How far a National Theatre, especially a State-assisted National Theatre, can be expected, or will consider it its duty, to produce new plays of merit is doubtful. If that is one of its functions it will not be its chief function; were it so its work would be the centre of perpetual tempests of controversy, and its controllers would learn what lobbying means. It will have quite enough to do if it concentrates on the systematic revival, on repertory lines, of the best classic plays, with occasional production of foreign plays and of old plays of historical interest. That, surely, is a thing which should be done, a work which should be continually maintained and developed, a work which should as certainly be maintained at the public expense (if necessary) as should, say, the Encyclopædia Britannica or the Dictionary of National Biography, should there ever come a time when no publisher felt able to spare the capital required to keep those great compilations going. After all, what is there to differentiate the cases of these enterprises from that of the British Museum, which nobody, whatever his opinion about public undertakings generally, suggests should be, or ever could be, stablished and maintained on its present scale by private enterprise?
The binding-case for Vol. I. of The London Mercury will be ready early in April. The case is of black cloth, with a white label in a sunk panel. It is designed to hold the six numbers plus an eight-page index (which will also be ready early in the month) and minus the six wrappers and the advertisement pages. Binding-cases will be supplied from this office at 3s. 6d. post free. If readers prefer that we should bind their numbers for them, they may send them here and pay an inclusive 6s., which will cover the cost of the case, the work of binding, and the return postage. The volume will be rather a fat one, but we felt that readers would think that twice a year was quite often enough to have this labour imposed on them.
LITERARY INTELLIGENCE
ARTHUR Henry Bullen died suddenly on February 29th, 1920, in his sixty-third year, at Stratford-on-Avon, where he had lived since 1906. He used to say that in his boyhood, as the son of Dr. George Bullen, Keeper of the Printed Books in the British Museum, he ran about the Library and browsed at pleasure, cultivating in his teens a taste (no doubt inherited) not only for the best in literature, but for the best in books too. He went to the City of London School and to Worcester College, Oxford, as a scholar; but, to judge from his mature habits, he must have been almost completely self-educated. A pleasant glimpse of him at Oxford may be seen in Professor Poulton's Viriamu Jones. He was already a man of very wide reading; within a few years of going down from Oxford he began to make himself known as an editor of Elizabethan drama and anthologies. Lyrics from Elizabethan Song-Books and its sequels no doubt are the most popular of his books; he rediscovered Thomas Campion, and poured out reprints of Old English Plays (two series), and the works of John Day, Marlowe, Marston, Middleton, and Peele. To edit a book, however, did not suffice him. For the last decade of the nineteenth century the firm of Lawrence & Bullen published a large number of remarkable works, ancient and modern, including not only familiar successes like Miss Harraden's Ships that Pass in the Night and Mr. W. W. Jacobs' Many Cargoes, half-a-dozen of the novels of George Gissing (a close friend of Bullen's), and early works of Mr. H. G. Wells, Moira O'Neill, and the authors of the Irish R.M., but also sumptuous and beautiful books, such as Botticelli's Illustrations to Dante, William Strang's Death and the Ploughman's Wife, and illustrated translations of Rabelais, Boccaccio, Straparola, Masuccio, and Ser Giovanni. Bullen's special taste was shown in the "Muses' Library," which began with Herrick, and included Keats (with an incomparable introduction by Robert Bridges) and William Blake (edited by W. B. Yeats).
Early in the present century he left the firm to continue publishing under his own name. To this period belong the Irish Plays and Ideas of Good and Evil of Mr. Yeats, whose Celtic Twilight and Secret Rose Bullen took over, with other books, from Lawrence & Bullen Ltd.; and such characteristic contributions to Elizabethan research as Dr. W. W. Greg's edition of Henslowe's Diary and Mr. R. B. McKerrow's Works of Thomas Nashe. In 1903 he dreamed one night that some one offered him a Shakespeare "printed at Stratford-on-Avon"; and within a year he had started the Shakespeare Head Press in order to realise the dream, which resulted in the "Stratford Town" Shakespeare in ten finely-printed volumes. Settling in Stratford, he devoted himself to printing and publishing, chiefly scholarly works of Shakespearean lore; but he also printed the handsome Collected Edition of the works of W. B. Yeats. About 1906, in addition to his other labours, he made a gallant effort as editor of the Gentleman's Magazine to revive its ancient glories, and managed to collect a wide variety of excellent articles. The best memorial to Bullen would be the realisation of a scheme long planned and fostered by him to make the Shakespeare Head Press at Stratford-on-Avon a properly subsidised centre of British Shakespearean scholarship.