_Receives the confidence of lonesome stars,_
_And where Carnarvon’s ruthless battlements_
_Magnificently oppress the daunted tide,_
_There comes—no fabled Merlin, son of mist,_
_And brother to the twilight, but a man_
_Who in a time terrifically real_
_Is real as the time; formed for the time;_
_Not much beholden to the munificent Past,_
_In mind or spirit, but frankly of this hour;_
_No faggot of perfections, angel or saint,_
_Created faultless and intolerable;_
_No meeting-place of all the heavenlinesses,_
_But eminently a man to stir and spur_
_Men, to afflict them with benign alarm,_
_Harass their sluggish and uneager blood,_
_Till, like himself, they are hungry for the goal;_
_A man with something of the cragginess_
_Of his own mountains, something of the force_
_That goads to their loud leap the mountain streams._
Sir William proceeds to a peroration on
_the man of Celtic blood,_
_Whom Powers Unknown, in a divine caprice,_
_Chose and did make their instrument, wherewith_
_To save the Saxon; the man all eye and hand,_
_The man who saw, and grasped, and gripped, and held._
_Then shall each morrow with its yesterday_
_Vie, in the honour of nobly honouring him,_
_Who found us lulled and blindfolded by the verge_
_Of fathomless perdition and haled us back._
_And poets shall dawn in pearl and gold of speech,_
_Crowning his deed with not less homage, here_
_On English ground, than yonder whence he rose._
This must certainly be the most eulogistic poem ever written about a
British politician.
There is nothing about Mr. W. M. Hughes, Lord Milner, Lord Curzon, or
Lord Devonport in the volume; these, perhaps, will be dealt with in Sir
William’s next book, which, I do not doubt, will be ready before long.
But Sir Edward Carson gets his meed in a sonnet _To the Right Hon. Sir
Edward Carson, on leaving Antrim, June 30, 1916_, and another sonnet
acclaims Lord Northcliffe—to whom, possibly, there is a delicate allusion
in the line quoted above, beginning “Whom Powers.” The sonnet is called
_The Three Alfreds_; the three being King Alfred, Alfred Lord Tennyson,
and Alfred Lord Northcliffe:
_Three Alfreds let us honour. Him who drove_
_His foes before the tempest of his blade_
_At Ethandune—him first, the all-glorious Shade,_
_The care-crowned King whose host with Guthrum strove._
_Next—though a thousand years asunder clove_
_These twain—a lord of realms serenely swayed;_
_Victoria’s golden warbler, him who made_
_Verse such as Virgil for Augustus wove._
_Last—neither king nor bard, but just a man_
_Who, in the very whirlwind of our woe,_
_From midnight till the laggard dawn began,_
_Cried ceaseless, “Give us shells—more shells,” and so_
_Saved England; saved her not less truly than_
_Her hero of heroes saved her long ago._
It is a pity that there could not have been added some reference to Lord
Northcliffe’s conviction that nobody in his senses ever dreamed of using
shrapnel against wire. Had the shells passage been expanded it might
have been less cacophonous. As it stands, it gives rise to the suspicious
illusion that the sibilant cry was uttered by Mr. (or is it Sir?) Wilkie
Bard. But no; it was “neither King nor Bard.”
Stranded
“No,” I thought, “I won’t take any books with me. I want a rest. I
shall swim. I shall catch fish. There is sure to be a billiard-room in
that pub., and pretty certain to be a few people who play bridge. The
overtaxed brain must be allowed relaxation. So good-bye, Plato; good-bye,
Spinoza; good-bye, Samuel Rawson Gardiner; good-bye, Freud. I won’t take
any of you.”
I had been in the place twenty-four hours, and had plumbed the depths of
my neighbours’ incapacity to play any games of skill or chance (except
possibly—I did not ask this—loo and vingt-et-un), when, sauntering down
the main, and indeed the only, street, I caught sight of the words,
“Grocer, Chemist, Tobacconist, Draper, and Circulating Library.” It would
be ungracious, I felt, to let such versatility go unrecognized. Besides,
one might as well take a novel or two out with one in the boat. It might
make the intervals between the bites seem a little shorter. So in I went.
A young girl with a pigtail escorted me past the Quaker Oats and the
Gold Flakes, under a little low doorway and into a back room. “A
shilling deposit, and twopence on each book,” she said; and left me to
the shelves. There were books there all right: about two thousand of
them, reaching from floor to ceiling on both sides. There was no sort
of order, alphabetical or otherwise, so it was no good expecting to
find a particular author right off. The only thing for it was beginning
somewhere and going steadily along the rows.
