BRIDGING THE LITERARY GULF.
(Famous Publisher’s Great Scheme of Reconciliation.)
Hearing on good authority that Mr. Blinkingham, the well-known publisher, was about to launch an enterprise of a magnitude only comparable with that of the Ency. Brit. or the D.N.B., Mr. Punch hastened to headquarters for confirmation of the report, was graciously admitted to his presence and furnished with the following interesting details. Mr. Blinkingham, it may be mentioned, is at all points a finely equipped representative of his class, handsome, well-groomed and wearing his monocle with distinction. His sanctum is furnished with delightfully catholic taste—Louis Quinze furniture, a Japanese embossed wall-paper, pictures by Botticelli and Mr. Wyndham Lewis and statuettes of Plato, Voltaire and Mr. Wells (the Historian, not the Bombardier).
After some preliminary observations on the deplorable condition of the pulp industry, Mr. Blinkingham unfolded his colossal scheme. “By way of preface,” remarked the great literary impresario, “let me call your attention to the momentous statement made by the Editor of The Athenæum in the issue of May 7th: ‘We doubt whether there has ever been a generation of men of letters so startlingly uneducated as this, so little interested in the study of the great writers before them.’ The Editor of The Athenæum takes a most gloomy view of the situation, which is fraught with an atmosphere of hostility and suspicion inimical to a revival of criticism. Yet he sees in such a revival the only way of salvation, the only means of healing the internecine feud which is now convulsing the young literary world.
“For my own part I am convinced that a better way is to lure back the modernists to a study of great writers by presenting them in a more palatable form, not by compressing or abridging them—for that has been tried before—but by having them re-written in conformity with present-day standards by eminent contemporary writers. This notion had been germinating in my head for some time past, but I did not see my way clear until I read the luminous and epoch-making remark of Mr. C. K. Shorter, that he would sooner have written Tom Jones than any book published these two hundred years. In a moment, in a flash, my scheme took shape. ‘He shall write it, or rather re-write it,’ I said to myself, and I have already submitted to this eminent man of letters my rough scenario of the lines on which Fielding’s novel should be brought home to the Georgian mind. In reply he has made a counter-suggestion that the characters should be rearranged on a Victorian basis, Charlotte Brontë replacing Sophia, Thackeray Mr. Allworthy, while the title-rôle should be assigned to an enterprising publisher. But I am not without hope that he will adopt my plan.
“The revival of interest in the works of Richardson, the other great eighteenth-century novelist, is, I think I may safely say, a foregone conclusion. Miss Dorothy Richardson has enthusiastically welcomed the proposition that she should reconstruct the romances of her illustrious namesake, and confidently expects, on the basis of the method employed by her in The Tunnel, that she will be able to excavate at least a hundred volumes from the materials supplied in Sir Charles Grandison and Clarissa Harlowe.
“Nor shall we overlook the earlier masters. Professor Chamberlin, whose thrilling lectures on Queen Elizabeth and Lord Leicester have been the talk of the town for the last fortnight, has kindly undertaken to organise a new variorum version of the Plays of Shakspeare, with the assistance of Mr. Looney, the writer of the recently-published and final work on the authorship of the plays. Milton will be presented in both verse and prose, Mr. Masefield having promised to re-write his epic in six-lined rhymed stanzas, shorn of Latinisms; while a famous novelist, who does not wish her name to appear at present, has consented to recast it in the form of a romance under the title of The Miseries of Mephistopheles.
“Returning to the eighteenth century, I am glad to be able to say that a brilliant reconstruction of Pope’s Dunciad is promised by the Sitwell family, in which the milk-and-water school is held up to ridicule, with Tennyson in the place of dishonour formerly occupied by Theobald. With a magnanimity that cannot be too highly commended, the staff of The Times has undertaken to adapt another forgotten work under the title of Grey’s Eulogy, with special reference to the work of the League of Nations.
“I confess to feeling rather doubtful as to the possibility of reviving any interest in the works of Scott, Dickens and Thackeray. They are at once too near and too far. Still I hope to persuade Miss Rebecca West to try her hand at Vanity Fair. Then there is George Eliot, another uncertain quantity, though perhaps something might be made of The Mill on the Floss if it were renamed Tulliver’s Travels, and given an up-to-date industrial atmosphere by Mr. Arnold Bennett. I have my eye on Mr. Lytton Strachey as the man who could make a fine modern version of Tom Brown’s Schooldays. At the moment he is too busy with his Life of Queen Victoria, but I feel sure he will not lightly abandon so splendid an opportunity of unmasking the pedantry and pietism of Dr. Arnold and throwing the white light of truth on ‘Rugby Chapel.’”