fancied herself writing a story. This was, I gather, immediately on
her return from Germany, where she had been touring about with Lewes,
with whom she had now been living for two years. Lewes said to her,
"You have wit, description, and philosophy--those go a good way towards
the production of a novel," and he encouraged her to write about the
virtues and vices of the clergy, as she had observed them at Griff and
at Coventry. _Amos Barton_ was the immediate result, and the stately
line of stories which was to close in _Daniel Deronda_ twenty years
later was started on its brilliant career. But what of the author?
She was a storm-tried matron of thirty-seven, who had sub-edited the
_Westminster Review_, who had spent years in translating Strauss's
_Life of Jesus_ and had sunk exhausted in a still more strenuous
wrestling with the _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_ of Spinoza, who had
worked with Delarive at Experimental Physics in Geneva, and who had
censured, as superficial, John Stuart Mill's treatment of Whewell's
_Moral Philosophy_. This heavily-built Miss Marian Evans, now dubiously
known as Mrs. Lewes, whose features at that time are familiar to us by
the admirable paintings and drawings of Sir Frederick Burton, was in
training to be a social reformer, a moral philosopher, an apostle of
the creed of Christendom, an anti-theological professor, anything in
the world rather than a writer of idle tales.

But the tales proved to be a hundred-fold more attractive to the
general public than articles upon taxation or translations from
German sceptics. We all must allow that at last, however tardily and
surprisingly, George Eliot had discovered her true vocation. Let us
consider in what capacity she entered this field of fiction. She
entered it as an observer of life more diligent and more meticulous
perhaps than any other living person. She entered it also with a store
of emotional experience and with a richness of moral sensibility which
were almost as unique. She had strong ethical prejudices, and a wealth
of recollected examples by which she could justify them. Her memory
was accurate, minute, and well-arranged, and she had always enjoyed
retrospection and encouraged herself in the cultivation of it. She was
very sympathetic, very tolerant, and although she had lived in the
very Temple of Priggishness with her Brays and her Hennells and her
Sibrees, she remained singularly simple and unaffected. Rather sad,
one pictures her in 1856, rather dreamy, burdened with an excess of
purely intellectual preoccupation, wandering over Europe consumed by
a constant, but unconfessed, nostalgia for her own country, coming
back to it with a sense that the Avon was lovelier than the Arno.
Suddenly, in that "dreamy mood," there comes over her a desire to build
up again the homes of her childhood, to forget all about Rousseau and
experimental physics, and to reconstruct the "dear old quaintnesses" of
the Arbury of twenty-five years before.

If we wish to see what it was which this mature philosopher and earnest
critic of behaviour had to produce for the surprise of her readers, we
may examine the description of the farm at Donnithorne in _Adam Bede_.
The solemn lady, who might seem such a terror to ill-doers, had yet a
packet of the most delicious fondants in the pocket of her bombazine
gown. The names of these sweetmeats, which were of a flavour and a
texture delicious to the tongue, might be Mrs. Poyser or Lizzie Jerome
or the sisters Dodson, but they all came from the Warwickshire factory
at Griff, and they were all manufactured with the sugar and spice of
memory. So long as George Eliot lived in the past, and extracted her
honey from those wonderful cottage gardens which fill her early pages
with their colour and their odour, the solidity and weight of her
intellectual methods in other fields did not interfere, or interfered
in a negligible way, with the power and intensity of the entertainment
she offered. We could wish for nothing better. English literature has,
of their own class, nothing better to offer than certain chapters of
_Adam Bede_ or than the beginning of _The Mill on the Floss_.

But, from the first, if we now examine coldly and inquisitively, there
was a moth sleeping in George Eliot's rich attire. This moth was
pedantry, the result doubtless of too much erudition encouraging a
natural tendency in her mind, which as we have seen was acquisitive
rather than inventive. It was unfortunate for her genius that after
her early enthusiasm for French culture she turned to Germany and
became, in measure, like so many powerful minds of her generation,
Teutonised. This fostered the very tendencies which it was desirable
to eradicate. One can but speculate what would have been the result on
her genius of a little more Paris and a little less Berlin. Her most
successful immediate rival in France was Octave Feuillet; the _Scenes
of Clerical Life_ answer in time to _Le Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre_,
and _Monsieur de Camors_ to _Felix Holt_. There could not be a stronger
or more instructive contrast than between the elegant fairy-land of the
one and the robust realism of the other. But our admirable pastoral
writer, whose inward eye was stored with the harmonies and humours of
Shakespeare's country, was not content with her mastery of the past.
She looked forward to a literature of the future. She trusted to her
brain rather than to those tired servants, her senses, and more and
more her soul was invaded by the ambition to invent a new thing, the
scientific novel, dealing with the growth of institutions and the
analysis of individual character.

The critics of her own time were satisfied that she had done this,
and that she had founded the psychological novel. There was much to
be said in favour of such an opinion. In the later books it is an
undeniable fact that George Eliot displays a certain sense of the
inevitable progress of life which was new. It may seem paradoxical to
see the peculiar characteristics of Zola or of Mr. George Moore in
_Middlemarch_, but there is much to be said for the view that George
Eliot was the direct forerunner of those naturalistic novelists. Like
them, she sees life as an organism, or even as a progress. George Eliot
in her contemplation of the human beings she invents is a traveller,
who is provided with a map. No Norman church or ivied ruin takes her
by surprise, because she has seen that it was bound to come, and
recognises it when it does come. Death, the final railway station, is
ever in her mind; she sees it on her map, and gathers her property
around her to be ready when the train shall stop. This psychological
clairvoyance gives her a great power when she does not abuse it, but
unfortunately from the very first there was in her a tendency, partly
consequent on her mental training, but also not a little on her natural
constitution, to dwell in a hard and pedagogic manner on it. She was
not content to please, she must explain and teach as well.

Her comparative failure to please made its definite appearance first
in the laboured and overcharged romance of _Romola_. But a careful
reader will detect it in her earliest writings. Quite early in _Amos
Barton_, for instance, when Mrs. Hackit observes of the local colliers
that they "passed their time in doing nothing but swilling ale and
smoking, like the beasts that perish," the author immediately spoils
this delightful remark by explaining, like a schoolmaster, that Mrs.
Hackit was "speaking, we may presume, in a remotely analogical
sense." The laughter dies upon our lips. Useless pedantry of this kind
spoils many a happy touch of humour, Mrs. Poyser alone perhaps having
wholly escaped from it. It would be entirely unjust to accuse George
Eliot, at all events until near the end of her life, of intellectual
pride. She was, on the contrary, of a very humble spirit, timorous and
susceptible of discouragement. But her humility made her work all the
harder at her task of subtle philosophical analysis. It would have
been far better for her if she had possessed less of the tenacity of
Herbert Spencer and more of the recklessness of George Sand. An amusing
but painful example of her Sisyphus temper, always rolling the stone
uphill with groans and sweat, is to be found in her own account of the
way she "crammed up" for the composition of _Romola_. She tells us
of the wasting toil with which she worked up innumerable facts about
Florence, and in particular how she laboured long over the terrible
question whether Easter could have been "retarded" in the year 1492. On
this, Sir Leslie Stephen--one of her best critics, and one of the most
indulgent--aptly queries, "What would have become of _Ivanhoe_ if Scott
had bothered himself about the possible retardation of Easter? The
answer, indeed, is obvious, that _Ivanhoe_ would not have been written."

The effect of all this on George Eliot's achievement was what must
always occur when an intellect which is purely acquisitive and
distributive insists on doing work that is appropriate only to
imagination. If we read very carefully the scene preceding Savanarola's
sermon to the Dominicans at San Marco, we perceive that it is built
up almost in Flaubert's manner, but without Flaubert's magic, touch
by touch, out of books. The author does not see what she describes
in a sort of luminous hallucination, but she dresses up in language
of her own what she has carefully read in Burlamacchi or in Villari.
The most conscientious labour, expended by the most powerful brain,
is incapable of producing an illusion of life by these means. George
Eliot may even possibly have been conscious of this, for she speaks
again and again, not of writing with ecstasy of tears and laughter, as
Dickens did, but of falling into "a state of so much wretchedness in
attempting to concentrate my thoughts on the construction of my novel"
that nothing but a tremendous and sustained effort of the will carried
her on at all. In this vain and terrible wrestling with incongruous
elements she wore out her strength and her joy, and it is heart-rending
to watch so noble a genius and so lofty a character as hers wasted
in the whirlpool. One fears that a sense of obscure failure added to
her tortures, and one is tempted to see a touch of autobiography in
the melancholy of Mrs. Transome (in _Felix Holt_), of whom we are
told that "her knowledge and accomplishments had become as valueless
as old-fashioned stucco ornaments, of which the substance was never
worth anything, while the form is no longer to the taste of any living
mortal."

The notion that George Eliot was herself, in spite of all the laudation
showered upon her, consciously in want of some element essential
for her success is supported by the very curious fact that from
1864 to 1869, that is to say through nearly one quarter of her whole
literary career, she devoted herself entirely to various experiments
in verse. She was so preternaturally intelligent that there is nothing
unlikely in the supposition that she realised what was her chief want
as a writer of imaginative prose. She claims, and she will always
be justified in claiming, a place in the splendid roll of prominent
English writers. But she holds it in spite of a certain drawback which
forbids her from ever appearing in the front rank as a great writer.
Her prose has fine qualities of force and wit, it is pictorial and
persuasive, but it misses one prime but rather subtle merit, it never
sings. The masters of the finest English are those who have received
the admonition _Cantate Domino!_ They sing a new song unto the Lord.
Among George Eliot's prose contemporaries there were several who
obeyed this command. Ruskin, for instance, above all the Victorian
prose-writers, shouts like the morning-star. It is the peculiar
gift of all great prosaists. Take so rough an executant as Hazlitt:
"Harmer Hill stooped with all its pines, to listen to a poet, as he
passed!" That is the chanting faculty in prose, which all the greatest
men possess; but George Eliot has no trace of it, except sometimes,
faintly, in the sheer fun of her peasants' conversation. I do not
question that she felt the lack herself, and that it was this which,
subconsciously, led her to make a profound study of the art of verse.

She hoped, at the age of forty-four, to hammer herself into poetry by
dint of sheer labour and will-power. She read the great masters, and
she analysed them in the light of prosodical manuals. In 1871 she told
Tennyson that Professor Sylvester's "laws for verse-making had been
useful to her." Tennyson replied, "I can't understand that," and no
wonder. Sylvester was a facetious mathematician who undertook to teach
the art of poetry in so many lessons. George Eliot humbly working away
at Sylvester, and telling Tennyson that she was finding him "useful,"
and Tennyson, whose melodies pursued him, like bees in pursuit of a
bee-master, expressing a gruff good-natured scepticism--what a picture
it raises! But George Eliot persisted, with that astounding firmness
of application which she had, and she produced quite a large body of
various verse. She wrote a Comtist tragedy, _The Spanish Gypsy_, of
which I must speak softly, since, omnivorous as I am, I have never been
able to swallow it. But she wrote many other things, epics and sonnets
and dialogues and the rest of them, which are not so hard to read.
She actually printed privately for her friends two little garlands,
_Agatha_ (1868) and _Brother and Sister_ (1869), which are the only
"rare issues" of hers sought after by collectors, for she was not given
to bibliographical curiosity. These verses and many others she polished
and re-wrote with untiring assiduity, and in 1874 she published a
substantial volume of them. I have been reading them over again, in the
intense wish to be pleased with them, but it is impossible--the root
of the matter is not in them. There is an _Arion_, which is stately in
the manner of Marvell. The end of this lyric is tense and decisive,
but there is the radical absence of song. In the long piece called
_A College Breakfast Party_, which she wrote in 1874, almost all
Tennyson's faults are reconstructed on the plan of the Chinese tailor
who carefully imitates the rents in the English coat he is to copy.
There is a Goethe-like poem, of a gnomic order, called _Self and Life_,
stuffed with valuable thoughts as a turkey is stuffed with chestnuts.

And it is all so earnest and so intellectual, and it does so much
credit to Sylvester. After long consideration, I have come to the
conclusion that the following sonnet, from _Brother and Sister_, is the
best piece of sustained poetry that George Eliot achieved. It deals
with the pathetic and beautiful relations which existed between her and
her elder brother Isaac, the Tom Tulliver of _The Mill on the Floss_:

      His sorrow was my sorrow, and his joy
        Sent little leaps and laughs through all my frame;
      My doll seemed lifeless, and no girlish toy
        Had any reason when my brother came.
      I knelt with him at marbles, marked his fling
        Cut the ringed stem and make the apple drop,
      Or watched him winding close the spiral string
        That looped the orbits of the humming-top.
      Grasped by such fellowship my vagrant thought
        Ceased with dream-fruit dream-wishes to fulfil;
      Myaëry-picturing fantasy was taught
        Subjection to the harder, truer skill
      That seeks with deeds to grave a thought-tracked line,
      And by "What is" "What will be" to define.

How near this is to true poetry, and yet how many miles away!

