THE LIBRARY OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 
 NORTH CAROLINA 
 
 FROM THE BOOKS OF 
 
 WILLIAM P. JACOCKS, M.D. 
 
 CLASS OF 1904 
 FRIEND OF THE LIBRARY 
 
 CB 
 H5fc3m 
 

FROM SHAKESPEARE TO O. HENRY 
 
FROM SHAKESPEARE 
 TO O. HENRY 
 
 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 BY 
 
 S. P. B. MAIS 
 
 Author oj 
 "A Public School in War Time' 
 
 a 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 
 
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE RIVERSIDE PRESS LIMITED 
 EDINBURGH 
 
TO 
 
 MY WIFE 
 
 r 
 
 to 
 
 <*) 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. SHAKESPEARE 
 
 II. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 III. SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 IV. SOME MORE MODERN POETS 
 V. THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 VI. MODERN DRAMA 
 VII. SAMUEL BUTLER 
 VIII. RICHARD MIDDLETON 
 IX. THE GENIUS OF JOHN MASEFIELD 
 X. RUPERT BROOKE 
 
 XI. THE POETRY OF THOMAS HARDY 
 XII. O. HENRY .... 
 
 PAOE 
 
 13 
 
 46 
 
 59 
 
 81 
 
 135 
 
 161 
 
 180 
 
 223 
 
 235 
 
 257 
 
 279 
 
 296 
 
/ desire to thank the editors of " The 
 Nineteenth Century," "The Fortnightly 
 Review" " The Journal of Education" 
 and "The Parents' Review" for permis- 
 sion to reprint here six of the following 
 essays. The remainder are now published 
 for the first time. 
 
 ii 
 
SHAKESPEARE 
 
 OF late we have regarded Shakespeare, so far 
 as we have regarded him at all, solely as a 
 Patriot and a War-Poet, and by so doing- 
 have run the risk of forgetting altogether his claim 
 to be the greatest dramatist of our own if not of all 
 nations ; it is perhaps just as well that the Tercen- 
 tenary of his death should fall in war time, for it will 
 tend to bring us back to our attitude of reverence and 
 never-ceasing gratitude for all that he has done for us. 
 It is also time to readjust our point of view regarding 
 his life and work in the light of what recent criticism 
 has done in the way of showing us the true Shakespeare. 
 There has never been an age so rich or so diverse in 
 Shakespearean criticism as our own : we have been 
 able, in a more unbiassed maimer than our fathers, to 
 glean what there was of lasting value in the pages of 
 Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, Lamb and Hazlitt ; added 
 to this there has been the never sufficiently to be praised 
 life study of Sir Sidney Lee, and the fact that we are 
 somehow more honest or more inspired than our 
 ancestors. Whatever the cause, there can be no doubt 
 that the studies of Brandes, Ten Brink, Taine, Raleigh, 
 Bradley, Frank Harris, Masefleld and Dowden have 
 opened up new roads of thought, each of them different 
 from the other, but each converging on the one end we 
 would all attain, the heart of Shakespeare. 
 
 We recognise now, for instance, that Wordsworth 
 was far more of a seer than Browning, and more 
 
 13 
 
14 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 probably right when he suggested that in the Sonnets 
 we have the real living Shakespeare : " with this key 
 Shakespeare unlocked his heart." The theory that we 
 know little or nothing of the dramatist's own life * or 
 point of view is exploded, we may hope, for ever : the 
 truth is that we know more, not less, about the actual 
 details of his life than we do about any other dramatist 
 of his time, owing to the indefatigable energy of Sir 
 Sidney Lee, Professor Wallace and others ; and, as 
 Bagehot says, Shakespeare is, after all, his own 
 biographer. Surely no man could desire a better 
 Boswell. As it was one of Shakespeare's most notable 
 gifts to be able to make a fictitious character live more 
 really than many people with whom we have been 
 intimately connected all our lives, so when he comes to 
 portray his own idiosyncrasies we find that we know 
 Shakespeare better almost than anybody else in the 
 whole world. It has been said, of course, that it is the 
 business of the dramatist to treat his art objectively, 
 to stand right outside it and so far to obliterate his own 
 point of view as to be able to step into the very body 
 and soul of his dramatis personce and, for the time being, 
 to become them : to see life from their particular niche 
 and to utter sentiments (which may be totally opposed 
 to his own) which fit their character. This is all quite 
 true and sound criticism, but when Homer nods, when 
 the character for some inexplicable reason gratuitously 
 emphasises points in his character which rather tend to 
 retard than to develop the action, we may justifiably 
 begin to think that at these times the personality of the 
 author is unconsciously obtruding itself and is, in a 
 word, his own temperament giving voice to its likes and 
 dislikes. 
 
 1 Sir George Greenwood's theory that Shakespeare the actor and 
 "Shakespeare" the playwright were two different men does not come 
 within the scope of this paper, but cannot be neglected. 
 
SHAKESPEARE 15 
 
 Again, when a dramatist returns time after time to 
 the same peculiarities in his major creations, it is obvious 
 that he is at any rate interested in those peculiarities, 
 either because they are his own obsessions or are 
 possessed by his most intimate friends. No man can 
 depict what he fails to understand, nor does he usually 
 attempt to draw what never interests him; Shakespeare, 
 for instance, nowhere gives us a living portrait of the 
 zealous Puritan fanatic reformer, or the shopkeeping, 
 middle-class citizen : neither type interested him. 
 
 Two types alone stand out among his delineations of 
 men : as Doctor Johnson shrewdly remarks, Shake- 
 speare has no heroes ; his best pictures of men are 
 those which depict them as creatures of obvious human 
 failings like unto ourselves, and they stand out, very 
 clear-cut, in two main groups. 
 
 First there is the group which we identify as like in 
 nearly all points to Shakespeare himself — the Hamlet, 
 Biron, Vincentio, Orsino, Prospero, Jaques, Macbeth, 
 Posthumus, Richard the Second type. These men are 
 amazingly alike even when, by all the laws of drama, 
 they ought not to be. They all love solitude, are far 
 too much given to introspection and thinking too pre- 
 cisely on the event, it is their great failing that their 
 native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er by the pale cast 
 of thought, they all find solace in music, they are gentle, 
 almost too gentle, " too full of the milk of human 
 kindness," in all of them their imaginative faculty is 
 developed at the expense of all their other faculties. 
 They may, in some cases, describe themselves as " plain, 
 blunt men," but as a matter of fact they delude them- 
 selves when they say so : the truth is that they are all 
 poets ; they never speak anything but the purest 
 poetry ; they are simply Shakespeare, Shakespeare 
 himself speaking through the lips of these kings and 
 
16 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 princes and dukes, Shakespeare the gentle, the passion- 
 ate, the irresolute. After all, if we take Leonardo da 
 Vinci's opinion to be worth anything, we should expect 
 this. * l For the form," he says, " we go to Nature and 
 use our observations, for the soul we look into our own 
 hearts and paint ourselves." 
 
 This it is that seems to me to account for Shake- 
 speare's failure when we begin to analyse his depiction 
 of the second broad group — the men of action. For 
 who are Shakespeare's men of action ? 
 
 Othello ? He begins as man of action and ends as 
 a man of action, but in the middle of the play he is the 
 poet, imaginative, given to much thinking (it is almost 
 a sine qua non that our men of action should not be over- 
 burdened with intellect ; it is just because they don't 
 waste time in overmuch thinking that we admire them 
 so), an abominably bad judge of character (where your 
 man of action is almost infallible), suspicious to an 
 extraordinary degree. He talks too much. 
 
 Macbeth ? He is superstitious, lily-livered in his 
 fear of blood, more a poet, and far more sensitive of 
 soul than Othello. 
 
 Henry the Fifth ? As a king he may compel admira- 
 tion, but as a man he is almost beneath contempt ; he 
 is a low, common cad who deserts his friends, butchers 
 his enemies and makes love like a savage. 
 
 Hotspur ? His masterpiece of the man of action is 
 a medley of contrarieties, who hates w ' mincing poetry " 
 and yet employs it ad nauseam, losing himself in mis- 
 timed philosophic reflection when he ought to be the 
 brave, blunt hero. 
 
 Richard the Second ? Heavens, no ! Falcon- 
 bridge ? He is slavishly copied from The Troublesome 
 Raigne. 
 
 Search the plays through and through and you will 
 
SHAKESPEARE 17 
 
 find that Shakespeare mars in some particular all his 
 men of action. The truth is that he is not sufficiently 
 interested in them to understand them. How other- 
 wise can we explain the fact that he never took the 
 trouble to depict a Raleigh, a Hawkins, a Frobisher, a 
 Drake or a Sir Philip Sidney ? He had models enough 
 near at hand ; he must have come into intimate con- 
 tact with men of this famous breed ; he nowhere 
 portrays them any more than he portrays the zealous 
 Puritan or the middle-class shopkeeper. He had 
 nothing in common with them. He had, truly, the 
 finest experiencing nature ever given to man ; his mind 
 was like a highly sensitive photographic plate. Conse- 
 quently, he has immortalised types which will live for 
 ever in tragedy and comedy. His Falstaff, about 
 whom it has been said that if anyone were to garner up 
 all the humour and gaiety of his entire life it would 
 amount to about the worth of one sentence of the 
 immortal knight ; his Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, who 
 remains ever fresh when all our real nurses are for- 
 gotten ; his Dogberry, who contains the essence of all 
 the policemen we have had the misfortune to know ; 
 his Shallow, whose humour Masefield compares to an 
 apple-loft in some old barn where the apples of last year 
 lie sweet in the straw — all these are in the world's great 
 portrait gallery. Yet it must not be forgotten that, in 
 spite of these, Shakespeare had his limitations, and this 
 failure to depict the man of action was one of the most 
 noticeable. He seems himself to have been a man 
 obsessed with a horror of bloodshed. He can never 
 quite rise to an adequate description of courage — as 
 Frank Harris says, when we want to see this side of 
 life faithfully rendered we have to turn to Bunyan : 
 Valiant-for-Truth, with his ww I fought till my sword did 
 cleave to my hand and when they were joined together 
 
18 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 as if a sword grew out of my arm, and when the blood 
 ran through my fingers, then I fought with most 
 courage," is quite beyond the scope of Shakespeare. 
 
 But, as Professor Saintsbury says in his Peace of the 
 Avgustans, " it is not a sin for a potato not to be a peach 
 or not to be sorry because it is one " : it is not Shake- 
 speare's fault if he left us no picture of the modern 
 Public School boy or drew the happy warrior less 
 happily than Wordsworth ; what is sinful is for us 
 to pretend that he did what he did not do. " For 
 the soul we look into our own hearts and paint 
 ourselves." 
 
 So when Shakespeare came to portray womanhood I 
 believe he painted those whom he knew, and sometimes 
 idealised them to such a degree that they became lifeless 
 abstractions. 
 
 Hazlitt's dictum that " Shakespeare's heroines 
 (though they have been found fault with as insipid) are 
 the finest in the world, ' ' like most of Hazlitt's judgments, 
 hits the nail on the head. 
 
 When suddenly we are asked to pick out our favourite 
 heroines in fiction we are hard put to it to think of any 
 with whom we would willingly spend our days. Scott 
 once, in Jeanie Deans, painted a real live girl, Meredith 
 again and again ; but few other writers have succeeded 
 in pleasing the fastidious male. Shakespeare certainly 
 has left the best we know, but with many even of his we 
 are prone to find fault. 
 
 Who, for instance, would willingly marry an Ophelia ? 
 She is scarcely more than a puppet. There are times 
 when we are so tortured in Othello that we long for any 
 girl of our acquaintance to change places for half-an- 
 hour with Desdemona. There simply would have been 
 no tragedy had a flesh-and- blood girl been in her situa- 
 tion : it is Desdemona's dumbness, Desdemona's 
 
SHAKESPEARE 19 
 
 etherial qualities that allow a tragedy which strains the 
 probabilities almost to breaking-point. 
 
 In Cordelia, however, Shakespeare rises to his 
 highest ; though she speaks barely a hundred lines she 
 lives for us for ever ; her foolish obstinacy, her show of 
 temper as she leaves her sisters, her amazing filial 
 devotion, all endear her to us, so that she stands out far 
 above all the other women whom Shakespeare depicted. 
 The truth is that Shakespeare was always painting ideal 
 portraits of girls : in Rosalind, in Portia, in Beatrice, 
 in Juliet. Again and again we have the same sprightly, 
 witty, loose-talking, boyish girl who is like no one we 
 ever met, but in some points like the girl of our dreams. 
 
 Occasionally we get a picture of a shrew, as in Adriana, 
 Katherine, or Constance (in the earlier scenes), and 
 from hints that Shakespeare drops from time to time 
 we may well believe that he was here depicting that 
 unfortunate Anne Hathaway, the wife who was eight 
 years older than her husband, to whom the second-best 
 bed was his last bequest. In Volumnia, that splendid 
 Roman matron, he has paid a grand tribute to mothers, 
 and it is quite on the cards that in the bloodless abstrac- 
 tions with which he occupied himself in his closing years, 
 in Perdita, Marina and Miranda, he may well have had 
 in mind his daughter Judith. But it none the less 
 remains true that he never succeeds in painting any 
 type of womanhood so successfully again as he did in 
 Cleopatra. No other woman in Shakespeare is worthy 
 to compare with her ; she is astoundingly alive and 
 real. She has the power of making us feel that had 
 we been Antony we should have done what Antony 
 did, and in rereading the play it seems impossible 
 to imagine that Shakespeare drew entirely from his 
 imagination when he conceived such a character. 
 Frank Harris's theory that Cleopatra and Cressida are 
 
20 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 both portraits of the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, that 
 Shakespeare's great tragedy was his unbridled passion 
 for this lady, call her Mary Fitton or whom you will, is 
 at least plausible, and becomes more and more likely as 
 we follow up the threads of his argument. 
 
 That Shakespeare personally experienced deep suffer- 
 ing of some sort seems to be obvious ; it is inconceivable 
 that he should have written Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth and 
 Othello had he not himself been in the depths ; what 
 that experience was we cannot now know for certain, 
 but, judging from what we do know of him, it appears 
 more likely to have been an agony of love, of treachery 
 and baseness in love than anything else. The story of 
 the friend being deputed to make love to the girl for 
 the hero does not occur, be it remembered, only in the 
 Sonnets ; we have the same story retold in Much Ado 
 About Nothing and in Twelfth Night. It is an absurd 
 story for a dramatist so versatile as Shakespeare to 
 harp on, but he somehow cannot get away from it, as he 
 would not, were he recalling an episode in his own life. 
 When we recollect how often Shakespeare inveighs 
 against the sin of ingratitude, to him obviously the 
 worst offence imaginable, it lends colour all the more 
 strongly to the theory that Shakespeare sent the young 
 Herbert to plead his cause with Mary Fitton, only to 
 discover that she succumbed to the attractiveness of 
 the friend and betrayed Shakespeare by giving herself 
 to his friend. 
 
 Whatever the truth of this may be, there is at least 
 no doubt that Shakespeare was more successful in his 
 portraiture of women when he was painting the coquette, 
 the wanton Cleopatra (whom he seemed to know right 
 down to the utmost depths) than he was in any other 
 type of womanhood at all. Even Ruskin noticed that 
 nearly all Shakespeare's women were faultless, but he 
 
SHAKESPEARE 21 
 
 does not conclude, therefore, as we do, that they were, 
 for this very reason, unhuman and untrue to life. 
 
 II 
 
 It has been said that Shakespeare spent his life in two 
 places : in the Court, mingling with the young gallants 
 who had taken him up and found his witty, sunny dis- 
 position to their liking ; and in the taverns, with Ben 
 Jonson and Marlowe, where he met the Bardolphs, 
 Fal staffs and Quickly s of life. The middle of humanity 
 he never knew, but only the extremes. This may be 
 due to all sorts of reasons ; one certainly was that he 
 was inherently an aristocrat ; by a strange paradoxical 
 irony, apparently he was also a snob. Somehow in the 
 light of this it is easier to understand the way in which 
 Mary Fitton treated him, " now she would and now she 
 wouldn't " — always keeping him on the tenterhooks 
 alternately of hope and despair, until she finally married 
 for the second time and left London for ever. Genius 
 was ever unhappy in its relations with the opposite sex, 
 and it appears unlikely that Shakespeare was an excep- 
 tion to a rule which has scarcely ever been broken, 
 except in the case of the Brownings. 
 
 It has been the fashion for many years now to extol 
 Shakespeare's sense of humour as almost the most 
 perfectly developed which we possess ; but Doctor 
 Johnson noticed what many of us nowadays feel : that 
 many of his so-called comic scenes are intolerably dull, 
 owing to the eternal playing upon words in which the 
 characters indulge. Just as Euphuism was a passing 
 phase, a fashion of the moment, so this habit of pun- 
 ning, so dear to the heart of Shakespeare, once it 
 reaches its zenith in Sidney Smith, ceases to have 
 any claim upon our attention : it has become the very 
 
22 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 lowest form of wit — cheap, vulgar, relegated to the less 
 desirable type of music-hall. No fashion changes more 
 quickly than the fashion of fun, the criterion of what is 
 or what is not humorous ; it is this that so surprises us 
 in Johnson's other statement when he says that in his 
 comic scenes Shakespeare seems to produce without 
 labour what no labour can improve ; Hazlitt strikes a 
 truer note when he says that we prefer Shakespearean 
 tragedy to Shakespearean comedy for the simple reason 
 that tragedy is better than comedy. Nothing, for 
 instance, could be more tedious or more wooden to 
 modern ears than the opening scene of Romeo and 
 Juliet, with its silly talk about " choler," " collier " and 
 " collar." It is now almost painful to have to attri- 
 bute such drivel to the pen that created Sir Andrew 
 Aguecheek, Sir Toby Belch and Bottom. 
 
 Shakespeare's failures in the world of humour are 
 more noticeable than any other man's, for the simple 
 reason that he was more richly endowed with the 
 precious gift than any other man ; as Meredith truly 
 points out, from Mother Earth 
 
 Came the honeyed corner of his lips, 
 
 The conquering smile wherein his spirit sails 
 
 Calm as the God who the white sea-wave whips, 
 Yet full of speech and intershifting tales, 
 
 Close mirrors of us : thence had he the laugh 
 We feel is hers. 
 
 There was in his life a summer time when his innate 
 capacity for sunny gaiety came to full expression in the 
 golden comedies of Twelfth Night, A Midsummer NighVs 
 Dream and As You Like It. 
 
 How different is his success in the ever-famous Nurse 
 and in Bully Bottom and their likes, all of whom he 
 saw with loving observation, from his pictures of men 
 
SHAKESPEARE 23 
 
 of action : very rarely does his humour become sar- 
 donic or contemptuous : rather is it closely allied with 
 Meredith's Comic Spirit — sympathetic, harmless and 
 beautiful as summer lightning. As Meredith says of 
 him : 
 
 Shakespeare is a well-spring of characters which are 
 saturated with the Comic Spirit ; with more of what we call 
 blood-life than is to be found anywhere else : and they are of 
 this world, but they are of the world enlarged to our embrace 
 by imagination and by great poetic imagination. 
 
 So much for the particular. But it is when Meredith 
 generalises on the Comic Spirit that he gives us so true 
 a picture of Shakespearean humour. 
 
 It has the sage's brows, and the sunny malice of a faun 
 lurks at the corners of the half-closed lips drawn in an idle 
 wariness of half-tension. It shows sunlight of the mind, 
 mental richness rather than noisy enormity. Its common 
 aspect is one of unsolicitous observation, as if surveying a full 
 field and having leisure to dart on its chosen morsels, without 
 any fluttering eagerness. Men's future upon earth does not 
 attract it ; their honesty and shapeliness in the present does : 
 and whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, 
 pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically 
 delicate ; whenever it sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked, 
 given to run riot in idolatries, drifting into vanities, congre- 
 gating in absurdities, planning short-sightedly, plotting 
 dementedly ; whenever they are at variance with their pro- 
 fessions and violate the unwritten laws binding them in 
 consideration one to another; whenever they offend sound 
 reason, fair justice : are false in humility, or mixed with 
 conceit, individually or in the bulk — the Spirit overhead will 
 look humanely malign and cast an oblique light on them, 
 followed by volleys of silvery laughter. 
 
 This so exactly and so perfectly describes Shake- 
 speare's humour that to add or subtract a word is 
 only to spoil a consummately exact picture. It leaves 
 
24 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 nothing to be said. Every iota of this criticism applies 
 with wonderful exactness to all his finest comic scenes. 
 
 Ill 
 
 We should have thought, from the fact that Shake- 
 speare must have met many hundreds of boys on the 
 stage, that he would have left us one deathless portrait 
 at least of the human boy, but by a strange paradox 
 he has left no picture of the living boy we know. All 
 Shakespeare's boy characters are precocious and almost 
 girlish in their ways. Arthur is far the best of them, 
 and may well stand as a type for all the others. There 
 is no question of his being alive : he holds a very dear 
 place in our hearts among the gallery of Shakespeare's 
 most successful characters, but he is scarcely the boy 
 as we know him ; he is all angelic love, a woman-child 
 in his unselfish sympathy, exceedingly tender and sweet 
 of heart, almost perfect and yet quite natural, never 
 mawkish or sentimental ; it is a wonderful creation, 
 tear-compelling in his pathetic helplessness, just as are 
 the prattling Princes or Macduff's son. 
 
 So then we see, whether we are discussing Shake- 
 speare's heroes, heroines, humour or boy characters, 
 broadly defined some of his own peculiar idiosyncrasies : 
 his gentle, forgiving, almost feminine mind stands out 
 at every phase of his life's journey and betrays him to 
 us. It remains for us to fill in the portrait by noting in 
 a careful rereading what other qualities he seems to 
 place in the category of good or bad. 
 
 First and by far the most noticeable is his love of 
 music ; all his favourite characters, from Orsino to 
 Cleopatra, call for music on the slightest pretext ; he 
 even goes out of his way to condemn the man who has 
 no music in his soul, though we know well enough how 
 
SHAKESPEARE 25 
 
 false a judgment that is. It is on a par with the " love 
 me, love my dog " theory, and incidentally in this con- 
 nection it is worthy of remark that Shakespeare always 
 derides dogs : for him they seem always to be synony- 
 mous with some vice ; he is, if there ever was one, a dog- 
 hater, which is all the more strange when we think of 
 his love for the open air and the country, and his know- 
 ledge of hounds. No man ever described the chase from 
 the point of view of the hare so well as Shakespeare ; 
 no man ever described a hound so well — and yet he 
 hated dogs ! It is a strange anomaly. 
 
 That he was generous and liberal-minded is clear to 
 anyone who has read The Merchant of Venice ; every- 
 one in the play (except Shy lock) seems to look on money 
 as dirt, and miserliness is, to Shakespeare's mind, 
 certainly only a lesser crime than ingratitude. I have 
 touched on his snobbishness before ; it is, of course, a 
 national trait, but Shakespeare seems to have suffered 
 from the malady badly ; it is strange indeed to think 
 that so great a man should have worried to appeal to 
 the Heralds' Court to be assigned a coat of arms as 
 befitted a gentleman ; that he was a gentleman and 
 an aristocrat is obvious, but none the less, he seems 
 delighted always to portray himself as a duke or prince 
 whenever possible. 
 
 With regard to his politics we may be sure that he 
 sided with law, order and the Constitution. It is not 
 always remembered that he wrote in Tudor times — it 
 would have been strange indeed had he done otherwise, 
 constituted as he was — he was certainly not the man to 
 understand Jack Cade ; Piers Plowman would have left 
 him cold. It has been pointed out frequently that in The 
 Tempest he damned the Socialistic point of view for ever, 
 but it may well be doubted whether, had he been living 
 now, he would have taken even the trouble to do that. 
 
26 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 " Shakespeare has nowhere drawn the religious type 
 of man in his plays " : so runs the famous indictment 
 of the great critic, and for many years the general 
 reader has agreed complacently without taking the 
 trouble to forage for himself and prove the truth or 
 falsity of this sweeping generalisation. 
 
 It all depends upon what you mean by the word 
 religious : in an age which no one in his senses could 
 call tolerant, Shakespeare stands out without a trace 
 of bigotry. It was scarcely likely that he would extol 
 the Roman Catholics : on the other hand, he has no- 
 where left a living picture of the fanatic Puritan, ready 
 to burn for his principles if need be, obsessed by the 
 zeal of his faith which could remove mountains : it 
 would have been so easy for a genius who had only 
 (apparently) to observe a man to become him to have 
 drawn an imperishable portrait of the finest type of 
 Puritan : but no ; the truth must be confessed : 
 Shakespeare, like Homer, had his blind side : to put it 
 shortly, the type did not interest him ; the middle-class 
 shopkeeper, together with the zealot, failed to attract 
 him. Shakespeare was for ever depicting the highest 
 and the lowest ; he seemed not to see the vast millions 
 who lay in between : that was part and parcel of his 
 aristocratic temperament. 
 
 That he was contemptuous, in a quite minor degree, 
 both of ordinary citizens and of the Puritans, was 
 natural when we think how both these types combined to 
 oppose the acting of plays, and even petitioned Elizabeth 
 to banish theatres to the suburbs, but it is absurd to take 
 Sir Andrew Aguecheek's opinion as Shakespeare's : — 
 
 Maria. Marry, sir, sometimes he is a kind of Puritan. 
 Sir Andrew. O, if I thought that, I'd beat him like a dog. 
 Sir Toby. What, for being a Puritan ? Thy exquisite 
 reason, dear knight ? 
 
SHAKESPEARE 27 
 
 Sir Andrew. I have no exquisite reason for't, but I have 
 reason good enough. 
 
 Incidentally it is to be noticed a propos of Malvolio, 
 that Maria replies to this : " The devil a Puritan that 
 he is, or anything constantly but a time-pleaser." 
 
 It was certainly not for his Puritanic leanings that 
 Shakespeare thought fit to make Malvolio " a most 
 notorious geek and gull." 
 
 The above dialogue reflects altogether on the utter 
 foolishness of Sir Andrew, and not at all on the Puritans 
 as a body. It might with more justice be urged that 
 Shakespeare is here paying the Puritans a very high 
 compliment. 
 
 No : the truth is that we may search Shakespeare 
 through and through in vain to discover any sectarian 
 point of view held up to admiration or ridicule. But 
 religion, to all except the few, is not sectarian. The 
 point at issue rather is, does or does not Shakespeare 
 propound a theory to explain the riddle of life ? Does 
 he praise virtue and condemn vice ? Is he, in the 
 broadest and only true sense, religious ? I answer, 
 without the shadow of a doubt, yes ! 
 
 It must, however, first of all be remembered that the 
 dramatist's first duty is, like the novelist's, to attract 
 and amuse his audience. He must not obtrude his 
 own personality or moralise upon his dramatis per s once. 
 His business is to show you the unfolding of character, 
 not to tell you what to think of the character as if he 
 were the editor of a school edition of his own plays. 
 He is also bound to depict life as he sees it, not as it 
 ought or ought not to be. 
 
 Hence to the dullard it is quite possible that Shake- 
 speare seems to have no ulterior moral purpose. We 
 have tragedy after tragedy in which the stage is literally 
 heaped with the corpses of righteous and vicious alike, 
 
28 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 in that indiscriminating way which, as the Psalmist 
 saw, is so true to life. The righteous man may beg his 
 bread, and appear to all intents and purposes forsaken, 
 while the wicked man obviously flourishes like a green 
 bay-tree. But that is not all : we are most distinctly 
 left with a sense (never mentioned in so many words, 
 but plainly hinted at again and again) that this world 
 is not all, and that even in this world the purpose of its 
 progress is towards virtue, for it is evil that violently 
 disturbs our ordered path ; hence it follows that 
 nature is not indifferent between evil and good, but is 
 quite definitely on the side of the angels. The whole 
 theory of Shakespearean tragedy is a proof of Shake- 
 speare's sane, broad-minded, religious point of view. 
 
 What could be more definite, more succinct, more 
 noble, than the whole attitude of Edgar towards life, 
 summed up in this one immortal phrase : — 
 
 men must endure 
 Their going hence, even as their coming hither : 
 Ripeness is all. 
 
 Or, again, his dictum that 
 
 The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices 
 Make instruments to scourge us. 
 
 Or, 
 
 Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours 
 Of men's impossibilities, have preserved thee. 
 
 It would be easy to multiply instances from his lips 
 to prove that Edgar, for one, was deeply religious. To 
 come to a far more famous instance, who would deny 
 that Hamlet was instinct with a very real sense of 
 religion ? 
 
 Xot a whit, we defy augury ; there is a special providence 
 in the fall of the sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come ; 
 
SHAKESPEARE 29 
 
 if it be not to come, it will be now : if it be not now, yet it 
 will come : the readiness is all. Since no man has aught 
 of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes ? Let be. 
 
 It is no argument to the contrary to quote that, on 
 the other hand, Macbeth talks about " the way to dusty 
 death," life itself being " but a tale, told by an idiot, 
 full of sound and fury signifying nothing." To those 
 whose obsessions have perverted their true nobility, 
 and degraded them below the level of normal man, 
 it is but natural that they should turn fatalist at the 
 end. Shakespeare, in all his tragedies, but emphasises 
 the truth of the wise Greek saying that " Character is 
 destiny," and in no case is this so clearly shown as in 
 the character of Banquo in the same play. Banquo 
 was a man with a devout sense of religion if there ever 
 was one, and should alone convince any fair critic of 
 the untruth of my opening quotation : — 
 
 In the great hand of God I stand, and thence 
 Against the undivulged pretence I fight 
 Of treasonous malice. 
 
 He is one who, determined to play the part of a brave 
 and honest man, when his turn comes, fails to do any- 
 thing of the kind, and is made to suffer in a manner 
 which seems quite out of proportion to his offence. 
 What Shakespeare appears to have on his mind here 
 is the incalculability of evil ; once start a train of evil 
 factors loose, and you can never guess at the damage 
 which such a procedure entails. All you can be sure 
 about is the impossibility of your escape from the 
 consequences. 
 
 Banquo, be it remembered, prays to be delivered 
 
 from temptation : — 
 
 merciful powers, 
 Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature 
 Gives way to in repose ! 
 
30 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 like the God-fearing man he was, but it is all of no avail. 
 He succumbs, and swift retribution follows. 
 
 Shakespeare lovers will scarcely need to be reminded 
 of the innate sense of religion which is so outstanding a 
 characteristic of Horatio as well as Hamlet : — 
 
 Hamlet. There's a divinity that shapes our ends 
 Rough-hew them how we will. 
 
 Horatio. That is most certain. 
 
 But what is more important than these isolated cases 
 is the general sense and unanalysable impression from 
 all Shakespearean tragedy. As Bradley very truly 
 says : — 
 
 Sometimes from the very furnace of affliction a conviction 
 seems borne to us that somehow, if we could see it, this 
 agony counts as nothing against the heroism and love which 
 appear in it and thrill our hearts. Sometimes we are driven 
 to cry out that these mighty or heavenly spirits who perish 
 are too great for the little space in which they move, and 
 that they vanish not into nothingness but into freedom. 
 Sometimes from these sources and from others comes a 
 presentiment, formless but haunting and even profound, 
 that all the fury of conflict, with its waste and woe, is less 
 than half the truth, even an illusion, " such stuff as dreams 
 are made on." 
 
 And just because Shakespeare felt so deeply and 
 sympathised so keenly with suffering humanity, his 
 religion could not bear to be confined within the narrow 
 limits of one strait sect, least of all of that sort of sect 
 which, in a few years, was to banish the maypole and 
 all gaiety, and substitute a horrible repression of all 
 natural outlets for the emotions of the people. 
 
 His was the religion of week-days as well as of 
 Sundays : — 
 
 " Dost thou think because thou art virtuous that there shall 
 
 be no more cakes and ale ? " 
 " Yea and by St Anne, ginger shall be hot i' the mouth 
 
 too." 
 
SHAKESPEARE 31 
 
 No man without a very real religion would ever have 
 possessed in such an accentuated degree that almost 
 divine gift of forgiveness. In all the later plays we 
 find that Shakespeare pockets all his grievances and, 
 God-like, pardons his enemies : — 
 
 The rarer action is 
 In virtue than in vengeance : they being penitent, 
 The sole drift of my purpose doth extend 
 Not a frown further. 
 
 Posthumus with all the reason in the world to give 
 over Iachimo to the death exclaims : — 
 
 The power that I have on you, is to spare you : 
 The malice towards you, to forgive you : Live, 
 And deal with others better. 
 
 No one will convince me that the man who coined those 
 two phrases was devoid of the religious temperament. 
 
 Shakespeare did not shrink from heaping scorn on 
 to the heads of ecclesiastical hypocrites, when it was 
 necessary, any more than he ever refrained from show- 
 ing up abuses in any branch of the State, even to the 
 delineation of such a man as Angelo, but he is likewise 
 not ashamed to put simple, sincere prayers into the 
 mouths of his soldier-kings, Henry V. and others, which 
 come straight from the heart of the dramatist himself. 
 And, finally, to any one who yet doubts, I would recom- 
 mend a close perusal of all that is to be found about 
 Brutus in Julius Ccesar. 
 
 Shakespeare always leaves us on a note of hopefulness. 
 We are never depressed by any of his tragedies as we are 
 by the work of so many of the moderns. As Meredith 
 so wonderfully puts it : 
 
 How smiles he at a generation ranked 
 
 In gloomy noddings over life ! They pass. 
 
 Not he to feed upon a breast unthanked, 
 Or eye a beauteous face in a cracked glass. 
 
32 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 But he can spy that little twist of brain 
 
 Which moved some weighty leader of the blind, 
 Unwitting 'twas the goad of personal pain, 
 
 To view in curst eclipse our Mother's mind, 
 And show us of some rigid harridan 
 
 The wretched bondmen till the end of time. 
 O lived the Master now to paint us Man, 
 
 That little twist of brain would ring a chime 
 Of whence it came and what it caused, to start 
 Thunders of laughter, clearing air and heart. 
 
 Tragedy is to Shakespeare a consequence of some 
 obsession : in Hamlet the consequence of irresolution 
 following upon too much thinking ; in Lear the conse- 
 quence of a foolish inability to understand human 
 nature ; in Coriolanus the consequence of too over- 
 weening a pride ; in Othello the consequence of a too 
 credulous mind ; in Antony the consequence of an un- 
 bridled passion. In every case man suffers in a way 
 totally disproportionate to the wrong done ; the point 
 to notice is that in each case the calamities do not 
 simply happen, nor are they sent : they proceed mainly 
 from actions : the protagonist sets the wheels of Fate 
 in motion and nothing can prevent their revolving to 
 the inexorable end, the death, after intolerable suffer- 
 ing, of the hero. The tragedy lies in the fact that, once 
 having started the course of events, man is no longer 
 able to calculate the results nor to control them ; the 
 interest lies entirely in the inward struggle ; but Ave are 
 never depressed, simply because we never get the feeling 
 that man is but a poor, weak creature. On the con- 
 trary, in most cases he r>uts up a magnificent fight and 
 has so much greatness that we are led to dwell rather 
 upon the grand possibilities of human nature than upon 
 its downfall in this particular case, and, most important 
 of all, we notice that the main source of the suffering in 
 tragedy is evil. If, therefore, it is evil that violently 
 
SHAKESPEARE 38 
 
 disturbs the order of this world, this order cannot be 
 friendly to evil or indifferent between evil and good. 
 
 This leads us to a consideration of Shakespeare's 
 villains, among whom, of course, Iago takes precedence, 
 much as Falstaff does among his men of humour. Ever 
 since the day when Coleridge coined his magic phrase of 
 kt motiveless malignity,-' opinion with regard to Iago's 
 temperament has differed almost as much as it has 
 about Hamlet. There is no quarrel about Iago's 
 intellectual gifts : he had not a stupendous intellect, 
 but, within limits, he most certainly had a finely work- 
 ing brain ; it is almost as if Shakespeare had embodied 
 his own intelligence in him. He is critical, but, strangely 
 enough, not maliciously so. Think for a moment of his 
 picture of the women. " You're pictures out of doors, 
 bells in your parlours, wild cats in your kitchens," and 
 so on. What could be wittier or fairer ? But Shake- 
 speare almost immediately impales himself upon the 
 horns of a dilemma from which there is no escape. 
 Having endowed his puppet with brains, he then strives 
 to make him concrete, which is a contradiction in terms, 
 for intellect is never entirely maleficent ; perfect pitiless 
 malignity is as impossible for man as perfect innate 
 goodness. Again and again the reader asks himself 
 why Iago is so venomous ; again and again Iago strives 
 valiantly (in soliloquy) to provide us with a reason ; 
 he adduces many : not one of them will hold water for 
 an instant. 
 
 In the end Othello himself asks piteously : 
 
 W "ill you, I pray, demand that demi-devil 
 Why he hath thus ensnared ray soul and body? 
 
 Iago refuses to answer ; in any case, whether he would 
 or would not, he could not, for the simple reason that 
 he literally did not know. Iachimo is but the pale 
 
34, STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 shadow of Iago, and even less of a real person. Edmund 
 alone of the villains has gaiety, and is more or less to be 
 understood. He is Shakespeare's only portrait of the 
 adventurer pure and simple, though by no means 
 destitute of feeling. He certainly lives for us, being 
 neither all black nor all white, as so many of the 
 dramatist's characters are. 
 
 There is one other point in connexion with Shake- 
 spearean tragedy which is not the least important part of 
 its hold upon our imagination. I mean the continual 
 use which Shakespeare makes of irony, particularly in 
 Macbeth, irony on the part of the author himself, 
 ironical juxtapositions of persons and events, and 
 especially that species which we call " Sophoclean," 
 whereby a speaker is made to use words bearing to the 
 audience, in addition to his own meaning, a further and 
 ominous sense, hidden from himself and, usually, from 
 the other persons on the stage. 
 
 Macbeth's first words : — 
 
 So foul and fair a day I have not seen — 
 
 are a famous example of this, echoing, as they do, 
 the witches' " Fair is foul, and foul is fair." " Fail 
 not our feast," says Macbeth, later, to Banquo, 
 who is about to be murdered. " My lord, I will 
 not," is his blood-curdling reply — and he keeps his 
 promise. 
 
 Instances of this will occur at once to all readers of 
 the tragedies ; this device is extremely useful for con- 
 tributing to excite the vague fear of hidden forces 
 operating on minds unconscious of their influence ; 
 added to this, and far more potent, of course, is the 
 machinery of the unseen world and the spirit of evil, to 
 the Elizabethan audiences a far more real dread than 
 it is to us. 
 
SHAKESPEARE 35 
 
 IV 
 
 Bothm the tragedies and comedies it is essential that 
 we take into account the audiences for whom Shake- 
 speare wrote : their credulity (if we can call it so) was 
 extraordinary ; witchcraft was treated with respect, as 
 we discover in Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft 
 (1584). Fairy lore and astrology occupied the serious 
 attention of vast numbers of the populace — but far 
 more important than this, from our point of view, is the 
 insatiable thirst for poetry, which was almost the most 
 pronounced characteristic of these rough, bloodthirsty 
 men who thronged, afternoon after afternoon, in the 
 theatres, fresh from the Spanish Main or the battle-fields 
 in Flanders. Men were beginning to use their language 
 and extend their vocabulary ; new ideas of amazing 
 import were penetrating their senses daily. They 
 began "to go crazy " over poetry ; they all wrote it, 
 they all demanded it from their favourite playwrights. 
 Shakespeare, as usual, gave the public what the public 
 wanted ; it is a noteworthy feature of his genius that 
 he seemed to pander to the public taste by giving them 
 all their old favourite machinery while changing this 
 machinery in the crucible of his mind into the undying 
 individual men and women we now know. For ex- 
 ample, the audience demanded a fool and he gave them 
 Feste and the Fool in Lear. They demanded a Jew who 
 should be baited and he gave them Shylock. They 
 demanded witches and he gave them Macbeth. They 
 demanded blood and he gave them Othello and Hamlet. 
 Most of all they demanded poetry, and he gave them 
 thirty- seven plays so steeped in magic that he caused a 
 Low Dutch dialect to become^ the cliiefest instrument 
 of civilisation, the world- speech of humanity at large. 
 
86 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Shakespeare found the blank-verse form a powerful 
 vehicle of dramatic elocution as used by Marlowe and 
 perfected it until in his years of maturity almost un- 
 wittingly he seemed to coin a new heaven and a new 
 earth of language ; here as elsewhere, however, it is as 
 well to recognise that he was no innovator as Words- 
 worth was ; he did not invent the blank- verse form any 
 more than he invented the plots for his plays : he took 
 whatever he found to be grist for his mill, as all geniuses 
 do, from the store-cupboard of all the writers who had 
 lived before him — discarding here, adding there, with 
 no thought but of benefiting from them and improving 
 upon their mistakes. He must have been an omnivor- 
 ous reader, much of the same type as Doctor Johnson, 
 who tore the hearts out of books ruthlessly in order to 
 extract the honey out of them expeditiously. The fact 
 that Shakespeare was an actor surely helped him 
 enormously ; knowing as he did the exigencies of the 
 stage, he would in his remodelling of old plays know 
 exactly how to adapt them to meet the popular demands, 
 and we shall do well to bear in mind the eight features 
 that Coleridge noted when he tried to particularise on 
 Shakespeare's peculiarities. 
 
 First he notices that Shakespeare gains his effect 
 always by expectation in preference to surprise ; this is 
 ever the way of genius ; his business lies in the un- 
 ravelling of character. Your interest as reader or play- 
 goer is in the development of character, not in sudden 
 surprises. In Macbeth, for instance, we are led gradually 
 to expect the murder of Duncan ; that is not the climax 
 of the play ; it is the result of the murder upon Mac- 
 beth's inner consciousness that so holds our attention 
 that wc scarcely dare to draw a breath until the last 
 scene; so it is with Hamlet. It is the strange, un- 
 accountable reluctance in the hero to take the obvious 
 
SHAKESPEARE 87 
 
 way that so enthralls us ; we feel how extraordinarily 
 natural it all is and yet how desperately tragic ; the 
 excitement is all the more tense because we are led 
 to expect various things; we don't want the cheap 
 substitution of surprise for expectation. 
 
 Secondly, Coleridge notices how Shakespeare adheres 
 to the law that opposites attract, a point not even now 
 sufficiently recognised by those who study the psy- 
 chology of the human race. What was it that attracted 
 the energetic, highly intellectual Hamlet in the anaemic, 
 spiritless doll, Ophelia ? What was it that so endeared 
 the gentle Desdemona to the warrior Othello ? Why 
 ever did Emilia marry Iago or Imogen Posthumus ? 
 What had Henry the Fifth in common with Falstaff or 
 Falstaff with him ? Again and again we see this trait 
 in Shakespeare, only explicable at all if we remember 
 how extraordinarily true it is in real life that opposites 
 have a strange attraction for each other. 
 
 The third point is that Shakespeare always keeps on 
 the high road ; he has no innocent adulteries, no senti- 
 mental rat-catchers, no aesthetic butchers ; he does not 
 penetrate the obscure corners of life. This is the same 
 feature which Meredith recognised when he said : 
 
 He probed from hell to hell 
 
 Of human passions, but of love deflowered 
 His wisdom was not for he knew thee [Mother Earth] well. 
 
 There is no " sick philosophy " in Shakespeare as there 
 has been in so much of our modern writing ; he had no 
 leanings towards an inverted morality which would 
 prove immorality moral and all morality immoral. It 
 is with a sense of getting back to clean, fresh air, after 
 having been immured in a cesspool, that we read 
 Shakespeare after some of our latter-day prophets. 
 Shakespeare's fourth peculiarity is his absolute 
 
88 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 independence between the dramatic interest and the 
 plot : the plot is simply the canvas, nothing more : it is 
 quite secondary to and independent of the main pur- 
 pose — the unfolding of character. This explains once 
 again why Shakespeare never troubled to invent a plot ; 
 the fifth peculiarity follows from the fourth; and is the 
 indejoendence of the interest on the story as the ground- 
 work of the plot. 
 
 The sixth feature is the interfusion of the lyrical with, 
 in and through the dramatic. Songs, Coleridge noticed, 
 in Shakespeare are introduced as songs only ; and yet 
 how he heightens the humour, tightens the intensity 
 and more forcibly brings home to us the point of view 
 he would have us carry away. His personal love of 
 music to a great extent, of course, accounts for this, but 
 it is as well to remember how here again he takes the old 
 machinery and turns it to his own good purpose. 
 
 The seventh point is perhaps the most important of 
 all : it is that the characters of the dramatis persona?, 
 like those in real life, are to be inferred by the reader ; 
 they are not told to him. This is the reason why we 
 come to so many different conclusions in our readings 
 of the different characters ; for years we are content to 
 take other men's opinions, and then, suddenly waking up 
 from our lethargic acquiescence in their views, we reread 
 the play again for ourselves and find, perhaps, that Henry 
 the Fifth was not the model man of valour we had been 
 led to think him, nor Falstaff so much of a coward as 
 we had been led to believe. We find that many of his 
 later heroines are scarcely more than milk and watery 
 abstractions, where we had before thought them glorious 
 specimens of perfect English girlhood at its best. 
 
 Lastly, Coleridge would have us notice how every- 
 thing, however heterogeneous in Shakespeare, is united, 
 as it is in Nature ; in other words, passion is that by 
 
SHAKESPEARE 30 
 
 which the individual is distinguished from others, not 
 that which makes a different kind of him. These eight 
 peculiarities are specially important for us to notice as 
 we pass along, trying to build up for ourselves the com- 
 plete picture of our Shakespeare. So far as he goes 
 Coleridge is seldom in the wrong, but there are several 
 points still to be touched on before we can hope to have 
 gained an all-round view. 
 
 For instance, Coleridge never mentioned the astonish- 
 ingly brilliant way in which Shakespeare introduced his 
 very necessary stage directions into the text. When we 
 take into account the absence of all scenery and the fact 
 that these plays were acted in broad daylight, in 
 theatres open alike to sun and rain, we begin to realise 
 with what almost insurmountable difficulties the play- 
 wright had to cope, we are lost in admiration at the 
 natural way in which the poet intersperses his hints 
 about the time of day, the attitude and dress of the 
 character, almost unnoticeably in the text. How often, 
 for instance, in the churchyard scene in Romeo and Juliet, 
 does Shakespeare lay stress upon the fact that it is pitch 
 dark ? The opening words attune our ears to the 
 general gloom : 
 
 Give me thy torch, boy : hence and stand aloof, 
 Yet put it out, for I would not be seen, 
 
 says Paris. Romeo, after he has killed him, pretends 
 that he has not been able to see his opponent's face : 
 " Let me peruse this face." When Friar Laurence 
 enters he begins : 
 
 What torch is yond', that vainly lends his light 
 To grubs and eyeless skulls ? 
 
40 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Paris's page on his re-entry with the watch 
 says : 
 
 This is the place : there, where the torch doth burn. 
 
 But Shakespeare not only introduces these very neces- 
 sary hints into the poetry, but he sometimes, with 
 magical success, makes his stage direction have a real 
 bearing on the plot. The most famous instance of this 
 is, of course, in Othello : 
 
 Put out the light, and then put out the light — 
 
 when Othello comes in to murder Desdemona. 
 
 In Julius Ccesar, when Brutus and Cassius are com- 
 muning apart, Shakespeare seizes the opportunity to 
 emphasise the time of day by making the rest of the 
 conspirators argue : 
 
 Decius. Here lies the east : doth not the day break here ? 
 
 Casca. No. 
 
 China. O, pardon, sir, it doth : and yon grey lines, 
 That fret the clouds, are messengers of day. 
 
 Casca. You shall confess that you are both deceived. 
 Here, as I point my sword, the sun arises : 
 Which is a great way growing on the south, 
 Weighing the youthful season of the year. 
 
 How extraordinarily it adds to the poignancy of 
 Macduff's suffering to hear Malcolm's 
 
 What ! man, ne'er pull your hat upon your brows. 
 
 It visualises the scene exactly ; you feel that you are 
 really there, a spectator of the sad sight of the strong 
 man bowed with grief, unable to do anything to 
 assuage it, 
 
 Shakespeare more than any other man in the world 
 seems always to have the exact word or phrase at his 
 command with which to captivate our attention. How 
 graphic is that touch of tl crying " in Prospero's 
 
SHAKESPEARE 41 
 
 description of his wandering with Miranda in an open 
 boat in her infant years : " Me and thy crying self," or 
 that wonderful use of the word " inly " in " the inly 
 touch of love." 
 
 Everyone will recall the " hoary leaves of the willow " 
 which were showing in " the glassy stream " where 
 Ophelia drowned herself, and Cleopatra's 
 
 He's speaking now, 
 Or murmuring " Where's my serpent of old Nile ? " 
 
 His language seems always to have been, as Hazlitt 
 said, hieroglyphical ; it translates thoughts into visible 
 images, so that you not only see and understand what 
 he describes but are yourself transported there. Think 
 of this description : ' ' Light thickens and the crow 
 makes wing to the rooky wood." No other words 
 would do, nothing else call up quite the image which we 
 visualise when we read this. 
 
 Strangely enough, when his characters are acting 
 under the stress of great emotion, they have a wonder- 
 ful habit of coining words. By far the best known 
 instance is the 
 
 No ; this my hand will rather 
 The multitudinous seas incarnadine, 
 Making the green one red 
 
 of Macbeth. 
 
 It is here particularly that we congratulate ourselves 
 on the fact that Shakespeare was unacademic and had 
 no conventional prejudices to outgrow ; he would have 
 no natural re23Ugnance against coining a fresh word if 
 his vocabulary failed him at a particular point. What 
 he did possess was an unerring ear for music, so 
 finely developed that words seem to come at his 
 beck and call straight from heaven. It is this that 
 
42 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 makes us gasp at the pure magic of such a lyrical 
 outburst as : 
 
 O ! my love ! my wife ! 
 Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath, 
 Hath had no power yet against thy beauty : 
 Thou art not conquer'd ; beauty's ensign yet 
 Is crimson in thy lips, and in thy cheeks, 
 And death's pale flag is not advanced there. 
 
 He had this gift from the very start. Think of the 
 stupendous sonnet which begins : 
 
 Full many a glorious morning have I seen 
 Flatter the mountain tops with sovran eye, 
 Kissing with golden face the meadows green, 
 Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchymy. 
 
 Could ever passionate love find more exquisite 
 expression in fewer words than in the 
 
 O thou weed that are so lovely fair 
 That the sense aches at thee 
 
 of Othello ? 
 
 Or was ever a picture of Nature's beauties drawn that 
 would parallel Perdita's 
 
 Daffodils 
 That come before the swallow dares and take 
 The winds of March with beauty : violets dim 
 But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes 
 Or Cytherea's breath . . . ? 
 
 Milton's attempts, fine as they are, induce the criti- 
 cism which Bagehot invented. " Why," he says, at the 
 conclusion of a long description of natural phenomena 
 in Paradise Lost, " you could draw a map of it." 
 
 This, then, is the secret of Shakespeare's greatness ; 
 not only had he, owing to his experiencing nature, his 
 large catholic sympathies, his ever-roaming, ever- 
 interested eye, the power of visualising man's char- 
 
SHAKESPEARE 43 
 
 acteristics, but superimposed upon that he had the 
 faculty for clothing his myriad thoughts in the most 
 perfectly fitting expressions that it has been the good 
 fortune of any genius to own. 
 
 It is easy to sum up his limitations, for they are almost 
 trivial ; he does not seem to have been interested in 
 novelties (he never mentions potatoes or tobacco ; we 
 get a better insight into the common life of the Eliza- 
 bethans by reading the contemporary drama of Dekker, 
 Jonson and the rest of them). He had a supreme con- 
 tempt for misers, Puritans and the middle classes ; he 
 may have been a bit of a snob, and was probably 
 sensuous — his faults only make him the more human, 
 the more lovable. What we do know about him is that 
 he was sunny, gentle, richly endowed with a sense of 
 humour which, in all probability, saved him in the years 
 when he probed from hell to hell the human passions, 
 but we know that he emerged serene in the latest years, 
 having discovered that 
 
 The rarer action is 
 In virtue than in vengeance. 
 
 The power of being able to forgive your adversary 
 Shakespeare ranks as almost the most priceless attribute 
 of man. He can even find it in him to forgive Iachimo. 
 " What an inhuman world," some modern philosopher 
 once said, " it would be without the old." Youth is 
 apt to be astonishingly cruel from the days when in 
 earliest infancy it deprives the fly upon the window- 
 pane of its wings, " just for fun." Shakespeare seems 
 to have been the great exception to this ; he had a very 
 real horror of all kinds of cruelty. He was almost 
 womanish in his dislike of harsh words or blows ; we 
 feel that he could never have been a soldier ; he shrank 
 instinctively from bloodshed as he shrank from crowds 
 
44 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 whom he did not understand but only loathed, as 
 sensitive people so often do. He was never so happy 
 as when he was in solitude or in the country, where he 
 could people the air with his fancies, yet he took a 
 delight in the material world or he would never have 
 been able to float those bubbles in the air or to lift the 
 land into mountain slopes so naturally, so entirely 
 without effort, as Emerson says : 
 
 He had the faculty of being able to change places at will 
 with all humanity, turning the globe round for his amusement : 
 it is not that he seeks to edify us, he wishes rather to amuse 
 both himself and us . . . the dreams of childhood, the 
 ravings of despair were alike the toys of his fancy. 
 
 His was not that cloistered virtue which Milton held 
 so much in contempt, which refused to sally forth and 
 seek its adversary ; rather at times did gentle Shake- 
 speare suffer horrible tortures amid the dust and heat — 
 " sed non sine pulvere palma." Through tribulation 
 he came to know men better, and out of the fire he came 
 purified seven times, so that he left behind, as his 
 testament to mankind, poetry so rich and full of multi- 
 tudinous beauties that the language in which it was 
 written has become the noblest in the world, a gallery 
 of portraits of men and women whom we know more 
 intimately than our nearest and dearest, and thoughts 
 couched in the most inspiring, unforgettable phrase- 
 ology that ever man could desire to solace and refresh 
 him in the arid deserts of life. 
 
 When we want to laugh, to cry, to be quiet, to be 
 boisterous, to find a friend, or be alone, whatever our 
 mood, Shakespeare can enter into it and-provide us with 
 exactly the companion we most need. Of all men who 
 have really lived he is the first to whom we turn when 
 in trouble or joy ; he halves our sorrows and doubles 
 our delights, for he is the most human, the readiest to 
 
SHAKESPEARE 45 
 
 understand, the quickest to soothe our troubled senses. 
 It is the greatest privilege that we enjoy as Englishmen 
 that this man was of our blood, an Englishman for the 
 English. It is by far the greatest achievement that 
 we as a nation have yet wrought that we have produced 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 A rarer spirit never 
 Did steer humanity. 
 
II 
 
 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 
 
 MR SAINTSBURY, in his latest critical work, 
 very cleverly proves how necessary it is for 
 those of us who pine and peek and fret amid 
 the turmoil of our frenzied life to-day to go back to the 
 eighteenth century for the sake of our peace of mind. 
 We are only too apt to live for the newspapers, buying 
 edition after edition in the hope of finding better news 
 from all the various scenes of action. Our conversation 
 runs in the everlasting groove of war and all its side 
 issues ; when work is over, and we are for a few moments 
 at leisure, we either go out to a theatre or else plunge 
 recklessly into a modern novel, with its inevitable lead- 
 ing up to the climax of August, 1914. How much better 
 it would be if we could only uproot ourselves from our 
 present age of agony in our hours of recreation and 
 immerse ourselves in the placid waters of the Augustan 
 lake. 
 
 No century has received more neglect than this one ; 
 no century ever deserved neglect less. From 1700 to 
 1798 is a period full of good things, all specifics for our 
 present-day malady. It is just a case of having given 
 the dog a bad name and the name has most unjustly 
 stuck. It will therefore be, perhaps, a good thing first 
 of all to clear the ground and state exactly what the 
 eighteenth century set out to do ; how far it attained 
 its aim ; what it did not pretend to achieve, and wherein 
 lies the difference between our own age and that of the 
 earlier Georges. The whole century was given over to 
 the cult of common- sense ; it viewed any tendency 
 
 4 e 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 47 
 
 towards such a thing as Enthusiasm with suspicion ; 
 clarity of diction, sparkling wit, sound material-mind ed- 
 ness, etc., the avoidance of any exaggerated notions 
 about idealism or other abstract " highfalutin " words, 
 were conspicuously present in all its writers. Nothing 
 could have been further removed from Shakespeare 
 and Milton on the one side or the Romantic revivalists 
 on the other. The field it set before itself to cover was 
 a small one. The point to remember is that it covered 
 it perfectly ; it never failed to achieve its purpose, 
 whether in prose, poetry, satire, the writing of letters, 
 or the more gigantic feat of composing novels. It had 
 no concejDtion of " the desire of the moth for the star " 
 theory, and Keats and Shelley were right outside its 
 ken. It had no dealings with the sublime, and it 
 descended but rarely to the ridiculous. There was a 
 robust sanity about it which compels admiration at all 
 times, and it was rarely dull. 
 
 Now everyone will allow that the tendency to-day is 
 all towards introspection, a state of continual hustle 
 as we search after whatever chimera for the moment 
 attracts us. Some of us believe (Mr Saintsbury is not 
 among the number ; he seizes every opportunity to be 
 rude to this fledgling century of ours) that the last few 
 years have been extraordinarily productive of good 
 poetry, lasting novels, and even of some signs of a sane 
 dramatic revival. However that may be, the point 
 rather lies in the fact that we have much to learn from 
 an age when enthusiasm was regarded as a vice, and the 
 end of knowledge, the habit of moderating the passions. 
 It is a truism that our best work is done when we are 
 " calm, cool and collected," as the nerve doctors say. 
 Most of us suffer from too highly strung nerves, and 
 consequently splash our canvas with all manner of 
 colours, careless of co-ordination, of shadows and lights, 
 
48 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 only pleased that such and such a patch looks beautiful. 
 There is to-day a very noticeable lack of method, a kind 
 of neurasthenic irritability in the work of even the best 
 men, which indicates the need for a long rest cure 
 among the Augustans. In a word, our enthusiasms, 
 excellent in intention as they are, need the tempering 
 that can only be gained by a course of Swift, Johnson, 
 Addison, Pope and the rest of a school who never 
 suffered their passions to get the upper hand. 
 
 It is good for us to renew our acquaintance with Sir 
 Roger de Coverley, Will Honeycomb and all the ador- 
 able bevy of bepatched beauties — Chloe, Clarissa, 
 Vanessa, Flavia and so on, of The Taller and Spectator ; 
 to turn over the pages of Addison's or Steele's Essays, 
 and to watch Sir Roger at the play, in church, in West- 
 minster Abbey, with the gipsies, at the Quarter Sessions 
 — to enter again into that life where ladies are laughed 
 out of their petty foibles and vain fancies, to read 
 Addison's Saturday sermons or his criticism on Paradise 
 Lost, interleaved with his sly reprimands to the oglers 
 and street-criers, the antics of the fan- wavers and the 
 members of the Trumpet and other clubs. It is all very 
 quiet, always witty, never heavy or dull, and, what is 
 most important, as different as possible from our life 
 to-day. And after Addison, Swift. Miserrimus as 
 he was in his own life, he never lifted the veil too far. 
 It was, as he himself said, only mankind in the mass 
 that he hated ; individual members of society he loved, 
 and, for all the carping of our more inane critics, 
 Gulliver's Travels does stand out as one of the most 
 humorous books ever written. Lacking, indeed, in the 
 comic spirit must that man be who is unable to be 
 tickled inwardly at the innumerable funny things in 
 Lilliput and Brobdingnag, or intellectually fed with the 
 amazing genius that went to the making of A Tale of a 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY M) 
 
 Tub. It is all part and parcel of the scheme of the 
 century that Swift was so far able to control his passions 
 that he could write so sweetly (yes, sweetly) that children 
 are kept from their play by the delights of Gulliver and 
 grown-up men and women can find refection in the finest 
 satire that has ever been written. But it is to The 
 Journal to Stella that we ought most surely to turn if we 
 want comfort and rest. Here we have a slice of import- 
 ant history, a sketch of manners delightful in them- 
 selves, a gazette in miniature, mingled pathos, humour 
 and love, pride and jealousy, all written not in ink, but 
 blood, making up a marvellous and absolutely genuine 
 autobiography. It is doubtful whether, when we 
 require pure recreation, there is any author so capable 
 of gripping our attention and holding us as the man 
 who wrote not only the above, but Polite Conversation, 
 A Modest Proposal, The Drapier Letters and The Battle 
 of the Books, to satisfy our aching senses. 
 
 Pope's place in literature has long been decided, but, 
 because it has been granted that he is not a poet of the 
 Wordsworthian order, it has somehow followed that he 
 has been little read of late. We acknowledge his lack 
 of originality, his insincerity and shallowness of thought, 
 but his positive qualities more than outweigh these 
 deficiencies. He is always witty, always polished and 
 urbane, and never devoid of an intellectual quality that 
 is not to be analysed, but is always felt and appreciated 
 by all but the most meticulously romantic critics. The 
 man or woman who fails to derive a very real pleasure 
 from that consummately artistic mock-heroic epic, The 
 Rape of the Lock, is sincerely to be pitied, while the Essay 
 on Criticism and the Essay on Man sum up, in the most 
 compact and charming style, aphorisms that have 
 become the commonplaces of our everyday speech. 
 The couplet about " true wit " is not the less valuable 
 
50 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 because it has suffered from too much bandying about. 
 But we ought to reread not only Pope, but the sunny, 
 honey-tongued Prior, Gay, Akenside, Churchill, Thom- 
 son and Young, all of whom contributed poetry of a 
 kind that is at once direct, soothing, witty and polished. 
 For far too long have these poets suffered an undeserved 
 neglect and been chastised for daring to be limited in 
 scope and execution. They form a very definite link 
 in the history of English poetry. If they did nothing 
 else they knocked a real sense of regular rhythm into 
 the English head, and for this alone we ought to be 
 devoutly thankful. But it is when we arrive at the 
 birth of the novel proper in Richardson, Fielding, 
 Smollett and Sterne that we stand on the surest ground. 
 I by no means agree with Mr Saintsbury's estimate of 
 our own age when he complains of the poverty of our 
 modern novelists. Rather do I feel, after a new work 
 of Compton Mackenzie, Hugh Walpole, Joseph Conrad, 
 H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Gilbert Cannan, St John 
 Lucas and the rest of our younger writers, that we live 
 in the golden age of the novel, but I readily acknow- 
 ledge that, for pure rest and refreshment, I prefer 
 Fielding, the innovator and perfecter of the direct 
 narrative type of fiction. There is so much searching 
 of heart, so much dwelling on sordid details in the 
 novelist of to-day, that we become troubled and 
 " nervy " ourselves after a dose of their work. 
 Fielding, on the other hand, simply enchants us. We 
 are not in the least perturbed by the many accidents by 
 flood and field that befall Tom Jones or Joseph Andrews ; 
 we watch the rapidly moving events as if in a kinema. 
 We are transported to an age in which we most decidedly 
 would not choose to live, but which is still picturesque, 
 real, robust and full of sound common-sense and good 
 humour. Partridge and Parson Adams are an ever- 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 51 
 
 lasting joy, and give us as much real rest and happiness 
 as any of Shakespeare's characters. I am convinced 
 that no better prescription could be devised for those 
 who would forget for a few hours the woes of to-day 
 than a course of eighteenth-century novel-reading — not 
 only all Fielding, Pamela, Humphrey Clinker and 
 Tristram Shandy, but John Buncle, The Spiritual 
 Quixote, The Case of Otranto, Vathek, Peter Wilkins 
 and Moll Flanders. All these novels are written with 
 the one idea of amusing their readers and interesting 
 them by excitement, suspense, pathos, sarcasm — by 
 whatever means their authors could devise. That they 
 succeeded for their own immediate readers is well 
 known ; that they are less read to-day casts an un- 
 worthy aspersion on our critical faculties. For the by 
 no means to be despised gift of story-telling, this age 
 has never been approached, and it is this lost art that 
 we now so much deplore and so much need to comfort 
 and console us in our leisure hours. 
 
 Lord Rosebery only echoed an opinion held by very 
 many cultivated men of taste when he declared that 
 there was no bed book in the world to compare with 
 BoswelPs Life of John-son, no other book which could 
 compete with it as a solace for the convalescent. I 
 myself can put on record that, when I had six months 
 of forced indolence after a somewhat serious illness, 
 Boswell was my constant companion and contributed 
 more than anything to my ultimate recovery. And, 
 as everyone has pointed out, Doctor Johnson is the 
 eighteenth century in epitome ; no other age did or 
 could produce him. In him is wrapt up all the Augustan 
 splendid sanity — its intolerance of cant, its magnificent 
 common- sense (tempered in his case by a melancholy 
 wisdom) ; its inimitable humour and avoidance of dull- 
 ness ; its direct vision, which has been mistaken more 
 
52 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 often than not for jDlatitudinising ; its habit of saying 
 outright what pleased and what displeased it, regardless 
 of quaint rulings of other ages ; its inflexible rigidity of 
 principle, combined with a very real charity ; its wide 
 knowledge, which has no sort of affinity with pedantry ; 
 its curiosity, mingled with a wholesome scepticism ; its 
 indomitable courage, coupled with that mysterious 
 charm which so many of us for so long a time have held 
 up to ridicule or scorned as being too childish for these 
 latter days of wisdom. 
 
 Doctor Johnson is John Bull as we like to fancy 
 him, not as travestied in the Press — superstitious, 
 weak-kneed, maudlin or scandalmongering — but stead- 
 fast, robust, intellectual, religious, and not ashamed of 
 being thought so ; companionable, witty and courteous 
 (I repeat, courteous ; think of the doctor's famous 
 epigram to Mrs Siddons or his treatment of the inmates 
 of his house) ; and it is not only Johnson the man 
 whom we meet in Boswell, but the Johnson of The 
 Rambler, of The Vanity of Human Wishes, of Rasselas, 
 of The Lives of the Poets and The Preface to Shakespeare ; 
 Johnson the writer, with whom Mr Saintsbury would 
 have us intimate. The legend that it is the man, and 
 not the writer, who is able to afford us such a perfect 
 rest and refreshment is utterly and radically erroneous. 
 We ought to reread his works as well as to listen to 
 his inimitable remarks. I would go even farther and 
 suggest that we no longer deride Johnson as a critic. 
 Within his very obvious limitations he is not only a 
 good, but a great, critic. I know few more illuminating, 
 and no more refreshing, pieces of criticism than his 
 remarks on Shakespeare. That he disliked blank verse 
 is very plain — he admits it ; and, after all, every man 
 is entitled to his own opinion. The question is, taking 
 all his idiosyncrasies into account, whether or not he 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 53 
 
 does shed light upon the works of the man whom he 
 discusses. I answer unhesitatingly — yes. 
 
 Of Johnson's companions, Goldsmith, of course, 
 stands out most prominently. For pure amusement 
 and refreshment it would, indeed, be hard to name a 
 more ideal companion. The most lovable of men in 
 himself, his prose style has been the never-ending charm 
 of all generations since ; its perfect simplicity, its 
 pellucid clarity and light humour have been the envy of 
 all writers since. It is impossible to analyse it ; it is 
 sheer gossamer. But it is Goldsmith's versatility that 
 is so amazing. He will write you a comedy, over which 
 even a schoolboy will shriek with delight as he reads it 
 to himself ; verses polished, descriptive, direct and even 
 poignant ; essays for which we cannot find high enough 
 praise ; a novel which still pleases and amuses every 
 reader of whatever age ; and even histories of various 
 kinds, which are a constant joy to anyone who is ever 
 lucky enough to unearth one in a second-hand bookshop. 
 
 You can be sure of amusement, of absolute recreation 
 and of perfect rest, whenever you pick up any one of the 
 works of this astonishing Irishman. And so we come 
 to a branch of literature which even the most blase and 
 " modernist " of the moderns will allow to be the 
 eighteenth century's peculiar gift — the art of letter- 
 writing. There must be something more than the 
 modern restlessness and hurry, the invention of tele- 
 phone and telegraph to account for the rapid decay of 
 this fascinating department of the kingdom of literature. 
 Whatever the cause, it is an established fact that never 
 before nor since, in any age, have we had letters to com- 
 pare with those of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Swift, 
 Pope, Horace Walpole, Chesterfield, Cowper and Gray. 
 What a magnificent orgy is conjured up by the mere 
 mention of these names ! We take up a volume of any 
 
54 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 one of them, and hours afterwards may still be found 
 glutting ourselves with their witticisms, their pictures of 
 the life and manners of their times, their delightful anec- 
 dotes and the thousand and one things about them that 
 attract us. Lady Mary, with her wonderful description 
 of life in Turkey and admonitions about her husband's 
 prospects ; Lord Chesterfield, with his never-failing 
 Attic salt and acumen, trying to model a perfect man of 
 the world ; Horace Walpole (to me the most interesting 
 of all, and to Mr Saintsbury so important that he 
 recommends these ten volumes as a vi thirdsman" to 
 the Bible and Shakespeare), with his abounding vitality 
 and endlessly refreshing kaleidoscope of current events, 
 portraying the history of his time more exactly than any 
 historian could ever hope to ; Gray, with his scholarly 
 and scientifically inclined investigations, keeping his 
 eye on the object like the true poet that he was ; and 
 Cowper, most popular of all, with his pen pictures 
 coined from nothing at all, able to interest us quietly, 
 sedately, yet withal amusingly, about Olney, his garden, 
 or a hare, the most exquisite small beer — all these 
 afford us a garden with never-ending j3leasances and 
 arbours, to which we can retire with absolute certitude 
 that we shall return to the whirl of our daily round 
 reinvigorated, full of new ideas, all our tangled skeins 
 unravelled, and quietly confident because of our new- 
 found peace. And wherein lies the magic of these 
 peculiarly eighteenth-century letter- writers ? Is it not 
 in the unfailing good sense, the inevitable good temper, 
 the obvious leisured ease of the authors and the genuine 
 interest betrayed and aroused in all sorts of different 
 things ? Nowhere did the century find so natural an 
 outlet for its genius as in this art, and to neglect these 
 letter-writers is to miss a very considerable portion of 
 the spice of life. 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 55 
 
 Of Gibbon and Burke Mr Saintsbury says but little ; 
 he recognises the refreshing qualities of The Decline and 
 Fall, but he by no means does justice to the gorgeous 
 rhetoric of our noblest statesmen. Lawyers invariably 
 tell me that they always look on a man who doesn't 
 know his Burke as only half educated, and certainly I 
 have derived more considerable aesthetic refreshment 
 from the speeches on India, France and America than 
 in any writers of a like kind in any language. To some 
 extent a novel depreciation of Sheridan has of late set 
 in. There were better things written between 1700 
 and 1798 than his three plays, and critics wax angry 
 because we don't read them ; but that ought not to 
 blind them to the fact that in their class these comedies 
 stand alone, and have been the constant delight of all 
 playgoers and readers ever since. No one in his senses 
 would deny that he gains a very definite sense of rest 
 and refreshment after seeing or rereading the comedies 
 of Sheridan or Goldsmith ; the stage, without these two 
 in this century, would have been poor indeed. But all 
 this time there has been an undercurrent of revolt 
 against the tenets of the Augustan school ; The Fugitives 
 from the Happy Valley were headed, of course, by Gray 
 and Collins, who, in spite of their personified abstrac- 
 tions, handed on a very definite torch to Wordsworth 
 himself. 
 
 Collins, in particular, had that peculiar dream quality, 
 that touch of pure lyrical softness, which haunts us in 
 the later romantics. He at least breaks with a school 
 which aims at neatness and polish and common-sense 
 above all else. How Sleep the Brave and The Ode to 
 Evening need no relative eulogy ; they are absolute, 
 final, ineffably graceful and sweet. Macpherson's 
 Ossian is, I fear, still caviare to the general, but its popu- 
 larity and influence were once widespread throughout 
 
56 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Europe. The point is that this verse-prose, with 
 its breath of the blue mountains of Skye and the 
 Hebrides and magic vagueness, shows yet another 
 cleavage from the school of Pope. But it is when we 
 come to Percy's Reliques (1765), the most epoch-making 
 book that appeared between 1700 and 1798, that we see 
 the first real glimmerings of the great dawn of the 
 Romantic revival. How good it must have been for 
 the eighteenth century to read Sir Cauline, Sir Patrick 
 Speits and The Nut Brown Maid. It would, we feel, 
 have been worth while to have lived at that period, 
 ordinarily ignorant, and suddenly to have come across 
 a copy fresh from the press. No wonder Scott raved 
 so about it. I never met anyone, boy or man, who was 
 not in raptures over it when it was first brought to his 
 notice. 
 
 It is difficult to analyse the charm which ballad 
 poetry exercises over us ; the fact remains that we 
 would part with many precious heritages before we 
 would consent to lose Chevy Chase, The Battle of Otter - 
 bourne. Young Waters and so on. It is hardly necessary 
 at this time of day to recommend people who are in 
 need of rest and refreshment to go back to the ballad, 
 but it is worth noticing that it is to the eighteenth 
 century that we owe its revival and consequent 
 popularity. Chatterton's Ballade of Excellent Charity 
 and Smart's Song to David will never fail to provide 
 restful pleasure to all who have eyes to see and ears 
 to hear, but their place at this time of day is also 
 well assured. And so we arrive at the setting of the 
 Augustan sun. Cowper, almost as versatile as Gold- 
 smith, we already know as a letter-writer. His hymns 
 stand out as the finest we possess, his John Gilpin and 
 The Task scarcely need mention here, but it is perhaps 
 permissible once more to draw attention to the import- 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 57 
 
 ance of Yardley Oak, which certainly contains matters 
 entirely foreign to the earlier writers in the century. 
 Here we have the imaginative envisagement of every- 
 thing, the half-pantheistic feeling of the community of 
 man and Nature and God, which is so perfectly developed 
 later on in Wordsworth. In all his poems, however, 
 there is the same peacefulness and quiet humour which 
 are so necessary for those in search of rest. 
 
 We feel, on laying down The Peace of the Augustans, 
 that Mr Saintsbury has conferred upon the State a real 
 benefit, for there never was a time when we all of us so 
 sorely needed all that the eighteenth century has to give 
 us — level-headedness, a sense of humour, a. sense of 
 quiet, even though oppressed and weighed down by 
 innumerable troubles, robust strength, an avoidance of 
 thinking too precisely on the event — all these and many 
 more are the gifts which this age has to bestow. It is 
 all the more difficult when we feel so grateful for such 
 a piece of criticism to have to comment adversely on 
 many features, but, in common fairness to ourselves, a 
 word must be added on the reverse side. 
 
 Never before can there have been such an astute 
 literary critic who wrote so deplorably as Mr Saintsbury. 
 His style has long been recognised as almost as bad as 
 his criticisms are good, but in this book he has " out- 
 Saintsburied Saintsbury," which must weigh with 
 university lecturers before they take the responsibility 
 of advocating this book as a text-book of criticism. 
 Furthermore, he is a Tory of the Tories, and obviously 
 prefers a political fight to all the literature there ever 
 was. Like many others of his belief, he is unable to 
 understand the moderns, and consequently reviles 
 them most unjustly. Lastly, and most important of 
 all, we close this book with a feeling that he himself 
 does actually prefer the low-lying levels of the Augustan 
 
58 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 poets to the sublime heights of Keats, Shelley and 
 Wordsworth. We feel that we have been cheated by a 
 very clever counsel, who insidiously recommends that, 
 for our sanity's sake, w r e should try his prescription of 
 eighteenth-century literature ; and, when he has us in 
 his clutches, he would have us leave all our glories of sea 
 and sky and mountain, and stay with him in this field 
 of very limited vision for ever. 
 
 The clever reader will take Mr Saintsbury's advice 
 gladly for a cure, but, when he is rested, he will rise 
 again like a giant refreshed with wine and come back 
 to the present age, ready to fight afresh for the new ideals 
 and the twentieth-century theory of life and letters, 
 which anyone less biased than Mr Saintsbury will allow 
 are incomparably finer than those of the nineteenth and 
 totally beyond the ken of the very earthy schemers of 
 the eighteenth century. 
 
Ill 
 
 SOME MODERN POETS 
 
 WHEN Mr Marsh first collected the poems 
 most representative of his age in 1912, he 
 kindly provided the critic with a beacon- 
 light by quoting the following passage from Lord 
 Dunsany : — 
 
 Of all materials for labour, dreams are the hardest ; and 
 the artificer in ideas is the chief of workers, who out of 
 nothing will make a piece of work that may stop a child from 
 crying or lead nations to higher things. For what is it to 
 be a poet ? it is to see at a glance the glory of the world, 
 to see beauty in all its forms and manifestations, to feel 
 ugliness like a pain, to resent the wrongs of others as bitterly 
 as one's own, to know mankind as others know single men, 
 to know nature as botanists know a flower, to be thought a 
 fool, to hear at moments the clear voice of God. 
 
 This brave venture appeared just at a time when 
 there was literally no sale whatever for poetry, when 
 Richard Middleton was driven to commit suicide 
 because he could make no headway in an age given over 
 to materialism. It seemed that so far as the general 
 public was concerned poetry was at its nadir ; the poet 
 was, in Dunsany's words, truly thought to be a fool ; 
 yet Mr Marsh persisted, and, as we now know, took the 
 tide on its turn ; by May, 1914, this slender volume had 
 gone into its tenth edition ; poetry had come into its 
 own again. 
 
