The mellowness and sweetness of these lines are worth noting as characteristic of a transformation which is obviously taking place through all the last pages of the diary. This transformation adds something in the nature of a rounding and a completion to the whole work, which might otherwise have been merely an interrupted record. It enlarges too our conception of the author's character and capacities and fills in, most graciously, our picture of him.
Barbellion was accustomed to accuse himself of being an egotist; but, on his own definition, he was a truth-seeker. His portrait of himself was not immutable. It grew clearer as he understood himself better and it changed as he changed. It was not complete when he died because his own development was not complete. But he carried it as far as he could and made of it a singular picture. His Journal is a book of an enduring sort, not merely because it is an accurate and candid self-portrait, but also because of the inherent attractions of its subject. Barbellion was a poet, a humorist, an observer, a philosopher, as well as a truthful, passionate, and extraordinarily courageous man. In drawing a picture of the last he also made a picture of the world as it seemed to the first four and thus captured in it poetry, humour, observation, and philosophy. The subject is still too fresh, and, by the vividness of its presentment, too painful, for any attempt at a final valuation to be made. A few months ago Barbellion was still alive, suffering and hoping; and, with the best will in the world, no critic can avoid being influenced by this fact. But his book is a fair topic for prophecy; and it is not very rash to predict that, as it loses the sharpness and painfulness of a record of fact, so its qualities as a work of literature will come more into prominence and we shall realise that Barbellion was not only a genius untimely overwhelmed by an evil fate, but a genius who, before he was overwhelmed, had opportunity to do some at least of his appointed work. Then, whatever may be the theoretical views we hold on the connection between disease and genius, we shall be able to think less of Barbellion as a "case" and more of him as a writer. We shall, perhaps, not think that we have a complete portrait of him in his Journal any more than we have a complete portrait of Keats in the Odes or even in the Letters. The greatest of artists cannot entirely disclose himself in his work. Barbellion did so no more than others. But he was an artist, and, between what he wrote of himself and what was otherwise revealed, it is possible to form a picture of an extraordinary personality.
A LITTLE CLASSIC OF THE FUTURE[27]
[27] Bibliographical Note: Principal Works by Edith Œ. Somerville and Martin Ross: An Irish Cousin, 1889; Naboth's Vineyard, 1891; Through Connemara in a Governess Cart, 1893; The Real Charlotte, 1895; The Silver Fox, 1897; Some Experiences of an Irish R.M., 1899; All on the Irish Shore, 1903; Some Irish Yesterdays, 1906; Further Experiences of an Irish R.M., 1908; Dan Russell the Fox, 1911; In Mr. Knox's Country, 1915; Irish Memories, 1917; Mount Music, 1919. All published by Longmans.
By ORLO WILLIAMS
THE evanescence of laughter is most pathetic. Its bubbles vanish from the sparkling wine that held it so soon after it has been uncorked, leaving a sadly flat beverage to the critical palates of future generations. Wit, being a subtler and less easily disintegrated essence, does not so quickly pass away, but the buoyant bubbles of laughter, except in some rare vintages, survive but a moment the uncorking of their bottle. We may smile at the things that aroused the laughter of our ancestors, bringing our intellect and our imagination to the tasting, but it is seldom that we experience spontaneously the "sudden glory" of bursting sides when we read the words which aroused it. It is almost painful to look through the files of Punch of some sixty years ago, for it arouses that agonised shame with which one witnesses the failure of an inferior joke injudiciously introduced into superior society. One blushes for its pitiful exposure. Nor is it any consolation to reflect that the laughter of our own day will, for the most part, seem like the cracking of most unsubstantial thorns under ghostly pots to those who come after us. Very little of the literature of the past which truly survives is really provocative of hilarity. The Falstaffian passages of Shakespeare at once leap up as if to deny this statement; but, in the first place, Shakespeare brewed one of those rarer vintages whose beaded bubbles wink ever at the brim, and, in the second place, dramatic literature can always be revived by the fresh infusion of a living actor's personality. It is the purely written word of humour which will not give that sudden jerk to our emotions which it gave on its first outpouring. We say that we can appreciate Rabelais and the comic tales of the Canterbury Pilgrims; we profess to revel in Tristram Shandy, and to find the Pickwick Papers delicious, and we are not wrong; but it is a soberer enjoyment than that which these works of art gave to their first audiences. We pick them up, certainly, when we wish to be entertained, but seldom when we wish to laugh. There was a tutor at Oxford—there may be one still—who was invariably annoyed when any of his pupils attributed a historical phenomenon to "the spirit of the age," averring that there was no such thing. But surely he was wrong in coupling this convenient spirit with the ghosts of Stephen Sly and old John Naps of Greece, for the peculiar changes undergone by laughter are there to prove its existence. Laughter is compounded of the spirit of the age: it is excited by peculiar and irrecoverable felicities and conjunctions of temperament and environment, all of which are ingredients in that very real but intangible spirit. We can guess at this spirit, but we cannot recapture it, any more than we can recapture the light effervescence of its laughter.
