"Without great men and without clear convictions this age is

nevertheless very active intellectually: it is studious, empirical,

inventive, sympathetic. Its wisdom consists in a certain contrite

openness of mind; it flounders, but at least in floundering it has

gained a sense of possible depths in all directions."

But our poetry is the poetry of barbarism, because this age has no sense

for perfection; its ideals are negative and partial, its moral strength

is a blind vehemence. So we get no total vision, no grasp of the whole

reality, no capacity for a sane and steady idealisation. In his little

essays on Materialism and Morals we find this outspoken philosophy on

the subject of war:

"There are panegyrists of war who say that without a periodical bleeding

a race decays and loses its manhood. Experience is directly opposed to

this shameless assertion. It is war that wastes a nation's wealth,

chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies,

condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny,

deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation. Internecine war,

foreign and civil, brought about the greatest set-back which the life of

reason has ever suffered; it exterminated the Greek and Italian

aristocracies. Instead of being descended from heroes, modern nations

are descended from slaves: and it is not their bodies only that show

it.... To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling

debauchery the soil of love."

But we read a philosopher mainly, I take it, to see how he himself

reached his serene height of detached interest in the universe. We who

have no philosophic bent fondly imagine that it is only after despairing

of instinctive happiness that the philosopher turns his back on the

struggle of life with his shout of "Sour Grapes." Reading Mr Santayana

will correct this delusion.

"We cannot venerate anyone in whom appreciation is not divorced from

desire. And this elevation and detachment of the heart need not follow

upon any great disappointment; it is finest and sweetest where it is the

gradual fruit of many affections now merged and mellowed into a natural

piety. Indeed, we are able to frame our idea of the Deity on no other

model.... There is perhaps no more frivolous notion than that a good,

once attained, loses all its value.... We turn from a beautiful thing,

as from a truth or a friend, only to return incessantly, and with

increasing appreciation."

This, then, is the reason why we should read Mr Santayana, that we

should clarify our aims, readjust our standards, and increase our

capacity for appreciating the beautiful, for this is the royal road to

the only happiness which is true, steadfast and eternal.

II

THE POEMS OF FRANCIS BRETT-YOUNG

Read but this one song:

"Why have you stolen my delight

In all the golden shows of spring

When every cherry-tree is white

And in the limes the thrushes sing,

O fickler than the April day,

O brighter than the golden broom,

O blyther than the thrushes' lay,

O whiter than the cherry-bloom,

O sweeter than all things that blow ...

Why have you only left for me

The broom, the cherry's crown of snow,

And thrushes in the linden-tree?"

Is there any need of further reason?

One concedes to that at once a word not often unlocked from one's

vocabulary; loveliness is implicit in it, music, harmony, beauty are all

there. Alas! that we should have to search among so many heaps of rubble

for one rich gem, but this at any rate is well-nigh flawless: for the

rest, Mr Brett-Young has approached excellence, achieved haunting lines

and oftentimes failed to arouse any emotional feeling at all. He talks

of the lovely words that wander through his brain, but they frequently

refuse to leave their refuge. He is at his best when he is most simple,

as here:

"High on the tufted baobab-tree

To-night a rain-bird sang to me

A simple song, of three notes only,

That made the wilderness more lonely;

For in my brain it echoed nearly,

Old village church bells chiming clearly:

The sweet cracked bells, just out of tune,

Over the mowing grass in June--

Over the mowing grass, and meadows

Where the low sun casts long shadows,

And cuckoos call in the twilight

From elm to elm, in level flight.

Now through the evening meadows move

Slow couples of young folk in love,

Who pause at every crooked stile

And kiss in the hawthorn's shade the while:

Like pale moths the summer frocks

Hover between the beds of phlox,

And old men, feeling it is late,

Cease their gossip at the gate,

Till deeper still the twilight grows,

And night blossometh, like a rose

Full of love and sweet perfume,

Whose heart most tender stars illume.

Here the red sun sank like lead,

And the sky blackened overhead;

Only the locust chirped at me

From the shadowy baobab-tree."

I don't deny that this trick of contrasting unpleasant existing

conditions with pleasant conditions that surrounded one's past some time

before was part of the stock-in-trade of every so-called war poet. I am

not at all concerned to defend, nor am I interested in, the contrast. I

merely chronicle the æsthetic pleasure that I derive from verses four

and five, though neither of these even approaches perfection. But I do

maintain that both the poems I have quoted are worth reading. I do

maintain that Mr Brett-Young has the instinct of all true poets: he

realises that "Beauty is an armour against fate," "that a lovely word

is not an idle thing": he is a true lover of Beauty: listen to his

confession of faith:

"Beauty and love are one,

Even when fierce war clashes:

Even when our fiery sun

Hath burnt itself to ashes,

And the dead planets race

Unlighted through blind space,

Beauty will still shine there:

Wherefore, I worship her."

He is, moreover, most successful when he invokes her:

"Whither, O my sweet mistress, must I follow thee?

For when I hear thy distant footfall nearing,

And wait on thy appearing,

Lo! my lips are silent: no words come to me.

Once I waylaid thee in green forest covers,

Hoping that spring might free my lips with gentle fingers;

Alas! her presence lingers

No longer than on the plain the shadow of brown kestrel hovers.

Through windless ways of the night my spirit followed after;--

Cold and remote were they, and there, possessed

By a strange unworldly rest,

Awaiting thy still voice heard only starry laughter.

The pillared halls of sleep echoed my ghostly tread.

Yet when their secret chambers I essayed

My spirit sank, dismayed,

Waking in fear to find the new-born vision fled.

Once indeed--but then my spirit bloomed in leafy rapture--

I loved; and once I looked death in the eyes:

So, suddenly made wise,

Spoke of such beauty as I may never recapture....

Whither, O divine mistress, must I then follow thee?

Is it only in love ... say, is it only in death

That the spirit blossometh,

And words that may match my vision shall come to me?"

It is because of these simple short poems that I like Mr Brett-Young's

work: in his more ambitious and longer poems like _Thamar_ he leaves me

untouched. He cannot convey in words the mysterious mingled effect that

the combined colour, music and movement of the Russian ballet produces

on the mind.

Let him remain content with the soft, sweet simplicity of Prothalamion

and we shall love him the more:

"When the evening came my love said to me:

Let us go into the garden now that the sky is cool,

The garden of black hellebore and rosemary,

Where wild woodruff spills in a milky pool.

Low we passed in the twilight, for the wavering heat

Of day had waned, and round that shaded plot

Of secret beauty the thickets clustered sweet;

Here is heaven, our hearts whispered, but our lips spake not.

Between that old garden and seas of lazy foam

Gloomy and beautiful alleys of trees arise

With spire of cypress and dreamy beechen dome,

So dark that our enchanted sight knew nothing but the skies.

Veiled with soft air, drench'd in the roses' musk

Or the dusky, dark carnation's breath of clove;

No stars burned in their deeps, but through the dusk

I saw my love's eyes, and they were brimmed with love.

No star their secret ravished, no wasting moon

Mocked the sad transience of those eternal hours:

Only the soft, unseeing heaven of June,

The ghosts of great trees, and the sleeping flowers.

For doves that crooned in the leafy noonday now

Were silent; the night-jar sought his secret covers,

Nor even a mild sea-whisper moved a creaking bough--

Was ever a silence deeper made for lovers?

Was ever a moment meeter made for love?

Beautiful are your closed lips beneath my kiss;

And all your yielding sweetness beautiful--

Oh, never in all the world was such a night as this!"

III

THE POEMS OF IRIS TREE

Iris Tree is worth reading for her vivacity, her hatred of shams, her

intellectual fireworks, her simple love of the beautiful, her youthful

rebellion, her sense of colour, her harmony, her humour, but most of all

for this:

"Many things I'd find to charm you,

Books and scarves and silken socks,

All the seven rainbow colours,

Black and white with 'broidered clocks.

Then a stick of polished whalebone

And a coat of tawny fur,

And a row of gleaming bottles

Filled with rose-water and myrrh.

Rarest brandy of the 'fifties,

Old liqueurs in leather kegs,

Golden Sauterne, copper sherry

And a nest of plovers' eggs.

Toys of tortoise-shell and jasper,

Little boxes cut in jade;

Handkerchiefs of finest cambric,

Damask cloths and dim brocade,

Six musicians of the Magyar,

Madness making harmony;

And a bed austere and narrow

With a quilt from Barbary.

You shall have a bath of amber,

A Venetian looking-glass,

And a crimson-chested parrot

On a lawn of terraced grass.

Then a small Tanagra statue

Found anew in ruins old,

Or an azure plate from Persia,

Or my hair in plaits of gold;

Or my scalp that like an Indian

You shall carry for a purse,

Or my spilt blood in a goblet ...

Or a volume of my verse."

If this doesn't make you rush out and buy her poems, nothing will. It is

the topmost level of her achievement, and it is an achievement that even

so musical a poet as Walter de la Mare would not be ashamed of having

written. Where, I would know, has the love of little material things

been so deliciously, so naïvely confessed by any other poet? Listen to

her in rebellious mood:

"You preach to me of laws, you tie my limbs

With rights and wrongs and arguments of good,

You choke my song and fill my mouth with hymns,

You stop my heart and turn it into wood.

I serve not God, but make my idol fair

From clay of brown earth, painted bright with blood,

Dressed in sweet flesh and wonder of wild hair

By Beauty's fingers to her changing mood.

The long line of the sea, the straight horizon,

The toss of flowers, the prance of milky feet,

And moonlight clear as grass my great religion,

And sunrise falling on the quiet street.

The coloured crowd, the unrestrained, the gay,

And lovers in the secret sheets of night

Trembling like instruments of music, till the day

Stands marvelling at their sleeping bodies white."

Here, surely, is that love of beauty, finely expressed, which is the

first thing we look for in any true poet. She invokes the aid of her

"three musketeers of faithful following," Love, Humour and Rebellion,

and these three stalwarts never desert her, and one finds oneself

wishing that some other poets had had the good sense to recruit the

services of such helpful henchmen.

Especially pleasant is it to find that she has not yet outgrown her

youthful pessimism: once youth has passed, time cries for

self-expression in other ways than these:

"There are songs enough of love, of joy, of grief:

Roads to the sunset, alleys to the moon:

Poems of the red rose and the golden leaf,

Fantastic faery and gay ballad tune.

The long road unto nothing I will sing,

Sing on one note, monotonous and dry,

Of sameness, calmness and the years that bring

No more emotion than the fear to die.

Grey house, grey house and after that grey house,

Another house as grey and steep and still:

An old cat tired of playing with a mouse,

A sick child tired of chasing down the hill."

There are nothing like enough songs of love or of joy, and no one knows

that better than Iris Tree, but Youth loves to drench itself in hopeless

greyness, if only to run through the whole gamut of human emotions,

"just for fun." It is like a child's dressing up in a myriad different

costumes:

"I see myself in many different dresses ...

I see myself the child of many races,

Poisoners, martyrs, harlots and princesses;

Within my soul a thousand weary traces

Of pain and joy and passionate excesses...."

Much more significant of maturity is her bizarre _Sonnet for Would-be

Suicides_ (that is my title for it, not hers):

"How often, when the thought of suicide

With ghostly weapon beckons us to die,

The ghosts of many foods alluring glide

On golden dishes, wine in purple tide

To drown our whim. Things danced before the eye

Like tasselled grapes to Tantalus: the sly

Blue of a curling trout, the battened pride

Of ham in frills, complacent quails that lie

Resigned to death like heroes--July peas,

Expectant bottles foaming at the brink--

White bread, and honey of the golden bees--

A peach with velvet coat, some prawns in pink,

A slice of beef carved deftly, Stilton cheese,

And cups where berries float and bubbles wink."

