NOVELS

Dusk and deep silence ...Three soldiers huddled on a benchOver a red-hot brazier,And a fourth who stands apartWatching the cold rainy dawn.Then the familiar sound of birds—Clear cock-crow, caw of rooks,Frail pipe of linnet, the "ting! ting!" of chaffinches,And over all the larkOutpiercing even the robin....Wearily the sentry movesMuttering the one word: "Peace."

Dusk and deep silence ...Three soldiers huddled on a benchOver a red-hot brazier,And a fourth who stands apartWatching the cold rainy dawn.

Then the familiar sound of birds—Clear cock-crow, caw of rooks,Frail pipe of linnet, the "ting! ting!" of chaffinches,And over all the larkOutpiercing even the robin....

Wearily the sentry movesMuttering the one word: "Peace."

Here there is more of a rhythm than usual. But the defect of Mr. Aldington and his Imagist friends is that, although they are quite right, though not original, in emphasising the need for concrete language, they do for the most part lack that rhythm that makes poetry what it is and rememberable. It is not that they write in free verse. Rhyme is no necessary part of verse, and nobody in the world ever contended that all the lines of a poem should be of standard lengths. But a poem in free verse—it is this which chiefly distinguishes Whitman's good from his bad poems—should have a continuous rhythm other than that of prose, andwillhave it if it is written by a man who is strongly moved and has the gift of musical expression. Mr. Aldington may have that gift, but if so he represses it.

Mr. Garrod's volume bears a picture of a graveyard: therein the tombstones of Messrs. Lloyd George and Balfour, Lords Haldane, Northcliffe and Birkenhead, and Sir Edward Carson. This looks sweeping, but on reference to his epigrammatic epitaphs, one finds that he admires the Old "Gang" and deplores the New. His verses are neat but slight. The best are those on Rupert Brooke, on the new invaders of Oxford who vainly attempt to emulate the dead, and on Reconstruction:

O soon you'll build the world againWith other and with better men;And I and plenty more will sit,And sit, and see you doing it.In a large West-end hotelRich non-combatants will dwell;Well-paid hands will ply the artOf binding up the broken heart,A special sub-department dealWith the wounds that never heal,Deputy-Controllers pourGovernment oil on every sore,And a civilian Soldier's FriendFurnish us forms world-without-endGod! does a man like me wanttape?I've wounds, man, here, that gape, that gape.

We note that Lord Derby is described asvir teres atque rotundus.

Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, in a lively introduction to the first of these volumes—in the course of which he suggests, provocatively, that blank verse is merely "a dignified kind of prose, pompous in recitation and for common reading dull"—says that "Lady Margaret Sackville is the best, in my opinion, of our English poetesses, at least of the younger generation." It is a good thing that he added the qualification, for, apart from the fact that Mrs. Woods has written poems better than anything that Lady Margaret has yet done, there is Mrs. Meynell, whose too exiguous volume of verse competes for quality with the best work of her generation. If there are scarcely any more exceptions to make we feel that the deduction is that women are at present doing very little in poetry, though there are vast numbers of them who write it. In the Victorian age when Christina Rossetti and Mrs. Browning, both of whom did immortal work, were writing together there was a general impression that these were the first fruits of women's emancipation and that future ages would see women becoming more and more prominent in poetry. But the wind bloweth where it listeth, and the fact that, at a time when an unusually large number of young men are writing sincerely and strongly, not one young poetess should have won prominence has now led to a general opinion that the peculiar qualities of passion and thought that make poets are, and will always be, more normal in men than in women. Lady Margaret Sackville has a reasonable technical equipment: a fair vocabulary, facility with metre. She never says quite stupid things, she sometimes says pretty things, and at times (as in her war poems) she reveals a certain depth of feeling. But usually she is first and foremost derivative; sometimes from Swinburne direct, more often generally derivative. You feel that she is giving a thin version of something else, even when you cannot say exactly what; and her poems, whether dramatic poems about Dionysus and Pan, or dreams, streams, Springs and things, are just saved from being ordinary verse by the fact that she has a brain and a heart which infuse the bare minimum of reality into them. The only things to be said in her favour is that she is young and that her latest verses are her best.

Something of what we lack in Lady Margaret is present, if intermittently, in the small, charmingly-produced book by Miss Viola Meynell. Her work is uneven, and her handling sometimes awkward, but she has, sometimes, force; she sees vividly, thinks strongly, feels strongly, imagines strongly. The point of view of the whale that swallowed strongly was a remarkable thing to try to adopt, but her poem on this subject, despite a weak ending, contains verses with more bite in them than any in Lady Margaret's book; if she has read Donne she has not read him to her hurt.The Maid in the Rice Fieldsis charming, andPoppy-seeds sent from the Eastis more than that:

Travelled here in winter sleepThe young wild Eastern poppies keepTheir eyelids closed. They nothing knowWhere is this land they lie in now.

The opening is delightful, and the theme is developed with craft and passion.

Mr. Harvey's first book,A Gloucestershire Lad, appeared when he was in France; his second when he was a prisoner in Germany; this is his third. The sequence has been too rapid to show much development; both his merits and his faults are what they were. He is only occasionally a good workman, and he has not yet succeeded in gettinghimself naturally and forcibly into his work. This is explicable. He loves his country; he wants to celebrate the old traditional simplicities of a healthy country life and (as propagandist) to restore what we have lost of them; he stands, he says, for Romance, Laughter, and the capacity for innocent Wonder. There is no pretence about this, but when a man feels that he must defend the natural there is comprehensibly an air of awkwardness and self-consciousness about him. The drinking-songs (Mr. Harvey also praises ale) of modern singers are examples: the roysterers always have an eye on the neighbouring teetotaller who they know is watching them and whose opposed philosophy they wish to unseat in the affections of their fellows. Mr. Harvey is best when he is forgetting the general principles for which he stands and simply enjoying himself; and the superiority of his more whimsical verses suggests that his bent, like that of Mr. Graves (with whom he has much else in common), lies more in that direction than towards large utterance or solemnity. The title of his book suggests that he realises this: the poem from which it is taken is certainly his most successful. It is really a close study of ducks made with infinite relish of their quaintness:

From troubles of the worldI turn to ducks,Beautiful comical things,Sleeping or curled,Their heads beneath white wingsBy water cool.Or finding curious thingsTo eat in various mucksBeneath the pool,Tail uppermost, or waddlingSailor-like on the shoresOf ponds, or paddling.

