This Study in Discord puts Mr. Fausset in the class of biographers at whose head stands Mr. Lytton Strachey. The reader may be annoyed by his obvious inimicality to the realistic strain in Donne’s character; he may be wearied by the turbulence of his exposition, but he can not fail to realise that in reading this book he is companioning a man of education, imagination, sentiment and vision, though his heart sometimes dominates his head.
Throughout the biography we capture as interesting a revelation of the mind of Fausset as we do of Donne, and his desire in writing the biography is summed up in one sentence in the epilogue, “And this soul is worthy of all honour; for though defeated it never accepted a fraudulent peace.”
The reader who knows of Donne from Campbell’s British Poets will, after reading Mr. Fausset’s book, be likely to agree that “the life of Donne is more interesting than his poetry.” It is indeed, and it becomes more interesting after each biographer has had his turn at it. The last word has not yet been said but the best that has been said is the last.
Thomas Burke, a young Britisher who has familiarised readers of English with the East End of London and its motley inhabitants, who writes about unclean things in a clean way and of vicious people wholesomely, and who has rare talent for creating literary atmosphere, calls his biography The Wind and the Rain. Next to Mr. Anderson’s story it is the most captivating narrative that I have read in a long time. Scarcely are these words written before pages of the Memoirs of an Editor by Edward P. Mitchell are reflected in the mirror of memory.
THOMAS BURKE
Thomas Burke says nothing of his parents; I fancy he did not know them. His first recollections are of his uncle, a gardener with a sense of humour, and of a Chinese with an appearance of mystery who was later deported because he trafficked in opium and morals. He got from the latter what Dostoievsky got from epileptic attacks: a sense of time arrested, crystallised; a sense of eternity; a fancy that always, behind the curtain of time, the joy of the moment had been. The secret that Pater attributed to Mona Lisa he learned from Quong Lee. Though Tommy was but ten years old, he knew all the beauty and all the evil of the heart of Asia: its cruelty, its grace, its wisdom. And the contact generated a writer, for from his sixteenth year he has been animated by a single motive: to express in writing one moment in a London side street. He has not yet succeeded to his own satisfaction. As Marcel Proust seeks to revive the memories and reveries associated with incidents and experiences of childhood and youth, Mr. Burke struggles to make come again “the pins-and-needles sensation in the back of my neck” and to have the soul feeling that accompanied it when Quong Lee beckoned him to his shop and gave him a piece of ginger.
Mr. Burke’s life seems to have been without remarkable event. He stalked poverty, and he fell in love with a snob who had an understanding friend of her own sex who shared a flat with her; he made a half-hearted attempt to get on in the City and a whole-hearted one to be a bohemian; and he saw the seams of the seamy side of life burst wide open now and then. But he also met men with hearts, like Mr. Creegan who gave him his first leg-up. This benefactor rescued him from une maison de joie et de jeux where he cleaned boots and ran errands after he left the orphanage; fed him, clothed him, lodged him, got him a job, and started him on the road that led to hobnobbing with Caruso and reminiscing in Monaco. And he met Gracie Scott. If he treated Gracie as he says in his book he did, it will be one of the sweetest memories of his life when that of Cicely shall have gone forever and that of Cosgrove shall have faded.
One of the many precious lies that grown-ups like to tell themselves is that the days of their youth were happy days. Mr. Burke is not addicted to that sort of story-telling. “I had little happiness then, partly because I was young, and partly because I had no friends, no money, bad food, and no hope. There was just one thing I had then which belongs to all youth, however miserable. Though utterly joyless, I had a tremendous capacity for joy.” One may share that tremendous capacity—for he still has it—by reading The Wind and the Rain.