VWILLIAM HAZLITT

"I think W. H. to be, in his natural and healthy state, one of the wisest and finest spirits breathing.... I think I shall go to my grave without finding, or expecting to find, such another companion," writes Charles Lamb to Robert Southey, but "I wish he would not quarrel with the world at the rate he does."

We read Lamb and Johnson and Pepys for their lovableness; we read Hazlitt for his intensity of passion, his vigorous hate, his sense of glorious enjoyment, his unstudied ease of manner, his healthy attitude to literature, his enduring freshness and his stimulating criticism.

There is little in his life history to endear him to us; he was unfortunate in his relations with the three women who came into his life: "I have wanted one thing only to make me completely happy, but lacking that I lack all"; he was an impossible friend; he even managed to quarrel with Lamb, and though he was an acute and brilliant lecturer, there was little sympathy between him and his audience. The early part of the nineteenth century was the worst possible time for a shy, over-sensitive and easily irritated writer to work in; the obscenities of theBlackwood's Magazineclique have left an ineradicable stain—but when they speak of Hazlitt "as rather an ulcer than a man," even after this lapse of time our gorge rises; one ceases to wonder at the vitriolic bitterness which he wastes on his enemies.

We read and admire Hazlitt because they never brought him to his knees; he was a born fighter, a true adventurer; he neither asked nor gave quarter.

Most of us have wondered why a nation so sports-mad as we are should have been content for so long with such inept accounts of mighty conflicts by field and river as we get in our newspapers. Bernard Shaw did his best to portray a boxing contest, but Hazlitt alone among writershas succeeded in expounding the philosophy of sport and making us live through every moment of a bygone fight as if we had actually witnessed it:

"Neate just then made a tremendous lunge at him, and hit him full in the face. It was doubtful whether he would fall backwards or forwards; he hung suspended for a second or two, and then fell back, throwing his hands in the air, and with his face lifted up to the sky. I never saw anything more terrific than his aspect just before he fell. All traces of life, of natural expression, were gone from him. His face was like a human skull, a death's head spouting blood. The eyes were filled with blood, the nose streamed with blood, the mouth gaped blood. He was not like an actual man, but like a preternatural, spectral appearance, or like one of the figures in Dante'sInferno."

It is worthy of notice that he dedicates this description to the ladies: "nor let it seem out of character for the fair to notice the exploits of the brave."

Hazlitt is pre-eminently a fresh-air man. His essayOn Going a Journey, as R. L. Stevenson said, "is so good that there should be a tax levied on all who have not read it." "Give me the clear blue sky over my head" (what joy it gives one merely to transcribe the well-known words), "and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner—and then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy." He brings just this naïve, fresh-air, healthy enthusiasm into all his critical work, and it is this quality that calls forth that noble panegyric of Professor Saintsbury which shows once and for all the reason for reading Hazlitt:

"To anyone who has made a little progress in criticism himself, to anyone who has either read for himself or is capable of reading for himself, of being guided by what is helpful and of neglecting what is not, there is no greater critic than Hazlitt in any language ... he is the critics' critic as Spenser is the poets' poet."

That this is a bare statement of truth can be seen in the opening lecture on the English poets:

"Poetry is the language of the imagination and thepassions. It relates to whatever gives immediate pleasure or pain to the human mind. It comes home to the bosoms and businesses of men; for nothing but what so comes home to them in the most general and intelligible shape can be a subject for poetry. Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry cannot have much respect for himself or for anything else ... it is not a branch of authorship: it is 'the stuff of which our life is made.'"

These are brave words and, as we should expect from so alert a pugilist, straight from the shoulder.

HisCharacters of Shakespeare's Playsis studded with gems of criticism. "It is the peculiar excellence of Shakespeare's heroines that they seem to exist only in their attachment to others. They are pure abstractions of the affections." He is the least derivative of all critics and quotes from one authority alone, himself: hence his conclusions are not those of the academic professors, and it delights our hearts to listen to him trouncing Henry V., that false idol of the mob, and extolling Falstaff at his royal master's expense: "Falstaff is the better man of the two."

And so you again ask me in one sentence why we should read Hazlitt and the answer is, in the words of George Sampson: "A fondness for Hazlitt is a fondness for health in literature" ... and there is room for health in the literature of to-day.

"Though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like Hazlitt."

If you want to prove this, turn again toThe Ignorance of the Learned. If only we could write like that!

All girls in their teens and most boys keep what they call a diary, just as most undergraduates and all young unmarried women write what they imagine to be a novel: the value of each of these forms of expression would be considerably enhanced if the writers of either took any pains to learn the technique of their art. Of the ideal diarist two things are pre-eminently required: an all-round interest in life and a complete self-candour which is poles removed from the anæmic sickness of self-love and an effective antidote against it. No one should dare to keep a diary before reading Pepys from end to end, and few people will dare to do so after reading him.

The question is not why we should read Pepys, but why we cannot help reading Pepys. The answer is simple: No novelist would have the audacity to ask us to believe in a hero who was at the same time Secretary to the Admiralty, regenerator of the navy, Master of the Trinity House, master of a city company, Member of Parliament, President of the Royal Society, the friend and counsellor of kings and princes, and yet spent his spare time "picking up" girls in church or behind the counter, making love to his own maids and actresses, hiding his gold in the garden and digging it up again, expressing "mighty content" at the spectacle of men being hanged, drawn and quartered, alternately sulking with his wife and soothing her suspicions about his amours, continually making oaths not to get drunk and breaking them, gloating over his clothes like a peacock, lamenting every expense in the way of entertainment like a miser, frightened to death by fear of ghosts, burglars and the plague, chronicling the details of every delectable dinner that he ate, and every delectable wench that he saw or kissed—in short, expressing all the undignified weaknesses our flesh is heir to.

"No man," says the philosopher, "was ever written down but by himself."

Certainly no man ever wrote himself "down" more honestly than Pepys. Arnold Bennett was only speaking the bare truth when he said that none of us would ever have the pluck to lock ourselves in a room and commit to paper exactly what we have said or done or felt during the whole of one day, even if we knew that no eyes but our own should ever scan the page and that the manuscript should be burnt as soon as it was written. Compromise is an essential concomitant of civilisation: perfect sincerity even with ourselves is impossible. This explains at once the irresistible fascination of Pepys: here is a man who has actually achieved the impossible. Nine-tenths of our staple food in conversation is gossip, not only in suburban drawing-rooms and London clubs, but in every department of life. Scandal-mongering is as much a part and parcel of our life as it was in Lady Sneerwell's day.

These peeps behind the scenes in a man's private life make us much more lenient in our judgment of our own peccadilloes: thousands of men have, we feel, acted as he did and we have done, but only Pepys has had the temerity to confess: there is no entertainment so diverting as that of watching a man give himself away. Pepys does it on every page with an unconscious humour which adds a thousandfold to our enjoyment:

"To the Strand, to my booksellers, and there bought an idle, rogueish French book, which I have bought in plain binding, avoiding the buying of it better bound, because I resolve, as soon as I have read it, to burn it, that it may not stand in the list of books, nor among them, to disgrace them if it should be found." ... "This day, not for want, but for good husbandry, I sent my father, by his desire, six pair of my old shoes, which fit him, and are good."

"To St Dunstan's church where ... I stood by a pretty, modest maid, whom I did labour to take by the hand; but she would not, but got further and further from me; and at last, I could perceive her to take pins out of her pocket to prick me if I should touch her again—which, seeing, I did forbear, and was glad I did spy her design. And then I fell to gaze upon another pretty maid, in a pew close to me, and she on me; and I did go about to takeher by the hand, which she suffered a little, and then withdrew."

Pretty good, this, for the Secretary to the Admiralty! We feel ourselves mighty superior fellows when we read confessions like this, don't we?

