There's a lonely grave somewhere,Where our dear and brave boy sleeps;There's a little home in England,Where mother and all of us weep.
There's a lonely grave somewhere,Where our dear and brave boy sleeps;There's a little home in England,Where mother and all of us weep.
There's a lonely grave somewhere,Where our dear and brave boy sleeps;There's a little home in England,Where mother and all of us weep.
or these:
Who knew that when he went away,Departing from his door,How or when he would come back,Or whether never more?For he who went away in health,In battle soon waylaid,Which took him in the prime of life,To lie in a distant grave.
Who knew that when he went away,Departing from his door,How or when he would come back,Or whether never more?For he who went away in health,In battle soon waylaid,Which took him in the prime of life,To lie in a distant grave.
Who knew that when he went away,Departing from his door,How or when he would come back,Or whether never more?For he who went away in health,In battle soon waylaid,Which took him in the prime of life,To lie in a distant grave.
No, there is little doubt of the need for teaching clearness and improving taste. As for correct and grammatical writing, one week's study of a popular daily newspaper yielded the following excerpts from a collection of two-score:
In the last resort we have to depend upon a jury drawn from the people to convict the scoundrel who has tainted our public life, and unless that jury does not do its duty, unless it is backed by the public sentiment of the people....The accused was ordered to pay £3, or a month's imprisonment in default.At Paignton, in Devon, a gigantic plum-pudding is made and distributed to the poor, which in 1897 weighed 250 lb.... the officers closed on him. In throwing him to the ground the revolver dropped from his hand.The charge is 50 per cent. higher than the same sheet may be bought in the street just outside. But what is a penny to an American?—— —— had an unfortunate experience. While seated in his greenhouse it was wrecked by the wind, and on being extricated it was ascertained that both his legs were broken above the knee, necessitating his removal to the infirmary.Provocation has been given by the hostile and shifty conduct of the Tibetan authorities, since the signing of the Treaty of 1800, which would have justified earlier punishment.While riding in a hansom at Southport a runaway horse dashed into the conveyance, and the shaft of the trap penetrated her body, pinning her to the hansom, and causing almost instantaneous death.But if you come to estimate a day's work—even in foot-pounds—the woman who cleans, bakes, washes, and takes to school six children, carries water and tramps upstairs and down for sixteen hours a day, need not fear comparison as to kinetic energy even with a miner working eight hours.
In the last resort we have to depend upon a jury drawn from the people to convict the scoundrel who has tainted our public life, and unless that jury does not do its duty, unless it is backed by the public sentiment of the people....
The accused was ordered to pay £3, or a month's imprisonment in default.At Paignton, in Devon, a gigantic plum-pudding is made and distributed to the poor, which in 1897 weighed 250 lb.
... the officers closed on him. In throwing him to the ground the revolver dropped from his hand.
The charge is 50 per cent. higher than the same sheet may be bought in the street just outside. But what is a penny to an American?
—— —— had an unfortunate experience. While seated in his greenhouse it was wrecked by the wind, and on being extricated it was ascertained that both his legs were broken above the knee, necessitating his removal to the infirmary.
Provocation has been given by the hostile and shifty conduct of the Tibetan authorities, since the signing of the Treaty of 1800, which would have justified earlier punishment.
While riding in a hansom at Southport a runaway horse dashed into the conveyance, and the shaft of the trap penetrated her body, pinning her to the hansom, and causing almost instantaneous death.
But if you come to estimate a day's work—even in foot-pounds—the woman who cleans, bakes, washes, and takes to school six children, carries water and tramps upstairs and down for sixteen hours a day, need not fear comparison as to kinetic energy even with a miner working eight hours.
What is the schoolmaster doing about it? He is teaching a great variety of languages ancient and foreign, sciences, arts and crafts, and among other things he is believed to teach "English." He has found out that it does not come by nature, and that a mastery of the English language cannot be assured by teaching something quite different. But as to the best method of teaching boys and girls to write, read, and appreciate good English there is a controversy. Just as in most other branches of education there is a traditional method and a reformed method. Upon the latter some of us build hopes of extraordinarily great achievements, and if these hopes lead us into impatience we must ask for pardon.
Though Mr.Mais2justly claims credit for originality in departing occasionally from the fixed lines of English teaching as it is practised in the Public Schools, his "Course" mainly follows the traditional modes and is directed to the preparation of pupils for the orthodox type of examination. The nature of the course is indicated by the chapter-headings; for example: "Grammar and Syntax—Analysis, Parsing and Synthesis—Punctuation—Vocabulary—Letter-writing—Reproduction—Paraphrase—Dictation—Précis—Prosody—Figures of Speech—Indirect Speech—Essay-writing—Examination Papers." There are, beside these thoroughly normal chapters, six pages on Elocution, Debating, Lecturing, Acting, etc., a useful list of cheap books for a home library, more than fifty critical pages on Shakespeare, and aregrettable3twenty-page chapter entitled "Short History of English Literature." I think the author is trying to shake off a yoke which is not entirely congenial to him. But if he will make boys write essays on Scandinavia, explain Synecdoche, paraphrase Keats, "condense theVision ofMirzahto 300 words," he cannot complain if he is mistaken for one of the old regime and guillotined in distinguished company.
