THE most popular theory advanced to account for the haunting of houses is that emanations of fear, hate or grief somehow impregnate a locality, and these emotions are released when in contact with a suitable medium. So with a poem or novel, passion impregnates the words and can make them active even divorced from the locality of creation.

An extreme instance of this process was claimed when Mr. Thomas Hardy came to Oxford to receive his honorary degree as Doctor of Literature, in the Sheldonian Theatre.

There were two very aged dons sitting together on a front bench, whom nobody in the assembly had ever seen before. They frowned and refrained from clapping Mr. Hardy or the Public Orator who had just described him as “Omnium poetarum Britannicorum necnon fabulatorum etiam facile princeps,” and people said they were certainly ghosts and identified them with those masters of colleges who failed to answer Jude the Obscure when he enquired by letter how he might become a student of the University. It seems one ought to be very careful when writing realistically.

LVII
THE LAYING ON OF HANDS

WHILE still in my perambulator about the year 1899,[2] I once received with great alarm the blessing of Algernon Charles Swinburne who was making his daily journey from “The Pines” in Putney to the Rose and Crown public house on the edge of Wimbledon Common. It was many years before I identified our nursery bogey man, “mad Mr. Swinburne,” with the poet. It interests me to read that Swinburne as a young man once asked and received the blessing of Walter Savage Landor who was a very old man indeed at the time, and that Landor as a child had been himself taken to get a blessing at the hand of Dr. Samuel Johnson, and that the great lexicographer in his childhood had been unsuccessfully “touched” by Queen Anne for the King’s Evil. And what the moral may be, I cannot say, but I have traced the story back to Queen Anne because I want to make my grimace at the sacerdotalists; for I must confess, I have been many times disillusioned over such “poetry in the great tradition” as Authority has put beyond criticism.

[2] See Mr. Max Beerbohm’s AND EVEN NOW, page 69.

In caution, and out of deference to my reader’s sensibilities I will only quote a single example. Before reading a line of Swinburne I had been frequently told that he was “absolutely wonderful,” I would be quite carried away by him. They all said that the opening chorus, for instance, of Atalanta in Calydon was the most melodious verse in the English language. I read:

When the hounds of Spring are on Winter’s traces,
The Mother of months in meadow and plain, ...

and I was not carried away as far as I expected. For a time I persuaded myself that it was my own fault, that I was a Philistine and had no ear—but one day pride reasserted itself and I began asking myself whether in the lines quoted above, the two “in’s” of Spring and Winter and the two “mo’s” of Mother and Months did not come too close together for euphony, and who exactly was the heroine of the second line, and whether the heavy alliteration in m was not too obvious a device, and whether months was not rather a stumbling-block in galloping verse of this kind, and would it not have been better....

Thereupon faith in the “great tradition” and in “Authority” waned.