"My wife being dressed this day in fair hair, did make me so mad, that I spoke not one word to her, though I was ready to burst with anger ... in my way home discovered my trouble to my wife, swearing several times, which I pray God forgive me for, and bending my fist, that I would not endure it. She, poor wretch, was surprised with it, and made me no answer all the way home; but there we parted, and I to the office late, and then home, and without supper to bed, vexed ... up (next day) and by-and-by down comes my wife ... she promising to wear white locks no more in my sight, which I, like a severe fool, thinking not enough, begun to except against, and made her fly out to very high terms and cry, and in her heat, told me of (my) keeping company with Mrs Knipp (the actress), saying, that if I would never see her more—of whom she hath more reason to suspect than I had heretofore of Pembleton—she would never wear white locks more. This vexed me ... but to think never to see this woman—at least, to have her here more; and so all very good friends as ever."

"'And so to bed,' writes Mr Secretary Pepys a hundred times in his diary, and we may be sure that each time he joined Mrs Pepys beneath the coverlet he felt that the moment which marked the end of his wonderful day was one deserving careful record." So writes "W. N. P. Barbellion," the only modern diarist possessed in any degree of Pepys' complete self-candour, and, it is worthy of notice, the passage occurs in a book calledEnjoying Life.

Because he always wrote prose like an artist Walter Savage Landor is worthy to be read at all times and in all moods.

"And through the trumpet of a child of RomeRang the pure music of the flutes of Greece."

We all know what Swinburne thought about him: the trouble has been that so few people have taken any pains to go further and rediscover this great, imaginative artist for themselves. He is one of those unfortunates whose work we agree to take as read. If we only had a half his feeling for the value and weight of words the English tongue would be ten times richer than it is to-day, richer in harmony, richer in preciseness, richer in simplicity. He had a very definite sense of a writer's duty: "I hate false words, and seek with care, difficulty and moroseness those that fit the thing." Surely when we find a man with so wide a range of thought, so filled with imagination, so much in love with heroism, beauty and freedom, with a prose style that is, of its kind, unrivalled, it is incumbent upon us to sink our prejudice against the classical and do the little extra work which is essential to a true appreciation of that salutary, clear-cut, highly disciplined art. His appeal is to the few who can enjoy the best literature for itself, but there is no reason why this circle should not be far wider than it is.

In his determination not to say anything superfluous he did at times fall into obscurity, but we forgive that in Browning: it is certainly not an all-obtrusive fault in Landor, especially in that later work of his, theImaginary Conversations, on which his reputation now rests. Whether in those short and stirring scenes of emotion and action, or in the long and quiet ones of discussion and reflection, he shows an admirable insight into character, a fine dignityand urbanity, a mastery over delicate aphorisms on human nature, and a range of interest running from the earliest times to his own era. Take a few of the titles at random if you wish to gauge his range: "Peleus and Thetis," "Leofric and Godiva," "Mahomet and Sergius," "Filippo Lippi and Pope Eugenius IV.," "Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn," "Peter the Great and Alexis," "The Dream of Boccaccio," "The Dream of Petrarca."

Who is there among the narrators of old-time legends capable of charming us so much as the man who makes the slave-girl Rhodopè begin her life story thus:

"Never shall I forget the morning when my father, sitting in the coolest part of the house, exchanged his last measure of grain for a chlamys of scarlet cloth fringed with silver. He watched the merchant out of the door, and then looked wistfully into the corn-chest. I, who thought there was something worth seeing, looked in also, and, finding it empty, expressed my disappointment, not thinking, however, about the corn. A faint and transient smile came over his countenance at the sight of mine. He unfolded the chlamys, stretched it out with both hands before me, and then cast it over my shoulders. I looked down on the glittering fringe and screamed with joy. He then went out; I know not what flowers he gathered, but he gathered many; and some he placed in my bosom, and some in my hair...."

Godiva's one poignant cry to herself, "I hope they will not crowd about me so to-morrow," strikes a more effective note than the whole of Tennyson's poem on the same subject. Filippo Lippi's peerless description of his adventures in Barbary in the service of the corsair Abdul, where he met Almeida of the hazel eyes, Almeida, "cool, smooth and firm as a nectarine gathered before sunrise," is too well known to be quoted here, but is one of the first to be read by those who would see Landor in his natural element of beauty. "The clematis overtopped the lemon and orange trees ... white pigeons, and others in colour like the dawn of day ..."—this passage in particular is a masterpiece of descriptive writing. Not easily does one forget the pathetic figure of the discarded Anne Boleyn confronted in prison by her drunken husband. "Love your Elizabeth, my honoured Lord, and God bless you!She will soon forget to call me; do not chide her; think how young she is. Could I, could I kiss her, but once again! It would comfort my heart—or break it."

His sense of the dramatic is nowhere better shown than in that dialogue, though Spenser's announcement of his terrible loss to Essex goes near to equal it in pathos as does the appearance of Fiammetta to Boccaccio in his dream.

But to prove how absolutely the classical spirit can bring perfection to our native language what need is there of quoting more than this:

"Laodameia died; Helen died; Leda, the beloved of Jupiter, went before. It is better to repose in the earth betimes than to sit up late; better than to cling pertinaciously to what we feel crumbling under us, and to protract an inevitable fall. We may enjoy the present while we are insensible of infirmity and decay: but the present, like a note in music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is past, and what is to come. There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave: there are no voices, O Rhodopè, that are not soon mute, however tuneful: there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last."

The white heat of austere, restrained passion is here, it is the sublimation of the Latin model. This surely is English as we would have her written, that which is rightly said and therefore sounds rightly. This is one of those certain occasions on which prose can bear a great deal of poetry: indeed there is more real poetry latent in the cadences of this paragraph than in many so-called poems of to-day.

Sir Sidney Colvin happily contrasts Landor's twilight with that more famous one of Keats:

"Within how few minutes has the night closed in upon us! Nothing is left discernible of the promontories, or the long irregular breakers under them. We have before us only a faint glimmering from the shells in our path, and from the blossoms of the arbutus."

"The presence of the twilight and its spell," he very justly comments, "are in the work of Landor not less keenly felt and realised than in the work of Keats,only they are felt and realised in a widely different manner."

This difference is simply that which lies between the romantic and the classical. Landor will never trust himself to go beyond a bare statement of fact, but beauty is no less implicit in the architecture of straight lines than in the architecture of adornments and embellishments. His aphorisms have passed into our common speech and men call up many beautifully coined phrases from the depths of their consciousness about life and death, forgetful of their source, which are attributable to Landor.

"To stand upon one's guard against Death exasperates her malice, and protracts our sufferings"; "Goodness does not more certainly make men happy than happiness makes them good"; "Those who are quite satisfied sit still and do nothing; those who are not quite satisfied are the sole benefactors of the world"; "We often hear that such or such a thing 'is not worth an old song.' Alas! how very few things are! What precious recollections do some of them awaken! What pleasurable tears do they excite? They purify the stream of life; they can delay it on its shelves and rapids; they can turn it back again to the soft moss amidst which its sources issue."

"Friendship is a vase, which, when it is flamed by heat, or violence, or accident, may as well be broken at once; it never can be trusted after. The more graceful and ornamental it was, the more clearly do we discern the hopelessness of restoring it to its former state. Coarse stones, if they are fractured, may be cemented again; precious ones never."

Reading exquisite thoughts like these clothed in such a perfectly firm manner, we are led to think of the values of phrases and words which, like many of our blessings, lie unrecognised.

"How carelessly, for example, do we say, 'I am delighted tohear from you.' No other language has this beautiful expression, which, like some of the most lovely flowers, loses its charm for want of close inspection."

The classical method, you will notice again, of getting close to the object and keeping one's eyes on it, not moving away to such a distance that all the beauty lies in thevagueness and mystery of the scene. Just as in his dramatic and narrative conversations he springs easily from age to age, shedding a flood of new light on historical episodes, so in his reflective and discursive notes he touches on every topic of human interest, religion, fame, death, love, manners, society, politics, literature; as a critic he moves easily, with felicity of expression and breadth of survey, "the herald of the gods," with a sure sense of what is required of him.

