ON THE MARGIN

ALDOUS HUXLEY

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

MORTAL COILS

CROME YELLOW

LIMBO

LEDA: AND OTHER POEMS

ON THE

MARGIN

NOTES AND ESSAYS

By ALDOUS HUXLEY

NEW YORK

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1923,

BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

ON THE MARGIN. II

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

Note: Most of these Essays appeared in The Athenæum, under the title “Marginalia” and over the signature AUTOLYCUS. The others were first printed in The Weekly Westminster Gazette, The London Mercury and Vanity Fair (New York).

ON THE MARGIN

ON THE MARGIN

I: CENTENARIES

From Bocca di Magra to Bocca d’Arno, mile after mile, the sandy beaches smoothly, unbrokenly extend. Inland from the beach, behind a sheltering belt of pines, lies a strip of coastal plain—flat as a slice of Holland and dyked with slow streams. Corn grows here and the vine, with plantations of slim poplars interspersed, and fat water-meadows. Here and there the streams brim over into shallow lakes, whose shores are fringed with sodden fields of rice. And behind this strip of plain, four or five miles from the sea, the mountains rise, suddenly and steeply: the Apuan Alps. Their highest crests are of bare limestone, streaked here and there with the white marble which brings prosperity to the little towns that stand at their feet: Massa and Carrara, Serravezza, Pietrasanta. Half the world’s tombstones are scooped out of these noble crags. Their lower slopes are grey with olive trees, green with woods of chestnut. Over their summits repose the enormous sculptured masses of the clouds.

From cape to cape, with a bridge-like shape,

Over a torrent sea,

Sunbeam-proof, I hang like a roof,—

The mountains its columns be.

The landscape fairly quotes Shelley at you. This sea with its luminous calms and sudden tempests, these dim blue islands hull down on the horizon, these mountains and their marvellous clouds, these rivers and woodlands are the very substance of his poetry. Live on this coast for a little and you will find yourself constantly thinking of that lovely, that strangely childish poetry, that beautiful and child-like man. Perhaps his spirit haunts the coast. It was in this sea that he sailed his flimsy boat, steering with one hand and holding in the other his little volume of Æschylus. You picture him so on the days of calm. And on the days of sudden violent storm you think of him, too. The lightnings cut across the sky, the thunders are like terrible explosions overhead, the squall comes down with a fury. What news of the flimsy boat? None, save only that a few days after the storm a young body is washed ashore, battered, unrecognizable; the little Æschylus in the coat pocket is all that tells us that this was Shelley.

I have been spending the summer on this haunted coast. That must be my excuse for mentioning in so self-absorbed a world as is ours the name of a poet who has been dead these hundred years. But be reassured. I have no intention of writing an article about the ineffectual angel beating in the void his something-or-other wings in vain. I do not mean to add my croak to the mellifluous chorus of centenary-celebrators. No; the ghost of Shelley, who walks in Versilia and the Lunigia, by the shores of the Gulf of Spezia and below Pisa where Arno disembogues, this ghost with whom I have shaken hands and talked, incites me, not to add a supererogatory and impertinent encomium, but rather to protest against the outpourings of the other encomiasts, of the honey-voiced centenary-chanters.

The cooing of these persons, ordinarily a specific against insomnia, is in this case an irritant; it rouses, it exacerbates. For annoying and disgusting it certainly is, this spectacle of a rebellious youth praised to fulsomeness, a hundred years after his death, by people who would hate him and be horrified by him, if he were alive, as much as the Scotch reviewers hated and were horrified by Shelley. How would these persons treat a young contemporary who, not content with being a literary innovator, should use his talent to assault religion and the established order, should blaspheme against plutocracy and patriotism, should proclaim himself a Bolshevik, an internationalist, a pacifist, a conscientious objector? They would say of him that he was a dangerous young man who ought to be put in his place; and they would either disparage and denigrate his talent, or else—if they were a little more subtly respectable—they would never allow his name to get into print in any of the periodicals which they controlled. But seeing that Shelley was safely burnt on the sands of Viareggio a hundred years ago, seeing that he is no longer a live dangerous man but only a dead classic, these respectable supporters of established literature and established society join in chorus to praise him, and explain his meaning, and preach sermons over him. The mellifluous cooing is accompanied by a snuffle, and there hangs over these centenary celebrations a genial miasma of hypocrisy and insincerity. The effect of these festal anniversaries in England is not to rekindle life in the great dead; a centenary is rather a second burial, a reaffirmation of deadness. A spirit that was once alive is fossilized and, in the midst of solemn and funereal ceremonies, the petrified classic is duly niched in the temple of respectability.

How much better they order these things in Italy! In that country—which one must ever admire more the more one sees of it—they duly celebrate their great men; but celebrate them not with a snuffle, not in black clothes, not with prayer-books in their hands, crape round their hats and a hatred, in their hearts, of all that has to do with life and vigour. No, no; they make their dead an excuse for quickening life among the living; they get fun out of their centenaries.

Last year the Italians were celebrating the six hundredth anniversary of Dante’s death. Now, imagine what this celebration would have been like in England. All the oldest critics and all the young men who aspire to be old would have written long articles in all the literary papers. That would have set the tone. After that some noble lord, or even a Prince of the Blood, would have unveiled a monument designed by Frampton or some other monumental mason of the Academy. Imbecile speeches in words of not more than two syllables would then have been pronounced over the ashes of the world’s most intelligent poet. To his intelligence no reference would, of course, be made; but his character, ah! his character would get a glowing press. The most fiery and bitter of men would be held up as an example to all Sunday-school children.

After this display of reverence, we should have had a lovely historical pageant in the rain. A young female dressed in white bunting would have represented Beatrice, and for the Poet himself some actor manager with a profile and a voice would have been found. Guelfs and Ghibellines in fancy dress of the period would go splashing about in the mud, and a great many verses by Louis Napoleon Parker would be declaimed. And at the end we should all go home with colds in our heads and suffering from septic ennui, but with, at the same time, a pleasant feeling of virtuousness, as though we had been at church.

See now what happens in Italy. The principal event in the Dante celebration is an enormous military review. Hundreds of thousands of wiry little brown men parade the streets of Florence. Young officers of a fabulous elegance clank along in superbly tailored riding breeches and glittering top-boots. The whole female population palpitates. It is an excellent beginning. Speeches are then made, as only in Italy they can be made—round, rumbling, sonorous speeches, all about Dante the Italianissimous poet, Dante the irredentist, Dante the prophet of Greater Italy, Dante the scourge of Jugo-Slavs and Serbs. Immense enthusiasm. Never having read a line of his works, we feel that Dante is our personal friend, a brother Fascist.

After that the real fun begins; we have the manifestazioni sportive of the centenary celebrations. Innumerable bicycle races are organized. Fierce young Fascisti with the faces of Roman heroes pay their homage to the Poet by doing a hundred and eighty kilometres to the hour round the Circuit of Milan. High speed Fiats and Ansaldos and Lancias race one another across the Apennines and round the bastions of the Alps. Pigeons are shot, horses gallop, football is played under the broiling sun. Long live Dante!

How infinitely preferable this is to the stuffiness and the snuffle of an English centenary! Poetry, after all, is life, not death. Bicycle races may not have very much to do with Dante—though I can fancy him, his thin face set like metal, whizzing down the spirals of Hell on a pair of twinkling wheels or climbing laboriously the one-in-three gradients of Purgatory Mountain on the back of his trusty Sunbeam. No, they may not have much to do with Dante; but pageants in Anglican cathedral closes, boring articles by old men who would hate and fear him if he were alive, speeches by noble lords over monuments made by Royal Academicians—these, surely, have even less to do with the author of the Inferno.

It is not merely their great dead whom the Italians celebrate in this gloriously living fashion. Even their religious festivals have the same jovial warm-blooded character. This summer, for example, a great feast took place at Loreto to celebrate the arrival of a new image of the Virgin to replace the old one which was burnt some little while ago. The excitement started in Rome, where the image, after being blessed by the Pope, was taken in a motor-car to the station amid cheering crowds who shouted, “Evviva Maria” as the Fiat and its sacred burden rolled past. The arrival of the Virgin in Loreto was the signal for a tremendous outburst of jollification. The usual bicycle races took place; there were football matches and pigeon-shooting competitions and Olympic games. The fun lasted for days. At the end of the festivities two cardinals went up in aeroplanes and blessed the assembled multitudes—an incident of which the Pope is said to have remarked that the blessing, in this case, did indeed come from heaven.

Rare people! If only we Anglo-Saxons could borrow from the Italians some of their realism, their love of life for its own sake, of palpable, solid, immediate things. In this dim land of ours we are accustomed to pay too much respect to fictitious values; we worship invisibilities and in our enjoyment of immediate life we are restrained by imaginary inhibitions. We think too much of the past, of metaphysics, of tradition, of the ideal future, of decorum and good form; too little of life and the glittering noisy moment. The Italians are born Futurists. It did not need Marinetti to persuade them to celebrate Dante with bicycle races; they would have done it naturally, spontaneously, if no Futurist propaganda had ever been issued. Marinetti is the product of modern Italy, not modern Italy of Marinetti. They are all Futurists in that burningly living Italy where we from the North seek only an escape into the past. Or rather, they are not Futurists: Marinetti’s label was badly chosen. They are Presentists. The early Christians preoccupied with nothing but the welfare of their souls in the life to come were Futurists, if you like.

We shall do well to learn something of their lively Presentism. Let us hope that our great-grandchildren will celebrate the next centenary of Shelley’s death by aerial regattas and hydroplane races. The living will be amused and the dead worthily commemorated. The spirit of the man who delighted, during life, in wind and clouds, in mountain-tops and waters, in the flight of birds and the gliding of ships, will be rejoiced when young men celebrate his memory by flying through the air or skimming, like alighting swans, over the surface of the sea.

The rocks are cloven, and through the purple night

I see cars drawn by rainbow-winged steeds

Which trample the dim winds; in each there stands

A wild-eyed charioteer urging their flight.

Some look behind, as fiends pursued them there,

And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars;

Others, with burning eyes, lean forth, and drink

With eager lips the wind of their own speed,

As if the thing they loved fled on before,

And now, even now, they clasped it.

The man who wrote this is surely more suitably celebrated by aeroplane or even bicycle races than by seven-column articles from the pens of Messrs.—well, perhaps we had better mention no names. Let us take a leaf out of the Italian book.