At last George Eliot seems to have felt that she could never hope, with
all her intellect, to catch the unconsidered music which God lavishes
on the idle linnet and the frivolous chaffinch. She returned to her own
strenuous business of building up the psychological novel. She wrote
_Middlemarch_, which appeared periodically throughout 1872 and as a
book early the following year. It was received with great enthusiasm,
as marking the return of a popular favourite who had been absent for
several years. _Middlemarch_ is the history of three parallel lives
of women, who "with dim lights and tangled circumstances tried to
shape their thought and deed in noble agreement," although "to common
eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness." The
three ineffectual St. Theresas, as their creator conceived them, were
Dorothea, Rosamond, and Mary, and they "shaped the thought and deed"
of Casaubon and Ladislaw and Fred Vincy. _Middlemarch_ is constructed
with unfaltering power, and the picture of commonplace English
country life which it gives is vivacious after a mechanical fashion,
but all the charm of the early stories has evaporated, and has left
behind it merely a residuum of unimaginative satire. The novel is a
very remarkable instance of elaborate mental resources misapplied,
and genius revolving, with tremendous machinery, like some great
water-wheel, while no water is flowing underneath it.

When a realist loses hold on reality all is lost, and I for one can
find not a word to say in favour of _Daniel Deronda_, her next and last
novel, which came out, with popularity at first more wonderful than
ever, in 1876. But her inner circle of admirers was beginning to ask
one another uneasily whether her method was not now too calculated,
her effects too plainly premeditated. The intensity of her early works
was gone. Readers began to resent her pedantry, her elaboration of
allusions, her loss of simplicity. They missed the vivid rural scenes
and the flashes of delicious humour which had starred the serious
pages of _Adam Bede_ and _The Mill_ like the lemon-yellow pansies
and potentillas on a dark Welsh moor. Then came _Theophrastus Such_,
a collection of cumbrous and didactic essays which defy perusal;
and finally, soon after her death, her _Correspondence_, a terrible
disappointment to all her admirers, and a blow from which even the
worship of Lord Acton never recovered. Of George Eliot might have been
repeated Swift's epitaph on Sir John Vanbrugh:

      Lie heavy on him, earth, for he
      Laid many a heavy load on thee.

It was the fatal error of George Eliot, so admirable, so elevated, so
disinterested, that for the last ten years of her brief literary life
she did practically nothing but lay heavy loads on literature.

On the whole, then, it is not possible to regard the place which
George Eliot holds in English literature as so prominent a one as
was rather rashly awarded her by her infatuated contemporaries. It
is the inevitable result of "tall talk" about Dante and Goethe that
the figure so unduly magnified fails to support such comparisons when
the perspective is lengthened. George Eliot is unduly neglected now,
but it is the revenge of time on her for the praise expended upon her
works in her life-time. Another matter which militates against her
fame to-day is her strenuous solemnity. One of the philosophers who
knelt at the footsteps of her throne said that she was "the emblem
of a generation distracted between the intense need of believing and
the difficulty of belief." Well, we happen to live, fortunately or
unfortunately for ourselves, in a generation which is "distracted" by
quite other problems, and we are sheep that look up to George Eliot
and are not fed by her ponderous moral aphorisms and didactic ethical
influence. Perhaps another generation will follow us which will be more
patient, and students yet unborn will read her gladly. Let us never
forget, however, that she worked with all her heart in a spirit of
perfect honesty, that she brought a vast intelligence to the service of
literature, and that she aimed from first to last at the loftiest goal
of intellectual ambition. Where she failed, it was principally from an
inborn lack of charm, not from anything ignoble or impure in her mental
disposition. After all, to have added to the slender body of English
fiction seven novels the names of which are known to every cultivated
person is not to have failed, but to have signally, if only relatively,
succeeded.

THE FUTURE POET AND OUR TIME

By J. C. SQUIRE

Here is our world in motion.

We see a corner of it through our eyes. A man will march down a street
with a crowd, or watch the politicians' cabs turning into Palace Yard,
or make speeches, or stand on the deck of a scurrying destroyer in the
North Sea, or mount guard in a Mesopotamian desert. A minute section of
the greater panorama passes before him.

In imagination he will, according to his information and his habit of
mind, visualise what he sees as a part of what he does not see: the
human conflict over five continents, climates and clothes, multitudes,
passions, voices, states, soldiers, negotiations. Each newspaper that
he opens swarms with a confusion of events and argument, of names
familiar and unfamiliar--Wilson, Geddes, Czecho-Slovakia, Yudenitch,
Shantung, and ten thousand more. For the eye there is a medley, for
the ear a great din. As far as he can, busy with his daily pursuits, a
man usually ignores it when it does not intrude to disturb him. When
most unsettled, the life of the world is most fatiguing. The spectacle
is formless and without a centre; the characters rise and fall,
conspicuous one day, forgotten the next. The newspapers mechanically
repeat that we are at the greatest crisis of history, and that "a
great drama is being unrolled." We are aware that the fortunes of our
civilisation have been and are in the balance. But we are in the wood
and cannot see it as we see the French Revolution. It is difficult,
even with the strongest effort of imagination, to visualise the process
as history will record it. To pick out those episodes and those persons
that will haunt the imagination of posterity by their colour and force
is more difficult still. An event, contemporaneously, is an event; a
man is a man who eats, drinks, wears collars, makes speeches, bandies
words with others, and is photographed for the newspapers.

Yet we know that a time will come when these years will be seen in far
retrospect as the years of Elizabeth or of Robespierre are now. The
judgments of the political scientist and the historian will be made:
these men will arrange their sequences and their scales of importance.
They will deduce effects and measure out praise and blame. With them
we are not concerned. But others beyond them will look at our time.
We shall have left our legacy for the imagination. What will it be?
Who of contemporary figures may we guess as likely to be the heroes
of plays and the subjects of poems? Which of the multitudinous events
of these years will give a stock subject to Tragedy? Which of the men
whom we praise or abuse will seem to posterity larger than human, and
go with gestures across their stages, clad in an antique fashion? For
to that age we shall be strange; whether our mechanical arts have died
and left us to haunt the memory of our posterity as a race of unquiet
demons, or whether "progress" along our lines shall have continued,
none of our trappings will have remained the same.

But the soul of man will have remained the same. Those elements in
events and persons which fascinate and stimulate us when we are looking
at our past will stir them when they brood on their past, which is our
to-day. And neither contemporary reputation, nor worldly position, nor
conquests in themselves, nor saintliness in itself, can secure for a
man a continued life in the imagination of the race.

Contemplate our own past in the light of this conception. Who are the
men of whom poets and playwrights and story-tellers have made fictions
and songs? Augustus Cæsar when he lived was the greatest man in the
world: but who since Virgil has panegyrised him and who--unless some
ingenious psychologist of the second-rate like Browning--would make
a dramatic poem out of him? William Wilberforce was a very good man,
but his deeds and his name have survived his personality, and he will
not be the hero of an epic. The Thirty Years' War was a long and very
devastating war; Gustavus and Wallenstein, in their degree, survive
the purposeless series of its disasters; and of all its events that
which most vividly lives in the memory is the small thing with which
it began: the flinging of two noblemen from a tower. What is it in
things and men that gives them permanently the power of stirring the
imagination and the curiosity of the artist? A quality of splendour and
of power that grows more certain when the dust that was its receptacle
has gone to dust. The artist who shall succeed with a historical
personage may make whatever implicit or even explicit commentary he
likes, but in choosing his subject--or being chosen by it--moral
judgment or scientific estimate will not influence him. He will be the
victim of an attraction beyond the will and beyond the reason. Consider
who are the figures that truly, imperatively, live in the political
story of the past. Not only and not all the Cæsars who fought over the
known world; not only such chivalric souls as saw, and obeyed, the
visions of Domrémy, and died when the echoes of the last horn faded
over Roncesvalles. The Crusades, as a whole, were a great poem, but few
of the Crusaders won more than an ephemeral name in art. Cœur de Lion
has been in our own time the hero of a romance, but no man is likely
again to write of even a Godfrey of Boulogne. The great age of historic
Greece passed and left imperishable monuments, "one nation making worth
a nation's pain," but how few of her soldiers and philosophers recur
to the creative imagination! Those stories and figures from history
and pre-history which do so recur are a strangely assorted collection.
The Trojan War and its leading personages are a fascination and an
inspiration perennially, and among those personages Helen, Hector,
Achilles, Ulysses; but not Paris or the sons of Atreus, who live but as
appendages. Coldly arguing, men may ask now as they asked then, why
the Greeks should take so much trouble to recover a worthless woman,
why a Hector should die to keep her, why ten thousand should perish
in such a cause. But to the imagination Hector, Achilles, Helen, the
divine unreason of that ten years' war, make an appeal that never comes
from worthier struggles and wiser people. That is true also of Antony
and Cleopatra: their story to the historian and the moralist is one of
ruinous folly, to the poet a

      Portentous melody of what giants wasting
        Near death, on what a mountainous eminence
        Still, in the proud contempt of consequence,
      The wine of life with jubilation tasting.

The figure of St. Francis has been created and recreated in art; like
those of Nero, Philip II., and Mary Stuart. With the mythical who
are but names we can do what we will; Lear and Hamlet Shakespeare
could cast in the sublimest mould; with the historical we are tied by
the historical, and few are great enough to come through the sieve.
Poets have attempted and failed to make great characters of Becket,
of Wolsey, of Strafford, and Charles I.; their degree of failure has
varied, but they have failed as certainly as Keats would have failed
with King Stephen. The material was not there. Cromwell and Frederick
the Great at least equalled Philip II. in achievement, and excelled him
in intelligence. But Carlyle's two heroes were no true heroes for an
artist; we are too uncertain about Cromwell's inner man, his direction;
for all his battles he could cast no colour over his surroundings; and
as for Frederick there was no tragedy about him--that was left for
his neighbours. A great Cromwell, in one sense, would be an invented
Cromwell; and we cannot invent a Cromwell because of the documents. But
Philip II., the intense, narrow, laborious, dyspeptic bigot, sitting
in a cell of his great bleak prison on the plateau, trying to watch
every corner of the world, and contriving how to scourge most of it; he
was contemptible, full of vices, a failure, but there was that in him
which has compelled the gaze of poets in seclusion from the seventeenth
century down to Verhaeren and Verlaine. He had a virtue in excess.
There was a touch of sublimity about him. The setting counts for much;
monarchs are on pinnacles. But where is Philip IV., except for his
horse-face on the canvases of Velasquez? Where even, as against the
man he beat, is William the Silent, who waged a great fight against
odds and died by the dagger; but was a cool Whig, excessive in nothing
but self-control? He is scarcely alive; but Satan, as Milton saw him,
reigns in hell. We must have splendour of a sort. The normal man loves
a conflagration, though he will lend a hand in putting it out; and if
he is putting it out the inmost heart of him will rejoice if it be
a large fire and there are very few firemen. Vivid force, moral or
non-moral, must be there; a Borgia, though he be as wicked as a Nero,
cannot compete with him before the imagination; he was commonplace and
sordid and there is no response to him.

Such passages and such people kindle us in the records of the past.
How, from this point of view, will the last five years, crowded and
full of strife, look when we are the materials for art?

Will the decline of Turkey command interest? To the historian, not to
the poet, so not, ultimately, to the generality of mankind. There is no
emergence there of the human spirit at an exalted pitch; very new and
surprising things must come out about Enver if he is to rank with the
great adventurers of the stage. Men may try it--they have tried most
things--but Constantinople has failed the artist before and will again.
There is something pathetic, there might be something tragic, in the
collapse of the House of Hapsburg after so many centuries, but so far
as we know at present (and our statements are avowedly conjectures)
there was no incident of that fall, compassed and witnessed by small
intriguing men, which can redeem it from squalor and insignificance;
and not all our reiterated assurances that this is a tremendous and
tragic catastrophe can invest it with the high romantic quality which
comes from passion in many men or in one man, strength and a heroic
struggle. The League of Nations may be the salvation of mankind, but
it has come in such a way, so slowly, so reluctantly, so haphazardly,
so sensibly, that (unless comedy) nothing vital will be written of
its birth. Can we see a subject for a Shakespeare or a Milton in the
domestic struggle here, or the fluctuations of the Balkans, or the
entry of the East into the war? These things made their differences,
but will they to the artist be more than facts? And the men. There
have arisen from the populations of all countries men, many of them
"great" by virtue of position, influence, achievement; many of them
disinterested and ethically admirable. The mind passes from one to
another; over some it flits, over others it hesitates and hovers. There
is something of the sublime about M. Clemenceau, the old fighter,
symbolising France at the last barrier: a man who, in early novels
now forgotten, formulated, or refused to formulate, a philosophy of
despair, and depicted a universe without principle, order, or hope,
in which the stronger beast, to no end, preyed on the weaker; a man,
nevertheless, so full of vital energy, and so certain of the one thing
he loved, that he desired nothing better than to continue furiously
struggling under the impending cope of darkness. There are, to some of
us, disagreeable things about him; stripped of the non-essential there
is something central, that is, elemental and fine. But were he of the
kind that becomes legendary, should we feel that central something
as still uncertain, and would it have needed a war at the age of
nearly eighty to have revealed something of grandeur in him? Is he, at
bottom, clear and forcible enough; or, alternatively, does he feel with
sufficient strength, does he want anything, plan or place or spectacle,
with sufficient passion? We cannot be certain: he may be forgotten.