 Cambridge published its own productions in verse, 
 
 59 
 
60 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Oxford followed suit ; quite normal citizens waited 
 impatiently for fresh issues of " New Numbers," so 
 that they might glut themselves with the poetry of 
 Wilfrid Gibson, Lascelles Abercrombie and John 
 Drinkwater ; where previously John Masefield alone 
 had been able to create a public for his long narrative 
 poems, now every new poet had a following, a coterie 
 of devoted adherents. Then the war came, and with 
 it the inevitable reaction. A writer of doggerel in 
 one of the halfpenny papers welcomed a new age of 
 action which should cause us to turn aside from this 
 foolish cult of reading and making poetry ; Mr Birrell 
 publicly announced that it would be as well to give 
 poetry the " go-by " until after the war ; publishers 
 found that money lay in war books ; only in The Times 
 did the dying Muse dare to assert herself, and there 
 rarely with distinction ; silence would have been a 
 sw r eeter swan-song, but with the passage of days the 
 public became discontented with Secrets of the Prussian 
 Court ; they longed for some seductive writer who 
 would carry them away from the war and lure them 
 back to an age when we were obsessed by less weighty 
 problems, back to a time when destruction was not the 
 world's united aim. Reprints of the great master- 
 pieces began to sell again ; the modern novelist re- 
 turned to his old successful niche ; and now there has 
 come about a reaction even against the six-shilling 
 novel. Poetry which but a little time ago was shunned 
 by every canny publisher is now being sought by them 
 eagerly ; it is not really easy to discover why. 
 
 Most of us can, of course, understand the reason for 
 Rupert Brooke's enormous success ; he stood alone, 
 above his age, as one who expressed finally all its aims 
 and aspirations. Everything about him attracted 
 something in each of us ; his brilliant intellect 
 
SOME MODERN POETS 61 
 
 captivated some, his ruthless realism others, his sense 
 of beauty ensnared the most perhaps, but his poetry 
 lives as the epitome of all our cravings and our 
 strange perplexities ; we are like blind children in the 
 dark, and we cling to a slightly stronger brother who 
 can yet, for all that, give voice to our agony : 
 
 Who want and know not what we want and cry 
 With crooked mouths for Heaven and throw it by. 
 
 There is no doubt, too, that the manner of his death 
 enticed the great public to start buying and even read- 
 ing his work. But though he is the greatest, he is 
 certainly not the only poet whose works are selling. 
 We hear that John Oxenham's Bees in Amber and AIVs 
 Well have quite outstripped his novels in circulation, 
 that Miss M'Leod's Songs to save a Soul are having an 
 immense vogue, that Miss Elinor Jenkins has her 
 thousands of readers ; all our public and secondary 
 school boys and girls are reading with great keenness 
 that splendid collection of contemporary poetry brought 
 out by Messrs Sidgwick & Jackson, at the instigation of 
 the English Association, entitled Poems of To-day. To 
 these we have now to add daily the songs of dead heroes 
 of the type of Charles Sorley, Colwyn Philipps, and 
 countless others. 
 
 All these are signs that there is a very sure renascence 
 of poetry in our midst, and it is worth while trying to 
 find out what are the leading principles of its pioneers 
 and whether it is likely to be ephemeral or lasting. 
 
 We expect to find (and are not disappointed) all the 
 best traits and most characteristic results in Mr Marsh's 
 second volume of Georgian Poetry, 1 which contains all 
 the work written between 1913 and 1915 which he was 
 
 1 Georgian Poetry, 1913-1915. The Poetry Bookshop, 191 5. 
 
62 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 allowed to reproduce and at the same time thought 
 worthy of inclusion. Taken in conjunction with his 
 volume of three years earlier, the contrast is in some 
 ways amazing. 
 
 Most of the present-day critics are loud in their pro- 
 testations against this new school ; they say that in 
 their passionate revolt against the Romantic movement 
 they are rapidly working into a groove of mechanical 
 reaction ; that there is a danger lest their convention 
 become only a worse convention than that of the 
 Victorians, who drew beauty for its own sake as if it were 
 interesting quite apart from what is made of it ; worse 
 in that the young poet now draws ugliness for its own 
 sake, though it neither points a moral nor adorns a 
 tale. 
 
 This seems to be the one handle which the critic turns 
 unceasingly : Rupert Brooke was attacked for his 
 realism in Jealousy, Menelaus and Helen, A Channel 
 Passage and innumerable other poems. Even those 
 who professed themselves among his most fervid 
 admirers exclaimed that they could not bear the intro- 
 duction of words like " dirty " and " blear-eyed " into 
 the middle of poems otherwise beautiful. What such 
 people fail to realise is that in his search for beauty the 
 true poet must occasionally find himself confronted by 
 ugliness ; he refuses to shut his eyes to it ; he knows 
 it to be monstrous, unreasonable and yet almost a 
 commonplace to less sensitive, saner minds who can 
 accustom themselves to the monstrous and gradually 
 become blind to it, in direct proportion as they become 
 blind to the beauty all around them ; fearlessly he sets 
 out to correlate it with his other vision, and the result 
 is to alienate men and women of weaker stomachs who 
 imagine that he dabbles in uncleanness because he 
 likes it. 
 
SOME MODERN POETS 68 
 
 In the first, and in some ways the greatest, poem in 
 this new volume, King Lear's Wife, Gordon Bottomley 
 has given such critics ground for complaint, which they 
 have not been slow to take. 
 
 What right, they ask, has a poet to deduce that Lear 
 in his earlier life was wanton, callous and neglectful of 
 his wife, making mistresses of her maidens ? 
 
 They declare that this is a play of great beauty, spoilt 
 by hideous touches, notably by lyrics about lice, which 
 have nothing to do with the great Shakespearean 
 tragedy. In point of fact, anyone who has for years 
 been troubled by the earlier play will recognise at once 
 how much the new one clears up the ground. It is 
 impossible to reread King Lear after finishing King 
 Lear's Wife without noticing again and again points 
 that used to puzzle the imagination, now made perfectly 
 plain. Why did the old King, in his madness, burst 
 forth into that frenzied speech about adultery ? There 
 was method in his madness ; there always is in Shake- 
 speare's madness. " This is not altogether fool, my 
 Lord." His mind casts back to some episode in his 
 earlier days, to Gormflaith : 
 
 Open your window when the moon is dead. 
 
 And I will come again. 
 
 The men say everywhere that you are faithless, 
 
 The women say your face is a false face 
 
 And your eyes shifty eyes. Ah, but I love you, Gormflaith. 
 
 The following passage sheds an entirely new light on the 
 relationship existing between Cordelia and her much 
 older sisters : — 
 
 Because a woman gives herself for ever, 
 Cordeil the useless had to be conceived 
 To keep her father from another woman. 
 
64 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Does it not help us in our differentiation between 
 Goneril and Regan that Goneril is here shown firm, 
 wary, swift and secret, the virgin huntress, harsh in 
 her purity, one lustful to kill but one who would kill 
 cleanly, full of contempt for her sister : 
 
 Does Regan worship anywhere at dawn ? 
 The sweaty, half-clad cook-maids render lard 
 Out in the scullery, after pig-killing, 
 And Regan sidles among their greasy skirts, 
 Smeary and hot as they, for craps to suck. . . . 
 
 She kills her father's mistress and so obtains an ascend- 
 ancy over him which she never after loses. " I thought 
 she had been broken long ago," says Lear hi his last 
 speech. " She must be wedded and broken ; I cannot 
 do it." What a blaze of sudden light this throws on 
 Goneril as we have known her only in her later days. 
 We gained some insight into Mr Gordon Bottomley's 
 poetic vision in the earlier volume, but in King Leafs 
 Wife he may, without hyperbole, be said to have arrived. 
 Mr Marsh is not wrong when he speaks of the honour 
 which the author has done to the book by allowing his 
 play to be published for the first time there. All 
 readers at once feel impatient on coming to the end 
 that they cannot at once rush out and see it acted. 
 
 The quiet sadness of the neglected dying queen, the 
 savagery of Lear, the freshness of the cold Goneril, the 
 tragedy of Cordeil, the lullaby with which Hygd is 
 hushed to sleep : 
 
 The owlets in roof holes Can sing for themselves ; 
 The smallest brown squirrel Both scampers and delves; 
 But a baby does nothing — She never knows how — 
 She must hark to her mother Who sings to her now ; 
 
 the love-making of Gormflaith : 
 
SOME MODERN POETS 65 
 
 It is a lonely thing to love a king, 
 
 Life holds no more than this for me : this is my hour ; 
 
 her singing in the garden, her premonition of 
 approaching disaster all go to prove that Mr 
 Bottomley has here touched high-water mark. 
 
 No one would deny that there are ugly things here 
 and there, just as there are ugly things in life, but 
 certainly beauty predominates. GoneriPs worship on 
 the hills at dawn, raising up her " shining hand in cold 
 stern adoration Even as the first great gleam went up 
 the sky," her lament over the body of her mother : 
 
 This is not death : death could not be like this. . . . 
 
 I did not know death could come all at once. 
 
 Come back : come back ; the things I have not done 
 
 Beat in upon my brain from every side . . . 
 
 If I could have you now I could act well . . . 
 
 My inward life, deeds that you have not known, 
 
 I burn to tell you in a sudden dread 
 
 That now your ghost discovers them in me : 
 
 all these are beautiful, beautiful not with an exotic 
 richness that hides its meaning under a magic rhythm, 
 but beautiful with the inevitable simplicity of the 
 Anglo-Saxon, monosyllabic yet haunting. It is their 
 very directness, their terse, uncompromising, actual, 
 everyday speech that first attracts us in all these new 
 writers. Mr Bottomley does not strive to heighten his 
 effect by the introduction of the quaint or the remote ; 
 he is almost Blake-like in his choice of phrases. The 
 result is that he has written a play which will remain in 
 the memory (in spite of the weak machinery of the 
 laying-out women which we could well have spared) as 
 long as any we have ever read. It is a fine achieve- 
 ment, not the least fine part of its great attraction lying 
 
66 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 in that direct, straightforward simplicity which is the 
 keynote to the whole volume. 
 
 Rupert Brooke occupies the second place of honour, 
 and we are here given valuable glimpses of his later 
 development. 
 
 In Tiare Tahiti we find him rebelling once more 
 against the Paradise of the Wise : he is so much in love 
 with material beauty, " Miri's laugh, Teipo's feet, and 
 the hands of Matua, Mamua, your lovelier head "... 
 that he cannot reconcile himself to the idea that in 
 another life there might be richness of life without 
 matter and the individuality of matter : 
 
 How shall we wind these wreaths of ours, 
 Where there are neither heads nor flowers ? 
 
 " There's little comfort in the wise," he concludes. To 
 accentuate this point further there is also included The 
 Great Lover, in which the poet shows us his overpower- 
 ing passion for the beauty of the ordinary things of life : 
 
 White plates and cups, clean-gleaming, 
 Ringed with blue lines . . . new-peeled sticks 
 And shining pools on grass. 
 
 His great regret is that they cannot accompany him into 
 the life hereafter. His scintillating wit is shown by the 
 inclusion of Heaven, in which the poet frames a religion 
 and a view of the Beyond for fish ; a poem compact of 
 bitter, caustic irony relieved by an exquisite humour. 
 One war sonnet and two more on the subject of the after- 
 life complete the extracts from one of the greatest poets 
 of our time ; they are certainly representative and ought 
 to drive anyone who has not yet read all Brooke's work 
 (if any such exist) to remedy this deficiency. He who 
 has given expression to all the insatiable yearnings of 
 
SOME MODERN POETS 67 
 
 his age deserves not only its gratitude but its undying 
 love. 
 
 Mr William H. Davies is one of those contributors 
 whose work seems to me to have deteriorated with the 
 passing years « he is still the singer of the hedgerows : 
 
 And I'll be dreaming of green lanes, 
 Where little things with beating hearts 
 Hold shining eyes between the leaves, 
 Till men with horses pass, and carts. 
 
 He is just as charming and as naively simple as he used 
 to be, but there seems to be nothing behind it all ; it is 
 beautiful but flimsy ; it seems almost at times as if he 
 had exhausted his theme ; only in 
 
 Sweet Stay-at-Home, sweet Well-content, 
 Sweet Stay-at-Home, sweet Love-one-place 
 
 does the richness of the lilt satisfy us, and we are con- 
 tent for the moment to be without that philosophy 
 which we now all demand from those who would inspire 
 us. 
 
 Mr Walter de la Mare is still master of that fairy 
 language that captivated us so surely in the previous 
 volume. None of us has forgotten the charm of 
 
 " Is there anybody there? " said the Traveller, 
 Knocking on the moonlit door. 
 
 It is not likely that we shall soon forget The Mocking 
 Fairy of the new volume : 
 
 " Won't you look out of your window, Mrs Gill ? " 
 
 Quoth the Fairy, nidding, nodding, in the garden ; 
 
68 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 nor the delicate, fantastic joy in Off the Ground : 
 
 Three jolly Farmers 
 
 Once bet a pound 
 Each dance the others would 
 
 Off the ground. 
 One — Two — Three ! 
 
 And away they go, 
 Not too fast, 
 
 And not too slow ; 
 
 of their progress through 
 
 Withy — Wellover — 
 Wassop — Wo . . . 
 
 until at last they reach the great green sea, whereupon 
 Farmer Tovey joins the mermaids and wins the bet. 
 Mr de la Mare seems to make poetry for the pure delight 
 of rhyming, for the sheer ecstasy of hearing words 
 bubble like a mountain burn : the irresponsibility of 
 childhood, infants' happy laughter — these are the things 
 that his poetry brings back to us ; we forget the scheme 
 and order of life, its myriad perplexities ; we are content 
 simply to sit spellbound and listen ; here, at least, is 
 happiness of a sort. 
 
 John Drink water is a poet of very brilliant calibre. 
 He has certainly never before risen to the height that he 
 reaches in The Carver in Stone of this volume ; here one 
 may read exactly what is the impelling force that guides 
 the young genius of to-day ; this Carver with eyes 
 
 Grey, like the drift of twitch-fires blown in June, 
 That, without fearing, searched if any wrong 
 Might threaten from your heart 
 
 is fct Every-poet " of the Georgian age ; he is talking of 
 himself : 
 
SOME MODERN POETS 69 
 
 Slowly out of the dark confusion, spread 
 
 By life's innumerable venturings 
 
 Over his brain, he would triumph into the light 
 
 Of one clear mood, unblemished of the blind 
 
 Legions of errant thought that cried about 
 
 His rapt seclusion. . . . 
 
 Here we find ourselves again in the atmosphere of 
 Rupert Brooke ; the sense of adventure, the sense of 
 an eternal yearning after self-expression, the brave 
 attempt to leave something behind us which will last 
 long enough to show those who shall come after that 
 in spite of multitudinous futilities there is much fine 
 stuff intermingled with the dross of the world if we 
 could only see it and translate it into real metal ; but 
 the Carver cannot bear the travesties which pass for 
 sound workmanship with the crowd : 
 
 Figures of habit driven on the stone 
 By chisels governed by no heat of the brain, 
 But drudges of hand that moved by easy rule. 
 Proudly recorded mood was none, no thought 
 Plucked from the dark battalions of the mind 
 And throned in everlasting sight. 
 
 Worst of all are the critics, wise 
 
 With words, weary of custom and eyes askew 
 That watched their neighbour's face for any news 
 Of the best way of judgment, till, each sure 
 None would determine with authority, 
 All spoke in prudent praise. 
 
 Sickened by the inanity of the judges, when he is 
 bidden to reshape his chosen god along the walls of the 
 temple together with all his fellow-craftsmen, he seizes 
 on the idea of carving a queer, puff-bellied toad, with 
 eyes that always stared sidelong at heaven and saw no 
 
70 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 heaven there. This toad seemed to him to stand for an 
 emblem of his kings and priests ; he loathed the false 
 work of his colleagues that passed for true and so deter- 
 mined that his truth should not be doomed to inarch 
 among this falsehood to the ages. So he chose a 
 secluded spot and there fashioned his toad, and round 
 it his people's gods, tigers, bats and owls . . . " all 
 signs of sightless thought adventuring the host that is 
 mere spirit " ; his leopard became " fear in flight before 
 accusing faith," his bull bore " the burden of the patient 
 of the earth." 
 
 And other than the gods he made . . . the stalks 
 
 Of bluebells heavy with the news of spring, . . . 
 
 All were deftly ordered, duly set . . . 
 
 Till on the wall, out of the sullen stone, 
 
 A glory blazed, his vision manifest, 
 
 His wonder captive. And he was content. 
 
 In this poem we are made to feel all the wild, un- 
 satisfied longings of the would-be creator, the ecstatic 
 joy of him who builds for eternity, the paean of triumph 
 of the man who has risen superior to all the little 
 empty world of critics and out of the crucible of 
 his mind has formed and perfected solid, substantial, 
 lasting beauty. It stands as the victorious anthem 
 of the poet of our era whose hand has found at 
 last something worthy to do and is doing it with all 
 his power, knowing full well that he is building for 
 eternity and in the serenity of his might content with 
 that. 
 
 No more shall we hear the cry of the restless spirit 
 of Brooke, no more will the sweet, exotic flavour 
 of Flecker's Eastern poems lull our senses in these 
 volumes ; of these two we take our farewell here, and 
 deep indeed is our regret. Widely differing as these 
 
SOME MODERN POETS 71 
 
 poets were, they both attracted much the same lovers. 
 Who could resist the metre of Yasmin ? 
 
 But when the silver dove descends I find the little flower of 
 
 friends 
 Whose very name that sweetly ends I say when I have said, 
 
 Yasmin. 
 
 Though perhaps it sounds a grotesque simile, the triple 
 rhyme in this metre strikes exactly the same chord as 
 is struck by the noise of a railway engine when it is 
 starting out of a station ; it is attractive, though some- 
 how it ought to be ugly. We hear the throb of the 
 engine again in The Gates of Damascus : 
 
 The dragon-green, the luminous, the dark, the serpent- 
 haunted sea, 
 
 The snow-besprinkled wine of earth, the white and blue 
 flower foaming sea. 
 
 Unlike most of his school, Flecker relies for effect on 
 strange words and Oriental names ; there is more of 
 Keats in his beauty than in most of his younger con- 
 temporaries. As a master of metre and lyrical expres- 
 sion he stood high among his companions, as can be 
 seen in The Dying Patriot : 
 
 Noon strikes on England, noon on Oxford town, 
 
 — Beauty she was statue cold — there's blood upon her gown. 
 
 Noon of my dreams, O noon ! 
 Proud and goodly kings had built her, long ago, 
 With her towers and tombs and statues all arow, 
 With her fair and floral air and the love that lingers there, 
 
 And the streets where the great men go ! 
 
 No more beautiful poem has been written since the war 
 began. And now he can sing to us no more. One more 
 apostle of beauty is lost to us just when we needed 
 him most. 
 
72 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 No one who had read The Hare of Wilfrid Gibson in 
 1912 doubted but that he had a rare gift of dramatic, 
 musical self-expression, but in Hoops he has outgrown 
 any puerilities of which he might then have been justi- 
 fiably accused. Here again we have the passionate 
 love of beauty, this time beauty of form, as desired by 
 a mis-stitched, gnarled, crooked stableman and odd-job 
 man attached to a travelling circus : 
 
 I've always worshipped the body, all my life — 
 
 The body, quick with the perfect health which is beauty, 
 
 Lively, lissom, alert . . . 
 
 The living God made manifest in man. 
 
 Wilfrid Gibson seems to owe something of his easy, 
 colloquial style in verse to Masefield's longer narrative 
 poems ; he seems — alone in this book — to be carrying 
 on that tradition which threatened to become an ob- 
 session amongst our poetasters before the war. But 
 Wilfrid Gibson has something to say ; he does " see 
 beauty in all its forms and manifestations' '; he certainly 
 does, more almost than all the others, " feel ugliness like 
 a pain " ; though he does not shut his eyes to it, as all 
 those who have read his short volume of war poems 
 know. 
 
 Ralph Hodgson is a new-comer, and all true lovers of 
 poetry will welcome him with open arms, for he has 
 come to stay. Time, you old Gypsy Man, we regret to 
 see, is not included in this volume ; but that, after all, 
 is obtainable in Poems of To-day. We certainly could 
 not spare either of the two of his poems which are in- 
 cluded. Many people prefer The Bull to anything in 
 the book. It is a wonderful piece of realism ; the 
 beauty and horror of the jungle permeate every line ; 
 the whole poem is throbbing with life ; it reads almost, 
 as someone has said, as if it were written by one bull 
 about another : we seem actuallv to see him 
 
SOME MODERN POETS 73 
 
 Standing with his head hung down 
 In a stupor, dreaming things : 
 Green savannas, jungles brown, 
 Battlefields and bellowings, 
 Bulls undone and lions dead 
 And vultures flapping overhead. 
 Dreaming things : of days he spent 
 With his mother gaunt and lean 
 In the valley warm and green, 
 Full of baby wonderment 
 Blinking out of silly eyes 
 At a hundred mysteries. 
 
 . . . and now he is deserted, dying . . . and has to turn 
 
 From his visionary herds 
 And his splendid yesterday, 
 Turns to meet the loathly birds 
 Flocking round him from the skies, 
 Waiting for the flesh that dies. 
 
 Ralph Hodgson more than fulfils Lord Dunsany's 
 definition of a poet, for he does more than know man- 
 kind as others know single men ; he seems to know the 
 world of beasts better than most of us know single men. 
 But there are sure to be some to whom this poem will 
 come as a tour de force ; they will acknowledge its 
 beauty of finish, the perfect workmanship that went to 
 the making of it, but they will deny that such a subject 
 is the end and aim of poetry. Let such readers turn to 
 The Song of Honour ; there will they find a universal 
 hymn of thankfulness from all the world that should be 
 sung on the hill-tops by every lover of Nature ; it is the 
 hosanna of all created things : 
 
 The song of each and all who gaze 
 On Beauty in her naked blaze, 
 
 Or see her dimly in a haze. 
 The song of all not wholly dark, 
 Not wholly sunk in stupor stark 
 
 Too deep for groping Heaven. 
 
74 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 All the songs that ever man sang are grouped together 
 here and poured out in one glorious medley, the song of 
 every singing bird, of poets, painters, wise men, beggars, 
 of men who face a hopeless hill with sparkling and 
 delight, of sailors, fighters, lovers, of men whose love 
 of motherland is like a dog's for one dear hand, sole, 
 selfless, boundless, blind : 
 
 The song of men all sorts and kinds, 
 As many tempers, moods and minds 
 As leaves are on a tree. 
 
 It places Mr Hodgson among those rare singers who up- 
 lift us and put new courage in our hearts by reason of 
 their sublime joy fulness ; we forget the real genius of 
 his lyricism in the sheer unreasoning abandon of his 
 theme. He makes us, too, want to cry out with 
 thankfulness for being alive. 
 
 Mr D. H. Lawrence is a poet of rigidity ; some years 
 ago he wrote some beautiful verses on A Schoolmaster ; 
 since then he has been cursed with an obsession of sex 
 which has threatened to destroy his equipoise ; he still 
 achieves beauty at intervals, but there is an under- 
 current of morbidity which disturbs the whole true 
 current of his art. You see it most plainly here in 
 Cruelty and Love ; somehow he always leaves us with 
 a sense that Lust is at the back of both his Cruelty and 
 his Love ; it is too fleshly altogether : " He caresses my 
 mouth with his fingers, smelling grim Of the rabbit's 
 fur." The girl talks of her lover kt nosing like a stoat 
 Who sniffs with joy before he drinks the blood." It 
 isn't that it is not nice ; it is much worse than that ; 
 it is not artistically true. That such things happen in 
 isolated cases does not justify a man portraying it as if 
 it were a universal tendency among lovers ; it is the 
 more distressing because in Mr Lawrence we have a 
 
SOME MODERN POETS 75 
 
 great novelist and a real poet losing himself in the 
 meshes of a foolish obsession. 
 
 Mr Francis Ledwidge is the other new-comer; he 
 sings sweetly, cleanly and surely on A Rainy Day in 
 April. He is the singer of the open fields and may (we 
 hope he will) carry on the tradition of the Mr Davies we 
 used to know. 
 
 The only selection from Mr Masefield is not really 
 typical of the last two years' work done by him, but it 
 was the only one at the disposal of the editor. Prob- 
 ably all of us would have preferred August 191 4 to The 
 Wanderer. Still, in some sense, the poem only goes 
 to prove more conclusively than ever how radically 
 wrong are those critics who imagine that these realist 
 poets of ours are not just as desperately serious in 
 their search for beauty as the most romantic 
 amongst us. 
 
 The theme of the poem is the same as that which 
 runs through nearly all Mr Masefield's poetry — the 
 power of beauty, the blindness of fate : 
 
 Blind pieces in a mighty game we swing : 
 Life's battle is a conquest for the strong ; 
 The meaning shows in the defeated thing. 
 
 There is the same true workmanship and perfect 
 execution that characterises most of his work, but in 
 some ways he seems outside the scope of this book ; 
 probably it is because we were reading his Poems and 
 Ballads twelve years ago, and all these other men are 
 more or less new to us. One of the few precious cameos 
 of a trifling nature which this book contains is called 
 Milk for the Cat, by Harold Monro ; it is rather open 
 to question whether such a poem is quite worthy of 
 inclusion ; it is certainly a miracle of description, but 
 it is, after all, a fantastic trifle, and as such seems to 
 
76 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 quite a number of people to be out of place. On the 
 other hand, the theme of Children of Love (the infant 
 Christ and the child Cupid) is most delicately handled, 
 and is one of the many really beautifully conceived 
 ideas in the volume. 
 
 The criticism which we applied to Mr W. H. Davies 
 applies almost equally to Mr James Stephens ; we all 
 went into rhapsodies over The Crock of Gold and over 
 parts of Here are Ladies, but his art was too precious to 
 be roughly handled ; somehow he seems to have lost 
 for the moment his faery touch, his glorious sense of 
 humour ; much the same has happened to his verse. 
 There was infinitely more real poetry in his contribu- 
 tion to the 1912 volume than there can be said to be in 
 the present one ; he has melody and facility ; he is in 
 touch with Nature himself, but he is unable to make us 
 realise quite how Nature affects him ; his simplicity 
 makes the poverty underlying his words more than ever 
 evident ; there is not enough reality to make us love 
 him, probably because we in our overburdened lives 
 have somehow got past that childish ingenuousness 
 and cannot tolerate it any longer ; so many of 
 us have had to grow up in the last two or three 
 years. 
 
 The volume ends, as it begins, with a play : Mr 
 Lascelles Abercrombie's The End of the World. Let it 
 be granted at once that there will be endless discussions 
 as to which is the greater of the two, Mr Bottomley's or 
 Mr Abercrombie's ; for the moment it is sufficient to 
 say that they are both good enough to make us glad 
 to live in an age both great and courageous enough to 
 produce them. 
 
 The plot of The End of the World is quite simple. 
 The scene is an ale-house kitchen ; a stranger comes in 
 full of news to the assembled drinkers, news which they 
 
SOME MODERN POETS 77 
 
 attempt to drag from him by various means. He tries 
 to convey to them his state of mind : 
 
 I wonder, did you ever hate to feel 
 The earth so splendid and so fine ? 
 
 They come to the conclusion that he is mad : 
 
 Yes, I was mad and crying mad, to see 
 The earth so fine, fine all for nothing ; 
 
 he then opens the door and shows them a comet in the 
 sky ; he says that that means the end of the world ; 
 they are about to be burnt up : 
 
 Time shall brush the fields as visibly 
 
 As a rough hand brushes against the nap 
 
 Of gleaming cloth — killing the season's colour . . . 
 
 And sailors panting on their warping decks 
 
 Will watch the sea steam like broth about them. 
 
 The publican wishes he had his old wife with him : 
 
 This would have suited her. 
 " I do like things to happen ! " she would say, 
 Never shindy enough for her ; and now 
 She's gone and can't be seeing that. 
 
 Each man takes the news differently and calls down the 
 derision of the dowser on their original scepticism : 
 
 Ay, you begin to feel it now, I think ; 
 
 But Life, 
 Life with her skill of a million years' perfection, 
 Of sunlight, and of clouds about the moon, 
 Spring lighting her daffodils . . . 
 And mountains sitting in their purple clothes . . . 
 O life I am thinking of, life the wonder, 
 All blotcht out by a brutal thrust of fire 
 Like a midge that a clumsy thumb squashes and smears. 
 
 Huff the farmer seizes the occasion to gloat over the 
 faithlessness of his wife : now at least he will see 
 
78 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 vengeance. The man with whom his wife ran away 
 comes in and Huff attempts to make him cower, but 
 to no purpose, and the curtain rings down on Act I., 
 leaving the dowser alone bemoaning the intolerable 
 waste of beauty that all this scorching of the world will 
 bring about. 
 
 On the rise of the curtain for the second and last Act 
 we see Sollers, the wainwright, wrecking the ale-house 
 room in a frenzy of apj^rehension ; the publican comes 
 in weeping, " I've seen the moon ; it has nigh broke 
 my heart ... I never before so noted her." Beauty 
 at last is beginning to mean something to him now that 
 it is all about to be smashed up and ruined. Merrick, 
 the smith, begins to achieve a philosophy ; he begins to 
 find a meaning in the life which is just slipping past him : 
 
 You know, this is much more than being happy. 
 'Tis hunger of some power in you, that lives 
 On your heart's welcome for all sorts of luck, 
 But always looks beyond you for its meaning. 
 The world was always looking to use its life 
 In some great handsome way at last. And now — 
 We are just fooled. . . . I've had my turn. 
 The world may be for the sake of naught at last, 
 But it has been for my sake : I've had that. 
 
 Huff comes in, moody, unable to find comfort in the 
 vengeance he thought to obtain from the panic-stricken 
 evil-doers ; his good, straight life has been like that of a 
 crawling caterpillar ... he thinks of a day long past 
 in Droitwich where he saw women half-naked cooking 
 brine ... he could have been daring once but missed 
 his chance. Suddenly Shale, his wife's lover, comes in 
 and implores Huff to take his wife back ; Warp, the 
 molecatcher, enters during the scene that follows and 
 tells them that there is nothing to fear ; the comet 
 is going away from them ; Huff's ricks are alight, 
 certainly, but there is to be no end of the world — yet. 
 
SOME MODERN POETS 79 
 
 Mrs Huff turns both from her lover and her husband : 
 
 They thinking J'ld be near one or the other 
 After this night. 
 
 We are left with Vine moaning : 
 
 But is it certain there'll be nothing smasht ? 
 Not even a house knockt roaring down in crumbles ? 
 — And I did think, I'ld open my wife's mouth 
 With envy of the dreadful things I'd seen! 
 
 There is no doubt about the fascination of the play ; it 
 holds the reader's attention throughout ; there is not 
 a false note from beginning to end. It contains all the 
 philosophy of the younger school ; the unending search 
 after beauty, the refusal to shut the eyes to ugliness 
 and dirt, the endeavour to find a meaning in life, the 
 determination to live life to the full and to enjoy. At 
 all costs they strive to avoid sentimentality ; these 
 country folk in The End of the World really live ; they 
 may be coarse ; they certainly have their tragedies, 
 but they are human. We seem to know them through 
 and through ; we certainly sympathise with their trials 
 and resent their wrongs as bitterly as we do our own. 
 
 This noble volume is intensely typical of the age ; 
 everything is tentative, experimental ; we are no longer 
 satisfied with the old gods, the old ideals ; we set out 
 to prove all things and get most horribly hurt in doing 
 it ; but life becomes much more of an adventure ; we 
 are at least brave enough to cut ourselves adrift from 
 the old, safe, enclosed harbourage ; we make many 
 and gross mistakes, but we do achieve something ; we 
 begin to learn for ourselves what life really means and 
 are not content to let our elders tell us what they think 
 it ought to mean. 
 
 It means beauty to start with, and that is an almost 
 
80 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 new thought ; at any rate beauty has to be found by 
 each individual soul at the cost of much sorrow of 
 heart and much unfortunate experience with the ugly ; 
 it means love, which is not so easily to be found as our 
 forefathers seem to have thought ; we are not to be put 
 off with shams ... it means courage, and courage is 
 not to be cultivated in safety, in an arm-chair ; we have 
 to cut adrift, away from convention and laws made for 
 a milk-livered generation. Georgian Poetry 1913-1914 
 is a brave book ; it is the standard of revolt of the 
 younger, braver souls among us, and we who are apt at 
 times to acquiesce because it is easier owe much to a 
 book which strengthens and fortifies our resolution just 
 when we show signs of wavering. Our poets are our 
 real national leaders ; they alone can express all those 
 desires which we feel but are unable to articulate ; if 
 our poets are false to us, then indeed are we decadent. 
 From 1913 to 1915 at any rate we may be thankful 
 that they have led us fearlessly, put fresh vitality and 
 renewed energy into our hopes and helped us once 
 more to try to wrest life's secret from her. 
 
IV 
 SOME .MORE MODERN POETS 
 
 IT is commonly said that the only true critics of 
 poetry are the masters in the same craft, and if 
 the case of Swinburne may be taken as typical, 
 I agree. We think of Francis Thompson's superb 
 tribute to Shelley and Masefield's contribution to our 
 completer understanding of Shakespeare, and shudder 
 at the thought of a mere prose-writer daring to pene- 
 trate the sanctuary and lay his rude hands on the 
 beauty he can never hope to explain. Suddenly we 
 think of Hazlitt and take comfort. To what critic do 
 we turn so often, and why ? 
 
 Because he acts as half-way house in the ascent of 
 Parnassus ; he is the intermediary between the gods 
 and ourselves, because he does what the poets them- 
 selves never find time to do, and that is to translate for 
 us exactly what they are at as he understands it. The 
 poets are so busy doing things that they never stop 
 to explain and we are left labouring far in the rear, 
 panting, dispirited . . . and sometimes even sym- 
 pathise with our intellectually moribund, materially 
 minded acquaintances or relatives who start at the 
 word " poetry " as if they had been shot, and exclaim : 
 " What's the use of it anyway ? What useful purpose 
 does it serve ? " as if they expected it to be a dynamo 
 in the physical as well as the spiritual world. 
 
 Those of us who have no poetry in our composition 
 
 and yet delight in it as the cleanser and purifier of life, 
 
 who regard poets as the unacknowledged legislators of 
 
 the world, in some way are perhaps best fitted to 
 
 f 81 
 
82 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 bring a realisation of it home to the businesses and 
 bosoms of men ; we pay less heed to the technique (in 
 so doing, of course, we miss some of the beauties) and 
 more to the matter. For it seems to me of the first 
 importance that a poet should have something to say. 
 I don't exactly mean a message to bear, but a song 
 that will ease the heart, cause aesthetic delight, help us 
 to face life with a cheerier spirit, fuller of determination 
 not only to see it through, but to make the most of it. 
 
 Poetry makes the deaf to hear, the blind to see, the 
 maimed and halt to walk ... if it doesn't do this, it 
 isn't poetry. Hence it follows that sincerity and 
 nobility of purpose are as essential to our poet as 
 sweetness and music ; in fact, these follow from it, for 
 there is no sweetness where there is no light and no 
 music where there is no motive. Facile versifiers 
 abound ; I am one of them ; you pick up their stuff in 
 all the daily and weekly papers ; they are not to be 
 despised any more than an undergraduate is to be 
 despised for dishing up second-hand opinions to his 
 tutor and calling it an essay ; it is popularly known as 
 an education. It may be ; you and I are not professors, 
 we are not paid to read or give academic exercises — we 
 needn't waste our time over what appears in ephemeral 
 journals. 
 
 What is much more extraordinary is that good poets 
 abound. There has never been an age so rich in poets 
 in history as our own, not even the wonderful days 
 exactly a hundred years ago. 
 
 We live in a time of amazing literary geniuses of 
 every sort ; the whole of England suddenly seems to 
 have become articulate, and in order to express itself 
 it has chosen the vehicle of poetry for the most part. 
 
 In times of intense emotional crises, face to face with 
 the eternal realities of birth and love and death, man 
 
SOME MORE MODERN POETS 83 
 
 will sing ; he cannot help it. Consequently we seem 
 to be at present a nation of soldier-poets and poet- 
 soldiers. All I can do is to make a haphazard selection 
 and try to show how the mosaic fits, how far they 
 cohere and where they cut themselves adrift from the 
 tendencies of their time. 
 
 It is a mistake to suppose that we owe this sudden 
 renaissance in poetry solely to the war, for much of the 
 work now appearing was written before or regardless of it. 
 
 Flecker, for instance, was doomed before ever its 
 shadow came. In some degree he is the most modern 
 of them all, for he returned to that tradition which 
 the Georgians set themselves against. He reacted 
 consciously against that reaction from the tradition of 
 material beauty, which is so marked a feature of all the 
 twentieth-century poets. He rebelled against the idea 
 that there should be any message in poetry, and set out, 
 sharpening his tools at the best forge, that of continu- 
 ous energy, with the sole idea of creating beauty. " It 
 is not," he says, "the poet's business to save man's soul, 
 but to make it worth saving." Consequently in all his 
 mature work we get a riot of colour and sensuous beauty, 
 names and men and relics made romantic and bizarre. 
 
 When he was in England he longed for the East, but 
 when he attained his wish he wished to be in England 
 once again. Like all of us, he was happiest in the 
 place where he was not. 
 
 Unlike most poets he did not try to transform the 
 common into the miraculous, but rather pressed on at 
 once into the virgin region of fantasy, and so we get the 
 exquisite Golden Journey to Samarkand, on which, in 
 the mind of the general reader, Flecker's fame will rest. 
 Has ever poet hit upon a more haunting melody than 
 that of Yasmin and The Gates of Damascus ? 
 
 But it must not be imagined that because he dwelt 
 
84 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 so persistently on beauty that he has left us no idea 
 of his own theory of the riddle of the universe. " We 
 poets crave no heaven but what is ours," he says, 
 and his heaven is this familiar world refashioned 
 without man's and Nature's pain . . . 
 
 Grant me earth's treats in Paradise to find 
 
 Nor listen to that island-bound St John, 
 
 Who'd have no Sea in Heaven, no Sea to sail upon ! 
 
 thereby linking himself up with both Kipling and 
 Brooke. 
 
 So insistent is his love for the sea and the beauty of 
 ships that I doubt whether I could find any poem more 
 typical of Flecker's work than The Old Ships. We 
 have in it that delicious honey of Hymettus, admixture 
 of colour and sensuous beauty that have made his name 
 famous to-day and will cause a place to be reserved for 
 him eternally in the Temple of Parnassus. 
 
 THE OLD SHIPS 
 I have seen old ships sail like swans asleep 
 Beyond the village which men still call Tyre, 
 With leaden age o'ercargoed, dipping deep 
 For Famagusta and the hidden sun 
 That rings black Cyprus with a lake of fire ; 
 And all those ships were certainly so old — 
 Who knows how oft with squat and noisy gun, 
 Questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges, 
 The pirate Genoese 
 Hell-raked them till they rolled 
 Blood, water, fruit and corpses up the hold. 
 But now through friendly seas they softly run, 
 Painted the mid-sea blue or shore-sea green, 
 Still patterned with the vines and grapes in gold. 
 But I have seen 
 
 Pointing her shapely shadows from the lawn 
 And image tumbled on a rose-swept bay 
 A drowsy ship of some yet older day ; 
 And, wonder's breath indrawn, 
 
SOME MORE MODERN POETS 85 
 
 Thought I — who knows — who knows — but in that same 
 
 (Fished up beyond Aeaea, patched up new 
 
 — Stern painted brighter blue — ) 
 
 That talkative, bald-headed seaman came 
 
 (Twelve patient comrades sweating at the oar) 
 
 From Troy's doom-crimson shore, 
 
 And with great lies about his wooden horse 
 
 Set the crew laughing, and forgot his course. 
 