2An English Course for Schools. By S. B. P. Mais, Assistant Master at Tonbridge School and Examiner in English to the University of London. Grant Richards Ltd.; 6s. net.
2An English Course for Schools. By S. B. P. Mais, Assistant Master at Tonbridge School and Examiner in English to the University of London. Grant Richards Ltd.; 6s. net.
3e.g."R. L. Stevenson represents the incurably romantic and is followed by Kipling and Conrad."
3e.g."R. L. Stevenson represents the incurably romantic and is followed by Kipling and Conrad."
The traditional method begins with the copy-book and proceeds by way of dictation and formal exercises to its goal in the essay. Dictation is the core and kernel of it, for even when the exercise is called "composition" the subjects are so chosen that the pupil needs detailed guidance throughout and the results are practically uniform. The writing is accompanied by reading and grammar, but the reading is severely limited and the text is obscured by comment and minute explanation. Poetry is not only studied with notes: it is analysed and paraphrased and parsed. The grammar, which is also traditional, is alien both in its method and terminology. The people who invented "English" in the middle of the nineteenth century were the classical grammarians who knew only one way of teaching a language, and had been forced under pressure from indignant parents to put "English" on the syllabus. They gave it an hour a week: they spent that hour in parsing, in declining uninflected nouns, in conjugating, in insisting that because the complement of a Latin or Greek copulative verb is in concord with its subject therefore "It'sme" must be wrong in English. They did violence to our tongue in other ways to make a Teutonic language fit a Latin system, introducing all sorts of unnecessary complications of gender, mood and case, which do not exist. They transferred to English the whole cumbrous system of Latin grammatical terminology and then set harmless English children to explain their hideous technicalities. All because they had an hour to waste and were determined to waste it in the manner to which they were accustomed. They were assisted in this ambition by the Scotch professors of rhetoric who were especially strong in figures of speech.
And then they remarked with pain and surprise that their method did not succeed. Their scholars did not appreciate good literature when it was taught to them. They lacked originality in their composition. They were tongue-tied in their speaking and muddled in their writing. There was once a man who determined to teach his monkey to sing "Voi che sapete," an air of which he was inordinately fond. So he took an old stocking with a hole in the toe and two holes in the heel and turned it inside out in order to conceal the holes, and crammed it full with shavings and breadcrumbs and fried it carefully and fed the monkey on it. When he complained that the monkey's voice was no better at the end of the course, his friends used to explain that it was because he was an old man and had lived in the reign of Queen Victoria.
Remember that this "English" teaching has been well tried for more than fifty years. Substantially, the course we are considering now does not differ in its methods from books like Dalgleish'sEnglish Composition in Prose and Verse based on Grammatical Synthesisof 1864 or Dr. William Smith'sEnglish Course. The subject subsists as a shuttlecock in a perpetual game of Badminton between examiners and teachers. If you ask the examinerof English why he continues to set such stupid questions, he replies quite rightly that he is forced to do so by the stupidity of the schoolmasters who teach it. If you ask the schoolmaster why he makes his "English" the dullest subject in the syllabus, he will probably answer that he is preparing for the London Matriculation. If you look for an explanation of the method, you might surmise that the aim is to secure accuracy in grammar at all costs. But that is not the aim. Mr. Mais explains it in a paragraph which he might well set for analysis of pronouns: "Of all our failings as a nation, this is the most marked. In our talk we are reticent; in our writing we are incoherent and slipshod. Every schoolmaster knows from sad experience that the average boy cannot produce a readable essay on any subject, however hard he may try. He strives by every means in his power to instil a sense of originality in his classes, to teach his boys and girls to observe...." Originality and observation!
To take the second first, every scoutmaster knows that observation can be taught, but not by dictation. Probably there is no faculty of the mind which responds so readily to training and practice. By systematic questioning a young child can be taught to notice the common objects by the wayside on his morning walk, the goods in the shop windows, the flowers in the garden, to remember them and describe them afterwards with great fidelity. A good teacher of infants can easily teach a child of six or seven to observe minute differences, to compare and contrast similar objects, such as the bulb of the iris and the corn of the crocus. This kind of observation is commonly appropriated by science, and it is indeed the same faculty which the physicist employs afterwards with his fine balances and test-tubes. But it is also, when reproduced in language, the beginning of good English. Words are the balances. Careful description in words, written and spoken, of things actually seen is, when developed fully, more than half of the business of poets, journalists, and novelists. A few gifted mortals like Balzac, Gissing, or Hardy may possess the faculty by nature, but any one may acquire it through early training and continuous practice. It can be lost almost as easily as it is won.
