IVTHE POEMS OF ALDOUS HUXLEY

"How often, when the thought of suicideWith ghostly weapon beckons us to die,The ghosts of many foods alluring glideOn golden dishes, wine in purple tideTo drown our whim. Things danced before the eyeLike tasselled grapes to Tantalus: the slyBlue of a curling trout, the battened prideOf ham in frills, complacent quails that lieResigned to death like heroes—July peas,Expectant bottles foaming at the brink—White bread, and honey of the golden bees—A peach with velvet coat, some prawns in pink,A slice of beef carved deftly, Stilton cheese,And cups where berries float and bubbles wink."

One at least of her faithful musketeers has served her to excellent purpose in this eminently philosophical poem. Uncle Max's eyes must twinkle with sheer merriment every time he reads this: it must be pleasant to have a niece so capable of profiting by his genius. Another friend of the family, Rupert Brooke, must have appreciated the panegyric on Worms. He may have directly inspired it:

"Mouth of the dust I kiss, corruption absolute,Worm, that shall come at last to be my paramour,Envenomed, unseen wanderer who alone is mute,Yet greater than gods or heroes that have gone before.For you I sheave the harvest of my hair,For you the whiteness of my flesh, my passion's valour,For you I throw upon the grey screen of the airMy prism-like conceptions, my gigantic colour.For you the delicate hands that fashion to make greatClay, and white paper, plant a tongue in silence,For you the battle-frenzy, and the might of hate,Science for giving wounds, and healing science.For you the heart's wild love, beauty, long care,Virginity, passionate womanhood, perfected wholeness,For you the unborn child that I prepare,You, flabby, boneless, brainless, senseless, soulless!"

"Mouth of the dust I kiss, corruption absolute,Worm, that shall come at last to be my paramour,Envenomed, unseen wanderer who alone is mute,Yet greater than gods or heroes that have gone before.

For you I sheave the harvest of my hair,For you the whiteness of my flesh, my passion's valour,For you I throw upon the grey screen of the airMy prism-like conceptions, my gigantic colour.

For you the delicate hands that fashion to make greatClay, and white paper, plant a tongue in silence,For you the battle-frenzy, and the might of hate,Science for giving wounds, and healing science.

For you the heart's wild love, beauty, long care,Virginity, passionate womanhood, perfected wholeness,For you the unborn child that I prepare,You, flabby, boneless, brainless, senseless, soulless!"

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

One string on which she continually harps is found most lucidly expressed in this stanza:

"Loneliness I love,And that is why they have called me forth into the streets.Loneliness I love,But the crowd has clutched at me with fawning hands ...My spirit speaksIn the scented quietness of a divine melancholyMurmuring the tunesFor which my dreams are the delicate instruments.The shadowy silencesHave made me beautiful and dressed me in velvet dignities,And that is whyThe noise of the tambourines has maddened my soul into dancing,And I am cladIn the lust-lipped whispering of future caresses,Holiness I love,And touching the virginal pierced feet of martyrs,The crucified feetNestled among lilies and hallowing candles.Holiness I loveAnd the melodious absolution falling on my sins.But that is whyBlasphemous priests have forced my hands to tearThe vesture of secrecyWhich hides the human nakedness of God."

That is a very definitely true cry from the depths and it is oft-repeated.

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

"Subconscious visions hold us and we fashionDelirious verses, tortured statues, spasms of paint,Make cryptic perorations of complaint,Inverted religion, and perverted passion."

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

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

"Moonlight flows over me,Spreads her bright, watery hair over my face,Full of illicit, marvellous perfumesWreathed with syringa, and plaited with hyacinths;Hair of the moonlight falling about me,Straight and cool as the drooping tresses of rain."

But in the end she comes back, gloriously sure of herself, in a poem which is worthy to stand by the one I first quoted:

"I know what happiness is—It is the negation of thought,The shutting offOf all those brooding phantoms that surroundAs dank trees in a forestCutting the daylight into rags,Caging the sunIn rusted prison bars.Happiness loves to lie at a river's edgeAnd make no song,But listen to the water's murmuring wisdom,The kissing touch of leaves wind-bowed together,The feathery swish of cloud wings on a hill:Opening wide the violet-petalled doorsOf every shy and cloistered sense,That all the scent and music of the worldMay rush into the soul.And happiness expandsThe rainbow arch for a procession of dreams,For moth-like fancies winged with evening,For dove-breasted silences,For shadowy reveriesAnd starry pilgrims ...I know what happiness is—It is the giving back to EarthOf all our furtive thefts,The lurid jewels that we stole awayFrom passion, sin and pain,Because they glittered strangely, luring usWith their forbidden beauty.Because our childish fingers curiouslyCrave the pale secrets of the moonAnd grope for dangerous toys.Happiness comes in giving back to EarthThe things we took from her with violent hands,Remembering onlyThat her dust is our garment,Her fruits our endeavour,Her waters our priestess,Her leaves our interpreters to God,Her hills our infinite patience."

That is a brave cry: "I know what happiness is." Happy indeed is the man or woman who has found this elixir of life—thrice happy is the poet who not only has found it, but is able to give exact and musical expression to the discovery. Iris Tree has matured: we watch her in the process of discarding her childish things.... When next we read her we shall find a full-fledged poet. There is earnest already of great things to come. That is why we should read her now. To watch a poet try her wings, soar and fall, only to soar again, is to be counted one of life's finer joys.

We read Aldous Huxley because we see in his work another real poet in embryo, but a poet working in as different a medium from that in which Iris Tree works as it is possible to imagine. He has been called the "neurasthenic Rabelais of 1920," and in so far as this connotes a perversity of intellect it is an accurate label. For there is no getting away from the cleverness of Mr Huxley: he is almost too intellectual. His brain, which helps him so admirably in his short stories, acts as an obstruction in his pursuit of beauty.

"The problem which the most authentic modern poetry is endeavouring to solve is to give beauty a fuller content by exploring unfamiliar paths of sensation and perception," but Mr Huxley most nearly approximates to beauty when he is most familiar. It is perhaps permissible to doubt whether these new, unfamiliar paths can lead anywhere but to cul-de-sac or cesspool.

