BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM
SEVEN MEN. By Max Beerbohm. Heinemann. 7s. net.
It is a common ground of complaint against Mr. Max Beerbohm that he publishes too little. But the very fastidiousness which makes him, compared with the word-fountains of our time, so notable an example of limitation of output is what makes the work he does print so surpassingly good. Economy is a word freely used and much abused. It is sometimes applied to writers whose only claim to it is that they use short sentences or that they omit everything except inessentials. But Mr. Beerbohm deserves more than any artist of our time the epithet "economical." Always, and increasingly so with the passage of time, he has taken pains to print no sentence and no word that does not help his effect; and the five stories in this book, even were their other merits less than they are, might serve as models of simple and exact expression, the cunning accumulation of telling detail, the complete avoidance of detail which does not tell.
Of the five stories one, James Pethel, is a study of the gambling temperament localised in an attractive but terrifying man, and one, A. V. Laider, is an astonishingly clever fantasia on the theme of lying. The other, and more ambitious, three are studies, we might almost call them historical studies, of literature, literary men, and "the literary life." They all relate to that remote period, now faded and therefore a little charming, "the nineties"; they give us types of writers, second or third or tenth rate, whose reputations die, but who are interesting enough to be celebrated as types, if not as individuals. Savonarola Brown—the obscure man who spent his life on an unfinished tragedy on the best blank-verse models—is the most slightly sketched of them; but here what the portrait lacks—perhaps that shadowy figure offered no more lines for the pencil to seize—is more than made up for by the best parody that even Mr. Beerbohm has written. Remove the burlesque, the comic stage directions, the juxtapositions of Lucrezia Borgia, St. Francis, Andrea del Sarto and Pippa (who "passes" in her own inimitable way), and the more extravagant convolutions of the plot, and you will see that Mr. Beerbohm could quite easily have manufactured a play better than most modern poetic dramas, and written in verse at once so fluent and so reminiscent of the best masters as to command the respect of the reviewers, and possibly a production (for a few nights) by some manager ambitious to show that he desired to reunite Literature and the Stage. At times we forget that we are reading a burlesque:
Pope. Of this anon.
[Stands over body of Gaoler.]
Our present business
Is general woe. No nobler corse hath ever
Impressed the ground. O let the trumpets speak it!
[Flourish of trumpets.]
This was the noblest of the Florentines.
His character was flawless, and the world
Held not his parallel. O bear him hence
With all such honours as our State can offer.
He shall interred be with noise of cannon,
As doth befit so militant a nature.
Prepare these obsequies.
[Papal Officers lift body of Gaoler.]
Did Mr. Beerbohm write this? Or was it Brown, fresh from The Duchess of Malfi or The Broken Heart?
The two stories that remain are more elaborate. In Enoch Soames we are given the picture of the kind of sepulchral, costive, dedicated, fame-gluttonous minor poet who has haunted the by-ways of literature in all ages; we are given, as well, a realistic picture of what those by-ways were twenty years ago, and a plot (which races between the future and the past) the intricacies of which are followed with equal ingenuity and imperturbability. But there can be little dispute that Maltby and Braxton is the great achievement of the volume. These two were rivals who had a brief vogue in the nineties; the very scent of the time comes back with the titles of their masterpieces, Ariel in Mayfair and A Faun in the Cotswolds. Maltby in a weak moment cheated Braxton out of a week-end at the Duchess of Hertfordshire's, and when the hapless Maltby got to Keeb Hall Braxton's ghost haunted him, driving him into perpetual solecisms and misadventures. There is the background: the gossiping coteries of London, the fleeting fashions of literature, the first vogue of the bicycle, the dabbling great dames, the house-parties, soirées, dinners, church-goings. And in front of it the most comic of tragedies, the most tragic of comedies is played. The story is written with such skill that the cruelty is never quite cruel, the laughter never quite flippant, the extravagances always anchored to reality: at the end, in spite not only of the caricature but of the "tallest" fiction about a ghost that we remember, we feel that we have been reading a plain statement of fact. And this is what, at bottom, the story is: it is more realistic than any naturalist novel: it is the work of one who, for all his fantastic invention and wit, has a prodigiously keen pair of eyes and a profound understanding of human nature. We hope, by the way, that Mr. Beerbohm's passage about literary fauns will finally expel these overworked creatures from our midst.
DONNE'S SERMONS: SELECTED PASSAGES WITH AN ESSAY. By Logan Pearsall Smith. Milford. 6s. net.
Donne's reputation as a poet, very high for some time after his death, sank almost to nothingness for two centuries. In the last thirty years he has, by virtue partly of his occasional splendours of passion, imagery, and even music, partly of a modernity in him which is attuned to the spirit of our own time, regained his old position. Much has been written of him; Mr. Gosse has written his Life in two volumes, Professor Grierson has edited him in one of the most exhaustive and scholarly of the Oxford editions of poets; he has exercised a traceable influence on men now writing. But the revival has been confined to his poems. His prose, contained in three huge folios and several small pamphlets, has remained unread; and it is significant that until a few years ago he who wished to possess (for none thought of perusing) the Dean's sermons was likelier to find them at a theological bookseller's than in one of those shops which cater for the collector of fine literature. The neglect was doubly explicable. Not only were Donne's Sermons sermons, and therefore liable to fall into the disregard into which the sermons of South and Tillotson, and even those of Jeremy Taylor, have fallen, but they were sermons so voluminous as to be terrifying to the most insatiable reader, and (for the most part) so involved, so stuffed with scholasticism, theological hair-splitting, debate about texts and about commentaries on texts, that a first attempt at perusal might have made the bravest quail. But the few who have dared the darkness of the great mine have never been disappointed; all over it, sparkling magnificently to the explorer's touch, are great jewels of imagination cut with the craft of a master of language.
Mr. Pearsall Smith, performing for his readers the labour they would have shirked, has gone through the whole of Donne's Sermons and extracted a hundred-and-fifty passages, short and long, illustrating his character and his genius. Not quite the whole of the ground is covered; the editor has chosen nothing of which the principal claim to distinction was that it conveyed, with great justice or great force, a doctrine of the Church or an edifying lesson. He has made his anthology as a poet and a student of character would make it; and the result is a volume of passages which exhibit that strange vehement man of genius more clearly than could any biography, and which substantiates his claim to be considered as being, at his best, a writer of English prose that has never been surpassed for music and richness. His greatest passages—and this holds good of all English prose—are those in which he is contemplating large elemental things. A roll like the roll of the prophetic books comes into his voice when he speaks of the majesty of God, the powers of Death and of Evil, the passage of time, the justice that waits for sin, and the decay that will overtake beauty; when he stands in the attitudes and assumes the voice of adoration, of accusation, or of grief. But even in his dialectics the restless intellectual in him was continually striking out sparks of wit; the insatiable observer in him was noting small things, sticks, straws, and insects, puddles and ponds; the insuppressible poet pouring out images copious enough to furnish out a hundred minor men. This is a long-needed book, done with competence and exquisite taste. His greatest, loveliest things are as good as Sir Thomas Browne's; his grandest are grander than Jeremy Taylor's. There is probably no sentence in our language so long as that in which he depicted Eternal Damnation, yet it swells and swells, never breaking its back, always borne up by the mighty mind of his spirit. Hell is deprivation of God. "That God," begins this great passage,
that God should let my soule fall out of his hand, into a bottomlesse pit, and roll an unremoveable stone upon it, and leave it to that which it finds there (and it shall finde that there, which it never imagined, till it came thither) and never think more of that soule, never have more to doe with it. That of that providence of God, that studies the life of every weed, and worme, and ant, and spider, and toad, and viper, there should never, never any beame flow out upon me; that that God, who looked upon me, when I was nothing, and called me when I was not, as though I had been, out of the womb and depth of darknesse, will not looke upon me now, when, though a miserable, and a banished, and a damned creature, yet I am his creature still, and contribute something to his story, even in my damnation....
so it proceeds in tremendous crescendo describing, or failing to describe, what it must mean "to fall out of the hands of the living God ... a horror beyond our expression, beyond our imagination"; and this is but the sublimest of many sublime utterances in these sermons of the greatest of the Church's poets. We commend Mr. Pearsall Smith's book, and shall return to it and its subject at length in an early number.
SOUTH SEA FOAM. By A. Safroni-Middleton. Methuen. 6s. net.
The sub-title of this book, "The Romantic Adventures of a Modern Don Quixote in the Southern Seas," gives the clue to a quality in Mr. Safroni-Middleton that might repel a fastidious reader. He is a little too effusive, a little too self-conscious in his adventurousness. But the reader who is repelled early will miss something; for with all its defects South Sea Foam is a full and exciting and often beautiful book. Mr. Middleton has not the technique of the artist; he does not write well. But he has the artist's sensibility, and his writing is at its most vivid when the greatest demands are made upon it. "My greatest literary effort in the following pages," he says, "has been to keep to the truth of the whole matter, even though such frankness should leave me, at the end of this volume, with a blackened name." He need not be anxious about his name; but if this book is all true he has had adventures as wild and strange as any man alive. His book is a medley of Polynesian legends, and the most extraordinary events on the ocean and among the islands; storms, moonlight dances, abductions of "dusky maidens" from chiefs' palaces, orgies in saloons, chases and shots, canoes, sharks, and love-songs: a great flood of brightly-coloured reminiscence tumbled out in language which is never quite "right" but always picturesque. At any page one is liable to come across some passage that thrills or deeply touches; and occasionally there is an episode narrated so well that criticism is silent. Such an episode is that of the old dog Moses, which falls overboard on a murky night. He barks amid the waves to guide the boat; but there comes a scream that means a shark and no more is heard. Next night the old bearded sailor-men sit on their chests in the fo'c'sle puffing out smoke, drinking rum in silence, brooding over the dog: and no scene could be more vividly painted. The last adventure (in a castaway boat with a brown girl), which we should call incredible were it not for Mr. Middleton's assurance, is the loveliest and most terrible of all. We think that anyone who reads this book once will make a habit of reading it.
RUPERT BROOKE AND THE INTELLECTUAL IMAGINATION: A LECTURE. By Walter de la Mare. Sidgwick & Jackson. 2s. 6d. net.
The lecture here printed was delivered before Rugby School on the occasion of the unveiling of a memorial there to Rupert Brooke. Mr. de la Mare, as he recalls, was chosen to go to America as Mrs. Brooke's representative to receive the first presentation of the Howland Memorial Prize, the posthumous award of which to Brooke was an act of international courtesy and generosity, too little noticed in this country at the time. It was fitting that Mr. de la Mare should be again associated with the dead poet; and in this short paper he outlines his character and his achievement with as much affection as discernment. Brooke, he is insistent to make plain, was a happy man, a vigorous, healthy creature, who found the world teeming with food for his multifarious appetites. It is with this fact in mind that all his poems, not omitting those which are "disquieting to read at meals," must be judged. He desired truth at all costs; and "if, unlike Methuselah, he did not live long enough to see life whole, he at least confronted it with a remarkably steady and disconcerting stare." "The theme of his poetry," says Mr. de la Mare, "is the life of the mind, the senses, the feelings, life here and now, however impatient he may be with life's limitations. Its longing is for a state of consciousness wherein this kind of life shall be possible without exhaustion, disillusionment, or reaction." This essay is short, but it is full both of wise judgments and beautiful sayings. It conveys a sense not only of the value of Brooke's poetry but also of the charm of his personality. More, much more, will be written about him; and we shall have his character carefully examined and defined, both by those who knew him and those who did not. But this brief study, at once an exposition and a ceremonial and moving eulogy, will retain its place in the literature collecting around his name.
SOME SOLDIER POETS. By T. Sturge Moore. Grant Richards. 7s. 6d. net.
This volume contains short essays on the poems of Julian Grenfell, Rupert Brooke, Robert Nichols, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, R. E. Vernède, Charles Sorley, Francis Ledwidge, Edward Thomas, F. W. Harvey, Richard Aldington, and Alan Seeger: with a paper on "The Best Poetry" at the end. A casual student of the list of contents might make several hasty criticisms. He might suppose that he was going to find here a series of short lives, manufactured because of an accidental connection between them. He might be fortified in this suspicion by the fact that one or two poets are in the list who have no claim to rank with the others. But he need only begin to read the book to remember that Mr. Sturge Moore is a poet, a sound critic, and a writer incapable of hackwork. There is one obvious defect; he has omitted a few poets (Edward Wyndham Tennant is an example) who had better claim to admission than some in his list. But there is little else that can be urged against him. Mr. Sturge Moore wastes no space over biography. He takes, seriatim, the books of these young poets and confronts them in a generous but not an undiscriminating mood, asking himself what is their spirit, what their technical qualities and defects and which are their best poems. These essays are not (even when their subjects are unworthy of effort) facile journalism; they are considered criticism written in the prose of a poet, prose rich with novel and beautiful images and embodying the results of profound reflection upon life and art.
Mr. Sturge Moore's essay on Brooke is too brief to be a final estimate; the main fault of all his essays is that they are not long enough to include sufficient quotations; otherwise they would certainly be of permanent value. But it is a penetrating essay, full of interesting obiter dicta, such as the statement that "the fallacy of impressionism" has tainted modern æsthetic thought, and the more disputable statement that "failure in love and war is much more inspiring to the poet than success; when the real world has rejected a man he feels freer in the Muses' house; he no longer has any interests that conflict with theirs." Julian Grenfell's Into Battle he describes (and we think he is right) as the best poem of the war. Of three poets commonly linked together, he says that "Those who shall gaze back a century hence may discern rather in Nichols than in Sassoon or Graves the poet's mind that is independent of time and approaches all human circumstance with the kinsman's joy and pain," though he admits that the race has only just begun, and another runner may outstrip the others. He is admirable on Sorley, whom many think the greatest loss to literature of all who fell in the war, and he has found—and no one before has, we believe, so celebrated this poem—in Mr. Harvey's The Bugler something like an isolated great poem. The one chapter which we find relatively inadequate is that which deals with Edward Thomas. "Every time I read them I like them better," he says; and he quotes in full Thomas's superb welcome to death; but the reader misses here all the rest of the poet's most beautiful poems and passages. They are even yet not known as they should be; we wait for a collected volume to reveal to most English readers how profuse, in his last two years, Thomas was of exquisite poems crowded with characteristic English landscape, and often profoundly moving by their sincere expression of universal emotions. He died resigned, and fulfilled at last. In Mr. Moore's words, "Our house was not well ordered; he should not have had to write hastily for his own and his children's bread; we have lost the chance of using him to the best advantage; yet he leaves us more than we deserved, something that will be treasured by posterity for ever. As his body fell, its cloak melted off the soul and we caught a glimpse which confounded our poor recollections of the man, and words of his still tolling round our ears make us aware that for him this dark casualty had a different meaning."
A BOOK OF R. L. S. By George Brown. Methuen. 7s. 6d. net.
This work is really a Stevenson Encyclopædia reminiscent of that colossal Browning Cyclopædia which still goes into new editions. Mr. Brown arranges, in alphabetical order, the names of Stevenson's books, characters, friends, critics, dwelling-places, etc. We have tested him with several questions and not found him to fail. He gives more than the facts he might be expected to give; for example, when a book is under notice he enters the latest prices paid for its first edition in the sale-room. He also lightens his pages with compact but pungent comments. For instance, he describes Mr. Swinnerton's able but hostile study of Stevenson as "the kind of study which it can be imagined Dr. Clifford would write of Ignatius Loyola." A good book of its kind and one that should be bought by everyone who has a Collected Stevenson. The illustrations do not greatly add to its charms.