He sketches the main outlines of a duck's varied life by barn, stable, and stack:

They wander at their will,But if you go too nearThey look at you through blackSmall topaz-tinted eyesAnd wish you ill.

On the whole, he thinks the duck was the best of God's jokes:

And he's probably laughing still at the sound that came out of his bill.

Of the more serious poems some are a trifle stale; the glorification of one's county, with place-names rhymed, might be given a rest.Requiescatis a moving poem, and the tenuity and familiarity of the idea does not preventSongfrom lingering in the memory more than anything else in the volume:

Sweetness of birdsong shall fall upon my heart,Shall fall upon my heart;Nor will I strive to mimicThe beauty that I find,But lie in a dream and open wide my heartAnd let the song of the birds sink down into my mind.

This song is all of a piece, a musical sigh.

Mr. Archibald Marshall is, we dare to say, one of the good writers most neglected by contemporary critics. He has brought nothing new to the development of the novel. If a general description were necessary, he might be most briefly and accurately classified as a descendant of Anthony Trollope. But his talent in his own generation is unique; and no person who enjoys or studies the fiction of this age can afford to neglect it. In some ways his latest volume is the climax of his performance and displays at their height his peculiar method and gifts. It consists of six stories. One, perhaps the least interesting, describes how John Clinton, a prosperous city merchant in the time of the Regency, rescued the family estates from his elder brother, the prodigal Beau Clinton. The second deals with a scientific peer, innocent and absorbed, who very nearly married a woman scientist, of origin much lower than his own, who was attracted to him only by his wealth and position. The hero of the third is a speculative builder. The fifth narrates the misfortunes of a patient and gentle clerk. The sixth is a story of old Squire Clinton's reactions to the war and of how he was reconciled to the different reactions of those about him. The fourth, which we have removed from its place, tells how Ann Sinclair, a day-pupil at Miss Sutor's school, was sent to Coventry by her companions because she was unjustly suspected of having damaged in malice Mary Polegate's illuminated chart of the kings of Juda and Israel. This is the longest story in the book, occupying over one hundred pages. The principal characters are all school-girls of various ages, and no extraneous interests are introduced. It seems almost impossible with this material to hold a reader's keen attention for twenty odd thousand words, and yet this is what Mr. Marshall has done. All the persons are vividly alive and convincing; and there is a whole range of them, each individualised and given a real personality. The story is an especially good example of what Mr. Marshall can do and how he does it. His narrative is extraordinarily quiet and unemphasised, and shows by its restraint the author's complete confidence in the interest of his subject and in the adequacy of his method. In all these tales events more or less moving take place or are referred to; but the teller never raises his voice or gesticulates. He has no tricks. His characters reveal themselves in speech or action; but if they do not he has no modern prejudices against telling the reader what are their motives and what is going on in their minds. His explanations are so quiet and so straightforward that they immediately carry conviction. When old Squire Clinton was passing through Paris with his daughter to see her husband, wounded and interned in Switzerland, he was displeased that his other daughter should take them to lunch in a restaurant:

He would not have objected to exactly the same meal served in her apartment. He would have eaten and drunk whatever had been set before him, and enjoyed it in spite of his always strongly expressed preference for English food and English cooking. The wine he might have noticed and commented on, because he knew about wines, and because you pleased your host by approving of his taste in them. But this ordering of your meal in public, in consultation with your guests, with amaître d'hôtelstanding at your elbow and booking your orders, notwithout advice of his own, struck him as very like taking part in a mistress's consultation with her servants—almost an indecency. The restaurant habit was, in fact, entirely unknown to him. In his expansive youth it had been unheard of. The nearest he had ever come to it had been in giving luncheons or dinners at one of his clubs—meals as elaborate as this and as carefully arranged, but arranged beforehand, so that the guests should get the right flavour of hospitality, and accept the good things set before them as they would have accepted them at his own table. Neither Joan nor Nancy divined that half his displeasure, which he could not hide, was at being obliged, under Inverell's hospitable pressure, to express his preference for this or that luxury, with the price of it staring him in the face on the menu, when indulgence in any sort of luxury was so far from his mood.

So delicate and exact and truthful is this delineation of a small tract in the old man's character that it would be almost possible to reconstruct the whole without any other guide, as is done in the case of louder roaring monsters than Mr. Marshall's creations.

Mr. Gilbert Frankau'sPeter Jackson, Cigar Merchant, presents a curious contrast to the method of Mr. Marshall. Mr. Marshall's virtues are so quiet and unobtrusive that it is possible to overlook them altogether. Mr. Frankau's defects are so vociferous that they tend to obscure his real merits. He paints in violent colours. He paints his sentimental passages with a yard broom. His style, as Mr. Arnold Bennett once observed of somebody else, is such that even in Carmelite Street the sub-editors would yearn to correct it. He has almost entirely eliminated the conjunction from his own version of the English language: the "ands" and "buts" omitted from this book would, if they were restored, increase its length by a hundred pages or so. Their absence gives the reader the impression that Mr. Frankau is in an enormous hurry and is very short of breath. All these defects are closely woven into the texture of one of the most strident novels ever written; and it is quite impossible to escape from them. Nevertheless this tale of a business man who became a gunner is one of the most lively and credible pictures of the war which we have yet had. It matters little in the end that, whether he is describing the purchase of a cigarette-factory or a love-scene or the battle of the Somme, the author scores exclusively for brass and big drums. This method certainly eliminates the love-scene, but it is not inappropriate to the other subjects; and in his accounts both of war and of business Mr. Frankau produces a huge, crowded chaotic picture which stuns and bewilders the reader, but at the same time convinces him that he is seeing at least one aspect of the truth. Mr. Frankau's high level of verisimilitude and interest in such passages as the description of the Battle of Loos depends to a very great extent on his peculiar power of packing much detail into a small space; and it is to this perhaps that we owe the somewhat regrettable lack of "the smaller parts of speech."