At any rate, in Mr Huxley's opinion, "Your centaurs are your only poets." He finds beauty "no far-fetched, dear-bought gem; no pomander to be smelt only when the crowd becomes too stinkingly insistent: it is not a birth of rare oboes or violins, not visible only from ten to six by state permission at a nominal charge, not a thing richly apart, but an ethic, a way of belief and of practice, of faith and works, medieval in its implication with the very threads of life." He desires "no Paphian cloister of pink monks. Rather a rosy Brotherhood of Common Life, eating, drinking; marrying and giving in marriage; taking and taken in adultery; reading, thinking, and when thinking fails, feeling immeasurably more subtly, sometimes perhaps creating."

So much for his theory: in practice he has given us many tentative exercises which reek of the intellectual, are rich in humour, deadly in their irony, and one long poem,Leda, which has much beauty (though it has beencalled the beauty of self-indulgence rather than that pure beauty of self-discipline), and passages of surprising ugliness. Whenever a poet seeks to retell a well-known story, like Keats inEndymionandHyperion, we invariably find ourselves comparing the effect with that which a parson gives when he translates a Biblical fable into the modern jargon which passes for English prose in the pulpit.

In the latter case we shiver with disgust; in the former it is the test of the poet's genius that we are uplifted and find the original vastly improved by the fresh treatment.

Mr Brett-Young does nothing to improve our impression of Thamar, Mr Huxley infuses into the old story ofLedaa thousand new concepts. Let your mind dwell on this picture:

"The tunic falls about her feet, and sheSteps from the crocus folds of drapery,Dazzlingly naked, into the warm sun.God-like she stood; then broke into a run,Leaping and laughing in the light, as thoughLife through her veins coursed with so swift a flowOf generous blood and fire that to remainToo long in statued queenliness were painTo that quick soul, avid of speed and joy.She ran, easily bounding, like a boy, ...Narrow of haunch and slim and firm of breast.Lovelier she seemed in motion than at rest,If that might be, when she was never less,Moving or still, than perfect loveliness."

Small wonder that Jove, scourged by his libido with itching memories of bliss, should turn his sickened sight from the monstrous shapes that met his eyes in Africa (this is the passage of surpassing ugliness) where

"Among unthinkable flowers, they pause and grinOut through a trellis of suppurating lips,Of mottled tentacles barbed at the tipsAnd bloated hands and wattles and red lobesOf pendulous gristle and enormous probesOf pink and slashed and tasselled flesh"

to young Leda where she stood, poised on the river-side. Straightway his heart held but one thought: he must possess that perfect form or die. Have her he must:

"Gods, men, earth, heaven, the wholeVast universe was blotted from his thoughtAnd nought remained but Leda's laughter, noughtBut Leda's eyes. Magnified by his lust,She was the whole world now; have her he must, he must...."

He goes to Aphrodite to plan the rape

" ... While she,Who was to be their victim, joyouslyLaughed like a child in the sudden breathless chillAnd splashed and swam, forgetting every illAnd every fear and all, save only this:That she was young, and it was perfect blissTo be alive where suns so goldenly shine,And bees go drunk with fragrant honey-wine,And the cicadas sing from morn till night,And rivers run so cool and pure and bright ...Stretched all her length, arms under head, she layIn the deep grass, while the sun kissed awayThe drops that sleeked her skin. Slender and fineAs those old images of the gods that shineWith smooth-worn silver, polished through the yearsBy the touching lips of countless worshippers,Her body was; and the sun's golden heatClothed her in softest flame from head to feetAnd was her mantle, that she scarcely knewThe conscious sense of nakedness. The blue,Far hills and the faint fingers of the skyShimmered and pulsed in the heat uneasily,And hidden in the grass, cicadas shrillDizzied the air with ceaseless noise, untilA listener might wonder if they criedIn his own head or in the world outside."

Lazily she looks up into the sky and sees there the conflict between the eagle and her lovely, hapless swan. Pity (the mother of voluptuousness) is roused in Leda's heart and she opens her arms to receive the transformed god.

"Crouched on the flowery groundYoung Leda lay, and to her side did pressThe swan's proud-arching opulent loveliness ...Closer he nestled, mingling with the slimAusterity of virginal flank and limbHis curved and florid beauty, till she feltThat downy warmth strike through her flesh and meltThe bones and marrow of her strength away....And over her the swan shook slowly freeThe folded glory of his wings, and madeA white-walled tent of soft and luminous shadeTo be her veil and keep her from the shameOf naked light and the sun's noonday flame.Hushed lay the earth and the wide, careless sky.Then one sharp sound, that might have been a cryOf utmost pleasure or of utmost pain,Broke sobbing forth, and all was still again."

Hushed lay the earth and the wide, careless sky.Then one sharp sound, that might have been a cryOf utmost pleasure or of utmost pain,Broke sobbing forth, and all was still again."

There is a sensuous beauty in this poem which makes it altogether lovely. Certainly in thinking of the fable of Leda in the future our minds will first fly back to Mr Huxley's poem and that is probably the highest tribute we can pay it. But the rest of his poems aim at something very different from the simple, sensuous and passionate and are on a different plane.

He deals cynically with the transitory nature of human passions, he laughs at Jonah as he sits praying and singing on "the convex mound of one vast kidney" of the whale that swallowed him; in his philosophers' songs he likes to sing of man as "a poor degenerate from the ape" and of God as a fool.

"If, O my Lesbia, I should commit,Not fornication, dear, but suicide,My Thames-blown body (Pliny vouches it)Would drift face upwards on the oily tideWith the other garbage, till it putrefied.But you, if all your lovers' frozen heartsConspired to send you, desperate, to drown—Your maiden modesty would float face down,And men would weep upon your hinder parts.'Tis the Lord's doing. Marvellous is the planBy which this best of worlds is wisely planned.One law he made for woman, one for man:We bow the head and do not understand."

"If, O my Lesbia, I should commit,Not fornication, dear, but suicide,My Thames-blown body (Pliny vouches it)Would drift face upwards on the oily tideWith the other garbage, till it putrefied.

But you, if all your lovers' frozen heartsConspired to send you, desperate, to drown—Your maiden modesty would float face down,And men would weep upon your hinder parts.'Tis the Lord's doing. Marvellous is the planBy which this best of worlds is wisely planned.One law he made for woman, one for man:We bow the head and do not understand."

This is certainly not poetry, but it is funny. The man with the wry face gets his laugh, even if we feel that to be facetious it is not necessary to be blasphemous.

He is happier in his rôle of Ninth Philosopher: he here attains a true expression of what is happening in the world of modern art.

