BOOKS OF THE MONTH
POETRY
MANSOUL, OR THE RIDDLE OF THE WORLD. By Charles M. Doughty. Selwyn & Blount. 7s. 6d. net.
We imagine that there is no difference of opinion, amongst those who have read it, about Mr. Doughty's prose book, now a generation old, Wanderings in Arabia Deserta. It was one of the great prose works of the nineteenth century, a book which (the geographers assure us) was astonishingly accurate as a record of exploration, and which repeatedly soared into passages of description and meditation unsurpassed for muscularity and grandeur. Even that book, however, was the work of a man odd in temperament and outlook and possessing peculiar ideas as to the use of the English language. In the volumes of poetry which he has been producing so rapidly in his old age his eccentricities have been projected very much farther. We should not be surprised to hear that he had never read (barring perhaps Shakespeare and Milton) any poet later than Spenser; we are certain that he habitually reads no one later than Spenser, and the poet with whom a comparison most frequently leaps to the mind is someone earlier still, namely, Langland. There are those, a very few, who swallow Mr. Doughty whole, who enjoy his archaisms, real and "pseudo," who think The Dawn in Britain the greatest poetical work of our time, and will hear nothing against even the topical passages of his poem about the German war. There are more who find him frankly unreadable in bulk, but are willing to turn over his pages for the sake of the occasionally lovely passages of description that they find on them; whilst the average intelligent reader would probably run from any page of any of his poetical works, so stony is the way that the disciple must tread and so vigorous the discipline to which he must subject himself.
For ourselves, we read Mr. Doughty through as in duty bound, and we perceive even in his knottiest and even in his naïvest passages the workings of a powerful and original mind, the observations of an eye which looks at history and the material world as though they had never been looked at before, the strivings of a heart that has always been acutely aware of the world behind the seen. Nevertheless, not even this compensates us fully for a cumbrousness of style, a malformation of shape, and a guttural obscurity of speech hard to equal in all the annals of literature; and we are, we fear, to be most sympathetic to that second class of readers who look to Mr. Doughty only for occasional flowers and remember, out of all they have read of his, only stray images, as of a shepherd on a hill or swallows circling over the fresh meadows in the dawn of the world. Mansoul is all of a piece with the others; we almost think that in a few months it will, in our own memories, have amalgamated with the others. It opens in the familiar mode, the "grand manner," but just a little awry:
As chanced I sate on terrace of an house,
In summer season, after sickness past;
And fell, surprised my sense, into deep trance;
Wherein meseemed, much musing in my thought,
I cogitations heard, of many hearts;
That came and went, in Mantown's market-place
Whereon I looked. And in my spirit I asked;
What were indeed right paths of a man's feet;
That lacking light, wont stumble in world's murk.
There can be heard the grave voice, there seen the something like majesty of port, there noticed a little of Mr. Doughty's obscurity and some of his, we daresay even unconscious, fads such as the avoidance of particles and the refusal to use the apostrophe 's. Thus it continues for two hundred pages of contortion and clouds with flashes of sunshine coming through them. At one moment we are wondering why on earth Mr. Doughty should call Tigris and Euphrates "Digla" and "Frat" if he has to translate these terms in a footnote; at another we are giving up an unusually dark passage in despair; at another we are wondering whether perhaps his best things do not actually gain something from the mannerisms that normally make our heads ache. The narrative is very hard to follow. The singer, accompanied by Mansoul and one Minimus, peregrinates through the under world, surveys past civilisations, and converses with (amongst others) Nebo, Zoroaster, Socrates, and St. Stephen. The Kaiser (we conceive) is, in anticipation, interviewed:
One crowned, cast lately down unto this place
a Warmonger and a coxcomb whose "werewolfs face" is now blotted by "a loathly leprosy"; and there is a pagan to the soul of all things at the end, the Muse of Britain and Colin (presumed Spenser) being intermittently in mind throughout. Yet at any time Mr. Doughty is liable to break, without the least awareness of writing a purple patch, into a packed passage full of feeling and sweet to the memory. Take one such: