and many-volumed collections of “Kings and Queens of Neo-Cymric
Realism and Romance,” and “The Universalest of All Libraries of
Super-extraordinary Fiction,” in forty-eight volumes, fifteen dollars
down and five dollars a month until the purchaser is summoned to a
Better Land. Either these people want books for mere shelf-furniture,
or else they are the victims of voracious book agents, and deserve a
tear of sympathy rather than a rebuke. Our concern, the concern of
those who have at heart the good name of printed literature and the
liberty of the individual householder of literary tastes, is with
the person who is highly literate and possessed of an account with a
bookseller, and is abusing his talent and privilege by “efficiently”
building up a library.
When efficiency confined itself to the office and the factory, it was
bad enough. When it (loathsome animal that it is!) crawled up a leg of
the table and began to preach to us about our food, babbling obscenely
of proteids and carbohydrates, we felt that the limit of endurance
had been reached. But no sooner do we cuff efficiency from the dining
table than it pops up in the library. And this is not to be endured.
Efficiency must be plucked down, kindly, of course, but resolutely,
from the bookshelves, and put in a covered basket to await the coming
of the wagon which shall convey it to the lethal of the S. P. C. A.
Except for an efficient family, what could be less interesting than an
efficient library? Think of the sameness of it--every study in a block
of houses containing the “Oxford Dictionary” and “Roget’s Thesaurus”
and the “Collected Essays of Hamilton Wright Mabie” and similar works
of reference, with a few standard fictions such as Arnold Bennett’s
“Your United States,” and Owen Wister’s “The Pentecost of Calamity”!
There would be no adventures among books possible in such libraries.
Indeed, efficiency in the library would soon reduce it, if logically
developed, to a collection of anthologies and reference books, and
possibly some such practical jokes as ex-President Eliot’s “Five Foot
Shelf.”
An advocate of the efficient library, a spectacled young gentleman
of the type already described, once engaged in some ignoble literary
task--book-reviewing I believe it was called--while a guest at my
house. The volume of which he was writing a criticism had to do with
a single-tax experiment in New Zealand, and therefore he wished to
include in his review a quotation from the “Life of Benvenuto Cellini.”
He did not find the “Life of Benvenuto Cellini” on my shelves, and
therefore reproached me, and made my library the object of his callow
disapproval.
I reasoned with him. He had read Benvenuto, I said, and Benvenuto
was waiting for him in the public library if he desired to renew his
acquaintance with him. Here, I said, are many volumes of biography
and autobiography in place of the one for which you cry. Here is a
book entitled “The Life and Labours of Henry W. Grady, his Speeches,
Writings, etc., Being in Addition to a Graphic Sketch of His Life, a
Collection of His Most Remarkable Speeches and Such of His Writings
as Best Illustrate His Character and Show the Wonderful Brilliancy of
His Intellect, also Such Letters, Speeches, and Newspaper Articles in
connection with His Life and Death as Will Be of General Interest.”
Here, I said, is “Colonel Thomas Blood, Crown Stealer,” by Wilbur
Cortez Abbott, a highly entertaining book. Here, I continued, as a
preface to this collection of the “Essays in Prose and Verse of J.
Clarence Mangan,” is an illuminating biographical essay by Mr. C. P.
Meehan, together with Mr. J. Wilson’s “Phrenological Description of
Mangan’s Head,” and “The Poet’s Own Recipe to Make Tar Water.” Here
is--
But my friend rudely interrupted my well-meant remarks, and went
in quest of Cellini to the south-west corner of Fifth Avenue and
Forty-second Street, where he found a library more suited to his
efficient tastes. In doing this he was perfectly justified. Public
Libraries should be efficient. They are places to which you go to get
useful but uninteresting information. But there is no more reason for
your own library to resemble a public library than there is for your
study to resemble your office, or for your dining-room to resemble the
Automat, or for every bedroom in your house to bear on its door printed
directions to ring twice for your wife to bring you hot water and three
times for a clean collar.
The crowning virtue of the successful private library is inefficiency.
As an example closely approaching the ideal, as a model to householders
who have been allowed a closet or vault in which to keep books, I
respectfully present my own library. And in order that the radiance of
its inefficiency may be as penetrating as possible, I wish my library
to be considered in comparison with its efficient rivals.