One at least of her faithful musketeers has served her to excellent

purpose in this eminently philosophical poem. Uncle Max's eyes must

twinkle with sheer merriment every time he reads this: it must be

pleasant to have a niece so capable of profiting by his genius. Another

friend of the family, Rupert Brooke, must have appreciated the panegyric

on Worms. He may have directly inspired it:

"Mouth of the dust I kiss, corruption absolute,

Worm, that shall come at last to be my paramour,

Envenomed, unseen wanderer who alone is mute,

Yet greater than gods or heroes that have gone before.

For you I sheave the harvest of my hair,

For you the whiteness of my flesh, my passion's valour,

For you I throw upon the grey screen of the air

My prism-like conceptions, my gigantic colour.

For you the delicate hands that fashion to make great

Clay, and white paper, plant a tongue in silence,

For you the battle-frenzy, and the might of hate,

Science for giving wounds, and healing science.

For you the heart's wild love, beauty, long care,

Virginity, passionate womanhood, perfected wholeness,

For you the unborn child that I prepare,

You, flabby, boneless, brainless, senseless, soulless!"

More childishness, but how delightful, how exactly in the spirit of

Donne.

One string on which she continually harps is found most lucidly

expressed in this stanza:

"Loneliness I love,

And that is why they have called me forth into the streets.

Loneliness I love,

But the crowd has clutched at me with fawning hands ...

My spirit speaks

In the scented quietness of a divine melancholy

Murmuring the tunes

For which my dreams are the delicate instruments.

The shadowy silences

Have made me beautiful and dressed me in velvet dignities,

And that is why

The noise of the tambourines has maddened my soul into dancing,

And I am clad

In the lust-lipped whispering of future caresses,

Holiness I love,

And touching the virginal pierced feet of martyrs,

The crucified feet

Nestled among lilies and hallowing candles.

Holiness I love

And the melodious absolution falling on my sins.

But that is why

Blasphemous priests have forced my hands to tear

The vesture of secrecy

Which hides the human nakedness of God."

That is a very definitely true cry from the depths and it is

oft-repeated.

"To fashion for my love one perfect song" has been ever her aim, but her

generation has been too much for her.

"Subconscious visions hold us and we fashion

Delirious verses, tortured statues, spasms of paint,

Make cryptic perorations of complaint,

Inverted religion, and perverted passion."

This may not be good poetry, but it is an admirably concise epitaph of

the age.

Sometimes she escapes into riotous, wanton imagery as a refuge:

"Moonlight flows over me,

Spreads her bright, watery hair over my face,

Full of illicit, marvellous perfumes

Wreathed with syringa, and plaited with hyacinths;

Hair of the moonlight falling about me,

Straight and cool as the drooping tresses of rain."

But in the end she comes back, gloriously sure of herself, in a poem

which is worthy to stand by the one I first quoted:

"I know what happiness is--

It is the negation of thought,

The shutting off

Of all those brooding phantoms that surround

As dank trees in a forest

Cutting the daylight into rags,

Caging the sun

In rusted prison bars.

Happiness loves to lie at a river's edge

And make no song,

But listen to the water's murmuring wisdom,

The kissing touch of leaves wind-bowed together,

The feathery swish of cloud wings on a hill:

Opening wide the violet-petalled doors

Of every shy and cloistered sense,

That all the scent and music of the world

May rush into the soul.

And happiness expands

The rainbow arch for a procession of dreams,

For moth-like fancies winged with evening,

For dove-breasted silences,

For shadowy reveries

And starry pilgrims ...

I know what happiness is--

It is the giving back to Earth

Of all our furtive thefts,

The lurid jewels that we stole away

From passion, sin and pain,

Because they glittered strangely, luring us

With their forbidden beauty.

Because our childish fingers curiously

Crave the pale secrets of the moon

And grope for dangerous toys.

Happiness comes in giving back to Earth

The things we took from her with violent hands,

Remembering only

That her dust is our garment,

Her fruits our endeavour,

Her waters our priestess,

Her leaves our interpreters to God,

Her hills our infinite patience."

That is a brave cry: "I know what happiness is." Happy indeed is the man

or woman who has found this elixir of life--thrice happy is the poet who

not only has found it, but is able to give exact and musical expression

to the discovery. Iris Tree has matured: we watch her in the process of

discarding her childish things.... When next we read her we shall find a

full-fledged poet. There is earnest already of great things to come.

That is why we should read her now. To watch a poet try her wings, soar

and fall, only to soar again, is to be counted one of life's finer

joys.

IV

THE POEMS OF ALDOUS HUXLEY

We read Aldous Huxley because we see in his work another real poet in

embryo, but a poet working in as different a medium from that in which

Iris Tree works as it is possible to imagine. He has been called the

"neurasthenic Rabelais of 1920," and in so far as this connotes a

perversity of intellect it is an accurate label. For there is no getting

away from the cleverness of Mr Huxley: he is almost too intellectual.

His brain, which helps him so admirably in his short stories, acts as an

obstruction in his pursuit of beauty.

"The problem which the most authentic modern poetry is endeavouring to

solve is to give beauty a fuller content by exploring unfamiliar paths

of sensation and perception," but Mr Huxley most nearly approximates to

beauty when he is most familiar. It is perhaps permissible to doubt

whether these new, unfamiliar paths can lead anywhere but to cul-de-sac

or cesspool.

At any rate, in Mr Huxley's opinion, "Your centaurs are your only

poets." He finds beauty "no far-fetched, dear-bought gem; no pomander to

be smelt only when the crowd becomes too stinkingly insistent: it is not

a birth of rare oboes or violins, not visible only from ten to six by

state permission at a nominal charge, not a thing richly apart, but an

ethic, a way of belief and of practice, of faith and works, medieval in

its implication with the very threads of life." He desires "no Paphian

cloister of pink monks. Rather a rosy Brotherhood of Common Life,

eating, drinking; marrying and giving in marriage; taking and taken in

adultery; reading, thinking, and when thinking fails, feeling

immeasurably more subtly, sometimes perhaps creating."

So much for his theory: in practice he has given us many tentative

exercises which reek of the intellectual, are rich in humour, deadly in

their irony, and one long poem, _Leda_, which has much beauty (though it

has been called the beauty of self-indulgence rather than that pure

beauty of self-discipline), and passages of surprising ugliness.

Whenever a poet seeks to retell a well-known story, like Keats in

_Endymion_ and _Hyperion_, we invariably find ourselves comparing the

effect with that which a parson gives when he translates a Biblical

fable into the modern jargon which passes for English prose in the

pulpit.

In the latter case we shiver with disgust; in the former it is the test

of the poet's genius that we are uplifted and find the original vastly

improved by the fresh treatment.

Mr Brett-Young does nothing to improve our impression of Thamar, Mr

Huxley infuses into the old story of _Leda_ a thousand new concepts. Let

your mind dwell on this picture:

"The tunic falls about her feet, and she

Steps from the crocus folds of drapery,

Dazzlingly naked, into the warm sun.

God-like she stood; then broke into a run,

Leaping and laughing in the light, as though

Life through her veins coursed with so swift a flow

Of generous blood and fire that to remain

Too long in statued queenliness were pain

To that quick soul, avid of speed and joy.

She ran, easily bounding, like a boy, ...

Narrow of haunch and slim and firm of breast.

Lovelier she seemed in motion than at rest,

If that might be, when she was never less,

Moving or still, than perfect loveliness."

Small wonder that Jove, scourged by his libido with itching memories of

bliss, should turn his sickened sight from the monstrous shapes that met

his eyes in Africa (this is the passage of surpassing ugliness) where

"Among unthinkable flowers, they pause and grin

Out through a trellis of suppurating lips,

Of mottled tentacles barbed at the tips

And bloated hands and wattles and red lobes

Of pendulous gristle and enormous probes

Of pink and slashed and tasselled flesh"

to young Leda where she stood, poised on the river-side. Straightway his

heart held but one thought: he must possess that perfect form or die.

Have her he must:

"Gods, men, earth, heaven, the whole

Vast universe was blotted from his thought

And nought remained but Leda's laughter, nought

But Leda's eyes. Magnified by his lust,

She was the whole world now; have her he must, he must...."

He goes to Aphrodite to plan the rape

" ... While she,

Who was to be their victim, joyously

Laughed like a child in the sudden breathless chill

And splashed and swam, forgetting every ill

And every fear and all, save only this:

That she was young, and it was perfect bliss

To be alive where suns so goldenly shine,

And bees go drunk with fragrant honey-wine,

And the cicadas sing from morn till night,

And rivers run so cool and pure and bright ...

Stretched all her length, arms under head, she lay

In the deep grass, while the sun kissed away

The drops that sleeked her skin. Slender and fine

As those old images of the gods that shine

With smooth-worn silver, polished through the years

By the touching lips of countless worshippers,

Her body was; and the sun's golden heat

Clothed her in softest flame from head to feet

And was her mantle, that she scarcely knew

The conscious sense of nakedness. The blue,

Far hills and the faint fingers of the sky

Shimmered and pulsed in the heat uneasily,

And hidden in the grass, cicadas shrill

Dizzied the air with ceaseless noise, until

A listener might wonder if they cried

In his own head or in the world outside."

Lazily she looks up into the sky and sees there the conflict between the

eagle and her lovely, hapless swan. Pity (the mother of voluptuousness)

is roused in Leda's heart and she opens her arms to receive the

transformed god.

"Crouched on the flowery ground

Young Leda lay, and to her side did press

The swan's proud-arching opulent loveliness ...

Closer he nestled, mingling with the slim

Austerity of virginal flank and limb

His curved and florid beauty, till she felt

That downy warmth strike through her flesh and melt

The bones and marrow of her strength away....

And over her the swan shook slowly free

The folded glory of his wings, and made

A white-walled tent of soft and luminous shade

To be her veil and keep her from the shame

Of naked light and the sun's noonday flame.

Hushed lay the earth and the wide, careless sky.

Then one sharp sound, that might have been a cry

Of utmost pleasure or of utmost pain,

Broke sobbing forth, and all was still again."

There is a sensuous beauty in this poem which makes it altogether

lovely. Certainly in thinking of the fable of Leda in the future our

minds will first fly back to Mr Huxley's poem and that is probably the

highest tribute we can pay it. But the rest of his poems aim at

something very different from the simple, sensuous and passionate and

are on a different plane.

He deals cynically with the transitory nature of human passions, he

laughs at Jonah as he sits praying and singing on "the convex mound of

one vast kidney" of the whale that swallowed him; in his philosophers'

songs he likes to sing of man as "a poor degenerate from the ape" and of

God as a fool.

"If, O my Lesbia, I should commit,

Not fornication, dear, but suicide,

My Thames-blown body (Pliny vouches it)

Would drift face upwards on the oily tide

With the other garbage, till it putrefied.

But you, if all your lovers' frozen hearts

Conspired to send you, desperate, to drown--

Your maiden modesty would float face down,

And men would weep upon your hinder parts.

'Tis the Lord's doing. Marvellous is the plan

By which this best of worlds is wisely planned.

One law he made for woman, one for man:

We bow the head and do not understand."

This is certainly not poetry, but it is funny. The man with the wry face

gets his laugh, even if we feel that to be facetious it is not necessary

to be blasphemous.

He is happier in his rôle of Ninth Philosopher: he here attains a true

expression of what is happening in the world of modern art.

"Beauty for some provides escape,

Who gain a happiness in eyeing

The gorgeous buttocks of the ape

Or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying."