Mr. Beverley Nichols's book is another of the triumphs of precocity—a novel describing the Public School system by a writer with very recent experience of it. And, like other novels on this subject, it is a novel with a thesis. Mr. Nichols is far from disapproving of the system. He sets out, on the other hand, to show that it is capable of receiving and making comfortable the most eccentric of boys if he will only make the least effort of adjustment to his environment that can be reasonably expected of a human being in any circumstances. His hero, Paul Trevelyan, has in an extreme form all the characteristics of the heroes of such books. He has been coddled, he has unusual tastes, he cares nothing for games. But, very refreshingly, Mr. Nichols treats with a firm hand both his characteristics and his sufferings. Paul undergoes just such discomforts as are required to rid him of effeminacy and priggishness, and mould him into a boy capable of taking a place in human society with satisfaction to himself and his companions. The thesis of the book appears to be that the Public School system does not necessarily deprive those who come under it of their individuality, does not necessarily crush or torture those who depart from the normal, does act as a civilising agent on those who are in need of it. As a piece of evidence, the book is interesting and useful. As a novel it isless remarkable than Mr. Waugh'sLoom of Youth. That book was not only a contribution to a dispute; it was also a work of fiction astonishingly well put together for its author's years and experience. Its characters and many of its incidents were extremely well observed and drawn. Mr. Nichols fails as a writer of fiction. His characters are vague and unconvincing: they have no fundamental individuality. The construction of his novel is extremely loose and uneven; and the passages of reflection are introduced with a very clumsy hand. Whether he will succeed in correcting these faults it is impossible to predict; but he clearly has gifts which ought to come to something. Precocity in the things he lacks is not always a certain indication of success in maturity.

Mr. Huxley, alone among these writers, betrays traces of exotic influence. The last story in his book,The Death of Lully, might have come from theContes Cruels, perhaps, in one way, has come thence. Others of the collection show less definite resemblances to French models and are less evenly and carefully composed; but there are in most of them traces of an alien exactitude and an alien wit. Mr. Huxley, as we know already from his verse, canwritebrilliantly. His defect here, as there, lies in a deficiency of feeling caused by an excess of self-consciousness. This self-consciousness does not make him awkward or effusive. He is far too clever to betray it thus rudely. As in the behaviour of some persons, it manifests itself in his work by an iron rigidity of attitude, an immovable equability of tone. When he invents characters he does not so much describe their actions or let them act as criticise them; he is led to adopt the pose of the satirist more consistently than perhaps he intends. Reaction follows fast on action; and the springs of his writing are laid bare in an extraordinarily ingenious dialogue, calledHappy Families, where he exposes the triple personalities, inciting, betraying, checking one another, of a young man and a young woman sitting out together at a dance. This piece, which seems to have unnecessarily puzzled a number of Mr. Huxley's critics, means nothing if it does not express his opinion that in every human being there is a stratum of the animal which is to be distrusted and restrained. But, here and elsewhere, one wonders whether his watchfulness over this stratum has not led him into exaggerating its extent and distrusting things which, to a less suspicious eye, do not look in the least like it. And in another story, so fast are his reactions, we find him mocking the shuddering and ascetic revulsion from the purely animal in man. This is the behaviour not merely of the critic dominant over the artist, but of the critic who leads towards Nihilism by discrediting all human impulses, instead of arranging them in order. Mr. Huxley has, however, too much of the poet for this to be fundamental in him, too much appreciation of bright and vivid things and bright and vivid phrases. And it would be gravely unjust to convey the impression that it spoils his book.The Farcical History of Richard Greenowis an admirable invention, full of possibilities for bitter comedy, most, if not all, of which have been worked out;Cynthiais a good joke, though its title betrays the climax a little too early; andThe Bookshopis more human in feeling than its companions. But the important point to notice is that, whatever may be the perversities or the affectations of his thought, Mr. Huxley always writes well, with a style that is never shabby or shoddy, never flamboyant or flat.

Mr. Bayfield'sMeasures of the Poetsis meant to be revolutionary. He finds existing systems of prosody neither complete nor sound, and would sweep them away in order to install his own trochaic scheme. Practically every work of a predecessor is ignored, and the author himself regrets that Lanier'sScience of English Verse, published forty years ago, did not come to his notice until the present book was written. He does not mention Professor Saintsbury'sHistoryorManual of English Prosody, nor (among other writings, by recent or living metrists) the essays of Patmore and Mr. Robert Bridges. A great deal of contention is thus avoided, but the probabilities of conversion are also reduced. He asserts that the normal foot of English verse is trochaic, and that the iambus cannot form a metrical foot, because the stressed syllable does not come first; while Professor Saintsbury declares that the iambic is the staple foot of English verse and is common to almost all prosodies.

How, then, let us ask the challenger, is the application of the trochaic system justified? In Mr. Bayfield's scheme the plain norm of the "full blank" verse line is an eleven-syllable arrangement of which the first is a "short," followed by five trochees; and the following line (quoted in his second book, which takes up the subject anew) is given as specimen:

I ⁝ come to | bury | Cæsar, | not to | praise him.‖

But the full line does not happen to be the common form, owing to its feminine ending, and so he admits that the prevailing type is the "checked" form:

To ⁝ sleep; per | chance to | dream: ay | there's the | rub.∧‖

The anacrusis or up-beat, marked off by ⁝, is an integral part of the new system; in reality it is the device by which the author changes iambic to trochaic movement. Here, indeed, is the crucial point of the dispute between iambic and trochaic. Under the first, this up-beat or take-off is neither very frequent nor very rare; under the second, it is common. Mr. Bayfield's idiosyncratic use of it is illustrated by himself thus:

My ⁝ heart | aches, and a | drowsy numbness pains,

and—

Or emptied some dull | opiate | to the drains,

andby—

But ⁝ being too | happy in thine happiness;

the reader being left to discover for himself the reason for the difference of prosodic interpretation. If the ear should be satisfied with this difference (and Mr. Bayfield admits that the ear is judge and jury), what might its verdict be as to the validity of a double up-beat, leaving only semi-syllables for the rest of the line?