Something of doubt colours also one's view of America's entry and the
career of President Wilson, in some regards a close analogue to that
of Lincoln. The lines of that story are simple--the watching pose,
the gradual approximation to war, the President's mental struggle,
his decision to throw America's weight into the scale, his manifestos
to the world in the names of liberty, honesty, and kindness, his
determination that the war, if possible, should be the last. But
the man at the centre of this tremendous revolution of events, the
mouthpiece of these great sentiments, has he that last abandonment of
feeling which alone captivates the imagination of those who hold the
mirror up to certain aspects of Nature? Without denying that it may be
a great blessing that he lacks that force, without presuming to know
all about him that may later be revealed, I feel doubtful. Death, more
particularly violent death, before the end, might have enabled artists
to impute to him something that perhaps was not there, to give him the
benefit of the doubt. But very likely for our good, possibly with the
greatest wisdom, he compromised at Paris. A more spontaneous man might
have ruined us all; but if compromise is excellent in politics, it is
of small use to poets. I doubt if the President will take his place
with St. Francis, Philip II., and Nero.

There will survive from the war, and from the other events of our
day, certain episodes which will, as by accident, draw the notice of
artists and be, as we speak, immortalised. A few of the countless
heroic and self-sacrificing actions which men have performed in every
country and by every sea will be snatched from oblivion. Tragedians,
in all probability, will brood on the story of Miss Cavell. The names
of a subaltern and an airman, fortuitously selected, will live as live
those of Hervé Riel and Pheidipiddes. But this is not what we call
history. I think that the Rupert Brooke legend will develop. He was
beautiful and a poet, and he died in arms, young. He had wandered to
the islands of the Pacific, and his comrades buried him in an island
of the Ægean. About him they will write poems, plays even, in which,
their colour given by actions and sayings which are recorded, he will
pass through experiences which were never his, and thoughts will be
imputed to him which possibly he never had. Two older artists have
taken a more prominent part in the war and its politics, a part that
may indisputably be called political. Of Paderewski I know nothing,
except that a man's progress could not easily have a setting more
superficially romantic; the strength of the man may be guessed at
by stray tokens. A person of whom fame in art may more certainly be
predicted is d'Annunzio, a man not in every way admirable, but of
a demoniacal courage, who has crowned a career full of flamboyant
passages with actions that, as a spectacle, are magnificent: orations
pulsating with ardour for the glory and power of the Latin genius,
words that were pregnant of acts, and following these, after years
of reckless flying, the sudden theatrical stroke at Fiume. As a
"character" he justified himself by that lawless blow; his rhetoric
finally proved itself the rhetoric of real passion, a lust for violent
life, self-assertion at the risk of death, the flaunting of the Italian
name; and, felt as such, it has moved a whole army and a whole people.
Whatever the results of analysis applied to his character or the
ultimate outcome of his splendid panache, he cannot but become, to the
artists of one nation at least, a hero, the material for romance.

There may be others. But, projecting myself as well as I am able, I
cannot see on the larger stage, amid the great fortunes of peoples
and their rulers, more than two subjects on which I think we may be
positive that they will pass into the company of material to which
artists return and return, subjects which already outline themselves
with some clarity to the imagination and have the air of greatness.

One is the fall of the German Empire. Were it shortly to be restored,
the force with which its calamities will appeal to us would be
diminished: for an end must be an end. But if what seemed to happen
really has happened there is a spectacle there which will appear
more prodigious and more moving as time goes on--that triply-armed
vainglorious kingdom pulling the world down on itself; the long,
desperate, ruthless fight against enemies ultimately superior; the
"siege"; the quality, proud and assured if barbaric, of the Prussian
spirit which filled the ruling caste and determined at once its fight
and its fall. The tale is tragic, and almost epic; the persons are
not yet revealed who shall be capable of being made, on the stage
or in books, the instruments for telling it. Certainly, though men,
misguidedly, will attempt to make Wilhelm II. sustain an artistic
load to which he is not equal, the Kaiser will make no great hero or
hero-villain. Possibly in some Hindenburg or other general will be
found the strength, the simplicity of belief or resolve, which make
a great figure; or possibly this will be of the tragedies in which
the individual humans are all pigmies subordinate to the main theme.
Elsewhere, I think, is to be found a man who has about him the certain
atmosphere of imaginative life. He is Vladimir Ulianoff, Lenin.

I talked a few weeks ago with a Russian in exile, a Conservative, an
official of the old regime, and (I think) a Baltic Baron. He was not,
therefore, sympathetic to the Bolsheviks or to Lenin; he hated, though
he understood, them and he loathed him. "Lenin has ruined Russia," he
said, taking no pains to conceal his desire that Lenin should die.
Then the imaginative man in him awoke, as it has a way of doing in
intelligent Russians of all kinds, and he suddenly added vehemently:
"But a hundred years hence a Hero of Legend, like Peter the Great and
the Prince who first introduced Christianity into Russia."

I felt immediately that he had spoken not merely a truth, but an
obvious one. Englishmen may have all sorts of opinions about Lenin;
few have heard much beyond rumour of him, but even those who are most
avowedly ignorant of him or most leniently inclined to him would
scarcely like to find him in their midst. Yet there is that flavour of
vitality, of greatness, about him that is lacking in many who have
caused misery to none and even in some of the most potent benefactors
of mankind. We feel it almost unconsciously; the recognition of it is,
as it were, instinctive; a picture of him, growing from stray scraps
of news and rumour, has been forming in our minds, a picture almost
from the first differentiated from that, say, of his equally active
colleague, Trotsky. Trotsky, one feels, might disappear to-morrow and
leave but a name and some wreckage. But the other man, if he be not in
the line of Tolstoi (as some of his adherents seem to suppose him to
be), is in the line of the great oriental despots, of Tamerlane and
Genghiz Khan.

And we shall know more of him, far more, than we shall ever know of
Tamerlane and Genghiz Khan: as much very likely as we know of Napoleon.
He has no physical attributes and no material accoutrements which
might lend him adventitious aid as the centre of a pageant of power,
struggle, or woe: a short, bowed man in a black coat, vivacious, hedged
by no formalities of ceremonial. Yet to the imagination--and it must
surely be so when he is seen backward--this little fanatic, who for
twenty years was hunted from exile to exile, and returned to overthrow
a government and enthrone himself on the ruins of a great Empire, is
the centre of Russia, seated in the middle of that enormous web of
conflict and suffering like an impassive and implacable spider. We
hear this and that of him. He is genial in conversation. He is not
personally cruel. He is willing to slaughter thousands at a blow to
realise his ideas, for he looks at human affairs historically, if with
but one eye. He is a poor speaker, but his words whip audiences into
enthusiasm. He thought he would be overturned in three weeks, but
adapted himself with instant decision when a longer lease was offered.
This man and that is jealous of him and has tried to upset him; he has
said this or that about his success and his failure; he will fly; or
he knows he will be executed. The reports contradict each other, but
the picture remains and strengthens, the picture of a man in the grip
of an idea, with one of the strongest wills in the world, indifferent
to the pains and pleasures of ordinary people. That ugly little face,
with its swollen bald forehead, its slanting lids closing on straight
penetrating eyes, its squat nose, its fleshy mouth between moustache
and goatee, its smile mechanical as a mask's, will be more familiar to
our descendants than to us. They will see in reverie the revolution,
with vast ancient Russia as its background, and this doctrinaire tyrant
as its centre, with his ragged armies, his spies and Chinamen, his
motley gang of clever Jews, brigands, and mild, bearded, spectacled
professors around him. They will feel his magnetism, and, whether as
"hero of legend" or devil of legend, they will celebrate him.

Of these things perhaps men will write two hundred or two thousand
years hence. But the duration of human life on our planet is measured,
as we suppose, in tens of thousands of years.

We go to the grave. The sunlight comes into this room; it shines on
the table and the books and the papers. I listen to the twittering of
the birds, shorter lived than ourselves, and the intermittent rushing
of the wind, which, while life lasts, goes on always the same. A car
moans past; its noise begins, swells, and dies away. The trees wave
about; a horse's feet plod by; the sunlight sparkles on the river
and glorifies the mud. Clouds come over. The sun, unseen, sets; the
evening grows bluer and lamps twinkle out over the misty river. So,
noiselessly, proceeds time, and the earth revolves and revolves through
its alternations of sun and shade. These airs, these lights and sounds,
will be the same; but we, alive and immortal as we feel, shall have
gone and the clamour that we made will recede. To an epoch we shall
be the coloured strutters of history and of legend; to a later age,
however remote and whatever the accumulation of our records, we must
become august shadows like the dim kings and fabulous empires that
passed before Babylon and Egypt. "Truly ye are the people, and wisdom
shall die with you." The sentence was written more than two thousand
years ago; the author is unknown and receding. Yet, obliterated in the
end though all remembrance of us may be, we shall not even on this
earth die with our bodies, and for some interval, not to be computed,
certain actions at this moment in progress will endure in a sublimated
state, and certain men with whom we may even have spoken will enlarge
to a more than human stature and communicate, as they could never do in
life, their essence to the enduring tradition of men. Are they those
whom we have mentioned; or are they, as they may be, others who to us
are insignificant and obscured?

HORACE WALPOLE[1]

      [1] _Letters of Horace Walpole; Oxford University Press,
          16 vols., 96s. Supplementary Letters, 1919; Oxford
          University Press, 2 vols., 17s._

By ROBERT LYND

Horace Walpole was a dainty rogue in porcelain who walked badly. In
his best days, as he records in one of his letters, it was said of
him that he "tripped like a pewit." "If I do not flatter myself," he
wrote when he was just under sixty, "my march at present is more like
a dabchick's." A lady has left a description of him entering a room,
"knees bent, and feet on tiptoe as if afraid of a wet floor." When his
feet were not swollen with the gout, they were so slender, he said,
that he "could dance a minuet on a silver penny." He was ridiculously
lean, and his hands were crooked with his unmerited disease. An
invalid, a caricature of the birds, and not particularly well dressed
in spite of his lavender suit and partridge silk stockings, he has
nevertheless contrived to leave in his letters an impression of almost
perfect grace and dandyism. He had all the airs of a beau. He affected
coolness, disdain, amateurishness, triviality. He was a china figure of
insolence. He lived on the mantelpiece, and regarded everything that
happened on the floor as a rather low joke that could not be helped.
He warmed into humanity in his friendships and in his defence of the
house of Walpole; but if he descended from his mantelpiece, it was more
likely to be in order to feed a squirrel than to save an Empire. His
most common image of the world was a puppet-show. He saw kings, prime
ministers, and men of genius alike about the size of dolls. When George
II. died, he wrote a brief note to Thomas Brand: "Dear Brand--You love
laughing; there is a king dead; can you help coming to town?" That
represents his measure of things. Those who love laughing will laugh
all the more when they discover that, a week earlier, Walpole had
written a letter, rotund, fulsome, and in the language of the bended
knee, begging Lord Bute to be allowed to kiss the Prince of Wales's
hand. His attitude to the Court he described to George Montagu as
"mixing extreme politeness with extreme indifference." His politeness,
like his indifference, was but play at the expense of a solemn world.
"I wrote to Lord Bute," he informed Montagu; "thrust in all the
_unexpecteds, want of ambition, disinterestedness, etc._, that I could
amass, gilded with as much duty, affection, zeal, etc., as possible."
He frankly professed relief that he had not after all to go to Court
and act out the extravagant compliments he had written. "Was ever so
agreeable a man as King George the Second," he wrote, "to die the very
day it was necessary to save me from ridicule?" "For my part," he adds
later in the same spirit, "my man Harry will always be a favourite; he
tells me all the amusing news; he first told me of the late Prince of
Wales's death, and to-day of the King's." It is not that Walpole was
a republican of the school of Plutarch. He was merely a toy republican
who enjoyed being insolent at the expense of kings, and behind their
backs. He was scarcely capable of open rudeness in the fashion of Beau
Brummell's "Who's your fat friend?" His ridicule was never a public
display; it was a secret treasured for his friends. He was the greatest
private entertainer of the eighteenth century, and he ridiculed the
great, as people say, for the love of diversion. "I always write the
thoughts of the moment," he told the dearest of his friends, Conway,
"and even laugh to divert the person I am writing to, without any ill
will on the subjects I mention." His letters are for the most part
those of a good-natured man.

It is not that he was above the foible--it was barely more than
that--of hatred. He did not trouble greatly about enemies of his own,
but he never could forgive the enemies of Sir Robert Walpole. His
ridicule of the Duke of Newcastle goes far beyond diversion. It is the
baiting of a mean and treacherous animal, whose teeth were "tumbling
out," and whose mouth was "tumbling in." He rejoices in the exposure of
the dribbling indignity of the Duke, as when he describes him going to
Court on becoming Prime Minister in 1754:

  On Friday this august remnant of the Pelhams went to Court for the
  first time. At the foot of the stairs he cried and sunk down; the
  yeomen of the guard were forced to drag him up under the arms. When
  the closet-door opened, he flung himself at his length at the King's
  feet, sobbed, and cried, "God bless your Majesty God preserve your
  Majesty!" and lay there howling and embracing the King's knees, with
  one foot so extended that my Lord Coventry, who was _luckily_ in
  waiting, and begged the standers-by to retire, with, "For God's sake,
  gentlemen, don't look at a great man in distress!" endeavouring to
  shut the door, caught his grace's foot, and made him roar with pain.

