As an example of what the Bookman really can do when it has a mind, let us quote the following review of a book by Mr. Le Gallienne:
“Mr. Le Gallienne is the Dick Whittington of song. His story reminds us of that other Richard, who, one summer morning many hundreds of years ago, sat listening to the bells of distant London. The one carried his little all tied up in a handkerchief slung to the end of a stick; the other came to London to seek his fortune with a sheaf of manuscript poems in his pocket and any number of poems singing in his head. Now, Mr. Le Gallienne is a figure in ‘society,’ and lives in a beautiful house crowded with costly bric-à-brac and valuable books; but I like to think sometimes of the sloping-roofed room, nestling under the gables of one of the most picturesque buildings left in London—quaint old Staple’s Inn—which was his first home in the great city.
“It was in just such a room that one might picture Chatterton—rough-hewn oak beams above, uneven oak flooring below, and in front a ‘magic casement’ ‘opening upon the foam’—not of ‘perilous seas’—but of perilous streets, where the black tides of hurrying human creatures never ceases [sic] to ebb and flow. Here were his bed, his books, and his papers. Here, too, though shillings were probably scarcer than sovereigns are now, were the flowers, which the extravagant tenant of the prophet’s chamber was never too poor to deny himself—the flowers which were the inspiration of many of his songs. And here, on a little stove in a corner, he would himself boil the water with which to brew for his visitor the tea or coffee that he would hand round with the ease and grace of a duke dispensing hospitality in his castle.
“I have been betrayed into this personal reminiscence by reading how ‘Love, a poor poet in need of a room for his bed and his rhymes,’ and ‘Beauty, a little blue-eyed girl who loved him,’ transformed into a seventh heaven a single seventh-story room which they had rented, for surely ‘Love’ stands for Mr. Le Gallienne himself, and ‘Beauty’ for the sweet-faced young wife with dove-like eyes and dove-like voice, whose loss has been the great sorrow of the poet’s life. It was in a beautiful idyll called A Seventh-Story Heaven that I read of the transformation, and this brings me to the fact with which I started or ought to have started—that Mr. Le Gallienne has published a new book. In other words, he has set open the door of another House of Welcome on the literary highway. And surely ’twere as hard, on a glaring summer’s noon, for a tired and thirsty traveller to pass by some ancient hostelry, through the ivy-hung porch of which he sees, lying back in cool shadow, a quaint stone-paven nook with a glimpse of green lawn and box-bordered flower beds beyond, as it were for the literary wayfarer to turn aside from a volume titled like Mr. Le Gallienne’s, The Prose Fancies of a Poet! Could a more alluring sign be set aswing before the doors of any literary House of Refreshment? Nor when we have entered are we disappointed by the bill of fare which is put before us. ‘A Seventh-Story Heaven,’ ‘Spring by Parcel Post,’ ‘A Poet in the City,’ ‘Brown Roses,’ ‘Death and Two Friends,’ ‘A Seaport in the Moon’—here surely is a list which might stir the imagination even of unimaginative folk.
“The score or so of ‘Fancies’ which form the volume are, as was only to be expected, of very varying merit. To the opening idyll, ‘A Seventh-Story Heaven,’ reference has already been made. Mr. Le Gallienne’s friend and neighbour, Mr. Grant Allen, a delightful naturalist and essayist, whom society by her neglect has turned into a thrower into her midst of Nihilistic bombs in the guise of novels, could bear witness to the fact that nests are built in stranger places, but surely never did love-birds find such strange quarters for their home as this eyrie at the top of a building, the ground floor of which was a sailor’s tavern. But dingy and unlovely as the spot may be, it is made beautiful for us in Mr. Le Gallienne’s page as the scene of a love-story so exquisitely told, and so tremulous with tender pathos, that we can only compare it to the work of the gentle Elia.
“I cannot say as much for the second Fancy, whimsically entitled ‘Spring by Parcel Post,’ for it is surely an error of taste which every admirer of Mr. Le Gallienne’s genius must regret. ‘The big Dutch hyacinths,’ he writes, ‘are already shamelessly enceinte with their buxom waxen blooms, so fat and fragrant—(one is already delivered of a fine blossom. Well, that is a fine baby, to be sure! says [sic] the other hyacinths with babes no less bonny under their own green apron—all waiting for the doctor Sun).’
“I wonder if this offends the taste of my readers as much as it offends mine. Mr. Le Gallienne may quote science and physiology against me, but I must confess that in regard to children and flowers I like to keep my very thoughts free from the smirch of sex, though I concede and contend that the smirch is entirely of man’s, not of God’s making. But in the passage I have quoted there is a certain coarseness of associations which is painful in connection with the purest and most perfect thing on God’s earth—a flower. It was to me as if hot hands were tampering with the petals of a lily. The air seemed to become close as I read, and it was not until I had had a dip—as into cool spring water—into the flower-poems of Burns and Wordsworth that I could go on with my reading of Prose Fancies.
“Let us turn the page and forget that one of the most delicately-minded of living poets, whose work has hitherto been distinguished for exquisite fancy and excellent taste, should so far have ‘lost himself’ as to have written it.
“Variations upon Whitebait is a caprice as skilful as Rossetti’s famous sonnet, A Match with the Moon. It is a very curiosity in similes, and though Mr. Le Gallienne will toss you a fresh and apt simile for every fish upon your fork, though he introduce as many variations as a pianist introduces into Home, Sweet Home, yet the essay is not all variation, but has a pretty story running like the thread of a tune throughout.