And thy ⁝ mouth | shúddering | like a | shót | bírd.‖

Here let it be remarked that his system acknowledges monosyllabic feet, but he is not well informed in denying them a place in the iambic system. He complains of "ragtimescansions," in referring to the fact that the iambic system admits trochees whenever it would break down by refusing them, and seems to deplore a resulting loss of "continuity of rhythm." Yet he himself does not scruple to write of one of his own illustrations: "A striking contrast inrhythmmay be noted here. That of the first line and a half ... is markedly trochaic; the other line and a half fall into an equally marked iambic rhythm." He has not, in fact, escaped from the difficulties and inconsistencies which beset the prosodist. He does little more than prove that the music of the poets cannot be defeated or disguised by either system. He gives this as containing a quinquesyllabic foot:

Well, ∧ | Juliet, I will | lie with thee to-night,

and dubiously suggests "hire" as a disyllable in:

And ⁝ hire | post-horses; | I will hence to-night.

He is aware that an alternative scansion may in some cases be correct, but does not sufficiently realise that any prosodic system is but an artificiality, formed to explain, and not dictate, the infinitely variable rhythms of poetry. His own particular system, for all its ingenuities, appears more artificial and arbitrary than the iambic. It is interesting to note that his examples are largely drawn from Shakespeare, Tennyson, Swinburne, and Shelley, all fruitful ground; while Milton and Coleridge, Campion and Keats are much less used or left alone altogether. Might not these fascinating and delusive excursions into the mysteries of rhythm be extended to certain living poets—at least to Mr. Hardy and Mr. Bridges?

Shakespeare's Versificationis a larger book, in which Mr. Bayfield inquires into the validity of the early texts. His purpose is:

First to give an intelligible and consistent account of the structure and characteristic features of his dramatic verse, the essential principles of which appear to have been wholly misconceived hitherto, and secondly to show that there are many thousands of lines of it that are given in modern texts not as their author intended them to be delivered, but clipped and trimmed to a featureless uniformity that he would have abhorred.

He finds inAntony and Cleopatrathe ideal of verse at which Shakespeare was always aiming, and denounces the depravity of the text as it stands—in this as in many other of the plays. The book has a cumulative, even a dramatic interest, for setting out to prove one thing, Mr. Bayfield frankly ends by proving another. With immense care and patience he has examined and compared Quartos and First Folio, and noted quite innumerable places at which the contraction and condensation of words and lines have distorted or ruined the rhythm; and he contends that if the verse is to be presented as the author meant it to be delivered, these must be expanded into their full forms. He begins by considering Shakespeare's use of the "resolved" foot—that is, a foot of more than two syllables—and discovers a constant tendency to reduce these "resolutions" by abbreviation; the result being, for example, that violent becomes vi'lent, desolate des'late, Demetrius Demetr'us, etc. He contends that from the outset Shakespeare employed resolved rhythms more freely than his contemporaries, and gradually increased the proportion with his later plays; and it is, of course, perfectly true that the growing liberation of style which in Shakespeare expresses a psychological development, is equally noticeable in later poets.

Now in comparing the Quartos with the First Folio Mr. Bayfield finds that of all the differences the most conspicuous is the elimination of resolutions, the tendency shown by the Quartos in this direction being aggravated in the Folio. The position is made clear in a Table relating to fourteen Quarto plays, which shows,e.g., that inOthellothe Folio eliminates eighty-six resolutions found in the Quarto, and the latter eliminates fourteen which the Folio displays; while a third figure, 84, "enumerates cases where, guided by the whole investigations and the revelations afforded by the first two columns[figures], I believe that a resolution should be restored." His deduction is that the Folio is a metrical reactionary; if it is unsound to prefer its revision to the Quartos, it is equally unsound to rely upon the Folio for the plays not included in the Quartos. He strengthens his argument by showing that the prose (ofJulius Cæsar, for instance), which has no metrical obligations, is far more immune from illicit contractions, although prose, being nearer to ordinary speech, might be expected to show very free colloquial abbreviations. We are not prepared to follow Mr. Bayfield blindly; his trochaic passions, hitched to his resolution to "resolve," do not compel unquestioning obedience; we are not convinced by a line like, "From ⁝ Syria to Lydia and to Ionia," when the received text reads:

From SyriaTo Lydia and to Ionia, whilst——

and his resort to "Cross Accent" for the scansion of such lines as

Her dowry shall weigh equal with a queen

is yet farther from persuading us, and seems, like so many of his arguments and instances, to be the mere expression of his hatred of the iambic. Nevertheless, his abundant recital of divergencies from the Quartos' resolved lines—to consider only that which is a matter of simple enumeration—can be taken quite apart from the soundness or unsoundness of his metrical prepossessions; and what we have called the cumulative interest of this treatise is most plainly felt in the development of this theme as play after play is examined.

It is in the chapter called "Conclusions" that the interest suddenly becomes dramatic. Mr. Bayfield has been arguing that Shakespeare is not printed as he should be printed—that is, with "the clear and uncramped enunciation of trisyllabic and quadrisyllabic feet"—and that the mangling of these was done for and by the players in order to reduce the verse to the common disyllabic type which alone they could comfortably manage. But now he derives a "flood of light" from the 1616 Jonson folio, the proofs of which are presumed to have been corrected by Jonson himself. From the printing ofSejanushe finds that Jonson's resolutions are abridged even where the line makes their full enunciation essential to the rhythm. Space will not permit the tracing of the new argument here, but Mr. Bayfield at length concludes that what he has supposed in the first three hundred pages of his book to be attributable to the perversities of the Press, are after all merely recognised contractions which were never meant to suggest the clipped pronunciations given to them. His charge, in fact, is no longer levelled against the early texts from which his affluence of instances is drawn, but against the interpretation of them; the very apostrophe (with division) being in reality but a signal calling attention to the resolution which generations of editors, readers, and players have supposed it was meant to abolish. The dramatic interest is complete.

Mr. Bayfield claims for his books the authority justly due from forty-five years' application of prosodic principles to English verse. We can but conclude with wishingShakespeare's Versificationa fuller index and a wide study, and suggest to the author that those who are concerned with verse as writers and not as teachers have not always failed to give the full syllabic value to the common abbreviations of the text.