II: ON RE-READING CANDIDE

The furniture vans had unloaded their freight in the new house. We were installed, or, at least, we were left to make the best of an unbearable life in the dirt and the confusion. One of the Pre-Raphaelites, I forget at the moment which, once painted a picture called “The Last Day in the Old Home.” A touching subject. But it would need a grimmer, harder brush to depict the horrors of “The First Day in the New Home.” I had sat down in despair among the tumbled movables when I noticed—with what a thrill of pleased recognition—the top of a little leather-bound book protruding from among a mass of bulkier volumes in an uncovered case. It was Candide, my treasured little first edition of 1759, with its discreetly ridiculous title-page, “Candide ou L’Optimisme, Traduit de l’Allemand de Mr. le Docteur Ralph.”

Optimism—I had need of a little at the moment, and as Mr. le Docteur Ralph is notoriously one of the preachers most capable of inspiring it, I took up the volume and began to read: “Il y avait en Westphalie, dans le Château de Mr. le Baron de Thunder-ten-tronckh....” I did not put down the volume till I had reached the final: “Il faut cultiver notre jardin.” I felt the wiser and the more cheerful for Doctor Ralph’s ministrations.

But the remarkable thing about re-reading Candide is not that the book amuses one, not that it delights and astonishes with its brilliance; that is only to be expected. No, it evokes a new and, for me at least, an unanticipated emotion. In the good old days, before the Flood, the history of Candide’s adventures seemed to us quiet, sheltered, middle-class people only a delightful phantasy, or at best a high-spirited exaggeration of conditions which we knew, vaguely and theoretically, to exist, to have existed, a long way off in space and time. But read the book to-day; you feel yourself entirely at home in its pages. It is like reading a record of the facts and opinions of 1922; nothing was ever more applicable, more completely to the point. The world in which we live is recognizably the world of Candide and Cunégonde, of Martin and the Old Woman who was a Pope’s daughter and the betrothed of the sovereign Prince of Massa-Carrara. The only difference is that the horrors crowd rather more thickly on the world of 1922 than they did on Candide’s world. The manœuvrings of Bulgare and Abare, the intestine strife in Morocco, the earthquake and auto-da-fé are but pale poor things compared with the Great War, the Russian Famine, the Black and Tans, the Fascisti, and all the other horrors of which we can proudly boast. “Quand Sa Hautesse envoye un vaisseau en Egypte,” remarked the Dervish, “s’embarrasse-t-elle si les souris qui sont dans le vaisseau sont à leur aise ou non?” No; but there are moments when Sa Hautesse, absent-mindedly no doubt, lets fall into the hold of the vessel a few dozen of hungry cats; the present seems to be one of them.

Cats in the hold? There is nothing in that to be surprised at. The wisdom of Martin and the Old Woman who was once betrothed to the Prince of Massa-Carrara has become the everyday wisdom of all the world since 1914. In the happy Victorian and Edwardian past, Western Europe, like Candide, was surprised at everything. It was amazed by the frightful conduct of King Bomba, amazed by the Turks, amazed by the political chicanery and loose morals of the Second Empire—(what is all Zola but a prolonged exclamation of astonishment at the goings-on of his contemporaries?). After that we were amazed at the disgusting behaviour of the Boers, while the rest of Europe was amazed at ours. There followed the widespread astonishment that in this, the so-called twentieth century, black men should be treated as they were being treated on the Congo and the Amazon. Then came the war: a great outburst of indignant astonishment, and afterwards an acquiescence as complete, as calmly cynical as Martin’s. For we have discovered, in the course of the somewhat excessively prolonged histoire à la Candide of the last seven years, that astonishment is a supererogatory emotion. All things are possible, not merely for Providence, whose ways we had always known, albeit for some time rather theoretically, to be strange, but also for men.

Men, we thought, had grown up from the brutal and rampageous hobbledehoyism of earlier ages and were now as polite and genteel as Gibbon himself. We now know better. Create a hobbledehoy environment and you will have hobbledehoy behaviour; create a Gibbonish environment and every one will be, more or less, genteel. It seems obvious, now. And now that we are living in a hobbledehoy world, we have learnt Martin’s lesson so well that we can look on almost unmoved at the most appalling natural catastrophes and at exhibitions of human stupidity and wickedness which would have aroused us in the past to surprise and indignation. Indeed, we have left Martin behind and are become, with regard to many things, Pococurante.

And what is the remedy? Mr. le Docteur Ralph would have us believe that it consists in the patient cultivation of our gardens. He is probably right. The only trouble is that the gardens of some of us seem hardly worth cultivating. The garden of the bank clerk and the factory hand, the shop-girl’s garden, the garden of the civil servant and the politician—can one cultivate them with much enthusiasm? Or, again, there is my garden, the garden of literary journalism. In this little plot I dig and delve, plant, prune, and finally reap—sparsely enough, goodness knows!—from one year’s end to another. And to what purpose, to whom for a good, as the Latin Grammar would say? Ah, there you have me.

There is a passage in one of Tchekov’s letters which all literary journalists should inscribe in letters of gold upon their writing desks. “I send you,” says Tchekov to his correspondent, “Mihailovsky’s article on Tolstoy.... It’s a good article, but it’s strange: one might write a thousand such articles and things would not be one step forwarder, and it would still remain unintelligible why such articles are written.”

Il faut cultiver notre jardin. Yes, but suppose one begins to wonder why?

III: ACCIDIE

The cœnobites of the Thebaid were subjected to the assaults of many demons. Most of these evil spirits came furtively with the coming of night. But there was one, a fiend of deadly subtlety, who was not afraid to walk by day. The holy men of the desert called him the dæmon meridianus; for his favourite hour of visitation was in the heat of the day. He would lie in wait for monks grown weary with working in the oppressive heat, seizing a moment of weakness to force an entrance into their hearts. And once installed there, what havoc he wrought! For suddenly it would seem to the poor victim that the day was intolerably long and life desolatingly empty. He would go to the door of his cell and look up at the sun and ask himself if a new Joshua had arrested it midway up the heavens. Then he would go back into the shade and wonder what good he was doing in that cell or if there was any object in existence. Then he would look at the sun again and find it indubitably stationary, and the hour of the communal repast of the evening as remote as ever. And he would go back to his meditations, to sink, sink through disgust and lassitude into the black depths of despair and hopeless unbelief. When that happened the demon smiled and took his departure, conscious that he had done a good morning’s work.

Throughout the Middle Ages this demon was known as Acedia, or, in English, Accidie. Monks were still his favourite victims, but he made many conquests among the laity also. Along with gastrimargia, fornicatio, philargyria, tristitia, cenodoxia, ira and superbia, acedia or tædium cordis is reckoned as one of the eight principal vices to which man is subject. Inaccurate psychologists of evil are wont to speak of accidie as though it were plain sloth. But sloth is only one of the numerous manifestations of the subtle and complicated vice of accidie. Chaucer’s discourse on it in the “Parson’s Tale” contains a very precise description of this disastrous vice of the spirit. “Accidie,” he tells us, “makith a man hevy, thoghtful and wrawe.” It paralyzes human will, “it forsloweth and forsluggeth” a man whenever he attempts to act. From accidie comes dread to begin to work any good deeds, and finally wanhope, or despair. On its way to ultimate wanhope, accidie produces a whole crop of minor sins, such as idleness, tardiness, lâchesse, coldness, undevotion and “the synne of worldly sorrow, such as is cleped tristitia, that sleth man, as seith seint Poule.” Those who have sinned by accidie find their everlasting home in the fifth circle of the Inferno. They are plunged in the same black bog with the Wrathful, and their sobs and words come bubbling up to the surface:

Fitti nel limo dicon: “Tristi fummo

nell’ aer dolce che dal sol s’ allegra,

portando dentro accidioso fummo;

Or ci attristiam nella belletta negra.”

Quest’ inno si gorgoglian nella strozza,

chè dir nol posson con parola integra.

Accidie did not disappear with the monasteries and the Middle Ages. The Renaissance was also subject to it. We find a copious description of the symptoms of acedia in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. The results of the midday demon’s machinations are now known as the vapours or the spleen. To the spleen amiable Mr. Matthew Green, of the Custom House, devoted those eight hundred octosyllables which are his claim to immortality. For him it is a mere disease to be healed by temperate diet:

Hail! water gruel, healing power,

Of easy access to the poor;

by laughter, reading and the company of unaffected young ladies:

Mothers, and guardian aunts, forbear

Your impious pains to form the fair,

Nor lay out so much cost and art

But to deflower the virgin heart;

by the avoidance of party passion, drink, Dissenters and missionaries, especially missionaries: to whose undertakings Mr. Green always declined to subscribe:

I laugh off spleen and keep my pence

From spoiling Indian innocence;

by refraining from going to law, writing poetry and thinking about one’s future state.

The Spleen was published in the thirties of the eighteenth century. Accidie was still, if not a sin, at least a disease. But a change was at hand. “The sin of worldly sorrow, such as is cleped tristitia,” became a literary virtue, a spiritual mode. The apostles of melancholy wound their faint horns, and the Men of Feeling wept. Then came the nineteenth century and romanticism; and with them the triumph of the meridian demon. Accidie in its most complicated and most deadly form, a mixture of boredom, sorrow and despair, was now an inspiration to the greatest poets and novelists, and it has remained so to this day. The Romantics called this horrible phenomenon the mal du siècle. But the name made no difference; the thing was still the same. The meridian demon had good cause to be satisfied during the nineteenth century, for it was then, as Baudelaire puts it, that

L’Ennui, fruit de la morne incuriosité,

Prit les proportions de l’immortalité.

It is a very curious phenomenon, this progress of accidie from the position of being a deadly sin, deserving of damnation, to the position first of a disease and finally of an essentially lyrical emotion, fruitful in the inspiration of much of the most characteristic modern literature. The sense of universal futility, the feelings of boredom and despair, with the complementary desire to be “anywhere, anywhere out of the world,” or at least out of the place in which one happens at the moment to be, have been the inspiration of poetry and the novel for a century and more. It would have been inconceivable in Matthew Green’s day to have written a serious poem about ennui. By Baudelaire’s time ennui was as suitable a subject for lyric poetry as love; and accidie is still with us as an inspiration, one of the most serious and poignant of literary themes. What is the significance of this fact? For clearly the progress of accidie is a spiritual event of considerable importance. How is it to be explained?