Let us therefore assume that the spectacled young gentleman already
several times celebrated in this treatise has, without acquiring
more sense, got married, and perhaps thereby acquired a sufficient
competency to warrant his establishing a library. Let us begin our
survey of his books with the shelves of poetry. Where is there a good
basis for comparison? Ah, here we have it--here is Milton in the
efficient library, and here the long-winded old gentleman is found
again in my own! Is any comparison between these volumes possible?
Would any real bibliophile hesitate a moment in making his choice
between the two? The efficient Milton is a tall, sombre-looking volume
with a long biographical preface by a man who used to be a poet before
he became a college professor, a preface which proves that Milton
never went blind, lived in Wales rather than in England, had only one
daughter and knew no Latin. At the foot of every page there is a thick
sprinkling of notes conveying unnecessary information. There is an
appendix of variant readings and an exhaustive, monumental bibliography.
Could anything be more depressing? The only illustration in the book
is John himself, in a black cloak, with what seems to be a baby’s bib
under his chin, and this picture can scarcely be called a decoration.
My “Milton’s Poetical Works,” which was published in New York in
1857 and purchased by me from a stall on Twenty-third Street for a
quarter, is more entertaining in every respect. In the first place,
it has no notes--which alone makes it worth the price of admission.
In the second place, the only biographical introduction is “The Life
of Milton, by His Nephew, Edward Philips,” a most estimable piece of
writing, which begins, “Of all the several parts of history, that which
sets forth the lives, and commemorates the most remarkable actions,
sayings or writings of famous and illustrious persons, whether in war
or peace--whether many together, or any one in particular--as it is not
the least useful in itself, so it is in the highest vogue and esteem
among the studious and reading part of mankind.” Doesn’t a biography of
this sort promise more flavours and exciting things than one written by
a college professor, and beginning, “John Milton was born in London,
England, December 9th, 1608”?
Furthermore, my Milton is bound in black cloth, with stars and wreaths
and baskets of flowers stamped in gold all over it. Furthermore,
my Milton has all sorts of highly entertaining steel engravings,
most delightfully 1857--Lycidas being shipwrecked on St. Michael’s
Mount, and the Warring Angels mustering for battle, and skeletons
and devils and angels and “wood nymphs, deck’d with daisies trim,”
keeping “their merry wakes and pastimes,” and Melancholy, who looks
like Queen Victoria in her old age, and the “Goddess fair and free,
in heaven yclep’d Euphrosyne,” wearing a very becoming white frock.
Furthermore, my Milton was “Presented to Mifs Ellen R. Baxter, by Her
Resp’t’l friend, J. Stuart, Oswego, May 4, 1859”--so the violet ink
inscription on the flyleaf tells me. And some one has drawn in pencil a
very attractive cat on the blank page opposite the opening of “Samson
Agonistes.” The efficient library’s copy of Milton lacks all these
amiable associations.
My efficient friend possesses a Byron, it is true. But not to be
mentioned in the same breath with the volume which stands in my study
between Witter Bynner and Bliss Carman. My Byron contains eight
contemporary memoirs of the poet, by distinguished fellow-craftsmen,
and sixteen pictures--himself, his birthplace, his Newfoundland dog,
his daughter, and a dozen landscapes which the publisher happened to
have on hand. Also, in the preface of my Byron I find this sentence:
“Thus died Lord Byron at the early age of thirty-seven, leaving behind
him a name second only to that of the renowned Emperor, Napoleon
Bonaparte, and a memory which the sublime effusions of his muse will
endear to all posterity.” My friend’s Byron has nothing to compare with
this.
The trouble with my friend’s library is that it has no surprises. Any
one who has seen his waistcoat--the V of which is edged with heavy
white cord--and his cuff links--which are oval and bear, engraven on
their golden surfaces, his initials--could describe his library to a
volume. It is obvious; its obviousness is a part of its efficiency.
I suppose Benvenuto Cellini is on a shelf of the efficient library.
He must be, since he is in the public library. Probably my efficient
friend has also Benjamin Franklin’s “Autobiography” and the “Complete
Works of Mrs. Humphry Ward.” He has a limp-leather tissue-paper
encyclopedia, and an obese dictionary, and a magnificent atlas. And in
a corner of his study he has a map of the world in the form of a great
globe on a pivot.