Miss Ford's book is a "practical" treatise and might have been a valuable one. The first sentence tells us that many of her examples of verse-forms are from her own pen,while Mr. Bayfield has at any rate been content with Shakespeare. Why should she write four stanzas in imitation ofLove in the Valley? She thinks it too well known to make quotation advisable, yet gives us the commonest things of Wordsworth and Shelley and Coleridge. She misprints Shakespeare and Wordsworth shamefully, thinks that Professor Saintsbury is dead, and, sparing only four pages for "the lyric," devotes twenty-seven to such forms as roundel, ballade, etc. Her book, we think, has been spoiled by haste; yet she has such enthusiasm and brightness as tempt us to regret that haste and to hope for better work.

Metaphysicians have been forced by the impossibility of obtaining from observed nature either confirmation or disproof of their theories to develop a technique the principal aim of which is coherence. So admirable indeed has this technique become in its logic and complexity that it has been adopted by many workers in other fields, on the whole with disastrous results. In this book Professor Babbitt applies it to literature, although he appears quite able to follow more empirical methods. His reading has been extensive, and his judgments are precise. Unfortunately he is not much interested in or amused by books save as the symptoms of moral and metaphysical observations. He eats nothing out of them. He only covers them with his cobwebs.

Like most metaphysicians, Professor Babbitt thinks in twos. The trick is familiar. Define A. Call not-A B. One is very bad, one very good, and the history of life, or of whatever else is under discussion, is the history of their conflict. For this professor, A is an emotional and naturalistic romanticism, and is very bad indeed. Rousseau is its high prophet, the great war its issue, and "smart young radicals" its dupes. We are invited back to ancient Greece, where A is absent, and B, that is to say classicism, has neither artifice nor formality, back to Socrates, back to Aristotle, back apparently to anyone who is a philosopher and not a poet.

Now there is an essential fallacy in grouping writers like politicians, in ringing a division bell for ever in their ears and furthermore doing their voting for them. This talk of schools and of influences and of disciples is extremely prevalent among the academic critics in America. It may safely be said that they have illuminated nothing thereby. Writers may use the language of their times and their friends, but it is as a vestment and not as a foundation. Of course, the romantic revolution, like the spluttering rebellions of our own day, may have induced some subordinates to produce manifestos and call them works of art. Some young men may be so excited by the eccentricity of their form as to forget the necessity of any content. But such works do not usually occupy the critic for long, and valuable appreciation of literature will not be content with a quasi-botanical classification.

What are we to do, for example, with Charles Lamb? Is he a classicist or a romanticist? Professor Babbitt has no qualms in affixing the latter label. Lamb is as romantic as Wordsworth is, he says, but about towns instead of about the country, and as a proof he refers the reader to a letter in which Lamb, writing to Wordsworth, says: "In London I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand ... the old bookstalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee houses, steams of soup from kitchens, the pantomimes," and so on. Little can be gained for the appreciation of Elia or of the "Lake School" by saying classic or romantic about this, and if this is indeed a child of Rousseau, we may be certain that he would have dropped it with the rest at the door of the foundling hospital.

Probably, however, the professor does not want to foster appreciation. His incursioninto literature is a border foray, and he is off at once with his plunder to his ethical highlands. We remain to count our losses. Milton, who "on the whole is highly serious," is not much injured. But Keats is unwise. Browning is only half-educated. Wordsworth, until he began theEcclesiastical Sonnets, was betrayed by his "penchant for paradox." Shelley was an emotional sophist, with a nympholeptic imagination, who fell into sheer unreality. These judgments contain truth, but a very little of truth. To write thus is too plainly to adopt the methods of a political opponent. Professor Babbitt warns us that if he had attempted rounded estimates these would have been more favourable, but that as it is he is severe because he is laying down principles, principles of discipline and authority as against the unrestrained individualism of the modern.

One wonders, too, whether this massive series—the present volume is the fourth—will contribute much more to ethics than to literature; whether an intensive study of the West European literature of 1790 to 1850 will indeed, as Professor Babbitt may expect, dissuade readers from surrendering to the emotions; whether the indecorum of Rousseau does threaten civilisation with breakdown; and whether the imitation of Sophocles and Dante would morally improve the character.

It is, in short, not very obvious why this book was written, nor who will take pleasure in reading it, except for the enjoyment of a first-class mind, even when it works in a vacuum.

This is an amiable book of gossipy essays, mostly in the key popular at University Extension meetings. Some of them are reviews and rely a little too much on extracts for any one familiar with the books noticed to derive much excitement from them. The title-essay, however, together with that on aProcession of Flowers, and the paper entitledRecollectionsare both worth attention. The essay on his boyhood and youth shows that Sir Francis has an eye for character, and no little gift for expressing himself neatly about his friends and acquaintances. Here is an admirable vignette of Parslow, the butler:

He had what may be called a baronial nature: he idealised everything about our modest household, and would draw a glass of beer for a postman with the air of a seneschal bestowing a cup of malvoisie on a troubadour. He would not, I think, have disgraced Charles Lamb's friend Captain Burney, who welcomed his guests in the grand manner to the simplest of feasts. It was good to see him on Christmas Day; with how great an air would he enter the breakfast-room and address us: "Ladies and gentlemen, I wish you a happy Christmas," etc. I am afraid he got but a sheepish response from us.

It has something of the air of those charming pictures of Christmas in the country which Randolph Caldecott used to contribute to theGraphicSpecial Numbers. Sir Francis's paper onNames of Characters in Fictiondoes not seem to us an adequate treatment of a really fascinating subject. He just touches the fringe of it, but he appears to us over-lenient to the bad old habit of naming characters after their vices, virtues, or idiosyncrasies. That is tolerable in purely allegorical work, such as Bunyan's, but becomes very tiresome in Thackeray—whom Sir Francis rates far too highly—and frequently absurd both in him and minor authors. Women novelists have here shown more sense; you do not meet such terrible monstrosities as Mantrap, Lollypop, Fitzoof, Portansherry, or Nockemorf in the novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, or Mrs. Gaskell. A character's name is not perfect if one can imagine it different, and most of the "typical" names are mere labels which have no real, organic connection with their wearers, as have the names of Flaubert's characters, of Balzac's, or of Henry James's.