 It was so old a ship — who knows, who knows ? 
 
 — And yet so beautiful, I watched in vain 
 
 To see the mast burst open with a rose, 
 
 And the whole deck put on its leaves again. 
 
 This and Brimana seem to me to mark the high- 
 water mark of Flecker' s genius. 
 
 I now want, for a little, to leave the well-known men 
 and talk almost at random about one or two of the 
 myriad men who are writing poetry in partial obscurity, 
 to see how far they carry on the tradition of their 
 masters. There was recently published a slim volume 
 called Fragments, by a subaltern in the Welsh Guards, 
 Evan Morgan, out of which I cull one sonnet. 
 
 LABURNUM 
 
 Lo ! from thy verdant arms drooping and pensile, 
 
 Molten gold falls in summer-scented cones ; 
 
 Clinging with quivering tongue, thirsty, prehensile, 
 
 Into thy lips thy velvet lover drones. 
 
 Subtle thy raiment, shading thy umber arms, 
 
 Falls like to sun-bars, or maiden's aureole tresses ; 
 
 Piercing thy emerald cloak, naked thy charms, 
 
 Lie for passion'd June's untuned caresses. 
 
 One early rose-kissed cloud of morning's love 
 
 Saw through thy tapestries a naked nymph 
 
 Amidst thy sinuous arms more sinuous move 
 
 And slip into the lily-painted lymph. 
 
 Her God-like lover with a silvery net 
 
 Drew back his prize all glistening and all wet. 
 
 There is much in this sonnet which will cause grave 
 searchings of heart among the older school of £>oets, but 
 
86 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 it has freshness, it is original if slightly bizarre in tone 
 and rather too intellectual. The influence of Rupert 
 Brooke is immediately manifest. He is an obvious 
 disciple both of Flecker and Brooke, though he neces- 
 sarily lags far behind. Like so many of these young 
 poets, he is careless about rhyme schemes ; he rhymes 
 " ore " with "floor," ; < amber " with " unbar " and even 
 "castle" with <• battle." His publisher even allows 
 such ridiculous solecisms as 
 
 "The clouds are shook out in their play." 
 
 " Thou shouldst lift up your hands, dear, and nestle me over 
 your heart." 
 
 But these are merely the foibles of youth, which is ever 
 indolent and averse from taking those pains which are 
 so essential to every artist. 
 
 We forgive all the touches of ccenobitic loons and 
 ocelliferous leaves (even Cowper never descended so low 
 as that !) when we come across the perfect simplicity 
 of Song in Valediction and the sensuous loveliness of 
 Laburnum. He plays with realism in an odious sonnet 
 to a drift of seaweed, and dwells too frequently on 
 anatomical perfection ; it is all very young, but certainly 
 worth doing ... as he says, and he is his own best 
 critic, "Here is Love, Joy, Sorrow, Reflection, a 
 cosmopolitan piece, ill-shapen, sincere." The ill-shape 
 may be grown out of; sincerity is too rare and too 
 valuable to be sneered at. We welcome him among 
 the Georgians. It is this cosmopolitan trait that is so 
 healthy a sign of our times. My next example is 
 Egbert T. Sandford, at the opposite end of the social 
 scale. 
 
 His influences are William Blake and Francis Thomp- 
 son, as will be seen at once in Great in their Littleness. 
 His one object is to take the common things of life and 
 
SOME MORE MODERN POETS 87 
 
 weave them into song. He is the apostle of light and 
 happiness. " Life looms with laughter : God fills our 
 world with gladness to the brim," he sings again and 
 again, trilling like a lark for the pleasure that is in him. 
 After treading the fire-strewn floors of hell he emerges 
 strengthened, joyful and endowed with the gift of pure 
 lyrical song, and, like all true poets, has something to 
 say which strikes an entirely new chord. I seem to 
 remember a text in the Bible which runs somehow 
 like this : " Blessed are the barren ; for they shall bear 
 children" — the kind of paradoxical phrase I could not 
 understand. To Mr Sandford as to Blake such things 
 are pellucidly clear, and in The Voice he translates so 
 that we purblind people can realise the glory and the 
 truth of that prophecy. His is the gospel of song, and 
 strife and love and life. 
 
 GREAT IN THEIR LITTLENESS 
 
 The faintest star in darkest night 
 Adds light unto the realms of light. 
 
 The smallest wave that breasts the sea 
 Helps with the ocean's melody. 
 
 The frailest flower that decks earth's sod 
 Lends lustre to the feet of God. 
 
 THE VOICE 
 
 Deep from a day, as sunless as 'twas lone, 
 
 There came a voice, 
 
 Saying to her : " Rejoice ! 
 
 Not every child is formed of flesh and bone. 
 
 " So, when his eyes are bruised and stained with tears, 
 Do thou bring forth sweet Laughter. When wild fears 
 Assail his soul, then let thy little one 
 Be Joy ; and bid thy children run— 
 
88 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Run straight to him. — Ah ! Dost thou know — 
 
 Thine offspring shall wax strong 
 
 And thou, thyself, shalt go 
 
 From strength to strength, with them. E'en though 
 
 Thou couldst not be the mother of his son, 
 
 Thou still mayst be the Mother of his Song." 
 
 " Live ! Live ! Live ! " he writes. " They only 
 die who never try to live." 
 
 How exactly he echoes the thoughts of every woman 
 in the land in Her Prayer — For Him. 
 
 HER PRAYER— FOR HIM 
 
 I do not ask that he may never yield 
 
 When fighting on the foam or on the field, 
 
 Since this I know : — 
 
 Where'er his country calls my man will go. 
 
 I only pray 
 
 That while he is away 
 
 You guard and guide him day by day ! 
 
 And give me strength to tend his little ones 
 
 Until he comes. 
 
 On land or sea, — 
 
 W T herever he may be, 
 
 God, kiss my man for me ! 
 
 In the last two poems which I have time to quote of 
 his, as in the one I have just quoted, we find the same 
 universality : in each he crystallises a point of view 
 that all of us have kept in the secret recesses of our 
 hearts and not been able, for want of adequate expres- 
 sion, to give voice to. 
 
 IF I SHOULD DIE 
 
 If I should die 
 
 Before you, dear, 
 
 God knows that I 
 
 Would be so lonely in that other Land ; 
 
 Yet, I am sure that He would understand, 
 
SOME MORE MODERN POETS 89 
 
 And have permission given 
 
 That I might wander in and out of Heaven 
 
 To meet you, here. 
 
 Love, shall I tell you where to look for me 
 
 In that dim day ? — 
 
 Not in the silent grave-yard way, 
 
 Through which grim ghosts of sorrow stray, 
 
 I shall not tarry there — 
 
 Come to a sunlit bush or tree, 
 
 To wind-swept moor, to storm-lashed sea ; 
 
 By brook, or bank, or flower, or star, 
 
 And, where the stained-with-struggle are — 
 
 Look for me there ! look for me there ! 
 
 IN WAR 
 
 She spread the cloth for two 
 And placed his chair. 
 Then cried : " How silly ! 
 Why, I thought that he was here." 
 
 At length there came a letter, 
 
 Saying : " Dear, 
 
 Did you find me yesterday ? . . . 
 
 . . . How I did pray 
 
 That I might meet you 
 
 In our wee home-way." . . . 
 
 Ah, then she knew 
 
 Why she had placed his chair, 
 
 And plate, and cup and saucer . . . 
 
 He was there. 
 
 Mr Theodore Maynard, my next choice, may be 
 known to you. I certainly hope so, for if not you have 
 missed a great poet. His slim volume, called Laughs 
 and Whifts of Songs, is a sheer delight. He is one 
 of those starveling poets and enthusiasts who have 
 shirked no battle for the stricken earth against its 
 tyrants' spears and arbalests with courage and with 
 mirth. Yes— that is the word— mirth. He has some- 
 
90 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 thing of the large, fat, good-humoured touches of Gilbert 
 Chesterton, whose disciple he obviously is ; a mystic, 
 like Sandford, yet he is poles removed from him in his 
 sense of colour, which pervades every poem. He is 
 simple, sincere, direct, whimsical and withal humorous. 
 He is the poet of that serene cheerfulness which is the 
 peculiar gift of the happy warrior. We see that at once 
 in When I Ride into the Town. The English Spring is just 
 typical of the age in which we live, now that we have 
 grown to recognise at last how lovely is our own land. 
 In Apocalypse we get that same hankering after material 
 beauty hereafter which Brooke so exquisitely described 
 in Tiare Tahiti. To a Good Atheist and To a Bad Atheist 
 show us the distance we have travelled in overcoming 
 our ancient prejudices and at last arrived at a sane 
 judgment. 
 
 APOCALYPSE 
 
 Shall summer wood where we have laughed our fill ; 
 
 Shall all your grass so good to walk upon ; 
 Each field which we have loved, each little hill, 
 
 Be burnt like paper — as hath said Saint John ? 
 Then not alone they die ! For God hath told 
 
 How all His plains of mingled fire and glass, 
 His walls of hyacinth, His streets of gold, 
 
 His aureoles of jewelled light shall pass, 
 That he may make us nobler things than these, 
 
 And in his royal robes of blazing red 
 Adorn his bride. Yea, with what mysteries 
 
 And might and mirth shall she be diamonded ! 
 And what new secrets shall our God disclose ; 
 
 Or set what suns of burnished brass to flare ; 
 Or what empurpled blooms to oust the rose ; 
 
 Or what strange grass to glow like angels' hair ! 
 What pinnacles of silver tracery, 
 
 What dizzy, vampired towers shall God devise 
 Of topaz, beryl and chalcedony 
 
 To make Heaven pleasant to His children's eyes ! 
 
SOME MORE MODERN POETS 91 
 
 And in what cataclysms of flame and foam 
 Shall the first Heaven sink — as red as sin — 
 
 When God hath cast aside His ancient home 
 As far too mean to house His children in ! 
 
 TO A GOOD ATHEIST 
 
 That you can keep your crested courage high, 
 
 And hopeless hope without a cause, and wage 
 Christ's warfare, lacking all the panoply 
 
 Of Faith which shall endure the end of age, 
 You must be made of finely tempered stuff, 
 
 And have a kinship with that Spanish saint, 
 Who wrote of his soul's night — it w r as enough 
 
 That he should drag his footsteps tired and faint 
 Along his God-appointed pathway. You 
 
 Have stood against our day of bitter scorn, 
 When loudly its triumphant trumpets blew 
 
 Contempt of all God's poor. Had you been born 
 But in the time of Jeanne or Catherine, 
 
 Whose charity was as a sword of flame, 
 W T ith those who drank up martyrdom like wine 
 
 Had stood your aureoled and ringing name. 
 Yet, when that secret day of God shall break 
 
 With strange and splendid justice through the skies, 
 When first are last, then star-ward you shall take 
 
 The praise and sorrow of your starry eyes. 
 
 TO A BAD ATHEIST 
 
 You do not love the shadows on the wall, 
 Or mists that flee before a blowing wind, 
 Or Gothic forests, or light aspen leaves, 
 Or skies that melt into a dreamy sea. 
 In the hot, glaring noontide of your mind 
 (I have your word for it) there is no room 
 For anything save sawdust, sun and sand. 
 
 No monkish flourishes will do for you ; 
 
 Your life must be set down in black and white. 
 
 The quiet half-light of the abbey close, 
 
 The cunning carving of a chantry tomb, 
 
 The leaden windows pricked with golden saints — 
 
 All these are nothing to your rag-time soul ! 
 
92 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Yet, since you are a solemn little chap, 
 In spite of all your blasphemy and booze, 
 That dreadful sword of satire which you shake 
 Hurts no hide but your own, — you cannot use 
 A weapon which is bigger than yourself. 
 
 Yet some there were who rode all clad in mail, — 
 
 With crosses blazoned on their mighty shields, 
 
 Roland who blew his horn against the Moor, 
 
 Richard who charged for Christ at Ascalon, 
 
 Louis a pilgrim with his chivalry, 
 
 And blessed Jeanne who saved the crown of France — 
 
 Pah ! You may keep your whining Super-man. 
 
 The Mystic and Free-Will carry on the same broad 
 sympathies and acute perception, and we take leave of 
 a real live poet in Requiem, which for sheer beauty is 
 worth its place in any anthology. 
 
 REQUIEM 
 
 When my last song is sung and I am dead 
 
 And laid away beneath the kindly clay, 
 Set a square stone above my dreamless head, 
 
 And sign me with the cross and signing say : 
 u Here lieth one who loved the steadfast things 
 
 Of his own land, its gladness and its grace, 
 The stubbled fields, the linnets' gleaming wings, 
 
 The long, low gables of his native place, 
 Its gravelled paths, and the strong wind that sends 
 
 The boughs about the house, the hearth's red glow, 
 The surly, slow good-fellowship of friends, 
 
 The humour of the men he used to know, 
 And all their swinging choruses and mirth " — 
 
 Then turn aside and leave my dust in earth. 
 
 Miss Eva Gore-Booth has already earned for herself 
 a name not lightly to be forgotten in The Little Waves of 
 Breffny, which is closely related to The Lake Isle of 
 Innisfree. She sings of the East, of mysticism, but 
 
SOME MORE MODERN POETS 93 
 
 most of all of the sun and the wind and the April rain, 
 and the wild seas' shining plain, the ancient joy in the 
 world's young eyes, the blue hills' dim eternal range. 
 
 THE LITTLE WAVES OF BREFFNY 
 
 The grand road from the mountain goes shining to the sea, 
 And there is traffic in it, and many a horse and cart ; 
 
 But the little roads of Cloonagh are dearer far to me, 
 
 And the little roads of Cloonagh go rambling through my 
 heart. 
 
 A great storm from the ocean goes shouting o'er the hill. 
 
 And there is glory in it and terror on the wind ; 
 But the haunted air of twilight is very strange and still, 
 
 And the little winds of twilight are dearer to my mind. 
 
 The great waves of the Atlantic sweep storming on their way, 
 
 Shining green and silver with the hidden herring shoal ; 
 But the little waves of Breffny have drenched my heart in 
 spray, 
 And the little waves of Breffny go stumbling through my 
 soul. 
 
 Mr Cecil Roberts, the marvellous boy, has been 
 in turn auctioneer's clerk, schoolmaster, journalist, 
 starved on the Embankment, stood for Parliament . . . 
 fighting for recognition as a poet through it all, with 
 the result that at twenty-three he has earned from 
 the big critics the title of our twentieth-century 
 Keats. 
 
 Unfortunately it is impossible to give you his best 
 poems— Andromache, A Child's Eyes and The Yovth of 
 Beauty — so I must wrench one stanza from its context, 
 and hope that you will grasp from that something 
 of the blend of Keats and Francis Thompson that 
 makes him so dear to the hearts of all lovers of 
 beautv. 
 
94 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 A CHILD'S EYES 
 
 Once upon a time, 
 
 That sad, all-suffering time, 
 
 When presaging song had filled my heart with woe, 
 
 I chanced to go, 
 A forlorn songster, smutted with the grime 
 Of the most heartless City of the World, 
 Sickened with undeserving long neglect, 
 Into a place where spread 
 On lettered shelves the great, undying dead, 
 Whose singing souls, in pilgrimage elect, 
 Still wing them down the ringing ways of Time, 
 With Fame's immortal banner o'er them furled : 
 And taking down a vellum-covered book, 
 
 I sought a nook 
 Wherein to scent the fragrance of its rhyme : 
 Ah, then how shall I tell this thing so great, 
 What song, what lyric rapture magical 
 Can fitly tell an act grown tragical 
 With cherished fondness in my foolish heart ? — 
 This little act beyond all estimate, 
 For 'twas at lowest ebb of Fortune's flood 
 A child intuitively understood, 
 A little child that in most tragic-wise 
 Looked with her big wide eyes, 
 Then spake, and changed my Hell to singing Paradise! 
 
 The whole idea of modern life is to open the heart, 
 broaden the sympathies, make people realise how 
 beautiful the world is, how unnecessarily brutal we 
 have allowed part of it to become. 
 
 You would not expect me to introduce a Guardsman 
 to you with such a remark, but Captain Colwyn 
 Philipps, devotee of Rudyard Kipling as he was, has in 
 his best work so simple and sincere a feeling that he 
 achieves almost unconsciously the poetic in his pity 
 and love for all humanity. There is no need for me to 
 quote extracts from his work, for, like his fellow-captain, 
 Charles Sorley, he is very widely read. These two, 
 
SOME MORE MODERN POETS 95 
 
 whom Ave could ill spare as poets and still less as men, 
 have both been killed, and England is the poorer— all 
 the best men go— as if God were jealous of our too good 
 fortune in having them. 
 
 I turn now from individual works to anthologies, and 
 first I would very shortly commend to your notice The 
 Country Life Anthology of Verse, which maintains a 
 level of excellence which I can best typify by selecting 
 just two poems, Separation and Parliament Hill. Even 
 the ephemeral weekly papers you see contain poetry of 
 a kind that is certainly far removed from mere verse. 
 
 SEPARATION 
 
 Though you have passed so very far away 
 
 Your life is mine, as mine is yours, to-day. 
 
 Time, space, are powerless and not as bars 
 
 Our groping thoughts to sever. 
 
 Dawns, faint and fair, and sunsets flaming wide 
 
 Still bring you to my side ; 
 
 And all high hopes that throb beneath the stars 
 
 Are yours and mine for ever. 
 
 But ah ! the little things for which I sigh, 
 
 As each day passes by : 
 
 The open book, the flower upon the floor, 
 
 The dainty disarray, 
 
 The sound of passing feet, 
 
 The distant door — 
 
 Alas, the little things of every day ! 
 
 The silent eve, my sweet, 
 
 The lonely waking — 
 
 Alas, alas ! for little things my heart is breaking. 
 
 Isabel Butchart. 
 
 PARLIAMENT HILL 
 Have you seen the lights of London, how they twinkle, 
 twinkle, twinkle, 
 Yellow lights, and silver lights, and crimson lights, and 
 blue? 
 
96 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 And there among the other lights is Daddy's little lantern- 
 light, 
 
 Bending like a finger-tip and beckoning to you. 
 
 Never was so tall a hill for tiny feet to scramble up. 
 Never was so strange a world to baffle little eyes, 
 
 Half of it as black as ink, with ghostly feet to fall on it, 
 And half of it all crammed with lamps, and cheerful 
 sounds and cries. 
 
 Lamps in golden palaces, and station-lamps, and steamer- 
 lamps, 
 Very nearly all the lamps that Mother ever knew, 
 And there among the other lamps is Daddy's little lantern- 
 lamp, 
 Bending like a finger-tip and beckoning to you. 
 
 H. H. Bashford. 
 
 R. L. Stevenson never excelled the fragile tenderness, 
 the exquisite whimsicality of this, even in The Lamp- 
 lighter. 
 
 A far more important volume is Sidgwick & Jackson's 
 brave venture, Poems of To-day, an anthology for 
 schools. I can scarcely believe that there is any 
 cultured person who does not possess a copy ; its 
 significance is overwhelming. First of all it means that 
 we do realise our own greatness, we are in no doubt as to 
 what is poetry, and we recognise the difference that it 
 makes to the lives of the young, who are of all people 
 the most easily influenced by imaginative work. 
 
 The selection has been made with infinite care, and 
 includes nothing that does not stand the test which we 
 apply to real poetry ; each poem contains a theme, 
 musically, perfectly expressed, a thought that could 
 not have been translated into words in any other 
 way. 
 
 It tells of the beauty of the country-side, of love of 
 women, of high and noble actions, of all that goes home 
 
SOME MORE MODERN POETS 97 
 
 to the hearts of men. My quotations must necessarily 
 be short. I cannot conceive that I am here giving 
 you anything that you do not already know better 
 than I do, but it would be hopelessly inadequate 
 to treat of modern poetry without reference to this 
 volume. 
 
 The selections are divided into three groups : of 
 History, of the Earth, " of England again and the long- 
 ing of the exile for home, of this and that familiar 
 country-side, of woodland and meadow and garden, of 
 the process of the season, of the open road and the wind 
 on the heath, of the city, its deprivations and its con- 
 solations," and finally of life itself, " of the moods in 
 which it may be faced, of religion, of man's excellent 
 virtues, of friendship and childhood, of passion, grief, 
 and comfort. All these poems mingle and interpene- 
 trate throughout, to the music of Pan's flute, and of 
 love's viol, and the bugle-call of Endeavour, and the 
 passing-bell of Death." 
 
 Almost every modern poet of genius is repre- 
 sented, from Stevenson, Meredith, Bridges, A. E., 
 Yeats, Alice Meynell and Francis Thompson, to 
 Gerald Gould, Chesterton, Lionel Johnson and John 
 Davidson. 
 
 It is the one great proof, if one were needed, 
 to show that this age need fear comparison with no 
 other in the whole range of English literature. A bold 
 assertion, you say. Well, here is one extract, chosen 
 almost at random, from one of the lesser-known poets. 
 What poet of what other age could have excelled this 
 in its own line ? 
 
 As I went down to Dymchurch wall, 
 I heard the South sing o'er the land ; 
 
 I saw the yellow sunlight fall 
 
 On knolls where Norman churches stand. 
 
98 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 And ringing shrilly, taut and lithe, 
 
 Within the wind a core of sound, 
 The wire from Romney town to Hythe 
 
 Alone its airy journey wound. 
 
 A veil of purple vapour flowed 
 
 And trailed its fringe along the Straits ; 
 
 The upper air like sapphire glow r ed ; 
 And roses filled Heaven's central gates. 
 
 Masts in the offing wagged their tops ; 
 
 The swinging waves pealed on the shore ; 
 The saffron beach, all diamond drops 
 
 And beads of surge, prolonged the roar. 
 
 As I came up from Dymchurch wall, 
 
 I saw above the Down's low crest 
 The crimson brands of sunset fall, 
 
 Flicker and fade from out the West. 
 
 Night sank : like flakes of silver fire 
 
 The stars in one great shower came down ; 
 
 Shrill blew the wind ; and shrill the wire 
 Rang out from Hythe to Romney town. 
 
 The darkly shining salt sea drops 
 
 Streamed as the waves clashed on the shore, 
 
 The beach, with all its organ stops 
 Pealing again, prolonged the roar. 
 
 Here are old favourites like Yeats' Lake Isle oflnnis- 
 free and Newbolt's stirring songs of the sea, Brooke's 
 Grantchester and Kipling's Sussex, Meredith's Lark 
 Ascending and Thompson's To a Snowflake, Masefield's 
 Beauty and the best of Alice Meynell. 
 
 But perhaps nothing remains more clearly in the 
 mind than that vigorous, peerless paean of praise of 
 Chesterton, The Praise of Dust 
 
 " What of vile dust ? " the preacher said. 
 
 Methought the whole world woke, 
 The dead stone lived beneath my foot, 
 
 And my whole body spoke. 
 
SOME MORE MODERN POETS 99 
 
 " You that play tyrant to the dust, 
 
 And stamp its wrinkled face, 
 This patient star that flings you not 
 
 Far into homeless space. 
 
 " Come down out of your dusty shrine 
 
 The living dust to see, 
 The flowers that at your sermon's end 
 
 Stand blazing silently, 
 
 " Rich white and blood-red blossom ; stones, 
 
 Lichens like fire encrust ; 
 A gleam of blue, a glare of gold, 
 
 The vision of the dust. 
 
 " Pass them all by ; till, as you come 
 
 Where, at a city's edge, 
 Under a tree — I know it well — 
 
 Under a lattice ledge, 
 
 u The sunshine falls on one brown head, 
 
 You, too, O cold of clay, 
 Eater of stones, may haply hear 
 
 The trumpets of that day, 
 
 " When God to all His paladins 
 
 By His own splendour swore 
 To make a fairer face than heaven, 
 
 Of dust and nothing more." 
 
 The English Association has done more to inculcate 
 a love of literature in the young than any other body 
 in existence, but it has never done more for the younger 
 generation than by publishing this collection of the best 
 poems of the day. The book contains nothing which 
 does not make an instant appeal to the heart of youth, 
 and each of the one hundred and forty-seven selections 
 has the true ring of inspiration and stimulates the young 
 to imitate and excel ; it gives them a standard to live 
 up to and, at the same time, widens their sympathies 
 and opens up new vistas of romance and virgin lands as 
 yet unexplored. 
 
100 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Mr Erskine Macdonald has collected the work of 
 twenty-four soldier poets, ranging from Captain Julian 
 Grenf ell's Into Battle, already almost a classic, to the 
 outpourings of Sergeant Streets. 
 
 No one of these brave singers, however, has so sure 
 a touch as Lieutenant E. F. Wilkinson, M.C., whose 
 two poems, Dad o' Mine and To my People, deserve 
 quotation in full. 
 
 Midsummer-day, and the mad world a-fighting, 
 
 Fighting in holes, Dad o' Mine. 
 
 Nature's old spells are no longer delighting 
 
 Passion-filled souls, Dad o' Mine. 
 
 Vainly the birds in the branches are singing, 
 
 Vainly the sunshine its message is bringing, 
 
 Over the green-clad earth stark hate is flinging 
 
 Shadow for shine, Dad o' Mine, 
 
 Shadow for shine. 
 
 No one dare prophesy when comes an end to it, 
 
 End to the strife, Dad o' Mine. 
 
 When we can take joy and once again bend to it, 
 
 What's left of life, Dad o' Mine. 
 
 Yet for one day we'll let all slip behind us, 
 
 So that your birthday, Dad, still may remind us 
 
 How strong yet supple the bonds are that bind us 
 
 Through shade and shine, Dad o' Mine, 
 
 Through shade and shine. 
 
 Leagues lie between us, but leagues cannot sever 
 
 Links forged by love, Dad o' Mine, 
 
 Bonds of his binding are fast bound for ever, 
 
 Future will prove, Dad o' Mine. 
 
 Your strength was mine since I first lisped your name, Dad, 
 
 Your thoughts were my thoughts at lesson or game, Dad, 
 
 In childhood's griefs, it was ever the same, Dad, 
 
 Your hand round mine, Dad o' Mine, 
 
 Your hand round mine. 
 
 Strengthened by shadow and shine borne together, 
 Comrades and chums, Dad o' Mine, 
 We shall not falter through fair or foul weather, 
 Whatever comes, Dad o' Mine. 
 
SOME MORE MODERN POETS 101 
 
 So in the years to be when you grow older, 
 
 Age puts his claim in and weakness grows bolder ; 
 
 We'll stand up and meet them, Dad, shoulder to shoulder, 
 
 Your arm in mine, Dad o' Mine, 
 
 Your arm in mine. 
 
 How far we have travelled from the sickly senti- 
 mentality of the nineteenth century here ! This is the 
 frank, fearless, outspoken affection of a boy, not afraid 
 to love his father and to express this love straight- 
 forwardly, purely and strongly. It is simple, with the 
 simplicity of one who has faced the eternal reality of 
 death and has no further use for the reticence or the 
 " good form " which used to be the god of youth. 
 
 In the next poem he goes still further and puts into 
 exquisite poetry his convictions with regard to war, 
 life, death and the life after death. 
 
 If then, amidst some millions more, this heart 
 Should cease to beat, — 
 Mourn not for me too sadly ; I have been, 
 For months of an exalted life, a king ; 
 Peer for these months of those whose graves grow green 
 Where'er the borders of our empire fling 
 Their mighty arms. And if the crown is death, 
 Death while I'm fighting for my home and king, 
 Thank God the son who drew from you his breath 
 To death could bring 
 
 A not entirely worthless sacrifice, 
 Because of those brief months when life meant more 
 Than selfish pleasures. Grudge not then the price, 
 But say, " Our country in the storm of war 
 Has found him fit to fight and die for her," 
 And lift your heads in pride for evermore. 
 But when the leaves the evening breezes stir 
 Close not the door. 
 
 For if there's any consciousness to follow 
 The deep, deep slumber that we know as Death, 
 If Death and Life are not all vain and hollow, 
 If Life is more than so much indrawn breath, 
 
102 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Then in the hush of twilight I shall come — 
 
 One with immortal life, that knows not Death 
 
 But ever changes form — I shall come home : 
 
 Although, beneath 
 
 A wooden cross the clay that once was I 
 
 Has ta'en its ancient earthy form anew. 
 
 But listen to the wind that hurries by, 
 
 To all the Song of Life for tunes you knew. 
 
 For in the voice of birds, the scent of flowers, 
 
 The evening silence and the falling dew, 
 
 Through every throbbing pulse of nature's powers — 
 
 I'll speak to you. 
 
 This is brave and it is new ; moreover, and which is 
 infinitely more important, it is true. It states a quite 
 definite fact, a fact as comforting and uplifting as it is 
 certain. It is also poetry, if poetry means the out- 
 pourings of a spirit that will not be denied, the expres- 
 sion and crystallisation of a thought that cannot be 
 expressed or crystallised in any other way. 
 
 This volume is likely to prove of invaluable service 
 as a factor in the new education. Now that Sir Arthur 
 Quiller- Couch would have all our young men compose 
 poems, not in order to be poets, but to perfect them- 
 selves in the expression of their ideas, it is as well that 
 they should have easy access to all that is best in the 
 work of the moderns. 
 
 So many beginners imagine that the composition of 
 poetry is a heaven-sent gift, that the lines just come and 
 you write them down ; here is a strong corrective for 
 such loose thinking. If every would-be poet were set 
 down to study the technique and intricate rhyme 
 schemes of half the poems in this book, they would 
 learn a much-needed lesson. 
 
 Most of us have an overpowering love for some 
 corner of England, which we would give a deal to be 
 able to put into words. It will help us more than a 
 little to study the way in which greater men have 
 
SOME MORE MODERN POETS 103 
 
 tackled the subject : by constant imitation and con- 
 scious plagiarism we shall attain originality. This is 
 one of the great paradoxes of progress ; each man 
 builds his edifice, not on a plan conceived in his brain 
 alone, but out of a vast and wide experience, based on 
 the efforts of his forbears. The nearer they are to him 
 in point of time the more valuable they are, for youth, 
 especially the youth of to-day, is out of sympathy with 
 the Tennysonian era ; he can understand Brooke and 
 Flecker ; they represent the pinnacle of genius to 
 him . . . and after all, why not ? 
 
 We talk a good deal about inspiring the young with 
 a sense of beauty ; we form societies to take them to 
 the tops of hills in order that they shall see and rhapso- 
 dise ... it is a far easier and more beneficial act to 
 let them see what the clear-sighted visionaries of their 
 own age have to say about Nature's bounty : they will 
 then extend their own vocabularies and learn to keep 
 their eyes on the object and not indulge in vague and 
 misty panegyrics or conventional, insincere idioms. 
 
 No one pretends that the book is complete ; it is 
 enough that there should be people possessed of 
 sufficient courage to declare that contemporary poetry 
 is worthy of the study of the youth of to-day, but I 
 should like a place to have been found for Gilbert 
 Thomas' sonnet, Birds of Passage. 
 
 Like swallows in some grey cathedral square, 
 Resting awhile, then mounting free again, 
 So round the cloistered temple of the brain 
 Flutter the flocks of thought upon the air ; 
 And now and then, perchance, they settle there, 
 But oh, we strive to capture them in vain ; 
 For never will the winged soul remain ; 
 They sweep into the sky, and vanish — where ? 
 Return, ye swift, shy visitants, return ! 
 Where have ye fled ? To what enchanted shore ? 
 
104 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 If ye our closest fellowship must spurn, 
 
 Return, and bring us only, as before, 
 
 Some vague, sweet song that makes the spirit burn — 
 
 Some twilight whispering of faery lore ! 
 
 The Catholic Anthology, as we gather from its Cubist 
 cover, is a violent attempt to divert our attention from 
 what we technically recognise as poetry to a chaotic, 
 disordered, formless type of versifying, mainly trans- 
 atlantic. 
 
 There are well-known names here, Ezra Pound, 
 Edgar Lee Masters, Harold Monro and Orrick Johns, 
 but no one of them succeeds in doing more than mildly 
 amusing us, except T. S. Eliot, who, in The Love Song 
 of J. Alfred Prufrock and Portrait of a Lady convinces 
 us that a poet has the right to free himself from the 
 trammels of artistic construction on rare occasions. 
 
 And would it have been worth it, after all, 
 
 Would it have been worth while, 
 
 After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, 
 
 After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail 
 
 upon the floor — 
 And this, and so much more ? — 
 It is impossible to say just what I mean ! 
 But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a 
 
 screen : 
 Would it have been worth while 
 If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, 
 And turning toward the window, should say : n That is not 
 
 it at all, 
 That is not what I meant at all." 
 
 I grow old ... I grow old . . . 
 
 I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. 
 
 Shall I part my hair behind ? Do I dare to eat a peach ? 
 
 I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. 
 
 I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. 
 
 I do not think that they will sing to me. 
 
 I have seen them riding seaward in the waves, 
 
 Combing the white waves blown back 
 
SOME MORE MODERN POETS 105 
 
 When the wind blows the water white and black. 
 We have lingered in the chambers of the sea 
 By sea girls wreathed with seaweed red strown 
 Till human voices wake us, and we drown. 
 
 These certainly are lines " that young men, tossing 
 on their beds, rhymed out in love's despair to flatter 
 beauty's ignorant ear," as Yeats says. 
 
 There is a depth of feeling and a striving to articulate, 
 without which no poetry is worth anything. What we 
 feel on laying down this volume is a rather harsh but 
 quite accurate judgment. 
 
 Would it not be better for these young men to wait 
 until they really knew what they did want before they 
 put on paper their childish gropings after truth and 
 beauty ? They are as uncertain as autumn leaves, 
 driven hither and thither by every whimsical gust of 
 wind, inconsequent, purposeless. 
 
 Mr Eliot, for instance, has all the makings of a great 
 poet, but in the day of his success his lovers will think 
 of Miss Helen Slingsby and shudder that he should ever, 
 even in childhood, have sunk to such a depth of bathos 
 or failed to cultivate a sense of humour. That is the 
 main fault of all these Impressionists : they have no 
 sense of humour ; they strain at sublimity and achieve 
 the ridiculous ; they take themselves far too seriously. 
 
 It is refreshing to turn from this side of America to 
 Alfred Noyes' Collection of Undergraduate Verse, written 
 by his pupils at Princeton University. His guiding 
 influence is everywhere evident and we see the young 
 men developing their sense of the poetic in a lucid, 
 orderly manner ; these men are not only captains of 
 their own souls, but of their words also. 
 
 All lovely things I love, 
 Whether of sky or sea ; 
 Earth and the fruit thereof, 
 
106 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 And the starry company 
 
 That wander through Heaven above, 
 
 Singing unceasingly. 
 
 I love all sweet- voiced things : 
 
 The coil of falling streams, 
 
 The honeyed murmurings 
 
 Of bees in their noontide dreams, 
 
 And the brush of Night's great wings, 
 
 That a sweeter silence seems. 
 
 I love all silent thought 
 Prisoned in cadenced sound ; 
 And many a jewel brought 
 From hearted caves profound : 
 And yet in all I've sought 
 Something I have not found. 
 
 This is a far cry from T. S. Eliot, and it is worth while 
 bearing in mind that it is by a younger mind. 
 
 We see at once the influence of the great masters of 
 English literature translated by Noyes himself : 
 
 As I begin to see beyond thy rhyme, 
 
 And learn to place each pleasing sound aright, 
 
 And view the steps by which thy verses climb 
 
 Through strength to beauty, and on from height to height ; 
 
 Then I begin to feel that eagle's lure 
 
 Which turns his gaze toward a challenging sun, 
 
 To leave behind the dull and level moor 
 
 For those high crags where glorious colours run. 
 
 So would I know with thee that steep ascent, 
 
 That difficult way to prospects yet unknown, 
 
 The winding paths, the chasms deeply rent, 
 
 The whispering pines by winds of poesy blown, 
 
 And face that sun of song whose radiance flows 
 
 In sky-born colours through this earth's dark prose. 
 
 Here we see at once the truth of that law which all 
 true geniuses realise, that the human spirit in the 
 height of its ecstasy desires and obeys the strictest 
 
SOME MORE MODERN POETS 107 
 
 laws ; the greatest freedom is only to be attained by 
 severe apprenticeship, a paradox which needs very 
 much to be brought home to the young writers of to-day. 
 Mr Noyes ought to be a proud man to think that it is 
 owing to his inspiration that the younger generation 
 have grasped this fact, and are not ungrateful to 
 him. 
 
 Three things would I bring to you, 
 Bring as a man to his mother returning ; 
 A heart that is young despite the years ; 
 The same old unfulfilled yearning ; 
 And all in all, let be what would, 
 The keen, swift faith that God is good. 
 
 For these things do I owe to you, 
 
 Taught me once when 1 was a boy ; 
 
 And only the poor in heart forget 
 
 In graver times what they knew in joy, 
 
 Or think since their own small world is sad, 
 
 That the heart of the world is aught but glad. 
 
 Love of towers I learnt from you, 
 Skyward held like hopes of men ; 
 Love of bells across the fields 
 Heard at dusk intoned — and then 
 Just the way a yellow light 
 Fell from a window in the night. 
 
 The world is a world of Truth, I know, 
 And man must live by the truth, or die ; 
 But truth is neither a poor, dried thing 
 Nor a strumpet, tawdry, gorgeous lie ; 
 But just the fact, that by doing and giving, 
 Young dreams come true while a man is living. 
 
 So I would bring three gifts to you, 
 Got from you by loving and learning ; 
 A heart that is young despite the years ; 
 The same old unfulfilled yearning ; 
 And all in all, let be what would, 
 The keen, swift faith that God is good. 
 
108 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 It is in such a poem as this I imagine that Mr Noyes 
 sees those seeds which he speaks of in such high terms. 
 " The splendid task of carrying on the torch of litera- 
 ture," he says in his preface, " may yet be reserved for 
 America." Few of us would have guessed that the 
 extracts I have quoted were written by any except our 
 own youthful poets. The older country has extended 
 a helping hand to its younger sons across the sea and 
 shown them that sweetness and light come not except 
 by arduous practice in the imitation of the great 
 masters. The undergraduates of Princeton have at 
 any rate learnt their lesson admirably, and, to judge 
 from this volume, are a nest of singing birds presaging 
 a glorious future for a nation that has striven hard to 
 give voice to its high aspirations in prose and poetry, 
 without any too generous recognition on this side of the 
 Atlantic. 
 
 In conclusion, I hope I may be pardoned if I introduce 
 the work of the best three boys who have passed 
 through my hands as a schoolmaster. I have known 
 and attempted to educate many youthful poets, but 
 three of these, each absolutely individual and as 
 different as possible from the others, stand out from 
 the rest. 
 
 The first, J. R. Ackerley, is a captain in the East 
 Surrey Regiment. At school he was an avowed 
 disciple of Masefield. When he left he was about to 
 go up to Magdalene College, Cambridge, when the w r ar 
 broke out and he did the obvious thing. The influence 
 of Masefield can easily be traced in the only poem which 
 he has yet had printed, The Evei'lasting Terror, which I 
 give in full, because I think it deserves it. 
 