"A perfect piece of criticism must exhibitwherea work is good or bad;whyit is good or bad; in what degree it is good or bad; must also demonstrate in what manner and to what extent the same ideas or reflections have come to others, and if they be clothed in poetry, why, by an apparently slight variation, what in one author is mediocrity, in another is excellence."

"To be useful to as many as possible is the especial duty of a critic, and his utility can only be attained by rectitude and precision. He walks in a garden which is not his own; and he neither must gather the blossoms to embellish his discourse, nor break the branches to display his strength. Rather let him point to what is out of order, and help to raise what is lying on the ground."

"When a writer is praised above his merits in his own times, he is certain of being estimated below them in the times succeeding."

"To constitute a great writer the qualities are, adequate expression of just sentiments, plainness without vulgarity, elevation without pomp, sedateness without austerity, alertness without impetuosity."

As we should expect, he lays most stress upon the virtues of moderation and composure. "Whoever has the power of creating has likewise the inferior power of keeping his creations in order. The best poets are the most impressive, because their steps are regular; for without regularity there is neither strength nor state. Look at Sophocles, look at Æschylus, look at Homer."

"There are four things requisite to constitute might, majesty and dominion in a poet: these are creativeness, constructiveness, the sublime, the pathetic. A poet of the first order must have formed, or taken to himself andmodified, some great subject. He must be creative and constructive."

"It is only the wretchedest of poets that wish all they ever wrote to be remembered: some of the best would be willing to lose the most."

When he descends to the particular we find the same strong, sane, comprehensive attitude of criticism. What could be better than his note on Addison?

"I have always been an admirer of Addison, and the oftener I read him, I mean his prose, the more he pleases me. Perhaps it is not so much his style, which, however, is easy and graceful and harmonious, as the sweet temperature of thought in which we always find him, and the attractive countenance, if you will allow me the expression, with which he meets me upon every occasion. It is very remarkable, and therefore I stopped to notice it, that not only what little strength he had, but even all his grace and ease, forsake him when he ventures into poetry."

He defends the use of idiom ("Every good writer has much idiom; it is the life and spirit of language") and attacks the use of quotation: "Before I let fall a quotation I must be taken by surprise. I seldom do it in conversation, seldomer in composition; for it mars the beauty and unity of style; especially when it invades it from a foreign tongue. A quoter is either ostentatious of his acquirements, or doubtful of his cause. And, moreover, he never walks gracefully who leans upon the shoulder of another, however gracefully that other may walk."

Of his verse epigrams all the world knowsRose Aylmerand most people his of himself:

"I strove with none, for none was worth my strife,Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;I warmed both hands before the fire of life,It sinks, and I am ready to depart."

It would be hard to improve upon the accuracy of that description or the artistry with which it is expressed.

"I shall dine late; but the dining-room will be well lighted, the guests few and select."

It is with the object of enticing you to join that groupof eclectics that I have attempted to show you what manner of man he is who invites you to his table. The conversation will be rich, the viands delicious to an Epicurean palate, but if you have no taste and your talk is vulgar you will only be bored.

Readers of Rupert Brooke will almost certainly have made the acquaintance of Donne the poet, admirers of Mr Logan Pearsall Smith will with equal certainty have dipped into the excellent selections which that versatile writer has made of Dr Donne's sermons.

But to search for a reason why everyone should read Donne we need go no further than George Saintsbury's words:

"For those who have experienced, or who at least understand, the ups-and-downs, the ins-and-outs of human temperament, the alternations not merely of passion and satiety, but of passion and laughter, of passion and melancholy reflection, of passion earthly enough and spiritual rapture almost heavenly, there is no poet and hardly any writer like Donne."