I envy him this last possession, for one may amuse himself by spinning
a geographical globe, as one entertains himself by spinning a piano
stool. But aside from this, there is nothing in my friend’s library
that I desire. And my own triumphantly inefficient library--what
treasures it contains!
You mention French literature. Do I overwhelm you with a sumptuous
Voltaire, or sicken you with a sentimentally illustrated “Paul et
Virginie”? I do not. I exhibit to you yellow-back volumes of the later
verse of Francis Jammes--which are supposed to be going to be bound
one of these days--or I show you a play or two of Rostand’s. If you
desire to have further dealings with the literature of France, the
French department of the university is, for a consideration, at your
service. You mention Fraser’s “Golden Bough”? I show you something
equally informing and more entertaining, comfortable volumes in which
the mythology of Ireland is narrated to us by Jeremiah Curtin and by
Seumas MacManus, and I show you a stray volume of Louis Ginzberg’s “The
Legends of the Jews.”
I should not try to make the possessors of efficient libraries unhappy.
But I do it for their own good, in the hope that I may eventually
reform them. And when I look upon my two volumes of “The Evergreen,” a
quarterly published in Edinburgh some twenty years ago, numbering among
its contributors Fiona MacLeod, Nora Hopper, Douglas Hyde, Standish
O’Grady and Rosa Mulholland, and “The Squire’s Recipes,” by Kendall
Banning, and “Scottish Heraldry Made Easy,” and Shaemas O’Sheel’s
“The Dear Old Lady of Eighty-sixth Street,” and a bound volume of
The Gentleman’s Magazine for 1761 and “L. Annsei Senecae et Aliorum
Tragoediae (Amsterodami, Apud Guiljel: Ians: Caesium)” and a battered
edition of Scott’s “Marmion,” enriched by the comments of a Louise
Cogswell who owned it in 1810 and wrote approvingly, “and very well
told too” under the sub-title “A Tale of Flodden Field,” and Joseph
Forster’s “Studies in Black and Red” (very ghastly), and both of Ernest
Dowson’s novels and his translations from the French, as well as his
poems, and “The American Annual of Photography” for 1916, and “Miss
Thackeray’s Works,” complete in one volume, and Layton Crippen’s “Clay
and Fire,” and Bithell’s “Contemporary Belgian Poetry,” and Sir Francis
Burnand’s “More Happy Thoughts,” and a volume containing “The Poetical
Works of Rogers, Campbell, J. Montgomery Lamb, and Kirke White,” and
an inscribed copy of Palmer Cox’s “The Brownies, Their Book”--when I
contemplate, among the more commonplace inhabitants of my shelves,
these books, then I cannot keep from feeling a sense of superiority to
all those who have laboriously “built up” their libraries in accordance
with the mandates of strict utility.
My library is inefficient and impractical, entertaining and unexacting.
Its members have come to me by chance and by momentary inclination.
For if a man’s books are to be, as the old phrase has it, his friends,
they must be allowed to him because of some fitness on his part subtly
felt by them. A man does not deliberately select his friends; there
must be a selection by them as well as by him. Unless he is applying
the principles of efficiency to friendship. And in that case he has no
friends at all.
THE POETRY OF HILAIRE BELLOC
Far from the poets being astray in prose-writing (said Francis
Thompson), it might plausibly be contended that English prose, as an
art, is but a secondary stream of the Pierian fount, and owes its very
origin to the poets. The first writer one remembers with whom prose
became an art was Sir Philip Sidney. And Sidney was a poet.
This quotation is relevant to a consideration of Hilaire Belloc,
because Belloc is a poet who happens to be known chiefly for his
prose. His _Danton_ and _Robespierre_ have been read by every
intelligent student of French history, his _Path to Rome_, that most
high-spirited and engaging of travel books, has passed through many
editions, his political writings are known to all lovers--and many
foes--of democracy, his whimsically imaginative novels have their
large and appreciative audience, and his exquisite brief essays are
contemporary classics. And since the unforgetable month of August of
the unforgetable year 1914, Hilaire Belloc has added to the number
of his friends many thousands who care little for _belles lettres_
and less for the French Revolution--he has become certainly the most
popular, and by general opinion the shrewdest and best informed, of all
chroniclers and critics of the Great War.