SOME MORE MODERN POETS 109 
 
 THE EVERLASTING TERROR 
 
 To Bobby 
 
 For fourteen years since I began 
 
 I learnt to be a gentleman, 
 
 1 learnt that two and two made four 
 
 And all the other college lore, 
 
 That all that's good and right and fit 
 
 Was copied in the Holy Writ, 
 
 That rape was wrong and murder worse 
 
 Than stealing money from a purse, 
 
 That if your neighbour caused you pain 
 
 You turned the other cheek again, 
 
 And vaguely did I learn the rhyme 
 
 " Oh give us peace, Lord, in our time, 
 
 And grant us Peace in Heaven as well, 
 
 And save our souls from fire in Hell " ; 
 
 So since the day that 1 began 
 
 I learnt to be a gentleman. 
 
 But when I'd turned nineteen and more 
 
 I took my righteousness to War. 
 
 The one thing that I can't recall 
 
 Is why I went to war at all ; 
 
 I wasn't brave, nor coward quite, 
 
 But still I went, and I was right. 
 
 But now I'm nearly twenty-two 
 And hale as any one of you ; 
 I've killed more men than I can tell 
 And been through many forms of Hell, 
 And now I come to think of it 
 They tell you in the Holy Writ 
 That Hell's a place of misery 
 Where Laughter stands in pillory 
 And Vice and Hunger walk abroad 
 And breed contagion 'gainst the Lord. 
 Well, p'raps it is, but all the same, 
 It heals the halt, the blind, the lame, 
 It takes and tramples down your pride 
 And sin and vainness fall beside, 
 
110 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 It turns you out a better fool 
 Than you were taught to be at school, 
 And, what the Bible does not tell, 
 It gives you gentleness as well. 
 
 Oh, God ! I've heard the screams of men 
 
 In suffering beyond our ken, 
 
 And shuddered at the thought that I 
 
 Might scream as well if I should die. 
 
 I've seen them crushed or torn to bits, — 
 
 Oh, iron tears you where it hits ! 
 
 And when the flag of Dawn unfurls 
 
 They cry — not God's name, but their girls', 
 
 Whose shades, perhaps, like Night's cool breath, 
 
 Are present on that field of death, 
 
 And sit and weep and tend them there, 
 
 God's halo blazing round their hair. 
 
 "Thou shalt not kill." But in the grime 
 
 Of smoke and blood and smell of lime 
 
 Which creeping men have scattered round 
 
 A blood-disfigured piece of ground, 
 
 When Time weighs on you like a ton, 
 
 And Terror makes your water run, 
 
 And earth and sky are red with flame, 
 
 And Death is standing there to claim 
 
 His toll among you, when the hour 
 
 Arrives when you must show your power 
 
 And take your little fighting chance, 
 
 Get up and out and so advance, 
 
 When crimson swims before your eyes 
 
 And in your mouth strange oaths arise, 
 
 Then something in you seems to break 
 
 And thoughts you never dreamt of wake 
 
 Upon your brain and drive you on, 
 
 So that you stab till life is gone, 
 
 So that you throttle, shoot or stick, 
 
 A shrinking man and don't feel sick 
 
 Nor feel one little jot of shame ; 
 
 My God, but it's a bloody game ! 
 
 Oh yes, I've seen it all and more, 
 And felt the knocker on Death's door ; 
 I've been wherever Satan takes you, 
 And Hell is good, because it makes you. 
 
SOME MORE MODERN POETS 111 
 
 As long as you're a man, I say, 
 
 The " gentle " part will find its way 
 
 And catch you up like all the rest — 
 
 For love I give the Tommy best ! 
 
 No need to learn of Christ's Temptation 
 
 There's gentleness in all creation, 
 
 It's born in you like seeds in pears, 
 
 It ups and takes you unawares, 
 
 It's Christ again, the real Lover 
 
 And not the corpse we languish over. 
 
 It makes us see, our vision clearer ; 
 
 When Christ is in us He is dearer, 
 
 We love Him when we understand 
 
 That each of us may hold His hand, 
 
 May walk with Him by day or night 
 
 In meditation towards the light ; 
 
 It's better far than paying shillings 
 
 For paper books with rusty fillings 
 
 Which say eternal punishment 
 
 Is due to those poor men who've spent 
 
 Their lives in gambling, drinking, whoring, 
 
 As though there were some angel scoring 
 
 Black marks against you for your sins 
 
 And he who gets the least marks wins. 
 
 This was a word Christ never sent, 
 
 This talk of awful punishment ; 
 
 You're born into a world of sin 
 
 Which Jesus' touch will guide you in, 
 
 And when you die your soul returns 
 
 To Christ again, with all its burns, 
 
 In all its little nakedness, 
 
 In tears, in sorrow, to confess 
 
 That it has failed as those before 
 
 To walk quite straight from door to door : 
 
 And Christ will sigh instead of kiss, 
 
 And Hell and punishment are this. 
 
 And so through all my life and days, 
 
 In all my walks, through all my ways, 
 
 The lasting terror of the war 
 
 Will live with me for evermore. 
 
 Of all the pals whom I have missed 
 
 There's one, I know, whom Christ has kissed, 
 
112 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 And in his memory I'll find 
 The sweetness of the bitter rind — 
 Of lonely life in front of me 
 And terror's sleepless memory. 
 
 June 2,0th) 1916. 
 
 There are lines in this which Masefield himself would 
 have been proud to acknowledge : 
 
 As though there were some angel scoring 
 Black marks against you for your sins 
 And he who gets the least marks wins 
 
 is in the best Masefield manner. 
 
 I like it for its honesty and nervous energy. It is 
 certainly beyond the power of any mere ephemeral 
 versifier, because of its perfect crystallisation of a mood. 
 He has written with his eye on the object and brings 
 home to us as a consequence the precise feelings of an 
 imaginative poet in action. I doubt if anyone has 
 portrayed so accurately the exact state of mind of the 
 poet-soldier. I've watched the progress of this young 
 poet since he was fourteen, and it seems to me that he 
 has increased (poetically) in stature and in wisdom year 
 by year ever since. I have a drawer full of his work, 
 which I am convinced will some day be required at my 
 hands by a discerning public. I can only give you his 
 latest and let you form your own conclusions. It is no 
 good extracting portions of them ; you must have them 
 in their entirety, because you will not be able to come 
 at them elsewhere. They are here printed for the first 
 time: 
 
SOME MORE MODERN POETS 118 
 
 OCTOBER 23rd, 1916 
 
 That he is dead 
 Seems unbelievable, 
 False, inconceivable, 
 He was so young. 
 Can it be said 
 Life indispensable 
 Falling insensible 
 Leaves us unsung ? 
 Picture the sight, — 
 Clothes hanging muddily, 
 Soppingly, bloodily ; 
 Eyes staring wide ! 
 One little fight 
 Stretching him rigidly, 
 Clammily, frigidly 
 On to his side ! 
 
 Picture the death, — 
 Young and so beautiful, 
 Lovable, dutiful, 
 Borne to the grave 
 Quite out of breath ; 
 Flowers of maternity 
 Plunged in eternity 
 Clean and so brave ! 
 What is the prize ? 
 England is unmolest, 
 Happy and unoppressed ? 
 England is Free ? 
 Oh, these are lies ! 
 Let England's glory wane ! 
 Give him back whole again, 
 Him whom I bore in pain, 
 Give him to me. . . . 
 
114 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 IF 
 
 I want to go to Devonshire 
 To hide myself away, 
 And try to find the glory-sun 
 That never warmed my day ; 
 To sit awhile and think a bit 
 Of all that might have been 
 If I had only heard of love 
 When I was seventeen. 
 
 If only I had had a chance 
 When I was still a child, 
 Instead of having smutty friends, 
 Instead of running wild ; 
 Instead of spending all my nights 
 Along with Cunny Jane ; 
 1 wouldn't do the things I done 
 If I might live again. 
 
 in 
 
 But everything's a' finished and 
 
 There ain't a second " try " ; 
 
 I'll have to go on aimlessly 
 
 Until I come to die ; 
 
 I never had a chance to live, 
 
 A God to call my own. 
 
 I took the road I stood upon 
 
 And walked it all alone. 
 
 I started off with Ned and Alf 
 Before I'd learnt to think, 
 And Ned was hanged in '99 
 And Alf 'e died o' drink ; 
 And 1 kept up with Cunny Jane 
 Until she sickened me ; 
 So that's the way I started off 
 In eighteen ninety three. 
 
SOME MORE MODERN POETS 115 
 
 And now I'm thirty-five or more 
 And come to looking back 
 On how I broke the law at eight 
 By lighting Farmer's stack ; 
 On how I nearly killed a cop 
 And spent ten years in quod, 
 Because I never had a chance 
 Of understanding God. 
 
 And so I long for Devonshire 
 To hide myself away, 
 And try to find the glory-sun 
 That never warmed my day ; 
 To sit a while and think a bit 
 Of all that might have been, 
 If I had only heard of love 
 When I was seventeen. 
 
 THE PRODIGAL SON 
 
 I'll not remain to waken thee ; 
 I'll not remain to strengthen thee ; 
 I'll be the man I want to be 
 
 Before the day is done ; 
 I'll go the way I want to go ; 
 I told t' fulish parson so, 
 I made t' parson's ears glow 
 
 An' then I run ! 
 
 I'm tired o' living like a weed, 
 It's not the life I want to lead, 
 I don't intend to go to seed 
 
 An' die a Farmer's lout ! 
 I'm young, an' strong an' full o' grit 
 I don't intend to simply sit, 
 I've had about enough of it 
 
 To last me out. 
 
116 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 in 
 
 No matter what the Dad allows, 
 
 I'll leave the farm and fields and sows, 
 
 I'll take the road without the cows 
 
 An' walk it all alone. 
 There's Henry gone an' Alfred too, 
 An' I stayed back because o' you, 
 But now I'm off to see it through 
 
 Upon my own. 
 
 IV 
 
 I'll never turn me back again 
 An' seek the little sunken lane 
 That leads me back to j-ellow grain 
 
 An' you an' shadow joy. 
 I know the way a maiden cries ; 
 I know the vainness in her eyes : 
 — It isn't hollow, twisted lies 
 
 That kill a boy ! 
 
 I'll be the man I want to be ; 
 I'll never take farewell of thee ; 
 I'll take the road towards the sea 
 
 An' setting o' the sun. 
 It isn't love that matters here, 
 It isn't pain, nor joy nor fear, 
 It's pluck that makes you persevere 
 
 When all is done ! 
 July 30th, 1 91 5. 
 
 " Masefield," 3^011 say ; of course : a young man must 
 imitate his masters. It is only Byron over again in his 
 youth imitating Pope, or Tennyson modelling himself 
 on Keats. He has a sense of the dramatic which is all 
 his own ; he is clever enough to see this and his plays 
 (of which there are many) have not been acted in 
 London theatres solely because of the weird plots which 
 he persists in using : a Cabinet minister throwing a 
 Cornish labourer over a cliff in one instance, and a 
 
SOME MORE MODERN POETS 117 
 
 tobacconist with a Swiftean sense of humour frighten- 
 ing the life out of a lady customer in his shop by pre- 
 tending to be mad. 
 
 He has a direct personal style which is rare indeed. 
 He already gives promise of a great future ; the poems 
 I have quoted are not without genius. 
 
 My second example is a cadet at Sandhurst, Alec R. 
 Waugh, son of the famous Arthur Waugh, worthy scion 
 of a great house. As a boy he was impregnated with 
 a passion for Wilde, Dowson, Rossetti, Swinburne 
 and Byron. He wrote a sensuous and luscious play 
 on Vashti, modelled on Stephen Phillips and Arthur 
 Symons, which had germs of beauty, but he too has 
 developed enormously since he left school. 
 
 The first poem I quote of his was written while still 
 at school, and shows at once his debt to these men. 
 
 THE PAGAN'S DREAM 
 
 I watched the stately cavalcade of Sulla's triumph passing by, 
 I saw the palace Herod made where Mariamne's beauties lie, 
 I heard once more the fevered groan of Cleopatra's poisoned 
 
 slave, 
 And the long breaker's sullen moan beside great Pompey's 
 
 shifting grave. 
 The pageant of the past swept by, the Pagan held his former 
 
 sway, 
 And passionate gleamed the purple sky, with memories of 
 
 yesterday. 
 From the dim tombs of ancient years, from Babylon and 
 
 Nineveh, 
 Welled the great fount of human tears straining towards the 
 
 shoreless sea. 
 Fantastic forms with swirl grotesque trailing their rainbow 
 
 canopy, 
 Wove into wondrous arabesque a saffron-tinted tapestry. 
 Apollo with his golden hair, and Helen on her rose-white 
 
 throne, 
 Proserpina, for earth too fair, and Hera's billowy tresses blown 
 
118 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Across the ruby-painted sun shone bright beyond the foam of 
 
 time 
 Where all the things in life begun, the half-dreamed dream, 
 
 the unsung rhyme, 
 The love that burnt itself to hate, the Lily-Beauty turned to 
 
 dross, 
 The longing wild unsatiate, the yearning and the poignant 
 
 loss, 
 Sleep on for ever in the arms of rest's eternal slumberland 
 As Merlin once to Vivian's charms in that far-off Broceliande. 
 On silver wings, on fairy feet, I tripped across that magic sea, 
 Called by that music bitter sweet, that haunting, clinging 
 
 melody, 
 Of Pagan hopes and Pagan dreams, of spires clad in amethyst, 
 Of stars whose lustre faintly gleams out through a veil of 
 
 shaded mist, 
 Of icy glaciers' snow-tipped peaks, of bright red wine and 
 
 purple rose, 
 Of passionate red-tinted cheeks where the fresh bloom of 
 
 beauty glows, 
 Of endless splendid pageantry where all the longing of the 
 
 years, 
 Knits into one great ecstasy, one note of laughter and of 
 
 tears. 
 And there sit the immortals throned in silent splendour : all 
 
 the while 
 Tired men forgetting how they groaned in the past years, 
 
 upon this isle 
 Hear the slow music of the waves, hear the long echoes of 
 
 dead days, 
 Wafted from where life's ocean laves the shores of night that 
 
 dawn betrays. 
 Here is the end of all life's cares, and here the end of all our 
 
 grief, 
 Here is the guerdon of our prayers, for sleep is long and life 
 
 is brief; 
 For love is but an hour's unrest and hate is nought, and sorrow 
 
 mirth ; 
 And here we reach the last behest of all we yearned for upon 
 
 earth, 
 Here is the song and here the feast, for through the crossing 
 
 of that sea 
 From all our woes and pain released we laugh into eternity. 
 
SOME MORE MODERN POETS 119 
 
 We hear the roll of myriad drums that herald Caesar's 
 
 conquering host ; 
 And Byron in his triumph comes from his well-loved iEgean 
 
 coast, 
 While Nero in his glory quaffs the wine of passion and of love, 
 And Voltaire, ever cynic, laughs at all that he cannot dis- 
 prove. 
 They lie who say that when the soul has left the weary 
 
 twitching limb 
 We all must pay a penance whole for every pleasure, every 
 
 whim. 
 It is enough we have endured enough of sorrow here below, 
 By hopes fantastic have been lured to pleasures melting as 
 
 the snow 
 Beneath our passion's burning flame, and we have known too 
 
 much of pain, 
 That we should feel the aching shame of all our penitence 
 
 again. 
 No : for we all shall soon forget the numbing anguish and 
 
 lament 
 The crying for some Juliet, the pity for some deed half 
 
 meant. 
 For we shall sit in ivory halls and sate ourselves with wine 
 
 and song 
 While music and love's heat enthralls the soul that suffered 
 
 overlong. 
 And when the Pagan pleasures tire and when the wine of joy 
 
 is drunk, 
 And comes the end of all desire, when leafless stands the 
 
 withered trunk, 
 Then shall we sleep and know no more, our eyes undimmed 
 
 shall gently close 
 In some dark-lighted cushioned floor, filled with the fragrance 
 
 of the rose ; 
 For sweet the dancing and the song ; but sweeter far the 
 
 poppies' bloom ; 
 And there where love can work no wrong, silence holds sway 
 
 within the tomb. 
 
 He has a quite sure sense of lilt and sweet music ; 
 he is filled with a love of beauty, even if this beauty- 
 is acquired at second hand from books and not from 
 
120 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 experience. After all, what experience do you expect 
 from a schoolboy of sixteen ? 
 
 How immeasurably he has advanced since then may 
 be gauged from the following : — 
 
 THE SECRET OF LIFE 
 
 Saith the sage : youth flieth by, 
 Like the dawn before the day : 
 
 Soon the flagon must run dry, 
 Soon the rainbow fade away. 
 
 Store your treasures for old age : 
 Saith the sage. 
 
 Saith the rose : one thing is sure, 
 
 Nothing is more sweet than laughter. 
 
 Who can tell what may endure, 
 
 What man knows what follows after ? 
 
 Take what's certain ere it goes : 
 Saith the rose. 
 
 Saith my heart : life's secret lies 
 
 Not alone in age nor youth, 
 But to both the same voice cries, 
 
 Colours change but not the truth. 
 Only love and never part : 
 Saith my heart. 
 
 IMMUTABILITY 
 
 In the long emptiness of days 
 Before I knew you, on this hill 
 I used to lie and watch the rays 
 Of the dying sunset quiver 
 Through the reeds beside the river, 
 And on the laughing stream, until 
 It lay a sheet of ruffled gold. 
 Long shadows crept along the wold, 
 Ghostly, majestic : through the haze 
 Shrouding the waters, glimmered faint 
 Tall lilies swaying. . . . 
 
SOME MORE MODERN POETS 121 
 
 . . . Beautiful 
 And calm as some old martyred saint 
 The evening died. . . . 
 
 . . . My heart was full 
 Of a wild glory : joy and praise 
 Supremely mingled : Beauty thrilled 
 My hungry senses : colour swept 
 Before my eyes : my spirit leapt 
 Knowing its vague dreams fulfilled, 
 Its yearnings satisfied. . . . 
 
 . . . But now 
 I gaze across these fields unmoved, 
 Across these fields that once I loved. 
 For I have found you fairer far 
 Than morning mist or evening star. 
 How should I praise the dawn, the skies, 
 Once having looked into your eyes, 
 That smoulder with the ardent glow 
 Of hidden fire ? Even the breeze 
 That flutters through the swaying trees, 
 Is not as soft as your white hand. 
 And, Love, the very sun is cold 
 When set against the rebel gold 
 Of your swift hair. . . . 
 
 . . . And yet I know 
 That love will die ; and I shall stand 
 Some day alone and watch the sun 
 Burn out its heart, its passion done. 
 While the lilies sway, and night 
 Trembles in the wake of light. 
 And the same cool wind will blow 
 Through the reeds beside the river. 
 Yet I shall not weep for you, 
 Nor for the love that has grown cold. 
 For though now your warm lips quiver 
 Under mine, we shall grow old ; 
 Old and past desire, sweet, 
 Miss the passion and the heat, 
 
122 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Kiss for habit's sake . . . Oh then 
 We, who have been so brave and true, 
 Clear-eyed and fearless, shall we stay 
 To mock at love, day after day 
 With words and make-believing, when 
 The flame is out ? Shall we pretend 
 That we love still, or make an end 
 Of folly nobly ? . . . 
 
 . . . Oh, I know 
 That you will turn aside and go, 
 Taking your separate path ; and I 
 Shall stand here as before : and gaze 
 Across the valley where the haze 
 Hovers above the reeds, and shadows 
 Steal across the sun-kissed meadows. 
 
 And, love, for all that we're apart, 
 I shall feel Beauty in my heart, 
 Watching the long day sink and die. 
 
 8/ h July 1916. 
 
 SONNET 
 
 The contest does not last so very long 
 
 That we should cringe before it. For a while 
 The proud, disdainful gods look down and smile 
 
 On us and on our efforts : right and wrong 
 
 To-day seem merged in one. Yet, Heart, be brave ! 
 Fearless and proud against immortal power 
 Let us stand firm. It is but for an hour. 
 
 There is no need for fear this side the grave. 
 
 But if some dim eternity should rend 
 The veil of silence, and no bound is set 
 To Time and its processional of pain ; 
 If we should wake to journey on again 
 With hopeless eyes, unable to forget. . . . 
 There is the fear. ... If Death were not the end. 
 
 6th August 1 916. 
 
SOME MORE MODERN POETS 128 
 
 NOCTURNE 
 
 The smouldering glow of sunset shines, 
 Faintly through the bending pines ; 
 Twilight silverfooted creeps 
 Down the dimming paths and peeps 
 Into glooms and dark recesses 
 Covering with her falling tresses 
 Gently as a maid her lover, 
 Foxglove, violet, and clover. 
 And soft scents that sleep by day 
 Wake and through the darkness stray. 
 Earth and night and trees and sky 
 Are harpstrings to the harmony 
 That built a city out of dreams 
 Beside Scamander's winter streams. 
 
 To-night the pulse of music thrills 
 
 No less than then : the wooded hills 
 
 Are bathed in beauty and the song 
 
 Of solitude is borne along 
 
 The wandering pathways of the breeze 
 
 Now soft, now passionate like the seas 
 
 That thunder round the Cyclades. 
 
 All lovely things beneath the sun 
 
 Blend in that music and are one. 
 
 Beauty of colour, tune and rhyme, 
 
 Odour of muskrose and wild thyme, 
 
 And your swift laughter. Though your feet 
 
 Tread other paths and find them sweet, 
 
 Safe from the shame of lengthening days 
 
 In every mood that Beauty sways 
 
 You dwell untainted. I can feel 
 
 The fragrance of your warm breath steal 
 
 Over my face. The perfumed air 
 
 Bows with the weight of your rich hair, 
 
 And murmuring among the trees 
 
 Your voice plays truant with the breeze. 
 
 So Love in after days when Death 
 Has made you his, and with cold breath 
 Silenced your laughter, keen and free, 
 
124 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Unfettered by mortality, 
 
 The sense of you will linger still 
 
 In flower and wind and wooded hill, 
 
 And safe from the grave's nothingness 
 
 In undiminshed loveliness 
 
 Your lambent spirit yet will brood 
 
 Above the darkling solitude 
 
 And hovering in the evening air 
 
 Make the fairest things more fair. 
 
 And I shall find you when dim night 
 
 In twilight's mantle kisses light. 
 
 My heart an altar for your sake 
 
 Will burn with vestal flames that take 
 
 Intenser radiance from the sense 
 
 Of your divine omniscience. 
 
 And in the corners of my brain 
 
 Your presence will awake again 
 
 The leaping fount of poetry 
 
 With knowledge that though roses die 
 
 Beauty imperishable still 
 
 Works out its self-appointed will. 
 
 O Love behind the darkness waits 
 We know not what : the jealous fates 
 Guard well their secrets ; but as long 
 As life in fire and gold leaps strong 
 Through pulsing veins, and the glad earth 
 Scatters its gifts of love and mirth, 
 Passion and Friendship, the bright flame 
 Of your quick soul unchanged, the same 
 That sings to-night, will kindle men, 
 Out of their agony and pain 
 To mould a heaven out of thought 
 And seek the star that changeth not. 
 \6th September 1916. 
 
 THE SEARCHLIGHT 
 
 Wearied by the lost battle of the day, 
 
 And sick with knowledge that all fair things must pass 
 
 Sometime into oblivion or decay, 
 Nightlong I lay upon the scented grass, 
 
 Quiet, at peace : the soft wind on my eyes 
 
SOME MORE MODERN POETS 125 
 
 Resting its summer wings. 
 And I was free from the fierce mysteries 
 And hopeless questionings 
 Of life and art and love. 
 
 And I watched far above 
 
 The long clear stream of light, 
 Flicker and fade : shine bright and die 
 Then shine again, piercing with keen relentless eye 
 
 The secrets of the night ; 
 Seeking the dark mysterious thing 
 That hovered somewhere in the dim expanse 
 Of high heaped mysteries. 
 In its wild dance 
 Through the dim skies 
 Its brilliance for a moment turned 
 A sable cloud lost in its wandering 
 Into a flaming radiance that burned 
 In transient eternity. 
 
 The Beam passed on, still searching the wide sky, 
 
 On to the last grey limit of its bound, 
 For the dark mystery that it never found. 
 
 I watched and watched until I saw 
 My soul and not the searchlight, move 
 Its fiery beam, probing the dark of outworn law, 
 
 Of dead tradition, useless love 
 Searching for truth, for one thing truly wise 
 Across a sky dark with the secrets of long generations, 
 Blank with the emptiness of hollow nations 
 To see against a host of lies. 
 And as that wandering light, I found nothing but the night 
 And the gloom of the night 
 
 Except on moments when some mood 
 That held a semblance of the eternal truth, 
 Before me burst in light, 
 And for an instant, flamed like youth, 
 And then like youth subsided and was still. 
 
 While my soul through the night's wild solitude, 
 Sought for the one, the real, the imperishable. 
 
 But as I watched that lambent flame 
 Steadfast, immutable, the same 
 
126 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Dauntless in failure and reverse 
 Striving against an alien universe. 
 I knew that sometime, either to-morrow or after many days, 
 
 That beam would find the thing it sought. 
 And then the very night would blaze 
 
 The sky would totter as a weak thing wrought 
 Of flame and fire and by itself consumed : 
 
 Colours would leap and fall where shadows had loomed, 
 And a primrose glow, like a halo, would rest 
 On a world long opprest. 
 
 And I felt that I too, before death 
 
 Had crept and with sensuous breath 
 Kissed me to slumber, should find 
 Within some long-locked chamber of my mind 
 The truth, the eternal truth, the secret of all 
 That should light the pathway of man, and lead him afar 
 From his sloth, and riot and carnival 
 To the one true star 
 That, hid no longer by mist 
 Shone silver and gold, scarlet and amethyst, 
 
 Pure as the mystic rose, warm as the Cytherean, 
 A splendour, the mingled glory of Pagan and Galilean. 
 And out of the old world's dust 
 A new world would rise, clean, laughing and whole, 
 Untouched by the trammels of lies and lust, 
 With flaming heart and a flaming soul. 
 
 21 st October 19 16. 
 
 TO YOUR DAUGHTER 
 
 FOR DORIS AND PETRE MAIS 
 
 The Thracians when a child was born 
 In solemn vigil wept, because 
 
 Yet one more soul, adrift, forlorn 
 
 Must know the weight of mortal laws. 
 
 But when one died, with revelry 
 They bore the silent corpse to rest 
 
 Glad that at least one man was free . . 
 To them not to be born was beet. 
 
SOME MORE MODERN POETS 127 
 
 What shall be said of you, whose eyes 
 
 Are full of infant questionings, 
 Child for whom all our mysteries, 
 
 And doubts and fears are unknown things ? 
 
 Your father's hand, your mother's kiss 
 
 Are to you now sufficient heaven, 
 Yet a world waits you beyond this 
 
 Where men for centuries have striven 
 
 To find its meaning ; yet have found 
 
 Only that certain things are lies 
 And others transient. . . . Now the ground 
 
 Lies heavy on their sightless eyes. 
 
 Youth hot upon its flaming quest 
 
 At length sinks sobbing into age, 
 And whimpers for the unpossessed 
 
 Dim-eyed. . . . This is your heritage. 
 
 And yet not wholly so : despair, 
 
 Doubt, disillusionment and death 
 Belong to all, in them you share 
 
 With all mankind the gift of breath. 
 
 But you the grim immortals bless 
 
 With something more. For in your eyes 
 
 Shines soft your mother's tenderness, 
 Flames fierce your father's hate of lies. 
 
 In you two dauntless spirits blend 
 
 The love and force whose questioning 
 
 Found life a sham, yet strove to mend 
 And not destroy the twisted thing. 
 
 One with the mother-love that cried 
 
 To merge the weak in the ideal, 
 The other wild, unsatisfied, 
 
 Breaking through false things to the real. 
 
 And both these souls are one in you. 
 
 This is your heritage . . . the rest 
 Matters but little, though you too 
 
 Some day will cry that it is best 
 
128 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Not to be born, since right and wrong 
 Seem bound together and the same 
 
 And dust's the end of every song . . . 
 But Happiness is not life's aim. 
 
 A soul of such material wrought 
 
 Is armed sufficiently to brave 
 The teeming myrmidons of doubt. 
 
 That is enough this side the grave. 
 
 Unflinching you will face the truth. 
 
 And others not so nobly wise 
 Will lay before your feet, their youth, 
 
 Their hopes, and their heart's treasuries. 
 
 So though you deem the gift of life 
 
 Better not had, those others torn 
 And bleeding in the throes of strife 
 
 Will thank their God, that you were born. 
 
 These all see the light of day for the first time now, 
 and it is for you to judge their worth. It is hard to 
 criticise the work of one's own pupils. One is apt to be 
 prejudiced — but they certainly do express that con- 
 tinual search after beauty which is the poet's peculiar 
 prerogative. All that I can say is that I am proud to 
 have a daughter who has inspired such a poem as To 
 Your Daughter, and whatever fate may be in store for 
 her, she is lucky to have had so sweet a tribute paid 
 to her as this ; it is comparable only to Francis 
 Thompson's poems to Olive and Viola Meynell. 
 
 My last example is from a boy, K. de B. Codrington, 
 now at Quetta. He has no definite master ; he has 
 read widely and deeply, and browsed in all sorts of 
 obscure nooks in the fields of English literature. 
 
 Like so many youngsters of to-day, he has learnt to 
 sing through suffering ; his mother, to whom he was 
 
SOME MORE MODERN POETS 129 
 
 devoted, was drowned in the Persia, and all his best 
 poems are merely reminiscences of her. 
 
 He sings of Nature and her appeal to the instinct 
 of beauty. I said that he had no definite master, but 
 there are obvious traces of Rupert Brooke here and 
 there, and sometimes, though much less obviously, of 
 Flecker. 
 
 LONDON FROM THE COUNTRY 
 
 The Sparrows twitter in the hedge 
 
 And nutter by the window-ledge, 
 
 And golden-red another day 
 
 Creeps slowly up and fades to grey. 
 
 Great gathering clouds go sailing by, 
 
 Cold and grey in the sodden sky, 
 
 And softly pattering the rain 
 
 Beats down and blurs the window-pane. 
 
 The poplars by the garden wall 
 
 Sway in the wind and dead leaves fall, 
 
 All brown and sodden in the rain 
 
 By the window, into the lane. 
 
 The willows whisper in the wind 
 
 And in the field, just close behind, 
 
 The wind beats through the wet clover 
 
 All murmuring : " The best is over. 
 
 Grow old and live and die with us, 
 
 Among the willows and the grass." 
 
 To-day I watch the misty down. 
 
 Yet yesterday I slept in town, 
 
 Four stories high above the square, 
 
 Above the noise and clatter there, 
 
 Lulled by the traffic's rumbling song 
 
 Amid the ever-passing throng, 
 
 Five days of happiness supreme, 
 
 And now I'm here and they're a dream. 
 
 The shops, the restaurants in Soho, 
 And everything I love and know, 
 Those matinees, just you and 1, 
 Are memories, and here I lie, 
 
130 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Watching the dawn-mists move and rise, 
 
 Dim wisps of grey against the skies. 
 
 Last night the arcs were burning bright, 
 
 Throwing great golden rings of light, 
 
 Now flickering above the throng, 
 
 Low dancing to the traffic's song ; 
 
 And here? — the stars gleamed dim and cold 
 
 And overhead the storm-clouds rolled ! 
 
 Last night, that table by the palm, 
 
 With its old waiter, fat and calm ; 
 
 The music rising soft and low, 
 
 Faintly in gusts from down below, 
 
 The clinking sound of touching glass, 
 
 As the quick waiters come and pass, 
 
 And you beside me, sitting there 
 
 As if that night w r ould last a year. 
 
 The hanging ivy moves and sighs, 
 And slow the rose-sprays dip and rise, 
 And the wind blows by the clover, 
 Still whispering : — " The best is over." 
 
 EVENING CLOUDS 
 
 Fair tints of evening in the sky, 
 
 Why haste away so soon ? — 
 The wind still whispers on the hill 
 
 And lingers on the dune. 
 
 The daffodils still nod their heads 
 And bend before the breeze, 
 
 And still the painted butterflies 
 Hang by the apple-trees. 
 
 Above the swallows homeward fly 
 
 And circle round the eaves, 
 Yet day still loiters in the lane 
 
 And glimmers on the leaves. 
 
 Night falls, and thou art gone, too soon, 
 
 Fair pledges of the day, 
 And as the stars come creeping out, 
 
 Thy glories fade away. 
 
SOME MORE MODERN POETS 131 
 
 SPRING, 1916 
 
 Winter is gone and spring is here again 
 
 All green with tender buds, and hung with dew, % 
 
 Loud sing the birds in every hedge and lane, 
 Sweet songs of love, such love I bore to you. 
 
 And by the trees all fresh with morning rain, 
 Like stars at evening breaking forth anew, 
 
 So bright you'd think they never fade or wane, 
 The gold-eyed primrose cast a lighter hue. 
 
 The dancing sunshine and the birds refrain, 
 In all I see or hear, dim thoughts of you 
 
 Come back, like stabs of long-dead pain, 
 And every beauty stirs the wound anew. 
 
 Last year you felt the waking sun's warm kiss, 
 
 And watched the buds break out, — last year, and this. 
 
 ALMA MATER 
 
 Sighs the wind in the scented limes 
 Just as it did in olden times, 
 Singing songs of the dim to-be, 
 Days that were then but dreams to me ? 
 
 Do the bells still chime along 
 Each lingering quarter with their song, 
 From early hall to afternoon, 
 Chiming away the time too soon ? 
 
 Still do the dancing sunbeams fall, 
 Glinting down by the library wall, 
 Glinting down by the gargoyle's head, 
 Painting the tiles a golden red ? 
 
 Do they go where we used to go 
 And do the things we used to do — , 
 Roll on the field at half-past three, 
 Bathing at six and back for tea r 
 
132 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Rules all round, yet never so free, 
 
 Is it just as it used to be ? 
 
 Are there shadows still on the grass, 
 
 — And do the clouds still, laughing, pass? 
 
 Others go where we used to walk 
 And linger where we used to talk, 
 Times have altered everywhere, 
 Now strange faces turn to stare : 
 
 Unknown faces turn to stare, 
 With eyes that no remembrance bear, 
 Time has flown and the day was short 
 When I too loitered through the court : 
 
 Only the same old heart-felt love, 
 Only the laughing clouds above, 
 Only the wind in the linden tree, 
 Sings the same old songs to me. 
 
 A REQUIEM 
 
 Fold thine arms upon thy breast, 
 Close thine eyes and take thy rest. 
 Sunset in the golden west, 
 Glorious, dies. 
 
 I will sing no dirge for thee, 
 For in every brake and tree 
 Birds sing out in melody, 
 To grey skies. 
 
 So, now thou hast gone from me, 
 I will sing my melody ; 
 Day grows old, to wane and die, 
 Yet to rise. 
 
 Still the wind stirs the roses, 
 Hung in great fragrant posies, 
 But your sunset ne'er loses, 
 Golden skies. 
 
SOME MORE MODERN POETS 138 
 
 Golden-tinted clouds sail by, 
 Twilight creeps across the sky, 
 Shadows fall and lightly lie, 
 On the eyes. 
 
 Night falls gleaming in the west, 
 Thou who wast of all, the best, 
 Fold thy arms and take thy rest, 
 Close thy eyes. 
 
 As usual, I am afraid to criticise them, because they 
 are too near to me. They were shown up as work . . . 
 and amid all the humdrum platitudes and inconse- 
 quent nonsense that boys produce as " prep.," to come 
 upon one such poem as Requiem is like reading a play 
 of Goldsmith after Mrs Aphra Ben, or a criticism of 
 Dixon Scott after the literary editor's reviews in a 
 halfpenny evening " rag." I can only murmur to 
 myself : " Exquisite," " Beautiful," and to the pupil : 
 " Yes, yes, but what about technique ? These lines 
 don't scan." It is the schoolmaster's special mission 
 never to encourage, always to pick holes ; for what 
 reason I know not. 
 
 All I feel at the moment is a fierce pleasure that 
 Ackerley, Waugh and Codrington all came, at one 
 time or another, under my influence. To me as an 
 individual they owe less than nothing ; to the books I 
 put into their hands, more than they will ever acknow- 
 ledge. I refuse to believe that their poems are any 
 whit inferior to the majority of those which I have 
 quoted elsewhere in this paper ; the only difference lies 
 in the fact that they still have to make their name, to 
 find a publisher and a public. 
 
 It staggers me to think that there are probably 
 hundreds of poets at this moment working quietly in 
 this country, as good as these, of whom we have heard 
 literally nothing ... it is the finest sign of our times. 
 
134 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 You may talk about the Renascence of Wonder, of the 
 Elizabethan lyricists, and other golden periods of 
 English literature, but I feel absolutely certain on this 
 one point, that the greatest age in our own national 
 history, if not in that of the whole world, is here 
 and now ; not as individuals, but collectively we are 
 living in the supreme age of lyrical sweetness ; never 
 before has beauty been so sought after . . . and 
 the reason ? Is it not simply because of the constant, 
 never-ending blare of the trumpets of ugliness on every 
 side of us ? Action and reaction, cause and effect, the 
 swing of the pendulum. It is science; it is logic ; it 
 is life. 
 
THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 THE novel proper, as we now understand the 
 term, is supposed to have started with Mr 
 Wells, in Love and Mr Lewisham, some fifteen 
 years ago, perhaps as a direct result of the shaking up 
 we received during the Boer War. After flourishing for 
 this short period with an almost astounding brilliance, 
 there are now not wanting critics who declare that as a 
 branch of letters novel- writing is decadent and quickly 
 dying ; that the result of this war will bring in a new 
 vehicle to express our thoughts and aspirations. What 
 I think these critics mean to imply is that the form of 
 art in question has been so travestied and degraded 
 that the true artist will soon turn with loathing from 
 this medium and discover a fresh method of imparting 
 whatever message he has to deliver. 
 
 But their reasoning is not sound. Who in his senses 
 doubts, for instance, that the theatre of this country has 
 a future before it of as yet unguessed-at possibilities ? 
 We had a glimpse in 1912 and 1913 in the rapid spread 
 of repertory companies, in the genius of Stanley 
 Houghton, Yeats, Synge, Chesterton, Shaw and 
 Bennett ; the stage was coming into its own at last. 
 The war broke out, domestic problems had to be shelved 
 and gay recreation for us all became the cry, with the 
 result that the only sort of theatre we care to visit 
 these days is that in which we can indulge in cheery 
 laughter and forget for the space of three hours the 
 darkness and horror of our time. This is the day of 
 " Revue," and it shows sheer ingratitude on our part 
 
 135 
 
136 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 if we join with those biased judges who would away 
 with lightness, frivolity and jocund dance because 
 (according to these poor, weak-witted fools) it under- 
 mines our morals and destroys our intellect, It does 
 nothing of the sort ; it revives us, it tends to make us 
 cheerful, it helps us to carry-on and not give way to 
 ghoulish fears and despair. But the day of the revue 
 is not for ever ; with the coming of peace the stage will 
 become in the end what we intend it to become, the 
 platform from which we can thrash out the problems 
 that beset us with regard to life and love and death. 
 