"Beauty for some provides escape,Who gain a happiness in eyeingThe gorgeous buttocks of the apeOr Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying."

ButFrascati'sshows him at his normal level of intellectual irony:

"Bubble-breasted swells the domeOf this my spiritual home,From whose nave the chandelier,Schaffhausen frozen, tumbles sheer.We in the round balcony sit,Lean o'er and look into the pitWhere feed the human bears beneath,Champing with their gilded teeth.What negroid holiday makes freeWith such priapic revelry?What songs? What gongs? What nameless rites?What gods like wooden stalagmites?What stream of blood or kidney pie?What blasts of Bantu melody?Rag-time.... But when the wearied BandSwoons to a waltz, I take her hand.And there we sit in blissful calm,Quietly sweating palm to palm."

This is the vein which he expands in what Middleton Murry regards as his best poem,Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt, an attempt to "fish up a single day" from a deadfriend's forgotten existence. John Ridley, as he calls him, wakes from a dream among his familiar books and pictures—

"Real as his dream? He wondered. Ten to nine.Thursday. Wasn't he lunching at his aunt's?Distressing circumstance.But then he was taking Jenny out to dine,Which was some consolation. What a chin!Civilised ten thousand years, and stillNo better way than rasping a pale maskWith imminent suicide, steel or obsidian:Repulsive task!And the more odious for being quotidian.If one should live till eighty-five ...And the dead, do they still shave? The horrible dead, are they alive?...Nine o'clock. Still in bed. Warm, but how lonely!He wept to think of all those single beds,Those desperate night-long solitudes,Those mental salons full of nudes.Shelley was great when he was twenty-four.Eight thousand nights alone—minus, perhaps,Six, or no! seven, certainly not more.Five little bits of heaven(Tum-do-rum, de-rum, de-rum),Five little bits of heaven and one that was a lapse,High-priced disgust: it stopped him suddenlyIn the midst of laughter and talk with a tingling down the spine(Like infants' impoliteness, a terrible infants' brightness),And he would shut his eyes so as not to seeHis own hot blushes calling him a swine."

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

"Pitiable to beQuite so deplorably naked when one strips.There was his scar, a panel of old roseSlashed in the elegant buff of his trunk hose;Adonis punctured by his amorous boar,Permanent souvenir of the Great War.One of God's jokes, typically good,That wound of his. How perfect that he shouldHave suffered it for—what?"

He dresses, goes down to breakfast, letters andThe Times: he reads some of his old work ...

"Yes, he had genius, if he chose to use it;If he chose to—but it was too much trouble,And he preferred reading. He lit his pipe,Opened his book, plunged in and soon was drownedIn pleasant seas ... to rise again and findOne o'clock struck and his unshaven faceStill like a record in a musical-box,And Auntie Loo miles off in Bloomsbury."

Mr Huxley wastes much satire on avuncular energies in war-time and makes his hero escape from his verbose relatives to walk the streets. Tired of this, he enters the inevitable café of the intellectual young novelist and moralises on the nightmare oppressiveness of profane love. He then sits out in the gardens of Leicester Square and finds comfort in regarding each hair and every pore on his hand. This palls soon enough, as one might expect, and then—

"Action, action! Quickly rise and doThe most irreparable things; beget,In one brief consummation of the will,Remorse, reaction, wretchedness, regret.Action! This was no time for sitting still.He crushed his hat down over his eyesAnd walked with a stamp to symboliseAction, action—left, right, left;Planting his feet with flabby beat,Taking strange Procrustean steps,Lengthened, shortened to avoidTouching the lines between the stones—A thing which makes God so annoyed."

Action translates itself into spending three pounds on a book which he didn't want and pulling the bell of a chance house. He turns into a cinema house, goes to sleep, wakes at eight o'clock and so keeps "dear Jenny" waiting.

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

"Food and drink, food and drink:Olives as firm and sleek and greenAs the breasts of a sea-god's daughter,Swimming far down where the corpses sinkThrough the dense shadowy water.Silver and black on flank and back,The glossy sardine mourns its head.The red anchovy and the beetroot red,With carrots, build a gorgeous stair—Bronze, apoplexy and Venetian hair—And the green pallor of the salad roundSharpens their clarion sound....Golden wine, pale as a Tuscan primitive,And wine's strange taste, half loathsome, half delicious:Come, my Lesbia, let us love and live....'Jenny, adorable—' (what draws the lineAt the mere word 'love'?) 'has anyone the rightTo look so lovely as you look to-night,To have such eyes, such a helmet of bright hair?'But candidly, he wondered, do I care?"

The night goes on, comes the time to part—

"'Good-night,' the last kiss, 'and God bless you, my dear.'So, she was gone, she who had been so near,So breathing-warm—soft mouth and hands and hair—A moment since. Had she been really there,Close at his side and had he kissed her? It seemedUnlikely as something somebody else had dreamedAnd talked about at breakfast, being a bore."

The first thing we feel tempted to say about this poem is that we should vastly prefer to be possessed of an Olympian libido for Leda than to be burdened with JohnRidley's "feebly sceptical, inefficient, profoundly unhappy" emotion for Jenny. Jove was, at any rate, healthy in his lusts: there is something terribly anæmic about our modern love-making, with our one eye on the intellect lest we should do anything without a reason. I am fully aware that this is not criticism: it is merely making a note of the feeling that is uppermost in our minds on finishing the poem. But that is one of the reasons why we should read Aldous Huxley: he is not lacking in daring: what he sees and feels he shows: he is very boyish in his desire to shock: in these days one would have thought that there was no one left to shock except the undergraduate, and those who preserve the callowness of the undergraduate through life. He exaggerates the importance of material joys and miseries: he is easily disgusted: his fastidious intellect rebels at many things that most of us accept complacently ... but it is to his credit that he makes us feel that we ought to be more fastidious, that we ought to think more, that we ought to accept less. At present he is engaged in the process of destruction, a joyous, youthful pastime: when he grows up he will give us something constructive. At present we rejoice in his vitality, energy and alertness. The rest will come. Above all, he is generously endowed with the comic spirit: that alone would make him readable in such an age of dullness.