The caricature of the Duke is equally merciless in the description of
George II.'s funeral in the Abbey, in which the "burlesque Duke" is
introduced as comic relief into the solemn picture:

  He fell into a fit of crying the moment he came into the chapel, and
  flung himself back in a stall, the Archbishop hovering over him with
  a smelling-bottle; but in two minutes his curiosity got the better of
  his hypocrisy, and he ran about the chapel with his glass to spy who
  was or was not there, spying with one hand and mopping his eyes with
  the other. Then returned the fear of catching cold; and the Duke of
  Cumberland, who was sinking with heat, felt himself weighed down, and
  turning round found it was the Duke of Newcastle standing upon his
  train to avoid the chill of the marble.

Walpole, indeed, broke through his habit of public decorum in his
persecution of the Duke; and he tells how on one occasion at a ball
at Bedford House he and Brand and George Selwyn plagued the pitiful
old creature, who "wriggled, and shuffled, and lisped, and winked, and
spied" his way through the company, with a conversation at his expense
carried on in stage whispers. There was never a more loyal son than
Horace Walpole. He offered up a Prime Minister daily as a sacrifice at
Sir Robert's tomb.

At the same time, his aversions were not always assumed as part of a
family inheritance. He had by temperament a small opinion of men and
women outside the circle of his affections. It was his first instinct
to disparage. He even described his great friend Madame du Deffand, at
the first time of meeting her, as "an old blind debauchée of wit." His
comments on the men of genius of his time are almost all written in a
vein of satirical intolerance. He spoke ill of Sterne and Dr. Johnson,
of Fielding and Richardson, of Boswell and Goldsmith. Goldsmith he
found "silly"; he was "an idiot with once or twice a fit of parts."
Boswell's _Tour of the Hebrides_ was "the story of a mountebank and
his zany." Walpole felt doubly justified in disliking Johnson owing
to the criticism of Gray in the _Lives of the Poets_. He would not
even, when Johnson died, subscribe to a monument. A circular letter
asking for a subscription was sent to him, signed by Burke, Boswell,
and Reynolds. "I would not deign to write an answer," Walpole told the
Miss Berrys, "but sent down word by my footman, as I would have done
to parish officers with a brief, that I would not subscribe." Walpole
does not appear in this incident the "sweet-tempered creature" he had
earlier claimed to be. His pose is that of a school-girl in a cutting
mood. At the same time his judgment of Johnson has an element of truth
in it. "Though he was good-natured at bottom," he said of him, "he was
very ill-natured at top." It has often been said of Walpole that, in
his attitude to contemporary men of genius, he was influenced mainly
by their position in society--that he regarded an author who was not a
gentleman as being necessarily an inferior author. This is hardly fair.
The contemporary of whom he thought most highly was Gray, the son of a
money broker. He did not spare Lady Mary Wortley Montagu any more than
Richardson. If he found an author offensive, it was more likely to be
owing to a fastidious distaste for low life than to an aristocratic
distaste for low birth; and to him Bohemianism was the lowest of low
life. It was certainly Fielding's Bohemianism that disgusted him. He
relates how two of his friends called on Fielding one evening and found
him "banqueting with a blind man, a woman, and three Irishmen, on some
cold mutton and a bone of ham, both in one dish, and the dirtiest
cloth." Horace Walpole's daintiness recoiled from the spirit of an
author who did not know how to sup decently. If he found Boswell's
_Johnson_ tedious, it was no doubt partly due to his inability to
reconcile himself to Johnson's table manners. It can hardly be denied
that he was unnaturally sensitive to surface impressions. He was a
great observer of manners, but not a great portrayer of character. He
knew men in their absurd actions rather than in their motives--even
their absurd motives. He never admits us into the springs of action in
his portraits as Saint-Simon does. He was too studied a believer in
the puppetry of men and women to make them more than ridiculous. And
unquestionably the vain race of authors lent itself admirably to his
love of caricature. His account of the vanity of Gibbon, whose history
he admired this side enthusiasm, shows how he delighted in playing with
an egoistic author as with a trout.

"So much," he concludes, "for literature and its fops." The comic
spirit leans to an under-estimate rather than an over-estimate of
human nature, and the airs the authors gave themselves were not only
a breach of his code, but an invitation to his contempt. "You know,"
he once wrote, "I shun authors, and would never have been one myself
if it obliged me to keep such bad company. They are always in earnest
and think their profession serious, and will dwell upon trifles and
reverence learning. I laugh at all these things, and write only
to laugh at them and divert myself. None of us are authors of any
consequence, and it is the most ridiculous of all vanities to be vain
of being _mediocre_." He followed the Chinese school of manners and
made light of his own writings. "What have I written," he asks, "that
was worth remembering, even by myself?" "It would be affected," he
tells Gray, "to say I am indifferent to fame. I certainly am not, but
I am indifferent to almost anything I have done to acquire it. The
greater part are mere compilations; and no wonder they are, as you say,
incorrect when they were commonly written with people in the room."

It is generally assumed that, in speaking lightly of himself, Walpole
was merely posturing. To me it seems that he was sincere enough. He
had a sense of greatness in literature, as is shown by his reverence
of Shakespeare, and he was too much of a realist not to see that his
own writings at their best were trifles beside the monuments of the
poets. He felt that he was doing little things in a little age. He was
diffident both for his times and for himself. So difficult do some
writers find it to believe that there was any deep genuineness in him
that they ask us to regard even his enthusiasm for great literature as
a pretence. They do not realise that the secret of his attraction for
us is that he was an enthusiast disguised as an eighteenth-century man
of fashion. His airs and graces were not the result of languor, but of
his pleasure in wearing a mask. He was quick, responsive, excitable,
and only withdrew into the similitude of a china figure, as Diogenes
into his tub, through philosophy. The truth is, the only dandies who
are tolerable are those whose dandyism is a cloak of reserve. Our
interest in character is largely an interest in contradictions of
this kind. The beau capable of breaking into excitement awakens our
curiosity, as does the conqueror stooping to a humane action, the
Puritan caught in the net of the senses, or the pacifist in a rage of
violence. The average man, whom one knows superficially, is a formula,
or seems to live the life of a formula. That is why we find him dull.
The characters who interest us in history and literature, on the other
hand, are perpetually giving the lie to the formulæ we invent, and are
bound to invent, for them. They give us pleasure not by confirming us,
but by surprising us. It seems to me absurd, then, to regard Walpole's
air of indifference as the only real thing about him and to question
his raptures. From his first travels among the Alps with Gray down to
his senile letters to Hannah More about the French Revolution, we see
him as a man almost hysterical in the intensity of his sensations,
whether of joy or of horror. He lived for his sensations like an
æsthete. He wrote of himself as "I, who am as constant at a fire as
George Selwyn at an execution." If he cared for the crownings of kings
and such occasions, it was because he took a childish delight in the
fireworks and illuminations.

He had the keen spirit of a masquerader. Masquerades, he declared,
were "one of my ancient passions," and we find him as an elderly man
dressing out "a thousand young Conways and Cholmondeleys" for an
entertainment of the kind, and going "with more pleasure to see them
pleased than when I formerly delighted in that diversion myself." He
was equally an enthusiast in his hobbies and his tastes. He rejoiced
to get back in May to Strawberry Hill, "where my two passions,
lilacs and nightingales, are in bloom." He could not have made his
collections or built his battlements in a mood of indifference. In
his love of mediæval ruins he showed himself a Goth-intoxicated man.
As for Strawberry Hill itself, the result may have been a ridiculous
mouse, but it took a mountain of enthusiasm to produce it. Walpole's
own description of his house and its surroundings has an exquisite
charm that almost makes one love the place as he did. "It is a little
plaything house," he told Conway, "that I got out of Mrs. Chenevix's
shop, and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set in enamelled
meadows, with filigree hedges:

      A small Euphrates through the piece is roll'd,
      And little finches wave their wings in gold."

He goes on to decorate the theme with comic and fanciful properties:

  Two delightful roads that you would call dusty supply me continually
  with coaches and chaises; barges as solemn as barons of the exchequer
  move under my window; Richmond Hill and Ham-walks bound my prospect;
  but, thank God, the Thames is between me and the Duchess of
  Queensberry. Dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all around, and
  Pope's ghost is just now skimming under my window by a most poetical
  moonlight. I have about land enough to keep such a farm as Noah's
  when he set up in the Ark with a pair of each kind.

It is in the spirit of a child throwing its whole imagination into
playing with a Noah's Ark that he describes his queer house. It is
in this spirit that he sees the fields around his house "speckled
with cows, horses, and sheep." The very phrase suggests toy animals.
Walpole himself declared at the age of seventy-three: "My best wisdom
has consisted in forming a baby-house full of playthings for my second
childhood." That explains why one almost loves the creature. Macaulay
has severely censured him for devoting himself to the collection of
knick-knacks, such as King William III.'s spurs, and it is apparently
impossible to defend Walpole as a collector to be taken seriously.
Walpole, however, collected things in a mood of fantasy as much as
of connoisseurship. He did not take himself quite seriously. It was
fancy, not connoisseurship, that made him hang up Magna Charta beside
his bed and, opposite it, the Warrant for the execution of King
Charles I., on which he had written "Major Charta." Who can question
the fantastic quality of the mind that wrote to Conway: "Remember,
neither Lady Salisbury nor you, nor Mrs. Damer, have seen my new divine
closet, nor the billiard-sticks with which the Countess of Pembroke
and Arcadia used to play with her brother, Sir Philip," and ended: "I
never did see Cotchel, and am sorry. Is not the old wardrobe there
still? There was one from the time of Cain, but Adam's breeches and
Eve's under-petticoat were eaten by a goat in the ark. Good night." He
laughed over the knick-knacks he collected for himself and his friends.
"As to snuff-boxes and tooth-pick cases," he wrote to the Countess of
Ossory from Paris in 1771, "the vintage has entirely failed this year."
Everything that he turned his mind to in Strawberry Hill he regarded
in the same spirit of comic delight. He stood outside himself, like a
spectator, and nothing gave him more pleasure than to figure himself
as a master of the ceremonies among the bantams, and the squirrels and
the goldfish. In one of his letters he describes himself and Bentley
fishing in the pond for goldfish with "nothing but a pail and a basin
and a tea-strainer, which I persuade my neighbours is the Chinese
method." This was in order to capture some of the fish for Bentley, who
"carried a dozen to town t'other day in a decanter."

Among the various creatures with which he loved to surround himself,
it is impossible to forget either the little black spaniel, Tony, that
the wolf carried off near a wood in the Alps during his first travels,
or the more imperious little dog, Tonton, which he has constantly to
prevent from biting people at Madame du Deffand's, but which with
Madame du Deffand herself "grows the greater favourite the more people
he devours." "T'other night," writes Walpole, to whom Madame du Deffand
afterwards bequeathed the dog in her will, "he flew at Lady Barrymore's
face, and I thought would have torn her eye out, but it ended in biting
her finger. She was terrified; she fell into tears. Madame du Deffand,
who has too much parts not to see everything in its true light,
perceiving that she had not beaten Tonton half enough, immediately
told us a story of a lady whose dog having bitten a piece out of a
gentleman's leg, the tender dame, in a great fright, cried out, 'Won't
it make him sick?'" In the most attractive accounts we possess of
Walpole in his old age, we see him seated at the breakfast-table,
drinking tea out of "most rare and precious ancient porcelain of
Japan," and sharing the loaf and butter with Tonton (now grown almost
too fat to move, and spread on a sofa beside him), and afterwards going
to the window with a basin of bread and milk to throw to the squirrels
in the garden.

Many people would be willing to admit, however, that Walpole was an
excitable creature where small things were concerned--a parroquet
or the prospect of being able to print original letters of Ninon de
l'Enclos at Strawberry, or the discovery of a poem by the brother of
Anne Boleyn, or Ranelagh, where "the floor is all of beaten princes."
What is not generally realised is that he was also a high-strung and
eager spectator of the greater things. I have already spoken of his
enthusiasm for wild nature as shown in his letters from the Alps. It is
true he grew weary of them. "Such uncouth rocks," he wrote, "and such
uncomely inhabitants." "I am as surfeited with mountains and inns as if
I had eat them," he groaned in a later letter. But the enthusiasm was
at least as genuine as the fatigue. His tergiversation of mood proves
only that there were two Walpoles, not that the Walpole of the romantic
enthusiasms was insincere. He was a devotee of romance, but it was
romance under the control of the comic spirit. He was always amused to
have romance brought down to reality, as when, writing of Mary Queen of
Scots, he said: "I believe I have told you that, in a very old trial of
her, which I bought for Lord Oxford's collection, it is said that she
was a large lame woman. Take sentiments out of their _pantoufles_, and
reduce them to the infirmities of mortality, what a falling off there
is!" But see him in the picture-gallery in his father's old house at
Houghton, after an absence of sixteen years, and the romantic mood is
uppermost. "In one respect," he writes, speaking of the pictures, "I am
very young; I cannot satiate myself with looking," and he adds, "Not
a picture here but calls a history; not one but I remember in Downing
Street or Chelsea, where queens and crowds admired them." And, if he
could not "satiate himself with looking" at the Italian and Flemish
masters, he similarly preserved the heat of youth in his enthusiasm
for Shakespeare. "When," he wrote, during his dispute with Voltaire on
the point, "I think over all the great authors of the Greeks, Romans,
Italians, French, and English (and I know no other languages), I set
Shakespeare first and alone and then begin anew."

