We read Mr F. M. Hueffer's work because it shows a versatility that is quite out of the common in modern authors.
He is successful with vers libre (which is decidedly uncommon) and even with rhymed vers libre (which is more uncommon still).
"Vers libre," he says, "is the only medium in which I can convey more intimate moods. Vers libre is a very jolly medium in which to write and to read, if it be read conversationally and quietly."
"What is love of one's land?...
I don't know very well.
It is something that sleeps
For a year—for a day—
For a month—something that keeps
Very hidden and quiet and still
And then takes
The quiet heart like a wave,
The quiet brain like a spell,
The quiet will
Like a tornado; and that shakes
The whole of the soul."
His poem On Heaven, which he afterwards wished to suppress as being "too sloppy," contains these lines:
"Nor does God need to be a very great magician
To give to each man after his heart,
Who knows very well what each man has in his heart:
To let you pass your life in a night-club where they dance,
If that is your idea of Heaven: if you will, in the South of France;
If you will, on the turbulent sea; if you will, in the peace of the night;
Where you will, how you will;
Or in the long death of a kiss, that may never pall:
He would be a very little God if He could not do all this,
And he is still
The great God of all."
But it is not as a poet, a taste of whose quality I have just given you, that he would be judged.
It is as the novelist who wrote two of the most interesting novels of our time, Ladies Whose Bright Eyes and The Good Soldier.
The former is the best historical romance that I have ever read.
Mr Sorrell, a mining engineer who had taken up publishing, is travelling up from Plymouth to London when the train goes off the line and he wakes up to find himself living in the fourteenth century possessed of a twentieth-century brain and filled with twentieth-century ideas. He is in possession of a sacred talisman which all the people he meets want to deprive him of: incidentally the fact that he has it causes everyone to treat him with great respect.