 On the other hand, the trashy, noxious, prurient, 
 bastard novel increases and multiplies and is as strong 
 as mongrels usually are. It is not with these that I am 
 concerned to-day ; it is with the score or so of great- 
 hearted men and women who keep their head above the 
 water and write, not for the business man's leisure 
 hours, nor in order to fill up the evenings of the lonely, 
 stupid vicar's daughter, but (for the only reason that 
 justifies men in writing anything at all) because they 
 must . . . because their own lives are so appallingly 
 complicated that they must advise others not so 
 experienced how to extricate themselves from the 
 labyrinth by which they are encompassed. 
 
 It follows, then, that the first point to be noticed about 
 the present-day novelists is their sense of psychology ; 
 they are introspective— and in that they are un- 
 like their fathers in art. We look in vain to-day for 
 the simple, full-blooded, narrative style of Fielding, the 
 quietude of Jane Austen, the sentimentality of Dickens, 
 the dogmatic baldness of George Eliot, the historic 
 sense of Scott (thank God), the uncleanness of Sterne, 
 the intellectual obscurity of Mered ith, and we are glad 
 of it. 
 
 The novelists of to-day have broken free from all 
 
THE MODERN NOVEL 137 
 
 tradition, not because, as their elders so often think, that 
 they like shocking people- tilting at existing conven- 
 tions or descending to the sordid but solely because 
 they are intent upon one thing alone, the search after 
 truth. Like the great scientists and all true reformers, 
 they are content to take nothing upon trust ; they must 
 prove all things and hold fast to that which they find 
 to be good. Now, to be accurate, this definition of 
 their aims necessarily makes us adjust our jDoint of 
 view about the date of the beginning of these traits. 
 It is not Love and Mr Lewisham but The Way of All 
 Flesh that holds the place of honour as the pioneer of 
 this movement. 
 
 In that book, which might have been produced this 
 season, so modern (in my present sense of the word) 
 it is, we see a boy brought up in the deadening atmos- 
 phere of a country parsonage, exceedingly religious, 
 bent on taking Orders, until he finds that he cannot 
 honestly conform to the accepted belief in the efficacy 
 of infant baptism. It is strictly autobiographical, and 
 gives us, with a wealth of detail, all the doubts that 
 assail the mind of youth with regard to the myriad 
 beliefs which his elders hold quite complacently, but, 
 according to his point of view, quite unreasoningly 
 and therefore immorally. 
 
 And this brings me to my first great rock on which 
 so many writers split, the relation of life to art. How 
 far has the novelist the right to transcribe from life ? 
 How far ought he to aim at the objective and the 
 impersonal ? 
 
 If we listen to one who was himself both a consum- 
 mate artist and able critic, R. L. Stevenson, we should 
 conclude that no art ever dares, in Henry James's 
 phrase, to compete with life. Life is monstrous, infinite, 
 illogical, abrupt and poignant ; art is neat, finite, self- 
 
138 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 contained, rational, flowing and emasculate ; yes, if 
 you please, I repeat — emasculate. 
 
 A man settling down to write a novel, just like his 
 brother artist, the musician or the painter, definitely 
 decides upon a theme, which he harps upon, ruthlessly 
 pruning away all irrelevancies until he has finished his 
 artistic conception, which is orderly, consecutive and 
 intelligible. Now life is seldom, if ever, intelligible, 
 never consecutive and most certainly not orderly ; 
 your true artist half shuts his eyes to the dazzle and 
 confusion of reality and flees the challenge of life, 
 pursuing instead an independent and creative aim : 
 he does not pretend to give a true picture of life : rather 
 does he make, so far as he is able, his story typical, 
 which accounts, of course, for Sam Weller, Mr Micawber 
 and Mrs Gamp. Hence follow, to the artist's horror 
 on the publication of each fresh work, a whole series of 
 misunderstandings, each one of the small circle of his 
 acquaintances endeavouring to "place" themselves 
 and other of his friends in the book- whereas, of 
 course, no man deliberately paints any man as he 
 sees him, but, taking a trait here and a trait there, 
 presents a composite portrait of the creature of his 
 imagination. 
 
 Lest I tire you with these general hypotheses, as if I 
 were here to prove a proposition in geometry, let me 
 descend to the particular score or so of writers whom I 
 have in mind as representative of the art of novel- 
 writing at its best to-day, and I will try to be as modern 
 as I possibly can be. 
 
 But before I can do this I must perforce call your 
 attention to an astonishing sameness in the writers of 
 our era. Their theme is nearly always the same : they 
 take a small child and work out, with miraculous 
 accuracy and meticulous care, his or her attitude to life 
 
THE MODERN NOVEL 139 
 
 from its earliest infancy. It is nearly always an only 
 child, and hence imaginative, queer and lonely. 
 
 It does not fit into the curriculum anywhere, least of 
 all into the rarefied atmosphere of a Public School (we 
 have to go to E. F. Benson, beloved of dowagers and 
 bookstall agents for that) ; Oxford days (all heroes go 
 to Oxford nowadays) are merely an occasion for scorch- 
 ing his w r ings, owing to the sudden liberty; he disappears 
 in a chastened frame of mind to an East End Settlement 
 or Bohemian Chelsea, or Paris- and there he meets with 
 further chastisement from a world which deals harshly 
 with those w r ho have little respect for its canons and 
 refuse to play for safety. We leave the protagonist 
 fighting, having not so much worked out his salvation 
 as cut away a few of the fimgus growths that impeded 
 his development. 
 
 What are we to make of a set of writers who always 
 take this line ? Two things about them stand out 
 clear : they are not lacking in courage, and they are 
 broad-minded. I wonder if it has ever struck the 
 opponents of the new school that there is an intense 
 amount of sorrow in the lives of all these big present- 
 day writers. A man or woman does not lightly give 
 up old comfortable beliefs and scandalise his mother, 
 alienate his best friends and cut himself adrift from 
 all those who would help him if only he kept in the 
 groove of the Victorians — without a very real sense 
 of dread and misgiving. 
 
 After all, he may be wrong. All his elders tell him 
 that he is ; he is held up as a scapegoat ; respectability 
 shuns him and conventional morality labels him as 
 abandoned. All he has to hold on to is the fiery white 
 burning flame within, which is the manifestation of the 
 divine as he sees it, the Holy Ghost of honesty ; it 
 needs more than a little courage to follow the Grail 
 
140 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 which your father tells you is a will-o'-the-wisp ; it hurts 
 such a man abominably to be told, as he is on every 
 occasion, that this much-vaunted op en-mind edness 
 and breadth is only a euphemism for lack of depth 
 and shallowness. There may be lack of depth in the 
 new writer before he has found his feet ; the very 
 shallows are sometimes mistaken by the passionate 
 spirit for the deep waters, but he soon learns to profit 
 by his mistakes. No — it is not the spirit that is lack- 
 ing ; the impulse is all right — publishers will tell you 
 that they are sometimes frightened by the amount of 
 good stuff which is sent to them daily. What is wrong 
 is the absence of any technique ; so anxious are these 
 firebrands to give voice to their disquietude, so keen to 
 be gospellers, that they forget that he who practises an 
 art must obey the laws that govern that art. They 
 think that it is enough to have something to say and 
 say it, which would be strictly true were novel-writing 
 a sort of photography, a literal transcription from life. 
 It is something very different from this even if we 
 agree that novels are now a chemical analysis of life. 
 In the scientific sense this is not quite true ; it is im- 
 possible to put down on paper, with precise verisimili- 
 tude, what you have evolved as a result of your tests 
 with alkalis and acids ; the compound of emotions, 
 impressions and volitions are not so easy to disin- 
 tegrate, the human factor looms too large ; it is men's 
 souls that you are striving to analyse and the process 
 brings tears of shame and pity ; sympathy of a very 
 acute kind is essential in the analyst, which is obviously 
 not a feature that enters into the calculation of the 
 chemist. To put it even more plainly, there is no 
 ease in these new novels : they are uncomfortable, and 
 designedly so ; they do not make for happy, restful 
 evenings ; they are purgative pills for the soul, tearing 
 
THE MODERN NOVEL 141 
 
 it up by the roots lest it should die for want of exercise 
 or become sluggish through inaction. 
 
 And here I am constrained against my wish to have 
 to talk on a theme that apparently causes quite a 
 number of hostile critics to prejudge these feverish 
 reformers and banish their w r ork summarily at sight. 
 The theme is realism. The fact that stoats slaughter 
 rabbits in a bestially cruel manner, that Nature is 
 harsh, ugly and unsympathetic, that man, in Meredith's 
 phrase, has not yet rounded Cape Turk in his attitude 
 to women, that mud and dirt exist, terrifies these 
 writers : they are honest, so they refuse to blind them- 
 selves to the truth ; they are searching for beauty and 
 meet ugliness, so they must needs write down the im- 
 pression it makes on them. Hence follows the croak of 
 the " unco' guid " about indecent and revolting details. 
 The coward trick of employing asterisks is the 
 resort of all the hucksters and the popularity hunters, 
 while the band of twenty stalwarts goes its way, heed- 
 less of the cries of ' 4 Shame," and in the end out of the 
 sordid they evolve splendour, out of the grotesque, 
 beauty, out of the shams and lies, truth. So realism 
 comes to mean reaction against the comfortable, dull, 
 cowardly attitude to life which was so characteristic of 
 the eighteen-nineties. It does not mean, and never 
 has meant, playing in the mire for love of mud. I 
 refuse to dwell on the point further. Let me come to 
 the individual members of my score. 
 
 I will take the women first. It is a curious thing that 
 whereas the sexes have never conflicted in the w r orld of 
 poetry (where are Christina Rossetti and Mrs Browning 
 when set up against Keats, Milton, Shelley and the rest 
 of our English singers ?) as novelists, women hold their 
 own easily. There have been many ready to acclaim 
 Jane Austen as worthy of a place nearer the Shake- 
 
142 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 spearean throne than any other of our writers, and she 
 is not, like Jael, alone. So to-day we have at least eight 
 places among my score taken by women — Ivy Low, 
 Viola Meynell, Ethel Siclgwick, Rose Macaulay, Dorothy 
 Richardson, Miss E. H. Young, Sheila Kaye-Smith and 
 May Sinclair. I will content myself with five. It is no 
 argument — perhaps you are thinking of it — to suggest 
 that our worst writers are also women. Each of these, 
 in her individual way, fans the flame of revolt and 
 drives home the crudity of life, the inexplicability of 
 it all, the need for courage to test, to experience, to 
 venture all in the cause of beauty and truth. 
 
 Ethel Sidgwick is no mean disciple of Meredith and 
 James. The Accolade would have been welcomed by 
 either ; she represents the intellectual, aristocratic side 
 of the quarrel. Certainly impersonal, she yet lives 
 again in her characters, who are living men and women, 
 full of human frailty and human passions and of infinite 
 charm, even when they fall short, as all the heroes and 
 heroines in the novels under discussion do fall short, of 
 the high calling whereto they were called. 
 
 She recognises, as do the others, how amazingty swift 
 the transition is between the sublime and the ridiculous, 
 how in a second of time a coward may become brave, 
 a good man turn villain ; in other words, she refuses to 
 believe in the old conventional theory , which is all right 
 on the boards of the Lyceum (The Morning Post would 
 say that it was the only safe guide in life), that men can 
 be divided into sheep and goats ; if they could there 
 would be no need for our age at all ; there would be no 
 problem ; it is the question of shadows and half lights 
 and tricky optical illusions of the soul that so worries 
 us. If all were either white or black this paper would 
 be meaningless and so would the writing of novels. 
 
 Ivy Low and Viola Meynell have much in common 
 
THE MODERN NOVEL 143 
 
 and can be grouped together. They follow what their 
 enemies call the convention of their school, the con- 
 vention of unconventionality, and depict heroes who 
 have nothing in them of the heroic ; feckless, vacillat- 
 ing creatures who achieve nothing though they pass 
 through indescribable tortures in their endeavour to 
 make something of their lives. Now, your brusque 
 business man (I take him as a type : he doesn't exist 
 at all except in our brains, but he is useful, just as the 
 King is useful — to hang a concrete idea on) gives little 
 shrift to the weak and takes but a small interest in 
 their puny efforts to make good. That really is 
 typical of us as a people ; we admire strong, successful 
 people. Who is there who dare confess to his soul that 
 he does not admire Mr Selfridge, Mr Bottomley and 
 Lord Northcliffe? What we need to cultivate far 
 more is a feeling of sympathy with the weak, not 
 maudlin, sentimental claptrap towards the poor and 
 needy (that is our everlasting shame as a country, not 
 as individuals, and organisation, not Dickens' system, 
 is the only cure), but a tolerant attitude towards those 
 who are less well endowed with any of this or the 
 next world's good attributes — the uneducated tub- 
 thumper who, behind all his low cunning and un- 
 reasoning hatred for what he calls the " aristocrats," 
 has something fine in him; the — well, I don't want 
 to waste time giving instances — roughly speaking, I 
 mean the stunted, the malformations that crowd every- 
 where, the miserable, unprepossessing nursery 
 governess with the capacity for deep passion. It is 
 the unsuspected depths in everybody that we want 
 to get at. Men do low, blackguardly acts and yet 
 are lovable ; girls have neither brains, nor looks, 
 nor strength, and yet- there lurks beneath the 
 forbidding exterior something- well, that is what 
 
144 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Viola Meynell and the rest of them want to find out 
 and want us to find out in the lives of those near to us 
 who are miserable and neglected as of no account. It 
 is hard to group these writers together like this, but I 
 think the guiding principle that is common to all of 
 them is the avoidance at all costs of snobbery — snobbery 
 of any kind. These accidental pronunciations, these 
 tricks of eating, these vulgar colloquialisms, these 
 dowdy clothes, these astonishing limitations all make 
 us so deuced superior. As this is, like nearly every- 
 thing I do, an intensely personal paper, I will elaborate 
 what I mean a little further. I know nothing whatever 
 about pictures, but by a very happy accident I really 
 do like the work that is supposed, by the only artists 
 whom I know, to be the best we've got. I mean, of 
 course, Augustus John, Mark Gertler, Nevinson, 
 Rothenstein and so on. The sight of a Blair Leighton, 
 a Marcus Stone, a Landseer or a Dicksee makes 
 me physically ill — and yet — well, my own house is 
 crowded with these criminal things. I keep them on 
 purpose — I know now what I like — but I keep these 
 in remembrance of the time when I bowed to popular 
 opinion and gave my own judgment no chance. And 
 yet my novelist friends, men of taste and judgment, 
 don't laugh at me — they are not snobs ; they don't 
 even laugh at me behind my back. . . . 
 
 Now, it's these people who have given me a soul : 
 they haven't laughed ; they have tried to find where 
 my limitations extend. Other people don't : other 
 people are snobs. I've explained that badly. These 
 women writers are full of the milk of human kindness 
 and extend their love to those who seem least of all 
 deserving of it. The only people they cannot stomach 
 are the safe, self-complacent men and women who 
 have been nurtured from their earliest youth in the 
 
THE MODERN NOVEL 145 
 
 established tradition and done all the right things in the 
 right way, even to marrying and being buried. 
 
 Of my dozen or so male writers I propose to take 
 Conrad first, not necessarily because he is greater or less 
 than any of the others, but because he stands rather 
 outside the group. We ought to have been reading 
 him thirty years ago, only, being led by the critics who 
 are like a man who, through oversmoking, can't tell a 
 Woodbine from a Weinberg, we never recognised his 
 genius until almost too late. One point he has in com- 
 mon with the younger school — in psychological analysis 
 lies his greatness ; his difference lies in the fact that 
 whereas Bennett and the rest don't care "tuppence" 
 about narrative, he revels in the telling of a tale. He is 
 a born raconteur ; he tells a story in the best possible 
 way ; he looks at it from every point of view ; he has 
 taken a most valuable leaf out of Browning's book — I 
 often wonder quite how much Conrad owes to The Ring 
 and the Book. I again often wonder whether a finer 
 analysis of a boy's life has ever been made than Conrad 
 made of that excessively romantic son of the parsonage, 
 inscrutable of heart, tearing himself out of the arms of 
 a jealous love at the sign, at the call of his exalted 
 egoism. He leaves a living woman to celebrate a pitiless 
 wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct. But you 
 all know the story ; alone among modern books we 
 have here a hero who is quite certain of himself, realises 
 quite definitely that errors are irretrievable and works 
 out his scheme of expiation to perfection. 
 
 Wells, too, in some degree stands a little aloof from 
 the moderns ; the best thing about him which he holds 
 in common with Arnold Bennett is his conviction of the 
 sacredness of his calling as novelist. Not once nor 
 twice but a hundred times Wells reiterates his gospel 
 in the clear notes of the clarion ; nothing is so sacred as 
 
146 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 work, nothing matters in comparison with getting your 
 mind clear ; life is wasted on every side ; only the 
 novelist really lives at all ; only he has the true vision. 
 Having cut away the frippery and foolishnesses of the 
 myriad things which pass for living, he alone can point 
 the way to where true happiness and contentment lie 
 — in the cultivation of the scientific spirit, in passion- 
 ate love and immense sympathy. To him has fallen 
 the wonderful privilege of being able to reveal the soul 
 of England during the past two years in Mr Britling 
 Sees It Through, by far the ablest novel written 
 since 1914. That is Mr Wells' triumph— he is the 
 supreme clarifier and crystalliser. He writes not as 
 Romain Rolland, with the detachment of a calm 
 observer on a Swiss peak, but with the passionate 
 resentment of a father who has lost his only son, who 
 was to remould the world after his father's death — it is 
 introspective and subjective to an extraordinary extent ; 
 through it all we see the old Wells we had so learnt to 
 love and reverence sadly chastened by a crime which 
 was so exactly to fulfil his age-old prophecies and put 
 back the progress of the country for countless years. 
 
 Wells had many detractors in the past, but no one 
 in his senses could dare to deny that as a master in 
 handling the English language and making it mean 
 quite clearly and consistently exactly what he wishes 
 to convey he stands alone ; his sincerity and honesty 
 perhaps frightened those who were afraid of the 
 lengths to which sincerity and honesty could go in 
 their search for truth. But Wells has proved his large- 
 heartedness long ago in his splendid sense of fun ; his 
 sympathy with man, in spite of his appalling narrow- 
 ness and refusal to take the advantages of education, is 
 overwhelmingly strong and gives us an insight into his 
 capacity for love. 
 
THE MODERN NOVEL 147 
 
 Freedom is his continual cry, freedom from all this 
 absurd restraint that curtails our energies, damps our 
 ardour and would deprive us of half the light and joy of 
 living. " Come out," he cries, " into the market-place 
 and test life ; better to fall over your own accord in the 
 endeavour to learn to walk than to be carried about all 
 your life hedged about with wet-nurses." 
 
 Arnold Bennett has many points in common with 
 Wells : his humour and his not less fervent sense of the 
 greatness of his calling. That he should have selected 
 the very commonplace people of the ugliest district in 
 England is typical of modern art. I refer you again to 
 Augustus John. By the aid of countless details carefully 
 correlated he gives you a never-to-be-forgotten picture 
 of the effect of two or more principal characters on 
 one another ; every trivial domestic incident is painted 
 in with a truth that almost staggers you. After read- 
 ing an Arnold Bennett book you feel exactly as if you 
 had lived with these people all your life; they are 
 neither intellectually brilliant, nor pretty, nor any- 
 thing else except commonplace — but they have their 
 passions as much as ever the Lady Barbaras of 
 Galsworthy or the Othellos of Shakespeare- and it is 
 their passion that makes them interesting. But it is 
 neither with Conrad, nor with Bennett, nor with Wells, 
 nor with the women that I am principally concerned. 
 I am now getting nearer to the heart of my subject, the 
 younger school of novelists, and I have such a galaxy 
 of talent in my mind's eye that I scarcely know with 
 whom to start. J. D. Beresford perhaps is the best, as 
 he is an avowed disciple of Shaw. In his great trilogy 
 dealing with the life history of Jacob Stahl we see 
 again the Wellsian theory of subjectivity. Jacob 
 Stahl is simply pure autobiography. All Beresford's 
 early struggle for fame, his successive stages in the 
 
148 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 conflict of life to secure real, lasting love, are told with 
 an honesty of purpose that almost scares you ; he 
 deliberately sets out to dissect and reveal his inner 
 being— there is no plot, no climax ; there rarely is in 
 the modern novel. There is no heightening effect to 
 secure a romantic atmosphere ; it is all realistic, bald 
 and cold — and yet coM not with a moral frigidity, 
 but cold as a perfectly executed marble statue hewn out 
 by genius at fever heat from the formless block. At 
 the end of three volumes he has at last found happiness 
 with Betty and her babies, but even so he is still un- 
 satisfied, he is still a candidate for truth. " Virtue lies 
 only," he writes, " in the continued renewal of effort ; 
 the boast of success is an admission of failure." Jacob 
 Stahl could never rest content with any such attain- 
 ment as was provided by the comfort of his wife's love, 
 by the fine, unselfish joy he finds in the care of his three 
 children, or, least of all, by such satisfactions as come 
 to him from his modern achievements in the world of 
 letters. He is ever at the beginning of life, reaching out 
 towards those eternal values that are ever beyond his 
 grasp. He is handicapped in many ways and must 
 continually regret his own ignorances and intellectual 
 limitations, but he has not been threatened by that 
 decay of mind which slowly petrifies and kills those 
 who fall into the habit of fixed opinions. 
 
 " Truly he who marries and has children," says 
 Bacon, " gives hostages to fortune," but our generation 
 is giving the lie direct to this seemingly profound asser- 
 tion. The point that matters is to preserve an un- 
 biased mind — " the fight's the thing." Browning 
 dimly recognised it in the unlit lamp and the ungirt 
 loin, though he spoilt his ideal by that dreadful line im- 
 mediately following, but this is ethical and I am here to 
 discuss the artistic, so far as they can be differentiated* 
 
THE MODERN NOVEL 149 
 
 Beresford is exactly typical of his school ; he is what 
 we call, in our ordinary language, " absolutely straight," 
 and fearless ; the world is an unweeded garden, things 
 rank and gross possess it merely. Instead of acquies- 
 cing in this quite true Shakespearean remark, instead of 
 shutting its eyes to it as uncomfortable and shocking, 
 the new generation forges straight ahead, intent only 
 on solution. Now in the first place it is quite likely 
 (though I don't believe this) that there isn't one ; it 
 doesn't seem to me to matter if there isn't ; everything 
 is relative, but the joy lies in the search if the end be 
 but a chimera. Secondly, such a search makes for dis- 
 content and unhappiness- acute unhappiness, atoned 
 for, we think, by moments of sheer ecstasy undreamt 
 of by the rest of the world. 
 
 It is this sense of directness of aim, in spite of causing 
 misery, that attracts us, in the first place, to perhaps 
 the best known and most widely read of this school, 
 Compton Mackenzie. I want, so far as possible, to 
 avoid comparison, because I firmly feel that out of my 
 score or so of great writers ten at least stand right out 
 from their generation and deserve to live so long as 
 English literature is read. Mackenzie may or may 
 not be one of these ten — he is certainly not the leader. 
 
 It is difficult to speak in cold, critical terms of a book 
 which all the reviewers (once given a lead) hailed as one 
 of the masterpieces of our language. 
 
 In the first place, as with Meredith, we can at once 
 place our finger on one characteristic and praise God for 
 Mackenzie's intellect ; his novels are certainly among 
 the cleverest. But far more important than that is his 
 sense of beauty : not the pseudo- romantic, bizarre sort of 
 beauty with which some people credit him, owing to his 
 unfortunate love of archaic forms, but the passionate 
 love of precise, pellucid phrases, and it is this sense of 
 
150 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 beauty which enables us to probe into the secrets of 
 youth and see a picture of a Public School boy's life, 
 which is not merely so much wasted paper, but then, of 
 course, it is so frightfully unfair to take a school like 
 St Paul's, situated right in the heart of London ; the 
 influences that acted on Michael's life were mainly from 
 without the school. At Oxford he tries to give an 
 impression of the callow life of the undergraduate, 
 forgetful of the fact that there is no typical Oxford or 
 typical Cambridge. All that you can say of either is 
 that exquisite poems might be written of the feet of the 
 young men who pass so very quickly, of the amazing 
 lack of sympathy they receive with any of the emotional 
 crises they pass through — in other words, that to 
 each individual soul the university means something 
 quite different from what it means to everybody else. 
 And Compton Mackenzie falls into the same error 
 which lesser men naturally do, of thinking that 
 "bonners" and "brekkers" and theatre " rags " and 
 " bumpers " matter in the least. 
 
 No; the secret of Compton Mackenzie's claim to 
 greatness lies in this one single sentence : 
 
 li Soon will come a great war and everybody will dis- 
 cover it has come either because people are Christians 
 or because they are not Christians. Nobody will think 
 it is because each man wants to interfere with the 
 conduct of his neighbour." 
 
 That is where Mackenzie comes into line with my 
 argument. In spite of all his delving in the depths - 
 and I am afraid I hold with that time-honoured adage 
 that we must all eat our peck of dirt before we die — he 
 has a clear, sane vision — excess of vice, like excess of 
 virtue, is a crime — in either case comes the interference 
 with the conduct of one's neighbour- interference not 
 emanating from sympathy, but proceeding from that 
 
THE MODERN NOVEL 151 
 
 police-like vigilance which is so prominent a feature of 
 the idle and the obtuse. 
 
 Sinister Street is not satisfactory because it is not 
 typical in its public School picture nor cannot be by 
 the nature of things in its view of Oxford, and is too 
 obviously out to paint extremes in the rest of the book. 
 Nobody but a bishop or the reader of the Northcliffe 
 feuilletons would believe that such men as Meats exist 
 in such quantities as to warrant inclusion in a work of 
 art. 
 
 The counter-argument, that the heroes of the modern 
 novelists are not typical, is quite untrue ; there are vast 
 numbers of people now growing up who are dissatisfied 
 with everything, full of doubts with regard to all the 
 things which the last generation held as sacred. There 
 looms before them an abyss of unfathomable depth, full 
 of horrors unless they are helped by pictures of others 
 in like case with themselves. We are discovering that 
 life isn't in the least what we thought it was going to 
 be ; everybody fails us when we turn for support except 
 this band of writers who are themselves suffering and 
 experiencing. 
 
 But I don't want to leave Compton Mackenzie on 
 the result of one and that his worst book. 
 
 In Carnival he showed us the life of a typical modern 
 girl. Has it ever struck you how many country 
 solicitors' daughters, and others who had been hedged 
 in and barred off from any sane view of life as a whole, 
 have been suddenly thrown into violent contact with 
 the crudity of it — of late in munition factories and 
 elsewhere ? They too are learning from experience, the 
 sternest but only true school of life. To what can they 
 turn for support in an emergency with any hope of a 
 rational answer to their questions except to men of the 
 calibre I am quoting ? It isn't at all a question of 
 
152 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 resisting temptation ; it's solely a question of how to 
 fulfil your destiny and thereby attain true nobility of 
 character. The fugitive and cloistered virtue no longer 
 exists; ignorance is immoral, unforgivable, just in pro- 
 portion as it is senseless and needless. 
 
 Jenny had to learn her hard lesson in the school of 
 life, than which no lesson can be harder, to differentiate 
 between love and passion, to uproot the animalism 
 that still lurks, cloven-footed, in primitive human 
 nature, and replace it by that divine fervour which 
 anybody can attain once he gives up the canting, old- 
 fashioned, effete theories about sex. Mackenzie's high- 
 water mark is reached in his latest novel, Guy and 
 Pauline, which is simply The Statue and the Bust re- 
 written : 
 
 Where is the use of the lips' red charm. 
 The heaven of hair, the pride of the brow 
 And the blood that blues the inside arm — 
 Unless we turn, as the soul knows how, 
 The earthly gift to an end divine ? 
 
 That is the secret of everything. Here we have an 
 idyllic picture set in an exquisitely beautiful setting of 
 two charming people madly in love with each other, 
 and watch, with agony in our hearts, the gradual diminu- 
 tion of passion, the gradual realisation on the part of 
 each of them that they were insufficient for each other 
 — a book that might have saved many unions. There 
 is nothing like it in the language ; it is the epic of 
 mistaken ideals. 
 
 I take Hugh Walpole next because he is in some 
 degree akin to Mackenzie, not. I mean, in the accidental 
 fact that they both, like so many of the younger school, 
 always go to Cornwall for their setting, but because of 
 that far more important feature, their unanimity in 
 
THE MODERN NOVEL 153 
 
 their outlook on life. The whole of Mr Walpole's text 
 lies on the first and last pages of Fortitude. 'Tisn't life 
 that matters 'tis the courage you bring to it. 
 
 Peter Westcott, imaginative, crude, potentially a 
 genius possessed of all the splendours and terrors which 
 that word implies , suffers abominably, unjustly, at the 
 hands of a girl brought up just in the way that all 
 these men so deprecate, the way of ignorance and 
 fear, of convention and second-hand opinions- Peter 
 thinks that in her he will find that illimitable affection 
 that is so necessary for him. She fails him. and he is 
 utterly broken temporarily. We leave him on the 
 Cornish moor listening to the new beatitudes which 
 are so pure, so fine, so intensely typical of the new and 
 glorious England which is now in its birth throes: 
 Blessed be pain and torment and every torture of the 
 body. Blessed be plague and pestilence and the illness 
 of nations. Blessed be all loss and failure of friends 
 and sacrifice of love. Blessed be the destruction of all 
 possessions, the ruin of all property, fine cities and great 
 palaces. Blessed be the disappointment of all ambi- 
 tions. Blessed be all failure and the ruin of every 
 earthly hope. Blessed be all sorrows, torments, hard- 
 ships, endurances that demand courage. Blessed be 
 these things— for of these things cometh the making of 
 a man. 
 
 You see how they all hang together in their splendid 
 creec [ — no t home comforts but homeless discomforts, 
 not safety but danger, not ignorance but experience, 
 not self-complacency but hideous doubts, not the pre- 
 tence of love but the eternal search after the unattain- 
 able : this is the gospel of to-day. The secret lies in 
 dissatisfaction, strife and energy, the glorious buffeting 
 and training of the soul. 
 
 Gilbert Caiman, intellectually superior to most of the 
 
154 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 school, yet comes to the same conclusion. " If ever 
 you find yourself faced with a risk, take it," concludes 
 old Mole, after a life of torture and the disillusionment 
 of experience. There is a thing called yesterday, but 
 that is only the dust-bin at the door, into which we cast 
 our refuse, our failures, our worn-out souls. There is a 
 thing called to-morrow, bursting with far better things 
 than those which we have discarded. But into to-day 
 the whole passionate force of the universe is poured — 
 and therefore to-day is marvellous. 
 
 There are few men and women born without the 
 kernel of passion, but what do they do with it ? Passion 
 is looked upon by our elders — who have outlived it, 
 crushed it, controlled it so well that it has vanished — 
 as something positively indecent — whereas passion 
 is only the prelude, the very necessary prelude to ideal- 
 ism (so laughed at in England), to the belief that there 
 is a wisdom greater than the wisdom of men. In its 
 place we have bowed the knee to the Baal of hypocrisy, 
 so that every man's home becomes a theatre — a care- 
 fully kept up pretence, everything stunted, soul, 
 affections, human passions. Now we come to an age 
 tired of this amazing puppet show in the home, and 
 what happens ? What happened to the Chinese 
 woman's feet when unbound ? They cause her agonies 
 of suffering, so that she cannot walk — so it has been 
 with us. That is the theme of "Old Mole" — 
 described by one leading reviewer as a " diverting 
 study." About as diverting as Othello. That is what 
 the English reading public want — diversion. That is 
 what I ought to be writing a paper on — -'The Modern 
 English Novel — Some Agencies of Diversion, with Illus- 
 trative Readings from the works of Mrs Humphry 
 Ward, Jeffery Farnol, John Buchan, Ian Hay, 
 Marjorie Bowen, Lucas Malet, Beatrice Harraden, 
 
THE MODERN NOVEL 155 
 
 Jessie Pope, Arnold Lunn, E. V. Lucas, E. F. Benson, 
 Gilbert Parker and Agnes and Egerton Castle." It is 
 just because, according to my theory, the modern novel 
 is not a diversion at all, but a new religion, an essential 
 factor in education, a complete guide to the art of 
 living, that I trouble to write a paper on it at all — after 
 which outburst, let me get on with my job. 
 
 Mr E. C. Booth has two novels to his credit, The Cliff- 
 End, now ten years old, and Fondle, quite recent— 
 that place him, as my Times reviewer would say, among 
 those that have to be reckoned with. 
 
 It is slightly divergent from the school which I am 
 trying to depict, and owes nothing, so far as I can see, to 
 any of them, and yet, in spite of its glaring differences, 
 it has this in common : its main object is analysis — 
 analysis of the soul of the flighty, lonely daughter of a 
 country parson and of her steadfast wheelwright lover, 
 Fondie. Her dreadful vulgarity and odious rural 
 limitations have the effect, which no doubt Mr Booth 
 intends them to have, of making us refuse to rest con- 
 tent until we have smashed for ever a state of things 
 which permits of a beautiful flower like this being be- 
 smirched and trodden under — wasted, in a word. The 
 love of Fondie is beautiful, the face and form of Blanche 
 are beautiful, and yet both these things are wantonly 
 destroyed — for want of what ? Experience. . . . By 
 reason of that path of ignorance on which I have been 
 harping. Blanche is driven to drown herself ; we feel 
 that it was the only way ; with things as they are such 
 ridiculous waste was the only solution . . . but whose 
 the fault ? Most clearly does the stern answer come : 
 Mine — yours — everyone's. " I didn't know — I didn't 
 know," she cries. 
 
 Now at any rate she can never grow old, age haunt 
 her with no terrors, Respectability never claim her as her 
 
156 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 rightful prey, writing upon her face the careworn lines 
 and characters with which she signalises her elect. God's 
 justice is greater than man's justice, God's wisdom than 
 man's wisdom, God's love than man's love, and God's 
 forgiveness than man's. Yet Fondie, in spite of all, 
 forgave all, loving her so much. We may leave it with 
 the Infinite to love and forgive more than man, with 
 all his limitations and narrow codes. So runs the 
 indictment ; the story is commonplace, ordinary — to 
 be seen every day in the news columns and in the serial 
 columns of every halfpenny paper. 
 
 It is the attitude with which the author regards the 
 story, the beauty of his nature expressed in the beauty 
 of his language that makes us include him in the list of 
 those who matter. Such things are, such things ought 
 not to be. In common with the rest of his contem- 
 poraries, he does not write merely to interest by narra- 
 tive, as the eighteenth-century novelists did, but to drive 
 a message home. These novels are all lay sermons— 
 well, why not ? I refuse to submit to the absurd dictum 
 that art is self-sufficing and serves no useful purpose — 
 all that nonsense about " beating beautiful ineffectual 
 wings," and so on. The finest art is just the finest 
 sermon in the world. 
 
 Mr St John Lucas brings us back to the main body 
 again : we can leave Mr Booth safely guarding our 
 flank. In The First Round, published seven years ago, 
 and its sequel, April Folly, we reach, perhaps, the 
 high- water mark of the school. 
 
 In the first place, though this is partially irrelevant, 
 The First Bound contains the finest picture of Public 
 School life as it really is that has ever been printed. 
 I know that Mr Walpole, in Mr Perrin and Mr Traill, 
 did for a certain sort of school what Compton 
 Mackenzie did for a certain sort of man — both these 
 
THE MODERN NOVEL 157 
 
 things may have been necessary. Personally, I think 
 Mr Walpole's novel was necessary, but the true 
 artist gives us the typical, and the school depicted 
 in The First Round might equally well be Sherborne, 
 Winchester, Wellington, Uppingham or Shrewsbury. 
 It is the life story of a boy with the aesthetic faculties 
 well developed ; he has the makings of a great 
 musician. Now there are more of these types — types 
 that are supra-normal — than are commonly allowed 
 for, and they suffer indescribable torture wherever 
 they are. Denis Yorke's first round in the battle 
 of life is an extremely severe one, and he comes 
 out of it just as Peter Westcott in Mr Walpole's 
 book — cleaner, saner, truer to the ideal. Sympathy 
 and forgetfulness of self — this was the answer to 
 the riddle of life, the magic talisman that made 
 existence beautiful in the darkest places, the great 
 compensation for all the poverty and suffering and 
 injustice in the world. The path was now plain. A 
 belief in others — this was the true path, not coldly 
 isolated, as he had thought, but full of hosts of other 
 pilgrims, on a journey where Love himself forbade that 
 even the vilest should fall by the wayside for lack of 
 succour from his comrades. In the sequel we see 
 where this theory lands him. One of his pupils (he be- 
 comes a teacher of music) falls madly in love with him, 
 and he is at present deceived into thinking that he loves 
 her. . . . When he finds out, nothing will alter him 
 from his determination to carry it through, but she 
 finds out and leaves him. They meet years afterwards 
 — an anticlimax, of course, like everything in life — a 
 miserable conversation follows, and they separate again. 
 An old man who has watched the meeting accosts the 
 hero, and leaves him with this advice. " I've seen the 
 world," he said. " I know life. Take an old man's 
 
158 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 advice and never do that — never hurt a woman. 
 Women, women give us everything, love and adoration 
 and pity, and then we don't know how to treat them, 
 and they go away crying. They lay their hearts in the 
 road and we trample on them. Never do that, young 
 sir, never do that." 
 
 The irony of it — the same old lesson — the same 
 causes, the same effect, misunderstanding, misery, 
 neglect all through the one agency — ignorance. " He 
 didn't know — he didn't know." 
 
 You must think that I have been appallingly serious, 
 that after all, as the philosopher says, " Nothing matters 
 half so much as we think it does." On the other hand, 
 though, I grant you that at once it is equally true that 
 everything matters a great deal more than we think it 
 does. 
 
 There is light-hearted, full-blooded humour in every 
 single one of these novels (with the exception, perhaps, 
 of Conrad's) : without it half the philosophy would 
 be lost. These young men do not take themselves 
 quite so seriously as I have perhaps led you to 
 think, but I have only just time to touch upon the 
 really salient features. I dare not pretend to offer 
 you anything like a complete picture of (for instance) 
 the sympathy with which they draw the very people 
 who are the prime movers of all the evil the parents, 
 the schoolmasters, the parochial-minded advisers of 
 their youth. They are all treated with a quite astonish- 
 ing courtesy, their good points given full play ; and 
 they have, of course, any number of good qualities. 
 They have their awful tragedies too ; the only thing is 
 that they are mercifully saved by their very blindness 
 from ever realising them to the full extent. 
 
 Had I time I would press home the need for reading 
 the humorists pure and simple, the inimitable Mr 
 
THE MODERN NOVEL 159 
 
 Munro, Stephen Leacock, E. V. Lucas, James Stephens, 
 G. K. Chesterton (who has, of course, as much of a 
 serious axe to grind as any of them), and so on : they 
 are as essential to our complete digestion and aesthetic 
 enjoyment as hors d'ceuvre, or sweets or succulent entree, 
 but they do not contain the body of the meal. I am 
 constrained to dwell only on the soul-satisfying meat 
 course — and your objection, every man's objection, to 
 meat is that it contains blood. Vegetarians and other 
 anaemic people (I am striving not to be unfair) hate the 
 thought of thinking of what I must, for hurry's sake, 
 call the realistic, naturalistic school of meat. I am 
 concluding on a general note. 
 