Not that it is possible to represent him as a man with anything
Dionysiac in his temperament. The furthest that one can go is to say
that he was a man of sincere strong sentiment with quivering nerves.
Capricious in little things, he was faithful in great. His warmth of
nature as a son, as a friend, as a humanitarian, as a believer in
tolerance and liberty, is so unfailing that it is curious it should
ever have been brought in question by any reader of the letters. His
quarrels are negligible when put beside his ceaseless extravagance of
good humour to his friends. His letters alone were golden gifts, but
we also find him offering his fortune to Conway when the latter was in
difficulties. "I have sense enough," he wrote, "to have real pleasure
in denying myself baubles, and in saving a very good income to make a
man happy for whom I have a just esteem and most sincere friendship."
"Blameable in ten thousand other respects," he wrote to Conway
seventeen years later, "may not I almost say I am perfect with regard
to you? Since I was fifteen have I not loved you unalterably?" "I am,"
he claimed towards the end of his life, "very constant and sincere to
friends of above forty years." In his friendships he was more eager to
give than to receive. Madame du Deffand was only dissuaded from making
him her heir by his threat that if she did so he would never visit
her again. Ever since his boyhood he was noted for his love of giving
pleasure and for his thoughtfulness regarding those he loved. The
earliest of his published letters was until recently one written at the
age of fourteen. But Dr. Paget Toynbee, in his supplementary volumes of
Walpole letters, recently published, has been able to print one to Lady
Walpole written at the age of eight, which suggests that Walpole was a
delightful sort of child, incapable of forgetting a parent, a friend,
or a pet:

  Dear mama, I hop you are wall, and I am very wall, and I hop papa is
  wal, and I begin to slaap, and I hop al wall and my cosens like there
  pla things vary wall and I hop Doly phillips is wall and pray give my
  Duty to papa.

        HORACE WALPOLE.

  and I am very glad to hear by Tom that all my cruatuars are all wall.
  and Mrs. Selwen has sprand her Fot and gvis her Sarves to you and I
  dind ther yester Day.

At Eton later on he was a member of two leagues of friendship--the
"Triumvirate," as it was called, which included the two Montagus, and
the "Quadruple Alliance," in which one of his fellows was Gray. The
truth is, Walpole was always a person who depended greatly on being
loved. "One loves to find people care for one," he wrote to Conway,
"when they can have no view in it." His friendship in his old age for
the Miss Berrys--his "twin wives," his "dear Both"--to each of whom he
left an annuity of £4000, was but a continuation of that kindliness
which ran like a stream (ruffled and sparkling with malice, no doubt)
through his long life. And his kindness was not limited to his friends,
but was at the call of children and, as we have seen, of animals.
"You know," he explains to Conway, apologising for not being able to
visit him on account of the presence of a "poor little sick girl" at
Strawberry Hill, "how courteous a knight I am to distrest virgins of
five years old, and that my castle gates are always open to them."
One does not think of Walpole primarily as a squire of children, and
certainly, though he loved on occasion to romp with the young, there
was little in him of a Dickens character. But he was what is called
"sympathetic." He was sufficient of a man of imagination to wish to see
an end put to the sufferings of "those poor victims, chimney-sweepers."
So far from being a heartless person, as he has been at times
portrayed, he had a heart as sensitive as an anti-vivisectionist.
This was shown in his attitude to animals. In 1760, when there was a
great terror of mad dogs in London, and an order was issued that all
dogs found in the streets were to be killed, he wrote to the Earl of
Strafford:

  In London there is a more cruel campaign than that waged by the
  Russians: the streets are a very picture of the murder of the
  innocents--one drives over nothing but poor dead dogs! The dear,
  good-natured, honest, sensible creatures! Christ! how can anybody
  hurt them? Nobody could but those Cherokees the English, who desire
  no better than to be halloo'd to blood--one day Samuel Byng, the next
  Lord George Sackville, and to-day the poor dogs!

As for Walpole's interest in politics, we are told by writer after
writer that he never took them seriously, but was interested in them
mainly for gossip's sake. It cannot be denied that he made no great
fight for good causes while he sat in the House of Commons. Nor had he
the temper of a ruler of men. But as a commentator on politics, and a
spreader of opinion in private, he showed himself to be a politician
at once sagacious, humane, and sensitive to the meaning of events.
His detestation of the arbitrary use of power had almost the heat
of a passion. He detested it alike in a government and in a mob. He
loathed the violence that compassed the death of Admiral Byng and the
violence that made war on America. He raged against a public world that
he believed was going to the devil. "I am not surprised," he wrote in
1776, "at the idea of the devil being always at our elbows. They who
invented him no doubt could not conceive how men could be so atrocious
to one another, without the intervention of a fiend. Don't you think,
if he had never been heard of before, that he would have been invented
on the late partition of Poland?" "Philosophy has a poor chance with
me," he wrote a little later in regard to America, "when my warmth
is stirred--and yet I know that an angry old man out of Parliament,
and that can do nothing but be angry, is a ridiculous animal." The
war against America he described as "a wretched farce of fear daubed
over with airs of bullying." War at any time was, in his eyes, all
but the unforgivable sin. In 1781, however, his hatred had lightened
into contempt. "The Dutch fleet is hovering about," he wrote, "but
it is a pickpocket war, and not a martial one, and I never attend to
petty larceny." As for mobs, his attitude to them is to be seen in his
comment on the Wilkes riots, when he declares:

  I cannot bear to have the name of Liberty profaned to the
  destruction of the cause; for frantic tumults only lead to that
  terrible corrective, Arbitrary Power--which cowards call out for as
  protection, and knaves are so ready to grant.

Not that he feared mobs as he feared governments. He regarded them
with an aristocrat's scorn. The only mob that almost won his tolerance
was that which celebrated the acquittal of Admiral Keppel in 1779. It
was of the mob at this time that he wrote to the Countess of Ossory:
"They were, as George Montagu said of our earthquakes, _so tame you
might have stroked them_." When near the end of his life the September
massacres broke out in Paris, his mob-hatred revived again, and he
denounced the French with the hysterical violence with which many
people to-day denounce the Bolshevists. He called them "_inferno-human_
beings," "that atrocious and detestable nation," and declared that
"France must be abhorred to latest posterity." His letters on the
subject to "Holy Hannah," whatever else may be said against them, are
not those of a cold and dilettante gossip. They are the letters of the
same excitable Horace Walpole who, at an earlier age, when a row had
broken out between the manager and the audience in Drury Lane Theatre,
had not been able to restrain himself, but had cried angrily from his
box, "He is an impudent rascal!" But his politics never got beyond an
angry cry. His conduct in Drury Lane was characteristic of him:

  The whole pit huzzaed, and repeated the words. Only think of my
  being a popular orator! But what was still better, while my shadow
  of a person was dilating to the consistence of a hero, one of the
  chief ringleaders of the riot, coming under the box where I sat, and
  pulling off his hat, said, "Mr. Walpole, what would you please to
  have us do next?" It is impossible to describe to you the confusion
  into which this apostrophe threw me. I sank down into the box, and
  have never since ventured to set my foot into the playhouse.

There you have the fable of Walpole's life. He always in the end sank
down into his box or clambered back to his mantelpiece. Other men might
save the situation. As for him, he had to look after his squirrels and
his friends.

This means no more than that he was not a statesman, but an artist.
He was a connoisseur of great actions, not a practiser of them. At
Strawberry Hill he could at least keep himself in sufficient health
with the aid of iced water and by not wearing a hat when out-of-doors
to compose the greatest works of art of their kind that have appeared
in English. Had he written his letters for money we should have praised
him as one of the busiest and most devoted of authors, and never have
thought of blaming him for abstaining from statesmanship as he did from
wine. Possibly he had the constitution for neither. His genius was a
genius, not of Westminster, but of Strawberry Hill. It is in Strawberry
Hill that one finally prefers to see him framed, an extraordinarily
likeable, charming, and whimsical figure.

Back in Strawberry Hill, he is the Prince Charming among
correspondents. One cannot love him as one loves Charles Lamb and men
of a deeper and more imaginative tenderness. But how incomparable he
is as an acquaintance! How exquisite a specimen--hand-painted--for the
collector of the choice creatures of the human race!

THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH

By J. C. STOBART

There is no doubt whatever about the need for it. Search high or low in
our social world, you will find it full of laments and dissatisfaction.
In the Services Commanding Officers complain that their subalterns,
even though they have been through the Classical course at Public
Schools and Universities, cannot write a clear report. Headquarters
themselves issue their orders and regulations in barbarous,
unintelligible jargon. Government Departments, manned by Greatsmen,
wrap themselves in phrases of pompous obscurity, and Cabinet Ministers
couch their decisions or agreements in terms of such ambiguity as to
leave nobody certain of their meaning. It would, however, be unjust to
attribute bad English entirely to upper-class education, classical or
modern. The business man in his "esteemed favours," though he may be
more terse and polite, is not always able to convey what he intends.
He lays the blame, when he fails to do so, upon the faulty education
of his clerks and stenographers. The masses of the public too often
show in practice that they simply cannot understand printed rules and
directions. It is naturally too much to expect a universal diffusion of
taste or elegance in the use of our language; but even when we feel the
need of fine words to express deep feeling we choose for an obituary
lines like these:

      There's a lonely grave somewhere,
        Where our dear and brave boy sleeps;
      There's a little home in England,
        Where mother and all of us weep.

or these:

      Who knew that when he went away,
        Departing from his door,
      How or when he would come back,
        Or whether never more?
      For he who went away in health,
      In battle soon waylaid,
        Which took him in the prime of life,
      To lie in a distant grave.

No, there is little doubt of the need for teaching clearness and
improving taste. As for correct and grammatical writing, one week's
study of a popular daily newspaper yielded the following excerpts from
a collection of two-score:

  In the last resort we have to depend upon a jury drawn from the
  people to convict the scoundrel who has tainted our public life, and
  unless that jury does not do its duty, unless it is backed by the
  public sentiment of the people....

  The accused was ordered to pay £3, or a month's imprisonment in
  default. At Paignton, in Devon, a gigantic plum-pudding is made and
  distributed to the poor, which in 1897 weighed 250 lb.

  ... the officers closed on him. In throwing him to the ground the
  revolver dropped from his hand.

  The charge is 50 per cent. higher than the same sheet may be bought
  in the street just outside. But what is a penny to an American?

  ---- ---- had an unfortunate experience. While seated in his
  greenhouse it was wrecked by the wind, and on being extricated it
  was ascertained that both his legs were broken above the knee,
  necessitating his removal to the infirmary.

  Provocation has been given by the hostile and shifty conduct of the
  Tibetan authorities, since the signing of the Treaty of 1800, which
  would have justified earlier punishment.

  While riding in a hansom at Southport a runaway horse dashed into the
  conveyance, and the shaft of the trap penetrated her body, pinning
  her to the hansom, and causing almost instantaneous death.

  But if you come to estimate a day's work--even in foot-pounds--the
  woman who cleans, bakes, washes, and takes to school six children,
  carries water and tramps upstairs and down for sixteen hours a day,
  need not fear comparison as to kinetic energy even with a miner
  working eight hours.

What is the schoolmaster doing about it? He is teaching a great variety
of languages ancient and foreign, sciences, arts and crafts, and among
other things he is believed to teach "English." He has found out that
it does not come by nature, and that a mastery of the English language
cannot be assured by teaching something quite different. But as to the
best method of teaching boys and girls to write, read, and appreciate
good English there is a controversy. Just as in most other branches of
education there is a traditional method and a reformed method. Upon the
latter some of us build hopes of extraordinarily great achievements,
and if these hopes lead us into impatience we must ask for pardon.

Though Mr. Mais[2] justly claims credit for originality
in departing occasionally from the fixed lines of English
teaching as it is practised in the Public Schools, his "Course"
mainly follows the traditional modes and is directed to the
preparation of pupils for the orthodox type of examination.
The nature of the course is indicated by the chapter-headings;
for example: "Grammar and Syntax--Analysis, Parsing and Synthesis--
Punctuation--Vocabulary--Letter-writing--Reproduction--Paraphrase--
Dictation--Précis--Prosody--Figures of Speech--Indirect Speech--
Essay-writing--Examination Papers." There are, beside these
thoroughly normal chapters, six pages on Elocution, Debating,
Lecturing, Acting, etc., a useful list of cheap books for a home
library, more than fifty critical pages on Shakespeare, and a
regrettable[3] twenty-page chapter entitled "Short History of English
Literature." I think the author is trying to shake off a yoke which is
not entirely congenial to him. But if he will make boys write essays
on Scandinavia, explain Synecdoche, paraphrase Keats, "condense the
_Vision of Mirzah_ to 300 words," he cannot complain if he is mistaken
for one of the old regime and guillotined in distinguished company.

      [2] _An English Course for Schools_. By S. B. P. Mais,
          Assistant Master at Tonbridge School and Examiner in
          English to the University of London. Grant Richards
          Ltd.; 6s. net.

      [3] _e.g._ "R. L. Stevenson represents the incurably
          romantic and is followed by Kipling and Conrad."