It is not as though the nineteenth century invented accidie. Boredom, hopelessness and despair have always existed, and have been felt as poignantly in the past as we feel them now. Something has happened to make these emotions respectable and avowable; they are no longer sinful, no longer regarded as the mere symptoms of disease. That something that has happened is surely simply history since 1789. The failure of the French Revolution and the more spectacular downfall of Napoleon planted accidie in the heart of every youth of the Romantic generation—and not in France alone, but all over Europe—who believed in liberty or whose adolescence had been intoxicated by the ideas of glory and genius. Then came industrial progress with its prodigious multiplication of filth, misery, and ill-gotten wealth; the defilement of nature by modern industry was in itself enough to sadden many sensitive minds. The discovery that political enfranchisement, so long and stubbornly fought for, was the merest futility and vanity so long as industrial servitude remained in force was another of the century’s horrible disillusionments.

A more subtle cause of the prevalence of boredom was the disproportionate growth of the great towns. Habituated to the feverish existence of these few centres of activity, men found that life outside them was intolerably insipid. And at the same time they became so much exhausted by the restlessness of city life that they pined for the monotonous boredom of the provinces, for exotic islands, even for other worlds—any haven of rest. And finally, to crown this vast structure of failures and disillusionments, there came the appalling catastrophe of the War of 1914. Other epochs have witnessed disasters, have had to suffer disillusionment; but in no century have the disillusionments followed on one another’s heels with such unintermitted rapidity as in the twentieth, for the good reason that in no century has change been so rapid and so profound. The mal du siècle was an inevitable evil; indeed, we can claim with a certain pride that we have a right to our accidie. With us it is not a sin or a disease of the hypochondries; it is a state of mind which fate has forced upon us.

IV: SUBJECT-MATTER OF POETRY

It should theoretically be possible to make poetry out of anything whatsoever of which the spirit of man can take cognizance. We find, however, as a matter of historical fact, that most of the world’s best poetry has been content with a curiously narrow range of subject-matter. The poets have claimed as their domain only a small province of our universe. One of them now and then, more daring or better equipped than the rest, sets out to extend the boundaries of the kingdom. But for the most part the poets do not concern themselves with fresh conquests; they prefer to consolidate their power at home, enjoying quietly their hereditary possessions. All the world is potentially theirs, but they do not take it. What is the reason for this, and why is it that poetical practice does not conform to critical theory? The problem has a peculiar relevance and importance in these days, when young poetry claims absolute liberty to speak how it likes of whatsoever it pleases.

Wordsworth, whose literary criticism, dry and forbidding though its aspect may be, is always illumined by a penetrating intelligence, Wordsworth touched upon this problem in his preface to Lyrical Ballads—touched on it and, as usual, had something of value to say about it. He is speaking here of the most important and the most interesting of the subjects which may, theoretically, be made into poetry, but which have, as a matter of fact, rarely or never undergone the transmutation: he is speaking of the relations between poetry and that vast world of abstractions and ideas—science and philosophy—into which so few poets have ever penetrated. “The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, or mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the poet’s art as any upon which he is now employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.” It is a formidable sentence; but read it well, read the rest of the passage from which it is taken, and you will find it to be full of critical truth.

The gist of Wordsworth’s argument is this. All subjects—“the remotest discoveries of the chemist” are but one example of an unlikely poetic theme—can serve the poet with material for his art, on one condition: that he, and to a lesser degree his audience, shall be able to apprehend the subject with a certain emotion. The subject must somehow be involved in the poet’s intimate being before he can turn it into poetry. It is not enough, for example, that he should apprehend it merely through his senses. (The poetry of pure sensation, of sounds and bright colours, is common enough nowadays; but amusing as we may find it for the moment, it cannot hold the interest for long.) It is not enough, at the other end of the scale, if he apprehends his subject in a purely intellectual manner. An abstract idea must be felt with a kind of passion, it must mean something emotionally significant, it must be as immediate and important to the poet as a personal relationship before he can make poetry of it. Poetry, in a word, must be written by “enjoying and suffering beings,” not by beings exclusively dowered with sensations or, as exclusively, with intellect.

Wordsworth’s criticism helps us to understand why so few subjects have ever been made into poetry when everything under the sun, and beyond it, is theoretically suitable for transmutation into a work of art. Death, love, religion, nature; the primary emotions and the ultimate personal mysteries—these form the subject-matter of most of the greatest poetry. And for obvious reasons. These things are “manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.” But to most men, including the generality of poets, abstractions and ideas are not immediately and passionately moving. They are not enjoying or suffering when they apprehend these things—only thinking.

The men who do feel passionately about abstractions, the men to whom ideas are as persons—moving and disquietingly alive—are very seldom poets. They are men of science and philosophers, preoccupied with the search for truth and not, like the poet, with the expression and creation of beauty. It is very rarely that we find a poet who combines the power and the desire to express himself with that passionate apprehension of ideas and that passionate curiosity about strange remote facts which characterize the man of science and the philosopher. If he possessed the requisite sense of language and the impelling desire to express himself in terms of beauty, Einstein could write the most intoxicating lyrics about relativity and the pleasures of pure mathematics. And if, say, Mr. Yeats understood the Einstein theory—which, in company with most other living poets, he presumably does not, any more than the rest of us—if he apprehended it exultingly as something bold and profound, something vitally important and marvellously true, he too could give us, out of the Celtic twilight, his lyrics of relativity. It is those distressing little “ifs” that stand in the way of this happy consummation. The conditions upon which any but the most immediately and obviously moving subjects can be made into poetry are so rarely fulfilled, the combination of poet and man of science, poet and philosopher, is so uncommon, that the theoretical universality of the art has only very occasionally been realized in practice.

Contemporary poetry in the whole of the western world is insisting, loudly and emphatically through the mouths of its propagandists, on an absolute liberty to speak of what it likes how it likes. Nothing could be better; all that we can now ask is that the poets should put the theory into practice, and that they should make use of the liberty which they claim by enlarging the bounds of poetry.

The propagandists would have us believe that the subject-matter of contemporary poetry is new and startling, that modern poets are doing something which has not been done before. “Most of the poets represented in these pages,” writes Mr. Louis Untermeyer in his Anthology of Modern American Poetry, “have found a fresh and vigorous material in a world of honest and often harsh reality. They respond to the spirit of their times; not only have their views changed, their vision has been widened to include things unknown to the poets of yesterday. They have learned to distinguish real beauty from mere prettiness, to wring loveliness out of squalor, to find wonder in neglected places, to search for hidden truths even in the dark caves of the unconscious.” Translated into practice this means that contemporary poets can now write, in the words of Mr. Sandburg, of the “harr and boom of the blast fires,” of “wops and bohunks.” It means, in fact, that they are at liberty to do what Homer did—to write freely about the immediately moving facts of everyday life. Where Homer wrote of horses and the tamers of horses, our contemporaries write of trains, automobiles, and the various species of wops and bohunks who control the horsepower. That is all. Much too much stress has been laid on the newness of the new poetry; its newness is simply a return from the jewelled exquisiteness of the eighteen-nineties to the facts and feelings of ordinary life. There is nothing intrinsically novel or surprising in the introduction into poetry of machinery and industrialism, of labour unrest and modern psychology: these things belong to us, they affect us daily as enjoying and suffering beings; they are a part of our lives, just as the kings, the warriors, the horses and chariots, the picturesque mythology were part of Homer’s life. The subject-matter of the new poetry remains the same as that of the old. The old boundaries have not been extended. There would be real novelty in the new poetry if it had, for example, taken to itself any of the new ideas and astonishing facts with which the new science has endowed the modern world. There would be real novelty in it if it had worked out a satisfactory artistic method for dealing with abstractions. It has not. Which simply means that that rare phenomenon, the poet in whose mind ideas are a passion and a personal moving force, does not happen to have appeared.

And how rarely in all the long past he has appeared! There was Lucretius, the greatest of all the philosophic and scientific poets. In him the passionate apprehension of ideas, and the desire and ability to give them expression, combined to produce that strange and beautiful epic of thought which is without parallel in the whole history of literature. There was Dante, in whose soul the mediæval Christian philosophy was a force that shaped and directed every feeling, thought and action. There was Goethe, who focussed into beautiful expression an enormous diffusion of knowledge and ideas. And there the list of the great poets of thought comes to an end. In their task of extending the boundaries of poetry into the remote and abstract world of ideas, they have had a few lesser assistants—Donne, for example, a poet only just less than the greatest; Fulke Greville, that strange, dark-spirited Elizabethan; John Davidson, who made a kind of poetry out of Darwinism; and, most interesting poetical interpreter of nineteenth-century science, Jules Laforgue.

Which of our contemporaries can claim to have extended the bounds of poetry to any material extent? It is not enough to have written about locomotives and telephones, “wops and bohunks,” and all the rest of it. That is not extending the range of poetry; it is merely asserting its right to deal with the immediate facts of contemporary life, as Homer and as Chaucer did. The critics who would have us believe that there is something essentially unpoetical about a bohunk (whatever a Bohunk may be), and something essentially poetical about Sir Lancelot of the Lake, are, of course, simply negligible; they may be dismissed as contemptuously as we have dismissed the pseudo-classical critics who opposed the freedoms of the Romantic Revival. And the critics who think it very new and splendid to bring bohunks into poetry are equally old-fashioned in their ideas.

It will not be unprofitable to compare the literary situation in this early twentieth century of ours with the literary situation of the early seventeenth century. In both epochs we see a reaction against a rich and somewhat formalized poetical tradition expressing itself in a determination to extend the range of subject-matter, to get back to real life, and to use more natural forms of expression. The difference between the two epochs lies in the fact that the twentieth-century revolution has been the product of a number of minor poets, none of them quite powerful enough to achieve what he theoretically meant to do, while the seventeenth-century revolution was the work of a single poet of genius, John Donne. Donne substituted for the rich formalism of non-dramatic Elizabethan poetry a completely realized new style, the style of the so-called metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century. He was a poet-philosopher-man-of-action whose passionate curiosity about facts enabled him to make poetry out of the most unlikely aspects of material life, and whose passionate apprehension of ideas enabled him to extend the bounds of poetry beyond the frontiers of common life and its emotions into the void of intellectual abstraction. He put the whole life and the whole mind of his age into poetry.