B. M. Croker: yes, I think I read a great many of hers in my youth. They
were about penniless young ladies going to India and getting married. It
is no good tackling this one. _The Gateless Barrier_, by Lucas Malet;
that was about spiritualism, and pretty average tosh it was; I shall
probably come to _Sir Richard Calmady_ presently, but I shall give him a
miss too. _The Iron Pirate_: I liked that rather, but it would be a pity
not to like it so much now. I feel the same about _Saracinesca_, _The
Witch of Prague_, and _In the Palace of the King_, which are all in a
lump together where some late devotee has replaced them. Marion Crawford,
upon whose every word my childhood hung, I dare not attempt you again;
even _A Cigarette Maker’s Romance_ and the chronicle of _Mr. Isaacs_ (who
enjoyed Kant and deluded me, for a time, into the belief that I should
like him too) will be more dear to the memory if they are not restored to
sight. _Count Hannibal_: that was the man who either massacred somebody
or escaped massacre on St. Bartholomew’s Day. He had a great square
jaw and eyes that made you jump; and women cowered and obeyed when he
emitted a short, sharp oath or looked like emitting one. William Black
I never liked at any time, so nothing by him need detain me. _Flames_?
No. _Dodo_? Oh dear, no. _Ships that pass in the Night_? No. There was
edelweiss in it, and an old man who was otherworldly and read nothing but
Gibbon. Queen Victoria thought highly of it, but I don’t want to read it
again. Nor _Red Pottage_ either. The husband and the other man (I think)
had a duel. They drew straws, and the man with the shortest straw had
to kill himself. What the lady thought about it I don’t remember. But
one of them was a Lord, New Zealand came in somewhere, and at suitable
places in the conversation a moth would flutter or a kingfisher flash by.
It is by touches like these that one can distinguish really imaginative
literature, but I am not tempted.
It is not reasonable to expect a man at this date to return to _A Yellow
Aster_, or _Moths_ by Ouida. As for _The Silence of Dean Maitland_, the
predicament of that respected ecclesiastic with the undisclosed sin on
his conscience is still fresh in my mind, and I still remember how my
elders, when it first came out, debated whether such a book ought to be
written, and whether Maxwell Gray was a man or a woman. Of _The Sorrows
of Satan_ I recall little of the plot, except that the Devil was a
gentleman. I think that the first sentences were: “Do you know what it is
to be poor? Not with that—poverty that—on ten thousand a year, but with
that grinding poverty that,” etc. How many years ago is it since that
immortal paragraph, reproduced in facsimile from the author’s own script,
appeared in the _Strand Magazine_, with pictures of the great novelist in
divers postures? It would be Ethel M. Dell now, I suppose; but they don’t
seem to keep Miss Dell’s works in this Circulating Library, of which the
circulation seems to have stopped many, many, many years since. They keep
instead Frankfort Moore and G. B. Burgin.
Anthony Hope now. Here is _The Intrusions of Peggy_. There was a grizzled
inventor who lived in the Temple, and he had a daughter (?) who shone
like a sunbeam amidst the dusty shades of the law. Anthony Hope, who was
very nearly a first-rate writer, must have put it better than that; but
I’m sure that that is what it was about. Seton Merriman now. This is
better. But will or will not a reperusal of _The Vultures_ and _Roden’s
Corner_ diminish the respect that still survives in me for him? He gave
me immense pleasure at one time; can I risk it? I don’t know.
With meditations like the above I roamed up and down before the frayed
and wrinkled backs of these veterans, fascinated by so systematic a
recovery of the familiar. Then I remembered that the sun was shining in
a blue sky, only slightly fleeced with cloud; that the salt wind blowing
shoreward was driving broken sunlight over the waves; that there were
as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it; and that I must really
take care of my health. Catching sight of _She_ and _Many Cargoes_,
which I have read at least ten times apiece, but am always good for
again, I detached them from their faded companions and took them into the
front shop, meditating upon the astonishing sluggishness of this shop,
where even Mrs. Barclay had not yet penetrated and Garvice was a cloudy
speculation in the far future.
I paid my one-and-fourpence and stepped out on to the cobblestones. As I
passed into the sun, it occurred to me that it was not surprising that
even the minor works in the library were like old friends. For—and things
like these do strangely remain known, yet for a time, unrelated—I spent a
summer in this village fifteen years ago.