Can originality be taught? Less easily perhaps than observation. Real originality, in the sense of creative power, or what in its highest form we call "Inspiration," cannot be taught in school. Who taught Blake to see the tiger burning bright in midmost eighteenth-century London? There are some men born, apparently, to be our masters. Ideas flow not into them but out of them. They are the mainsprings of our mechanism. We attribute their origin to the wandering breath of some holy spirit. But in a humbler sense children can certainly be trained to be original, just as they can be trained by opposite methods to be commonplace, slavish, imitative, genteel, conventional, correct, and accommodating. These virtues are taught with great diligence and success in many schools, public and private. In the earliest stage you copy in a beautiful copperplate handwriting words like "England Expects Every," and you read aloud very slowly from a littlebook which contains these words in immense type:Shun that ox he is shy. You recite in chorus after teacher, you correct your speech by mimicking her accents and gestures. You sit, stand, or march to numbers at the word of command. In the next stage you are promoted to dictation, and once a fortnight you write a composition. But as the theme is Duty or The Elephant or something about which you can hardly be expected to have connected notions, you are given the headings, told what to say, have your mistakes carefully underlined, and are then presented with a model or fair copy. Any departure from the normal, whether in spelling or in ideas, is heavily penalised, and no credit is given for positive merit. In the next stage you learn the art of letter-writing by studying celebrated models, you paraphrase good poetry into bad prose, you analyse and parse and explain grammatical terms, you summarise and expand, you turn direct into indirect speech and generally feed your mind with a generous diet of cold minced hash.
If I were a little boy trained for years and years according to this plan, I hope I should be grateful to my teachers for all the trouble they had taken with me. But, if they then turned round upon me and reproached me with not beingoriginal, I should be sorely tempted to commit a breach of good English and say "That is the limit!"
In the pedagogical and psychological sense these methods are twenty years behind the times. They have been exploded in theory and disproved in practice. Each subject in its turn has fought its battle with the Dictation Method, and everywhere, except perhaps in religious instruction, the principle has been decided. In drawing, the freehand copy has given place to direct observation; in mathematics, mechanical working of rules and examples has been replaced by intelligence and problems. Even physical exercises are no longer mere drill.
Perhaps it is in the primary school that we shall find the right principles most clearly marked, if only because with the younger children the teacher is nearer to Nature and mistakes punish themselves more visibly. There also the dead weight of tradition has been less oppressive. Before Madame Montessori's star had risen above the firmament the best teachers in English infant schools had solved the fundamental problems of how to teach good English. The principle is that what the child speaks or writes shall come from its own brain. The first medium of expression is, of course, the tongue. No children, not even English children, are tongue-tied by nature, but they are generally timid and sensitive. If they find their adult world discouraging communicativeness with anger, or sarcasm, or pedantry, they will close down upon the rock of silence like the limpet which you must smash before you move. Probably before he comes to school the child has already been silenced by a mother or father whose love will bear anything for the child except to listen to him. It is wonderful to watch the skilled teacher of infants repairing this mischief, re-establishing confidence between innocence and wisdom, unlocking hearts and tongues, creating an atmosphere of freedom in which she possesses, in reality, absolute control. Instead oflimpets you behold sea-anemones full open. The children talk at great length in co-ordinate construction about their mother and the baby's tooth, and when they have finished they sit quiet listening to others. Sometimes the teacher takes up her parable and tells them about Cinderella or the King of the Golden River. In other lessons other mediums of expression appear—pencils, chalk, plastic clay, music, dance, drama. The teacher continues unobtrusively feeding the children with beautiful things, she sings and plays to them, shows them pictures and exhibits gentleness, calm, and love.
Amid all the fog of controversy and all the noise of disputing cheap-jacks that surrounds the art and practice of education I see some of these infants' class-rooms as clear beacons showing the incontestably true course. I cannot see any limit of years to its progress. Many boys' and girls' schools have grasped the same principles and extended them to the age of fourteen with the same undeniable success in the results. Naturally, as the child grows the method has to be adapted, but the principle remains steadfast. I would not describe it as "freedom," because the child is not free, though he feels free. One never doubts the existence of a controlling will. But what is encouraged is authentic expression. In writing, topics are set which draw out of the child's own world the child's own thoughts. He is guided to think for himself and to speak his thoughts fearlessly. The skill of the teacher is shown mainly in the choice of subjects and the discretion with which corrections are made. Observation is translated into description, first in speech and then, when the pencil has been mastered, in writing. A child of nine may be asked to describe a corner of the class-room so that a blind man could understand exactly what is there and what it looks like. A child of twelve may be asked to describe the prettiest room she ever saw. A child of fourteen may be asked to describe the Harrow Road (a) on a Saturday night, (b) on a Sunday morning. Why stop at fourteen?