We to-day are metaphysicals without our Donne. Theoretically we are free to make poetry of everything in the universe; in practice we are kept within the old limits, for the simple reason that no great man has appeared to show us how we can use our freedom. A certain amount of the life of the twentieth century is to be found in our poetry, but precious little of its mind. We have no poet to-day like that strange old Dean of St. Paul’s three hundred years ago—no poet who can skip from the heights of scholastic philosophy to the heights of carnal passion, from the contemplation of divinity to the contemplation of a flea, from the rapt examination of self to an enumeration of the most remote external facts of science, and make all, by his strangely passionate apprehension, into an intensely lyrical poetry.

The few poets who do try to make of contemporary ideas the substance of their poetry, do it in a manner which brings little conviction or satisfaction to the reader. There is Mr. Noyes, who is writing four volumes of verse about the human side of science—in his case, alas, all too human. Then there is Mr. Conrad Aiken. He perhaps is the most successful exponent in poetry of contemporary ideas. In his case, it is clear, “the remotest discoveries of the chemist” are apprehended with a certain passion; all his emotions are tinged by his ideas. The trouble with Mr. Aiken is that his emotions are apt to degenerate into a kind of intellectual sentimentality, which expresses itself only too easily in his prodigiously fluent, highly coloured verse.

One could lengthen the list of more or less interesting poets who have tried in recent times to extend the boundaries of their art. But one would not find among them a single poet of real importance, not one great or outstanding personality. The twentieth century still awaits its Lucretius, awaits its own philosophical Dante, its new Goethe, its Donne, even its up-to-date Laforgue. Will they appear? Or are we to go on producing a poetry in which there is no more than the dimmest reflection of that busy and incessant intellectual life which is the characteristic and distinguishing mark of this age?

V: WATER MUSIC

The house in which I live is haunted by the noise of dripping water. Always, day and night, summer and winter, something is dripping somewhere. For many months an unquiet cistern kept up within its iron bosom a long, hollow-toned soliloquy. Now it is mute; but a new and more formidable drip has come into existence. From the very summit of the house a little spout—the overflow, no doubt, of some unknown receptacle under the roof—lets fall a succession of drops that is almost a continuous stream. Down it falls, this all but stream, a sheer forty or fifty feet on to the stones of the basement steps, thence to dribble ignominiously away into some appointed drain. The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep; but my lesser waterfalls play a subtler, I had almost said a more “modern” music. Lying awake at nights, I listen with a mixture of pleasure and irritation to its curious cadences.

The musical range of a dripping tap is about half an octave. But within the bounds of this major fourth, drops can play the most surprising and varied melodies. You will hear them climbing laboriously up small degrees of sound, only to descend at a single leap to the bottom. More often they wander unaccountably about in varying intervals, familiar or disconcertingly odd. And with the varying pitch the time also varies, but within narrower limits. For the laws of hydrostatics, or whatever other science claims authority over drops, do not allow the dribblings much licence either to pause or to quicken the pace of their falling. It is an odd sort of music. One listens to it as one lies in bed, slipping gradually into sleep, with a curious, uneasy emotion.

Drip drop, drip drap drep drop. So it goes on, this watery melody, for ever without an end. Inconclusive, inconsequent, formless, it is always on the point of deviating into sense and form. Every now and then you will hear a complete phrase of rounded melody. And then—drip drop, di-drep, di-drap—the old inconsequence sets in once more. But suppose there were some significance in it! It is that which troubles my drowsy mind as I listen at night. Perhaps for those who have ears to hear, this endless dribbling is as pregnant with thought and emotion, as significant as a piece of Bach. Drip drop, di-drap, di-drep. So little would suffice to turn the incoherence into meaning. The music of the drops is the symbol and type of the whole universe; it is for ever, as it were, asymptotic to sense, infinitely close to significance, but never touching it. Never, unless the human mind comes and pulls it forcibly over the dividing space. If I could understand this wandering music, if I could detect in it a sequence, if I could force it to some conclusion—the diapason closing full in God, in mind, I hardly care what, so long as it closes in something definite—then, I feel, I should understand the whole incomprehensible machine, from the gaps between the stars to the policy of the Allies. And growing drowsier and drowsier, I listen to the ceaseless tune, the hollow soliloquy in the cistern, the sharp metallic rapping of the drops that fall from the roof upon the stones below; and surely I begin to discover a meaning, surely I detect a trace of thought, surely the phrases follow one another with art, leading on inevitably to some prodigious conclusion. Almost I have it, almost, almost.... Then, I suppose, I fall definitely to sleep. For the next thing I am aware of is that the sunlight is streaming in. It is morning, and the water is still dripping as irritatingly and persistently as ever.

Sometimes the incoherence of the drop music is too much to be borne. The listener insists that the asymptote shall somehow touch the line of sense. He forces the drops to say something. He demands of them that they shall play, shall we say, “God Save the King,” or the Hymn to Joy from the Ninth Symphony, or Voi che Sapete. The drops obey reluctantly; they play what you desire, but with more than the ineptitude of the child at the piano. Still they play it somehow. But this is an extremely dangerous method of laying the haunting ghost whose voice is the drip of water. For once you have given the drops something to sing or say, they will go on singing and saying it for ever. Sleep becomes impossible, and at the two or three hundredth repetition of Madelon or even of an air from Figaro the mind begins to totter towards insanity.

Drops, ticking clocks, machinery, everything that throbs or clicks or hums or hammers, can be made, with a little perseverance, to say something. In my childhood, I remember, I was told that trains said, “To Lancashire, to Lancashire, to fetch a pocket handkercher”—and da capo ad infinitum. They can also repeat, if desired, that useful piece of information: “To stop the train, pull down the chain.” But it is very hard to persuade them to add the menacing corollary: “Penalty for improper use Five Pounds.” Still, with careful tutoring I have succeeded in teaching a train to repeat even that unrhythmical phrase.

Dadaist literature always reminds me a little of my falling drops. Confronted by it, I feel the same uncomfortable emotion as is begotten in me by the inconsequent music of water. Suppose, after all, that this apparently accidental sequence of words should contain the secret of art and life and the universe! It may; who knows? And here am I, left out in the cold of total incomprehension; and I pore over this literature and regard it upside down in the hope of discovering that secret. But somehow I cannot induce the words to take on any meaning whatever. Drip drop, di-drap, di-drep—Tzara and Picabia let fall their words and I am baffled. But I can see that there are great possibilities in this type of literature. For the tired journalist it is ideal, since it is not he, but the reader who has to do all the work. All he need do is to lean back in his chair and allow the words to dribble out through the nozzle of his fountain pen. Drip, drop....

VI: PLEASURES

We have heard a great deal, since 1914, about the things which are a menace to civilization. First it was Prussian militarism; then the Germans at large; then the prolongation of the war; then the shortening of the same; then, after a time, the Treaty of Versailles; then French militarism—with, all the while, a running accompaniment of such minor menaces as Prohibition, Lord Northcliffe, Mr. Bryan, Comstockery....

Civilization, however, has resisted the combined attacks of these enemies wonderfully well. For still, in 1923, it stands not so very far from where it stood in that “giant age before the flood” of nine years since. Where, in relation to Neanderthal on the one hand and Athens on the other, where precisely it stood then is a question which each may answer according to his taste. The important fact is that these menaces to our civilization, such as it is—menaces including the largest war and the stupidest peace known to history—have confined themselves in most places and up till now to mere threats, barking more furiously than they bite.

No, the dangers which confront our civilization are not so much the external dangers—wild men, wars and the bankruptcy that wars bring after them. The most alarming dangers are those which menace it from within, that threaten the mind rather than the body and estate of contemporary man.

Of all the various poisons which modern civilization, by a process of auto-intoxication, brews quietly up within its own bowels, few, it seems to me, are more deadly (while none appears more harmless) than that curious and appalling thing that is technically known as “pleasure.” “Pleasure” (I place the word between inverted commas to show that I mean, not real pleasure, but the organized activities officially known by the same name) “pleasure”—what nightmare visions the word evokes! Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work. But I would rather put in eight hours a day at a Government office than be condemned to lead a life of “pleasure”; I would even, I believe, prefer to write a million words of journalism a year.

The horrors of modern “pleasure” arise from the fact that every kind of organized distraction tends to become progressively more and more imbecile. There was a time when people indulged themselves with distractions requiring the expense of a certain intellectual effort. In the seventeenth century, for example, royal personages and their courtiers took a real delight in listening to erudite sermons (Dr. Donne’s, for example) and academical disputes on points of theology or metaphysics. Part of the entertainment offered to the Prince Palatine, on the occasion of his marriage with James 1.’s daughter, was a syllogistic argumentation, on I forget what philosophical theme, between the amiable Lord Keeper Williams and a troop of minor Cambridge logicians. Imagine the feelings of a contemporary prince, if a loyal University were to offer him a similar entertainment!

Royal personages were not the only people who enjoyed intelligent pleasures. In Elizabethan times every lady and gentleman of ordinary culture could be relied upon, at demand, to take his or her part in a madrigal or a motet. Those who know the enormous complexity and subtlety of sixteenth-century music will realize what this means. To indulge in their favourite pastime our ancestors had to exert their minds to an uncommon degree. Even the uneducated vulgar delighted in pleasures requiring the exercise of a certain intelligence, individuality and personal initiative. They listened, for example, to Othello, King Lear, and Hamlet—apparently with enjoyment and comprehension. They sang and made much music. And far away, in the remote country, the peasants, year by year, went through the traditional rites—the dances of spring and summer, the winter mummings, the ceremonies of harvest home—appropriate to each successive season. Their pleasures were intelligent and alive, and it was they who, by their own efforts, entertained themselves.

We have changed all that. In place of the old pleasures demanding intelligence and personal initiative, we have vast organizations that provide us with ready-made distractions—distractions which demand from pleasure-seekers no personal participation and no intellectual effort of any sort. To the interminable democracies of the world a million cinemas bring the same stale balderdash. There have always been fourth-rate writers and dramatists; but their works, in the past, quickly died without getting beyond the boundaries of the city or the country in which they appeared. To-day, the inventions of the scenario-writer go out from Los Angeles across the whole world. Countless audiences soak passively in the tepid bath of nonsense. No mental effort is demanded of them, no participation; they need only sit and keep their eyes open.

Do the democracies want music? In the old days they would have made it themselves. Now, they merely turn on the gramophone. Or if they are a little more up-to-date they adjust their wireless telephone to the right wave-length and listen-in to the fruity contralto at Marconi House, singing “The Gleaner’s Slumber Song.”