Mr. Phillips is rather a pathologist of fiction than a critic. His thesis here, broadly speaking, is that Dickens, and after him Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade, were drawn into melodramatic invention by the demands of the public and the conditions of publication of their day. His diagnosis is indisputable, though his premises are not. It is not to be denied that Dickens wrote melodrama. He liked that kind of thing, and so did his public. Where Mr. Phillips goes astray is in assuming that Dickens was a tradesman who supplied a craving public. The truth is otherwise. Dickens gained his public with thePickwick Papers, and after that could do what he pleased. It is quite another thing to say that he was of like mind with his public, and took in melodrama through the pores. It had been in the air for fifty years. But Mr. Phillips sees little else in Dickens, and thereby does his subject and himself injustice. For one false note which that great man struck, the trained ear will detect two dozen true. If some of his monsters—Quilp in particular—are pantomime monsters, and some of his angels pantomime angels, others of them, monstrous or not, have been added to the inhabitants of English-speaking lands, and still walk in our midst. No writer has ever increased the population to the same extent. Mrs. Gamp may be more than woman, or less; she may be a living proverb. It does not matter, since she lives. Dickens, in fact, was a genius. He did what he chose, or what he must, sometimes superlatively well, sometimes incredibly ill. We bolt the bad for the sake of the good. There is no concealment possible of the fact that he had unfortunate and occasionally unwholesome tastes. The worst of them was his pleasure in cruelty. Quilp and his wife, Jonas Chuzzlewit and his, Creakle and his boys, Squeers and his: there is a gloating over such relations which, to our mind, is the worst blot upon Dickens's fame. But Mr. Phillips, absorbed in the commercial aspect of literature, counting the words in the huge novels of that day, calculating circulation, and examining into profits, has not had time for such points. He had been better employed there than in amassing statistics for "The Novelist as Wage-earner." Too much attention has been paid already to the finance of the business. Money-getting did not affect Dickens in the first flights of his genius, when his direction for good and all was determined. It may have stimulated Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade—a very different pair of men. Mr. Phillips is in the right when he hits them off as "virtuosos." "Not even Stevenson," he shrewdly says, "was more exclusively and hopelessly a writer of story-books" than Charles Reade.

Here are three new additions to the colossal pile of "war books"—two of them the personal records of soldiers, the third a more pretentious effort by a civilian. Colonel Butler went out in 1914 with the Seventh Division to Belgium, was engaged in the first battle of Ypres, came home wounded, returned to Flanders, went thence to the Somme (in the days before the Somme became hell), and leaves us finally at Marseilleson his way to "some other theatre of war." The book contains nothing very remarkable, but it is agreeably written, and should give pleasure to the author's friends and to others who care to be reminded again of "Somewhere in France," where they have marched and fought and billeted.

Mr. Bishop's is a modestly told and mildly exciting story of an escape from the Turks. He was an Indian Army subaltern captured at Kut, and interned at Kastamuni. Thence with two companions he got away to the Black Sea coast, was recaptured and rescued again. The rescuers were a handful of diverting brigands, with whose help Mr. Bishop eventually crossed the Black Sea and made his way homeviâRussia. There is no attempt to generalise either about military matters or prison life. We gather, however, that Mr. Bishop and his friends were not on the whole badly treated by the Turks. And there was a time, in 1916, when they lived well—eggs at halfpenny a piece, good white flour at sixpence a pound, and fruit practically gratis! O blessed Kastamuni!

Mr. Bodley is more sophisticated. In the first half of his book he takes us over the battlefields of France, and discourses of the captains and the kings, the priests and politicians of past centuries who fought and played and intrigued there, of the glories and beauties of the old towns and villages of the Somme and the Marne, of Rheims and Verdun and a hundred other places. But he completely changes the angle of his attack in the second half of his volume, which he calls, "An additional chapter on the results of the late war as affecting our national life and imperial interests." His main theme appears to be the necessity or desirability of continuing hostility to Germany. The Germans, he thinks, are still a fundamentally evil race whose worst faults we imitate and whose few virtues we eschew. These virtues are their commercial enterprise, their zest for town-planning and housing, and the comparatively small amount of money they waste in paying lawyers. Lawyers, it appears, are Mr. Bodley'sbête noire; he regards them, and especially the political barristers and the overpaid judges and law officers, as the curse of our unhappy country. But what chiefly raises his ire are the abominations which we are said to have copied from Prussia of bureaucracy and the system of "honours"—peerages, baronetcies, knighthoods, Orders of Merit, Orders of the British Empire, poured out in bucketfuls on a motley crowd of corrupt or undistinguished individuals. This is, of course, an indictment which any writer is entitled to make, though some may think that Mr. Bodley occasionally lets himself be carried rather far by his indignation. But the connection with the faults of Germany seems a little far-fetched. There are times, too, in the course of his special pleading when he verges on the ridiculous. Is it not absurd, for example, to say that "the formidable machinery of state socialism" (meaning chiefly Old Age Pensions and National Insurance) is "incompatible with representative government"? And who wants a long argument to prove that Queen Victoria was not responsible for the plague of Germanism which Mr. Bodley thinks has infected English society? The whole of this "additional chapter" is a melancholy illustration of the effect of the war in causing an educated Englishman to lose his sense of proportion.