The traditional method begins with the copy-book and proceeds by
way of dictation and formal exercises to its goal in the essay.
Dictation is the core and kernel of it, for even when the exercise is
called "composition" the subjects are so chosen that the pupil needs
detailed guidance throughout and the results are practically uniform.
The writing is accompanied by reading and grammar, but the reading
is severely limited and the text is obscured by comment and minute
explanation. Poetry is not only studied with notes: it is analysed
and paraphrased and parsed. The grammar, which is also traditional,
is alien both in its method and terminology. The people who invented
"English" in the middle of the nineteenth century were the classical
grammarians who knew only one way of teaching a language, and had
been forced under pressure from indignant parents to put "English"
on the syllabus. They gave it an hour a week: they spent that hour
in parsing, in declining uninflected nouns, in conjugating, in
insisting that because the complement of a Latin or Greek copulative
verb is in concord with its subject therefore "It's _me_" must be
wrong in English. They did violence to our tongue in other ways to
make a Teutonic language fit a Latin system, introducing all sorts
of unnecessary complications of gender, mood and case, which do not
exist. They transferred to English the whole cumbrous system of Latin
grammatical terminology and then set harmless English children to
explain their hideous technicalities. All because they had an hour
to waste and were determined to waste it in the manner to which they
were accustomed. They were assisted in this ambition by the Scotch
professors of rhetoric who were especially strong in figures of speech.

And then they remarked with pain and surprise that their method did not
succeed. Their scholars did not appreciate good literature when it was
taught to them. They lacked originality in their composition. They were
tongue-tied in their speaking and muddled in their writing. There was
once a man who determined to teach his monkey to sing "Voi che sapete,"
an air of which he was inordinately fond. So he took an old stocking
with a hole in the toe and two holes in the heel and turned it inside
out in order to conceal the holes, and crammed it full with shavings
and breadcrumbs and fried it carefully and fed the monkey on it. When
he complained that the monkey's voice was no better at the end of the
course, his friends used to explain that it was because he was an old
man and had lived in the reign of Queen Victoria.

Remember that this "English" teaching has been well tried for more
than fifty years. Substantially, the course we are considering now
does not differ in its methods from books like Dalgleish's _English
Composition in Prose and Verse based on Grammatical Synthesis_ of
1864 or Dr. William Smith's _English Course_. The subject subsists as
a shuttlecock in a perpetual game of Badminton between examiners and
teachers. If you ask the examiner of English why he continues to set
such stupid questions, he replies quite rightly that he is forced to
do so by the stupidity of the schoolmasters who teach it. If you ask
the schoolmaster why he makes his "English" the dullest subject in the
syllabus, he will probably answer that he is preparing for the London
Matriculation. If you look for an explanation of the method, you might
surmise that the aim is to secure accuracy in grammar at all costs.
But that is not the aim. Mr. Mais explains it in a paragraph which he
might well set for analysis of pronouns: "Of all our failings as a
nation, this is the most marked. In our talk we are reticent; in our
writing we are incoherent and slipshod. Every schoolmaster knows from
sad experience that the average boy cannot produce a readable essay on
any subject, however hard he may try. He strives by every means in his
power to instil a sense of originality in his classes, to teach his
boys and girls to observe...." Originality and observation!

To take the second first, every scoutmaster knows that observation can
be taught, but not by dictation. Probably there is no faculty of the
mind which responds so readily to training and practice. By systematic
questioning a young child can be taught to notice the common objects
by the wayside on his morning walk, the goods in the shop windows, the
flowers in the garden, to remember them and describe them afterwards
with great fidelity. A good teacher of infants can easily teach a
child of six or seven to observe minute differences, to compare and
contrast similar objects, such as the bulb of the iris and the corn
of the crocus. This kind of observation is commonly appropriated by
science, and it is indeed the same faculty which the physicist employs
afterwards with his fine balances and test-tubes. But it is also, when
reproduced in language, the beginning of good English. Words are the
balances. Careful description in words, written and spoken, of things
actually seen is, when developed fully, more than half of the business
of poets, journalists, and novelists. A few gifted mortals like Balzac,
Gissing, or Hardy may possess the faculty by nature, but any one may
acquire it through early training and continuous practice. It can be
lost almost as easily as it is won.

Can originality be taught? Less easily perhaps than observation. Real
originality, in the sense of creative power, or what in its highest
form we call "Inspiration," cannot be taught in school. Who taught
Blake to see the tiger burning bright in midmost eighteenth-century
London? There are some men born, apparently, to be our masters. Ideas
flow not into them but out of them. They are the mainsprings of our
mechanism. We attribute their origin to the wandering breath of some
holy spirit. But in a humbler sense children can certainly be trained
to be original, just as they can be trained by opposite methods to
be commonplace, slavish, imitative, genteel, conventional, correct,
and accommodating. These virtues are taught with great diligence and
success in many schools, public and private. In the earliest stage
you copy in a beautiful copperplate handwriting words like "England
Expects Every," and you read aloud very slowly from a little book
which contains these words in immense type: SHUN THAT OX HE IS SHY. You
recite in chorus after teacher, you correct your speech by mimicking
her accents and gestures. You sit, stand, or march to numbers at the
word of command. In the next stage you are promoted to dictation, and
once a fortnight you write a composition. But as the theme is Duty or
The Elephant or something about which you can hardly be expected to
have connected notions, you are given the headings, told what to say,
have your mistakes carefully underlined, and are then presented with a
model or fair copy. Any departure from the normal, whether in spelling
or in ideas, is heavily penalised, and no credit is given for positive
merit. In the next stage you learn the art of letter-writing by
studying celebrated models, you paraphrase good poetry into bad prose,
you analyse and parse and explain grammatical terms, you summarise and
expand, you turn direct into indirect speech and generally feed your
mind with a generous diet of cold minced hash.

If I were a little boy trained for years and years according to this
plan, I hope I should be grateful to my teachers for all the trouble
they had taken with me. But, if they then turned round upon me and
reproached me with not being _original_, I should be sorely tempted to
commit a breach of good English and say "That is the limit!"

In the pedagogical and psychological sense these methods are twenty
years behind the times. They have been exploded in theory and disproved
in practice. Each subject in its turn has fought its battle with
the Dictation Method, and everywhere, except perhaps in religious
instruction, the principle has been decided. In drawing, the freehand
copy has given place to direct observation; in mathematics, mechanical
working of rules and examples has been replaced by intelligence and
problems. Even physical exercises are no longer mere drill.

Perhaps it is in the primary school that we shall find the right
principles most clearly marked, if only because with the younger
children the teacher is nearer to Nature and mistakes punish themselves
more visibly. There also the dead weight of tradition has been less
oppressive. Before Madame Montessori's star had risen above the
firmament the best teachers in English infant schools had solved the
fundamental problems of how to teach good English. The principle
is that what the child speaks or writes shall come from its own
brain. The first medium of expression is, of course, the tongue. No
children, not even English children, are tongue-tied by nature, but
they are generally timid and sensitive. If they find their adult world
discouraging communicativeness with anger, or sarcasm, or pedantry,
they will close down upon the rock of silence like the limpet which
you must smash before you move. Probably before he comes to school the
child has already been silenced by a mother or father whose love will
bear anything for the child except to listen to him. It is wonderful
to watch the skilled teacher of infants repairing this mischief,
re-establishing confidence between innocence and wisdom, unlocking
hearts and tongues, creating an atmosphere of freedom in which she
possesses, in reality, absolute control. Instead of limpets you
behold sea-anemones full open. The children talk at great length in
co-ordinate construction about their mother and the baby's tooth, and
when they have finished they sit quiet listening to others. Sometimes
the teacher takes up her parable and tells them about Cinderella or the
King of the Golden River. In other lessons other mediums of expression
appear--pencils, chalk, plastic clay, music, dance, drama. The teacher
continues unobtrusively feeding the children with beautiful things, she
sings and plays to them, shows them pictures and exhibits gentleness,
calm, and love.

Amid all the fog of controversy and all the noise of disputing
cheap-jacks that surrounds the art and practice of education I
see some of these infants' class-rooms as clear beacons showing
the incontestably true course. I cannot see any limit of years to
its progress. Many boys' and girls' schools have grasped the same
principles and extended them to the age of fourteen with the same
undeniable success in the results. Naturally, as the child grows the
method has to be adapted, but the principle remains steadfast. I would
not describe it as "freedom," because the child is not free, though he
feels free. One never doubts the existence of a controlling will. But
what is encouraged is authentic expression. In writing, topics are set
which draw out of the child's own world the child's own thoughts. He is
guided to think for himself and to speak his thoughts fearlessly. The
skill of the teacher is shown mainly in the choice of subjects and the
discretion with which corrections are made. Observation is translated
into description, first in speech and then, when the pencil has been
mastered, in writing. A child of nine may be asked to describe a corner
of the class-room so that a blind man could understand exactly what
is there and what it looks like. A child of twelve may be asked to
describe the prettiest room she ever saw. A child of fourteen may be
asked to describe the Harrow Road (_a_) on a Saturday night, (_b_) on a
Sunday morning. Why stop at fourteen?

As well as observation and description, the infant school trains the
elements of imagination and invention. Cannot the child who at eight
years old wrote on "If I were the King...." profitably be asked to
write on "If I had been Oliver Cromwell...." at eighteen? In one girls'
school the teacher merely wrote on the blackboard "When the Moon went
out" and left the rest to the class. In the same way children can
be trained to argue _pro_ and _contra_ about problems of their own
lives which clearly admit of argument, like "Would you rather be six
or sixteen?" "Would you rather be a boy or a girl?" People new to
the method might suppose that, although the brighter children could
possibly attack such themes with success, the ordinary or dull child
would be left staring. It is not so. Whole classes of children trained
in this way produce work which is pleasant to read. The essentials seem
to be stimulating topics, authentic expression without dictation, and
constant practice. To one who has seen the elementary steps there is no
magic in the Perse Plays or the Draconian Poems. They are natural. It
is dullness that is artificial. Real dullness, such as one finds in
Common Rooms, Mess Rooms, Pulpits, and Government Offices is the fruit
of a long, careful, and generally expensive education in that quality.

In teaching a young person to speak and write you are also teaching
him to think, because words represent thoughts. The adult may be able
to think connectedly in silence, but the child generally cannot.
The child's world is, however, at the largest a little one, and it
is necessary to enlarge it by various means, including stories and
pictures, songs and books. The book gradually becomes more prominent
as the art of reading is mastered. A child constantly encouraged to
express himself freely, always giving out and seldom taking in, would
develop a number of unpleasant qualities. Therefore reading is only
second to writing in its importance. A generous supply of good books is
the second fundamental necessity of sound English teaching. So far as
I know, no school has ever reached the limit in this direction. There
is an excellent society which bases its method of teaching mainly on
copious reading and has been able to multiply seven-fold the usual
reading programme of primary schools. But they seem to put the book a
little too much into the foreground. It is citizens that we seek to
educate. For them books should be the background of real life. We do
not all possess those opulent libraries into which Ruskin would turn
his princesses to browse at will; but I subscribe to his doctrine in
principle. Mere quantity of reading is a great thing. The more children
read, the better they will choose their books.

Now these two things alone, authentic expression and copious reading,
are capable of producing good English. Children taught well in these
methods can, without any formal instruction in spelling or grammar,
write correctly as well as pleasantly. Something more is needed for
those who seek to become scholars in English, and still more if they
aim at the study of language. For such as these the teaching may
gradually and progressively develop a scientific character. In the
earliest stages fluency was itself a chief aim, and the teacher was
compelled to be very sparing of interruptions and corrections. She
had to use discretion and to judge for herself what mistakes were
dangerous. She might not interpose though twenty successive clauses
were joined together by "and," because she knew that it is natural
for language to begin with co-ordinates and that mere mental growth
combined with practice in reading and writing will cure the fault.
She corrected vulgarisms, like "he done it," not with any grammatical
disquisition but dogmatically. Even where the children come from homes
where the King's English is never spoken, systematic speech-training
in the infants' school can correct and refine language before pen is
put to paper. These infant years seem to be intended by Nature for
the learning of language. Ears are sharp and memories retentive. But
habits once formed at that age, whether good or bad, are very difficult
to eradicate later on. Perhaps pronunciation is best taught through
disguised phonetics in the singing lesson and elocution in the poetry
lesson.

In the first written work it may be found that the spelling is all
wrong. Great controversies rage on this subject. But it seems right
to regard bad spelling as a disease which needs careful individual
diagnosis in the earliest stages, when it can be cured so as to give no
more trouble. Most often it springs from some fault in the method by
which the child has learnt to read. Some people are allowed to grow up
incapable of spelling because they make out the printed word by some
process of guesswork and never fix the letters upon their memory. Good
or bad spelling very rapidly becomes automatic.

Much the same is true of grammar. As I have said before, accurate
use of language can be attained by purely empirical and dogmatic
methods. Grammar is no essential preliminary to good English, but
nevertheless there may be a good case for teaching it later on to
those who can afford the time. It is well that English boys and girls
should know something of the history and structure of their language
as well as their constitution. It may be necessary for the linguist to
understand the common grammatical technique of all languages. Moreover,
teachers naturally seek to limit the domain of mere dogma and to give
explanations where they can. Thus a child can easily be cured of saying
"Between you and I" merely through the teacher's command, "Say _me_."
He can be cured of saying "Like I did" in the same way. He will of
course be on surer ground if he understands the reason. Only let it be
English grammar and not Latin grammar that is used. The reason why the
child should say "I am taller than he" is, if a reason must be given,
that _than_ is historically identical with _then_, not that "_quam_
takes the same case after it as before it."