And if they want literature, there is the Press. Nominally, it is true, the Press exists to impart information. But its real function is to provide, like the cinema, a distraction which shall occupy the mind without demanding of it the slightest effort or the fatigue of a single thought. This function, it must be admitted, it fulfils with an extraordinary success. It is possible to go on for years and years, reading two papers every working day and one on Sundays without ever once being called upon to think or to make any other effort than to move the eyes, not very attentively, down the printed column.

Certain sections of the community still practise athletic sports in which individual participation is demanded. Great numbers of the middle and upper classes play golf and tennis in person and, if they are sufficiently rich, shoot birds and pursue the fox and go ski-ing in the Alps. But the vast mass of the community has now come even to sport vicariously, preferring the watching of football to the fatigues and dangers of the actual game. All classes, it is true, still dance; but dance, all the world over, the same steps to the same tunes. The dance has been scrupulously sterilized of any local or personal individuality.

These effortless pleasures, these ready-made distractions that are the same for every one over the face of the whole Western world, are surely a worse menace to our civilization than ever the Germans were. The working hours of the day are already, for the great majority of human beings, occupied in the performance of purely mechanical tasks in which no mental effort, no individuality, no initiative are required. And now, in the hours of leisure, we turn to distractions as mechanically stereotyped and demanding as little intelligence and initiative as does our work. Add such leisure to such work and the sum is a perfect day which it is a blessed relief to come to the end of.

Self-poisoned in this fashion, civilization looks as though it might easily decline into a kind of premature senility. With a mind almost atrophied by lack of use, unable to entertain itself and grown so wearily uninterested in the ready-made distractions offered from without that nothing but the grossest stimulants of an ever-increasing violence and crudity can move it, the democracy of the future will sicken of a chronic and mortal boredom. It will go, perhaps, the way the Romans went: the Romans who came at last to lose, precisely as we are doing now, the capacity to distract themselves; the Romans who, like us, lived on ready-made entertainments in which they had no participation. Their deadly ennui demanded ever more gladiators, more tightrope-walking elephants, more rare and far-fetched animals to be slaughtered. Ours would demand no less; but owing to the existence of a few idealists, doesn’t get all it asks for. The most violent forms of entertainment can only be obtained illicitly; to satisfy a taste for slaughter and cruelty you must become a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Let us not despair, however; we may still live to see blood flowing across the stage of the Hippodrome. The force of a boredom clamouring to be alleviated may yet prove too much for the idealists.

VII: MODERN FOLK POETRY

To all those who are interested in the “folk” and their poetry—the contemporary folk of the great cities and their urban muse—I would recommend a little-known journal called McGlennon’s Pantomime Annual. This periodical makes its appearance at some time in the New Year, when the pantos are slowly withering away under the influence of approaching spring. I take this opportunity of warning my readers to keep a sharp look out for the coming of the next issue; it is sure to be worth the modest twopence which one is asked to pay for it.

McGlennon’s Pantomime Annual is an anthology of the lyrics of the panto season’s most popular songs. It is a document of first-class importance. To the future student of our popular literature McGlennon will be as precious as the Christie-Miller collection of Elizabethan broadsheets. In the year 2220 a copy of the Pantomime Annual may very likely sell for hundreds of pounds at the Sotheby’s of the time. With laudable forethought I am preserving my copy of last year’s McGlennon for the enrichment of my distant posterity.

The Folk Poetry of 1920 may best be classified according to subject-matter. First, by reason of its tender associations as well as its mere amount, is the poetry of Passion. Then there is the Poetry of Filial Devotion. Next, the Poetry of the Home—the dear old earthly Home in Oregon or Kentucky—and, complementary to it, the Poetry of the Spiritual Home in other and happier worlds. Here, as well as in the next section, the popular lyric borrows some of its best effects from hymnology. There follows the Poetry of Recollection and Regret, and the Poetry of Nationality, a type devoted almost exclusively to the praises of Ireland. These types and their variations cover the Folk’s serious poetry. Their comic vein is less susceptible to analysis. Drink, Wives, Young Nuts, Honeymoon Couples—these are a few of the stock subjects.

The Amorous Poetry of the Folk, like the love lyrics of more cultured poets, is divided into two species: the Poetry of Spiritual Amour and the more direct and concrete expression of Immediate Desire. McGlennon provides plenty of examples of both types:

When love peeps in the window of your heart

[it might be the first line of a Shakespeare sonnet]

You seem to walk on air,

Birds sing their sweet songs to you,

No cloud in your skies of blue,

Sunshine all the happy day, etc.

These rhapsodies tend to become a little tedious. But one feels the warm touch of reality in

I want to snuggle, I want to snuggle,

I know a cosy place for two.

I want to snuggle, I want to snuggle,

I want to feel that love is true.

Take me in your arms as lovers do.

Hold me very tight and kiss me too.

I want to snuggle, I want to snuggle,

I want to snuggle close to you.

This is sound; but it does not come up to the best of the popular lyrics. The agonized passion expressed in the words and music of “You Made Me Love You” is something one does not easily forget, though that great song is as old as the now distant origins of ragtime.

The Poetry of Filial Devotion is almost as extensive as the Poetry of Amour. McGlennon teems with such outbursts as this:

You are a wonderful mother, dear old mother of mine.

You’ll hold a spot down deep in my heart

Till the stars no longer shine.

Your soul shall live on for ever,

On through the fields of time,

For there’ll never be another to me

Like that wonderful mother of mine.

Even Grandmamma gets a share of this devotion:

Granny, my own, I seem to hear you calling me;

Granny, my own, you are my sweetest memory ...

If up in heaven angels reign supreme,

Among the angels you must be the Queen.

Granny, my own, I miss you more and more.

The last lines are particularly rich. What a fascinating heresy, to hold that the angels reign over their Creator!

The Poetry of Recollection and Regret owes most, both in words and music, to the hymn. McGlennon provides a choice example in “Back from the Land of Yesterday”:

Back from the land of yesterday,

Back to the friends of yore;

Back through the dark and dreary way

Into the light once more.

Back to the heart that waits for me,

Warmed by the sunshine above;

Back from the old land of yesterday’s dreams

To a new land of life and love.

What it means, goodness only knows. But one can imagine that, sunk to a slow music in three-four time—some rich religious waltz-tune—it would be extremely uplifting and edifying. The decay of regular churchgoing has inevitably led to this invasion of the music-hall by the hymn. People still want to feel the good uplifting emotion, and they feel it with a vengeance when they listen to songs about

the land of beginning again,

Where skies are always blue ...

Where broken dreams come true.

The great advantage of the music-hall over the church is that the uplifting moments do not last too long.

Finally, there is the great Home motif. “I want to be,” these lyrics always begin, “I want to be almost anywhere that is not the place where I happen at the moment to be.” M. Louis Estève has called this longing “Le Mal de la Province,” which in its turn is closely related to “Le Mal de l’au-delà.” It is one of the worst symptoms of romanticism.

Steamer, balançant ta mâture,

Lève l’ancre vers une exotique nature,

exclaims Mallarmé, and the Folk, whom that most exquisite of poets loathed and despised, echo his words in a hundred different keys. There is not a State in America where they don’t want to go. In McGlennon we find yearnings expressed for California, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, and Georgia. Some sigh for Ireland, Devon, and the East. “Egypt! I am calling you; oh, life is sweet and joys complete when at your feet I lay [sic].” But the Southern States, the East, Devon, and Killarney are not enough. The Mal de l’au-delà succeeds the Mal de la Province. The Folk yearn for extra-mundane worlds. Here, for example, is an expression of nostalgia for a mystical “Kingdom within your Eyes”:

Somewhere in somebody’s eyes

Is a place just divine,

Bounded by roses that kiss the dew

In those dear eyes that shine.

Somewhere beyond earthly dreams,

Where love’s flower never dies,

God made the world, and He gave it to me

In that kingdom within your eyes.

If there is any characteristic which distinguishes contemporary folk poetry from the folk poetry of other times it is surely its meaninglessness. Old folk poetry is singularly direct and to the point, full of pregnant meaning, never vague. Modern folk poetry, as exemplified in McGlennon, is almost perfectly senseless. The Elizabethan peasant or mechanic would never have consented to sing or listen to anything so flatulently meaningless as “Back from the Land of Yesterday” or “The Kingdom within your Eyes.” His taste was for something clear, definite and pregnant, like “Greensleeves”:

And every morning when you rose,

I brought you dainties orderly,

To clear your stomach from all woes—

And yet you would not love me.

Could anything be more logical and to the point? But we, instead of logic, instead of clarity, are provided by our professional entertainers with the drivelling imbecility of “Granny, my own.” Can it be that the standard of intelligence is lower now than it was three hundred years ago? Have newspapers and cinemas and now the wireless telephone conspired to rob mankind of whatever sense of reality, whatever power of individual questioning and criticism he once possessed? I do not venture to answer. But the fact of McGlennon has somehow got to be explained. How? I prefer to leave the problem on a note of interrogation.

VIII: BIBLIOPHILY

Bibliophily is on the increase. It is a constatation which I make with regret; for the bibliophile’s point of view is, to me at least, unsympathetic and his standard of values unsound. Among the French, bibliophily would seem to have become a kind of mania, and, what is more, a highly organized and thoroughly exploited mania. Whenever I get a new French book I turn at once—for in what disgusts and irritates one there is always a certain odious fascination—to the fly-leaf. One had always been accustomed to finding there a brief description of the “vingt exemplaires sur papier hollande Van Gelder”; nobody objected to the modest old Dutchman whose paper gave to the author’s presentation copies so handsome an appearance. But Van Gelder is now a back number. In this third decade of the twentieth century he has become altogether too simple and unsophisticated. On the fly-leaf of a dernière nouveauté I find the following incantation, printed in block capitals and occupying at least twenty lines:

Il a été tiré de cet ouvrage, après impositions spéciales, 133 exemplaires in-4. Tellière sur papier-vergé pur-fil Lafuma-Navarre, au filigrane de la Nouvelle Revue Française, dont 18 exemplaires hors commerce, marqués de A à R, 100 exemplaires réservés aux Bibliophiles de la Nouvelle Revue Française, numérotés de I à C, 15 exemplaires numérotés de CI à CXV; 1040 exemplaires sur papier vélin pur-fil Lafuma-Navarre, dont dix exemplaires hors commerce marqués de a à j, 800 exemplaires réservés aux amis de l’Edition originale, numérotés de 1 à 800, 30 exemplaires d’auteur, hors commerce, numérotés de 801 à 830 et 200 exemplaires numérotés de 831 à 1030, ce tirage constituant proprement et authentiquement l’Edition originale.