The plain man who walks in the trim garden of literature must feel, in coming upon Lord Fisher in print, as we imagine the shade of Bach might feel confronted by a jazz band, or an elementary drawing mistress before a canvas of Mr. Wyndham Lewis. Lord Fisher has for many months been "the talk of the town"; the respectable reviewer feels that only in the talk of the town can the appropriate comments be found.Recordsbegins thus: "Of all the curious fables I've ever come across, I quite think the idea that my mother was a Cingalese Princess of exalted rank is the oddest! Onecan't see the foundation of it!" And it ends with a letter from a fellow-Admiral suggesting that Lord Fisher, like Jesus Christ, is an Enigma. Between those two passages there is a roaring torrent of anecdote, of quotations and exclamation marks and capital letters, of criticism (often highly "indiscreet"), of apologia, of confident prediction, of everything that is diverting and irritating and arresting and astoundingly human—a torrent that sweeps the reader off his feet and leaves him gasping and incredulous. The book is a monument of magnificent egoism. One can only use its author's own word of a sermon by Dean Inge and say it is "splendiferous." We are told, in parenthesis, that he got into the Navy by writing out the Lord's Prayer, doing a Rule of Three sum, and drinking a glass of sherry. We are told that he looks like a Christmas-tree when he wears his decorations. We have stories of how, in his shirt-sleeves and with a boot in each hand, he entertained King Edward VII. in his bedroom, and of a comic postcard sent to him by Queen Alexandra. There is one chapter devoted to his views on the Bible, and another containing a reprint of four speeches which he made: one at the Royal Academy Banquet, a second at the Mansion House, the other two (and these would both go on a postcard) in the House of Lords. There are numerous photographs of him standing on his quarter-deck with Kings and Tsars, and gentlemen grotesquely clad in top hats and frock coats; there is a long appendix containing a list of Lord Fisher's "Great Naval Reforms." His style beggars description. He throws epithets such as "lovely" about like a high-spirited schoolgirl. He tells us, with the candour of a schoolboy, that Sir William Harcourt was "a genial ruffian" and Sir Michael Hicks-Beach "a perfect beast." The whole book is ablaze with these bright flowers. And let us not be misunderstood: we say nothing in disparagement of them. Would that more biographies were written so!

But Lord Fisher, we suspect, has suffered, and will suffer, from the defects—or should one say the excess?—of his qualities. It is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for an Englishman—and above all an official Englishman—to take a man seriously who writes and talks and thinks like this.Hinc illæ lacrimæ!as our author might say (for he loves his tags). And yet there is serious stuff in this book—discussions of the conduct of the war, of naval tactics and education, of submarines and oil-engines and guns, and "Admiralty limpets." He has quarrelled on all these matters—and on a thousand more, no doubt—with many of his colleagues. It is not for us to take sides in such Homeric contests. Even now he is trailing his coat again before the respectable public with a hectic chapter entitled "Democracy." "Democracy," he says, "means 'equal opportunity for all.'" A real Democracy in England would not have permitted secret treaties nor flouted the Russian Revolution, nor "kept true Labour leaders waiting on the doormat." "Hereditary titles," he cries, "are ludicrously out of date ... and the sooner we sweep away all the gimcracks and gewgaws of snobbery the better." And, in short, this old warrior of seventy-nine, a Peer of the Realm, dressed like a Christmas-tree in his decorations, the intimate of Kings and Emperors, declares himself a Republican, and wants to "sack the lot"! Words fail us; we can only lay the book down and pant for the next!

The deeplier we study eighteenth-century political history the more satisfied we become that there were but two figures in it with the gleam of statesmanship upon them, and but one with the light of genius. Sir Robert Walpole deserves his son's boast: He did "maintain this country in the enjoyment of the twenty happiest years that England ever enjoyed." Writing when he did, and so far as it goes, that is true. If his methods draw us to a cynical conclusion, the material to his hand—a German King, a discreditedopposition, and a horde of rapacious place-hunters to keep fed—must be remembered and allowed for. Pitt was a much more scrupulous man, and a much more gifted man, but he was less successful for those very reasons. He had the honest man's scorn of iniquity, and he had less hold of himself. Sir Robert could keep his temper; Pitt never could. He knew the Duke of Newcastle to be a liar and an old fool, and as good as told him so. "Fewer words, if you please, my lord, for your words have long lost all weight with me." There is not much accommodation about that. Sir Robert suffered fools gladly: he could work with them better. Pitt was fastidious, and would not soil his fingers with the only things they wanted of him. As for all the rest they were a venal crew, timid as rats and greedy as dogs. A month or two ago there came under review in these pages the life of one of them, George Bubb Dodington—remarkable only because, a thorough-paced rogue, he turned himself inside out for the admiration of posterity. Here, at much greater length, done with conspicuous judgment and ability, is the life, in two volumes, of another, Henry Fox, the founder of Holland House and its line of peers.

If a word were needed to explain the rise of the brothers Stephen and Henry Fox, the sons of a creature (whom Horace Walpole called "a footman") of Charles II.'s, it would be the word which explains the whole of eighteenth-century statecraft, the word Patronage. From the King, fountain of honours, this sacred river ran to the Peers, disposers of places, and from them broadened out into a pool where swam the borough-mongers and jobbers, owners of the House of Commons. As for the electorate, wherever there was one, "the business of the people is to choose Us," said young Charles Fox, while he was yet under the influence of his father; and although the capital letter is ours, and not upon record, we may be sure that it was not wanting in delivery. It is indeed but an echo of Henry Fox himself.

Our elections, thank God! do not depend upon the giddy mob. They are generally governed by men of fortune and understanding, and of such our ministers, for this twenty years past, have been so happy as to have a majority in their favour. Therefore, when we talk of people with regard to elections, we ought to think only of those of the better sort, without comprehending the mob or mere dregs of the people.

Such was the nursery-ground of the hero of Lord Ilchester's volumes, from which that hero's son was able to lift himself.

By sitting still and stolidly manipulating his boroughs Stephen Fox served himself better than his more able brother. He did not become so rich, though he never lacked. He had money, he married money, and became an earl. He suffered none of the mortifications and humiliations of the active politician, who made himself the most unpopular man in England, and, after serving his King at the expense of his country, was thrown out and thrown over. To be sure he was Paymaster for eight years, during which time a sum of £46,000,000 passed through his hands to his immeasurable profit; but to do justice to Fox, his riches weighed as nothing beside his sense of the ingratitude of the Rigbys and others of the sort whom he had loved and tried to serve. Though he did not begin so well off as his elder brother, he cannot be said to have been badly off. At twenty-one he dropped into a sinecure office of £450 a year and a capital sum which brought his whole income to something like £900. His first political acquaintance of note was Lord Hervey, and his next, from whom, to his credit, he never swerved, was Sir Robert Walpole. "Fox really loved that man," was said of him, and truly said; and when Sir Robert fell and he was handed over to Henry Pelham he was found faithful again. In all this he differed widely from Bubb Dodington, having a heart as well as a stomach, and if not principles, at least passions. Dodington was merely a merchant of himself, but Fox suffered his feelings to act and react, often to his temporal detriment. As Lord Ilchester shows, he was not wise in his attachments, nor alwaystemperate in his actions. He alienated Scottish sympathies by his vehemence after the Porteous riot; he made an enemy of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke by his opposition to the Clandestine Marriages Act—an opposition which may have been grounded upon the fact that his own marriage had been of that order; he became the friend and ally of the Duke of Cumberland, and obnoxious on that account to Leicester House and the heir-apparent. When George III. succeeded, and Lord Bute became the all-powerful minister, he attached himself there, just in time to lose the friendship of the Duke and to share in the hatred and distrust which the whole nation turned upon the administration. In these mischances his heart rather than his head played him false. Yet, for all his pains, neither of his masters liked him. George II. owned that Fox had never told him a lie, and added that he was the only man who had not. But he never trusted him in spite of that. George III., having after much hesitation given him a barony, steadily refused to advance him higher, though no man had worked harder in his service or, it must be added, more discreditably. It was Henry Fox who set to work, by methods which can only be called flagrant, to form a party in Parliament to be known as "the King's friends." That he did not succeed was not his fault.