As well as observation and description, the infant school trains the elements of imagination and invention. Cannot the child who at eight years old wrote on "If I were the King...." profitably be asked to write on "If I had been Oliver Cromwell...." at eighteen? In one girls' school the teacher merely wrote on the blackboard "When the Moon went out" and left the rest to the class. In the same way children can be trained to argueproandcontraabout problems of their own lives which clearly admit of argument, like "Would you rather be six or sixteen?" "Would you rather be a boy or a girl?" People new to the method might suppose that, although the brighter children could possibly attack such themes with success, the ordinary or dull child would be left staring. It is not so. Whole classes of children trained in this way produce work which is pleasant to read. The essentials seem to be stimulating topics, authentic expression without dictation, and constant practice. To one who has seen the elementary steps there is no magic in the Perse Plays or the Draconian Poems. They are natural. It is dullness that is artificial. Real dullness, such as one finds inCommon Rooms, Mess Rooms, Pulpits, and Government Offices is the fruit of a long, careful, and generally expensive education in that quality.
In teaching a young person to speak and write you are also teaching him to think, because words represent thoughts. The adult may be able to think connectedly in silence, but the child generally cannot. The child's world is, however, at the largest a little one, and it is necessary to enlarge it by various means, including stories and pictures, songs and books. The book gradually becomes more prominent as the art of reading is mastered. A child constantly encouraged to express himself freely, always giving out and seldom taking in, would develop a number of unpleasant qualities. Therefore reading is only second to writing in its importance. A generous supply of good books is the second fundamental necessity of sound English teaching. So far as I know, no school has ever reached the limit in this direction. There is an excellent society which bases its method of teaching mainly on copious reading and has been able to multiply seven-fold the usual reading programme of primary schools. But they seem to put the book a little too much into the foreground. It is citizens that we seek to educate. For them books should be the background of real life. We do not all possess those opulent libraries into which Ruskin would turn his princesses to browse at will; but I subscribe to his doctrine in principle. Mere quantity of reading is a great thing. The more children read, the better they will choose their books.
Now these two things alone, authentic expression and copious reading, are capable of producing good English. Children taught well in these methods can, without any formal instruction in spelling or grammar, write correctly as well as pleasantly. Something more is needed for those who seek to become scholars in English, and still more if they aim at the study of language. For such as these the teaching may gradually and progressively develop a scientific character. In the earliest stages fluency was itself a chief aim, and the teacher was compelled to be very sparing of interruptions and corrections. She had to use discretion and to judge for herself what mistakes were dangerous. She might not interpose though twenty successive clauses were joined together by "and," because she knew that it is natural for language to begin with co-ordinates and that mere mental growth combined with practice in reading and writing will cure the fault. She corrected vulgarisms, like "he done it," not with any grammatical disquisition but dogmatically. Even where the children come from homes where the King's English is never spoken, systematic speech-training in the infants' school can correct and refine language before pen is put to paper. These infant years seem to be intended by Nature for the learning of language. Ears are sharp and memories retentive. But habits once formed at that age, whether good or bad, are very difficult to eradicate later on. Perhaps pronunciation is best taught through disguised phonetics in the singing lesson and elocution in the poetry lesson.
In the first written work it may be found that the spelling is all wrong. Great controversies rage on this subject. But it seems right to regard badspelling as a disease which needs careful individual diagnosis in the earliest stages, when it can be cured so as to give no more trouble. Most often it springs from some fault in the method by which the child has learnt to read. Some people are allowed to grow up incapable of spelling because they make out the printed word by some process of guesswork and never fix the letters upon their memory. Good or bad spelling very rapidly becomes automatic.
Much the same is true of grammar. As I have said before, accurate use of language can be attained by purely empirical and dogmatic methods. Grammar is no essential preliminary to good English, but nevertheless there may be a good case for teaching it later on to those who can afford the time. It is well that English boys and girls should know something of the history and structure of their language as well as their constitution. It may be necessary for the linguist to understand the common grammatical technique of all languages. Moreover, teachers naturally seek to limit the domain of mere dogma and to give explanations where they can. Thus a child can easily be cured of saying "Between you and I" merely through the teacher's command, "Sayme." He can be cured of saying "Like I did" in the same way. He will of course be on surer ground if he understands the reason. Only let it be English grammar and not Latin grammar that is used. The reason why the child should say "I am taller than he" is, if a reason must be given, thatthanis historically identical withthen, not that "quamtakes the same case after it as before it."
