BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM
THE LONDON VENTURE. By Michael Arlen. Heinemann. 4s. net.
It is a little hard to know under what classification this book ought to be considered, whether fiction, biography, or belles-lettres. The same difficulty has occasionally arisen with the works of Mr. George Moore. But since the author is alluded to in it by the name which he acknowledges to be his own, we have decided that it cannot be fiction. For a reason which has sometimes occurred to the critics of Mr. George Moore, we beg to be excused from treating it as biography. There remains nothing but belles-lettres.
And Mr. George Moore's name occurs here very appropriately, for not he, not even Mr. Max Beerbohm, has written anything so characteristically Moore-ish as some of these pages. Observe how it is done:
But this letter has seemed strange to me because, perhaps, I shall never again receive a letter whose writer is dead, and who, when writing it, dreamt of all material things but death. Were I Oscar Wilde I might wonder now if Englishwomen who die in America come back to London; for there is much of London in the letter: "I should like to be in London to-day—Bloomsbury London, Mayfair London, Chelsea London, London of the small restaurants and large draughts of wine, London of the intellectual half-lights, drone of flippant phrases and racy epigrams, with a thin fog outside." ...
... Out of the silence of two years at last came a letter from her. I found it when I came in very late one night, and for a long time I stood in my little hall and examined the Eastern stamp and postmark; and the writing on the envelope was so exactly the same as on the last note she had sent me before leaving England that I had to smile at the idea of Shelmerdene, in the rush of her last pursuit of her perfect fate, laying in a sufficient store of her own special nibs to last her for the lifetime she intended to spend abroad; for when I opened the letter I found that, as I had guessed, she would never come back to England, saying, "I am a fugitive branch which has at last found its parent tree.... I have run my perfect fate to earth, Dikran! more perfect than any dream, more lasting than the most perfect dream." ...
Here is the very attitude, here the very cadences of the original; and the adventures are not dissimilar. Now Mr. Moore has acquired his style by long labour, and it is a little amusing to see the flower of it culled by a writer who has neither dug nor watered. But Mr. Arlen will not in so close a discipleship make the best of the talents which the very closeness of his discipleship shows him to possess. An author who can copy so exactly the manner of another ought to be able to evolve a manner of his own; and we look forward to seeing a book in which Mr. Arlen shall have done this.
IN THE GARRET. By Carl Van Vechten. Knopf.
Mr. Van Vechten is an American critic, rather of the type of the ingenious Mr. Huneker. He is quite as fluent, not quite so versatile. No art or aspect of life presents itself to Mr. Huneker as superior to any other; but Mr. Van Vechten has a great deal more to say about music than about anything else. He touches the theatre a great deal, literature a little, and music most of all; and he gulps down greedily all he touches. One name is as good as another to him and he knows a great many names of all sorts. "George Moore," he says, apropos of Mr. Moore's suggestion that Robinson Crusoe ought to be rewritten, "has rewritten many of his own books. Henry James rewrote all of his novels and tales that he cared to preserve for the definitive edition. On the other hand, Ouida believed (and expressed this belief in a paper published in her Critical Studies) that once a book was given to the public it became a part of life, a part of history, and that its author had no right to tamper with it." Mr. Ernest Newman likes the operas of Isaac Albéniz, but Mr. Marliave does not share his enthusiasm. On two opposite pages we discovered the names of the following persons: Mr. Cabell, Mr. Arthur Machen, George Sand, M. Maeterlinck, Mr. Cecil Forsythe, Monet, Leonardo, Homer, Rabelais, Cervantes, Remy de Gourmont, Dickens, Huysmans, and Mr. Havelock Ellis. This is lively enough in all conscience, and Mr. Van Vechten is able to keep it up without flagging and to support it with an equal vivacity of style, as when he remarks that the art of the musician "deals with clang-tints." Modern English criticism is sometimes reproached with being a little too heavy. Here we have a critic so volatile that he bounces like a child's balloon from the name of one great man to another.
AMONG ITALIAN PEASANTS. By Tony Cyriax. Collins. 12s. 6d. net.
The brush rather than the pen is evidently the medium of expression for Mrs. Tony Cyriax. The pictures in her book convey an infinitely better impression of the life of the peasant in an Italian mountain-village than all she says about it in writing, which is rather crude and colourless. But the pictures are delightful, and are sufficiently praised in an appreciative Introduction by Mr. Muirhead Bone.
The best chapters in the book are those dealing with the tending of silkworms in peasant cottages, and the greatly dreaded hailstorm which, despite the prayers of the priest, religious processions, and the ringing of church bells, destroys in an hour the labour of months and brings the villagers to the verge of starvation.
Such a storm as the writer describes will recall vividly to the memory of any one who has stayed in an Italian hillside village the pathetic anxiety of the natives when a thunderstorm is brewing. All around stretch the vineyards, which from dawn till dusk have been the care of people to whose toil the day's work of an English agricultural labourer is child's play. Will the hailstones utterly ruin the vines? If so, the villagers will be faced with semi-starvation, and yet more bread-winners, in despair, must emigrate to America, that refuge for the Italian destitute.
Pathetic, too, is an account of weeks of unceasing toil in connection with the cottage silkworm industry. The cavalleri (as the peasants call the silkworms), remorseless in their greed for mulberry leaves and their demands for the right temperature, will keep a whole family working for them from morning till night.
Here, as given by Mrs. Tony Cyriax, is the result of the labour of one such household:
"The work from start to finish had covered forty days, and Rosina's cocoons had weighed fifty-six kilograms ... so Rosina had earned exactly 224 lire, which is all but £9."
As a record of the hard existence that may be passed in the midst of Nature's graciousness and beauty Among Italian Peasants is not without value.
SUSSEX IN BYGONE DAYS: Reminiscences of Nathaniel Paine Blaker, M.R.C.S. Hove, Combridges. 1919. 5s.
The recorders of Sussex must have a shelf to themselves by this time, and there are many reasons for it. Sussex has not only individual quality, amenity and interest: all counties have them. But it is accessible, and it is the fashion. Not to go back to Dallaway and his likes, the best of the moderns are Mr. Lucas and Mr. Halsham, and the better of them Mr. Lucas, as we think. He has the mellower outlook, a benevolent, postprandial regard. Mr. Halsham is more pedagogical; he regrets much, and seldom approves. He cannot praise a landscape without reminding us how much better it was before old What's-his-name cut down those trees. Taken at some length—indeed, taken in series—he becomes tiresome. Nevertheless, he wrote a novel once, called Kitty Fairhall, which contains more of the essence of the Sussex peasant than Mr. Lucas himself is likely to apprehend.
Mr. Nathaniel Blaker, the latest chronicler, earns a place upon the shelf the rather because it need only be a little one. Our quarrel with him would be that it did not ask a larger. He has lived long and served his county honourably in an honourable profession; but he has not much to say. That is a pity. He has stored his mind, but cannot load his page. He remembers mail-coaches, he remembers the ox-teams, he remembers the days of reaping with the sickle, the foot-high stubbles, the threshing with a flail. To some of us those memories have a savour so sharp that, with the wind, one might catch and transfigure it in words. To Mr. Blaker they are as the primrose was to Mr. Bell, and one feels that he puts them down rather because that is the kind of thing one does put down in books of this sort than because they import a perfume which it is luxury to distil upon the page. Lacking gusto, Mr. Blaker tantalises his reader. The beautiful names which he strews about him—Selmesten, Steyning, Hurstpierpoint, Ringmer, Fulking—flicker like a mirage. He tells us, for example, that Steyning Fair in the old days "was a scene of great excitement and confusion, and probably as much iniquity as could be crowded into so small a space." We dare say so; but we are athirst for the iniquities, and he gives us none to drink of. One wishes to get Mr. Blaker by the fire with a matured cigar, and ply him with questions. Gypsies now. Obviously he knows a great deal about them. He says, "I well recollect, very many years ago, one rainy afternoon, which prevented them working, watching a family of gypsies in a barn. I think the family must have consisted of the father and mother and several children, one daughter nearly grown up, and two or three acquaintances. They all sat or lay about upon the straw, doing absolutely nothing, while one or two girls kept singing a peculiarly plaintive and monotonous but soothing and agreeable tune in a language, I believe, I did not know, for I could not catch a single word." That is the sort of thing Mr. Blaker will do with a pen in his hand—give us the materials of a picture and leave us burning. His "broken hinted sights" do but sting the mind.
Of course he tells us—he can't help it—some interesting things. One of them is "a common saying that Sussex girls had such long legs because they stretched them by pulling them out of the mud." That must have been in the Weald—but we did not know that feature of Sussex girls. Cobbett knew, and so do we, that they are remarkable for their good looks. Mr. Blaker does not say so. We regret his Peter Bell attitude to life. His best chapters are upon the horse and the birch, with both of which he is evidently acquainted. "It used to be considered," he says, "a great joke when a lady's first baby arrived to send her a carefully packed parcel containing a small birch rod, with a label, 'To be used when required.'" That is what we want. And, again, he says that "it was the custom when the cloth was laid for dinner in the middle of the day, for the cane, which was kept over the mantel ... to be placed with the carving-knife and steel on papa's right hand." Excellent. These scraps show what a handsome sack of oddments Mr. Blaker must have. He should have shaken it more liberally over his book.
A PILGRIM IN PALESTINE AFTER ITS DELIVERANCE. By John Finley. Chapman & Hall. 10s. net.
Of Mr. Finley's sincerity and enthusiasm there can be no question: of his taste there is a good deal to be said. Many books have been written about the Holy Land; but surely none before which deliberately puts the history and the personages of Palestine into the background of a picture whose foreground is occupied with the events of the recent campaign. Mr. Finley has no hesitation in viewing sacred history sub specie temporis hodierni. For him Allenby's battle at Armageddon is "the beginning of the end of the battle with the Beast." The German is not, however, only Anti-Christ: he is also Judas. Here are Mr. Finley's meditations over the Holy City:
I was an ashamed spectator, standing there at the Gethsemane Gate, feeling that we had been sleeping when we should have been watching, when we should have been preparing for defence against the German Judas who had professed devotion to the teachings of Him who spoke the Sermon on the Mount. Did not the great German Hospice stand most conspicuously on the Mount, that its pilgrims might dip their bread in the very sop of the Master's dish? And do not the towers of the German churches stand out most prominently (and offensively) in the Inner City?
Most of his book is like that: and if you cannot see history in quite the startling black-and-white of Mr. Finley's imagination you had better leave the book unread. Mr. Finley was with the American Red Cross, and he tells one happy story of himself, which it is only fair to quote. He was worshipping in the Russian Church of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives:
A woman of sharp, eager face, as of a zealot, with a grey shawl over her head, seeing me standing near the door, approached me and said, in rather sharp voice, "Quelle croix?" I did not at first understand the import of her inquiry, though I realised that she was putting to me an all-important question: "Quelle croix?—grecque ou latine?" ... My answer was "La Croix Rouge."
If the soil of Palestine be favourable for legends, no doubt a tale will arise of a strange religion whose devotees cross themselves neither in the Western or Eastern manner, but in some strange, "red" mode which Mr. Finley's zealot was probably eager to see.
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA. By John Galsworthy. Heinemann. 6s. net.
Generalisation, which used to be a philosophy, is rapidly becoming little more than a hobby. During the war it was a hobby savagely or amiably ridden by those who sought to explain the mentality of the Allies or the Enemy. Gradually individuals learnt that not every Belgian was Belgium, nor every German Germany: but for propaganda purposes we still used great typical figures. It saved thought, and it flattered either our own pride or that of our friends. The propagandists' most delicate task was always to explain Great Britain to the United States of America: and certainly it was a wise thing to send Mr. Galsworthy across the Atlantic. Surely he, if anyone, might be able to justify the ways of the country house to Boston and New York, to Washington and even to Chicago. Here we have his addresses delivered during 1919 in the United States. In his paper on America and Britain he takes the line that by words we are saved:
The tie of language is all-powerful—for language is the food formative of minds. Why a volume could be written on the formation of character by literary humour alone.
It sounds not unconvincing, until one remembers that French is not the language of Alsace; that English is spoken by most of the inhabitants of Ireland; or, to go further back, that the possession of a common language did not prevent Athens and Sparta from indulging in the Peloponnesian War.
We like Mr. Galsworthy better when he leaves his generalisations and tells stories. In the paper "Tallary at Large" he displays that sweet-naturedness, that mellowed irony which never lapses into satire, that humour which is always aware that a sense of pity is invaluable in comedy. Here is the true Galsworthy:
In the fifth year of the war two men sat alone in a railway carriage. One pale, young, and rather worn, had an unlighted cigarette in his mouth. The other elderly, prosperous, and of a ruddy countenance, was smoking a large cigar. The young man, who looked as if his days were strenuous, took his unlighted cigarette from his mouth, gazed at it, searched his pockets, and looked at the elderly man, and said, ... "Could you give me a light, sir?" The elderly man regarded him for a moment, dropped his eyelids, and murmured: "I've no matches." The young man sighed, mumbled the cigarette on his watering lips, then said very suddenly: "Perhaps you'll very kindly give me a light from your cigar, sir." The elderly man moved throughout his body as if something very sacred had been thrilled within him. "I'd rather not," he said, "if you don't mind." A quarter of an hour passed, while the young man's cigarette grew moister, and the elder man's cigar shorter. Then the latter stirred, took it from under his grey moustache, looked critically at it, held it out a little way towards the other with the side which was least burned-down foremost, and said: "Unless you'd like to take it from the edge."
And there are people who are surprised that the returned soldier occasionally commits acts of violence.
THOUGHTS IN MIDDLE LIFE. By G. Locker Lampson. Humphreys. 3s. 6d. net.
This book is beautifully printed on admirable paper, and is priced very low. Unfortunately Mr. Locker Lampson has reached middle life without learning that most platitudes are better unwritten. "No man is a hero to his own valet, and the same principle may be applied as in part the cause of our invidious comparisons between the men of yesterday and those of to-day." "He alone has a right to be called successful who has led a happy life." Sometimes he will enliven his platitude by a pleasing derangement of metaphors. "Autobiographies are of little value in extending the personality of their authors. We may get an occasional glimpse below the surface, but the waters are generally agitated by all kinds of subsidiary motives, and the eye cannot pierce them." The one sentence which explains the author is to be found in the essay One's Own Company: "No man, then, need ever be bored by himself, although he cannot avoid being bored by others."
DOMUS DOLORIS. By W. Compton Leith. The Bodley Head. 7s. 6d. net.
In the unornamental language, from which even the loftiest intelligence may extract apt expression for itself, this little book may be called a collection of thoughts in hospital from a patient's standpoint, and an impression of the various nurses who attended him. And yet such a description is unjust and utterly beside the point. The publisher's note upon the cover tells us that Mr. Leith has "a rare sense of the value of words and the beauty of phrases," and there is no doubt of it. But the value to literature and humanity of phrases which are but the vehicles of their own intrinsic beauty is to be questioned. The whole essay is precious in the last degree.
"Oblivion flowed up like evening gloom. Life moved with it to the edge of a great deep; it was drawn over; it floated down and down, wound in the arms of sleep."
"A faint awareness stole into being, like the grey of morning; then a sense of movement; but whether it was a coming up and forth, or a declining, there was no power to tell."
This sort of thing, exquisite as it may be sometimes, constantly reminds us, however, and with relief, that Henley, with simplicity and humour, covered the same ground in verse. From time to time an unpretentious passage comes to us with a shock, and we ask ourselves again and again, if, as it seems, the writer has opinions to air, observations about life and death to make, what especial virtue there is in the high-falutin obscurity of his expression. One of the chief and most necessary concealments of art lies in a well-simulated nonchalance to the more obvious kind of purple patch. Here the entire robe is of purple, though certainty of a royal shade. There were voices, Mr. Leith tells us on the first page (and it was not until the fifteenth that we knew where the voices came from), which "kept thought strained after a meaning." A light strain is no doubt good for thought; but in reading this book it is not light: and it is hard to say which strain is the more severe—the student's for meaning or the author's for effect.
A CHILDHOOD IN BRITTANY EIGHTY YEARS AGO. By Anne Douglas Sedgwick. Arnold. 10s. 6d. net.
Nowhere in England, nor even in Ireland or Scotland, could the life pictured in this book be paralleled. Feudalism has lingered, but not in delicate or decorative ways: in the Brittany of which Miss Sedgwick tells us, the beauty, the generous abundance, and the sincere brotherliness of life almost overcome one's distaste for the feudal system which formed its basis. The lady whose childhood is shown us was of a noble Breton family; her father seems to have been the only Republican she knew among the company of Royalists; life was still so ordered that the country people, coming to Mass, would bow to the lord and lady of the manor, after paying their respects to the altar. Yet one is left with a sense of fraternity as genuine as that one feels in reading Chaucer, as the story witnesses:
One peasant, I remember, Paul Simur by name, of whom my father was specially fond, was so dirty and unwashed that a sort of mark of dirt had formed upon his features. One day, at a hunting-party, papa called to Paul to come and sit beside him, and the other huntsmen, with singular bad taste, began to make fun of Paul, who sat much abashed, with hanging head. Papa affectionately laid an arm about his neck and defended him, until his friends finally cried out that they wagered he would not kiss him. At this, although he confessed afterwards to the most intense repugnance, he at once kissed Paul heartily. Poor Paul was quite overcome. He came to my father afterwards with tears in his eyes and said, standing before him and gazing at him: "Oh, mon maître, que je t'aime!"
Although the accounts of old Breton customs—the glimpse at the Folgoat pardon, the gently critical analysis of the lives of the gentry, the sidelights on the peasants, their cooking and their cottages—are all full of interest, the book is chiefly to be valued for preserving the fragrance of an order of living which too many of us are apt to think of as one of harsh tyranny alleviated by wanton luxury.