But _Frascati's_ shows him at his normal level of intellectual irony:

"Bubble-breasted swells the dome

Of this my spiritual home,

From whose nave the chandelier,

Schaffhausen frozen, tumbles sheer.

We in the round balcony sit,

Lean o'er and look into the pit

Where feed the human bears beneath,

Champing with their gilded teeth.

What negroid holiday makes free

With such priapic revelry?

What songs? What gongs? What nameless rites?

What gods like wooden stalagmites?

What stream of blood or kidney pie?

What blasts of Bantu melody?

Rag-time.... But when the wearied Band

Swoons to a waltz, I take her hand.

And there we sit in blissful calm,

Quietly sweating palm to palm."

This is the vein which he expands in what Middleton Murry regards as his

best poem, _Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt_, an attempt to "fish up a

single day" from a dead friend's forgotten existence. John Ridley, as

he calls him, wakes from a dream among his familiar books and pictures--

"Real as his dream? He wondered. Ten to nine.

Thursday. Wasn't he lunching at his aunt's?

Distressing circumstance.

But then he was taking Jenny out to dine,

Which was some consolation. What a chin!

Civilised ten thousand years, and still

No better way than rasping a pale mask

With imminent suicide, steel or obsidian:

Repulsive task!

And the more odious for being quotidian.

If one should live till eighty-five ...

And the dead, do they still shave? The horrible dead, are they

alive?...

Nine o'clock. Still in bed. Warm, but how lonely!

He wept to think of all those single beds,

Those desperate night-long solitudes,

Those mental salons full of nudes.

Shelley was great when he was twenty-four.

Eight thousand nights alone--minus, perhaps,

Six, or no! seven, certainly not more.

Five little bits of heaven

(Tum-do-rum, de-rum, de-rum),

Five little bits of heaven and one that was a lapse,

High-priced disgust: it stopped him suddenly

In the midst of laughter and talk with a tingling down the spine

(Like infants' impoliteness, a terrible infants' brightness),

And he would shut his eyes so as not to see

His own hot blushes calling him a swine."

At last he throws the nightmare of his blankets off, gets up and goes

into the bathroom--

"Pitiable to be

Quite so deplorably naked when one strips.

There was his scar, a panel of old rose

Slashed in the elegant buff of his trunk hose;

Adonis punctured by his amorous boar,

Permanent souvenir of the Great War.

One of God's jokes, typically good,

That wound of his. How perfect that he should

Have suffered it for--what?"

He dresses, goes down to breakfast, letters and _The Times_: he reads

some of his old work ...

"Yes, he had genius, if he chose to use it;

If he chose to--but it was too much trouble,

And he preferred reading. He lit his pipe,

Opened his book, plunged in and soon was drowned

In pleasant seas ... to rise again and find

One o'clock struck and his unshaven face

Still like a record in a musical-box,

And Auntie Loo miles off in Bloomsbury."

Mr Huxley wastes much satire on avuncular energies in war-time and makes

his hero escape from his verbose relatives to walk the streets. Tired of

this, he enters the inevitable café of the intellectual young novelist

and moralises on the nightmare oppressiveness of profane love. He then

sits out in the gardens of Leicester Square and finds comfort in

regarding each hair and every pore on his hand. This palls soon enough,

as one might expect, and then--

"Action, action! Quickly rise and do

The most irreparable things; beget,

In one brief consummation of the will,

Remorse, reaction, wretchedness, regret.

Action! This was no time for sitting still.

He crushed his hat down over his eyes

And walked with a stamp to symbolise

Action, action--left, right, left;

Planting his feet with flabby beat,

Taking strange Procrustean steps,

Lengthened, shortened to avoid

Touching the lines between the stones--

A thing which makes God so annoyed."

Action translates itself into spending three pounds on a book which he

didn't want and pulling the bell of a chance house. He turns into a

cinema house, goes to sleep, wakes at eight o'clock and so keeps "dear

Jenny" waiting.

This dinner with Jenny is the most effective part of the poem, as we

might expect:

"Food and drink, food and drink:

Olives as firm and sleek and green

As the breasts of a sea-god's daughter,

Swimming far down where the corpses sink

Through the dense shadowy water.

Silver and black on flank and back,

The glossy sardine mourns its head.

The red anchovy and the beetroot red,

With carrots, build a gorgeous stair--

Bronze, apoplexy and Venetian hair--

And the green pallor of the salad round

Sharpens their clarion sound....

Golden wine, pale as a Tuscan primitive,

And wine's strange taste, half loathsome, half delicious:

Come, my Lesbia, let us love and live....

'Jenny, adorable--' (what draws the line

At the mere word 'love'?) 'has anyone the right

To look so lovely as you look to-night,

To have such eyes, such a helmet of bright hair?'

But candidly, he wondered, do I care?"

The night goes on, comes the time to part--

"'Good-night,' the last kiss, 'and God bless you, my dear.'

So, she was gone, she who had been so near,

So breathing-warm--soft mouth and hands and hair--

A moment since. Had she been really there,

Close at his side and had he kissed her? It seemed

Unlikely as something somebody else had dreamed

And talked about at breakfast, being a bore."

The first thing we feel tempted to say about this poem is that we should

vastly prefer to be possessed of an Olympian libido for Leda than to be

burdened with John Ridley's "feebly sceptical, inefficient, profoundly

unhappy" emotion for Jenny. Jove was, at any rate, healthy in his lusts:

there is something terribly anæmic about our modern love-making, with

our one eye on the intellect lest we should do anything without a

reason. I am fully aware that this is not criticism: it is merely making

a note of the feeling that is uppermost in our minds on finishing the

poem. But that is one of the reasons why we should read Aldous Huxley:

he is not lacking in daring: what he sees and feels he shows: he is very

boyish in his desire to shock: in these days one would have thought that

there was no one left to shock except the undergraduate, and those who

preserve the callowness of the undergraduate through life. He

exaggerates the importance of material joys and miseries: he is easily

disgusted: his fastidious intellect rebels at many things that most of

us accept complacently ... but it is to his credit that he makes us feel

that we ought to be more fastidious, that we ought to think more, that

we ought to accept less. At present he is engaged in the process of

destruction, a joyous, youthful pastime: when he grows up he will give

us something constructive. At present we rejoice in his vitality, energy

and alertness. The rest will come. Above all, he is generously endowed

with the comic spirit: that alone would make him readable in such an age

of dullness.

V

THE POEMS OF ROBERT GRAVES

There are not many reasons why we should read Robert Graves, but one

reason is of such outstanding importance that it overshadows the want of

many. While Siegfried Sassoon and Osbert Sitwell have vented their

vitriol on the old, Mr Graves in _Country Sentiment_ has run away into

the land of nursery rhymes as an escape from the haunting horrors of our

post-war era. There are strong men of little imagination who have wiped

off the memory of the war from their minds like chalk-marks off a slate:

there are others who will be haunted by it for the rest of their lives.

Robert Graves is one of the latter:

"Gulp down your wine, old friends of mine,

Roar through the darkness, stamp and sing

And lay ghost hands on everything,

But leave the noonday's warm sunshine

To living lads for mirth and wine.

I met you suddenly down the street,

Strangers assume your phantom faces,

You grin at me from daylight places,

Dead, long dead, I'm ashamed to greet

Dead men down the morning street."

That is why he prays that

"[But may] the gift of heavenly peace

And glory for all time

Keep the boy Tom who tending geese

First made the nursery rhyme."

Only in the contemplation of childish toys can he regain repose. But

nursery rhymes and childish toys are as flimsy as gossamer, the latter

too easily get broken, the former are too often patently absurd.

There is a gnat-like thinness even in this delicious little song:

"Small gnats that fly

In hot July

And lodge in sleeping ears,

Can rouse therein

A trumpet's din

With Day-of-Judgment fears.

Small mice at night

Can wake more fright

Than lions at midday.

An urchin small

Torments us all

Who tread his prickly way.

A straw will crack

The camel's back,

To die we need but sip,

So little sand

As fills the hand

Can stop a steaming ship.

One smile relieves

A heart that grieves

Though deadly sad it be,

And one hard look

Can close the book

That lovers love to see."

He listens to the pale-bearded Janus, who urges him to

"Sing and laugh and easily run

Through the wide waters of my plain,

Bathe in my waters, drink my sun,

And draw my creatures with soft song;

They shall follow you along

Graciously with no doubt or pain."

So he extols the simple rhymes that we learnt in childhood's days and

seeks to add to them.

"So these same rhymes shall still be told

To children yet unborn,

While false philosophy growing old

Fades and is killed by scorn."

Unfortunately it is not given to any modern to imitate with any degree

of success either the ballads our ancestors loved or the nursery rhymes

which all children have learnt: this age is too sophisticated and this

avenue of escape is denied to Mr Graves: one of the lessons that we find

most painful in the learning is that we are the product of our own age

and cannot get away from it. Mr Graves anticipates his reviewers in his

_L'Envoi_ when he says:

"Everything they took from my new poem book

But the fly-leaf and the covers."

But there are one or two other things I should leave inside the

singularly attractive covers, and one of them is this:

"Restless and hot two children lay

Plagued with uneasy dreams,

Each wandered lonely through false day

A twilight torn with screams.

True to the bed-time story, Ben

Pursued his wounded bear,

Ann dreamed of chattering monkey men,

Of snakes twined in her hair ...

Now high aloft above the town

The thick clouds gather and break,

A flash, a roar, and rain drives down:

Aghast the young things wake.

Trembling for what their terror was,

Surprised by instant doom,

With lightning in the looking-glass,

Thunder that rocks the room.

The monkey's paws patter again,

Snakes hiss and flash their eyes:

The bear roars out in hideous pain:

Ann prays and her brother cries.

They cannot guess, could not be told

How soon comes careless day,

With birds and dandelion gold,

Wet grass, cool scents of May."

This is no nursery rhyme, but it is a very important parable. Mr Robert

Graves is by nature a poet, but his vision has become blurred, his

senses distorted, his nerves jangled by the war. Can no one tell him of

the approach of careless day, of birds and dandelion gold, wet grass,

cool scents of May? Surely the nightmare of his soul is nearly over, and

he can creep out from under the soft quilt of nursery rhymes to the

clear light of day and sing us the golden songs that we know are in him,

as yet unexpressed.

VI

J. D. BERESFORD

A common criticism levelled against novelists is that when they depict

failures we find it unnecessary to turn to the last page to prove these

failures successes. No novelist except Gissing has dared to write the

story of a failure who remained a failure till the end. Mr J. D.

Beresford's art is frankly autobiographical, and the very fact of his

having a novel published proves that he at any rate has ceased to be a

failure, and yet the fact is that Jacob Stahl at each stage of his life

looks upon himself as a failure; the truth of the matter is that Mr

Beresford, like his hero, fully realises that "virtue lies only in the

continual renewal of effort; the boast of success is an admission of

failure." Jacob never boasts of success.

In _W. E. Ford_ Mr Beresford talks of his architectural experiences, his

unfortunate first marriage, his temporary inhibitions and his ultimate

literary success; his hero in the trilogy is just such a man as Mr

Beresford declares himself to be. Jacob Stahl was lame, Mr Beresford

suffers from a like physical disability. At every point in these three

books we feel convinced that he is setting down the facts of his own

struggle, and if it needed proof that genius does not necessarily

manifest itself through the imagination, but through a careful selection

of actual autobiographical experiences, we should get that proof in

these remarkable novels. He even goes so far as to interpolate into the

body of his novels the actual eulogistic criticism that his own early

works received from the reviewers. We know that he was actually employed

by W. H. Smith & Son to do much the same work as Jacob Stahl is called

upon to do for Price & Mallinson.