If we could only keep our eyes steadily fixed on the goal and discard formalism, tradition, and antiquated examinations, there is in the work of the best infants' and elementary schools a broad enough base for us to build a sound structure of English up to the University and beyond. Perhaps some day a progressive University may try the experiment of an English Arts Course in which the first part would consist solely of Advanced Reading and Writing, and the second part of options between English Philosophy, English Philology, English Poetics, or English Criticism. It need not be any lower in standard than an Oxford Greats course.
We could not well spare the scholars. On the contrary, those who believe with me that English contains all things necessary to culture will be most anxious to enlist for its service the finest scholarship of the day. Some will think the fare provided in such a course as I have outlined too rich in sugar or fat and wanting in the tougher constituents which produce bone and muscle. It is essential to require more and more precision and accuracy as the child passes through the phases of adolescence. This was the real virtue of the old classical training, and it is too often wanting on Modern Sides. We must contemplate something very like the best of classical teaching applied to English Classics for big boys and girls.
I write as a Pharisee of the Pharisees, brought up at the feet of Gamaliel. A man like Robert Whitelaw loved the literature of Greece and Rome with such devotion that its very forms were sacred to him. A false quantityor a false concord was to him a personal affront: it caused him physical pain. Accents and particles mattered to him and so they mattered to us. There was a right and a wrong. We did not understand why, but we knew and felt his scorn of anything careless or superficial. He read Sophocles aloud with an intensity that at first puzzled and then infected us. Occasionally, but all too rarely, it was his task to do the same with Chaucer or Browning. Why not?
But at this point I labour with a sense of unreality. Is it possible to capture for our language a tithe of that old classical fervour? We have buried our Grammarian upon his peak, fronting the sunrise. He settledhoti'sbusiness. I have heard him lecture for an hour upon the future sense of the optative with an enthusiasm that was drawn from some pure source in the depths. Doubtless he survives in disciples. Is it the mere mystery and power of the Word that inspires them? I will not believe that it is any inherent virtue possessed by Propertius but denied to Shelley that inspires the classical scholar. But where are our inspired teachers of English? I have an impression of critical, quizzical gentlemen, deeply learned in Elizabethan drama or Saxon dialect, but all the same terribly mild. I cannot picture one of their disciples seriously moved by a misplaced "and which" or an unrelated participle in English. Something is missing.
There are thousands of genuine lovers of English literature scattered up and down the country, people who feel the thrill of delight in verbal beauty quite as keenly as any classical scholar. But they want leaders and a voice. We suffer our fools too gladly in English studies. Any lunatic is allowed to criticise, traduce, misinterpret Dryden, Carlyle, Addison, even Shakespeare, as if they were our private playthings. They are not. They are worthy of their pedestals of worship just as much as Homer and Aristotle.
The issue of the War has established more firmly than ever the predominance of the English language in the world. If our schools would rise to their opportunity and raise English into a culture worthy of its qualities there seems no reason why it should not become the universal medium of civilisation for the world. The richness and variety of its literature and the simplicity and flexibility of its structure render it, as a language, amply sufficient. Whether this is visionary or not, it is no longer safe for those who cherish the humanities in education to rely upon the old impregnable position of Latin and Greek. The world has received one of those secular shocks in which tradition crumbles to dust.
By ALICE MEYNELL
"Inconquerable"—BACON
A GENERALgood habit might long ago have been ruled for our national literature in the use of two negatives—"un" or "in," and "less." A good rule once made known, long ago, would surely have lasted. We might set about it even yet, though with much to chastise. Let us try. The fault of "un" and "in" is of long standing. That of a misapplied "less" is probably quite modern. What I have to suggest is an obvious enough correction, but the offence is broadcast, therefore correction cannot surely be inopportune or importunate. For who is there who does not give the teutonic "un" to the Latin or Romance word, writing "unfortunate" or "ungracious"? Or who now is careful to write "inconquerable"? Any man to-day would certainly write "unconquerable." It may not be that Bacon is always consistent; nor is Landor, who had something—but that something has proved altogether ineffectual—to say on this question of good English. We must own the incorrect use of the German particle to be the commonest thing in the world, but the incorrect use of the Latin or Romantic derivative, on the other hand, does not occur.
