“Where the thistle lifts a purple crown
Six foot out of the turf,
And the harebell shakes on the windy hill,
O the breath of the distant surf.”
“Yes,” said Hubert, “but the trouble is that everyone writes so well nowadays that it is hardly worth while for any new poet to write well. All can raise the flower because all have got the seed.”
The undergraduates had no great enthusiasm for any of these new writers. I mean the intellectuals among the undergraduates. But the booksellers were always urging us to buy them on the plea that they would go up. Some of them did, and those who speculated in Francis Thompson and Yeats did well. The curious thing is that the prose writers and the poets were supposed to be great sticklers for form, to be absorbed by the theory of art for art’s sake, and to be aiming at impeccable craftsmanship. Looking back on the work of those poets now, their technique, compared to that of more modern poets, seems almost ludicrously feeble, but they seem to have had just what they were supposed to be without: a burning ideal to serve literature; to have been consumed with the desire to bring about a renaissance in English literature and an English renaissance. There was one poet’s name which was sometimes mentioned then, and which had come down to the ’nineties from other and older generations. The name has gone on being mentioned since, and will one day, I think, reach the safe harbour of lasting fame, and this was Michael Field. Michael Field was a pseudonym which covered the remarkable personalities of two ladies, an aunt and a niece, who were friends of Robert Browning and of all the literary lights of their day, and who wrote a series of most remarkable dramas in verse and some extremely beautiful lyrics.
John Lane, the publisher, used to come down to Cambridge sometimes, and I made his acquaintance and, through him and Mr. Gosse, that of many of the writers I have mentioned: John Davidson, Le Gallienne, and others. There was a society at this time in London called the Cemented Bricks, to which some of the littérateurs and poets belonged, which met at Anderton’s Hotel in Fleet Street, and I was made a member, and on one occasion made a speech, and was down to read a paper, but I had to go abroad and this never came off. But what I chiefly remember about it is one occasion when Le Gallienne read a paper in which he passionately attacked the theory of art for art’s sake, and insisted on the relative unimportance of art compared with Nature, saying that a branch of almond blossom against the sky was worth all the pictures in the world. His paper was answered a month later by a young man who said this was the most Philistine sentiment he had ever heard expressed. This was while I was at Cambridge.
I did little work at Cambridge, and from the Cambridge curriculum I learnt nothing. I attended lectures on mathematics which might just as well have been, for the good they did me, in Hebrew. I spent hours with a coach who wearily explained to me things which I didn’t and couldn’t understand. I went to some lectures on French literature, but all I remember of them is that the lecturer demonstrated at some length that the French written by many well-known authors was often ungrammatical and sometimes full of mistakes. The lecturer cited to support his case pages of Georges Ohnet. One hardly needed a lecturer to point out that Georges Ohnet was not a classical writer. The lecturer’s aim was not to show the badness of certain authors, but to prove that the French of modern current literature was an independent living organism that was growing and developing heedless of classical models, grammatical rules, and academic authority. I think he would have done better had he pointed out how certain other authors were writing prose and verse of so great an excellence that in the course of time their works might become classics. Boileau was one of the books to be read for the Tripos, and I had already read a great deal of Boileau and learnt his verse by heart as a child. I copied out the following lines in 1888:
“Hélas! qu’est devenu ce temps, cet heureux temps,
Où les rois s’honoraient du nom de fainéants;