A conversation with Meredith that Jacob has on the subject of literary

art is equally illuminating as descriptive of Beresford's own theories.

"Why shouldn't a novelist describe life as he sees it?... I simply don't

understand all that stuff about art," replied Jacob. "Method,

technique, yes. You have got to find words to express what you've seen."

He agreed that the essential thing was the accurate representation of

the commonplace, and realised when it was put to him that he had put a

piece of life under the microscope and not related it to the whole; we

feel, furthermore, that Mr Beresford was thinking solely of himself when

he impressed upon us the importance of realising that at the end of his

struggle Jacob Stahl "could never rest content with any such attainment

as was provided by the comfort of his wife's love ... in the care of his

three children, or, least of all, by such satisfactions as come to him

from his modest achievements in the world of letters; he is ever at the

beginning of life reaching out towards those eternal values that are

ever beyond his grasp ... and that earnest search of his for some aspect

of permanent truth keeps his spirit young." Mr Beresford is

pre-eminently among the novelists of to-day a candidate for truth.

Surely no one has been so completely honest over his relations with the

other sex; it is true that in _God's Counterpoint_ Philip is so

puritanically distorted in his attitude towards sex as to become as vile

and disgusting as the most degenerate physical profligate, and we feel

that a more normal man than Mr Beresford's hero (the shadow of himself)

in the trilogy would not have taken Madeline so seriously or have

believed in, much less have married, such a woman as Lola so casually,

or have caused such a perfect type of womanhood as Betty so many

heart-burnings. Anyone but Jacob would have seen through Mrs Latimer in

half-an-hour. It would have served Jacob right if she had made him marry

her. At the same time a more normal man than Mr Beresford would have

been quite unable to make such people not only live but actually

interesting, not so much for what they do as for what they are as

betrayed in their conversations; an underbred clerk, a temporarily

reclaimed drunkard of a curate, a courtesan countess, a saviour of

souls, a self-sacrificing aunt, a pedantic successful brother, a woman

of the streets, whist-playing inhabitants of a boarding-house, literary

giants, omniscient commercial travellers, pretty typists, truculent

compositors, Cornish villagers, flit in and out of the pages of the

trilogy, who, once met, can never be forgotten. They are all flesh and

blood. These two perfect cameos of psychological analysis may be taken

as typical:

"When Laurence's brain grew dull and futile after a period of clean

living and close application, he could find no stimulus for it save by a

concession to the brute in him. When the brute was tired by excess, it

found rest and the means of recovery during the activity and temporary

dominance of the spirit.... If he had lived for the spirit he would have

died in a madhouse, as it was the brute gradually absorbed him."

Again, of Cecil Barker: "Truly, the man was honest when he was not

fishing (for the souls of men). He could beget love for himself in the

mind of man or woman; and he could reject it without compunction when

offered--a far harder thing.... He was only selfish in the rigour of his

self-denial ... he was a superman who worked for no rewards here, and

none ever heard him speak of any hope of reward hereafter.... Even those

who--like Jacob Stahl--suffered bitterly at his hands, still remembered

him in after years with admiration and love."

The fact is that in common with all true artists Mr Beresford (like his

hero) was extraordinarily impressionable, and therefore saw further into

the hearts of men than most of us, even if, as he says of himself, he

resembled rubber rather than wax in that he was only impressed

momentarily. But his resilience is opposed to the woodenness of ordinary

writers in exactly the same proportion as his protagonists have as much

likeness to life as theirs have none.

One of the most pleasing traits in Mr Beresford's work comes from what

he calls his "scattered education"; there is always in his work a

pleasing absence of mere cleverness which endears him to all those who

regard life as less of an intellectual problem than something which

every man has to live for himself; we are shown in one page of absorbing

interest how books affected the life of Jacob Stahl; from standard

novels of which _Robert Elsmere_ may be taken as a typical example he

rises to the _Origin of Species_, works on biology, physics and

philosophy; only after his life with the swearing mission parson, Cecil

Barker (an exquisitely drawn character), does he realise the

shortcomings of orthodox Christianity and the fact that experience is

the only school that matters; he feels quite honestly ignorant in the

presence of his brother as he does in the presence of all so-called

"well-read" men. He owed more to his financial and marital disasters

than to anything else in his life except the influence of Betty; by

inclination he was tempted to deny God through his foolish tendency to

immolate himself. Only when he got clear of cant, from a morality that

depended on repression to one that depended upon the liberation of

impulse, did he achieve freedom and success. Mr Beresford, it will be

seen at once, by presenting us with a slice of life (unconsciously

perhaps) teaches us how to live. Like Wells, he becomes more and more

interested as life goes on in linking up science, religion and art; the

unity of life, the beauty of truth, the truth of beauty, these are the

things at which he aims; the methods by which he would attain them are

best presented to us in his educational experiment, _W. E. Ford_. There

in the shortest possible compass we get the trend of his teaching, for

like all great artists he is first and foremost a teacher; and if his

own observations have taught him nothing else, they have at any rate

taught him "that a positive immorality (as we now regard it) is a far

more admirable thing than a negative virtue." It would be hard to ask a

man to give a more convincing proof than the results of his own

observations, especially when he can express them, as Mr Beresford does,

with subtle irony, genial humour and an uncanny knowledge of the motives

which govern human action.

VII

_NIGHT AND DAY_

There is one thing that Virginia Woolf demands of all her readers before

she can be appreciated at her true worth, and that is leisure. Try to

read _Night and Day_ at the rate you read W. J. Locke and you will hear

a faint buzz of conversation amid an interminable rattle of tea-cups ...

and nothing more. For it is certainly true that people in this novel

rarely stop talking, and it is equally true that when they do stop it is

usually to have another cup of tea with a thin slice of lemon in it. It

treats on the one side of a type that one finds "at the tops of

professions, with letters after their names"; sitting "in luxurious

public offices, with private secretaries attached to them"; writing

"solid books in dark covers, issued by the presses of the two great

universities"; and "when one of them dies the chances are that another

of them writes his biography."

The heroine's mother spent her life in making phrases and adding to the

monumental biography of her poet father, while Katherine, the daughter,

rose early in the morning or sat up late at night to work at

mathematics, a subject that appealed to her solely because it was

opposed to literature.

As a foil to Katherine is Mary Datchet, the twenty-five-year-old

parson's daughter living alone in London, enjoying Emerson and the

darning of stockings, while earning her own living in a suffrage office

in Russell Square. The two main male characters are also sharply

differentiated.

There is William Rodney, who reads papers on the Elizabethan use of

metaphors, irresistibly ludicrous in appearance, with his nervous,

impulsive manners and immaculate clothes. "By profession a clerk in a

Government office, he was one of those martyred spirits to whom

literature is at once a source of divine joy and of almost intolerable

irritation. Not content to rest in their love of it, they must attempt

to practise it themselves, and they are generally endowed with very

little facility in composition." This man is engaged to Katherine though

ten years her senior and "with more of the old maid in him than poet."

Ralph Denham, the other man of importance, is a rough-tongued, poor

solicitor with an uncanny power of making people do what he wanted

(especially the two girls in the novel), who lived in a very different

style from that to which Katherine was accustomed. Here is a delightful

description of the Hilbery _ménage_:

"They were all dressed for dinner, and, indeed, the prettiness of the

dinner-table merited that compliment. There was no cloth upon the table,

and the china made regular circles of deep blue upon the shining brown

wood. In the middle there was a bowl of tawny red and yellow

chrysanthemums, and one of pure white, so fresh that the narrow petals

were curved backwards into a firm white ball. From the surrounding walls

the heads of three famous Victorian writers surveyed this entertainment,

and slips of paper pasted beneath them testified in the great man's own

handwriting that he was always yours sincerely or affectionately or for

ever"--from which it appears that Virginia Woolf is one of those writers

who, interested in every thing, observe and note every detail in their

work. "Daily life in a house where there are young and old is full of

curious little ceremonies and pieties, which are discharged quite

punctually, though the meaning of them is obscure, and a mystery has

come to brood over them which lends even a superstitious charm to their

performance." Every evening, for instance, we hear of Katherine reading

aloud while her mother knitted scarves intermittently on a little

circular frame, and her father read the newspaper, "not so attentively

but that he could comment humorously now and again upon the fortunes of

the hero and the heroine."

Her father spent his days editing his review or "placing together

documents by means of which it would be proved that Shelley had written

'of' instead of 'and,' or that the inn in which Byron had slept was

called the 'Nag's Head' and not the 'Turkish Knight,' or that the

Christian name of Keats's uncle had been John rather than Richard."

He represents the opposite pole from Ralph Denham, the seemingly hard

and self-sufficient young man with the queer temper, consumed with a

desire to get on, unpopular both in the office and at home.

One of the charms of the book lies in the setting. We are swept from

Lincoln's Inn Fields and Kensington to country rectories and manor

houses in Lincolnshire where everything is reminiscent of the Middle

Ages. It is in this country that the main characters find themselves.

Ralph finds himself in love with Katherine; Katherine finds herself out

of love with Rodney, to whom she is engaged, and in love with Ralph;

Mary finds herself in love with Ralph; Rodney finds that nobody loves

him: there are incomprehensible confusions in the minds of all the

characters about love: but most of them are honest enough not only to

realise their confusions, but to confess them. They begin to doubt their

loves when they are in each other's presences, and be certain of them

when they are again alone.

It is this finding of themselves that makes them interesting, for they

are not, on the whole, lovable characters. One feels sorry for them,

yes, and it is probable that Virginia Woolf herself loves them, but we

feel that they are all shut away in a world which is far from ours. Over

and over again we find ourselves enveloped in a Jane Austenish

atmosphere, partly induced, no doubt, by the extreme deliberation of the

writer. Virginia Woolf is in no hurry to arrive at any conclusion.

Perhaps it is a virtue in her that we feel that reason will always

triumph over the heart in these people. Perhaps it should, but it surely

depends on the height of the passion to which the heart is capable of

rising. In none of these characters is there any very explosive

property.

Katherine's attempt to reconcile the world of reality with the dream

world is not fairly portrayed, for the simple reason that her dream

world is always such a thin one. Ralph Denham embodies for her the lover

on the great horse riding by the seashore and the leaf-hung forests, but

beyond the fact that he paces up and down the streets outside her

windows for two nights he gives no indications of the great lover. The

truth is that we are never allowed to see at all clearly into

Katherine's or Ralph's dream world. Virginia Woolf may have found

herself incapable of taking us into its recesses: in the world of

reality she is wonderful. It gives the whole of the book away when we

find that we are more interested in the purely ineffective characters,

like Mrs Hilbery, than in Katherine, who ought to have been a tragic

character. "It's life that matters, nothing but life--the process of

discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process," quotes Katherine to

herself, "not the discovery itself at all." When one of Hugh Walpole's

heroines begins to say things like that to herself we know that she is

going to suffer incredible anguish in the process, but Katherine suffers

nothing worse than having to listen to the gossip of an aunt who tells

her that her _fiancé_ (with whom she is not in love) has been flirting

with another girl. Katherine ought to have been a discarded mistress at

least. We feel cheated.

But we don't feel cheated when we listen to the author describing

trivial people or a beautiful scene. Just as she is able to see and

describe whatever emotions and ideas flit through the souls of her

characters, so she can see and describe with equal skill and beauty and

exactness the country fields of Lincolnshire, Kew Gardens, London by

night, the river and interiors of houses.