The Teutonic "un" comes more readily to the English pen than the Latin "in," and thus is joined habitually to the wrong kind of adjective and verb and adverb. Not only, moreover, to the Romantic word, but also to the Greek. We have learnt to write "asymmetry," but not to avoid "unsymmetrical." There is also a very frequent jumble, so that "uncivil" appears in the same phrase with "incivility," and "unable" with "inability," "undigested" with "indigestible," "ungrateful" with "ingratitude"—but I need cite no more. It is worth noting that these confusions are not due to a kind of reluctance in the use of "un" for nouns. We have many nouns with the "un" (not otherwise to my purpose): "unrest," "unbelief," "unfaith," "unhappiness," "untruth," "unthrift," "unskilfulness," and so forth.
Now I know well that the reader has been courteously waiting until I should draw breath for a paragraph in order to say "Undiscovered: Shakespeare." It is all too true. I can only repeat, murmuring, "Inconquerable: Bacon."
There is nothing in English that we should prize more dearly than our right negative particles of both derivations, and especially our particle of German derivation in its right Teutonic place. That "un" implies, encloses so much, denies so much, refuses so much, point-blank, with a tragic irony that French, for example, can hardly compass. Compare our all-significant "unloved," "unforgiven," with any phrase of French. There are abysses,in those words, at our summons, deep calling to deep, dreadful or tender passion, the thing and its undoing locked together, grappled. But in order to keep these great significances the "un" should not be squandered as we squander it. And neither should the less closely embraced "in" be so neglected. It has its right place and dignity and is, as it were, more deliberate. It is worth while, furthermore, to enhance the value of both our negative particles (one of them, of course, shared with French) by considering how poor a negative that last-named tongue has often and often to use for lack of a better; not even a particle, but a thing unfastened, a weak separate word, a half-hearted denial—"peu." Let us try to keep our "un" in its right place by considering how, for instance, it makes of "undone" a word of incomparable tragedy, surpassing "defeated" and "ruined" and all others of their kind. "Undone" has the purely English faculty, moreover, of giving to a little familiar word a sudden greatness, such greatness as leaps to Lear's "every inch." This was found to be intranslatable when Rossi acted King Lear in Italian; he had to speak the phrase in English. Wonderfully well furnished as we are for all adventures, is it not then time that we reviewed and revised our habits, and restored to their proper lineage the great contemporary histories of our language by a right and left distribution of the "in" and the "un"? Our incorrect ways were never standardized, or they standardized themselves by precedent. No, it is all too late. We shall never undo the habit now, or cease to be "unconscious" in our custom.
But for the other particle—"the less"—there is hope or there might be, but for Shakespeare's strange and slightly ambiguous "viewless." We might at least check new coinings. "Less" is in the construction here to be considered, though not in other combinations, fairly equivalent to the Teutonic "without." It has great value. It also locks close meanings with its word. But that word should be a noun, and not a verb. Yet it is a verb at the present day, not only in hasty column after column, but in page by deliberate page, and especially in stanza by deliberate stanza. For no doubt the perfervid poets have spread that fashion. You will find "relentless" scattered in modern verse, and "quenchless" and "tireless" frequent. Keats, instigated indirectly if not directly by Leigh Hunt, has "utterless." The misuse of "less" is even somewhat more to be resisted than that of "un" because in the case first named the grammatical construction of our English words (and we have not too many laws of construction) is violated. And beautiful words that are neglected for "quenchless" and "relentless" pass out of use; the words that have "less" for their lawful negative are cheapened; and writers of talent learn to dash and as it were to gesticulate.
Correspondence from readers on all subjects of bibliographical interest is invited. The Editor will, to the best of his ability, answer all queries addressed to him.
WEare glad to see that the Clarendon Press has published Mr. Percy Simpson's edition ofEvery Man in His Humour, a pioneer volume to the complete edition of Ben Jonson's Works, which the same editor, in conjunction with Professor Herford, has been for many years preparing. Their edition should, we think, be definitive (we use Sir Eric's magical word with extreme caution for fear of provoking the National Union of Textual Editors to down books and refuse to continue their researches). A new edition of Ben Jonson's work is certainly needed: Gifford, re-edited by Cunningham, is sadly inadequate; the text is bad and the notes explain nothing that one wants to know. One walks darkling through theDiscoveries. Take Ben's remarks about painting—they are Hermetic. What, for instance, does this mean? "Parrhasius was the first won reputation by adding symmetry to picture.... Eupompus gave it splendour by numbers and other elegancies." We shall indeed be grateful to the new editors if they can tell us exactly how Eupompus gave splendour to art by numbers—and other elegancies. The secret might be whispered along the galleries of Burlington House.