Fox directly attacked two separate members of the House of Commons, and with so little decorum on the part of either buyer or seller that a shop was publicly opened at the Pay Office, whither members flocked, and received the wages of their venality in bank bills, even to so low a sum as two hundred pounds for their votes on the treaty. Twenty-five thousand pounds, as Martin, Secretary of the Treasury, afterwards owned, were issued in one morning; and in a single fortnight a vast majority was purchased to approve the peace.

It is perhaps going far to say that nothing more disgraceful was ever done in Parliament, but it is not too much to affirm that no greater act of treachery was ever attempted against the theory of popular representation by a member of the supposed popular House. But he had his barony, and received it three years later than Bubb Dodington obtained his.

It is not Lord Ilchester's fault that much of the intrigue he elucidates is rueful reading. The wonder is that he has found the spirit with which to achieve it. When one's native country, its neighbour states and colonial dependencies, when King, Lords, Commons, Army, Navy, and Church are all seen to have been counters in a great game of grab; when patriotism is as much an unknown quantity as even a rudimentary civic sense, and the only certainty is that of one's own and one's rivals' common dishonesty, it is no wonder that the accidents of his book count for more than the substance. What we get of Charles Fox makes amends for Henry. Everything that Lord Ilchester has to tell us of Charles is good. We have him first as a baby. "He is weakly, but likely to live. His skin hangs all shrivell'd about him, his eyes stare, he has a black head of hair, and 'tis incredible how like a monkey he look'd before he was dress'd." Then he is at a preparatory school, in 1757, where it seems that Charles has more emulation than any boy almost ever had; next at Eton, where he and his brother Stephen entertained their father at a dinner "bespoke from the Christopher: ... boil'd mutton and broth, three large fowls, and a leg of mutton roasted." It was at Eton in 1758, when he was nine years old, that he thus announced his philosophy of life. The father is writing to the mother:

That odd dog Charles said, with a smile, he wish'd his life was at an end. I asked the reason. "Why," says he, "it is a troublesome affair, and one wishes one had this thing or that thing, and then one is not the happier; and then one wishes for another thing, and one's very sorry if one can't get it, and it does not make one happier if one does."

We can follow him to Oxford, and wish we had room for his letter to his father explaining with elaborate pains how he came to knock the bottom out of £150, or foranother which announces the loss of eighty guineas at cards, and registers the first of a series of vows that it shall never happen again. All this will be found in Volume II., together with some account of the stormy opening of his parliamentary career—at nineteen; but there or thereabouts we regretfully leave him, the best thing by far that Henry Fox ever made.

If it were asked what this man had done in his days to deserve two biographies on the scale of Mr. Riker's and Lord Ilchester's, the answer would be long in coming. Henry Fox was a man of good but moderate abilities, a bad speaker, a fair debater, one of the few, at any rate, who ever stood up to William Pitt the first. He conducted his War Secretaryship with diligence, his Paymastership with what must be called legal honesty. He robbed his country, but no more than any other Paymaster had done. He enriched himself by trading with the huge balances left on his hands, sometimes lending of them to the country which found them at twenty per cent! Every Paymaster except Pitt, who would have none of it, had done as much, and most of them did worse. But one searches Lord Ilchester's pages in vain for anything definitelydoneby Fox, except, to be sure, the infamous attempt to betray the constitution by making the third estate of the realm a creature of the first. Even that he did not succeed in doing. It was Lord North who reaped for King George what Fox had sown. And that is about all that one can say, and very much what Lord Ilchester himself says of Henry Fox. What should be added to that is that the book is admirable both for lucidity of style and arrangement, for gallantry of attack, and gaiety in action.

Lady Georgiana was born in 1836 and is daughter of Lord John Russell. She should have memorable things to tell, and perhaps she has. But Providence, which has given her length of days and illustrious descent, has not conferred the garnering eye or the gift of tongues. It is a pity, for she has seen so much: Holland House and Pembroke Lodge, Bowood in the days of its greatness, Sir Robert Peel and Lord Palmerston, the Duke and Disraeli, Rogers, Tom Moore and his wife, Tennyson, Dickens, Thackeray, the whole Victorian galaxy. She has danced with the Prince Consort, and found him rather cross; she has heard Tom Moore sing, and seen him weep at his own music; she has helped entertain Garibaldi, and dined with Macaulay. She was not, however, impressed by that pundit, found his monologue a bore, and agreed with Sydney Smith when he said, "very gravely, towards the end of dinner, 'Macaulay, when I'm dead, you'll be sorry you never heard me talk.'" That is something; and here is another thing equally good. When Lord John was about to take John Bright down to stay at Woburn, "a candid friend" wrote to the Duke of Bedford, "Hope you'll count your spoons." Here, once more, is a glimpse into the manners of that stately place, about 1840:

Many were the happy Christmases we spent at Woburn. I remember, to our huge delight, we were allowed to help throw mutton chops out of the dining-room window for whoever cared to pick them up. I think that custom died out. When I was a child each guest was provided with a piece of paper in which to wrap up an eatable for people waiting outside.

Back to Index Next