We do feel cheated when Katherine has visions such as the following ...

and nothing comes of them:--

"She was walking down a road in Northumberland in the August sunset; at

the inn she left her companion, who was Ralph Denham, and was

transported, not so much by her own feet as by some invisible means, to

the top of a high hill. Here the scents, the sounds among the dry

heather-roots, the grass-blades pressed upon the palm of her hand, were

all so perceptible that she could experience each one separately. After

this her mind made excursions into the dark of the air, or settled upon

the surface of the sea, which could be discovered over there, or with

equal unreason it returned to its couch of bracken beneath the stars of

midnight, and visited the snow valleys of the moon. These fancies would

have been in no way strange, since the walls of every mind are decorated

with some such tracery, but she found herself suddenly pursuing such

thoughts with an extreme ardour, which became a desire to change her

actual condition for something matching the conditions of her dream."

Unfortunately there is nothing in Ralph Denham to make him the object of

such an ardour, unless his brusque way of trying to bully people of less

mental calibre than himself makes him a heroic figure.

"I suppose I'm in love," he says to Mary, who is herself madly in love

with him and he knows it. "Anyway, I'm out of my mind. I can't think, I

can't work, I don't care a hang for anything in the world. Good heavens,

Mary! I'm in torment! One moment I'm happy; next I'm miserable. I hate

her for half-an-hour; then I'd give my whole life to be with her for ten

minutes; all the time I don't know what I feel, or why I feel it; it's

insanity, and yet it's perfectly reasonable."

Whatever he felt he had no right to talk to her of all women like that.

This is no rider from the sea on a great horse, but as ineffectual and

contemptible a creature as the pedant, Rodney. He actually sets before

him on his table a note from Katherine, a flower he had picked for her,

a photograph of a statue of a Greek goddess which (if the lower part

were concealed!) had often given him the ecstasy of being in her

presence and then sets himself to visualise her.

No, Ralph Denham is not calculated to inspire our affection, respect or

love. It is more pleasant to dwell on the reality of his home than of

himself. Katherine visits his mother and finds her sitting at a large

dining-room table "untidily strewn with food and unflinchingly lit up by

incandescent gas," bending over an unsatisfactory spirit-lamp.

"The unsparing light revealed more ugliness than Katherine had seen in

one room for a very long time. It was the ugliness of enormous folds of

brown material, looped and festooned, of plush curtains, from which

depended balls and fringes, partially concealing bookshelves swollen

with black school texts. Her eye was arrested by cross scabbards of

fretted wood upon the dull green wall, and wherever there was a high

flat eminence, some fern waved from a pot of crinkled china, or a bronze

horse reared so high that the stump of a tree had to sustain his

forequarters."

That is excellent writing and invaluable for the creation of a proper

atmosphere.

It is in this sense of atmosphere that Virginia Woolf most clearly shows

her great gifts. The broad green spaces, the vista of trees, the ruffled

gold of the Thames in the distance at Kew, the Strand which makes

Katherine think in terms of mathematics, and the Embankment which sent

her back to her dream forest, the ocean beach, the leafy solitudes, the

magnanimous hero, are delicately but surely made to serve their turn in

the unravelling of the story. "Strange thoughts are bred in passing

through crowded streets should the passenger, by chance, have no exact

destination in front of him, much as the mind shapes all kinds of forms,

solutions, images when listening inattentively to music."

So walking down the Charing Cross Road Katherine wonders if she would

mind being run over by a motor-bus or having "an adventure with that

disagreeable-looking man hanging about the entrance of the Tube

station," and her mind answers, No. She could not conceive fear or

excitement.

So Ralph Denham's mind is filled with a sense of the actual presence of

Katherine when in Lincolnshire he sees "laid out on the perfectly flat

and richly green meadow at the bottom of the hill a small grey manor

house, with ponds, terraces and clipped hedges in front of it, a

farm-building or so at the side, and a screen of fir-trees rising

behind, all perfectly sheltered and self-sufficient. Behind the house

the hill rose again, and the trees on the farther summit stood upright

against the sky, which appeared of a more intense blue between their

trunks."

So Mrs Hilbery in her consciousness of the running green lines of the

hedges, the swelling ploughland, the mild blue sky finds a pastoral

background to the drama of human life.

So Ralph associates Mary with the mist of winter hedges and the clear

red of the bramble leaves: so Mary with regard to Ralph. "Her thoughts

seemed even to take their colour from the street she happened to be in.

Thus the vision of humanity appeared to be in some way connected with

Bloomsbury and faded distinctly by the time she crossed the main road;

then a belated organ-grinder in Holborn set her thoughts dancing

incongruously; and by the time she was crossing the great misty square

of Lincoln's Inn Fields she was cold and depressed and horribly

clear-sighted."

Mary, by the way, is nearer our conception of a likeable person than

anyone else in the book. She has at any rate attained to the standpoint

that life is full of complexity and must, in spite or because of that,

be loved to the last fibre of it.

And so it is with us: we carry away, after putting _Night and Day_ down

for the last time, an atmosphere of a room full of deep shadows,

firelight, unwavering silver candle flames, and empty spaces to be

crossed before reaching the round table in the middle of the room, with

its frail burden of silver trays and china tea-cups, red parrots

swinging on the chintz curtains and arm-chairs warming in the blaze.

And so we come to read _Night and Day_ in a mood very different from

that which sends us to _Tom Jones_ or _Wuthering Heights_: there is no

full-blooded narrative full of incident or wild, insatiable passion. It

is a penetrating, shrewd comedy wherein many feckless people are

portrayed to the life. It is essentially modern in so far as there is no

attempt to make us fall in love with the hero or heroine: we are never

on the verge of tears through pity of their fate, though we are

interested by their confused states of mind.

We are never unable to put the book down: on the other hand, there are

few that we are more inclined to pick up and read for the _n_th time.

There is a rich harvest of beauty on almost every page; there is true

satirical humour; there is brilliance of intellect, clarity of aim and

complete fearlessness: above all, there is strangeness and

individuality, and the reader who turns away from _Night and Day_

because the atmosphere has failed to ensnare him in the first three

hundred or so pages deserves our pity. He has missed a real treat, both

emotional and intellectual.

VIII

E. C. BOOTH

There are many people whose taste in fiction is so fastidious that the

sight of dialect in a novel makes them refuse to read it. To such people

Mr Edward C. Booth makes no appeal. Both in _The Cliff-End_ and _Fondie_

(his two great books) well-nigh every character speaks in a broad

Yorkshire accent. They are stories of the soil, of people who move in a

world very different from that which Mr Stephen M'Kenna has annexed as

his own. His novels move in a most leisurely manner, like the people in

them: anyone who reads novels for their plots alone may omit Mr Booth's

name from his library list. Neither in _The Cliff-End_ nor _Fondie_ does

the actual plot matter much. In point of fact, the basic idea in each is

rather stupid. Pamela is so sweet a girl that the Spawer would never

have hesitated at all in real life; Blanche in reality would never have

drowned herself for so little a reason as one illegitimate child.

No: we read _The Cliff-End_ for its spaciousness, its freshness, its

rippling current of humour, its myriad living characters, its beautiful

setting and its picture of love. For it is first and last a rattling

good love romance.

You can test your appreciation of Mr Booth by his opening chapters. If

the description of Tankard's Bus fails to charm you, don't read on. Such

fare is not for you. But there are many of us who can be sufficiently

grateful for such a beginning as this:

"Tankard's Bus is the most beautiful bus in the world--the biggest,

blandest, noblest, longest, good-naturedest, most magnanimous ... no

fewer than five steps swing at its tail-end to two yards out, with

balustrades of real brass. Five steps form the complement of a

full-grown flight of stairs in Ullbrig--as many, indeed, as take most of

us up to bed ... only to take one sacramental sniff of its cushions is

to be filled as a perfumed vase with the breath and spirit and sympathy

of the district; is to divine the soul of the soil, the heart of the

heavy-headed corn, a-flush to the cliff-edge; the sensuous sway of the

barley in ceaseless stir of mystic communion; the stillness of turnips;

the rustle of oats; the grateful green of pasture, traversed slowly here

and there with streaks of dun and white-and-tan, and the fleecy grey

blots of nibbling sheep; the murmur of many waves; the rippling cadence

of the reaper; the busy hum of the threshing-machine, in indefatigable

ascent and descent of its three semitones ... it is timed to leave the

Market Arms at three o'clock. To make quite sure of a corner seat you

would do well to be sitting in it by four o'clock at the latest...." All

the way through the first chapter we watch this 'bus filling and

emptying like a bee-hive, threading its way at last out of Hunmouth,

away into the country-side ... "and so on and so on and so on, along the

dusty hedge-lined road, homeward in the slanting beams of gold, with the

sun spinning dizzily behind and the great elongated shadow of Tankard

and his colleagues thrown far away out before, till that last moment

when the mill spreads its mighty arms to the left-hand window in welcome

of home-coming, and the squat, square-towered church stares stolidly

through the other with its unwinking blue-diamond clock eye, and the

little red roofs gathered round its midway give warm greeting over the

latticed hedges in the mellowed evening light."

Not only has Mr Booth observed accurately and with the eye of an artist

this corner of East Yorkshire scenery, but he has made himself complete

master of the vernacular.

"''Ev ye 'eard 'ow Mester Jenkison' mother' sister-in-law's gettin' on,

Steg?'

"'Ay,' says Steg.

"''Ow is she then?'

"'She's deead.'

"'Nay! Is she an' all? Poor owd woman!'

"'She is that!' says Steg, warming with a sense of triumph to the work,

as though he had the credit of her demise. 'She deed ti morn at aif-past

six.'

"'An' when's t' buryin'? Did y'ear?'

"'Ay, they telt me,' says Steg.

"'It'll be o' Thosday, Ah's think.'

"'Nay, bud it weean't. Wensday. There's ower much thunder about for

keepin'.'"

A man who can make his yokels talk like this has got little to learn.

In Father Mostyn Mr Booth has created one of the most glorious parsons

in fiction.

"'Ha! The vicar's lobster if you please. Not out of the window there; I

won't have lobster out of the window. The sunlight has a peculiar

chemical action upon the tin, liberating certain constituents of the

metal exceedingly perilous to the intercostal linings.'"

Nothing that goes on in the village is hidden from him, so we see him at

once making friends with the Spawer, the stranger who comes to Cliff-End

to compose his music in quiet. "The house stands endwise to the sea, set

deep in a horse-shoe of trees; a big, hearty, whitewashed building under

bronze-red tiles; two storeys high in front, that slope down backward

over the dairy toward the stack-garth till they touch its high

nettles.... The kitchen takes up the whole end of the house, facing two

ways. The first window watches the lane across the red tile path and the

little unclassified garden; the second comes on to the broadside front

of the house, facing south, where the sun is a gorgeous nuisance after

mid-morning in summer, ... dipping below the sunk stone wall and the dry

nettle-grown ditch in which the ball buries itself instinctively

whenever you hit it, is the big grass field for cricket, with the

wickets always standing. And beyond this, sweeping away in every

direction ... go the great lagoons of corn, brimming up to their green

confines ... and the dim Garthstone windmill turning its listless sails

over in dreamy soliloquy across three miles of fattening grain and green

hedge and buttercupped pasture ... and the celestial sound of the sea,

two fields off, tipping the lonely shore ... and the stirring of lazy

leaves, the chick of poultry, the soothing grunt of distant pigs ... the

solaceful shutting of unseen gates...."

God forbid that we should hurry amid surroundings such as these. Readers

of _The Cliff-End_, fully to enjoy it, must imitate our village youths

who prop themselves up by the wall of the bridge every Sunday afternoon

and watch the water flow underneath in complete content for six hours

at a time.