Further, laughter is not a lofty emotion. The beasts, they say, have it not, but those who are little better than beasts laugh heartily. We ourselves are not so proud of our laughter that we wish it to echo through the ages, as we would have our high thoughts ring and our tears, perhaps, drip. The heady wine that moves it is often an unworthy vintage, more like the champagne which Murger's Schaunard christened coco épileptique than the true Hippocrene. So it has been in the past. The shelves of libraries are full of these flat draughts from which all the liveliness that alone gave them savour has departed. Yet in all ages there have been nobler bins of these light literary wines which, for all that they no longer catch at the throat, have a more lasting quality and never entirely lose their gratefulness to the tongue of the taster. They may not have sparkled in their prime more brightly than their now neglected contemporaries, but they live for certain finer essences in their composition, wit, style, finish, colour, bouquet, or something even subtler than these, that indefinable taste which distinguishes all that has been grown on a rich literary soil, warmed by the sun of beauty and matured by a vintner who has carefully and lovingly learned his trade. Such, after exciting the laughter of the present in their youth, may in their ripeness, and even in their decline, earn the humour of posterity. They may possibly be numbered among the classics, that is to say, among the productions of any age which deserve to live as models for the future or as peculiarly happy expressions of a bygone time. The test of a classic is what men and women of any age will always call its modernity, which means that it possesses some of those timeless qualities of greatness or artistic excellence which permeate the spirit of any age. Skill in construction and delineation, accuracy of vision, fine rhythm, perfect choice of language, happy adaptation of form to matter, sense of beauty, all these, like beauty itself, do not die. The work which holds them, even though thinly commingled, will outlive the evaporation of its bubbles, and may by their preservative effect become, if not a great, at least a little classic.
To have done, then, with the bush which no good wine needs, I would like to taste again, in the company of the reader, what, if I may prophesy in hope rather than in certainty, may become in English literature a little classic of the future. The bush would not have been so thick had it not been, on the face of it, unusual so to greet a work that has moved so many thousands of us to hearty and inextinguishable laughter. I mean the work of Miss Edith Somerville and her mourned-for second self in letters who wrote under the name of Martin Ross. Few humorists who write merely to catch the passing fancy of the day can have been more successful or more popular: in the merely temporary quality of effervescence they can compete with any of their contemporaries. The sportsman who hates art and loathes poetry has the Irish R.M. and its fellows in well-thumbed copies on his bookshelves; the man who only reads for laughter and never for improvement praises these authors as highly as the most discriminating, and those who would faint at the suspicion of becoming in any way involved in classic literature will joyfully immerse themselves in "Somerville and Ross," like thirsty bibbers quaffing a curious vintage for its exhilaration rather than its quality. Appreciation has poured in upon them from all sides, from those who know and delight in the comic sides of Irish life, when treated observantly and not fantastically, from those to whom hunting and horseflesh are almost the be-all and end-all of existence, from those who treat their brains to a good story as to a stimulative drug, as well as from those who bring more discrimination to their appraisement. The devotees will often claim that they alone can scent the subtler flavour from these hilarious pages. The Irishman, unless he be of the kind that despises all light-heartedness in writing of his country, will assert that none but he can get the exquisite appreciation of comparing the work of art with the reality which inspired it: the hunting fraternity will find it hard to suppose that one who knows not what it is to be