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Another interesting book that should soon, though there is no news of its immediate arrival, be coming from the Clarendon Press is the third volume of Mr. Saintsbury'sCaroline Poets. The first two volumes of this massive anthology opened up a whole province of literature hitherto almost unknown to the general reader. In the last this great work of excavation and exploration should be completed. With the exception of Chamberlayne and the Matchless Orinda the Carolines of Mr. Saintsbury's choice have been very obscure. In the last volume, we understand, he intends to soar to the dizzy heights of eminence on which Cleveland stands. A good critical edition of Cleveland will be welcomed by all lovers of seventeenth-century literature. The early editions of his works are a piratical sort of publication. Some of his poems were, even in his own life-time, attributed to other writers, notably hisHermaphrodite, which was fathered on Randolph, and which he claimed as his own in an amusing little poem appended, later on, to the stolen piece. And yet, in spite of Cleveland's claim to his own property, Carew Hazlitt, in his reprint of Randolph, continues to attribute theHermaphroditeto its wrongful owner. A very unnecessary and supererogatory blunder.
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While we are on the subject of the Caroline Poets we would like to express a pious hope that some day, when we are all immensely rich, the Clarendon Press, or some other great publishing institution, will bring out a complete corpus of English poetry. More than a century has elapsed since Chalmers issued hisEnglish Poets, and the book, in spite of bad editing and very imperfect—indeed non-existent—critical apparatus, is still an extremely useful one. It contains a complete Gower, a complete Lydgate, a complete Hawes, and a complete Skelton. The text of these older poets is indeed atrocious; but the fact remains that they are there, reprinted and easily accessible in Chalmers's stout volumes. For any study of the eighteenth century Chalmers is invaluable; everything is in him, from theRuins of Rometo thePleasures of Digestion—or is it theArt of Preserving Health? A well-edited Chalmers would be a work of immensevalue. And if the Clarendon Press would go on, in the same edition, from the Carolines to the Georgians and back, through the Elizabethans and Tudors as far as the Brutians (the contemporaries of our first Trojan king), we should be for ever grateful. But before that comes to pass we must all, as has already been hinted, be immensely rich
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A rather battered Purchas'sPilgrimminus its title-page came into our hands recently. It appears to be the second edition, but the only actual indication of date that we can discover is to be found in the following passage, on which by a happy chance we lighted while turning over the pages of the book. "Sultan Achmet is now, Anno 1613, five and twentie yeares old: of good stature, strong and active more than any of his Court. He hath three thousand Concubines." We cannot help believing that someone had been pulling the Reverend Samuel Purchas's leg on the subject of young Sultan Achmet's harem.
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The other day we bought a charming little first edition ofCandide(1759). The title-page is amusing: "Candide, ou l'Optimisme, traduit de l'Allemand de Mr. le Docteur Ralph"; no publisher or place, but the date MDCCLIX. It was often Voltaire's custom not to acknowledge his publications till they were a success.Zadig(1749) is similarly without author's or publisher's name.
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Perhaps some of our readers may be able to throw some light on a curious and interesting book,Specimens of Macaronic Poetry, published by J. Richard Beckley in 1831. The volume contains epics written on a single letter, like that which begins:
Cattorum canimus certemina clara canumque,
Cattorum canimus certemina clara canumque,
Cattorum canimus certemina clara canumque,
Odes in this style:
Emma! fer chartam, calamos, et inkum,
Emma! fer chartam, calamos, et inkum,
Emma! fer chartam, calamos, et inkum,
And the old Scottish Testament of Mr. Andro Kennedy, of which the first stanza runs:
I Master Andro Kennedy,A matre quando sum vocatus,Begotten with some incuby,Or with some freir infatuatus;In faith I can nocht tell redely,Unde aut ubi fui natus,But in truth I trow trewely.Quod sum diabolus incarnatus.
I Master Andro Kennedy,A matre quando sum vocatus,Begotten with some incuby,Or with some freir infatuatus;In faith I can nocht tell redely,Unde aut ubi fui natus,But in truth I trow trewely.Quod sum diabolus incarnatus.
I Master Andro Kennedy,A matre quando sum vocatus,Begotten with some incuby,Or with some freir infatuatus;In faith I can nocht tell redely,Unde aut ubi fui natus,But in truth I trow trewely.Quod sum diabolus incarnatus.
No author's name is given and we have had no time or opportunity to make researches. But perhaps, as we have suggested, some of our readers may be able to give us the information desired.
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We were fortunate in recently securing a very fine copy ofCertaine Learned and Elegant Workes of the Right Honourable Fulke Lord Brooke, written in his Youth and familiar Exercise with Sir Philip Sidney, Henry Seyle, 1633. It is high time that a new edition of these very interesting and, by moments, very great poems was published. Grosart's reprint is faulty and is, furthermore, practically unprocurable. As a matter of fact a new edition was, we understand, in process of being prepared by a very able young scholar of Christ Church, when the war broke out and the would-be editor was unhappily killed. Mr. Rose had, we believe, made considerable researches and had even discovered a certain amount of new material, but he had not committed the results ofhis labours to paper; so that the possible new edition of Greville has perished with him. If the rest of Greville's works could be edited as well as his Life of Sidney has been by Mr. Nowell Smith we should be very well pleased. But the prospect of getting any new edition at all seems now extremely unlikely.