We are content to dawdle with the Spawer in his little, faded,

old-world, out-of-the-world room, with its choir of pink roses on the

walls and his own books scattered indiscriminately about: Daudet,

Tolstoi, Turgenev, Molière, Swinburne and so on.

By the time we reach chapter eight we have forgotten to wish that

anything should happen ... and immediately something does. A sudden

human sob breaks in upon the Spawer as he plays Chopin at midnight.

"Outside, the world lay wrapped in a great breathing stillness. Night's

ultramarine bosom was ablaze with starry chain of mail. From the far

fields came faint immaterial sounds, commingled in the suspended

fragrance of hay, in warm revelations of ripening corn, in the aromatic

pungency of nettles, and all the humid suffocation of herbs that open

their moist pores at even. Distant sheep, cropping in ghost-like

procession across misty, dew-laden clover, contributed now and again

their strange, cutting, human cough." The night calls him and he jumps

out of the window: he hears garments in swift full stir, the rending of

a frock ... and at last sees, "struck in fugitive stoop to stone, the

dim, motionless figure of a girl." In a voice that had "the rare mellow

sweetness of blown pipes about it" she explains that she couldn't resist

coming to hear him play. "He noted the wide generous forehead, the big

consuming eyes, burning deep in sorrowing self-reproach and giving him a

moment's gaze over the uplifted tumbler; the dispassionate narrow nose,

sprinkled about its bridge ... with a pepper-castor helping of freckled

candour; the small lips, the long, sleek cheeks; the slender,

pear-shaped chin; the soft, supple neck of russet tan, spliced on to a

gleaming shaft of ivory; the quick-throbbing throat and the burning

lobes of red, like live cinders, in her hair ... she wore a shabby pale

blue tam-o'-shanter...." And this vision turns out next morning to be

the post-girl. He learns her history from the Vicar. "'Pamela, you mean!

I knew we should come to that before long. She's not like the rest of

us; comes of a different class altogether.... Take note of her when she

laughs ... she covers the whole diapason. Ullbrig doesn't laugh like

that. Ullbrig laughs on one note, as though it were a plough furrow.'"

He weaves a fantastic story out of the little that he knows about her: a

mother dying of a broken heart, having married beneath her, come to

Ullbrig to escape the world, leaving Pamela, who "can do everything in

the world except kill chickens." She can bake bread, paper-hang, paint,

milliner and dress-make and plays the organ in church. She lives with

John William Morland, who combines the office of postmaster with the

trade of cobbler.

"'Stop a bit,'" the stern voice of the postmaster would tell you when

you laid the penny and the boots on the counter together, and shot out

your dual request for a "'stamp an' these 'ere solin'.'" "'Let's 'ave

one thing at a time. Stamps 'as nowt to do wi' shoes, an' shoes 'as nowt

to do wi' stamps. Tek yer boots off'n counter, or 'appen Ah s'll be

slippin' 'em away by parcel post, an' then where sewd we be?... Noo;

stamps fost; let's know what ye want.'"

Which point being settled and the penny rung into the till, he would

suddenly cast his Governmental mask under the counter, throw the

austerity out of his voice, and catch up the shoemaker's smile all at

once in a quick-change act marvellous to behold.

The Vicar arranges a feast which Pamela prepares for and of course

shares with him and the Spawer. And the collation is described as

Dickens would describe it, to make your mouth water:

"There was a chicken-pie in a Mother Hubbard frill, with its crust as

brown as a hazel-nut, and just nicely large enough to feed half-a-dozen,

which is a capital size for three; and a noble sirloin of beef, fringed

with a hoary lock of horse-radish, and arching its back in lonely

majesty on an oval arena of Spode, ... and there was a salad, heaped up

high under the white and yellow chequer of sliced eggs, and a rosy

tomato comb, in a glorious old oaken bowl as big as a kettle-drum, ...

and there were some savoury eggs, deliciously embowered in their

greenery of mustard and cress ... and a tinned tongue ... and some

beetroot ... and whipped creams, and a trifle pudding, all set out on

snowy white damask amid an arctic glitter of glass and silver and

cutlery. Except the cheese, which was a Camembert, and went by itself

on the grained side-cupboard."

After the olives and the herrings Father Mostyn approaches the beef with

a terrible "'Ha! I see you've not forgotten what I told you. The

exterior albumen's duly coagulated for the preservation of the nutritive

juices, and there's a fine osmazonic smell that bodes well for the

flavour.'"

Who wants to go on to the love episode when he can stay and refresh

himself with a feast like this? Not I, for one. The longer I can stay

with "the little tongues of crimson ham and grey-brown purple buttons of

mushrooms" the better so long as Pamela is there. I want as many

helpings as possible of the stewed plums, the custard, the trifle

pudding, the port-wine jellies, the whipped creams and the cheese. Time

enough for love. There is the music to follow: the A flat Prelude twice,

the Black Study, bits of Beethoven, the 111, snatches of Brahms ... and

to Pam as to us "there seemed not more happiness in Heaven."

All too quickly even that night the shadows fall: Pam goes home and

encounters the village schoolmaster, a fellow-lodger at the Morlands',

the veins in whose forehead stood out always, a thin, frail consumptive,

who tortures himself with love of her. This night he waits up for her

and makes her try to care for him, as so many others have in the past.

Out of pity for him she could not bring herself to deal the one smart

blow that the moment required: the strength was lacking, and so she

prepares for herself terrible consequences. The plot thickens. The

Spawer sees more and more of Pam, he teaches her music, but he is

already engaged to a girl in Switzerland of whom Pam knows nothing. He

screws up his courage to tell her on one notable day when he goes with

her to take dainties and administer comfort to an old dying man. The

description of this one afternoon and evening takes up many chapters of

the book, and the gradual leading up to the crisis where the Spawer has

to tell Pam is wonderfully done.

Exactly at the moment when she acknowledges her sorrow at his departure

the schoolmaster emerges out of the blackness and takes her away: she

discovers now the Spawer is going that she is in love with him. "'He

likes me,'" she says to the accusing consumptive, "'but he doesn't love

me. I wish he did.... But I'm not good enough for him. There has never

been any question of his loving me. He is engaged to marry somebody else

... and he may leave Ullbrig any day. When he told me he was going ... I

was so unhappy that I began to cry. I couldn't help it. I didn't think

he would notice ... but he did ... and tried to comfort me. And

then--and then--you were there and saw. And I love him--I love him--I

love him and I tell you....'"

She is fated to take the letter to her lover which she imagines will

summon him away from her ... and she fails to deliver it. The

schoolmaster discovers her crime, gets it from her and makes her promise

to marry him before he will restore it (this is where the actual story

becomes unbearably silly--people don't do these things). She decides to

run away; the same night the Spawer walks along the cliffs late, and the

schoolmaster, who has discovered Pam's flight, shadows him, so clumsily

that the Spawer discovers him: they argue on the cliff edge and the

Spawer falls over: Pamela hears his scream and goes to the rescue, and

the two discover their love for each other at death's door. They are cut

off from help by the rising tide.

"'I want to ask you ...'" he said. "'You know why I was going back. The

other letter was--from Her. She asks me to set her free. If there hadn't

been--been any other one in the case, and I'd asked you ... to marry me

... would you have married me?'"

In an instant the girl's arms were about the man's neck, and her lips

upon his lips, as though they would have sucked the poor remaining life

out of his body into her own ... yea--though Death stood by their side

... yet could he not arrest this moment.

"'Oh--my love, my love!' the girl wept through the wet lips that clung

to him. 'What do I care about dying now? I would rather a thousand times

die to learn that you had loved me--than live and never know it. Promise

me--you will not--let go of me--when the time comes.... Don't let me go.

I want to die with you.'

"And there being nothing else to do, they stood and waited for

death...."

But this is a love romance: it could not be allowed to end like that.

Drunken Barclay, having missed Tankard's Bus that night, hears Pam's

calls for help and saves them both and gives us and Mr Booth a fuller

chance to revel in a regular orgy of love. The Spawer was glad to be

thus helpless on his back, for the glory of being cradled in such a

love, and learning his love over again, from the lips and looks and

actions, the dear, large-hearted A B C Primer of Pam. "Her very love of

him, issuing towards him from every pore of her body, fertilised the

girl's own beauty, like the sap in the lush hedgerows at spring. Her

soft, velvet eyes ... darkened and deepened ... till they were beyond

all plumb of mortal gaze. Her lips ... coloured now to a deeper, clearer

carmine, with little pools of love visible lurking in the corners of

them ... her lashes ... grew black as ebony ... her freckles ... more

purely golden.

"And Pam stooped over him as she was always doing, and slipped her

linked fingers under his neck, and looked into his face first, and

kissed him ... and buried her face by his, and lifted it to look at him

once more, and kissed him again.... Who should stop her now from telling

him she loved him, loved him, loved him?"

Yes, there is no doubt about it: Mr Booth, whose gift for seeing things

is so remarkably acute, can describe the passion of love with the best

of them. Not easily does one forget those dear, kissable, candid

freckles, powdered in pure gold-dust about the bridge of the nose and

the brows ... the great round eyes with the blacky-brown velvety

softness of bulrushes ... the rapt red lips ... the big beneficence of

hair ... the oaten-tinted cheeks ... the little pink lobes ... the

tanned russet neck ... and the pale blue tam-o'-shanter of our beloved

Pam. She is one of the most alive heroines in fiction, and the man who

doesn't find himself a good deal more in love with her than the Spawer

was is not to be envied.

_Fondie_ is a novel of quite another sort. It is the grim tragedy of a

flirtatious daughter of an impoverished country parson who gets "let

down" by an undergraduate and drowns herself.

It has the same excellent qualities that so distinguish _The Cliff-End_,

in that it is leisurely, the dialect is wonderfully reproduced, the

scenery painted with an exquisite sense of colour and exactness, the

characters all live ... and there is Fondie the wheelwright, Fondie the

foolish, who "never used bad language even when unprovoked," who was not

a bit of good among the girls, who did his best work when he was not

being paid for it, who was always respectfully in love with the girl,

Blanche, and offered to marry her when she had already got into trouble

with the other man. "'Lad's fond,'" said his father, who was as

"laughterless as Jehovah and as summary. 'He'll do owt onnybody tells

him.'"

There are many inimitable anecdotes scattered irrelevantly through these

pages, the best of which is perhaps that of the black bull which coughed

grass and spittle all down the back of Bless Allcot's neck while he was

engaged in fervent prayer in the chapel: "'Thoo's best not ti pray

public of a Sunday or two, Bless Allcot, till thoo's had a chance ti

pray private,'" shouts Fondie's father to the prayer ... and an

altercation starts during divine service which nearly develops into a

fight.

An example of Mr Booth's humour may be seen in his description of the

installation of the harmonium in the chapel:

"There were two grand services ... and the cobbler from Sproutgreen

walked all the way over to Whivvle in a parson's hat and a white tie, to

tell folk what a sinful life he had led in his younger days and how, but

for the Living Word, he might probably have been wearing a grey coat and

coloured kerchief to this day, and been even as the other sinners whom

he had met this morning bicycling along the road to Hell. And Bless

Allcot's eyes were as wet as cut lemons ... and at both services he

prayed in the key of G flat minor for absent Brethren."

Fondie's father, who in old days had scraped his fiddle-strings so

frenziedly in that chapel that he had to give the fiddle a rest for one

verse in three, "to cool her bearings and prevent her from firing,"

naturally hated the innovation, but went to the chapel to shame the

others ... "he went, casting the chapel into such a hush as if he had

been his own corpse, so that the praying went as dry as a duck-pond in

August ... and Bless Allcot's daughter let the wind out of the harmonium

time after time and lost all her faculty for counting how many verses

there were in each hymn" ... and Fondie's father returns home

triumphant:

"'Aye. It's been a judgment on 'em. Lord's visited 'em.'"