If we could only keep our eyes steadily fixed on the goal and discard
formalism, tradition, and antiquated examinations, there is in the work
of the best infants' and elementary schools a broad enough base for us
to build a sound structure of English up to the University and beyond.
Perhaps some day a progressive University may try the experiment of an
English Arts Course in which the first part would consist solely of
Advanced Reading and Writing, and the second part of options between
English Philosophy, English Philology, English Poetics, or English
Criticism. It need not be any lower in standard than an Oxford Greats
course.

We could not well spare the scholars. On the contrary, those who
believe with me that English contains all things necessary to culture
will be most anxious to enlist for its service the finest scholarship
of the day. Some will think the fare provided in such a course as I
have outlined too rich in sugar or fat and wanting in the tougher
constituents which produce bone and muscle. It is essential to require
more and more precision and accuracy as the child passes through the
phases of adolescence. This was the real virtue of the old classical
training, and it is too often wanting on Modern Sides. We must
contemplate something very like the best of classical teaching applied
to English Classics for big boys and girls.

I write as a Pharisee of the Pharisees, brought up at the feet of
Gamaliel. A man like Robert Whitelaw loved the literature of Greece
and Rome with such devotion that its very forms were sacred to him.
A false quantity or a false concord was to him a personal affront:
it caused him physical pain. Accents and particles mattered to him
and so they mattered to us. There was a right and a wrong. We did not
understand why, but we knew and felt his scorn of anything careless or
superficial. He read Sophocles aloud with an intensity that at first
puzzled and then infected us. Occasionally, but all too rarely, it was
his task to do the same with Chaucer or Browning. Why not?

But at this point I labour with a sense of unreality. Is it possible
to capture for our language a tithe of that old classical fervour? We
have buried our Grammarian upon his peak, fronting the sunrise. He
settled _hoti's_ business. I have heard him lecture for an hour upon
the future sense of the optative with an enthusiasm that was drawn from
some pure source in the depths. Doubtless he survives in disciples. Is
it the mere mystery and power of the Word that inspires them? I will
not believe that it is any inherent virtue possessed by Propertius but
denied to Shelley that inspires the classical scholar. But where are
our inspired teachers of English? I have an impression of critical,
quizzical gentlemen, deeply learned in Elizabethan drama or Saxon
dialect, but all the same terribly mild. I cannot picture one of their
disciples seriously moved by a misplaced "and which" or an unrelated
participle in English. Something is missing.

There are thousands of genuine lovers of English literature scattered
up and down the country, people who feel the thrill of delight in
verbal beauty quite as keenly as any classical scholar. But they
want leaders and a voice. We suffer our fools too gladly in English
studies. Any lunatic is allowed to criticise, traduce, misinterpret
Dryden, Carlyle, Addison, even Shakespeare, as if they were our private
playthings. They are not. They are worthy of their pedestals of worship
just as much as Homer and Aristotle.

The issue of the War has established more firmly than ever the
predominance of the English language in the world. If our schools
would rise to their opportunity and raise English into a culture
worthy of its qualities there seems no reason why it should not become
the universal medium of civilisation for the world. The richness and
variety of its literature and the simplicity and flexibility of its
structure render it, as a language, amply sufficient. Whether this
is visionary or not, it is no longer safe for those who cherish the
humanities in education to rely upon the old impregnable position of
Latin and Greek. The world has received one of those secular shocks in
which tradition crumbles to dust.

AN ARTICLE ON PARTICLES

By ALICE MEYNELL

"_Inconquerable_"--BACON

A general good habit might long ago have been ruled for our national
literature in the use of two negatives--"un" or "in," and "less."
A good rule once made known, long ago, would surely have lasted.
We might set about it even yet, though with much to chastise. Let
us try. The fault of "un" and "in" is of long standing. That of a
misapplied "less" is probably quite modern. What I have to suggest is
an obvious enough correction, but the offence is broadcast, therefore
correction cannot surely be inopportune or importunate. For who is
there who does not give the teutonic "un" to the Latin or Romance word,
writing "unfortunate" or "ungracious"? Or who now is careful to write
"inconquerable"? Any man to-day would certainly write "unconquerable."
It may not be that Bacon is always consistent; nor is Landor, who had
something--but that something has proved altogether ineffectual--to
say on this question of good English. We must own the incorrect use of
the German particle to be the commonest thing in the world, but the
incorrect use of the Latin or Romantic derivative, on the other hand,
does not occur.

The Teutonic "un" comes more readily to the English pen than the Latin
"in," and thus is joined habitually to the wrong kind of adjective
and verb and adverb. Not only, moreover, to the Romantic word, but
also to the Greek. We have learnt to write "asymmetry," but not to
avoid "unsymmetrical." There is also a very frequent jumble, so that
"uncivil" appears in the same phrase with "incivility," and "unable"
with "inability," "undigested" with "indigestible," "ungrateful" with
"ingratitude"--but I need cite no more. It is worth noting that these
confusions are not due to a kind of reluctance in the use of "un" for
nouns. We have many nouns with the "un" (not otherwise to my purpose):
"unrest," "unbelief," "unfaith," "unhappiness," "untruth," "unthrift,"
"unskilfulness," and so forth.

Now I know well that the reader has been courteously waiting until I
should draw breath for a paragraph in order to say "_Undiscovered_:
Shakespeare." It is all too true. I can only repeat, murmuring,
"_Inconquerable_: Bacon."

There is nothing in English that we should prize more dearly than
our right negative particles of both derivations, and especially
our particle of German derivation in its right Teutonic place. That
"un" implies, encloses so much, denies so much, refuses so much,
point-blank, with a tragic irony that French, for example, can hardly
compass. Compare our all-significant "unloved," "unforgiven," with any
phrase of French. There are abysses, in those words, at our summons,
deep calling to deep, dreadful or tender passion, the thing and its
undoing locked together, grappled. But in order to keep these great
significances the "un" should not be squandered as we squander it. And
neither should the less closely embraced "in" be so neglected. It has
its right place and dignity and is, as it were, more deliberate. It is
worth while, furthermore, to enhance the value of both our negative
particles (one of them, of course, shared with French) by considering
how poor a negative that last-named tongue has often and often to use
for lack of a better; not even a particle, but a thing unfastened,
a weak separate word, a half-hearted denial--"_peu_." Let us try to
keep our "un" in its right place by considering how, for instance, it
makes of "undone" a word of incomparable tragedy, surpassing "defeated"
and "ruined" and all others of their kind. "Undone" has the purely
English faculty, moreover, of giving to a little familiar word a sudden
greatness, such greatness as leaps to Lear's "every inch." This was
found to be intranslatable when Rossi acted King Lear in Italian; he
had to speak the phrase in English. Wonderfully well furnished as
we are for all adventures, is it not then time that we reviewed and
revised our habits, and restored to their proper lineage the great
contemporary histories of our language by a right and left distribution
of the "in" and the "un"? Our incorrect ways were never standardized,
or they standardized themselves by precedent. No, it is all too late.
We shall never undo the habit now, or cease to be "unconscious" in our
custom.

But for the other particle--"the less"--there is hope or there might
be, but for Shakespeare's strange and slightly ambiguous "viewless." We
might at least check new coinings. "Less" is in the construction here
to be considered, though not in other combinations, fairly equivalent
to the Teutonic "without." It has great value. It also locks close
meanings with its word. But that word should be a noun, and not a verb.
Yet it is a verb at the present day, not only in hasty column after
column, but in page by deliberate page, and especially in stanza by
deliberate stanza. For no doubt the perfervid poets have spread that
fashion. You will find "relentless" scattered in modern verse, and
"quenchless" and "tireless" frequent. Keats, instigated indirectly if
not directly by Leigh Hunt, has "utterless." The misuse of "less" is
even somewhat more to be resisted than that of "un" because in the
case first named the grammatical construction of our English words
(and we have not too many laws of construction) is violated. And
beautiful words that are neglected for "quenchless" and "relentless"
pass out of use; the words that have "less" for their lawful negative
are cheapened; and writers of talent learn to dash and as it were to
gesticulate.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES AND NEWS

_Correspondence from readers on all subjects of bibliographical
interest is invited. The Editor will, to the best of his ability,
answer all queries addressed to him._

GENERAL NOTES

We are glad to see that the Clarendon Press has published Mr. Percy
Simpson's edition of _Every Man in His Humour_, a pioneer volume to
the complete edition of Ben Jonson's Works, which the same editor,
in conjunction with Professor Herford, has been for many years
preparing. Their edition should, we think, be definitive (we use Sir
Eric's magical word with extreme caution for fear of provoking the
National Union of Textual Editors to down books and refuse to continue
their researches). A new edition of Ben Jonson's work is certainly
needed: Gifford, re-edited by Cunningham, is sadly inadequate; the
text is bad and the notes explain nothing that one wants to know.
One walks darkling through the _Discoveries_. Take Ben's remarks
about painting--they are Hermetic. What, for instance, does this
mean? "Parrhasius was the first won reputation by adding symmetry
to picture.... Eupompus gave it splendour by numbers and other
elegancies." We shall indeed be grateful to the new editors if they
can tell us exactly how Eupompus gave splendour to art by numbers--and
other elegancies. The secret might be whispered along the galleries of
Burlington House.

Another interesting book that should soon, though there is no news of
its immediate arrival, be coming from the Clarendon Press is the third
volume of Mr. Saintsbury's _Caroline Poets_. The first two volumes
of this massive anthology opened up a whole province of literature
hitherto almost unknown to the general reader. In the last this great
work of excavation and exploration should be completed. With the
exception of Chamberlayne and the Matchless Orinda the Carolines of
Mr. Saintsbury's choice have been very obscure. In the last volume,
we understand, he intends to soar to the dizzy heights of eminence on
which Cleveland stands. A good critical edition of Cleveland will be
welcomed by all lovers of seventeenth-century literature. The early
editions of his works are a piratical sort of publication. Some of his
poems were, even in his own life-time, attributed to other writers,
notably his _Hermaphrodite_, which was fathered on Randolph, and which
he claimed as his own in an amusing little poem appended, later on,
to the stolen piece. And yet, in spite of Cleveland's claim to his
own property, Carew Hazlitt, in his reprint of Randolph, continues to
attribute the _Hermaphrodite_ to its wrongful owner. A very unnecessary
and supererogatory blunder.

While we are on the subject of the Caroline Poets we would like to
express a pious hope that some day, when we are all immensely rich,
the Clarendon Press, or some other great publishing institution, will
bring out a complete corpus of English poetry. More than a century has
elapsed since Chalmers issued his _English Poets_, and the book, in
spite of bad editing and very imperfect--indeed non-existent--critical
apparatus, is still an extremely useful one. It contains a complete
Gower, a complete Lydgate, a complete Hawes, and a complete Skelton.
The text of these older poets is indeed atrocious; but the fact remains
that they are there, reprinted and easily accessible in Chalmers's
stout volumes. For any study of the eighteenth century Chalmers is
invaluable; everything is in him, from the _Ruins of Rome_ to the
_Pleasures of Digestion_--or is it the _Art of Preserving Health_? A
well-edited Chalmers would be a work of immense value. And if the
Clarendon Press would go on, in the same edition, from the Carolines to
the Georgians and back, through the Elizabethans and Tudors as far as
the Brutians (the contemporaries of our first Trojan king), we should
be for ever grateful. But before that comes to pass we must all, as has
already been hinted, be immensely rich

A rather battered Purchas's _Pilgrim_ minus its title-page came into
our hands recently. It appears to be the second edition, but the only
actual indication of date that we can discover is to be found in the
following passage, on which by a happy chance we lighted while turning
over the pages of the book. "Sultan Achmet is now, Anno 1613, five and
twentie yeares old: of good stature, strong and active more than any of
his Court. He hath three thousand Concubines." We cannot help believing
that someone had been pulling the Reverend Samuel Purchas's leg on the
subject of young Sultan Achmet's harem.

The other day we bought a charming little first edition of _Candide_
(1759). The title-page is amusing: "Candide, ou l'Optimisme, traduit
de l'Allemand de Mr. le Docteur Ralph"; no publisher or place, but the
date MDCCLIX. It was often Voltaire's custom not to acknowledge his
publications till they were a success. _Zadig_ (1749) is similarly
without author's or publisher's name.

Perhaps some of our readers may be able to throw some light on a
curious and interesting book, _Specimens of Macaronic Poetry_,
published by J. Richard Beckley in 1831. The volume contains epics
written on a single letter, like that which begins:

      Cattorum canimus certemina clara canumque,

Odes in this style:

      Emma! fer chartam, calamos, et inkum,

And the old Scottish Testament of Mr. Andro Kennedy, of which the first
stanza runs:

      I Master Andro Kennedy,
      A matre quando sum vocatus,
      Begotten with some incuby,
      Or with some freir infatuatus;
      In faith I can nocht tell redely,
      Unde aut ubi fui natus,
      But in truth I trow trewely.
      Quod sum diabolus incarnatus.