Mr. Ralph Hodgson
Mr. Ralph Hodgson is a poet who has still not quite got his due. He
has just collected into one volume (_Poems_), with a few others, the
verses published in a series of “Flying Fame Booklets” with Mr. Lovat
Fraser’s charming and ingenious cuts. Ten years’ work goes into seventy
pages, so that a charge of over-production is scarcely possible. In
the circumstances Mr. Hodgson might have included one or two poems,
_The Last Blackbird_, for example, from his earlier book. That book as
a whole, however, was not comparable with this, which contains _The
Bull_, indubitably one of the finest poems of our generation, _The Song
of Honour_, which is almost as good, and many charming lighter lyrics.
_Eve_, particularly, is a feat. Mr. Hodgson makes a delicate tripping
song out of the Fall of Man; he pictures Eve, “that orchard sprite,”
_Wondering, listening,_
_Listening, wondering,_
_Eve with a berry_
_Half-way to her lips,_
and the serpent, a graceful beast,
_Tumbling in twenty rings_
_Into the grass._
The whole story trips like that.
_“Eva!” Each syllable_
_Light as a flower fell,_
_“Eva!” he whispered the_
_Wondering maid,_
_Soft as a bubble sung_
_Out of a linnet’s lung,_
_Soft and most silverly_
_“Eva!” he said._
But—and this is the achievement—one is not left with a sense of
inadequacy and triviality. For the feeling throughout is sincere, and the
nature of the calamity is conveyed as clearly by Mr. Hodgson, who makes
the small birds chatter with sorrow and indignation when Eve falls, as it
would have been by another man with all the paraphernalia of darkening
heavens, thunderous voices, and long Latin words.
But this poem is not on the same plane as _The Bull_ and _The Song of
Honour_. No writer has ever entered more completely into the feelings
of an animal than does Mr. Hodgson as, in a setting of tropical forest
and swamp, he shows the defeated, expelled, and dying leader of the herd
remembering his calfhood, and his early fights, and his prowess and his
final fall, whilst the obscene birds circle round overhead waiting for
his death. _The Song of Honour_, an attempt to echo the Hymn of Praise
sung by all things to their Maker, is, in the nature of things, more
disjointed and impressionistic, less exact and well-shaped. It owes as
much as any poem can decently owe to another to Christopher Smart’s _Song
to David_. But the strength of feeling never fails, and parts of the
breathless pæan are very beautiful.
_The music of a lion strong_
_That shakes a hill a whole night long,_
_A hill as loud as he,_
_The twitter of a mouse among_
_Melodious greenery,_
_The ruby’s and the rainbow’s song,_
_The nightingale’s—all three,_
_The song of life that wells and flows_
_From every leopard, lark and rose_
_And everything that gleams or goes_
_Lack-lustre in the sea._
_I heard it all, I heard the whole_
_Harmonious hymn of being roll_
_Up through the chapel of my soul_
_And at the altar die,_
_And in the awful quiet then_
_Myself I heard, Amen, Amen,_
_Amen I heard me cry!_
_I heard it all and then although_
_I caught my flying senses, Oh,_
_A dizzy man was I!_
_I stood and stared; the sky was lit,_
_The sky was stars all over it,_
_I stood, I knew not why,_
_Without a wish, without a will,_
_I stood upon that silent hill_
_And stared into the sky until_
_My eyes were blind with stars and still_
_I stared into the sky._
Those are two of the last stanzas, and even standing alone, I think, give
something of the quality of the poem. They certainly are characteristic
in the simplicity of their language.
Double Misprints
I take the following paragraph from the _Connersville (Ind.) Herald_:
“The Guest Day meeting of the literary club will be held at the
home of Mrs. L. A. Frazer to-morrow afternoon. Mrs. De Morgan
Jones, of Indianapolis, will lecture on ‘William Butler Meats
and the Garlic Revival.’”
I think the Lady of Shalott should have been brought in. Double misprints
are rare, but I remember another which also was perpetrated in America
but which has not quite so convincing an air of sheer accident as this
one. A Colonel, who had fought in the Civil War, was described in
his local paper as “a battle-scared veteran.” This imputation on his
courage brought him to the office with a big stick and a demand that
the paragraph should be reprinted with the offensive remark corrected.
It was: but another misprint crept in and the word appeared as
“bottle-scarred.” Every one who has dealings with the Press occasionally
corrects, amid the mass of quite meaningless “literals,” a misprint
that really makes some sort of sense. I myself in the last few months
have had to emend printers’ references to Mr. Hotairio Bottomley and
Mr. Edmund Goose. The former one felt tempted to leave uncorrected, the
derangement of letters being so extremely apt.