Fondie, like the Spawer in _The Cliff-End_, "could bide music as long as

a sow could bide scratching," and Blanche made him play the organ for

her in church, but because he wouldn't kiss her, altered the figures in

the hymns, making threes into eights and ones into sevens so that he

would play his worst, which he did.

"If he had been half a man--for there was nobody in the workshop at the

time, except the two of them, amid the seductive warm scent of fresh

pine-shavings--Fondie would have thrown both arms round Blanche's neck

and held on. Blanche would only have whispered, 'Shut up, Fondie!

Fondie, you silly fool!' and Fondie would have whispered, 'Who's a silly

fool?' between the kisses, and Blanche would have answered, 'You, you

fool!' struggling with just sufficient discretion to give his kisses the

requisite raptorial flavour ... and who knows how differently Whivvle

history might have had to be written.... For that one kiss, or the lack

of it, is altering lives the whole world over."

So Fondie is left to experience all the pitfalls of the double chant and

odd verse as the village church organist and the awful feeling that

accompanies the falling into it, as if one had slipped off the belfry

ladder in the dark.

The family to which Blanche belonged was a big one, but most of them

were abroad: there was, however, Harold, in an accountant's office in

Hunmouth, who went to music halls twice a week and wore cuffs, and a

younger brother, who went to the village school and wore corduroys, but

Blanche was the only one that mattered--Blanche with her profligate

golden hair and blue eyes, Blanche of the cheap Birmingham jewellery,

Blanche, who inspired respect from no one except Fondie, who addressed

her as "Miss," or "Miss Blanche" in all circumstances, "as naturally as

he would take up his gravy on the knife-blade, without, for a moment,

contemplating any other way."

We are shown Blanche in all her nakedness, from her earliest days, when

"I wish I had a sovereign for every time that Blanche rode in the

hat-rack in defiance of the notice that this was provided for light

luggage only," until the day when the verdict on her body goes forth,

"Found Drowned." She would have assignations in the belfry while Harold

folded cigarettes during the Litany and pared his nails for the coming

week and read _The Confessions of a Lady's Maid_ and _Secrets of

Matrimony_ with his head down, as if he had had a stroke, whilst his

father preached from Samuel and Kings.

"The Creator that conceived and executed Blanche, and equipped her with

that amphitheatre of teeth and those scintillating eyes, must have been

a tyro at his trade if he really expected sobriety and worship of them;

or else a jocund God of Mirth, who loved laughter and human happiness."

Her father had even occasion to take for his text one day: "My daughter

hath a devil" ... and she certainly was a thorn in his flesh. He made

periodic attempts to put his house in order and his foot down, but

within three days of new regulations he would have to give up his

attempt at discipline and go back to his hens and tool-shed and the

nutrition of the vicarage pig, while Blanche locked herself in her

bedroom and learnt the mysteries of life from books that she stole from

her brother and _Sunday Sacred Pennyworths_, where "the advertisements

were even more absorbing than the literary matter and contributed

liberally to her education."

This picture of the sordid, poverty-stricken vicarage life would make us

weep were it not for the light relief afforded by the villagers, in such

gorgeous scenes as that in which Fondie swarms the bees:

"'Thee wants ti gan up fierce-like, same as Bless says, an' sing a bit

as thoo gans, an' swear when thoo gets ti top, an' mek bees think thoo's

as good as them.'"

When he has finished collecting them he looks less like a victim of bees

than of overstudy.

Meanwhile Blanche goes from conquest to conquest among her boys (always

excepting Fondie) and makes with him a new friend in Lancelot Griffith

D'Arcy Mersham. Fondie becomes more and more proficient in his trade of

wheelwright and in his passion for music: "Music stirred him, he knew

not how or why; books, too, haunted him with the desire to read

them--and beauty, whether of Blanche, or of a bird, of sunset or

moonrise, of stars or blossoms, troubled him with a sweet sickness, a

pining of the soul to be something other and something better than he

was." Blanche fails to make much headway with the aristocratic Lancelot,

who prefers the society of Fondie and helps him to throw off much of his

vernacular so that he becomes more or less bilingual. In the church, or

elsewhere, he spoke of "harmonium" and "home" and "Hunmouth," and said,

"I am, sir," and "Were you, sir?": whereas in public he systematically

dropped one "h" in every three out of consideration for his hearers'

feelings, and said, "I misdoot" and "I'se fit ti think" and "nobbut" and

"jealous" as before.

Blanche rises to the height of a bicycle, which gave her scope to extend

the range of her acquaintances, but we don't hear much of these. Her

fatal day is that of the Mersham Flower Show, to which she went "in a

pale lavender print frock and a large straw hat trimmed with shasta

daisies and blue cornflowers, spinning a creamy sunshade over her

shoulder with a white-cotton-gloved hand." For it was here that she met

for the first time Leonard D'Alroy, who was afterwards to prove her

undoing. Mr Booth is lavish in his details of this show, and surely no

flower show has ever been so admirably described: he misses nothing from

the swing-boats to the sports with their inevitable clamour of

unfairness on the part of the judges. "'Steeny would very like a' been

first nobbut he only went ti choch a bit reglarer, and sung i' choir.'"

We take leave of Blanche on this occasion by watching her fade away in

the dusk with her arms about the neck of a boy on a bicycle, shouting

"Oo-li-oo!" to all other defeated admirers. From that day the young

squire was seen riding down the streets of Whivvle "with his hat at the

back of his head" at very frequent intervals. In October he vanished to

be "larned high books at Oxford," and by mid-November we see Blanche

changed. This was not the Blanche of "Don't cares" and "Aren't

frighteneds." This was another Blanche born of the fierce crucible of

the cares and fears she had once so recklessly defied--Time had chosen

this month to take a stern revenge at last. She goes to call on the

carrier's wife and faints: her condition is discovered.

"Not that she had ever looked for marriage, or thought of it. No word of

marriage had ever passed between them: no word of love even. Their

attachment had been but physical; their affection only make-believe--to

colour fact, and suffuse reality with romance. Only that insatiable

appetite for life had really led her wrong; that passion for physical

vitality; the same fierce desire to do something with her body, to put

it to some purpose, that Deacon Smeddy and others of the pious

experienced in regard to the soul; not merely to possess it, but to be

sensible of its possession and quicken it into an ardent instrument of

life."

The carrier's wife takes her home and her father is acquainted with the

truth about his daughter in these words: "'I'se jealous Blanche is like

to be a mother, sir.'" The Vicar then calls on the opulent Rector of

Mersham, who stoutly denies that his nephew could possibly be to blame.

"You ought to have kept your daughter safe at home, Bellwood. Why, good

gracious, a dog-fancier could have taught you better wisdom in the

matter than you seem to have shown."

Meanwhile Fondie hears and fells a man who jests about Blanche's

delinquency.

"There are those who affirm that Fondie grew into a man from this hour."

Leonard D'Alroy doesn't answer Blanche's letters and her last hope is

wrested from her. She meets Fondie, who tells her at last what he has

always felt for her:

"I've never had but one feeling for you, miss, since day I was old

enough to have any. You know now what that feeling is, without one

having to name it, in case it isn't to your approval.... I should be

prouder wi' you, Miss Blanche--than any other man in England is wi' all

pride he can muster."

But she won't let him make that great sacrifice for her: she goes off

and drowns herself.

"Who knows, Blanche, save you whose icy lips retain the secret safely

locked behind them--who knows but that Destiny led you well and wisely,

and that her cruel hand was kindest after all? For now you can never

grow old: age can haunt you with no terrors.... Death? Upon your pillow

you have lain dead and dreamless many an hour: by the sedgy margin of

the muddy pond itself, often on summer afternoons have you laid your

face upon your arms, turned from the unbearable brightness of the sun

and sky, and tasted a few brief minutes of irresistible, sweet death.

And of the darkness never were you yet afraid.... God's hand, be sure,

is gentler than a child's: there is no thunder on God's lips, nor

dreadful lightnings in His eyes. If Fondie were God you would not fear

him. Fear God, then, less, nor think God's infinite mercy will suffer to

be put to shame by the finite compassion of a wheelwright's son."

And we leave Fondie as ever thinking upon whatsoever things are true,

honest, just, lovely and of good report. Fondie has a soul for his

inheritance, a soul that was swiftly, wholesomely alive.

Mr Booth has written other books than these two, but they represent him

at his best in the vein of rich comedy and in the vein of real tragedy.

That they are worth reading ought to be obvious even from the extracts

alone that I have quoted ... they leave one with a feeling that here is

a rare artist with a finely developed sympathy and sensitive soul,

capable of appreciating and loving all manner of men, sunny-tempered,

magnanimous, one who glorifies all such things as are of good report. We

read Mr Booth because he makes us love him, and not all authors, not all

good authors even, are lovable.

IX

FORD MADOX HUEFFER

We read Mr F. M. Hueffer's work because it shows a versatility that is

quite out of the common in modern authors.

He is successful with _vers libre_ (which is decidedly uncommon) and

even with rhymed _vers libre_ (which is more uncommon still).

"_Vers libre_," he says, "is the only medium in which I can convey more

intimate moods. _Vers libre_ is a very jolly medium in which to write

and to read, if it be read conversationally and quietly."

"What is love of one's land?...

I don't know very well.

It is something that sleeps

For a year--for a day--

For a month--something that keeps

Very hidden and quiet and still

And then takes

The quiet heart like a wave,

The quiet brain like a spell,

The quiet will

Like a tornado; and that shakes

The whole of the soul."

His poem _On Heaven_, which he afterwards wished to suppress as being

"too sloppy," contains these lines:

"Nor does God need to be a very great magician

To give to each man after his heart,

Who knows very well what each man has in his heart:

To let you pass your life in a night-club where they dance,

If that is your idea of Heaven: if you will, in the South of France;

If you will, on the turbulent sea; if you will, in the peace of the

night;

Where you will, how you will;

Or in the long death of a kiss, that may never pall:

He would be a very little God if He could not do all this,

And he is still

The great God of all."

But it is not as a poet, a taste of whose quality I have just given you,

that he would be judged.

It is as the novelist who wrote two of the most interesting novels of

our time, _Ladies Whose Bright Eyes_ and _The Good Soldier_.

The former is the best historical romance that I have ever read.

Mr Sorrell, a mining engineer who had taken up publishing, is travelling

up from Plymouth to London when the train goes off the line and he wakes

up to find himself living in the fourteenth century possessed of a

twentieth-century brain and filled with twentieth-century ideas. He is

in possession of a sacred talisman which all the people he meets want to

deprive him of: incidentally the fact that he has it causes everyone to

treat him with great respect.

With every regard for detail even to language Mr Hueffer builds up a

picture for us of life in 1326 in a Hampshire castle:

"A great many sounds of trumpets came from the castle below to proclaim

that supper was about to be set on the boards. The sun was just down

below the hills, for at that harvest time of the year, when all men and

women were wont to be in the fields helping to get in the oat crop and

the last of the hay, supper, which was usually at four, was not partaken

of till after sunset.

"It was not really dark, but blue shadows had fallen over the long

valley of the Wiley, mists were arising amongst the heavy foliage of the

trees. The castle of Tamworth, farther down the valley, showed enormous

and purple, as if it blocked up all the passage way, and the houses of

the little town of Wishford, which was beyond the bridge, being visible

from that high place, showed their white mud sides all pink in the light

reflected from the sky. From the top of the Portmanmote Hall, the gilded

effigy of the Dragon of Wiley turned slowly in the capricious air of the

evening, sending forth now a stream of light, and again being obscured.