Our appetite for Donne was probably first whetted by Izaak Walton, who wrote so admirable a biography of him. His personality intrigues us from the start, his Marlowesque thirst for experience, experience of the intellect and experience of sensation, finds a sympathetic echo to-day in the minds of most of us. He knew a good deal about medicine, law, astronomy and physiology, as well as theology: he joined the expedition of Essex to Cadiz in 1596: he was ever adventuring in science, in love and in travel. At the age of forty-two, poverty-stricken and a failure, he took Orders and became one of the greatest preachers we have ever had. He poured his whole soul into his sermons, and held his congregations spellbound with his gorgeous prose, "perhaps never equalled for the beauty of its rhythm and the Shakespearean magnificence of its diction": he dwelt mainly on the subject of Sin (about which he knew a good deal from experience), Death, God, Heaven and Infinity. Listen to this on Eternity: "And all the powerfull Kings, and all the beautifullQueenes of this world, were but as a bed of flowers, some gathered at six, some at seven, some at eight, All in one Morning, in respect of this Day. In all the two thousand yeares of Nature, before the Law given byMoses, and the two thousand yeares of Law.... In all this six thousand, and in all those, which God may be pleased to adde, ... in this House of his Fathers, there was never heard quarter clock to strike, never seen minute glasse to turne." Or this personal confession (rarest of delights in sermons): "I throw my selfe downe in my Chamber, and I call in, and invite God, and his Angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his Angels, for the noise of a Flie, for the ratling of a Coach, for the whining of a doore; I talke on, in the same posture of praying; Eyes lifted up; knees bowed downe; as though I prayed to God; and, if God, or his Angels should aske me, when I thought last of God in that prayer, I cannot tell; Sometimes I finde that I had forgot what I was about, but when I began to forget it, I cannot tell. A memory of yesterdays pleasures, a feare of to morrows dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine eare, a light in mine eye, an anything, a nothing, a fancy, a Chimera in my braine, troubles me in my prayer. So certainely is there nothing, nothing in spirituall things, perfect in this world."

"If Donne," says Robert Lynd, "had written much prose in this kind, hisSermonswould be as famous as the writings of any of the saints since the days of the Apostles."

If only more sermons contained such human touches as the following, the modern church-goers would be more plentiful:—

"I am not all here, I am here now preaching upon this text, and I am at home in my Library considering whether S. Gregory, or S. Hierome, have said best of this text, before. I am here speaking to you, and yet I consider by the way, in the same instant, what it is likely you will say to one another, when I have done, you are not all here neither; you are here now, hearing me, and yet you are thinking that you have heard a better sermon somewhere else, of this text before."

But as an example of his highest power of eloquence and impassioned imagination I will quote a passage that can challenge any passage in the whole range of English prose:

"The ashes of an Oak in the Chimney, are no Epitaph of that Oak, to tell me how high or how large that was; It tels me not what flocks it sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell. The dust of great persons graves is speechlesse too, it sayes nothing, it distinguishes nothing: As soon the dust of a wretch whom thou wouldest not, as of a Prince whom thou couldest not look upon, will trouble thine eyes, if the winde blow it thither; and when a whirle-winde hath blowne the dust of the Church-yard into the Church, and the man sweeps out the dust of the Church into the Church-yard, who will undertake to sift those dusts again, and to pronounce, This is the Patrician, this is the noble flowre, and this the Yeomanly, this the Plebeian bran...."

But it is Donne the poet, the Donne who wrote

"Her pure and eloquent bloodSpoke in her cheeks and so distinctly wrought,That one might almost say her body thought,"

the Donne of

"I long to talk with some old lover's ghost,Who died before the God of Love was born,"

"I wonder by my troth what thou and IDid till we loved?"

of the

"Bracelet of bright hair about the bone,"

that attracts the ordinary man and woman of to-day.

In spite of repeated incentives to listen, we turn deaf ears to sermons: towards poetry we are inclined to be perhaps too kind.

Donne is all the more important as a poet because he treats of the universal passion of love in more phases than any other poet. He was the complete experimentalist in love, both in actual life and in his work. He is frankly in search of bodily experiences:

"Whoever loves, if he do not proposeThe right true end of love, he's one that goesTo sea for nothing but to make him sick."

He is brutal:

"For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love."

He is inconstant:

"I can love any, so she be not true."

He bewails the inconstancy of women:

"Though she were true when you met her,And last till you write your letter,Yet sheWill beFalse, ere I come, to two or three."

His passion for sheer ugliness carries him away time after time:

"Had it been some bad smell, he would have thoughtThat his own feet, or breath, that smell had wrought."