If I were one of the hundred Bibliophiles of the Nouvelle Revue Française or even one of the eight hundred Friends of the Original Edition, I should suggest, with the utmost politeness, that the publishers might deserve better of their fellow-beings if they spent less pains on numbering the first edition and more on seeing that it was properly produced. Personally, I am the friend of any edition which is reasonably well printed and bound, reasonably correct in the text and reasonably clean. The consciousness that I possess a numbered copy of an edition printed on Lafuma-Navarre paper, duly watermarked with the publisher’s initials, does not make up for the fact that the book is full of gross printer’s errors and that a whole sheet of sixteen pages has wandered, during the process of binding, from one end of the volume to the other—occurrences which are quite unnecessarily frequent in the history of French book production.

With the increased attention paid to bibliophilous niceties, has come a great increase in price. Limited éditions de luxe have become absurdly common in France, and there are dozens of small publishing concerns which produce almost nothing else. Authors like Monsieur André Salmon and Monsieur Max Jacob scarcely ever appear at less than twenty francs a volume. Even with the exchange this is a formidable price; and yet the French bibliophiles, for whom twenty francs are really twenty francs, appear to have an insatiable appetite for these small and beautiful editions. The War has established a new economic law: the poorer one becomes the more one can afford to spend on luxuries.

The ordinary English publisher has never gone in for Van Gelder, Lafuma-Navarre and numbered editions. Reticent about figures, he leaves the book collector to estimate the first edition’s future rarity by guesswork. He creates no artificial scarcity values. The collector of contemporary English first editions is wholly a speculator; he never knows what time may have in store.

In the picture trade for years past nobody has pretended that there was any particular relation between the price of a picture and its value as a work of art. A magnificent El Greco is bought for about a tenth of the sum paid for a Romney that would be condemned by any self-respecting hanging-committee. We are so well used to this sort of thing in picture dealing that we have almost ceased to comment on it. But in the book trade the tendency to create huge artificial values is of a later growth. The spectacle of a single book being bought for fifteen thousand pounds is still sufficiently novel to arouse indignation. Moreover, the book collector who pays vast sums for his treasures has even less excuse than has the collector of pictures. The value of an old book is wholly a scarcity value. From a picture one may get a genuine æsthetic pleasure; in buying a picture one buys the unique right to feel that pleasure. But nobody can pretend that Venus and Adonis is more delightful when it is read in a fifteen thousand pound unique copy than when it is read in a volume that has cost a shilling. On the whole, the printing and general appearance of the shilling book is likely to be the better of the two. The purchaser of the fabulously expensive old book is satisfying only his possessive instinct. The buyer of a picture may also have a genuine feeling for beauty.

The triumph and the reductio ad absurdum of bibliophily were witnessed not long ago at Sotheby’s, when the late Mr. Smith of New York bought eighty thousand pounds’ worth of books in something under two hours at the Britwell Court sale. The War, it is said, created forty thousand new millionaires in America; the New York bookseller can have had no lack of potential clients. He bought a thousand guinea volume as an ordinary human being might buy something off the sixpenny shelf in a second-hand shop. I have seldom witnessed a spectacle which inspired in me an intenser blast of moral indignation. Moral indignation, of course, is always to be mistrusted as, wholly or in part, the disguised manifestation of some ignoble passion. In this case the basic cause of my indignation was clearly envy. But there was, I flatter myself, a superstructure of disinterested moral feeling. To debase a book into an expensive object of luxury is as surely, in Miltonic language, “to kill the image of God, as it were in the eye” as to burn it. And when one thinks how those eighty thousand pounds might have been spent.... Ah, well!

IX: DEMOCRATIC ART

There is intoxication to be found in a crowd. For it is good to be one of many all doing the same thing—good whatever the thing may be, whether singing hymns, watching a football match, or applauding the eternal truths of politicians. Anything will serve as an excuse. It matters not in whose name your two or three thousand are gathered together; what is important is the process of gathering. In these last days we have witnessed a most illuminating example of this tendency in the wild outburst of mob excitement over the arrival in this country of Mary Pickford. It is not as though people were really very much interested in the Little Sweetheart of the World. She is no more than an excuse for assembling in a crowd and working up a powerful communal emotion. The newspapers set the excitement going; they built the fire, applied the match, and cherished the infant flame. The crowds, only too happy to be kindled, did the rest; they burned.

I belong to that class of unhappy people who are not easily infected by crowd excitement. Too often I find myself sadly and coldly unmoved in the midst of multitudinous emotion. Few sensations are more disagreeable. The defect is in part temperamental, and in part is due to that intellectual snobbishness, that fastidious rejection of what is easy and obvious, which is one of the melancholy consequences of the acquisition of culture. How often one regrets this asceticism of the mind! How wistfully sometimes one longs to be able to rid oneself of the habit of rejection and selection, and to enjoy all the dear, obviously luscious, idiotic emotions without an afterthought! And indeed, however much we may admire the Chromatic Fantasia of Bach, we all of us have a soft spot somewhere in our minds that is sensitive to “Roses in Picardy.” But the soft spot is surrounded by hard spots; the enjoyment is never unmixed with critical disapprobation. The excuses for working up a communal emotion, even communal emotion itself, are rejected as too gross. We turn from them as a cœnobite of the Thebaid would have turned from dancing girls or a steaming dish of tripe and onions.

I have before me now a little book, recently arrived from America, which points out the way in which the random mob emotion may be systematically organized into a kind of religion. This volume, The Will of Song (Boni & Liveright, 70 c.), is the joint production of Messrs. Harry Barnhart and Percy MacKaye. “How are art and social service to be reconciled?... How shall the Hermit Soul of the Individual Poet give valid, spontaneous expression to the Communal Soul of assembled multitudes? How may the surging Tides of Man be sluiced in Conduits of Art, without losing their primal glory and momentum?” These questions and many others, involving a great expense of capital letters, are asked by Mr. MacKaye and answered in The Will of Song, which bears the qualifying sub-title, “A Dramatic Service of Community Singing.”

The service is democratically undogmatic. Abstractions, such as Will, Imagination, Joy, Love and Liberty, some of whom are represented in the dramatic performance, not by individuals, but by Group Personages (i.e., choruses), chant about Brotherhood in a semi-Biblical phraseology that is almost wholly empty of content. It is all delightfully vague and non-committal, like a Cabinet Minister’s speech about the League of Nations, and, like such a speech, leaves behind it a comfortable glow, a noble feeling of uplift. But, like Cabinet Ministers, preachers and all whose profession it is to move the people by the emission of words, the authors of The Will of Song are well aware that what matters in a popular work of art is not the intellectual content so much as the picturesqueness of its form and the emotion with which it is presented. In the staging—if such a term is not irreverent—of their service, Messrs. Barnhart and MacKaye have borrowed from Roman Catholic ritual all its most effective emotion-creators. The darknesses, the illuminations, the chiming bells, the solemn mysterious voices, the choral responses—all these traditional devices have been most scientifically exploited in the Communal Service.

These are the stage directions which herald the opening of the service:

As the final song of the Prelude ceases, the assembly hall grows suddenly dark, and the Darkness is filled with fanfare of blowing Trumpets. And now, taking up the trumpets’ refrain, the Orchestra plays an elemental music, suggestive of rain, wind, thunder and the rushing of waters; from behind the raised Central Seat great Flashes of Fire spout upward, and while they are flaring there rises a Flame Gold Figure, in a cone of light, who calls with deep, vibrant voice: “Who has risen up from the heart of the people?” Instantaneous, from three portions of the assembly, the Voices of Three Groups, Men, Women and Children, answer from the dark in triple unison: “I!”

Even from the cold print one can see that this opening would be extremely effective. But doubts assail me. I have a horrid suspicion that that elemental music would not sweep me off my feet as it ought to. My fears are justified when, looking up the musical programme, I discover that the elemental music is by Langey, and that the orchestral accompaniments that follow are the work of Massenet, Tschaikovsky, Langey once more, Julia Ward Howe and Sinding. Alas! once more one finds oneself the slave of one’s habit of selection and rejection. One would find oneself left out in the cold just because one couldn’t stand Massenet. Those who have seen Sir James Barrie’s latest play, Mary Rose, will perhaps recall the blasts of music which prelude the piece and recur at every mystical moment throughout the play. In theory one ought to have mounted on the wings of that music into a serene acceptance of Sir James Barrie’s supernatural machinery; one ought to have been filled by it with deeply religious emotions. In practice, however, one found oneself shrinking with quivering nerves from the poignant vulgarity of that Leitmotif, isolated by what should have united one with the author and the rest of the audience. The cœnobite would like to eat the tripe and onions, but finds by experiment that the smell of the dish makes him feel rather sick.

One must not, however, reject such things as The Will of Song as absolutely and entirely bad. They are useful, they are even good, on their own plane and for people who belong to a certain order of the spiritual hierarchy. The Will of Song, set to elemental music by Massenet and Julia Ward Howe, may be a moving spiritual force for people to whom, shall we say, Wagner means nothing; just as Wagner himself may be of spiritual importance to people belonging to a slightly higher caste, but still incapable of understanding or getting any good out of the highest, the transcendent works of art—out of the Mass in D, for example, or Sonata Op. 111.

The democratically minded will ask what right we have to say that the Mass in D is better than the works of Julia Ward Howe, what right we have to assign a lower place in the spiritual hierarchy to the admirers of The Will of Song than to the admirers of Beethoven. They will insist that there is no hierarchy at all; that every creature possessing humanity, possessing even life, is as good and as important, by the mere fact of that possession, as any other creature. It is not altogether easy to answer these objections. The arguments on both sides are ultimately based on conviction and faith. The best one can do to convince the paradoxical democrat of the real superiority of the Mass in D over The Will of Song is to point out that, in a sense, one contains the other; that The Will of Song is a part, and a very small part at that, of a great Whole of human experience, to which the Mass in D much more nearly approximates. In The Will of Song, and its “elemental” accompaniment one knows exactly how every effect is obtained; its range of emotional and intellectual experience is extremely limited and perfectly familiar. But the range of the Mass in D is enormously much larger; it includes within itself the range of The Will of Song, takes it for granted, so to speak, and reaches out into remoter spheres of experience. It is in a real sense quantitatively larger than The Will of Song. To the democrat who believes in majorities this is an argument which must surely prove convincing.

