There is much real beauty in the book, too. Blunt was a poet of very considerable charm, and a little story told by a former schoolmate of his seems rather characteristic. When a child he used to keep caterpillars in paper boxes; but he always pricked holes in the lids in the form of the constellations—so that the imprisoned caterpillars might think they were still out of doors and could see the stars.
It’s a queer thing. Those caterpillars, somehow or other, make us think of newspaper men.
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GENIUS
Occasionally we have fired off a culverin or two in honour of Stella Benson, that remarkably agile and humorous creature, who is, with May Sinclair and “Elizabeth,” one of our favourite female novelists. So we are particularly pleased to have F. H. P. recall to us a passage about the Dog David, in Living Alone:
David Blessing Brown, a dog of independent yet loving habit, had spent about four-fifths of his life in the Brown family. He was three years old and though ineligible for military service made a point of wearing khaki about his face and in a symmetrical heart-shaped spot near his tail. To Sarah Brown he was the Question and the Answer, his presence was a constant playtime for her mind; so well was he loved that he seemed to her to move in a little mist and glamour of love....
I believe that Sarah Brown had loved the Dog David so much that she had given him a soul. Certainly other dogs did not care for him. David said that they had found out that his second name was Blessing and that they laughed at him for it. His face was seamed with the scars of their laughing. But I know that the enmity had a more fundamental reason than that. I know that when men speak with the tongues of angels they are shunned and hated by men, and so I think that when dogs approach humanity too nearly they are banished from the love of their own kind.
If you do not recognize, even in that little random passage, the curious quality of Stella Benson’s talent, then we fear (brave friends) we can never agree about literature. In her writing we always seem to see that special and bewildering richness that we prize most of all; something that does not lie in any particular nicety or adornment of words, but in an underrunning flavour and queer subtlety of meaning. Is there any subject in the world more trite, more shopworn, and defaced by acres of blab than Dogs and their relations to mankind? There is not. And yet see how Stella Benson, without one pompous or pretentious word, and with a humour both mocking and tender, has not only said something new, but something which, as soon as it is said, becomes old, because it is permanent. That is what, in lieu of a better word, we are inclined to call genius, and we have never read a page of Miss Benson’s work which did not show it.
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