Or again:

"And like a bunch of ragged carrots standThe short swollen fingers of thy gouty hand."

In hisElegieshe tells stories of his conquests dramatically, in full detail, satirically, sensually. InJealousywe are given an exact picture of the deformed husband who,

"Swol'n and pampered with great fare,Sits down and snorts, cag'd in his basket chair"

—so that the poet and his mistress perforce have to "play in another house," away from those "towering eyes, that flamed with oily sweat of jealousy."

InThe Perfumewe see the girl's "immortal mother, which doth lie still buried in her bed, yet will not die," who, fearing lest her daughter be swollen, embraces her and names strange meats to try her longings: we see

"The grim-eight-foot-high-iron-bound-serving-manThat oft names God in oaths, and only then."

But the scent that the lover uses gives him away and so he is by her "hydroptic father catechized."

There is a good deal of frank naturalism in the elegy entitledTo his Mistress Going to Bed, but it is healthily coarse, though scarcely quotable even in these times, which is a pity.

"There is no penance due to innocence."

But playing as he does on all the notes of all the different sorts of love, Donne gives the impression of one who attained in the end an abiding love for one person, Anne More, his wife.

InThe Ecstasywe see him crying out against passionate friendship:

"But O alas, so long, so far,Our bodies why do we forbear?"

and makes an unanswerable point in this verse:

"So must pure lovers' souls descendT'affections and to faculties,Which sense may reach and apprehend,Else a great Prince in prison lies.To our bodies turn we then, that soWeak men on love reveal'd may look;Love's mysteries in souls do growBut yet the body is the book."

And inThe Anniversaryhe retracts all that he had once said about inconstancy:

"Here upon earth we are Kings, and none but weCan be such Kings, nor of such subjects be.Who is so safe as we, where none can doTreason to us, except one of us two?True and false fears let us refrain;Let us live nobly, and live, and add againYears and years unto years, till we attainTo write three-score: This is the second of our reign."

There are few lovelier lyrics thanBreak of Day:

"Stay, O sweet, and do not rise;The light that shines comes from thine eyes;The day breaks not, it is my heart,Because that you and I must part.Stay, or else my joys will dieAnd perish in their infancy."

Or, to take a complete poem, none shows Donne in truer, finer light thanThe Dream:

"Dear love, for nothing less than theeWould I have broke this happy dream;It was a themeFor reason, much too strong for fantasy.Therefore thou waked'st me wisely; yetMy dream thou brokest not, but continued'st it.Thou art so true that thoughts of thee sufficeTo make dreams truths, and fables histories;Enter these arms, for since thou thought'st it best,Not to dream all my dream, let's act the rest.As lightning, or a taper's light,Thine eyes, and not thy noise waked me;Yet I thought thee—For thou lovest truth—an angel, at first sight;But when I saw thou saw'st my heart,And knew'st my thoughts beyond an angel's art,When thou knew'st what I dreamt, when thou knew'st whenExcess of joy would wake me, and earnest then,I must confess, it could not choose but beProfane, to think thee anything but thee."

As lightning, or a taper's light,Thine eyes, and not thy noise waked me;Yet I thought thee—For thou lovest truth—an angel, at first sight;But when I saw thou saw'st my heart,And knew'st my thoughts beyond an angel's art,When thou knew'st what I dreamt, when thou knew'st whenExcess of joy would wake me, and earnest then,I must confess, it could not choose but beProfane, to think thee anything but thee."

There is enough nastiness, eccentricity, coarseness, roughness and extravagance in Donne to put off many fastidious readers: but his faults lie open to the sky: his beauties are frequently hidden, but they are worth searching for.

And yet—a word of warning—let George Saintsbury give it: "No one who thinksDon Quixotea merely funnybook, no one who sees in Aristophanes a dirty-minded fellow with a knack of Greek versification ... need trouble himself even to attempt to like Donne."

We read Donne, then, for his fiery imagination, for his deep and subtle analysis, for his humanity, for his passion, for his anti-sentimentalism, for his eager search "to find a north-west passage of his own" in intellect and morals, for the richness and rarity of the gems with which all his work, both prose and poetry, is studded, for his modernity and freshness. We read Donne as a corrective of lazy thinking: he frees us from illusion.