The History of Earl Pumbles
“The late Earl (Eorl?) Pumbles was of lowly birth. He was born in the
thorp of Stoke Parva in 1850, the son of a penniless timber-wright.
Outdriven from his first school, he became a fighting-man. He was a
dreadless and fearnought wight, and was once left for dead on the field,
bleeding at every sweat-hole. The saw-bones brought him through. Coming
back to England he saw the haplihood of making a gold-hoard in the
soap-trade. He set up a business with the gold of others; got rid of his
yoke-mates by sundry under-slinkings, and soon became amazingly wealthy.
An earldom followed; though it is markworthy that on the morning after
its bestowal a great songsmith wrote to the _Daily Score_ to say: ‘The
Gusher of Fair-Name is befouled.’ In 1910 Lord Pumbles went as sendling
to the King of Siam, with a bode-word from our King. In the back-end
of the next year his health gave out; he became bit-wise worse; and he
died last night of belly-ache. Lord Pumbles was often to be seen at Sir
Henry Wood’s Out-Road Glee-Motes at Queen’s Hall, but he was almost a
comeling at the House of Lords. He was cunning in Kin-lore, and in his
fair wonestead at Pumbles wrote a great book on the stem-tree of his
kin. By ill hap he was an eat-all and rather soaksome. He will be buried
on Wednesday in the bone-yard at Pumbles, in which lich-rest his wife
already lies. The earldom goes, by out-of-the-way odd-come-short, to his
daughter.”
This little biography may have puzzled those who have got thus far.
They may have thought it absurd. I compiled it with the help of “C. L.
D.’s” _Word-Book of the English Tongue_, just published by Routledge.
“C. L. D.” (the initials are, I observe, those of the author of _Alice
in Wonderland_) is one of those enthusiasts who long “to shake off the
Norman yoke” which lies so heavy on our speech. He follows, that is
to say, in the footsteps of the late Rev. William Barnes (of Dorset),
who asked his countrymen to call a perambulator a “child-wain” and an
omnibus a “folk-wain.” “What many speakers and writers,” he remarks,
“even to-day, call English, is no English at all but sheer French.
Nevertheless, there are many who feel not a little ashamed of the
needless loan-words in which their speech is clothed, and of the borrowed
feathers in which they strut. Over and over again it has been said, and
most truly, that for liveliness and strength, manliness and fulness of
meaning, the olden English Tongue were hard to beat.” “In this little
Word-Book, therefore,” he says:
“after having chosen a few thousand stock loan-words, I have
striven to set by the side of each, not indeed ‘synonyms,’ but
other good English words, which may stand in their stead.”
Which is certainly (or, I think I should say, “ywis” or “in good sooth”)
a pure English sentence.
One primary fault “C. L. D.” avoids almost entirely. He does not (as
he might have done had he cared to take all the astonishing Latin
words from Johnson’s Word-Book) load the dice by including in his
list of “loan-words” words which we hardly ever use. There are a few.
Only a scientist would say “acephalous” when he meant “headless”;
and the general public does not need to be warned to say “grind,”
“bristly,” “stalkless,” and “barefooted,” instead of “comminute,”
“aristate,” “acaulescent,” and “discalced.” It would never dream of
saying acaulescent. Where our author errs is where he would inevitably
err: in suggesting to us (1) Saxon words which we simply won’t use,
and (2) Saxon words which do not take the place of the Latin words of
which he disapproves. Take, for instance, as an instance of the latter
category, this very word “disapprove.” All he can give us is a list of
“strong” words beginning with “hiss” and “hoot,” none of which gets the
exact shade of meaning required. Similarly with “decry,” for which his
suggestions are “boo” and “hoot.” In suggesting “clean,” “flat,” etc.,
for “absolute” he is merely booing and hooting the slang use of that
word, but he has not found a Saxon equivalent for the real “absolute.”
For “complimentary” he gives “smooth-spoken”; but how would, say, the
Archbishop of Canterbury like to get a letter of thanks beginning: “My
dear Archbishop,—Many thanks for your very smooth-spoken remarks”?
For “uncomfortable” he can only suggest “writhing”—as though we could
say that we had spent a fortnight in a most writhing hotel; and for
“temporalities” he has nothing but “loaves and fishes”—which is simply
offensive. If one began using words like these promiscuously, one would
simply (here I consult the _Word-Book_ again) be asking for misluck.