There are not many reasons why we should read Robert Graves, but one reason is of such outstanding importance that it overshadows the want of many. While Siegfried Sassoon and Osbert Sitwell have vented their vitriol on the old, Mr Graves inCountry Sentimenthas run away into the land of nursery rhymes as an escape from the haunting horrors of our post-war era. There are strong men of little imagination who have wiped off the memory of the war from their minds like chalk-marks off a slate: there are others who will be haunted by it for the rest of their lives. Robert Graves is one of the latter:

"Gulp down your wine, old friends of mine,Roar through the darkness, stamp and singAnd lay ghost hands on everything,But leave the noonday's warm sunshineTo living lads for mirth and wine.I met you suddenly down the street,Strangers assume your phantom faces,You grin at me from daylight places,Dead, long dead, I'm ashamed to greetDead men down the morning street."

"Gulp down your wine, old friends of mine,Roar through the darkness, stamp and singAnd lay ghost hands on everything,But leave the noonday's warm sunshineTo living lads for mirth and wine.

I met you suddenly down the street,Strangers assume your phantom faces,You grin at me from daylight places,Dead, long dead, I'm ashamed to greetDead men down the morning street."

That is why he prays that

"[But may] the gift of heavenly peaceAnd glory for all timeKeep the boy Tom who tending geeseFirst made the nursery rhyme."

Only in the contemplation of childish toys can he regain repose. But nursery rhymes and childish toys are as flimsy as gossamer, the latter too easily get broken, the former are too often patently absurd.

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

"Small gnats that flyIn hot JulyAnd lodge in sleeping ears,Can rouse thereinA trumpet's dinWith Day-of-Judgment fears.Small mice at nightCan wake more frightThan lions at midday.An urchin smallTorments us allWho tread his prickly way.A straw will crackThe camel's back,To die we need but sip,So little sandAs fills the handCan stop a steaming ship.One smile relievesA heart that grievesThough deadly sad it be,And one hard lookCan close the bookThat lovers love to see."

"Small gnats that flyIn hot JulyAnd lodge in sleeping ears,Can rouse thereinA trumpet's dinWith Day-of-Judgment fears.

Small mice at nightCan wake more frightThan lions at midday.An urchin smallTorments us allWho tread his prickly way.

A straw will crackThe camel's back,To die we need but sip,So little sandAs fills the handCan stop a steaming ship.

One smile relievesA heart that grievesThough deadly sad it be,And one hard lookCan close the bookThat lovers love to see."

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

"Sing and laugh and easily runThrough the wide waters of my plain,Bathe in my waters, drink my sun,And draw my creatures with soft song;They shall follow you alongGraciously with no doubt or pain."

So he extols the simple rhymes that we learnt in childhood's days and seeks to add to them.

"So these same rhymes shall still be toldTo children yet unborn,While false philosophy growing oldFades and is killed by scorn."

Unfortunately it is not given to any modern to imitate with any degree of success either the ballads our ancestors loved or the nursery rhymes which all children have learnt: this age is too sophisticated and this avenue of escape is denied to Mr Graves: one of the lessons that we find most painful in the learning is that we are the product of our own age and cannot get away from it. Mr Graves anticipates his reviewers in hisL'Envoiwhen he says:

"Everything they took from my new poem bookBut the fly-leaf and the covers."

But there are one or two other things I should leave inside the singularly attractive covers, and one of them is this:

"Restless and hot two children layPlagued with uneasy dreams,Each wandered lonely through false dayA twilight torn with screams.True to the bed-time story, BenPursued his wounded bear,Ann dreamed of chattering monkey men,Of snakes twined in her hair ...Now high aloft above the townThe thick clouds gather and break,A flash, a roar, and rain drives down:Aghast the young things wake.Trembling for what their terror was,Surprised by instant doom,With lightning in the looking-glass,Thunder that rocks the room.The monkey's paws patter again,Snakes hiss and flash their eyes:The bear roars out in hideous pain:Ann prays and her brother cries.They cannot guess, could not be toldHow soon comes careless day,With birds and dandelion gold,Wet grass, cool scents of May."

"Restless and hot two children layPlagued with uneasy dreams,Each wandered lonely through false dayA twilight torn with screams.

True to the bed-time story, BenPursued his wounded bear,Ann dreamed of chattering monkey men,Of snakes twined in her hair ...

Now high aloft above the townThe thick clouds gather and break,A flash, a roar, and rain drives down:Aghast the young things wake.

Trembling for what their terror was,Surprised by instant doom,With lightning in the looking-glass,Thunder that rocks the room.

The monkey's paws patter again,Snakes hiss and flash their eyes:The bear roars out in hideous pain:Ann prays and her brother cries.

They cannot guess, could not be toldHow soon comes careless day,With birds and dandelion gold,Wet grass, cool scents of May."

This is no nursery rhyme, but it is a very important parable. Mr Robert Graves is by nature a poet, but his vision has become blurred, his senses distorted, his nerves jangled by the war. Can no one tell him of the approach of careless day, of birds and dandelion gold, wet grass, cool scents of May? Surely the nightmare of his soul is nearly over, and he can creep out from under the soft quilt of nursery rhymes to the clear light of day and sing us the golden songs that we know are in him, as yet unexpressed.

A common criticism levelled against novelists is that when they depict failures we find it unnecessary to turn to the last page to prove these failures successes. No novelist except Gissing has dared to write the story of a failure who remained a failure till the end. Mr J. D. Beresford's art is frankly autobiographical, and the very fact of his having a novel published proves that he at any rate has ceased to be a failure, and yet the fact is that Jacob Stahl at each stage of his life looks upon himself as a failure; the truth of the matter is that Mr Beresford, like his hero, fully realises that "virtue lies only in the continual renewal of effort; the boast of success is an admission of failure." Jacob never boasts of success.

InW. E. FordMr Beresford talks of his architectural experiences, his unfortunate first marriage, his temporary inhibitions and his ultimate literary success; his hero in the trilogy is just such a man as Mr Beresford declares himself to be. Jacob Stahl was lame, Mr Beresford suffers from a like physical disability. At every point in these three books we feel convinced that he is setting down the facts of his own struggle, and if it needed proof that genius does not necessarily manifest itself through the imagination, but through a careful selection of actual autobiographical experiences, we should get that proof in these remarkable novels. He even goes so far as to interpolate into the body of his novels the actual eulogistic criticism that his own early works received from the reviewers. We know that he was actually employed by W. H. Smith & Son to do much the same work as Jacob Stahl is called upon to do for Price & Mallinson.