One imagines Nigel Playfair and Arnold Bennett suddenly starting hares over their cigars after dinner. "What shall we do next?" asks N. P. plaintively. "Aren't there any old plays that are really good that the public knows nothing of?"

A. B. gets up wearily and turns over a Dodsley or a Nimmo. "We don't want to cut into the preserves of the Phœnix," he grumbles. "The Duchess of Malfi,Volpone,All for Love... do you mean that sort of thing?"

"Good God, no," replies Nigel truculently. "I meant something light—something with a 'zip' about it."

"The CriticorA Trip to Scarborough?" queries A. B. He is getting sleepy and is rather bored.

"This is for the Lyric, Hammersmith,ourLyric, not the Tooting Bec Hippodrome or the Moss Empires."

"Well, what aboutThe Beggar's Opera?" answers A. B. so languidly that Nigel doesn't hear. He repeats it.

"The Beggar's what?" asks Nigel. "Never heard of it."

"I'll sing you some of the songs in it," says Arnold, waking up.

"No, no, for God's sake, no. We'll take it as sung."

That, I truly believe, is how plays get played. At any rate this is how plays get read.

There are dozens of things lying buried in your old library, but you won't take the trouble to unearth them. But now, well, you've only got to dine earlier and enter a detestable Tube and cross a more detestable Broadway and you can seeThe Beggar's Operamost exquisitely done for you on the stage. You can read the more piquant bits of it during the interval in a truly Martin Seckerish edition if your companion goes to the bar; this is quitedifferent from the play as one hears it. The eye is not so easily shocked as the ear. But I am wandering from my point, which is this: "Why we should read Such a Book asThe Beggar's Opera" is my heavily weighted heading to this chapter.

ReadThe Beggar's Opera, yes, and then see if you can't find some of the scores of other neglected plays equally well worth playing, and make such a fuss about them that soon Nigel and Arnold or some other lover of the theatre is compelled to put them on.

There is no dearth of mirth-provoking material, which is still not quite intellectually futile—— But I'm wandering again. Let me begin.

We readThe Beggar's Operafor much the same reason that we read Fielding, because it is, as Maurice Baring says, English, as English as a landscape by Constable, or eggs and bacon. It has this added advantage to those who see it acted, that it is full of ravishing English music. Written in the first place in ridicule of the musical Italian opera, we now read it or see it to regain some of that atmosphere of London life, of brilliant wit, of racy coarseness, of satiric richness, which marked the healthy century that gave it birth.

A bigger set of rogues than we here meet with it would be impossible to imagine, butnos hæc novimus esse nihiland we laugh undisturbed for once by any moral twinges. "All Men are thieves in love, and like a woman the better for being another's property": that is the sort of proverb we like to hear in such a play: the more we hear the merrier we grow.

How amazingly appropriate too are the songs: when Mrs Peachum learns that Polly is really married to Macheath one feels that there was no other way for her but to burst out into song:

"Our Polly is a sad Slut! nor heeds what we have taught her.I wonder any Man alive will ever rear a Daughter!For she must have both Hoods and Gowns, and Hoops to swell her Pride,With Scarfs and Stays, and Gloves and Lace; and she will have Men beside;And when she's drest with Care and Cost, all tempting, fine and gay,As Men should serve a Cowcumber, she flings herself away."

"Do you think your Mother and I should have liv'd comfortably so long together, if ever we had been married?" roars Peachum in a fine frenzy.

"Can you support the Expence of a Husband, Hussy, in Gaming, Drinking and Whoring? Have you Money enough to carry on the daily Quarrels of Man and Wife about who shall squander most?... Why, thou foolish Jade, thou wilt be as ill-us'd, and as much neglected, as if thou hadst married a Lord," shrieks her mother.

Polly confesses that she loves her husband and Mrs Peachum faints at the awful news; revived by a double dose of cordial, she joins her daughter in one of the most delicious songs in the play.

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