Some early printed books of considerable interest have recently been added to the Library of the British Museum, among them a copy of Sannazaro'sArcadia, Venice, 1502, in a contemporary binding of boards covered with designs printed from woodblocks.Terentius: Comediæ cum interpretatione Donati, Baptista de Tortis, Venice, 1482.Elegantiolae, by Augustinus Datus, produced at Verona by an unidentified printer in 1483.Ptolemaeus, Liber quadripartit, Ratdolt, Venice, 1484. Maurice de Sully, Bishop of Paris:Les exposicions des euungilles en romant, Antoine Neyret, Chambéry, 1484. (Only four fully authenticated incunabula of Chambéry are known, of which this is the earliest and rarest. It is printed in large Gothic type and adorned with woodcuts. The Museum possesses specimens of the second, third, and fourth Chambéry books, and this is a perfect copy of the first.)Jo: Balbus Januensis: Catholicon, Jean du Pré, Lyon, 1492. Several examples of early Spanish printing have also been presented, as well as two first editions of Swinburne,Laus Veneris, Moxon, 1866, andDolores, Hotten, 1867, with "The Devil's Duel: a letter to the editor ofThe Examiner," an attack on Robert Buchanan, written by Swinburne under the pseudonym of Thomas Maitland, and printed for private circulation in 1875.
With the present boom in seventeenth-century literature one is unlikely, to judge from the catalogues of the better-known booksellers, to pick up many bargains in Caroline literature in London. The collector's only hope will be chance or the oversight or ignorance of the vendor. We know of someone who recently had the good fortune to find a copy of the extremely scarceLyric Poemsof Philip Ayres (1687) in a parcel of miscellaneous rubbish. But that was a stroke of luck not likely to be repeated, and collectors must be prepared to pay pretty heavily for their seventeenth century now. The following items from various catalogues will indicate the current scale of prices for early editions of Jacobean and Caroline books. We shall be interested to see the prices fetched in the sale of the third portion of the late Mr. W. J. Leighton's stock, at Messrs. Sotheby's in the last days of October. The catalogue makes mention of many extremely interesting seventeenth-century books as well as important manuscripts and early printed books.
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Messrs. Dobell offer eight first editions of Richard Brathwaite.Barnabee's Journall, published by John Haviland in 1638, is priced at £48, andAr't Asleepe Husband? A Boulster Lecture, 1640, at £25. Two more copies of this last work are included among the books at the Leighton sale. The second edition of Carew's Poems (1642), in the original calf, is offered at ten guineas; and a first edition of Dekker'sTragi-Comedy, called Match Mee in London(1631), at £14. A copy of the 1772 edition of Carew's Poems, originally the property of Mrs. Browning, with her maiden name and date, 1842, on the title-page, is on sale at the Serendipity Bookshop, price four guineas. Another book of Mrs. Browning's at the Serendipity Shop is Samuel Daniel'sHistory of the Civil Wars, 1717. This is one of those odd reprints of Elizabethan poets that are to be found scattered up and down the eighteenth century. Perhaps the most unexpected of them is the folioWorks of Michael Drayton, Esq.; A celebrated Poet in theReigns of Queen Elizabeth, King James I., and Charles I., printed by J. Hughs and sold by R. Dodsley, 1748. Among other valuable seventeenth-century books at the Serendipity Shop are Crashaw'sCarmen Deo Nostroin the original vellum, printed at Paris, 1652, £40, a second edition of Herbert'sTemple, and a first edition ofHesperides, or the works, both Human and Divine, of Robert Herrick, Esq., £140.
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It is interesting to note what high prices the works of Surtees can always command. In Mr. Frank Hollings's catalogue a set of the Sporting novels, with Leech's illustrations, one of them a first edition and the others early issues, is offered for £37 10s.
On the other hand, a first edition ofFriendship's Garlandcan be bought at Messrs. Dobell's for 10s.6d., and a first edition of Buchanan'sBook of Ormfor half-a-crown.
People still seem prepared to pay high prices for odds and ends from the nineties. Mr. Hollings has a complete Savoy at £7 10s.and two first editions of Oscar Wilde at nearly four pounds apiece.
A first edition ofTrilby(1895) can be purchased for 7s.6d.at Messrs. Dobell's, and ofDaniel Deronda(1876) at 18s.Evan Harrington, in the twelve original parts ofOnce a Week, is offered at 25s.at the Serendipity Shop.