A conversation with Meredith that Jacob has on the subject of literary art is equally illuminating as descriptive of Beresford's own theories. "Why shouldn't a novelist describe life as he sees it?... I simply don't understand all that stuff about art," replied Jacob. "Method,technique, yes. You have got to find words to express what you've seen." He agreed that the essential thing was the accurate representation of the commonplace, and realised when it was put to him that he had put a piece of life under the microscope and not related it to the whole; we feel, furthermore, that Mr Beresford was thinking solely of himself when he impressed upon us the importance of realising that at the end of his struggle Jacob Stahl "could never rest content with any such attainment as was provided by the comfort of his wife's love ... in the care of his three children, or, least of all, by such satisfactions as come to him from his modest achievements in the world of letters; he is ever at the beginning of life reaching out towards those eternal values that are ever beyond his grasp ... and that earnest search of his for some aspect of permanent truth keeps his spirit young." Mr Beresford is pre-eminently among the novelists of to-day a candidate for truth. Surely no one has been so completely honest over his relations with the other sex; it is true that inGod's CounterpointPhilip is so puritanically distorted in his attitude towards sex as to become as vile and disgusting as the most degenerate physical profligate, and we feel that a more normal man than Mr Beresford's hero (the shadow of himself) in the trilogy would not have taken Madeline so seriously or have believed in, much less have married, such a woman as Lola so casually, or have caused such a perfect type of womanhood as Betty so many heart-burnings. Anyone but Jacob would have seen through Mrs Latimer in half-an-hour. It would have served Jacob right if she had made him marry her. At the same time a more normal man than Mr Beresford would have been quite unable to make such people not only live but actually interesting, not so much for what they do as for what they are as betrayed in their conversations; an underbred clerk, a temporarily reclaimed drunkard of a curate, a courtesan countess, a saviour of souls, a self-sacrificing aunt, a pedantic successful brother, a woman of the streets, whist-playing inhabitants of a boarding-house, literary giants, omniscient commercial travellers, pretty typists, truculent compositors, Cornish villagers, flit in and out of the pages of the trilogy, who, once met, can never be forgotten. They are all flesh andblood. These two perfect cameos of psychological analysis may be taken as typical:

"When Laurence's brain grew dull and futile after a period of clean living and close application, he could find no stimulus for it save by a concession to the brute in him. When the brute was tired by excess, it found rest and the means of recovery during the activity and temporary dominance of the spirit.... If he had lived for the spirit he would have died in a madhouse, as it was the brute gradually absorbed him."

Again, of Cecil Barker: "Truly, the man was honest when he was not fishing (for the souls of men). He could beget love for himself in the mind of man or woman; and he could reject it without compunction when offered—a far harder thing.... He was only selfish in the rigour of his self-denial ... he was a superman who worked for no rewards here, and none ever heard him speak of any hope of reward hereafter.... Even those who—like Jacob Stahl—suffered bitterly at his hands, still remembered him in after years with admiration and love."

The fact is that in common with all true artists Mr Beresford (like his hero) was extraordinarily impressionable, and therefore saw further into the hearts of men than most of us, even if, as he says of himself, he resembled rubber rather than wax in that he was only impressed momentarily. But his resilience is opposed to the woodenness of ordinary writers in exactly the same proportion as his protagonists have as much likeness to life as theirs have none.

One of the most pleasing traits in Mr Beresford's work comes from what he calls his "scattered education"; there is always in his work a pleasing absence of mere cleverness which endears him to all those who regard life as less of an intellectual problem than something which every man has to live for himself; we are shown in one page of absorbing interest how books affected the life of Jacob Stahl; from standard novels of whichRobert Elsmeremay be taken as a typical example he rises to theOrigin of Species, works on biology, physics and philosophy; only after his life with the swearing mission parson, Cecil Barker (an exquisitely drawn character), does he realise the shortcomings of orthodox Christianity and the fact that experience is the only school that matters; hefeels quite honestly ignorant in the presence of his brother as he does in the presence of all so-called "well-read" men. He owed more to his financial and marital disasters than to anything else in his life except the influence of Betty; by inclination he was tempted to deny God through his foolish tendency to immolate himself. Only when he got clear of cant, from a morality that depended on repression to one that depended upon the liberation of impulse, did he achieve freedom and success. Mr Beresford, it will be seen at once, by presenting us with a slice of life (unconsciously perhaps) teaches us how to live. Like Wells, he becomes more and more interested as life goes on in linking up science, religion and art; the unity of life, the beauty of truth, the truth of beauty, these are the things at which he aims; the methods by which he would attain them are best presented to us in his educational experiment,W. E. Ford. There in the shortest possible compass we get the trend of his teaching, for like all great artists he is first and foremost a teacher; and if his own observations have taught him nothing else, they have at any rate taught him "that a positive immorality (as we now regard it) is a far more admirable thing than a negative virtue." It would be hard to ask a man to give a more convincing proof than the results of his own observations, especially when he can express them, as Mr Beresford does, with subtle irony, genial humour and an uncanny knowledge of the motives which govern human action.

There is one thing that Virginia Woolf demands of all her readers before she can be appreciated at her true worth, and that is leisure. Try to readNight and Dayat the rate you read W. J. Locke and you will hear a faint buzz of conversation amid an interminable rattle of tea-cups ... and nothing more. For it is certainly true that people in this novel rarely stop talking, and it is equally true that when they do stop it is usually to have another cup of tea with a thin slice of lemon in it. It treats on the one side of a type that one finds "at the tops of professions, with letters after their names"; sitting "in luxurious public offices, with private secretaries attached to them"; writing "solid books in dark covers, issued by the presses of the two great universities"; and "when one of them dies the chances are that another of them writes his biography."

The heroine's mother spent her life in making phrases and adding to the monumental biography of her poet father, while Katherine, the daughter, rose early in the morning or sat up late at night to work at mathematics, a subject that appealed to her solely because it was opposed to literature.

As a foil to Katherine is Mary Datchet, the twenty-five-year-old parson's daughter living alone in London, enjoying Emerson and the darning of stockings, while earning her own living in a suffrage office in Russell Square. The two main male characters are also sharply differentiated.

There is William Rodney, who reads papers on the Elizabethan use of metaphors, irresistibly ludicrous in appearance, with his nervous, impulsive manners and immaculate clothes. "By profession a clerk in a Government office, he was one of those martyred spirits to whom literature is at once a source of divine joy and of almost intolerable irritation. Not content to rest in their love of it, they must attempt to practise it themselves, and theyare generally endowed with very little facility in composition." This man is engaged to Katherine though ten years her senior and "with more of the old maid in him than poet."