X: ACCUMULATIONS

In the brevity of life and the perishableness of material things the moral philosophers have always found one of their happiest themes. “Time, which antiquates Antiquities, hath an Art to make dust of all things.” There is nothing more moving than those swelling elegiac organ notes in which they have celebrated the mortality of man and all his works. Those of us for whom the proper study of mankind is books dwell with the most poignant melancholy over the destruction of literary treasures. We think of all the pre-Platonic philosophers of whose writings only a few sentences remain. We think of Sappho’s poems, all but completely blotted from our knowledge. We think of the missing fragments of the “Satyricon,” and of many other precious pages which once were and are now no more. We complain of the holes that time has picked in the records of history, bewailing the loss of innumerable vanished documents. As for buildings, pictures, statues and the accumulated evidence of whole civilizations, all destroyed as though they had never been, they do not belong to our literary province, and, if they did, would be too numerous to catalogue even summarily.

But because men have once thought and felt in a certain way it does not follow that they will for ever continue to do so. There seems every probability that our descendants, some two or three centuries hence, will wax pathetic in their complaints, not of the fragility, but the horrible persistence and indestructibility of things. They will feel themselves smothered by the intolerable accumulation of the years. The men of to-day are so deeply penetrated with the sense of the perishableness of matter that they have begun to take immense precautions to preserve everything they can. Desolated by the carelessness of our ancestors, we are making very sure that our descendants shall lack no documents when they come to write our history. All is systematically kept and catalogued. Old things are carefully patched and propped into continued existence; things now new are hoarded up and protected from decay.

To walk through the book-stores of one of the world’s great libraries is an experience that cannot fail to set one thinking on the appalling indestructibility of matter. A few years ago I explored the recently dug cellars into which the overflow of the Bodleian pours in an unceasing stream. The cellars extend under the northern half of the great quadrangle in whose centre stands the Radcliffe Camera. These catacombs are two storeys deep and lined with impermeable concrete. “The muddy damps and ropy slime” of the traditional vault are absent in this great necropolis of letters; huge ventilating pipes breathe blasts of a dry and heated wind, that makes the place as snug and as unsympathetic to decay as the deserts of Central Asia. The books stand in metal cases constructed so as to slide in and out of position on rails. So ingenious is the arrangement of the cases that it is possible to fill two-thirds of the available space, solidly, with books. Twenty years or so hence, when the existing vaults will take no more books, a new cellar can be dug on the opposite side of the Camera. And when that is full—it is only a matter of half a century from now—what then? We shrug our shoulders. After us the deluge. But let us hope that Bodley’s Librarian of 1970 will have the courage to emend the last word to “bonfire.” To the bonfire! That is the only satisfactory solution of an intolerable problem.

The deliberate preservation of things must be compensated for by their deliberate and judicious destruction. Otherwise the world will be overwhelmed by the accumulation of antique objects. Pigs and rabbits and watercress, when they were first introduced into New Zealand, threatened to lay waste the country, because there were no compensating forces of destruction to put a stop to their indefinite multiplication. In the same way, mere things, once they are set above the natural laws of decay, will end by burying us, unless we set about methodically to get rid of the nuisance. The plea that they should all be preserved—every novel by Nat Gould, every issue of the Funny Wonder—as historical documents is not a sound one. Where too many documents exist it is impossible to write history at all. “For ignorance,” in the felicitous words of Mr. Lytton Strachey, “is the first requisite of the historian—ignorance which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.” Nobody wants to know everything—the irrelevancies as well as the important facts—about the past; or in any case nobody ought to desire to know. Those who do, those who are eaten up by an itch for mere facts and useless information, are the wretched victims of a vice no less reprehensible than greed or drunkenness.

Hand in hand with this judicious process of destruction must go an elaborate classification of what remains. As Mr. Wells says in his large, opulent way, “the future world-state’s organization of scientific research and record compared with that of to-day will be like an ocean liner beside the dug-out canoe of some early heliolithic wanderer.” With the vast and indiscriminate multiplication of books and periodicals our organization of records tends to become ever more heliolithic. Useful information on any given subject is so widely scattered or may be hidden in such obscure places that the student is often at a loss to know what he ought to study or where. An immense international labour of bibliography and classification must be undertaken at no very distant date, if future generations of researchers are to make the fullest use of the knowledge that has already been gained.

But this constructive labour will be tedious and insipid compared with the glorious business of destruction. Huge bonfires of paper will blaze for days and weeks together, whenever the libraries undertake their periodical purgation. The only danger, and, alas! it is a very real danger, is that the libraries will infallibly purge themselves of the wrong books. We all know what librarians are; and not only librarians, but critics, literary men, general public—everybody, in fact, with the exception of ourselves—we know what they are like, we know them: there never was a set of people with such bad taste! Committees will doubtless be set up to pass judgment on books, awarding acquittals and condemnations in magisterial fashion. It will be a sort of gigantic Hawthornden competition. At that thought I find that the flames of my great bonfires lose much of their imagined lustre.

XI: ON DEVIATING INTO SENSE

There is a story, very dear for some reason to our ancestors, that Apelles, or I forget what other Greek painter, grown desperate at the failure of his efforts to portray realistically the foam on a dog’s mouth, threw his sponge at the picture in a pet, and was rewarded for his ill-temper by discovering that the resultant smudge was the living image of the froth whose aspect he had been unable, with all his art, to recapture. No one will ever know the history of all the happy mistakes, the accidents and unconscious deviations into genius, that have helped to enrich the world’s art. They are probably countless. I myself have deviated more than once into accidental felicities. Recently, for example, the hazards of careless typewriting caused me to invent a new portmanteau word of the most brilliantly Laforguian quality. I had meant to write the phrase “the Human Comedy,” but, by a happy slip, I put my finger on the letter that stands next to “C” on the universal keyboard. When I came to read over the completed page I found that I had written “the Human Vomedy.” Was there ever a criticism of life more succinct and expressive? To the more sensitive and queasy among the gods the last few years must indeed have seemed a vomedy of the first order.

The grossest forms of mistake have played quite a distinguished part in the history of letters. One thinks, for example, of the name Criseida or Cressida manufactured out of a Greek accusative, of that Spenserian misunderstanding of Chaucer which gave currency to the rather ridiculous substantive “derring-do.” Less familiar, but more deliciously absurd, is Chaucer’s slip in reading “naves ballatrices” for “naves bellatrices”—ballet-ships instead of battle-ships—and his translation “shippes hoppesteres.” But these broad, straightforward howlers are uninteresting compared with the more subtle deviations into originality occasionally achieved by authors who were trying their best not to be original. Nowhere do we find more remarkable examples of accidental brilliance than among the post-Chaucerian poets, whose very indistinct knowledge of what precisely was the metre in which they were trying to write often caused them to produce very striking variations on the staple English measure.

Chaucer’s variations from the decasyllable norm were deliberate. So, for the most part, were those of his disciple Lydgate, whose favourite “broken-backed” line, lacking the first syllable of the iambus that follows the cæsura, is metrically of the greatest interest to contemporary poets. Lydgate’s characteristic line follows this model:

For speechéless nothing maist thou speed.

Judiciously employed, the broken-backed line might yield very beautiful effects. Lydgate, as has been said, was probably pretty conscious of what he was doing. But his procrustean methods were apt to be a little indiscriminate, and one wonders sometimes whether he was playing variations on a known theme or whether he was rather tentatively groping after the beautiful regularity of his master Chaucer. The later fifteenth and sixteenth century poets seem to have worked very much in the dark. The poems of such writers as Hawes and Skelton abound in the vaguest parodies of the decasyllable line. Anything from seven to fifteen syllables will serve their turn. With them the variations are seldom interesting. Chance had not much opportunity of producing subtle metrical effects with a man like Skelton, whose mind was naturally so full of jigging doggerel that his variations on the decasyllable are mostly in the nature of rough skeltonics. I have found interesting accidental variations on the decasyllable in Heywood, the writer of moralities. This, from the Play of Love, has a real metrical beauty:

Felt ye but one pang such as I feel many,

One pang of despair or one pang of desire,

One pang of one displeasant look of her eye,

One pang of one word of her mouth as in ire,

Or in restraint of her love which I desire—

One pang of all these, felt once in all your life,

Should quail your opinion and quench all our strife.

These dactylic resolutions of the third and fourth lines are extremely interesting.

But the most remarkable example of accidental metrical invention that I have yet come across is to be found in the Earl of Surrey’s translation of Horace’s ode on the golden mean. Surrey was one of the pioneers of the reaction against the vagueness and uncertain carelessness of the post-Chaucerians. From the example of Italian poetry he had learned that a line must have a fixed number of syllables. In all his poems his aim is always to achieve regularity at whatever cost. To make sure of having ten syllables in every line it is evident that Surrey made use of his fingers as well as his ears. We see him at his worst and most laborious in the first stanza of his translation:

Of thy life, Thomas, this compass well mark:

Ne by coward dread in shunning storms dark

Not aye with full sails the high seas to beat;

On shallow shores thy keel in peril freat.

The ten syllables are there all right, but except in the last line there is no recognizable rhythm of any kind, whether regular or irregular. But when Surrey comes to the second stanza—

Auream quisquis mediocritatem

Diligit, tutus caret obsoleti

Sordibus tecti, caret invidenda

Sobrius aula—

some lucky accident inspires him with the genius to translate in these words:

Whoso gladly halseth the golden mean,

Void of dangers advisedly hath his home;

Not with loathsome muck as a den unclean,

Nor palace like, whereat disdain may gloam.

Not only is this a very good translation, but it is also a very interesting and subtle metrical experiment. What could be more felicitous than this stanza made up of three trochaic lines, quickened by beautiful dactylic resolutions, and a final iambic line of regular measure—the recognized tonic chord that brings the music to its close? And yet the tunelessness of the first stanza is enough to prove that Surrey’s achievement is as much a product of accident as the foam on the jaws of Apelles’ dog. He was doing his best all the time to write decasyllabics with the normal iambic beat of the last line. His failures to do so were sometimes unconscious strokes of genius.