The cavalcade of the Lady Dionissia had reached the foot of the green

knoll, and her trumpeter blew a turn of notes to demand admission to the

castle of Coucy."

We are given every detail of the lives of these mediæval people right

down to the odours that pervaded the court.

We see Mr Sorrell sitting down to a first course at dinner of fourteen

dishes, eating a piece of dark-looking meat, both salt and sweet and

tasting of nutmeg and cinnamon, having the consistency of soft jelly. He

finds even his wines spiced with cloves.

The first dish of the first course was a compound of the tongues of

rabbits, hedgehogs, deer, geese and wild boars, the breasts of

partridges and the livers of pheasants. It contained, moreover,

forcemeat balls made of honey, cinnamon and flour boiled in wine, and

the same was made of honey, nutmegs, cloves, garlic and mint. Next he

had to taste a panade of herring boiled in white wine, covered with a

sweet sauce compounded out of cherries, which seemed to Mr Sorrel to be

a mixture of strawberry jam and oysters.

"The pages carried away the plates and emptied them into a great tub

with two handles which served for the broken meat of the poor waiting

outside the castle gates. This was done to the sound of trumpets. And

whilst the second course was being brought, a man came in with a bear

that danced in a sort of horseshoe formed by the two tables along the

wall and the small table on the dais. This man had with him a girl who

danced upon her hands with her feet in the air."

Conversation ran on exploits in the Holy Land, strange happenings in the

Adriatic and miracles, amid a din of knives, teeth, crying out for more

wine, more ale, more metheglin, so that Mr Sorrell could neither hear

others nor make himself heard. When he complained orders were given and

a man armed with a long stick like a hop-pole began running down the

tables striking people on the heads and hands, "upsetting drinking

vessels and sending platters of meat skimming on to the rushes, where

they were devoured by the many and large dogs that lay beneath all the

tables."

In the next part of the book we are shown the young knight of Egerton

with his leman, a fifteen-year-old girl who sulked because she had no

velvet gloves set with stones, no hawk from Norway, no white horse of

her own with trappings of silver, no monkey, or collars of pearls, or a

weekly allowance of five pounds of sugar. She had to pour hot water over

her capricious master as he sat in his bath and bear with all his queer

tantrums.

"In the room in which she had to live the walls were all of bare stone

and the young knight was accustomed to lock her in there for days at a

time, so that she knew every stone and every patch of damp.... The bed

was of walnut wood gone black and very huge, so that it would hold four

persons: the hutch at its foot was of a rough oak gone grey." The young

knight in the midst of his ablutions suddenly notices spots of rain upon

his armour and leaps out of his bath on to his page. "His mantle,

blazing red and white and clasped at the neck with a buckle of gleaming

beaten gold weighing three ounces, whirled out all round him; the water

dripped from his wet and hairy limbs that, white beneath the scarlet and

all knotted and distorted, fell like the sails of a windmill about the

page's ears."

Gertrude the leman taunts him and he rounds on her, and yet he could not

"raise his hand against this insulting atomy, he, who had been famed for

having in ten years seven of the most beautiful lemans in Christendom.

There had been Isabelle de Joie, with hair like corn; Constance de

Verigonde, with teeth like pearls; Bearea la Belle, with breasts like

mother-of-pearl; Bice de Carnas, with arms like alabaster; and Jeune la

Ciboriee, whose breath was sweeter than the odour of pinks...."

We are even shown the Queen Mother and the little King.

"The Queen was a fat matron, with a cunning, determined face. Her eyes

were small, brown, and keen. Her dress was of purple velvet, all of one

piece, and sewn with thick gold thread that glinted in the seams. About

her waist she had a rope of amber beads that was twisted before her and

fell in two ropes at her feet. The King was all in scarlet, a boy of

fourteen. Upon his yellow hair was a small circlet of gold; round his

knees were two garters of solid gold links; the ends, passing through

the buckles, fell down to the top of his shoes that were very long and

gilded."

In the next part of the book we see Mr Sorrell riding in the narrow

streets of Salisbury. "The houses were all very low; they were all built

of mud and they were all raggedly thatched, house-leeks growing from

many roofs, and on others great tufts of flags. The houses were set down

at all angles to the road. Sometimes it was very narrow, so that they

could hardly pass, ... and the geese fled shrieking at their approach.

Sometimes it was so broad that ... the great pigs would continue to

wallow undisturbed in the pools of mud.... He observed noise, dirt,

nauseous smells, and great crowds of importunate and ugly people. They

were nearly all in ragged clothes of a grey home-spun. Some had capes,

some hoods with long tails like funnels; most of the men had leather

belts; most of the women went bare-legged, and were very dirty ... most

of the children ... were crooked, distorted, or bore upon their faces

pock-marks of a hideous kind."

Nearer the cathedral were houses of stone, bales of cloth set out to

attract customers, men weaving at looms, and great joints of meat upon

hooks, in huge cellars below. Over these cellars were suspended signs of

gilded suns, boys painted green and brown, swans and unicorns. Men

emerged from the cellars in green jerkins or red surcoats furred with

white lamb's-wool. Having accompanied Mr Sorrell to the door of the

cathedral, his hostess, Lady Dionissia, went back to the town to buy

some juice of fir-trees "said to be sovereign for hardening and

strengthening the hands of warriors." Meanwhile Mr Sorrell entered the

new, brilliantly coloured building, the interior roof of which was

grass-green, picked out with bright golden images of angels, queens and

grinning fiends. Everybody round was talking loudly, some drinking, most

of them selling cherries and eggs; the monks were painting, the chapter

clergy whispered and laughed, for it was blood-letting day. Mr Sorrell

performs his mission with the Dean, which is to secure the Church's

sanction for the Lady Dionissia to divorce her husband (the young knight

of Egerton) and marry him: this is an inimitably humorous piece of

satirical writing on bribery and corruption in the Church.

"'It is neither decent nor in order to desire to marry a lady who is

already married,' said the Dean.

"'I desire to do it,' Mr Sorrell said, 'with the sanction of the

church.'

"'That, of course,' the Dean said seriously, 'is another matter.'"

Mr Sorrell finds himself slipping all too easily into his new life and

suffers periodic twinges of conscience.

"'Surely it is pleasant,'" he says to his paramour on the return ride of

this visit to Salisbury, "'but I cannot see that it is well, and

pleasantness is not the whole of life ... are there not such things as

duties, ambitions, and responsibilities?'

"'I do not know what these things are,' answered the Lady Dionissia. 'In

the spring the moles come out of the woods and the little birds sing,

and we walk in the gardens and take what pleasure we can. And then comes

the winter, and shuts us up in our castles so that it is not so

pleasant; but with jongleurs and ballad-singers we pass the time as well

as we may.'

"'It is just that that is so fatal,' Mr Sorrell said. 'It is just that

that I am slipping into. You dress me up in these scarlet clothes, and I

take a pleasure in it; you ride a-hawking, and it seems to me the whole

end of life when your tassel strikes down a heron or a daw....'

"'When I first set eyes on you,'" she replies a little later, "'I knew

that I loved you, and what more is there to ask or to say?... Gentle

friend, is it a new thing that a great knight, putting upon himself the

garb of a minstrel, and accompanied by a page or two and a few men of

arms to give him sufficient state and respect, should journey through

the world and sing of the high things of love, or of great adventures in

arms?... We should travel through the great forests and along the broad

streams and over the endless plains.'

"The breath from her lips was sweet, like the breath of cows that have

come out of the clover fields: closer and closer they drew to each

other.

"'Before you came,' she said, 'there was nothing in the whole world----'

"'There was no sweetness in the world before I came here to you,' he

answered.... 'I have come down to you through centuries; all the men of

my past are like a few phantoms--there is only you in all the world.'

"With a great rustling there came from the wood a wild sow, but they did

not hear it.... There stole in Mr Sorrell's nostrils a penetrating

perfume. An immense dread swept down on him, the dumb agony of a

nightmare. He seemed unable to move ... agony was in his heart, on his

lips that would not speak, in his throat whose muscles would not act.

The perfume overwhelmed him, suffocating, warm, sweet in the throat,

sinister and filling him with a mad foreboding. It was the odour of

chloroform. He screamed out loud; great beads of sweat burst out on his

forehead.

"He stretched out his hand like a madman and clutched at her dress.

"'Are you there?' he asked, and she answered:

"'I am here, beloved of my heart,' and he lifted his face towards hers

which was slightly cold with dew and the night.

"'It is so well with me,' she whispered: but Mr Sorrell was full of

fears."

The cleverness of that touch of the chloroform at that particular stage

in the story is amazing. I know nothing quite like that chapter in all

fiction.

We are then swept back at once to a pageant of colour where the ladies

hold a tourney and Mr Sorrell is knighted by Sir Ygorac of Fordingbridge

as Sir Guilhelm de Winterburne de St Martin. The Lady Dionissia fights

in the lists against the Lady Blanche, first with spears and then with

axes, which fight the Lady Dionissia, of course, wins. She then goes

with Mr Sorrell to his new castle and her husband returns and kills the

new knight of Winterburne ... and Mr Sorrell wakes up, wakes up to

intolerable agony in a hospital.

Two months afterwards he goes back to Salisbury to retrace the steps and

rides all over the country-side in search of----"A girl shot past them

going very fast. She had a face of conspicuous fairness, a dress of

light blue print, a white linen coif that hid all her hair.

"'My God!' Sir William said suddenly. [He is now Sir William Sorrell.]

'Did you see? Who was that? In God's name who was that?'

"'Why,' young Lee-Egerton said, 'that was Nurse Morane. The one who

nursed you till the first time they trepanned you. She broke down the

day before they trepanned you the second time. My mother says she

couldn't stand the excitement, because she was in love with you."

Sir William galloped off down the road and up the hill towards a cluster

of old and falling buildings.... "It was so old that you could hardly

recognise it for a house, and so forlorn that you shivered when you

passed it ... the living-room into which Sir William went was large,

long and low. It was quite empty ... a door ... opened gently. There

appeared a girl in a blue dress.

"'You are Sir William Sorrell,' she said. 'I am Dionissia Morane.... I

was born in this room....'

"'What does it all mean?' he asked.

"'I can't tell,' she answered. 'Do you know, after they trepanned you

for the first time you said suddenly, "Es tu là?" and reached out your

hand to me, and I took your hand ... and I kept saying to myself, "It is

very well with me," which is what the country people about here say when

they are glad.'"

Sir William builds a replica of the fourteenth-century castle and

Dionissia ruminates on the future.

"'In the summer it will be very pleasant: the birds will sing, and we

shall walk in the gardens. And in the winter we shall go into our little

castle, and we shall sit by our fire, and our friends will come and we

shall pass the time in talking and devising. And all around us there

will be the oceans of time and the ages of space----'

"'I've heard that before,' he said.

"'Yes, certainly you've heard all that before,' she answered. 'It's

nothing new; it's the oldest wisdom or the oldest folly. You will find

it in Chaucer ... you will find it in the Bible, because there's nothing

else really to say.... It's the only thing that's worth saying in

life.'"

Quite another vein is struck in _The Good Soldier_, which is essentially

a modern novel. It is a story of betrayals. The man who tells the story

finds that his wife is the mistress of his friend, the good soldier.

"I can't believe that that long, tranquil life, which was just stepping

a minuet, vanished in four crashing days at the end of nine years and

six weeks."