 The realists, I reiterate, do not dwell on the sordid side 
 of life out of a love of the sordid, nor on the ugly because 
 they prefer ugliness to the beautiful. " We do not," in 
 George Moore's words, " always choose what you call 
 unpleasant subjects, but we do try to get at the roots of 
 things : and the basis of life being material, the analyst 
 sooner or later finds himself invariably handling what 
 this sentimental age calls coarse . . . the novel if it be 
 anything is contemporary history [I refer you to Dead 
 Yesterday and Mr Britling for confirmation of this], an 
 exact and complete reproduction of the social surround- 
 ings of the age we live in. 
 
 ' 4 Seen from afar all things in nature are of equal 
 worth and the meanest things when viewed with the 
 eyes of God are raised to heights of tragic awe which 
 conventionality would limit to the deaths of kings and 
 patriots." 
 
 It is rubbish to suppose that the Realists adopted 
 the idea of unhappy endings because they loved 
 them; like Shakespeare, they observed that certain 
 causes produce certain effects, and they refused 
 to shut their eyes to a fact which the whole world 
 
160 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 already knows. Conversely, or rather hence, neutral 
 endings predominate in this school of writing because 
 they also — notoriously — predominate in real life. But 
 all this talk of unhappiness does not detract from 
 beauty ; such an argument is only an illustration of the 
 terrible way in which our minds get confused. Rather 
 have the Realists discovered a new beauty in things, the 
 loveliness that lies in obscure places, the splendour of 
 sordidness, humility and pain. They have taught us 
 that beauty, like the Holy Spirit, blows where it lists — 
 no true Realist but is an Idealist too. 
 
VI 
 MODERN DRAMA 
 
 TWO totally different factors have led me to 
 try to elucidate exactly whither we are tending 
 in our stagecraft at the present time : (1) the 
 hubbub caused by certain generals and bishops who 
 see in "revue" nothing but '' suggest iveness " and 
 a vicious lure ; and (2) the amazingly brilliant critical 
 work of the late Mr Dixon Scott, published recently 
 under the title of Men of Letters, 
 
 With regard to the theatre of to-day the most obvious 
 criticism to make is that out of all the thirty or so 
 plays now running in London, every one of which draws 
 a full house every night, only two are by men oi re- 
 cognised standing in the dramatic world, and one of 
 these is a revival. And yet only three years ago our 
 most enlightened and unbiased historians were stat- 
 ing quite definitely that the novel had had its day and 
 was immediately to be supplanted by a literary revival 
 in drama which should astonish the world. The 
 machine-made plays of Labriche and Sardou had been 
 ousted by the freer, more naturalistic school of Ibsen. 
 The stage had become a platform for the discussion of 
 all the intricate problems of modern life, the emancipa- 
 tion of women, the crime of poverty, false romanticism, 
 Home Rule, the struggle between labour and capital, 
 the evils that arose from all forms of stereotyped con- 
 ventions, and so on. Most of the leading geniuses of our 
 time had contributed their quota to these polemical 
 discourses, nearly always with brilliance, if not with an 
 altogether satisfactory knowledge of craftsmanship and 
 l 161 
 
162 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 technique. There were also meteoric flights of poetic 
 geniuses who neither followed nor founded any school, 
 but flashed brilliantly for an hour and then swept by. 
 
 Then the war came, and with it the cessation of all 
 serious drama. All domestic problems vanished before 
 the one great, overwhelming one of coping with the 
 enemy, and this was scarcely one to brook being dis- 
 cussed on the boards. Moreover, there was no argu- 
 ment ; the maximum output of energy directed into 
 its best channels was the only theme of the ardent 
 patriots. The nerves of the nation became tense, its 
 muscles taut ; we all went into training. The result 
 was that we temporarily lost sight of art or its uses. 
 Relaxation we understood to be necessary for all of us, 
 else why should soldiers ever be granted leave ? The 
 point was : What sort of relaxation was best for the 
 fighter and worker ? We were not long left in doubt. 
 America stepped into the breach left by the legitimate 
 drama's decease and charmed us with " revue." 
 Musical comedy maintained a rather precarious hold 
 on its conservative lovers, comedy and tragedy proper 
 died, the music-halls, in order to save their lives, were 
 compelled to abandon isolated "turns " for this new 
 craze, and as a result we have now the choice between 
 " revue " and . . . nothing. 
 
 Men back from the front were supplied with the 
 dishes for which their souls ached : lightness, prettiness, 
 merriment, catchy songs, colour, youth, and, in modera- 
 tion (because of its exceeding rarity), beauty. They 
 found it possible to forget all the mud and blood, the 
 horror of separation and death ; for three hours they 
 could laugh whole-heartedly, lose themselves in delight 
 and carry away impressions of gaiety which would 
 buoy them up in the dark moments which threatened 
 their future. 
 
MODERN DRAMA 168 
 
 Suddenly a warning voice sounded : the voice oi a 
 man whom all Englishmen respect ; a second followed ; 
 a third . . . and half the nation began to repeat the 
 admonition. "These 'revues' are vulgar, naughty, 
 even vicious ; they lead men on to active evil ; they 
 affect our morals ; we are becoming as a result loose, 
 decadent, foul-minded." It was an astonishing 
 thought. Most of us in our heart of hearts had deplored 
 the decay of all serious plays, but it was easy to under- 
 stand that a man back from the front would not wish 
 to be wearied with the domestic problems of Poor Law 
 and housing abuses ; on the other hand, we had heard 
 so much of the renaissance of a poetic spirit in the 
 trenches that we thought that some genius might have 
 produced a literary drama to satisfy the craving for 
 beauty which w r e all confess to. But it had never 
 struck us that these gossamer-like, inconsequent, 
 jovial " revues " were active agents of the devil : we 
 had taken them as narcotics. That they were fre- 
 quently dull, rarely as witty as we could have wished, 
 with no definite point, we knew ; so were many sermons, 
 but we did not stigmatise sermons as immoral on that 
 account ; that many of the girls were pretty and 
 vivacious we hoped, but did not always find, but surely 
 it was possible to like prettiness and youthful charm 
 without debasing that liking into something worse. 
 Frankly, we looked in vain for those demoralising 
 features which were said to be the ruin of our man- 
 hood. The jokes, such as they were, seemed to be in 
 much better taste than those current in the music- 
 halls and musical comedies of five years ago ; they 
 were also a trifle less dull ; once or twice they almost 
 approached the subtle . . . but you don't want 
 subtlety in a narcotic. You require no stimulus to 
 the intellect, rather is the object to soothe it, to send your 
 
164 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 thinking powers to sleep. That object the creators 
 oi' " revue " seem to me to have produced. 
 
 I am amazed at the hue and cry raised at present 
 against these so necessary amusements, but it does 
 indirectly raise the question of serious acting. 
 
 Surely there must by now be many people who are 
 tired of an interminable round of " telephone-scenes," 
 of the effect (once so bizarre and delectable) of play- 
 ing the " revue " backwards, of jingling, meaningless 
 rhymes, and songs that drive you desperate with their 
 thinness of melody and lack of originality in theme. 
 
 It is time a new dramatist arose to carry on the high 
 traditions of 1913, to give us fresh ideas and nobler 
 ideals, to amuse us, not by buffoonery, but by subtlety 
 and charm, to ensnare us artistically. We do not want 
 merely the revival of Shakesjoeare and Sheridan, we 
 want a fresh impetus in the world of drama as we have 
 in the sphere of poetry and painting, fiction and music. 
 Why is it that the theatre alone has played us false 
 in this crisis ? In the face of incredible difficulties, 
 artists and musicians have kept the flame of beauty 
 alive in our hearts ; it is time beauty returned to the 
 stage. At the present day most thinking men and 
 women seek pleasure anywhere but in the theatre : 
 the galleries are crowded, the concert-halls better 
 attended than ever before. The only reason why the 
 " revues " are full is because everyone necessarily 
 gravitates in war-time to London. The country is 
 unbearable ; we tend to become introspective, which 
 spells madness in these days. Being in London, we 
 naturally attend its theatres . . . consequently money 
 is pouring into the laps of the managers and proprietors. 
 But if only a little courage could be cultivated by these 
 most conservative purveyors of amusement 1 think that 
 they would find that Brighouse and Barrie are not the 
 
MODERN DRAMA 165 
 
 only serious playwrights who are able to command our 
 attention. Where are Granville Barker, Shaw, Arnold 
 Bennett, Masefield and Chesterton ? — to mention the 
 most obvious quintette. 
 
 Do the theatre owners really think, because there is a 
 war on, that we are unable to appreciate the artistry 
 of such plays as The Madras House, Nan, Magic, The 
 Great Adventure, or How He Lied to Her Husband ? 
 It has already been proved that we cannot tolerate 
 melodramatic rubbish like The Hawk. We are much 
 more critical, much more alert than we used to be, as a 
 natural consequence of our quadrupled energy. We do 
 not want eternal narcotics as our refection ; after a 
 time they cease to take effect. A change of environment, 
 not mere blankness, is the best refreshment for the 
 body and brain, the jaded munitioneer or the wounded 
 warrior. It is just as much a national service for our 
 great playwrights to exert their powers on our behalf 
 as it is for those of us whose lot lies in more mundane 
 duties to do what we best can for the cause to which 
 we are pledged. Who then are the men we look to to 
 come forward and " cleanse our stage," and what is it 
 that we expect from them ? 
 
 It is at this point that I would introduce Mr Dixon 
 Scott's critical essays to the notice of those unfortunates 
 who are as yet unfamiliar with them. 
 
 Many critics, particularly Mr Chesterton, have written 
 brilliant expositions of the work of Bernard Shaw, but 
 no one has got so close to the heart of the matter as 
 Mr Dixon Scott. To find out exactly what Shaw has 
 done for the stage we have to go back some years, to 
 the days, in fact, when he set out, Quixote-like, to make 
 the theatre " a factory of thought, a prompter of con- 
 science, an elucidator of conduct, an armoury against 
 despair and dullness, and a temple of the Ascent of 
 
166 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Man "... all this simply because he happened to 
 be dramatic critic of The Saturday Review, for, as Mr 
 Dixon Scott has pointed out. Shaw's besetting weakness 
 is a certain stubborn pride of soul which cannot permit 
 him to admit, even in a whisper to himself, that the 
 cause he is engaged in is not crucial. As Rodin has 
 said, susceptible to impressions like all artists and a 
 philosopher at the same time Shaw cannot do other- 
 wise than deceive himself. At any rate by 1898 he 
 had deceived himself into thinking that the drama was 
 his special mission. Now in the first place he lacked 
 the prime essential of all dramatists, the quality of an 
 imaginative sympathy : the quality of just watching 
 with ever-growing delight the doings of every sort and 
 size of people ; no one could be less fitted than he was 
 to give the public the sort of play that they ought to 
 have had. He was intolerant of his audience's stupidity 
 and viciousness, " part of them nine-tenths chapel- 
 goers by temperament, and the remainder ten-tenths 
 blackguards." His earl y training in socialism had 
 made him unsociable, and a moment's thought will 
 convince us of the limitations of a playwright who 
 wantonly narrows his range because of his misunder- 
 standing of and contempt for the people. 
 
 Secondly, the very brilliance of his diction, terse, in- 
 tellectually incisive, keen and crisp as it had become by 
 years of practice, necessarily cut him adrift from more 
 than nine-tenths of his fellow-men. He could only 
 write definite dialogue, so all his characters have to be 
 men and women of quite definite convictions. All the 
 dramatis personam seem to belong to one exclusive caste. 
 Thirdly, this exclusiveness made him innocently accept 
 what was then known as the "New Woman" (how 
 grotesque and old-fashioned she seems to-day) as woman. 
 The amazing thing is that in spite of these limitations — 
 
MODERN DRAMA 107 
 
 and it is imperative that we should grasp what they mean 
 — Shaw's plays do remain the most tonic of our time. 
 Behind it all he is actuated by a passion for purity, 
 gentleness, truth, justice and beauty ; once you 
 realise this, and regard these plays with the sympathy 
 they doggedly deride then you will receive the help 
 which they hunger to offer. Such is Mr Dixon Scott's 
 solution of the vexed question of Shavian drama, and 
 it is, I think, a fairly conclusive one. Is there no room 
 for these intellectual fireworks to-day ? Surely there 
 must be thousands of tired men and women who would 
 revel in a revival of Fanny's First Play or Candida even 
 if Shaw could not be induced to write on some fresh 
 topic. Shaw on Local Tribunals, on the American 
 Invasion of the Stage, on the New Army, the New 
 Woman, the Rich Munition Worker would be richly 
 humorous, delightfully irritating. It is not necessary 
 to believe in Shaw's creed to enjoy his plays ; to take 
 them too seriously is to lose half the fun, but to allow a 
 whole winter season to run without giving him a chance 
 of standing on his head is to deprive ourselves of 
 one of the most mirth-provoking and intellectually 
 stimulating treats imaginable. 
 
 For those who refuse to see the amusing side of 
 Shaw's polemical discourses on strikes and morals I 
 would suggest that a revival of Oscar Wilde's artificial 
 comedies should be tried. There at any rate will be 
 no talk of the poor man's rights, for the simple reason 
 that there are no poor in his world. There is Jermyn 
 Street, Piccadilly, Half -Moon Street, just as there used 
 to be Bath and Vauxhall Gardens. There are no 
 problems of poverty any more than there are problems 
 of morals. There is just artistry, delicacy and the 
 beauty of a hothouse plant, and with it silvery laughter, 
 quiet and self-complacent : not at all a bad recipe 
 
168 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 for those who wish to forget the pain and lies that 
 await them outside the theatre. It is no question of 
 holding the mirror up to nature either with Shaw or 
 Wilde any more than it was with Congreve and his 
 fellow Restoration dramatists. It is, we may say with 
 R. L. Stevenson, with the object of escaping from life 
 that we turn to books or the stage to-day. No one 
 wants to see our actual conflict with the powers of 
 evil depicted on the London stage. We want to be 
 amused : why not permit society's licensed jesters of 
 the last two decades to come and cut their capers before 
 us once again ? Age cannot wither nor custom stale 
 their artificial humour. 
 
 Again, what has happened to the Irish players ? 
 Only a few years ago we were all agog with enthusiasm 
 over the "Celtic Revival," with the sparkling, astringent, 
 tonic qualities of Synge and his compatriots, Yeats, 
 Lady Gregory, St John Irvine, Rutherford Mayne, 
 Lennox Robinson and the rest of them. 
 
 Certainly we find a different school of thought 
 catered for again here. There is no question of chang- 
 ing the world. Synge writes down in a musical, 
 rhythmical prose that has never been equalled before 
 nor since exactly what he heard and saw in those remote 
 islands off the west of Ireland. Is there no room to-day 
 for such a play as The Well of the Saints, with its central 
 motif of the tragedy of fulfilled desire ; do we no 
 longer care to witness artistic representations of world- 
 truths ? To judge from letters and articles in the Press, 
 we are only just beginning to be alive to them : why 
 then banish them from the stage ? Do our theatrical 
 managers really believe that a revival of The Playboy 
 of the Western World would involve financial loss ? 
 Why, there never was a time when men and women 
 were so interested in the development of the soul 
 
MODERN DRAMA 169 
 
 within us. War has made many of us " likely gaffers 
 in the end of all " who might otherwise have been content 
 to crawl from cradle to grave feckless, blind, un- 
 ambitious and useless as Christy Mahon was before 
 Pegeen Mike (the prototype of war) awoke in him self- 
 confidence and the thousand latent talents which were 
 to make a man of him. There is no sermonising here, 
 but only a vast imaginative sympathy, a telling sense 
 of dramatic values and the haunting melody of a patois 
 lew of us had ever appreciated before. There was, 
 moreover, acting of a kind we had never seen in England ; 
 these Irish players appeared merely to be living their 
 ordinary lives and we privileged to look through the 
 windows of their cottages as they went about their 
 business, ignorant of our presence. 
 
 No wonder the best critics became optimistic and 
 prophesied a brave future for the drama . . . but why 
 have war's alarms driven them from our midst ? We 
 need them now more than ever we did. 
 
 Why did the repertory system make such headway 
 in Dublin, Glasgow, Birmingham, Manchester and 
 Bristol and fail ignominiously in London ? There can be 
 no doubt that salvation lies in this system and in this 
 alone. . . . Such a play as Mr Chesterton's Magic 
 has a perennial charm. It can no more grow stale 
 than Max Beerbohm's cartoons or Henry James's 
 novels can. It is for all time. That being so, there is 
 no need to put it on for two hundred nights and then 
 consign it to oblivion as is done with the majority of 
 long-run plays, the machine-made melodrama, the 
 treacly sentimental comedy, the vacuous musical (!) 
 farce or the pageant-play. In common with the works 
 of other geniuses which deal with beauty and the eternal 
 verities it ought to take its turn for a fortnight, say, 
 sandwiched between Strife and The Tragedy of Nan, 
 
170 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 then be given a rest and produced again in three or 
 four months. It is just such a fantasy as will whirl 
 you away into a wonderland of pure mirth mingled 
 with real pathos, where shrewdness and intellect are 
 not blunted but rather exhilarated and sharpened. It 
 leaves you thinking, as you come out, over the many 
 suggestions, the flashes of insight into the meaning of 
 life which encrust the play like so many rich jewels. 
 It has the gift, which is almost the criterion of every 
 good play, of not leaving you where it found you. You 
 have advanced yet another rung on the difficult ladder 
 of life. 
 
 All these men fulfil Synge's dictum that "on the 
 stage one must have reality, and one must have joy." 
 Mr Granville Barker, the pierrot on pilgrimage, is the 
 next playwright on whom the critical genius of Mr 
 Dixon Scott alights : of his plays he picks out The 
 Madras House as the high- water mark of his genius. 
 " Here we have," says Mr Scott, " a beautiful loyalty to 
 life, an exquisitely natural unfurling and effoliation of 
 character and motive, undeflected by an arbitrary 
 concejDt or merely intellectual creed ; a deliciously fluent 
 pose, balance, grace of construction and design ; beauty 
 comes flying back to this play, a glittering invader, 
 gloriously flushing and confirming all its action." In 
 eighteen years Mr Barker has written only four plays, 
 but each of these belongs to the imperishable type which 
 will long outlast the generation for whom they were 
 written ; for eighteen years he has been laboriously, 
 slowly cutting letters out afresh, in order that he can 
 see and use the virgin ore beneath our phrases, fighting 
 down to something dense as metal, as enduring as a 
 marble pavement underneath, economical as a cable- 
 gram and yet with a charm, grace and elegance, a 
 silvery slenderness. a quivering "life" like the spring 
 
MODERN DRAMA 171 
 
 of a sword-blade ; by a magic of fusion, the incom- 
 patible qualities of curtness and charm are made one. 
 The Marrying of Ann Leete, Mr Dixon Scott calls our 
 one genuine modern tragedy of manners. Mr Granville 
 Barker has been frequently bracketed with Shaw by 
 undiscerning critics, whereas the truth lies in the fact 
 that they are totally opposed. Shaw, convinced that 
 he has the truth in his pocket, flings it in our faces with 
 contempt, while Mr Barker watches us ordinary 
 mortals with a wistful wonder, like a wondering pierrot 
 searching for the truth, prefacing every statement with 
 a tentative, whimsical "perhaps." 
 
 Mr Barker sets his characters free in his mimic, 
 magic world, whence all accidentals have been banished, 
 w T here they can move and change and respond without 
 any interference, and lets them evolve there as they 
 will (none of Shaw's creatures ever evolve !), trusting 
 the spark of vitality with which, as a creator, he has 
 endowed them to guide them in accordance with the 
 final laws of life ; as Philip says at the close of The 
 Madras House: "Male and female created He them 
 . . . and left us to do the rest. Men and women are a 
 long time in the making, aren't they ? " 
 
 This is miles in advance of the Shavian code of ethics. 
 There is a quietness about Barker which is quite foreign 
 to Shaw, a breadth of vision which we should welcome 
 with open arms on the stage to-day if only we were 
 permitted to witness it. 
 
 Harold Brighouse alone of the Mancunian school has 
 a play now running. But what of his far greater con- 
 temporary and friend, Stanley Houghton ? I am not 
 pretending that The Younger Generation and Hindle 
 Wakes show us Houghton working in his true medium ; 
 he was cut off before he really found himself. Mr 
 Dixon Scott is probably correct in his inference that 
 
172 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 another five years would have seen the dramatist as a 
 successful writer of fiction. The immediate point at 
 issue is that there was much in his plays which we 
 deplore the want of to-day. He may have been imita- 
 tive : we can smell Shaw, Wilde, Hankin, Bennett, 
 and even Synge in most of his work, but he wrested 
 from these a sense of witty and crisp dialogue which is 
 altogether dead now. 
 
 In his plays he may, as Mr Brighouse asserts, have 
 observed life from the comic writer's point of view, 
 which is not the poet's. For his art, not the beauty of 
 life, but the absurdities and hypocrisies of daily exist- 
 ence., were the targets of his aim. Even so Ave may be 
 duly grateful for such a manifestation of the Comic 
 Spirit, for she is woefully lacking in the theatre to-day. 
 Hindle Wakes and The Younger Generation did at least 
 bring reality back to the stage, and also joy : they 
 woke us up to the fact that " even in the North " (so 
 provincial are Ave Southrons !) things are moving ; 
 the youth of the age Avas knocking at the door and 
 demanding a right to live its oavii life in its own way. 
 Mr Dixon Scott is hardly just to Houghton ; he is too 
 keen to prove that heAA r as a dramatist by force of circum- 
 stances, a novelist by instinct ; he forgets that even in 
 the little that Ave possess of his dramatic work he shows 
 an insight into character, a sense of " situation," and 
 an amazing shrewdness which are just the qualities 
 we most need on the stage at this juncture. 
 
 He does not moralise like Shaw ; he just stands aside, 
 draws the curtain and lets his characters develop 
 normally, shocking us by their crudity, pleasing us 
 with their reality, tickling our minds with their 
 " foreign " method of speech and code of manners. 
 Mr Brighouse has learnt hoAv effective the Lancashire 
 dialect can be to amuse a London audience. It is on 
 
MODERN DRAMA 173 
 
 the same plane as the Scots brogue in Bunty pulls the 
 Strings or the Irish in the Synge plays. 
 
 The debt owed by the drama to Masefield, that 
 versatile genius who succeeds in whatever form of 
 literary composition he undertakes, is by no means 
 inconsiderable. Pompey the Great no doubt owes its 
 modern note to Ccesar and Cleopatra, but its poetry is 
 all Masefield's own. Xan is an attempt to create a 
 new form of drama in which beauty and the high 
 things of the soul may pass from the stage to the mind, 
 a result of that power of exultation which comes from 
 a delighted brooding on excessive, terrible things. 
 It is only by such a vision as is presented to us in plays 
 of this calibre that the multitude can be brought to 
 the passionate knowledge of things exulting and eternal. 
 
 The short, staccato sentences of Masefield, who always 
 works with an economy of vocabulary little short of 
 astounding, are like scintillating jewels. Like all his 
 great contemporaries, he lets his puppets loose and 
 watches them develop ; no one is ever the same at 
 the end as he was at the beginning of the play, whether 
 actor or audience ; it is all nonsense to pretend that 
 we are depressed by an artistic representation of the 
 terrible ; it is only the exploitation of the sordid by the 
 muck-merchants that revolts us ; there is an intellectual 
 delight to be found in all real tragedy unlike any other 
 sort of delight in the world . . . and yet we are told 
 that because it is war-time we must not have serious 
 plays: "They will make us brood." Nothing 
 could be further from the truth. 
 
 The quarrel, as a matter of fact, goes deeper than that. 
 It is a question of the unintelligence of the English 
 stage as a whole. The public is given what the public 
 wants ; there are hundreds of intelligent dramatists 
 only too anxious to put intelligent dramas on to the 
 
174 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 boards, but they are kept out in the cold, solely because 
 the managers will not risk taking on their shoulders the 
 education of the public. Had this not been so we 
 should not have Arnold Bennett lying fallow at this 
 moment. 
 
 Cupid and Commonsense, What the Public Wants, 
 Milestones and The Great Adventure may not be highly 
 imaginative plays, but they are intelligent, they have 
 humour, they did fill a most pronounced gap in the 
 history of English drama ; they left the audience 
 pondering over various problems of modern life, with a 
 determination to get more out of existence, to see, to 
 move, to squeeze whatever juice they could from the 
 inchoate, humdrum medley of contradictions which 
 made up their days. Furthermore, they lent them- 
 selves to good acting and bringing out the latent talent 
 of all the cast. 
 
 None of these modern dramatists ever write, one-man 
 plays. All the subsidiary characters have their own 
 intrinsic importance; they are not mere puppets, 
 who walk on and off, arousing on interest. We are 
 keenly alive to the human side of all the dramatis 
 personam. Galsworthy, of course, like Shaw, uses the 
 stage as a platform for the presentation of his theses 
 on social problems. More than any contemporary 
 artist he detaches himself from his characters, and gives 
 both sides of a case with scrupulous fairness. In 
 Strife we are compelled to admire both the conservative 
 stolidity and courageous obstinacy of the capitalist, 
 and the struggle of the men against their employers. 
 Galsworthy will never show his hand. He has a superb 
 sense of situation and of atmosphere, and presents 
 both with beautiful, consummate artistry. In The 
 Silver Box each character is delineated with a masterly 
 insight and a tremendous sympathy made individualistic 
 
MODERN DRAMA 175 
 
 by the exact truth of the dialogue. No other dramatist 
 has ever succeeded in giving the everyday talk of 
 the artisan and charwoman with such artistic truth ; 
 his favourite maxim, that " character is destiny," gives 
 the keynote to all his creatures, particularly to the 
 poor, feckless hero of Justice ; he is always quiet and 
 relentlessly logical, and never makes a bid for our 
 tears, which may account for the extent to which our 
 emotions are always roused on witnessing one of his 
 plays. He rouses us to fury by his carefully feigned 
 aloofness ; the truth is that he himself is passionately 
 alive to the anomalies of the law and the dire and awful 
 penalties that man incurs, unwitting, by taking one 
 false step. His conception of tragedy is akin to 
 Shakespeare's : man sets the wheels of Fate in motion 
 and no power on earth can prevent them from slowly 
 crushing him and grinding round to their inexorable 
 end. "The wheel is come full circle: I am here" 
 might well be taken for the text of all his plays. 
 
 Yet just as the Elizabethan audience, in the intervals 
 of fighting, could and did revel in the tragedies of 
 Shakespeare, delighting therein, so surely would our 
 warriors of to-day find solace and comfort in witnessing 
 these plays of Galsworthy with their artistic beauty and 
 philosophic quietude. They supplied a craving of the 
 soul when they were first written, in the far-off days of 
 peace. Surely our souls do not crave less for inspiration 
 now than they did then. War does not blunt our 
 aesthetic faculties ; rather does it sharpen them through 
 personal and national suffering. 
 
 With the exception of Mr Brighouse, Sir James 
 Barrie is the only dramatist of the first order who has 
 a play now running : it is significant that this is not 
 only a revival, but one of his earliest and weakest 
 fantasies. The Professor's Love Story is not of such a 
 
176 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 kind as to cause us to stop over it ; it is sentimental, 
 machine-made and not capable ol bearing careful 
 scrutiny. 
 
 He has made numbers of mistakes as Stevenson 
 foreshadowed as long ago as 1892 (" Stuff in that young 
 man ; but he must see and not be too funny ") ; he 
 wrote Rosy Rapture, which would have damned a lesser 
 man; but he also wrote An Admirable Crichton 
 and Peter Pan, and he is immediately forgiven. His 
 strength lies in his power to rouse our delight in a one- 
 act play, Rosalind, The Will, The Twelve-pound Look 
 and The New Word — he can quietly, whimsically 
 yet quite surely in one little half-hour make us run 
 through the whole gamut of human emotions ; he is 
 a master of quaint conceits, of bizarre touches and 
 childlike ingeniousness — and yet all the time, as 
 Mr Dixon Scott so superbly puts it, we are cognisant 
 of two quite separate " egos " fighting for the mastery in 
 this man's composition : one, the solemn aspirant, tre- 
 mendously aware of the dignity of letters, worshipping 
 portraits of great writers with all the grim ambitious- 
 ness of the Scot; the other, an incurable lover of 
 the pretty and the prankish. People are fond of saying 
 that he has never grown up ; the truth is that he has 
 grown down and dwindled just when he longed most 
 passionately to tower, and finds his feet perversely 
 trotting off to the Round Pond to play with children, 
 when all the time he was ordering them to mount the 
 granite staircase that leads to lasting fame. " When 
 he is neither humorous nor pathetic he is nothing," 
 says Arnold Bennett; "imagine a diet all salt and 
 sugar " — and this is, in truth, the final word with 
 regard to him. He is always touching us to laughter 
 or tears ; no one living can move us more quickly to 
 weep with laughter and then, within a moment, cause 
 
MODERN DRAMA 177 
 
 us to weep with grief, only to laugh hilariously again 
 the next second. His diet is really all condiments : 
 there is no " body " in it, no lasting nutriment, as there 
 is in the work of Galsworthy and Barker — and yet 
 there is artistry, there is a shimmery sort of beauty, 
 opalescent, gossamer. 
 
 Few of our theatrical optimists, in 1913, would have 
 dared to prophesy that by 1916 St John Hankin would 
 be dead, but his name has crossed the lips of no play- 
 goer since the war began. Surely we have not advanced 
 so far that we can afford to neglect such supremely 
 witty, clarifying, astringent work as The Charity that 
 Began at Home, The Cassilis Engagement and The 
 Return of the Prodigal. He has something of the 
 aristocratic detachment of Galsworthy, the same 
 limpid, musical prose style and acute perception of 
 dialogue — all of which excellences are sadly to 
 seek in the stage to-day ; we might as well shut our 
 eyes to the beauty of Wilde. They have this much 
 in common : a shrewd sense of humour and a telling 
 sense of " situation." Hankin cared a good deal about 
 social problems, Wilde not at all. Both were devoted 
 to the cause of art, and gave of their best to make the 
 stage intelligent and literary. Perhaps no other man 
 is so well qualified to make us forget the miseries of our 
 own time as a genius of Wilde's temperament, with his 
 astonishing epigram and paradox, his remoteness from 
 actual workaday life and amoral attitude to every- 
 thing. 
 
 The English theatre is in dire need of brains. . . . We 
 have borne, for two and a half years, more or less sadly, 
 with ephemeral, sentimental rubbish, gaudy pageantry, 
 cheap melodrama, American " revue," musical comedy, 
 rowdy farces, one-man " light " comedies, all written 
 with an eye on the gallery ; it is time some brave 
 
 M 
 
178 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 producer took his stand and resuscitated legitimate 
 drama, revived Wilde, Hankin, Bennett, Synge, 
 Houghton, Arthur Symons, Stephen Phillips, Chesterton, 
 Masefield, Barker and Shaw (what joys their very 
 names conjure up to the lover of art !) and encouraged 
 the young geniuses of the new generation to follow in 
 their steps and perfect what they left undone. There 
 is no lack of native latent talent ; it is only waiting for 
 an invitation to come forward. 
 
 It is not immorality that we charge the stage with 
 nowadays : it is dullness, sheer blankness, a desperate, 
 stereotyped form of entertainment, without a spark of 
 originality, relying on age-old, threadbare jests, inane 
 dialogue, and an absence of any artistry. The acting 
 is all right. It is marvellous how much our leading 
 actors and actresses can get out of the wooden, lifeless 
 parts which are assigned to them. 
 
 We cannot too often repeat Synge' s dictum that on 
 the stage one must have reality and joy ; as at present 
 constituted there is a lamentable absence of both. 
 Nothing could well be further removed from either than 
 the plays which are commonly accounted successes ; 
 a false, hysterical giggling has supplanted joy, and an 
 artificial convention, as remote from actuality as the 
 feuilleton in a halfpenny paper, has taken the place 
 of realism. 
 
 We never needed amusement more than we do now ; 
 we do not want, as Shaw tried to delude himself into 
 believing, the theatre turned into a sort of pulpit, but 
 we do want it to appeal to our sense of the beautiful, 
 and our intellectual senses. We do not want to be 
 sent to sleep; we want to be transported, as Shake- 
 speare, Goldsmith and Sheridan transported our fathers, 
 into a land of sheer delights ; we want to feel again 
 the purgative joys of true tragedy, to revel in the 
 
MODERN DRAMA 179 
 
 rarefied atmosphere of pure comedy, to laugh at the 
 manifestation of the Comic Spirit, not to cackle like 
 buffoons at the antics of clowns and vulgar double 
 entendres. 
 
 We look to Mr Grein ... is there no public bene- 
 factor forthcoming who will earn the undying gratitude 
 of a public satiated with rubbish by coming to our 
 rescue before we entirely forget the theatre's true place 
 as an educative force, an elevator and not a debaser 
 of all that is best in us ? 
 
VII 
 SAMUEL BUTLER 
 
 TO the question, " What sort of man was the 
 author of Erewhon ? " I suppose the best and 
 quickest answer would be : " He was the sort 
 of man who preferred Handel above all other com- 
 posers, Italy above all other countries, disliked Tenny- 
 son, Dickens and Thackeray, and was not afraid to say 
 so, and, according to Shaw's own account, was the 
 prime influence in the formation of that iconoclast's 
 character." 
 
 That he is still but little known in educational 
 quarters can be gauged by the fact that at one great 
 Public School the librarian bought from Mr Fifield his 
 complete works, under the impression that they were 
 by the author of Hudibras. I know of no other big 
 school where the complete works of our Samuel Butler 
 are to be found. He was related neither to the Bishop 
 nor to the Restoration poet. His grandfather was the 
 headmaster of Shrewsbury; his father the vicar of 
 Langar, near Nottingham, where Samuel himself was 
 born on 4th December 1835. He naturally attended 
 the school where his grandfather had been headmaster, 
 and was there for six years. In 1854 he went up to 
 St John's College, Cambridge, and took a first-class in 
 the Classical Tripos in 1858. In the same year he went 
 to London with the idea of working among the poor and 
 eventually taking Holy Orders, but he now began to 
 doubt the efficacy of infant baptism, which led to his 
 abandoning this project, and he sailed to New Zealand 
 
 180 
 
SAMUEL BUTLER 181 
 
 and started sheep-farming instead. His interest in 
 Darwin's theory of Selection began to manifest itself 
 in 1862, when he wrote to " the Press " on the subject in 
 an article called Darwin on the Origin of Species — A 
 Dialogue. In 1864 he returned to England and settled 
 down for the rest of his life at 15 Clifford's Inn, London, 
 as a painter, exhibiting at the Royal Academy and else- 
 where. He had constantly been over to Italy since his 
 early boyhood, and in 1870 he returned thereto recover 
 from a spell of overwork. The same year he met Miss 
 Eliza Mary Ann Savage, who so influenced the rest of 
 his life, and w r hose character is so splendidly portrayed 
 in Alethea in The Way of All Flesh. In 1872 Erewhon 
 was published, and the following year saw the publica- 
 tion of The Fair Haven, an ironical work purporting to 
 be " in defence of the miraculous element in our Lord's 
 ministry upon earth, both as against rationalistic 
 impugners and certain orthodox defenders," written 
 under the pseudonym of John Pickard Owen, w r ith a 
 memoir of the supposed author by his brother, William 
 Bickersteth Owen. 
 
 This book, to Butler's supreme joy, was taken 
 seriously by certain Church papers and praised for its 
 splendid defence of orthodox Christianity. 
 
 Between 1876 and 1886 he experienced serious 
 financial difficulties, but he had the good fortune in the 
 first of these years to make the acquaintance of Mr 
 Henry Festing Jones, who has preserved for us so many 
 of his conversations and given us Butler's greatest work 
 in The Notebooks, wherein is contained all the cream 
 of his philosophy and humour. 
 
 In 1877 was published Life and Habit, which gives in 
 detail his views on Darwin's theory and his points of 
 divergence from it. It was followed, in 1881, by Alps 
 and Sanctuaries, one of his most interesting and perhaps 
 
182 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 the most charming of his works, as he wrote it in holiday 
 mood and illustrated it throughout himself. In 1883 
 he began to compose music as nearly as he could in the 
 style of Handel. Two years later Miss Savage died, 
 and the year following the death of his father finally 
 ended his financial distress. 
 
 In 1892 he gave his lecture on The Humour of Homer, 
 in which we see, for the first time, his conception 
 as to the authorship of the Odyssey, which he main- 
 tained was written by a woman and very probably by 
 Nausicaa. 
 
 In 1897 he printed The Authoress of the Odyssey, to 
 strengthen this view, and in 1899 he published a most 
 valuable criticism on Shakespeare's Sonnets, in which 
 he follows the autobiographical tradition very strongly. 
 1901 saw the publication of Erewhon Revisited, and on 
 18th June 1902 he died, leaving behind the MS. of 
 his purely autobiographical novel, The Way of All 
 Flesh, which was published by R. A. Streatfeild in 
 1903. 
 
 As everyone knows, Butler's fame in his lifetime was 
 not great, but every year since his death has increased 
 the circle of his readers. Gilbert Caiman's able book, 
 followed by that of Mr John F. Harris, has done much 
 to keep him before the public eye, and it is probable 
 that as time goes on the thinking public will be attracted 
 more and more to a man who could think so clearly, 
 argue so convincingly, preserve so perfect a sense of 
 humour and freshen and enliven the imagination and 
 the intellect as Samuel Butler did. He is certainly 
 safe for his " good average threescore years and ten 
 of immortality " if ever man was. 
 
SAMUEL BUTLER 183 
 
 II 
 
 To anyone beginning to read Butler for the first time 
 I should recommend The Way of All Flesh, Alps and 
 Sanctuaries, The Humour of Homer (together with the 
 other essays in that delightful book) and The Note- 
 books — that is for a person constituted as I am, with no 
 very definite leanings to biology and the laws of natural 
 selection. Erewhon as a modern Utopia is a magnifi- 
 cent piece of writing and worked out with a skill that 
 Swift would not have been ashamed of. To the 
 majority of readers, however, Butler is just the author 
 of Erewhon and nothing more ; everyone has read that. 
 I need therefore scarcely waste time in describing what 
 most people know. 
 
 " In the department of satire," as Bernard Shaw once 
 most truly said, " Butler is the greatest English writer 
 of the latter half of the nineteenth century. " It is very 
 much to be doubted whether irony has ever had a cleaner 
 or more sparkling exponent in this country at all. 
 There was so little bitterness in Butler : he was all com- 
 pact of quaint, whimsical, jovial touches ; he was one 
 who loved life even after being granted a view into the 
 crystal, such as is given to but few. 
 
 The Way of All Flesh perhaps ought to be read first 
 in order that the reader may gain an exact picture of the 
 sort of man Butler was. Many modern readers find it 
 fatiguing to be taken back over so many generations of 
 the life of the Pontif ex family, but what Butler had to un- 
 fold required a sense of leisure ; he recognised that to 
 the making of a great book went years of labour, and he 
 was content to draw on a big canvas so that we should 
 get the proper perspective of his own life. We are 
 shown the hideous, convention-ridden atmosphere of a 
 
184 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 country parsonage in all its phases, and never has this 
 odious existence been more ruthlessly exposed or with 
 such wealth of detail. We are given the boy's life at 
 school, with the gradual dawning of his doubts as to 
 many of the things which the Victorians adhered to 
 like limpets as part and parcel of their creed, without 
 which the whole fabric of their lives would fall about 
 their ears. 
 
