Mr. Huxley, alone among these writers, betrays traces of exotic influence. The last story in his book, The Death of Lully, might have come from the Contes Cruels, perhaps, in one way, has come thence. Others of the collection show less definite resemblances to French models and are less evenly and carefully composed; but there are in most of them traces of an alien exactitude and an alien wit. Mr. Huxley, as we know already from his verse, can write brilliantly. His defect here, as there, lies in a deficiency of feeling caused by an excess of self-consciousness. This self-consciousness does not make him awkward or effusive. He is far too clever to betray it thus rudely. As in the behaviour of some persons, it manifests itself in his work by an iron rigidity of attitude, an immovable equability of tone. When he invents characters he does not so much describe their actions or let them act as criticise them; he is led to adopt the pose of the satirist more consistently than perhaps he intends. Reaction follows fast on action; and the springs of his writing are laid bare in an extraordinarily ingenious dialogue, called Happy Families, where he exposes the triple personalities, inciting, betraying, checking one another, of a young man and a young woman sitting out together at a dance. This piece, which seems to have unnecessarily puzzled a number of Mr. Huxley's critics, means nothing if it does not express his opinion that in every human being there is a stratum of the animal which is to be distrusted and restrained. But, here and elsewhere, one wonders whether his watchfulness over this stratum has not led him into exaggerating its extent and distrusting things which, to a less suspicious eye, do not look in the least like it. And in another story, so fast are his reactions, we find him mocking the shuddering and ascetic revulsion from the purely animal in man. This is the behaviour not merely of the critic dominant over the artist, but of the critic who leads towards Nihilism by discrediting all human impulses, instead of arranging them in order. Mr. Huxley has, however, too much of the poet for this to be fundamental in him, too much appreciation of bright and vivid things and bright and vivid phrases. And it would be gravely unjust to convey the impression that it spoils his book. The Farcical History of Richard Greenow is an admirable invention, full of possibilities for bitter comedy, most, if not all, of which have been worked out; Cynthia is a good joke, though its title betrays the climax a little too early; and The Bookshop is more human in feeling than its companions. But the important point to notice is that, whatever may be the perversities or the affectations of his thought, Mr. Huxley always writes well, with a style that is never shabby or shoddy, never flamboyant or flat.
BELLES-LETTRES AND CRITICISM
THE MEASURES OF THE POETS. By M. A. Bayfield, M.A. Cambridge University Press. 5s. net.
A STUDY OF SHAKESPEARE'S VERSIFICATION. By M. A. Bayfield, M.A. Cambridge University Press. 16s. net.
LESSONS IN VERSE-CRAFT. By S. Gertrude Ford. Daniel. 3s. 6d. net.
Mr. Bayfield's Measures of the Poets is meant to be revolutionary. He finds existing systems of prosody neither complete nor sound, and would sweep them away in order to install his own trochaic scheme. Practically every work of a predecessor is ignored, and the author himself regrets that Lanier's Science of English Verse, published forty years ago, did not come to his notice until the present book was written. He does not mention Professor Saintsbury's History or Manual of English Prosody, nor (among other writings, by recent or living metrists) the essays of Patmore and Mr. Robert Bridges. A great deal of contention is thus avoided, but the probabilities of conversion are also reduced. He asserts that the normal foot of English verse is trochaic, and that the iambus cannot form a metrical foot, because the stressed syllable does not come first; while Professor Saintsbury declares that the iambic is the staple foot of English verse and is common to almost all prosodies.
How, then, let us ask the challenger, is the application of the trochaic system justified? In Mr. Bayfield's scheme the plain norm of the "full blank" verse line is an eleven-syllable arrangement of which the first is a "short," followed by five trochees; and the following line (quoted in his second book, which takes up the subject anew) is given as specimen:
I ⁝ come to | bury | Cæsar, | not to | praise him.‖
But the full line does not happen to be the common form, owing to its feminine ending, and so he admits that the prevailing type is the "checked" form: