E. and I had invented a game which I think I enjoyed more than any game I have ever played at, with the exception of a good game of Spankaboo. It was called: “The Game.” You played it like this: One player gave the other player two lines or more of poetry, or a sentence of prose, in any language. The other player was allowed two guesses at the authorship of the quotation, and, if he said it immediately after the second guess, breathlessly so to speak, a third guess; but there must not be a second’s pause between the second and the third. They had to be “double leads.” The third had to come, if at all, helter-skelter after the second guess. If you guessed right you got a mark, and if you guessed wrong you got a nought; the noughts and crosses were entered into a small book, which went on getting fuller and fuller. They were added up at the bottom of every page; but as The Game is eternal, we shall never know who won it, until the Last Day, and then perhaps there won’t be time. We both played it well on the whole, although we both had strange lapses. I never could guess a line out of Lycidas and E. never could guess a line out of Adonaïs. I attributed one day one of the finest lines of Milton to the poet Montgomery, and E. made an equally absurd mistake, which happened to have a profound effect on my future, or rather on my future literary aspirations. We were playing the game in the Biergarten at Hildesheim. The band was playing the overture from Tannhäuser. Schoolboys were walking round the garden, arm in arm, and when they met an acquaintance took off their hats all together, in time, and by the right, or by the left, as the case might be, held them at an arm’s length and put them back stiffly. At many little tables, groups and families were sitting enjoying the music, drinking beer and eating Butterbrote. I said to E.: “Who is this by in The Game?” which was the recognised formula for saying you had begun to play, because the game began suddenly in the midst of conversation and circumstance quite remote from it: no matter how inappropriate or inopportune. The lines I quoted were these:
“Sank in great calm, as dreaming unison
Of darkness and midsummer sound must die
Before the daily duty of the Sun.”
“Oh,” said E., without any hesitation, “it’s magnificent—Shakespeare.”
“No,” I said, “it is not by Shakespeare; it is the end of a sonnet by Maurice Baring, written at Hildesheim in 1892.”
Now I had shown the poem in which these lines occurred with others to some undergraduates at Cambridge, possibly to E. himself, and had been told the stuff was deplorable, which no doubt it was, but this had so damped my spirits that I had resolved never to try and write verse again. Then came Nencioni’s praise (who had marked these very lines in blue pencil), and I partially reconsidered my decision. Now came this incident, which opened a shut door for me. It was not that I didn’t know that in this Game one was capable of any aberrations. It was not that I took myself seriously, but the mere fact of E. making such a mistake convinced me that mistakes in my favour were possible. Nencioni might be right after all. In any case, there was no reason why I should not try; and two days later I produced a sonnet, which E. entirely approved of, and which I afterwards published.
It was a great game; it included not only verse and prose, but sayings of great and small men, and even of personal acquaintances. We were both at our best in guessing things from books we had never read. I had an unerring ear for Zola’s prose, which I had then read little of, and E., whose reading was far wider and deeper than mine, was very hard to baffle except, as I have already said, by quoting Shelley’s Adonaïs, which he ended by learning by heart.
At Heidelberg I introduced E. to Professor Ihne. Professor Ihne, confronted, in the shape of E., with an undergraduate, or rather with a graduate, who had just taken his degree, and had won academical distinctions, was in his most Johnsonian mood, and contradicted him even when he agreed with him. He asked E. what degree he had taken at Cambridge, and when E. said: “Palæography,” Ihne, with a smile, said: “Oh, that’s all nonsense.” The Professor turned the conversation on to his favourite topic: the superfluity of the Norman element in the English language; the sad occurrence of the word pullulate in a Times article was mentioned, and E. made a spirited defence of the phrase: “Assemble and meet together,” which he said was a question of rhythm. “Pooh!” said Ihne, “it’s only association makes you think that.” The word “to get,” he said, was used to denote too many things. Poor E. was interpellated, as if he, and he alone, had been responsible for the shortcomings of the English language. He used, said Ihne, the word education when he meant instruction. “One is instructed at school,” he said. He asked E. for the derivation of the word caterpillar. E. had no suggestion to offer. Ihne said he derived it from Kater and to pill, but he had also given καθερπίζω a thought. Then the talk veered round to literature. “Schiller,” said Ihne, “is a greater dramatic poet than Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s tragedies are too painful; King Lear and Othello are unbearable.” E. said, unwisely, that Schiller’s women were so uninteresting. Ihne said that that was a thing E. could know nothing about, as he was not a married man. For his part, and he had been a married man, Schiller’s characters, and especially Thekla, were the most beautiful women characters that had ever been drawn. E. tried to defend Shakespeare, and pointed out the qualities of Shakespeare’s women. He mentioned Portia. “No,” said Ihne; “Portia is not a good character, because she oversteps her duties as counsel and tries to play the part of a judge.” “I consider Lord Byron,” said Ihne, “the finest English poet of the century.” E. said Byron had a great sense of rhythm. “If he had merely a great sense of rhythm,” said Ihne, “he wouldn’t have been a great poet.” E., to propitiate him, said something laudatory about Goethe’s Faust. Ihne at once said that Schiller was a greater poet than Goethe, because Faust was a collection of detached scenes, and Schiller’s plays were complete wholes.
We saw Professor Ihne several times, and what I have described is typical of all our conversations.