XII: POLITE CONVERSATION

There are some people to whom the most difficult to obey of all the commandments is that which enjoins us to suffer fools gladly. The prevalence of folly, its monumental, unchanging permanence and its almost invariable triumph over intelligence are phenomena which they cannot contemplate without experiencing a passion of righteous indignation or, at the least, of ill-temper. Sages like Anatole France, who can probe and anatomize human stupidity and still remain serenely detached, are rare. These reflections were suggested by a book recently published in New York and entitled The American Credo. The authors of this work are those enfants terribles of American criticism, Messrs. H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. They have compiled a list of four hundred and eighty-eight articles of faith which form the fundamental Credo of the American people, prefacing them with a very entertaining essay on the national mind:

Truth shifts and changes like a cataract of diamonds; its aspect is never precisely the same at two successive moments. But error flows down the channel of history like some great stream of lava or infinitely lethargic glacier. It is the one relatively fixed thing in a world of chaos.

To look through the articles of the Credo is to realize that there is a good deal of truth in this statement. Such beliefs as the following—not by any means confined to America alone—are probably at least as old as the Great Pyramid:

That if a woman, about to become a mother, plays the piano every day, her baby will be born a Victor Herbert.

That the accumulation of great wealth always brings with it great unhappiness.

That it is bad luck to kill a spider.

That water rots the hair and thus causes baldness.

That if a bride wears an old garter with her new finery, she will have a happy married life.

That children were much better behaved twenty years ago than they are to-day.

And most of the others in the collection, albeit clothed in forms distinctively contemporary and American, are simply variations on notions as immemorial.

Inevitably, as one reads The American Credo, one is reminded of an abler, a more pitiless and ferocious onslaught on stupidity, I mean Swift’s “Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation, according to the most polite mode and method now used at Court and in the Best Companies of England. In three Dialogues. By Simon Wagstaff, Esq.” I was inspired after reading Messrs. Mencken and Nathan’s work to refresh my memories of this diabolic picture of the social amenities. And what a book it is! There is something almost appalling in the way it goes on and on, a continuous, never-ceasing stream of imbecility. Simon Wagstaff, it will be remembered, spent the best part of forty years in collecting and digesting these gems of polite conversation:

I can faithfully assure the reader that there is not one single witty phrase in the whole Collection which has not received the Stamp and Approbation of at least One Hundred Years, and how much longer it is hard to determine; he may therefore be secure to find them all genuine, sterling and authentic.

How genuine, sterling and authentic Mr. Wagstaff’s treasures of polite conversation are is proved by the great number of them which have withstood all the ravages of time, and still do as good service to-day as they did in the early seventeen-hundreds or in the days of Henry VIII.: “Go, you Girl, and warm some fresh Cream.” “Indeed, Madam, there’s none left; for the Cat has eaten it all.” “I doubt it was a Cat with Two Legs.”

“And, pray, What News, Mr. Neverout?” “Why, Madam, Queen Elizabeth’s dead.” (It would be interesting to discover at exactly what date Queen Anne took the place of Queen Elizabeth in this grand old repartee, or who was the monarch referred to when the Virgin Queen was still alive. Aspirants to the degree of B. or D.Litt. might do worse than to take this problem as a subject for their thesis.)

Some of the choicest phrases have come down in the world since Mr. Wagstaff’s day. Thus, Miss Notable’s retort to Mr. Neverout, “Go, teach your Grannam to suck Eggs,” could only be heard now in the dormitory of a preparatory school. Others have become slightly modified. Mr. Neverout says, “Well, all Things have an End, and a pudden has two.” I think we may flatter ourselves that the modern emendation, “except a roly-poly pudding, which has two,” is an improvement.

Mr. Wagstaff’s second dialogue, wherein he treats of Polite Conversation at meals, contains more phrases that testify to the unbroken continuity of tradition than either of the others. The conversation that centres on the sirloin of beef is worthy to be recorded in its entirety:

Lady Smart. Come, Colonel, handle your Arms. Shall I help you to some Beef?

Colonel. If your Ladyship please; and, pray, don’t cut like a Mother-in-law, but send me a large Slice; for I love to lay a good Foundation. I vow, ’tis a noble Sir-loyn.

Neverout. Ay; here’s cut and come again.

Miss. But, pray; why is it call’d a Sir-loyn?

Lord Smart. Why, you must know that our King James the First, who lov’d good Eating, being invited to Dinner by one of his Nobles, and seeing a large Loyn of Beef at his Table, he drew out his Sword, and, in a Frolic, knighted it. Few people know the Secret of this.

How delightful it is to find that we have Mr. Wagstaff’s warrant for such gems of wisdom as, “Cheese digests everything except itself,” and “If you eat till you’re cold, you’ll live to grow old”! If they were a hundred years old in his day they are fully three hundred now. Long may they survive! I was sorry, however, to notice that one of the best of Mr. Wagstaff’s phrases has been, in the revolution of time, completely lost. Indeed, before I had read Aubrey’s “Lives,” Lord Sparkish’s remark, “Come, box it about; ’twill come to my Father at last,” was quite incomprehensible to me. The phrase is taken from a story of Sir Walter Raleigh and his son.

Sir Walter Raleigh [says Aubrey] being invited to dinner to some great person where his son was to goe with him, he sayd to his son, “Thou art expected to-day at dinner to goe along with me, but thou art so quarrelsome and affronting that I am ashamed to have such a beare in my company.” Mr. Walter humbled himselfe to his father and promised he would behave himselfe mighty mannerly. So away they went. He sate next to his father and was very demure at least halfe dinner time. Then sayd he, “I this morning, not having the feare of God before my eies, but by the instigation of the devill, went....”

At this point Mr. Clark, in his edition, suppresses four lines of Aubrey’s text; but one can imagine the sort of thing Master Walter said.

Sir Walter, being strangely surprized and putt out of countenance at so great a table, gives his son a damned blow over the face. His son, as rude as he was, would not strike his father, but strikes over the face the gentleman that sate next to him and sayd, “Box about: ’twill come to my father anon.” ’Tis now a common-used proverb.

And so it still deserves to be; how, when and why it became extinct, I have no idea. Here is another good subject for a thesis.

There are but few things in Mr. Wagstaff’s dialogue which appear definitely out of date and strange to us, and these super-annuations can easily be accounted for. Thus the repeal of the Criminal Laws has made almost incomprehensible the constant references to hanging made by Mr. Wagstaff’s personages. The oaths and the occasional mild grossnesses have gone out of fashion in mixed polite society. Otherwise their conversation is in all essentials exactly the same as the conversation of the present day. And this is not to be wondered at; for, as a wise man has said:

Speech at the present time retains strong evidence of the survival in it of the function of herd recognition.... The function of conversation is ordinarily regarded as being the exchange of ideas and information. Doubtless it has come to have such a function, but an objective examination of ordinary conversation shows that the actual conveyance of ideas takes a very small part in it. As a rule the exchange seems to consist of ideas which are necessarily common to the two speakers and are known to be so by each.... Conversation between persons unknown to one another is apt to be rich in the ritual of recognition. When one hears or takes part in these elaborate evolutions, gingerly proffering one after another of one’s marks of identity, one’s views on the weather, on fresh air and draughts, on the Government and on uric acid, watching intently for the first low hint of a growl, which will show one belongs to the wrong pack and must withdraw, it is impossible not to be reminded of the similar manœuvres of the dog and to be thankful that Nature has provided us with a less direct, though perhaps a more tedious, code.

XIII: NATIONALITY IN LOVE

The hazards of indiscriminate rummaging in bookshops have introduced me to two volumes of verse which seem to me (though I am ordinarily very sceptical of those grandiose generalizations about racial and national characteristics, so beloved of a certain class of literary people) to illustrate very clearly some of the differences between the French and English mind. The first is a little book published some few months back and entitled Les Baisers.... The publisher says of it in one of those exquisitely literary puffs which are the glory of the Paris book trade: “Un volume de vers? Non pas! Simplement des baisers mis en vers, des baisers variés comme l’heure qui passe, inconstants comme l’Amour lui-même.... Baisers, baisers, c’est toute leur troublante musique qui chante dans ces rimes.” The other volume hails from the antipodes and is called Songs of Love and Life. No publisher’s puff accompanies it; but a coloured picture on the dust-wrapper represents a nymph frantically clutching at a coy shepherd. A portrait of the authoress serves as a frontispiece. Both books are erotic in character, and both are very indifferent in poetical quality. They are only interesting as illustrations, the more vivid because of their very second-rateness, of the two characteristic methods of approach, French and English, to the theme of physical passion.

The author of Les Baisers approaches his amorous experiences with the detached manner of a psychologist interested in the mental reactions of certain corporeal pleasures whose mechanism he has previously studied in his capacity of physiological observer. His attitude is the same as that of the writers of those comedies of manners which hold the stage in the theatres of the boulevards. It is dry, precise, matter-of-fact and almost scientific. The comedian of the boulevards does not concern himself with trying to find some sort of metaphysical justification for the raptures of physical passion, nor is he in any way a propagandist of sensuality. He is simply an analyst of facts, whose business it is to get all the wit that is possible out of an equivocal situation. Similarly, the author of these poems is far too highly sophisticated to imagine that

every spirit as it is most pure,

And hath in it the more of heavenly light,

So it the fairer body doth procure

To habit in, and it more fairly dight

With cheerful grace and amiable sight.

For of the soul the body form doth take;

For soul is form and doth the body make.

He does not try to make us believe that physical pleasures have a divine justification. Neither has he any wish to “make us grovel, hand and foot in Belial’s gripe.” He is merely engaged in remembering “des heures et des entretiens” which were extremely pleasant—hours which strike for every one, conversations and meetings which are taking place in all parts of the world and at every moment.

This attitude towards volupté is sufficiently old in France to have made possible the evolution of a very precise and definite vocabulary in which to describe its phenomena. This language is as exact as the technical jargon of a trade, and as elegant as the Latin of Petronius. It is a language of which we have no equivalent in our English literature. It is impossible in English to describe volupté elegantly; it is hardly possible to write of it without being gross. To begin with, we do not even possess a word equivalent to volupté. “Voluptuousness” is feeble and almost meaningless; “pleasure” is hopelessly inadequate. From the first the English writer is at a loss; he cannot even name precisely the thing he proposes to describe and analyze. But for the most part he has not much use for such a language. His approach to the subject is not dispassionate and scientific, and he has no need for technicalities. The English amorist is inclined to approach the subject rapturously, passionately, philosophically—almost in any way that is not the wittily matter-of-fact French way.

In our rich Australian Songs of Love and Life we see the rapturous-philosophic approach reduced to something that is very nearly the absurd. Overcome with the intensities of connubial bliss, the authoress feels it necessary to find a sort of justification for them by relating them in some way with the cosmos. God, we are told,

looking through His hills on you and me,

Feeds Heaven upon the flame of our desire.