Ralph Denham, the other man of importance, is a rough-tongued, poor solicitor with an uncanny power of making people do what he wanted (especially the two girls in the novel), who lived in a very different style from that to which Katherine was accustomed. Here is a delightful description of the Hilberyménage:

"They were all dressed for dinner, and, indeed, the prettiness of the dinner-table merited that compliment. There was no cloth upon the table, and the china made regular circles of deep blue upon the shining brown wood. In the middle there was a bowl of tawny red and yellow chrysanthemums, and one of pure white, so fresh that the narrow petals were curved backwards into a firm white ball. From the surrounding walls the heads of three famous Victorian writers surveyed this entertainment, and slips of paper pasted beneath them testified in the great man's own handwriting that he was always yours sincerely or affectionately or for ever"—from which it appears that Virginia Woolf is one of those writers who, interested in every thing, observe and note every detail in their work. "Daily life in a house where there are young and old is full of curious little ceremonies and pieties, which are discharged quite punctually, though the meaning of them is obscure, and a mystery has come to brood over them which lends even a superstitious charm to their performance." Every evening, for instance, we hear of Katherine reading aloud while her mother knitted scarves intermittently on a little circular frame, and her father read the newspaper, "not so attentively but that he could comment humorously now and again upon the fortunes of the hero and the heroine."

Her father spent his days editing his review or "placing together documents by means of which it would be proved that Shelley had written 'of' instead of 'and,' or that the inn in which Byron had slept was called the 'Nag's Head' and not the 'Turkish Knight,' or that the Christian name of Keats's uncle had been John rather than Richard."

He represents the opposite pole from Ralph Denham, the seemingly hard and self-sufficient young man with the queer temper, consumed with a desire to get on, unpopular both in the office and at home.

One of the charms of the book lies in the setting. We are swept from Lincoln's Inn Fields and Kensington to country rectories and manor houses in Lincolnshire where everything is reminiscent of the Middle Ages. It is in this country that the main characters find themselves. Ralph finds himself in love with Katherine; Katherine finds herself out of love with Rodney, to whom she is engaged, and in love with Ralph; Mary finds herself in love with Ralph; Rodney finds that nobody loves him: there are incomprehensible confusions in the minds of all the characters about love: but most of them are honest enough not only to realise their confusions, but to confess them. They begin to doubt their loves when they are in each other's presences, and be certain of them when they are again alone.

It is this finding of themselves that makes them interesting, for they are not, on the whole, lovable characters. One feels sorry for them, yes, and it is probable that Virginia Woolf herself loves them, but we feel that they are all shut away in a world which is far from ours. Over and over again we find ourselves enveloped in a Jane Austenish atmosphere, partly induced, no doubt, by the extreme deliberation of the writer. Virginia Woolf is in no hurry to arrive at any conclusion. Perhaps it is a virtue in her that we feel that reason will always triumph over the heart in these people. Perhaps it should, but it surely depends on the height of the passion to which the heart is capable of rising. In none of these characters is there any very explosive property.

Katherine's attempt to reconcile the world of reality with the dream world is not fairly portrayed, for the simple reason that her dream world is always such a thin one. Ralph Denham embodies for her the lover on the great horse riding by the seashore and the leaf-hung forests, but beyond the fact that he paces up and down the streets outside her windows for two nights he gives no indications of the great lover. The truth is that we are never allowed to see at all clearly into Katherine's or Ralph's dreamworld. Virginia Woolf may have found herself incapable of taking us into its recesses: in the world of reality she is wonderful. It gives the whole of the book away when we find that we are more interested in the purely ineffective characters, like Mrs Hilbery, than in Katherine, who ought to have been a tragic character. "It's life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process," quotes Katherine to herself, "not the discovery itself at all." When one of Hugh Walpole's heroines begins to say things like that to herself we know that she is going to suffer incredible anguish in the process, but Katherine suffers nothing worse than having to listen to the gossip of an aunt who tells her that herfiancé(with whom she is not in love) has been flirting with another girl. Katherine ought to have been a discarded mistress at least. We feel cheated.

But we don't feel cheated when we listen to the author describing trivial people or a beautiful scene. Just as she is able to see and describe whatever emotions and ideas flit through the souls of her characters, so she can see and describe with equal skill and beauty and exactness the country fields of Lincolnshire, Kew Gardens, London by night, the river and interiors of houses.

We do feel cheated when Katherine has visions such as the following ... and nothing comes of them:—

"She was walking down a road in Northumberland in the August sunset; at the inn she left her companion, who was Ralph Denham, and was transported, not so much by her own feet as by some invisible means, to the top of a high hill. Here the scents, the sounds among the dry heather-roots, the grass-blades pressed upon the palm of her hand, were all so perceptible that she could experience each one separately. After this her mind made excursions into the dark of the air, or settled upon the surface of the sea, which could be discovered over there, or with equal unreason it returned to its couch of bracken beneath the stars of midnight, and visited the snow valleys of the moon. These fancies would have been in no way strange, since the walls of every mind are decorated with some such tracery, but she found herself suddenly pursuing such thoughts with an extreme ardour, which became a desire to changeher actual condition for something matching the conditions of her dream."

Unfortunately there is nothing in Ralph Denham to make him the object of such an ardour, unless his brusque way of trying to bully people of less mental calibre than himself makes him a heroic figure.

"I suppose I'm in love," he says to Mary, who is herself madly in love with him and he knows it. "Anyway, I'm out of my mind. I can't think, I can't work, I don't care a hang for anything in the world. Good heavens, Mary! I'm in torment! One moment I'm happy; next I'm miserable. I hate her for half-an-hour; then I'd give my whole life to be with her for ten minutes; all the time I don't know what I feel, or why I feel it; it's insanity, and yet it's perfectly reasonable."

Whatever he felt he had no right to talk to her of all women like that. This is no rider from the sea on a great horse, but as ineffectual and contemptible a creature as the pedant, Rodney. He actually sets before him on his table a note from Katherine, a flower he had picked for her, a photograph of a statue of a Greek goddess which (if the lower part were concealed!) had often given him the ecstasy of being in her presence and then sets himself to visualise her.

No, Ralph Denham is not calculated to inspire our affection, respect or love. It is more pleasant to dwell on the reality of his home than of himself. Katherine visits his mother and finds her sitting at a large dining-room table "untidily strewn with food and unflinchingly lit up by incandescent gas," bending over an unsatisfactory spirit-lamp.

"The unsparing light revealed more ugliness than Katherine had seen in one room for a very long time. It was the ugliness of enormous folds of brown material, looped and festooned, of plush curtains, from which depended balls and fringes, partially concealing bookshelves swollen with black school texts. Her eye was arrested by cross scabbards of fretted wood upon the dull green wall, and wherever there was a high flat eminence, some fern waved from a pot of crinkled china, or a bronze horse reared so high that the stump of a tree had to sustain his forequarters."

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

It is in this sense of atmosphere that Virginia Woolf most clearly shows her great gifts. The broad green spaces, the vista of trees, the ruffled gold of the Thames in the distance at Kew, the Strand which makes Katherine think in terms of mathematics, and the Embankment which sent her back to her dream forest, the ocean beach, the leafy solitudes, the magnanimous hero, are delicately but surely made to serve their turn in the unravelling of the story. "Strange thoughts are bred in passing through crowded streets should the passenger, by chance, have no exact destination in front of him, much as the mind shapes all kinds of forms, solutions, images when listening inattentively to music."

So walking down the Charing Cross Road Katherine wonders if she would mind being run over by a motor-bus or having "an adventure with that disagreeable-looking man hanging about the entrance of the Tube station," and her mind answers, No. She could not conceive fear or excitement.

So Ralph Denham's mind is filled with a sense of the actual presence of Katherine when in Lincolnshire he sees "laid out on the perfectly flat and richly green meadow at the bottom of the hill a small grey manor house, with ponds, terraces and clipped hedges in front of it, a farm-building or so at the side, and a screen of fir-trees rising behind, all perfectly sheltered and self-sufficient. Behind the house the hill rose again, and the trees on the farther summit stood upright against the sky, which appeared of a more intense blue between their trunks."

So Mrs Hilbery in her consciousness of the running green lines of the hedges, the swelling ploughland, the mild blue sky finds a pastoral background to the drama of human life.

So Ralph associates Mary with the mist of winter hedges and the clear red of the bramble leaves: so Mary with regard to Ralph. "Her thoughts seemed even to take their colour from the street she happened to be in. Thus the vision of humanity appeared to be in some way connected with Bloomsbury and faded distinctly by the time she crossed the main road; then a belated organ-grinderin Holborn set her thoughts dancing incongruously; and by the time she was crossing the great misty square of Lincoln's Inn Fields she was cold and depressed and horribly clear-sighted."

Mary, by the way, is nearer our conception of a likeable person than anyone else in the book. She has at any rate attained to the standpoint that life is full of complexity and must, in spite or because of that, be loved to the last fibre of it.

And so it is with us: we carry away, after puttingNight and Daydown for the last time, an atmosphere of a room full of deep shadows, firelight, unwavering silver candle flames, and empty spaces to be crossed before reaching the round table in the middle of the room, with its frail burden of silver trays and china tea-cups, red parrots swinging on the chintz curtains and arm-chairs warming in the blaze.

And so we come to readNight and Dayin a mood very different from that which sends us toTom JonesorWuthering Heights: there is no full-blooded narrative full of incident or wild, insatiable passion. It is a penetrating, shrewd comedy wherein many feckless people are portrayed to the life. It is essentially modern in so far as there is no attempt to make us fall in love with the hero or heroine: we are never on the verge of tears through pity of their fate, though we are interested by their confused states of mind.

We are never unable to put the book down: on the other hand, there are few that we are more inclined to pick up and read for thenth time. There is a rich harvest of beauty on almost every page; there is true satirical humour; there is brilliance of intellect, clarity of aim and complete fearlessness: above all, there is strangeness and individuality, and the reader who turns away fromNight and Daybecause the atmosphere has failed to ensnare him in the first three hundred or so pages deserves our pity. He has missed a real treat, both emotional and intellectual.

There are many people whose taste in fiction is so fastidious that the sight of dialect in a novel makes them refuse to read it. To such people Mr Edward C. Booth makes no appeal. Both inThe Cliff-EndandFondie(his two great books) well-nigh every character speaks in a broad Yorkshire accent. They are stories of the soil, of people who move in a world very different from that which Mr Stephen M'Kenna has annexed as his own. His novels move in a most leisurely manner, like the people in them: anyone who reads novels for their plots alone may omit Mr Booth's name from his library list. Neither inThe Cliff-EndnorFondiedoes the actual plot matter much. In point of fact, the basic idea in each is rather stupid. Pamela is so sweet a girl that the Spawer would never have hesitated at all in real life; Blanche in reality would never have drowned herself for so little a reason as one illegitimate child.

No: we readThe Cliff-Endfor its spaciousness, its freshness, its rippling current of humour, its myriad living characters, its beautiful setting and its picture of love. For it is first and last a rattling good love romance.

You can test your appreciation of Mr Booth by his opening chapters. If the description of Tankard's Bus fails to charm you, don't read on. Such fare is not for you. But there are many of us who can be sufficiently grateful for such a beginning as this:

"Tankard's Bus is the most beautiful bus in the world—the biggest, blandest, noblest, longest, good-naturedest, most magnanimous ... no fewer than five steps swing at its tail-end to two yards out, with balustrades of real brass. Five steps form the complement of a full-grown flight of stairs in Ullbrig—as many, indeed, as take most of us up to bed ... only to take one sacramental sniff of its cushions is to be filled as a perfumed vase with the breath and spirit and sympathy of the district; is todivine the soul of the soil, the heart of the heavy-headed corn, a-flush to the cliff-edge; the sensuous sway of the barley in ceaseless stir of mystic communion; the stillness of turnips; the rustle of oats; the grateful green of pasture, traversed slowly here and there with streaks of dun and white-and-tan, and the fleecy grey blots of nibbling sheep; the murmur of many waves; the rippling cadence of the reaper; the busy hum of the threshing-machine, in indefatigable ascent and descent of its three semitones ... it is timed to leave the Market Arms at three o'clock. To make quite sure of a corner seat you would do well to be sitting in it by four o'clock at the latest...." All the way through the first chapter we watch this 'bus filling and emptying like a bee-hive, threading its way at last out of Hunmouth, away into the country-side ... "and so on and so on and so on, along the dusty hedge-lined road, homeward in the slanting beams of gold, with the sun spinning dizzily behind and the great elongated shadow of Tankard and his colleagues thrown far away out before, till that last moment when the mill spreads its mighty arms to the left-hand window in welcome of home-coming, and the squat, square-towered church stares stolidly through the other with its unwinking blue-diamond clock eye, and the little red roofs gathered round its midway give warm greeting over the latticed hedges in the mellowed evening light."