There is nothing, it may be said, about these achievements to indicate
the poet. How can this most public of publicists woo the shy and
exacting Muse? His superabundant energy may now and again overflow in
little lyrical rivulets, but how can he find time to turn it into the
deep channels of song?
Well, what is the difference between a poet who writes prose and a
prose-writer who writes verse? The difference is easy to see but hard
to describe. Mr. Thomas Hardy is a prose writer. He has forsaken the
novel, of which he was so distinguished a master, to make cynical
little sonnet portraits and to pour the acid wine of his philosophy--a
sort of perverted Presbyterianism--into the graceful amphora of poetic
drama. But he is not a poet. Thackeray was a prose-writer, in spite of
his delicious light verse. Every novelist writes or has written verse,
but not all of them are poets.
Of course, Sir Walter Scott was first of all a poet--the greatest poet
who ever wrote a novel. And no one who has read _Love in the Valley_
can hesitate to give Meredith his proper title. Was Macaulay a poet? I
think so--but perhaps I am in a hopeless minority in my belief that the
author of _The Battle of Naseby_ and _The Lays of Ancient Rome_ was the
last of the great English ballad makers.
But this general truth cannot, I think, honestly be denied; there have
been many great poets who have devoted most of their lives to writing
prose. Some of them have died without discovering their neglected
talent. I think that Walter Pater was one of these; much that is
annoyingly subtle or annoyingly elaborate in his essays needs only
rhyme and rhythm--the lovely accidents of poetry--to become graceful
and appropriate. His famous description of the Mona Lisa is worthless
if considered as a piece of serious æsthetic criticism. But it would
make an admirable sonnet. And it is significant that Walter Pater’s two
greatest pupils--Lionel Johnson and Father Gerard Hopkins, S.J.,--found
expression for their genius not in prose, the chosen medium of their
“unforgetably most gracious friend,” but in verse.
From Walter Pater, that exquisite of letters, to the robust Hilaire
Belloc may seem a long journey. But there is, I insist, this
similarity between these contrasting writers, both are poets, and both
are known to fame by their prose.
For proof that Walter Pater was a poet, it is necessary only to
read his _Renaissance Studies_ or his interpretations--unsound but
fascinating--of the soul of ancient Greece. Often his essays, too
delicately accurate in phrasing or too heavily laden with golden
rhetoric, seem almost to cry aloud for the relief of rhyme and rhythm.
Now, Hilaire Belloc suggests in many of his prose sketches that he is
not using his true medium. I remember a brief essay on sleep which
appeared in _The New Witness_--or, as it was then called, _The Eye
Witness_--several years ago, which was not so much a complete work in
itself as it was a draft for a poem. It had the economy of phrase, the
concentration of idea, which is proper to poetry.
But it is not necessary in the case of Hilaire Belloc, as it is in
that of Walter Pater, to search pages of prose for proof that their
author is a poet. Now and then--all too seldom--the idea in this man’s
brain has insisted on its right, has scorned the proffered dress of
prose, however fine of warp and woof, however stiff with rich verbal
embroidery, and has demanded its rhymed and rhythmed wedding garments.
Therefore, for proof that Hilaire Belloc is a poet it is necessary only
to read his poetry.
II
Hilaire Belloc is a poet. Also he is a Frenchman, an Englishman,
an Oxford man, a Roman Catholic, a country gentleman, a soldier, a
democrat, and a practical journalist. He is always all these things.
One sign that he is naturally a poet is that he is never deliberately a
poet. No one can imagine him writing a poem to order--even to his own
order. The poems knock at the door of his brain and demand to be let
out. And he lets them out, carelessly enough, setting them comfortably
down on paper simply because that is the treatment they desire. And
this happens to be the way all real poetry is made.
Not that all verse makers work that way. There are men who come upon a
waterfall or mountain or an emotion and say: “Aha! here is something
out of which I can extract a poem!” And they sit down in front of that
waterfall or mountain or an emotion and think up clever things to say
about it. These things they put into metrical form, and the result they
fondly call a poem.
There’s no harm in that. It’s good exercise for the mind, and of it
comes much interesting verse. But it is not the way in which the sum of
the world’s literature is increased.
