"She is, I am aware, sitting in the hall, forty paces from where I am now writing.... I should marry Nancy if her reason were ever sufficiently restored to let her appreciate the meaning of the Anglican marriage service.... Is there any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or are all men's lives like the lives of us good people—like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords—broken, tumultuous, agonised, and unromantic lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies?... I can't conceal from myself the fact that I loved Edward Ashburnham—and that I love him because he was just myself. If I had had the courage and the virility and possibly also the physique of Edward Ashburnham I should, I fancy, have done much what he did."
We read novels like The Good Soldier and Ladies Whose Bright Eyes for their freshness and honesty of outlook. They follow no stereotyped form of writing; they lay bare character in an unusual manner; they demand intelligent reading and an appreciation of the quietly subtle. They give a picture of life which is devoid of sentimentality, true to experience and courageously uncoloured. Most of all they give the impression of being written by a careful and highly gifted artist.
Mr Hueffer is a master of English prose style.
X
THE BALLAD OF THE WHITE HORSE
Most people have read G. K. Chesterton's prose, many people have read the drinking songs in The Flying Inn, some people have read his collected Poems, and a few, only too few, have read the work by which he will probably be remembered when all the rest of his work is dead. The Ballad of the White Horse was first published in 1911 and is, as might be expected, a vindication of Christianity. "I say, as do all Christian men, that it is a divine purpose that rules, and not Fate," he quotes as his motto. He dedicates the poem to his wife because of "the sign that hangs about your neck":
"Therefore I bring these rhymes to you,
Who brought the cross to me."
Before we have read five pages we realise that here is at last a ballad which is not a spurious imitation. It rings clear, clean and true. We see Alfred beaten to his knees by "a sea-folk blinder than the sea," almost broken-hearted, beseeching the Virgin Mary for a sign.
"'Mother of God,' the wanderer said,
'I am but a common king,
Nor will I ask what saints may ask,
To see a secret thing....