,_
_Waiting at the church._
_When I found he’d left me in the lurch,_
_Lor’, how it did upset me!_
_Then he sent me round a little note,_
_Just a little note,_
_This is what he wrote:_
_“Can’t get away to marry you to-day—_
_My wife won’t let me.”_
That seems to me a well-calculated chorus, and the clinch of the last two
lines couldn’t be beaten. But perhaps the austere Mr. Archer would think
it debasing on the grounds that it led the audience to think lightly of
bigamy.
Bigamy is one of the chief comic-song subjects. Vermin in one’s bed,
drunkenness, and the food in boarding-houses are the others. The “booze”
songs are not, as a rule, as good as they should be. The only one I
remember that was at all neat ran _something_ like:
_First she had some marmalade,_
_And then she had some jam,_
_Then some dozen of oysters_
_And then a plate of ham,_
_A lobster and a crab or two_
_And a pint of bottled beer,_
_A little gin hot to settle the lot_
_—And that’s what made her queer._
I certainly don’t suggest that any of the songs I have quoted—and I’m
certain that consultation with a few expert friends, now in Flanders,
would bring better ones to light—are masterpieces. But I do think they
are quite comic verse, and that if all music-hall songs were as well
turned there would not be much ground for complaint. One does, that
is, laugh _occasionally_ at a music-hall, in spite of Mr. Archer.
But, unhappily, of ninety-nine songs out of a hundred the words are
too abysmal for anything, and the serious ones are almost invariably
imbecile. I wonder, by the way, whether the music-hall authorities ever
try to induce competent comic rhymers, known in other spheres, to turn
out songs for them? Probably not; they think the words don’t matter.
That they are mistaken (though the tunes count for most) is shown by the
way that a song with good words succeeds with the audience. Even one
ingenious line will often bring the house down. I remember the old song
_I can’t change it_. There was a stanza about a bride who appalled her
bridegroom by taking herself to pieces, removing a wig, a glass eye, a
wooden arm, two wooden legs, etc. In the chorus the narrator suddenly
described her as “’Arf a woman and ’arf a tree,” and this admirable if
unrefined trope was the most successful thing of the year. But as I say,
I largely agree with Mr. Archer. If only they would let me smoke in
theatres I would never go near a music-hall again until the programmes
were improved, and I imagine many other people are in the same boat.
More Music-Hall Songs
How little do we know the consequences of our acts. “I say there is not
a red Indian, hunting by Lake Winnipic, can quarrel with his squaw, but
the whole world must smart for it: will not the price of beaver rise?
It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand
alters the centre of gravity of the Universe.” That was Carlyle’s way
of putting it. Somebody wrote a book of theatrical reminiscences: the
book set Mr. William Archer pondering on the fatuity of music-halls; Mr.
Archer’s article made me try to remember comic fragments of music-hall
songs; and my observations would appear, judging from the quantities of
correspondence they have produced, to have tempted whole families to
spend their evenings trying to recall the popular choruses of their youth.
Numbers of them seem to have better memories than mine. Whole verses of
_More Work for the Undertaker_ (I think it was Mr. Dunville’s song) reach
me. The scheme may be illustrated by one stanza:
_Sammy Snoozer laboured on the railway;_
_His work he was very clever at!_
_Sammy one day was a-polishing the metals_
_With a lump of mouldy fat._
_Up come a runaway engine,_
_Sammy stood upon the track;_
_He held out his arms, for he firmly believed_
_He could push that locomotive back._
(The drum: _Boom!!_)
(Chorus)