Not only has Mr Booth observed accurately and with the eye of an artist this corner of East Yorkshire scenery, but he has made himself complete master of the vernacular.

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

"'Ay,' says Steg.

"''Ow is she then?'

"'She's deead.'

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

"'She is that!' says Steg, warming with a sense of triumph to the work, as though he had the credit of her demise. 'She deed ti morn at aif-past six.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

"'Ha! The vicar's lobster if you please. Not out of the window there; I won't have lobster out of the window. The sunlight has a peculiar chemical action upon the tin, liberating certain constituents of the metal exceedingly perilous to the intercostal linings.'"

Nothing that goes on in the village is hidden from him, so we see him at once making friends with the Spawer, the stranger who comes to Cliff-End to compose his music in quiet. "The house stands endwise to the sea, set deep in a horse-shoe of trees; a big, hearty, whitewashed building under bronze-red tiles; two storeys high in front, that slope down backward over the dairy toward the stack-garth till they touch its high nettles.... The kitchen takes up the whole end of the house, facing two ways. The first window watches the lane across the red tile path and the little unclassified garden; the second comes on to the broadside front of the house, facing south, where the sun is a gorgeous nuisance after mid-morning in summer, ... dipping below the sunk stone wall and the dry nettle-grown ditch in which the ball buries itself instinctively whenever you hit it, is the big grass field for cricket, with the wickets always standing. And beyond this, sweeping away in every direction ... go the great lagoons of corn, brimming up to their green confines ... and the dim Garthstone windmill turning its listless sails over in dreamy soliloquy across three miles of fattening grain and green hedge and buttercupped pasture ... and the celestial sound of the sea, two fields off, tipping the lonely shore ... and the stirring of lazy leaves, the chick of poultry, the soothing grunt of distant pigs ... the solaceful shutting of unseen gates...."

God forbid that we should hurry amid surroundings such as these. Readers ofThe Cliff-End, fully to enjoy it, must imitate our village youths who prop themselves up by the wall of the bridge every Sunday afternoon andwatch the water flow underneath in complete content for six hours at a time.

We are content to dawdle with the Spawer in his little, faded, old-world, out-of-the-world room, with its choir of pink roses on the walls and his own books scattered indiscriminately about: Daudet, Tolstoi, Turgenev, Molière, Swinburne and so on.

By the time we reach chapter eight we have forgotten to wish that anything should happen ... and immediately something does. A sudden human sob breaks in upon the Spawer as he plays Chopin at midnight.

"Outside, the world lay wrapped in a great breathing stillness. Night's ultramarine bosom was ablaze with starry chain of mail. From the far fields came faint immaterial sounds, commingled in the suspended fragrance of hay, in warm revelations of ripening corn, in the aromatic pungency of nettles, and all the humid suffocation of herbs that open their moist pores at even. Distant sheep, cropping in ghost-like procession across misty, dew-laden clover, contributed now and again their strange, cutting, human cough." The night calls him and he jumps out of the window: he hears garments in swift full stir, the rending of a frock ... and at last sees, "struck in fugitive stoop to stone, the dim, motionless figure of a girl." In a voice that had "the rare mellow sweetness of blown pipes about it" she explains that she couldn't resist coming to hear him play. "He noted the wide generous forehead, the big consuming eyes, burning deep in sorrowing self-reproach and giving him a moment's gaze over the uplifted tumbler; the dispassionate narrow nose, sprinkled about its bridge ... with a pepper-castor helping of freckled candour; the small lips, the long, sleek cheeks; the slender, pear-shaped chin; the soft, supple neck of russet tan, spliced on to a gleaming shaft of ivory; the quick-throbbing throat and the burning lobes of red, like live cinders, in her hair ... she wore a shabby pale blue tam-o'-shanter...." And this vision turns out next morning to be the post-girl. He learns her history from the Vicar. "'Pamela, you mean! I knew we should come to that before long. She's not like the rest of us; comes of a different class altogether.... Take note of her when she laughs ... she covers the whole diapason.Ullbrig doesn't laugh like that. Ullbrig laughs on one note, as though it were a plough furrow.'" He weaves a fantastic story out of the little that he knows about her: a mother dying of a broken heart, having married beneath her, come to Ullbrig to escape the world, leaving Pamela, who "can do everything in the world except kill chickens." She can bake bread, paper-hang, paint, milliner and dress-make and plays the organ in church. She lives with John William Morland, who combines the office of postmaster with the trade of cobbler.

"'Stop a bit,'" the stern voice of the postmaster would tell you when you laid the penny and the boots on the counter together, and shot out your dual request for a "'stamp an' these 'ere solin'.'" "'Let's 'ave one thing at a time. Stamps 'as nowt to do wi' shoes, an' shoes 'as nowt to do wi' stamps. Tek yer boots off'n counter, or 'appen Ah s'll be slippin' 'em away by parcel post, an' then where sewd we be?... Noo; stamps fost; let's know what ye want.'"

Which point being settled and the penny rung into the till, he would suddenly cast his Governmental mask under the counter, throw the austerity out of his voice, and catch up the shoemaker's smile all at once in a quick-change act marvellous to behold.

The Vicar arranges a feast which Pamela prepares for and of course shares with him and the Spawer. And the collation is described as Dickens would describe it, to make your mouth water:

"There was a chicken-pie in a Mother Hubbard frill, with its crust as brown as a hazel-nut, and just nicely large enough to feed half-a-dozen, which is a capital size for three; and a noble sirloin of beef, fringed with a hoary lock of horse-radish, and arching its back in lonely majesty on an oval arena of Spode, ... and there was a salad, heaped up high under the white and yellow chequer of sliced eggs, and a rosy tomato comb, in a glorious old oaken bowl as big as a kettle-drum, ... and there were some savoury eggs, deliciously embowered in their greenery of mustard and cress ... and a tinned tongue ... and some beetroot ... and whipped creams, and a trifle pudding, all set out on snowy white damask amid an arctic glitter of glass and silver and cutlery. Except thecheese, which was a Camembert, and went by itself on the grained side-cupboard."

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