No author's name is given and we have had no time or opportunity to
make researches. But perhaps, as we have suggested, some of our readers
may be able to give us the information desired.

We were fortunate in recently securing a very fine copy of _Certaine
Learned and Elegant Workes of the Right Honourable Fulke Lord Brooke,
written in his Youth and familiar Exercise with Sir Philip Sidney_,
Henry Seyle, 1633. It is high time that a new edition of these very
interesting and, by moments, very great poems was published. Grosart's
reprint is faulty and is, furthermore, practically unprocurable. As a
matter of fact a new edition was, we understand, in process of being
prepared by a very able young scholar of Christ Church, when the war
broke out and the would-be editor was unhappily killed. Mr. Rose had,
we believe, made considerable researches and had even discovered a
certain amount of new material, but he had not committed the results
of his labours to paper; so that the possible new edition of Greville
has perished with him. If the rest of Greville's works could be edited
as well as his Life of Sidney has been by Mr. Nowell Smith we should be
very well pleased. But the prospect of getting any new edition at all
seems now extremely unlikely.

RECENT ADDITIONS TO LIBRARIES

Some early printed books of considerable interest have recently
been added to the Library of the British Museum, among them a copy
of Sannazaro's _Arcadia_, Venice, 1502, in a contemporary binding
of boards covered with designs printed from woodblocks. _Terentius:
Comediæ cum interpretatione Donati_, Baptista de Tortis, Venice,
1482. _Elegantiolae_, by Augustinus Datus, produced at Verona by
an unidentified printer in 1483. _Ptolemaeus, Liber quadripartit_,
Ratdolt, Venice, 1484. Maurice de Sully, Bishop of Paris: _Les
exposicions des euungilles en romant_, Antoine Neyret, Chambéry, 1484.
(Only four fully authenticated incunabula of Chambéry are known, of
which this is the earliest and rarest. It is printed in large Gothic
type and adorned with woodcuts. The Museum possesses specimens of
the second, third, and fourth Chambéry books, and this is a perfect
copy of the first.) _Jo: Balbus Januensis_: Catholicon, Jean du Pré,
Lyon, 1492. Several examples of early Spanish printing have also been
presented, as well as two first editions of Swinburne, _Laus Veneris_,
Moxon, 1866, and _Dolores_, Hotten, 1867, with "The Devil's Duel: a
letter to the editor of _The Examiner_," an attack on Robert Buchanan,
written by Swinburne under the pseudonym of Thomas Maitland, and
printed for private circulation in 1875.

ITEMS FROM THE BOOKSELLERS' CATALOGUES

With the present boom in seventeenth-century literature one is
unlikely, to judge from the catalogues of the better-known booksellers,
to pick up many bargains in Caroline literature in London. The
collector's only hope will be chance or the oversight or ignorance
of the vendor. We know of someone who recently had the good fortune
to find a copy of the extremely scarce _Lyric Poems_ of Philip Ayres
(1687) in a parcel of miscellaneous rubbish. But that was a stroke of
luck not likely to be repeated, and collectors must be prepared to pay
pretty heavily for their seventeenth century now. The following items
from various catalogues will indicate the current scale of prices for
early editions of Jacobean and Caroline books. We shall be interested
to see the prices fetched in the sale of the third portion of the late
Mr. W. J. Leighton's stock, at Messrs. Sotheby's in the last days of
October. The catalogue makes mention of many extremely interesting
seventeenth-century books as well as important manuscripts and early
printed books.

Messrs. Dobell offer eight first editions of Richard Brathwaite.
_Barnabee's Journall_, published by John Haviland in 1638, is priced
at £48, and _Ar't Asleepe Husband? A Boulster Lecture_, 1640, at
£25. Two more copies of this last work are included among the books
at the Leighton sale. The second edition of Carew's Poems (1642), in
the original calf, is offered at ten guineas; and a first edition of
Dekker's _Tragi-Comedy, called Match Mee in London_ (1631), at £14. A
copy of the 1772 edition of Carew's Poems, originally the property of
Mrs. Browning, with her maiden name and date, 1842, on the title-page,
is on sale at the Serendipity Bookshop, price four guineas. Another
book of Mrs. Browning's at the Serendipity Shop is Samuel Daniel's
_History of the Civil Wars_, 1717. This is one of those odd reprints
of Elizabethan poets that are to be found scattered up and down the
eighteenth century. Perhaps the most unexpected of them is the folio
_Works of Michael Drayton, Esq.; A celebrated Poet in the Reigns of
Queen Elizabeth, King James I., and Charles I._, printed by J. Hughs
and sold by R. Dodsley, 1748. Among other valuable seventeenth-century
books at the Serendipity Shop are Crashaw's _Carmen Deo Nostro_ in
the original vellum, printed at Paris, 1652, £40, a second edition of
Herbert's _Temple_, and a first edition of _Hesperides, or the works,
both Human and Divine, of Robert Herrick, Esq._, £140.

It is interesting to note what high prices the works of Surtees can
always command. In Mr. Frank Hollings's catalogue a set of the Sporting
novels, with Leech's illustrations, one of them a first edition and the
others early issues, is offered for £37 10_s._

On the other hand, a first edition of _Friendship's Garland_ can be
bought at Messrs. Dobell's for 10_s._ 6_d._, and a first edition of
Buchanan's _Book of Orm_ for half-a-crown.

People still seem prepared to pay high prices for odds and ends from
the nineties. Mr. Hollings has a complete Savoy at £7 10_s._ and two
first editions of Oscar Wilde at nearly four pounds apiece.

A first edition of _Trilby_ (1895) can be purchased for 7_s._ 6_d._
at Messrs. Dobell's, and of _Daniel Deronda_ (1876) at 18_s._ _Evan
Harrington_, in the twelve original parts of _Once a Week_, is offered
at 25_s._ at the Serendipity Shop.

Mr. Everard Meynell has a curiosity of nineteenth-century literature
for sale in the shape of Coventry Patmore's _Odes_, dated 1868, but
never published, for the following reason: "Early in 1868 he had
written nine odes, which in the April of that year he printed for
private circulation. Afterwards, keenly mortified at the coldness of
their reception by friends, he made a fire in the hall and cast on it
(as he thought) all the copies remaining in his hand, while he calmly
sat and watched them burn. A friend, who had heard of the intended
bonfire, persuaded his daughter Emily to abstract a copy or two, and
these, with the few which had been sent to friends, were all that
remained of the edition." The price of this soul saved from the burning
is £8 10_s._, and a first edition of _The Unknown Eros_ (1878), with
inscription from the author to Richard Garnett, is priced £2 10_s._

Having recently picked up cheap a third edition (1872) of FitzGerald's
_Omar Khayyám_ (Quaritch, 1872), we are interested to see that a copy
of the fourth edition (1879) is for sale at three guineas. We suspect
ourselves of having made a bargain, but are not yet quite sure.

Messrs. Dobell have an interesting collection of first editions of
works by Victor Hugo, most of them presentation copies, with Hugo's
autograph inscription, to Mademoiselle Louise Jung.

        A. L. H.

CORRESPONDENCE

(_To the Editor of_ THE LONDON MERCURY)

SIR,--On the assumption--I hope justified--that you propose to have a
"Correspondence Column" in your paper, I write to plead that you should
devote some of your attention to the subject of what is, I believe,
called "book production." That your guidance as to the contents of
books will be valuable I do not doubt; but I feel that an organ such as
yours might be of considerable service if it would determine to devote
some consideration to their physical form.

It may fairly be said, I think, that, as a body, English publishers
produce their books as respectably as any publishers in the world.
The Germans produce--or produced before the war--a larger number of
agreeable-looking cheap books, and a larger number of finely-printed
and bound editions _de luxe_, such as were specialised in by firms
like Langen of Munich. But the ordinary German book of commerce was
frequently very shoddy and the pseudo-romantic "Albert Memorial"
tradition had never been entirely shaken off. The French presses issue
many books which are a delight to possess. Their tradition is an old
one. It can be traced through the delicate eighteenth-century editions,
with their unequalled engravings, back to the Estiennes and the Torys,
who were infinitely superior to the printers of their time. Throughout
the last fifty years French publishers and "societies of bibliophiles"
have issued editions of poetry and of old rarities exquisite in their
taste: beautifully printed on the best paper and never eccentric.
But the ordinary French novel or political book, printed in blunt
unattractive type and "bound" in yellow paper covers, which fall in
pieces at a touch, is certainly not a model that anyone would wish to
copy. Much may be said against our wood-pulp paper and our common cloth
bindings; but, on the whole, we certainly clothe most books in garments
more durable than the books deserve; and the same thing holds good of
America, though there the types and bindings are, as a rule, uglier
than ours.

The fact remains that not one book out of twenty that we produce can
be called beautiful, and that fifteen out of twenty are indisputably
ugly. That the "public" will ever demand an improvement is a fantastic
dream. The ordinary reader likes a nice book when he sees it, but will
never make an "effective demand" on his own account. We have to rely on
the initiative, largely disinterested, of (1) the publishers, (2) the
authors, and (3) the critics.

Publishers, we know, must earn their living like other men; their
chief attention must be given to procuring saleable "matter." But they
have to get their books printed, and they have to get them bound; and
while they are about it they would lose nothing, and we should all
gain something, if they would see to it that the work was done by
someone who cared about types and was anxious to make the best of the
materials available at a specified price. Authors, again, may often
be heard complaining that they do not like the look of their books;
but does any author (except Mr. Bernard Shaw and a few bibliophiles
who patently supervise the job themselves) ever take any steps to
secure a "production" of which he would approve? Finally, though the
critics occasionally praise a book for being "beautifully printed" or
tastefully "bound," not one of them seems to make a regular practice
of commenting on the physical design of books--which, after all, is an
ingredient in our civilisation just as much as the design of cottages.

I should, as I say, be relieved to hear that the MERCURY, from which we
all hope so much, intends to "do its bit" in this connection.--Yours
faithfully,

        ORIGINAL SUBSCRIBER.

[We think our correspondent is a little hard on English publishers.
Some of them, though a minority, seldom produce an unattractive book;
and the book-production of them all is on a higher average level than
it was ten years ago, or has ever been in our time. But we agree that
there is room for improvement, and scope for commendation or the
reverse; and we purpose in our next issue to institute a regular page
of "Book Production Notes," which we hope will give our correspondent
satisfaction.--ED. L.M.]

BOOKS OF THE MONTH

POETRY

REYNARD THE FOX. By JOHN MASEFIELD. Heinemann. 5_s._ net.

It is an agreeable thing to find a man whose work has been overpraised
writing better than he has ever done before. Mr. Masefield's earlier
narrative poems were panegyrised for their vices: their unreal plots,
their bad psychology, their sentimentality, their jog-trot metres. He;
wiser in his generation, appears to have realised that the best parts
of them were the "descriptions": details of vivid imagery, pictures of
scenes and brief incidents; and that where he was dealing with a person
he was at his best when the person was alone and in one self-centred
mood. The picture of the widow alone in her cottage was worth all that
incredible plot in the _Widow in the Bye Street_; the public-house
scene and the birds following the plough remain in the memory when Saul
Kane's spiritual struggles have faded away; Dauber was little more than
a means of arriving at that peaceful entry when the ship trod the quiet
waters of the harbour like a fawn; and landscapes were the only excuse
for _The Daffodil Fields_. Mr. Masefield (who very likely realises
that _Biography_, a poem that will not die, is the best thing he has
done) seems to have discovered his bent. In _Reynard the Fox_ there is
only one leading character, the fox, and he is shown in no complicated
relationships. It is the description of a chase and of a fight for
life, and we could not hope to see it better done. Mr. Masefield's
faults of writing are still evident. Lines like

      He, too (a year before), had had
      A zest for going to the bad

might have come out of one of the numerous parodies which have been
perpetrated at his expense; he is unscrupulous in rhyming, he takes
pot-shots with words, and he is occasionally grossly sentimental. But
none of these faults is bad enough in this poem to get in the way. It
is a poem to read again as soon as one has forgotten it, and it will
give equal enjoyment every time.

The opening section, which describes the meet, is a little too
drawn out; too much time is taken up with describing a multitude of
characters, once seen and then forgotten. But no Dutch painter ever
gave a better idea of the bustle about an inn than Mr. Masefield does,
and the approach of the Hunt is done deliciously. We would spare little
of the long description of the hounds who come round the corner in
front of the red-coats:

      Intent, wise, dipping, trotting, straying,
      Smiling at people, shoving, playing,
      Nosing to children's faces, waving
      Their feathery sterns and all behaving,

and then draw round Tom Dansey on the green in front of the Cock and
Pye:

      Arrogant, Daffodil, and Queen
      Closest, but all in little space.
      Some lolled their tongues, some made grimace,
      Yawning, or tilting nose in quest,
      All stood and looked about with zest,
      They were uneasy as they waited.

Byron said the octosyllabic metre is the easiest to write. It is,
unvaried, the most monotonous to read. Mr. Masefield, who breaks into
anapæstic passages when hounds are in full cry, pulls it off all the
way. It was not an easy thing to supply enough bite to descriptions of
earth, tree, and sky, to invent enough novel incidents, to enable us to
follow without fatigue a ten or fourteen miles chase across country.
But it has been done, and Mr. Masefield has also succeeded in intensely