Could anything, for example, be less studied, be more clearly marked
with the stigmata of that noble spontaneity we call inspiration,
than the passionate, rushing, irresistible lines “To the Balliol Men
Still in Africa”? Like Gilbert K. Chesterton and many another English
democrat, Hilaire Belloc deeply resented his country’s war upon the
Boers. Yet his heart went out to the friends of his university days who
were fighting in Africa. They were fighting, he thought, in an unjust
cause; but they were his friends and they were, at any rate, fighting.
And so he made something that seems (like all great writing) an
utterance rather than a composition; he put his love of war in general
and his hatred of this war in particular, his devotion to Balliol and
to the friends of his youth into one of the very few pieces of genuine
poetry which the Boer War produced. Nor has any of Oxford’s much-sung
colleges known praise more fit than this
“House that armours a man
With the eyes of a boy and the heart of a ranger,
And a laughing way in the teeth of the world,
And a holy hunger and thirst for danger.”
But perhaps a more typical example of Hilaire Belloc’s wanton genius is
to be found not among those poems which are, throughout, the beautiful
expressions of beautiful impressions, but among those which are
careless, whimsical, colloquial. There is that delightful, but somewhat
exasperating _Dedicatory Ode_. Hilaire Belloc is talking--charmingly,
as is his custom--to some of his friends, who had belonged, in their
university days, to a youthful revolutionary organisation called the
Republican Club. He happens to be talking in verse, for no particular
reason except that it amuses him to talk in verse. He makes a number of
excellent jokes, and enjoys them very much; his Pegasus is cantering
down the road at a jolly gait, when suddenly, to the amazement of
the spectators, it spreads out great golden wings and flashes like a
meteor across the vault of heaven! We have been laughing at the droll
tragedy of the opium-smoking Uncle Paul; we have been enjoying the
humorous spectacle of the contemplative freshman--and suddenly we come
upon a bit of astonishingly fine poetry. Who would expect, in all this
whimsical and jovial writing, to find this really great stanza?
“From quiet homes and first beginning
Out to the undiscovered ends,
There’s nothing worth the wear of winning
But laughter and the love of friends.”
Who having read these four lines, can forget them? And who but a poet
could write them? But Hilaire Belloc has not forced himself into this
high mood, nor does he bother to maintain it. He gaily passes on to
another verse of drollery, and then, not because he wishes to bring the
poem to an effective climax, but merely because it happens to be his
mood, he ends the escapade he calls an Ode with eight or ten stanzas of
nobly beautiful poetry.
There is something almost uncanny about the flashes of inspiration
which dart out at the astonished reader of Hilaire Belloc’s most
frivolous verses. Let me alter a famous epigram and call his light
verse a circus illuminated by lightning. There is that monumental
burlesque, the Newdigate Poem--_A Prize Poem Submitted by Mr. Lambkin
of Burford to the Examiners of the University of Oxford on the
Prescribed Poetic Theme Set by Them in 1893, “The Benefits of the
Electric Light.”_ It is a tremendous joke; with every line the reader
echoes the author’s laughter. But without the slightest warning Hilaire
Belloc passes from rollicking burlesque to shrewd satire; he has been
merrily jesting with a bladder on a stick, he suddenly draws a gleaming
rapier and thrusts it into the heart of error. He makes Mr. Lambkin say:
“Life is a veil, its paths are dark and rough
Only because we do not know enough:
When Science has discovered something more
We shall be happier than we were before.”
Here we find the directness and restraint which belong to really great
satire. This is the materialistic theory, the religion of Science,
not burlesqued, not parodied, but merely stated nakedly, without the
verbal frills and furbelows with which our forward-looking leaders of
popular thought are accustomed to cover its obscene absurdity. Almost
these very words have been uttered in a dozen “rationalistic” pulpits
I could mention, pulpits occupied by robustuous practical gentlemen
with very large eyes, great favourites with the women’s clubs. Their
pet doctrine, their only and most offensive dogma, is not attacked,
is not ridiculed; it is merely stated for them, in all kindness and
simplicity. They cannot answer it, they cannot deny that it is a
mercilessly fair statement of the “philosophy” that is their stock in
trade. I hope that many of them will read it.
III