To turn to the other lot, it is altogether too late to ask us to say
“rede-craft” for “logic”; “back-jaw” for “retort”; “handmaid” for
“servant”; “outganger” for “emigrant”; “wanhope” (a most beautiful word,
I admit) for “despair”; “scald” or “songsmith” for “poet”; “hight” or
“yclept” for “denominated”; “uplooking” for “aspiring”; “fourwinkled” for
“quadrangular”; and, above all, to replace “depilatory” by “hair-bane.”
“Ereold” and “foreold” for “ancient” are no longer possible; and the man
who should say that the King was crowned and besmeared in Westminster
Abbey would be quite unable to persuade people that he wasn’t merely a
rather coarse satirist. In cases where both terms are alive, the Latin
is often more convenient—because shorter—than the Saxon. If we always
used “breach of wedlock” instead of “adultery,” many modern novels, and
most Sunday newspapers, would use up twice as much paper and ink. (There
was once a half-way word: the mediæval heralds used to say that the
leopard was “begotten in spouse-breach between the lion and the pard.”)
In proposing “hand-grip” for portmanteau, our wordloresman is doing an
audacious thing: adopting a bit of modern American—though, as often as
not, the term is shortened, across the water, to “grip” _tout court_.
There remain, of course, a very large number of words for which “C.
L. D.” does provide genuine living synonyms which, in many cases, are
stronger and terser than the originals. Even here, of course, there are
occasional difficulties; we have, at any rate in print, thrown over
“C. L. D.’s” favourites “belly-ache” and “gripes” in favour of “colic”
simply because they _are_ what is called “good sturdy Saxon,” altogether
too apt and sturdy. As for his proposal of “ropes” and “manifolds” for
“intestines,” all I can say is that I much prefer here to remain under
the Norman yoke. At the same time, too much Latinity is a nuisance and
a danger to the vividness of our tongue; and, whilst refraining from
following “C. L. D.” to his thorps or Barnes to his folk-wain, I think I
shall sometimes find the _Word-Book_ useful.
On Destroying Books
“It says in the paper” that over two million volumes have been presented
to the troops by the public. It would be interesting to inspect them.
Most of them, no doubt, are quite ordinary and suitable; but it was
publicly stated the other day that some people were sending the oddest
things, such as magazines twenty years old, guides to the Lake District,
Bradshaws, and back numbers of _Whitaker’s Almanack_. In some cases, one
imagines, such indigestibles get into the parcels by accident; but it is
likely that there are those who jump at the opportunity of getting rid of
books they don’t want. Why have kept them if they don’t want them? But
most people, especially non-bookish people, are very reluctant to throw
away anything that looks like a book. In the most illiterate houses that
one knows every worthless or ephemeral volume that is bought finds its
way to a shelf and stays there. In reality it is not merely absurd to
keep rubbish merely because it is printed: it is positively a public duty
to destroy it. Destruction not merely makes more room for new books and
saves one’s heirs the trouble of sorting out the rubbish or storing it:
it may also prevent posterity from making a fool of itself. We may be
sure that if we do not burn, sink, or blast all the superseded editions
of Bradshaw, two hundred years hence some collector will be specializing
in old railway timetables, gathering, at immense cost, a complete series,
and ultimately leaving his “treasures” (as the Press will call them) to a
Public Institution.
But it is not always easy to destroy books. They may not have as many
lives as a cat, but they certainly die hard; and it is sometimes
difficult to find a scaffold for them. This difficulty once brought me
almost within the Shadow of the Rope. I was living in a small and (as
Shakespeare would say) heaven-kissing flat in Chelsea, and books of
inferior minor verse gradually accumulated there until at last I was
faced with the alternative of either evicting the books or else leaving
them in sole, undisturbed tenancy and taking rooms elsewhere for myself.
Now, no one would have bought these books. I therefore had to throw
them away or wipe them off the map altogether. But how? There were
scores of them. I had no kitchen range, and I could not toast them on
the gas-cooker or consume them leaf by leaf in my small study fire—for
it is almost as hopeless to try to burn a book without opening it as to
try to burn a piece of granite. I had no dustbin; my debris went down a
kind of flue behind the staircase, with small trap-doors opening to the
landings. The difficulty with this was that the larger books might choke
it; the authorities, in fact, had labelled it “Dust and Ashes Only”; and
in any case I did not want to leave the books intact, and some dustman’s
unfortunate family to get a false idea of English poetry from them. So in
the end I determined to do to them what so many people do to the kittens:
tie them up and consign them to the river. I improvised a sack, stuffed
the books into it, put it over my shoulder, and went down the stairs into
the darkness.