 His life in lodgings in London is so vividly done that 
 nothing could ever make us forget Mrs Jupp, who 
 deserves to live longer than Mrs Gamp, or Mrs Gum- 
 midge as an eternal type, imperishable so long as 
 human nature remains what it is. His adventures with 
 his fellow-lodgers are ghastly, and yet how inevitably 
 true . . . that is what so attracts us about the whole 
 book : it is absolutely real ; you don't feel at all that 
 it was written about an age long past which we abhor 
 beyond all others. It would be just as true were it 
 written about life to-day. Perhaps we care less about 
 these strange cavillings over orthodox beliefs. We are 
 also more emancipated in other ways, but we, too, have 
 just the same fight for the right to live our own lives 
 even if the hydras we oppose are slightly different from 
 those against which Samuel Butler so successfully tilted. 
 The romance of his life we can only guess at, We know 
 how much he cared for Miss Savage . . . we should 
 have known that from his picture of Alethea alone. 
 Why lie never married her we do not know ; his affec- 
 tion for her may have been like Swift's for Stella ; it 
 certainly seems so to the casual reader. 
 
 Authors are notorious for the way they mess up the 
 best part of their lives ; their relations with their 
 womenfolk are best left alone ; it is hard to probe their 
 reasons and not altogether important. 
 
 The feeling that one has on finishing The Way of All 
 
SAMUEL BUTLER 185 
 
 Flesh is that we must begin it all over again at once . . . 
 we then wish and wish that he had written not one but 
 twenty novels — so terse a style, so definite a point 
 of view, so much sense, so little padding is not to be 
 seen once in ten years in the novels of to-day. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Alps and Sanctuaries was received with contemptuous 
 silence from the critics, for the most part ; those who 
 mentioned it treated it with open hostility. It is im- 
 possible to imagine either point of view to-day. It is 
 an open-air, genial book packed with good things, not 
 least among which are the amazing sketches from the 
 pencil of Butler himself. It is simply an account of a 
 walking tour through Italy taken by Butler in the com- 
 pany of his friend, Festing Jones. In it we find that 
 overmastering love of Handel, which was one of Butler's 
 most pronounced characteristics, coming out on every 
 page : a chapel, a valley, a snow-clad peak, a village 
 any picturesque setting sets him off and he im- 
 mediately puts it to music. He is reminded of a snatch 
 from an oratorio of Handel, and puts it straight down 
 in the book, and so insidious is his description that he 
 makes you see the place more clearly than any other 
 writer, solely because of his threefold power of attract- 
 ing you by his music, his painting and his writing. 
 
 He tells us all sorts of interesting things about him- 
 self : of his dislike of Milton, of his habit of marking in 
 red on the ordnance map the places he passes. He gives 
 you exquisite hints for the avoidance of canting, 
 hypocritical points of view. 
 
 Witness this test for liking a picture : 
 
186 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 " Would you care to look at it alone ? " 
 and this for the appreciation of good music : 
 
 " Do you find your attention straying to the adver- 
 tisements on the back of the programme ? " 
 
 His sense of the whimsical is almost Celtic, and re- 
 minds us of James Stephens. " The potato is a good- 
 tempered, frivolous plant, easily aroused and easily 
 bored ; and one, moreover, which, if bored, yawns 
 horribly. . . ." " The spider is an ugly creature, but I 
 suppose God likes it." 
 
 It is in Alps and Sanctuaries that there occurs that 
 famous emendation : ' ' There lives more doubt in 
 honest faith, believe me, than in . . ." — which was 
 corrected in the margin of the British Museum copy 
 (a story that sounds too good to be true). How 
 Butler would have loved to have seen that marginal 
 correction ! 
 
 Philosophy, too, abounds. " A bad sign for man's 
 peace in his own convictions when he cannot stand 
 turning the canvas of his life upside down." This 
 might have been taken by G. K. Chesterton for his life 
 motto, so exactly does it fit that robust Christian. 
 
 " Sourtout point de zele," he continues, " take a 
 spiritual outing occasionally, try seasonarianism, people 
 must go to church to be a little better, to the theatre to 
 be a little naughtier, to the Royal Institution to be a 
 little more scientific than they really are." 
 
 Is there not some healthy, breezy sort of feeling that 
 comes over you as you read that ? No one but a 
 definitely religious and devout man could have written 
 it — one who had resolutely faced all the problems that 
 worry humanity and forced an answer out of the 
 infinite. Samuel Butler, most of all men, was delighted 
 to wrestle with that same spirit whom Jacob met . . . 
 but who nowadays, for some reason, leaves us alone to 
 
SAMUEL BUTLER 187 
 
 our flabby unfitness. (I am speaking here solely of 
 moral fitness, of course.) His literary criticism is of a 
 piece with his philosophical. 
 
 " Disraeli's novels are so much better than those 
 of Thackeray and Dickens because he was always 
 growing." 
 
 Then comes the startling information that " any 
 man who can write can draw to a not inconsiderable 
 extent." 
 
 The day I first read that I went out on to the Downs 
 and endeavoured to depict on paper with a pen what I 
 had already described in an article. My friends were 
 not too sanguine about the result, but I hope that does 
 not mean that the contradictory converse is true and 
 that he who cannot draw cannot write. 
 
 From what I have already culled you will gather that 
 Butler will have something fresh to say on every subject, 
 and not least on education. The only system that has 
 any working value in his eyes is the apprenticeship 
 system. " The principle is that a man should be doing 
 something he is bent on doing and get a younger one to 
 help him. The elder takes the work of the younger in 
 payment." 
 
 Apropos of examinations : " The most examination- 
 ridden people in the world are the Chinese, and they 
 are the least progressive." 
 
 With regard to worrying about the way to fame : 
 " Doors are like the Kingdom of Heaven, they come not 
 by observation, least of all do they come by forcing ; 
 let them just go on doing what comes nearest, atten- 
 tively, and a great wide door will one day spring into 
 existence." Optimist ! And this is the man whom 
 short-sighted critics have called bitter. 
 
 He takes an apt simile from climbing in his advice to 
 would-be artists and writers : " Nothing taxes so much 
 
188 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 as looking up, nothing encourages so much as looking 
 down. It does a beginner positive harm to look at the 
 masterpieces of Turner and Rembrandt. The secrets 
 of success are affection for the pursuit chosen, a flat 
 refusal to be hurried or to pass anything as understood 
 which is not understood, and an obstinacy of character 
 . . . together with a slight infusion of its direct 
 opposite.'' 
 
 We close the book on a note ringing like a gale sweep- 
 ing all our preconceived, second-hand theories away like 
 a piece of paper on the rocks. 
 
 "Raffaelle, Plato, M. Aurelius, Dante, Goethe and two 
 others (neither of them Englishmen) should be consigned 
 to limbo as the Seven Humbugs of Christendom." 
 
 I said : " We close the book." I am wrong. The wise 
 man will find infinite enjoyment in perusing the index, 
 where he will be sent back to follow up such clues as are 
 given by "Pantheism of Rhubarb," or "Rhinoceros 
 grunts a fourth," and other delectable treasures. Alps 
 and Sanctuaries deserves far more fame than has yet 
 been accorded to it. It is a joyous, thoughtful book 
 ■ — a sort of Alice in Wonderland of a great scientist 
 and philosopher. And it is a truism that the holiday 
 moods of these world-thinkers are not lightly to be 
 despised ; their lightning flashes of merry wit are all 
 pregnant with illuminating, blinding shocks which 
 electrify our system and cause us to delve deeper for 
 ourselves into the world's mysteries and come away 
 from our search enriched beyond all our wildest dreams. 
 
 IV 
 
 One of the many things we missed by being born 
 about the time of Queen Victoria's jubilee was hearing 
 
SAMUEL BUTLER 189 
 
 Ruskin lecture ; another was William Morris. To this 
 we now have to add Samuel Butler's scintillating gossip 
 to working men on The Humour of Homer. How he 
 must have shaken the dovecotes of Oxford and Cam- 
 bridge, if they even so much as heard that a new 
 prophet had arisen who knew not Homer but openly 
 flaunted his belief in the woman authorship of the 
 Odyssey. His translation is the only one we know 
 which renders the pure spirit of the Greek into modern, 
 up-to-date English prose. 
 
 Here, if anywhere, he has followed his own advice 
 that a man should be clear of his meaning before he 
 gives it any utterance ; having made up his mind what 
 to say, he should say it briefly, pointedly and plainly. 
 
 It is in this book that we learn that the Burmah, on 
 which he fully meant to sail for New Zealand, went 
 down with all hands. " Surely there is a Providence 
 that guides our ends." It is in The Humour of 
 Homer that we also learn that Chapman & Hall, to 
 their everlasting disgrace, refused the MS. of Erewhon, 
 on the advice of no less gifted a critic than Meredith. 
 
 Butler conceived a theory, fantastic and half- 
 humorous, that Wordsworth harboured a dark secret 
 in his life, and in an amazingly humorous passage 
 annotates the text of one of the " Lucy " poems to 
 prove that he had done the poor girl to death. It would 
 have puzzled him not a little to discover that he was 
 nearer the truth than he thought, and that it remained 
 for an American, in 1916, to reveal what had been 
 successfully hidden from the world for over a century — 
 namely, that Wordsworth, the revered apostle of ortho- 
 doxy, the stand-by of all who believe in regularity of 
 living and rectitude of conduct, was the father of a 
 natural child by a French girl whom he was unable to 
 marry. 
 
190 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 One piece of advice he gives us with regard to Homer 
 which should be engraven on a text and distributed 
 throughout every classroom in every classical school in 
 the kingdom. " If we are to be at home with Homer, 
 there must be no sitting on the edge of one's chair 
 dazzled." 
 
 It is here that he makes his epigram with regard to 
 the three Samuel Butlers of literary fame. 
 
 " If « Erewhon' were a horse I should say : « Erewhon 
 by Hudibras out of Analogy,' " in which there is a pro- 
 fundity of meaning uncommon in epigrammatic speech. 
 
 It delights the hearts of those of us who believe that 
 Shakespeare drew upon his acquaintances for his major 
 characters to find that Butler believed that Mrs Quickly 
 was found by the dramatist in real life and simply 
 photographed on to the stage. It needed courage to 
 say this in the eighties with impunity ; even in 1916 
 such a statement does not go unscathed. 
 
 There is a splendid paragraph in this book on " Titles 
 for Books I hope to Write. ' ' One of the most inspiring is 
 "Half-Hours with the Worst Authors. " How many of us 
 could submit endless cuttings for that gallery nowadays. 
 
 And now we are come to the book whereon we should 
 be content te let all Samuel Butler's fame rest, The Note- 
 books. In this volume is collected together all the germs 
 of all his work in tablet, portmanteau form. To read 
 them is to copy them out ; to copy them out is to learn 
 them ; and to learn them is an education in itself. 
 
 Apparently Butler carried a notebook about with 
 him wherever he went, and copied into it whatever of 
 value he heard anyone say or whatever he said himself 
 
SAMUEL BUTLER 191 
 
 that struck him as worthy of preservation. His reason 
 for copying them was : 
 
 " One's thoughts fly so fast that one must shoot 
 them ; it is no use trying to put salt on their tails." 
 
 By the time that he came to die he had filled well 
 over five bound volumes, each one taking up over two 
 hundred pages of closely written sermon paper. These 
 he wrote in copying ink, in order to keep a duplicate 
 of them, and we learn from them about his early life 
 at Langar, Handel, schooldays at Shrewsbury, Cam- 
 bridge, Christianity, literature, New Zealand, sheep- 
 farming, philosophy, painting, money, evolution, 
 morality, Italy, speculation, photography, music, 
 natural history, archaeology, botany, religion, book- 
 keeping, psychology, metaphysics, the Iliad, the 
 Odyssey, Sicily, architecture, ethics, the Sonnets of 
 Shakespeare, and a thousand and one other things 
 about life which interested him. 
 
 This we now have bound up in one volume of four 
 hundred pages, owing to the indefatigable energy of 
 Mr Festing Jones, who sifted and pruned and condensed 
 and classified such as he found worthy of permanence, 
 and, as I said, the result is that The Notebooks will 
 remain for all time as the essence of all that is best in 
 the work of this inspired humorist. 
 
 They are divided up into twenty-five sections, oddly 
 titled in some cases, but in no case to be omitted by 
 those who would learn more of life and morality as seen 
 by the acutest man of his time. The first section is 
 headed : " Lord, what is Man ? " and deals with man- 
 kind in general. The following note is perhaps typical 
 of all : "A man is a passing mood coming up and going 
 down in the mind of his country : he is the twitching of 
 a nerve, a smile, a frown, a thought of shame or honour, 
 as it may happen." 
 
192 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 We get here a glimpse of that theory which was so 
 characteristic of Butler, that death was nothing, our 
 immortality was the thought with which we enriched 
 the world or that shameful deed which impoverished it. 
 As to the art of living, he says : "A sense of humour 
 keen enough to show a man his own absurdities, as well 
 as those of other people, will keep him from the com- 
 mission of all sins, or nearly all, save those that are 
 worth committing." This little tang in the tail of his 
 epigrams reminds us of Rupert Brooke and strikes a 
 note which is commonly supposed to be much more 
 modern than the Victorian age in which Butler lived. 
 " Life is like music," he continues. " It must be 
 composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule. 
 Nevertheless, one had better know the rules, for they 
 sometimes guide in doubtful cases — though not often." 
 
 It comes as a shock to the " unco' guid," but how it 
 must have delighted the heart of the youthful G. B. S. 
 to hear his master say that all progress is based upon a 
 universal innate desire on the part of every organism 
 to live beyond its income . . . followed by the quaint 
 confession that he was glad that he had squandered a 
 good deal of his life. ..." What a heap of rubbish 
 there would have been if I had not," he whimsically 
 concludes. Life beyond the grave to him means 
 seventy years of immortality, of fame after he is dead, 
 as a guide to the next generations of Englishmen who 
 shall come after him. 
 
 A delightful piece of philosophy is contained in one of 
 his earliest notes, to the effect that all things are either 
 of the nature of a piece of string or a knife. One makes 
 for " togetheriness," the other for " splitty-uppiness." 
 " In high philosophy one should never look at a piece of 
 string without considering it also as a knife, nor at a 
 knife without considering it as a piece of string." 
 
SAMUEL BUTLER 193 
 
 The second section is on Elementary Morality, where 
 we find a code of right and wrong which acts like 
 ammonia on our dulled senses. " When the righteous 
 man turneth away from his righteousness that he hath 
 committed and doeth that which is neither quite lawful 
 nor quite right, he will generally be found to have gained 
 in amiability what he has lost in holiness. It is as im- 
 moral to be too good as to be too anything else. How 
 often do we not see children ruined through the virtues, 
 real or supposed, of their parents ? Truly he visiteth 
 the virtues of the fathers upon the children unto the 
 third and fourth generation. Vice is the awakening to 
 the knowledge of good and evil — without which there 
 is no life worthy of the name. There cannot be a 
 1 Hold fast that which is good ' without a ' Prove all 
 things ' going before it." 
 
 Here we see the reaction against the Nottingham- 
 shire Rectory coming out with a vengeance. This is 
 the result of the convention-ridden atmosphere of strict 
 Sabbatarianism. Oh ! that men might be made to see 
 the agony they inflict on their children by a thought- 
 less, rigid code of ethics, doled out without thought of 
 temperament or changing times. Here is a text that 
 should again be hung, not only all round the dormi- 
 tories of Public Schools, but in every church and chapel 
 in the British Isles. 
 
 It is also as well that some of us should take to heart 
 what our doctors so frequently tell us, that intellectual 
 over-indulgence is the most gratuitous and disgraceful 
 form which excess can take ; for we pride ourselves 
 hypocritically on the fact that half England does no 
 work at all, while we slave for our daily bread night 
 and day without rest throughout the livelong year . . . 
 jboasting about it as if it were a virtue ; one might as 
 [well brag of drinking night and day. 
 
194 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 The extremes of vice and virtue, Butler is never tired 
 of pointing out, are alike detestable ; absolute virtue 
 is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the 
 dullnesses of it and the pomposities of it. 
 
 It sends a disagreeable thrill through one's too- 
 comfortable mind to remember that, after all, morality 
 is the custom of one's country and consequently that 
 cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country. On every 
 page of The Notebooks we see more and more how 
 much Shaw owes to Butler ; of course he has acknow- 
 ledged the debt, but for some inexplicable reason no one 
 has yet taken the trouble to believe him. Ignorant 
 critics still hiss Nietzsche, and we are content to leave 
 it at that. 
 
 Compare this statement, for instance, with countless 
 passages in Shaw's plays : "I believe that more un- 
 happiness comes from the attempt to prolong family 
 connection unduly and to make people hang together 
 artificially who would never naturally do so than from 
 any other." Why ! here is the whole Shavian bag of 
 tricks, the very thing that has sent country parsons 
 boiling over with rage in the pulpit, seething with 
 righteous indignation about " sacred family ties" and 
 all the rest of the jargon so popular among that 
 uneducated type. 
 
 VI 
 
 I propose to pass over the notes that apply to such 
 definitely technical theories as are contained in the 
 Darwin controversy and the germs of Erezvhon and 
 Life and Habit because I am endeavouring here simply 
 to show how necessary Butler is to all who think at all 
 generally or care about the laws that govern our mode 
 of life. Butler's contributions to evolution are, shortly : 
 
SAMUEL BUTLER 195 
 
 (1) The identification of heredity and memory and the 
 corollaries relating to sports, the reversion to remote ances- 
 tors, the phenomena of old age, the causes of the sterility 
 of hybrids and the principles underlying longevity. 
 
 (2) The reintroduction of teleology into organic life. 
 
 (3) An explanation of the physics of memory. 
 
 (-1) Vibrations — as a means of connection between 
 the organic and inorganic. 
 
 With regard to vibrations he tells us that we shall 
 never get straight till we leave off tying to separate 
 mind and matter. Mind is not a thing, or if it be, we 
 know nothing about it; it is a function of matter. 
 Matter is not a thing, or if it be, we know nothing 
 about it ; it is a function of mind. 
 
 He then proceeds to take an apt illustration from eat- 
 ing. Cooking, he says, is good because it makes matter 
 easier by unsettling the meat's mind and preparing it 
 for new ideas. So with thoughts ; they are more easily 
 assimilated that have been already digested by other 
 minds. 
 
 Sitting quiet after eating is akin to sitting still during 
 divine service, so as not to disturb the congregation. 
 We are catechising and converting our proselytes, and 
 there should be no row. As we get older we must digest 
 more quietly still, our appetite is less, our gastric juices 
 are no longer so eloquent ; they have lost that cogent 
 fluency which carried away all that came in contact with 
 it. They have become sluggish and unconciliatory. 
 This is what happens to any man when he suffers from 
 an attack of indigestion. The healthy stomach is 
 nothing if not conservative. Few radicals have good 
 digestions. 
 
 Again, you notice the sting in the tail which increases 
 the value of the whole epigram and opens up a whole 
 new field of thought. 
 
196 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 In this same section of notes on Mind and Matter we 
 come across that note on Nightshirts and Babies which 
 so pleased the heart of John Harris. 
 
 " On Hindhead, last Easter, we saw a family wash 
 hung out to dry. There were papa's two great night- 
 shirts and mamma's two lesser nightgowns and then 
 the children's smaller articles of clothing and mamma's 
 drawers and the girls' drawers, all full swollen with a 
 strong north-east wind. But mamma's nightgown 
 was not so well pinned on and, instead of being full of 
 steady wind like the others, kept blowing up and down 
 as though she were p reaching wildly. We stood and 
 laughed for ten minutes. The housewife came to the 
 window and wondered at us, but we could not resist the 
 pleasure of watching the absurdly lifelike gestures 
 which the nightgowns made. I should like a Santa 
 Famiglia with clothes drying in the background." 
 You must read the rest of this peerless note for your- 
 self ; it is simply wonderful, but too long to give in 
 detail. 
 
 VII 
 
 But it is on the subject of the making of music, 
 pictures and books that Butler pleases the ordinary 
 man of the world most. Here he gives us the most 
 profound thoughts that ever emanated from his mind 
 and we get more clues than we can find in any other 
 literary man's work that I can for the moment recollect, 
 except, perhaps, Robert Louis Stevenson. 
 
 " What we should read," he says, " is not the 
 words but the man whom we feel to be behind the 
 words." 
 
 Again : ' k Words are like money : there is nothing so 
 useless, unless when in actual use. Books are simple 
 
SAMUEL BUTLER 197 
 
 imprisoned souls until someone takes them down from 
 the shelf and reads them." 
 
 He says that the same rule applies to the making of 
 literature, music and pictures ; what is required is 
 that the artist shall say or depict what he elects to say 
 or depict discreetly ; that he shall be quick to see the 
 gist of a matter and give it pithily without either 
 prolixity or stint of words . . . the fewest words or 
 touches, there lies the secret of the whole business. 
 Would to heaven that all the writers and painters of 
 my acquaintance would follow out this golden advice. 
 
 Shortly after this we come upon a most illuminating 
 piece of advice : " I have always found compressing, 
 cutting out, and tersifying a passage suggest more than 
 anything else does. Things pruned off in this way are 
 like the heads of the hydra, two grow for every one that 
 is lopped off. Brevity is not only the soul of wit, but 
 the soul of making oneself agreeable and of getting 
 on with people, and indeed of everything that makes 
 life worth living." 
 
 To our surprise he tells us to let the main work slide 
 when a number of small things remain to be done, just 
 as we do with unpaid bills. If we attend continually 
 and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere 
 long be surprised to find how little remains that we 
 cannot do. " The rule should be never to learn a thing 
 till one is pretty sure one wants it," he says, apropos 
 of knowledge and power. " There are plenty of things 
 that most boys would give their ears to know, these 
 and these only are the proper things for them to sharpen 
 their wits upon." If a boy is idle and does not want 
 to learn anything at all, Butler would not have him 
 flogged into learning things against the grain, but 
 rather that he should never be made to learn anything 
 till it is pretty obvious that he cannot get on without it. 
 
198 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 In conclusion he tells us: "Don't learn to do, but 
 learn in doing " [this is only the apprenticeship note 
 amplified]. * ' Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, 
 but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble 
 of the world ; only, of course, let them be on a small 
 scale in the first instance till you feel your feet safe 
 under you. Act more and rehearse less. Above all, 
 work so slowly as never to get out of breath. Take it 
 easy, in fact, until forced not to do so. Do not hunt 
 for subjects, let them choose you, not you them. 
 Only do that which insists upon being done and rims 
 right up against you, hitting you in the eye until you 
 do it. Till called in this way do nothing. 5 ' This is 
 invaluable advice to all young writers possessed of 
 feverish energy who whip themselves into action, 
 however flagging their spirit is. 
 
 One of Butler's great charms is this potent doctrine 
 which compels you to act on his advice as if he were 
 some great Harley Street specialist. It is only what 
 we expect to find when we read that Butler is here 
 preaching after practising. He tells us that he never 
 made his books : they grew, insisting on being written ; 
 he confesses that he did not want to write Erezvhon, he 
 wanted to go on with his painting ; only those books 
 live, he thinks, that have drained much of their author's 
 own life into them. The personality of the writer 
 interests us far more than his work. Everything should 
 be read aloud as soon as it is written in order to detect 
 those weak places which when read to oneself are 
 passed over as all right. 
 
 Lastly, the audience to whom one should address 
 one's thoughts are mainly specialists and people 
 between twenty and thirty. After the age of thirty, 
 he shrewdly remarks, only a few men and women read 
 at all. 
 
SAMUEL BUTLER 199 
 
 VIII 
 
 The next note is on Handel and Music. From boy- 
 hood Butler had worshipped Handel. Even so, as is 
 so typical of Butler, he admires Handel as a man just 
 as he admires Shakespeare as a man, more than his 
 work ; behind all the art and the music he feels the 
 presence of the great, heroic soul. Perhaps the reason 
 for his placing him above Bach and Beethoven can be 
 more easily understood when we read that Handel is 
 so great and so simple that no one but a professional 
 musician is unable to understand him. The greatest 
 men do not go over the heads of the masses ; they take 
 them rather by the hand. Moreover, and this makes 
 a tremendous appeal to a man who detested shams, 
 Handel knew when to stop, and when he meant stopping 
 he stopped much as a horse stops, with little, if any, 
 peroration. 
 
 Add to this his capacity for bringing to mind a fine 
 piece of scenery by a haunting strain and you have 
 Handel's genius in a nutshell. It disgusted Butler 
 beyond all expression to think that we buried Dickens 
 in the next grave, cheek-by-jowl with Handel. Art, 
 says Butler, and this applies equally to Handel's music 
 and all great writing and painting, has no end in view 
 save the emphasising and recording in the most effective 
 way some strongly felt interest or affection. Every- 
 thing else is sham art. We are to think of and look 
 at our work as though it were done by our enemy. If 
 we look at it to admire it we are lost. The only men 
 who go on improving are those who are always bona 
 fide dissatisfied with their work. 
 
 In the section headed " The Position of a Homo Unius 
 Libri " we learn more interesting details of Butler's 
 
200 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 own life. He there tells us his aversion from the 
 literary and scientific giants of his age. " If I was to 
 get in with them I should hate them and they me. I 
 should fritter away my time and my freedom without 
 getting a quid pro quo ; as it is, I am free and I give the 
 swells every now and then such a facer as they get from 
 no one else [It might be the voice of Bernard Shaw 
 himself speaking] ; I know that I don't go the right 
 way to get on in a commercial sense, but I am going 
 the right way to secure a lasting reputation and that 
 is what I really care for. I have gone in for posthumous 
 fame only, and that I believe I shall secure." 
 
 When he had written Erewhon people immediately 
 implored him to set to work at once and write another 
 book like it, Nothing, he says, is so cruel as to try and 
 force a man beyond his natural power ; if he has got 
 more stuff in him it will come out in its own time and 
 in its own way. The more promise a young writer has 
 given, the more his friends should urge him not to over- 
 tax himself. He lost apparently over £750 on his 
 books, and gives as a reason the fact that he attacked 
 people who were at once unscrupulous and powerful 
 and made no alliances. His own age would not tolerate 
 him because he attacked two powerful sets of vested 
 interests at once — the Church and Science. It is 
 better, he concludes, to write fearlessly for posterity, 
 if you can afford to, than to write like George Eliot 
 and make a lot of money by it. As to being adequately 
 paid, however, he says, who can say, when we realise 
 how much we inherit from past generations and all that 
 now makes life worth living, London, with its sources 
 of pleasure and amusement, good theatres, concerts, 
 picture galleries, the British Museum Reading Room, 
 newspapers, a comfortable dwelling, railways, and, 
 above all, the society of friends we value. In the note 
 
SAMUEL BUTLER 201 
 
 which follows this on Cash and Credit we hear more 
 about the requirements of the true writer. Emphasis- 
 ing again the need for brevity and clarity (Butler 
 never tires of reiterating the importance of these 
 qualities) he proceeds to point out the necessity for 
 honesty. Whether a book will personally do him good 
 or harm should never be allowed to weigh at all with 
 a writer ; he only is the genuine man of letters who 
 lives in fear and trembling lest he should fail in respect 
 of keeping his good name spotless among those whose 
 opinion he values (this sounds like Milton ; more and 
 more am I inclined to think that Butler, like Shaw, will 
 in the end be placed among the great Puritans of 
 English writers), who never writes without thinking 
 how he shall best serve good causes and damage bad 
 ones. Such work is done as a bird sings — for the love 
 of it — it is persevered in as long as body and soul can 
 be kept together without thought or hope of pecuniary 
 reward. As soon as any art is pursued with a view 
 to money, then farewell all hope of genuine good work. 
 There is a certain sort of person very commonly to be 
 found among those who despise all art, who asks, when 
 he sees a great picture, reads a fine poem, or hears a 
 rich sonata or oratorio: "Well, this is all very well, 
 but what useful purpose does it serve ? " And we 
 are in nine cases out of ten hard put to it to answer in 
 such a way as to make our opponent understand. 
 
 It is refreshing to listen to Butler on this vexed 
 question : " When I look at those works which we all 
 hold to be the crowning glories of the world, as, for 
 example, the Iliad, the Odyssey, Hamlet, The Messiah, 
 Rembrandt's portraits, or Holbein's, or Giovanni 
 Bellini's [it sheds not a little light on Butler's personality 
 to go carefully through this list] the connection between 
 them and use is, to say the least of it, far from obvious. 
 
202 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Music, indeed, can hardly be tortured into being useful 
 at all, unless to drown the cries of the wounded in 
 battle, or to enable people to talk more freely at 
 evening parties. The uses of painting, materially 
 speaking, are again very doubtful ; and literature 
 may be useful until it reaches its highest point, but the 
 highest cannot be put in harness to any but spiritual 
 uses. So we conclude that it is fatal to the highest art 
 that it should be done with a view to those uses that 
 tend towards money." 
 
 As so many great writers have endeavoured to define 
 that indefinable will-o'-the-wisp word Genius, we are 
 all the more delighted to get still a different facet 
 shown us by Butler. Everyone, he says, has more or 
 less genius — that is to say, everyone has more or less 
 madness and inspiration — but it is the small excess 
 weight of it that carries a man over the border. It is, 
 he says, exquisitely parodying Carlyle, the supreme 
 capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all 
 kinds and keeping them therein so long as the genius 
 remains. It is a mistake to suppose that men possessed 
 of this spirit are always painstaking ; sometimes if they 
 had been less so they would have been greater geniuses. 
 
 Pains can serve it or even mar it, but they cannot 
 make it. Perhaps an even better definition would be 
 that genius is the supreme capacity for saving other 
 people from having to take pains, if the highest flights 
 of genius did not seem to know nothing about pains 
 one way or the other. Genius points to change, and 
 change is a hankering after another world, so the old 
 world suspects it as subversive of order, unsettling to 
 our mores and hence immoral. 
 
 But you must be careful here to take Butler's con- 
 notation of morality. Absolute morality, it follows 
 from the above, is absolute stagnation and death — 
 
SAMUEL BUTLER 203 
 
 hence immorality, in his sense, is not only necessary 
 but beneficial — a synonym for all progress. And this 
 in Butler's view is genius, the curious elusive faculty 
 which so despises the world, of which the world is so 
 permanently enamoured, and the more it flouts it 
 the more the world worships it, when it has once well 
 killed it in the flesh. As it cannot be bought with 
 money so it still less can sell what it produces. The 
 only price that we can pay for it is suffering, and this 
 is the only wages it can receive. 
 
 Genius and common-sense are like wife and husband, 
 always quarrelling, and the latter always imagining 
 himself to be master while in reality genius is by far the 
 better half. Dullness is much stronger than genius 
 because there is so much more of it — an Arctic 
 volcano can do nothing against Arctic ice, as Butler 
 beautifully expresses it. He sums up in a nutshell the 
 difference between ephemeral and permanent success 
 by the epigram that independence is essential for the 
 latter but fatal to immediate prosperity. 
 
 IX 
 
 It would be hard to find so much wisdom in any other 
 six volumes as is contained in the few notes, the essence 
 of which I have tried to convey in the last section. In 
 section twelve we are brought near to the man himself, 
 " The Enfant Terrible of Literature." " If I cannot," 
 he begins, " and I know I cannot, get the literary and 
 scientific big wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I 
 know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them." 
 He immediately heaves a big one at the literary critics 
 of his day. " Talking it over, we agreed that Blake 
 was no good because he learnt Italian at sixty in order 
 
204 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 to study Dante, and we knew Dante was no good because 
 he was so fond of Virgil, and Virgil was no good because 
 Tennyson ran him, and as for Tennyson — well, Tennyson 
 goes without saying." 
 
 I should like to have been in the Athenaeum Club 
 with the bishops and headmasters and antique, well- 
 groomed critics when that note was first published, 
 and read it out loud to as large an audience as I could 
 have gathered round me and then got Herkomer and 
 Augustus John to paint their faces : another thing I 
 have missed by being born too late. For years we 
 nourish within our own minds our secret dissatisfaction 
 with poets who have been thrust down our throats as 
 divine, never daring to contradict our elders, and here 
 is a man old enough to be our great-grandfather who 
 openly propagated his opinion fearlessly years before 
 we were born. What cowards we are ! 
 
 He then goes on to throw bricks into the rose-garden 
 of the Victorian prose- writers. " Mr Walter Pater's 
 style is to me like the face of some old woman who 
 has had herself enamelled. The bloom is nothing but 
 powder and paint, and the odour is cherry-blossom. 
 Matthew Arnold's odour is as the faint sickliness of 
 hawthorn." No one who reads that will ever be able 
 to read either of these stylists without recalling these 
 amazingly perfect similes. What consternation they 
 must have caused in the academic circles of his day : 
 how good for the undergraduate bookworm of the day 
 to have been compelled to write his essays from 
 Butler's Notebooks. 
 
 It is at this point that Butler makes his general 
 confession. 
 
 " I have left unsaid much that I am sorry I did not 
 say, but I have said little that I am sorry for having 
 said, and I am pretty well on the whole, thank you." 
 
SAMUEL BUTLER 205 
 
 On the question of style we learn more in a para- 
 graph of Butler's than from whole books of better- 
 known men. 
 
 " I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest 
 pains with his style and was at the same time readable. 
 Plato's having had seventy shies at one sentence is 
 quite enough to explain to me why I dislike him. A 
 man may, and ought to take a great deal of pains to 
 write clearly, tersely and euphemistically : he will write 
 many a sentence three or four times over — to do much 
 more than this is worse than not re-writing at all : 
 he will be at great pains to see that he does not repeat 
 himself, to arrange his matter in the way that shall 
 best enable the reader to master it, or cut out super- 
 fluous words, and even more, to eschew irrelevant 
 matter : but in each case he will be thinking not of his 
 own style but of his reader's convenience. I do not 
 know whether I have a style or not : What I believe 
 and hope I have is just common, simple straight- 
 forwardness. More than this is a loss to yourself 
 and your readers." 
 
 Incidentally it does seem to occur to him that he 
 may have been begging the question, for after all 
 is not this a definition of style — and a counsel of 
 perfection at that ? Butler almost confesses so immedi- 
 ately after. In fact, he sums up his point of view and 
 clinches the argument finally in another passage in 
 an earlier portion of the book : "A man's style should 
 be like his clothes, neat, well-cut and such as not to 
 call any attention to him at all." 
 
 He returns immediately to his criticism of authors. 
 He finds The Pilgrim's Progress an infamous libel on 
 life and things, a blasphemy against the fundamental 
 ideas of right and wrong ; its heaven is essentially 
 infidel, a transformation scene at Drury Lane. " 'No 
 
206 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 crown, no cross for me' is the bargaining, Jewish 
 spirit that pervades it. There is no conception of the 
 faith that a man should do his duty cheerfully, with 
 all his might, though he will never be paid directly or 
 indirectly. Still less is there any conception that 
 unless a man has this faith he is not worth thinking 
 about." No wonder Butler abandoned the thought of 
 taking Holy Orders. Like nearly all other iconoclasts, 
 like Shelley especially, he was angry at a world which 
 refused to smash a half-and-half religion and demand 
 for itself one nearer to its heart's best desire. " What 
 a pity it is/' he continues, " that Christian never met 
 Mr Common-sense with his daughter Good-Humour, 
 and her affianced husband, Mr Hate-Cant." 
 
 It is in this note that we learn of Butler's love for 
 Swift, " a far more human and genuine person than he 
 is generally represented," and, strangely enough, his 
 dislike of Fielding. 
 
 Probably he was too much of a Puritan to relish the 
 full-blooded canvas of the eighteenth-century novelist. 
 He then generalises by pointing out what we have all 
 of us thought, but no one, so far as I know, has ever yet 
 expressed : 
 
 " The highest poetry is ineffable — it must be felt 
 from one person to another, it cannot be articulated." 
 
 Apro]oos of versifying he says that the last thing a 
 great poet will do in these days is to write verses. He 
 finds Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece 
 fatiguing to read ; " They teem with good things, but 
 they are got-up fine things." He consideres that a 
 sonnet is the utmost length to which any rhymed 
 poem should extend. He certainly here, as everywhere 
 else, practises what he preaches. I can for the moment 
 recollect no genius so steadfastly consistent as Samuel 
 Butler was, which is another proof of the likelihood of 
 
SAMUEL BUTLER 207 
 
 my theory that he was strictly a Puritan at heart : 
 he had all the best qualities of that abused sect. Lest 
 we should mistake his attitude to Bunyan from his 
 foregoing remarks, he tells us that the Preface to The 
 Pilgrim's Progress is verse but not poetry, while the 
 body of the book is poetry but not verse. 
 
 On Homer we expect to find Butler at his best, 
 knowing as we do his immense affection for the Iliad 
 and the Odyssey. With regard to translation he says 
 that if you wish to preserve the spirit of a dead author 
 you must not skin him, stuff him and set him up in a 
 case. You must eat him, digest him and let him live 
 in you, with such life as you have, for better or worse. 
 The difference between the Andrew Lang manner of 
 translating the Odyssey and his own he compares to 
 the difference between making a mummy and a baby. 
 Lang tries to preserve a corpse, while Butler tries to 
 originate a new life, one instinct with the spirit though 
 not the form of the original. The only person who 
 could ever really translate the poem adequately, he 
 believes, would be some high-spirited English girl who 
 had been brought up in Athens and therefore not been 
 jaded by academic study of the language. 
 
 It is with a peculiar sense of anticipation that we 
 turn to " Unprofessional Sermons " and read Butler's 
 commentary on the superior ideals of the Greeks and 
 Romans over the Jews. On the subject of Hebraic 
 literature he is, as usual, fresh, satirical and vivid. 
 He picks out The Song of Solomon and the Book of 
 Esther as the most interesting in the Old Testament, 
 but adds that these are the very ones that make the 
 
208 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 least pretensions to holiness and neither of them of 
 transcendent merit. t; They would stand no chance of 
 being accepted by Messrs Cassell & Co. or by any 
 biblical publisher of the present day. Chatto & 
 Windus might take The Song of Solomon but, with this 
 exception, I doubt if there is a publisher in London who 
 would give a guinea for the pair. Ecclesiastes contains 
 some fine things but is strongly tinged with pessimism, 
 cynicism and affectation ; the Psalms generally are 
 poor, and for the most part querulous, spiteful and 
 introspective. Mudie would not take thirteen copies 
 of the lot if they were to appear now for the first time, 
 unless their royal authorship were to arouse an adven- 
 titious interest in them. As for the prophets, well, 
 they will not hold their own against The Pilgrim's 
 Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, and Tom 
 Jones. Whether there be prophecies, says the Apostle, 
 they shall fail. On the whole I should say that Isaiah 
 and Jeremiah must be held to have failed." To-day 
 we can read this without a tremor. Nay, more, most 
 of us can cordially agree, but think of the effect of such 
 criticism, blasphemy they would have called it, on our 
 fathers ! He finds the wisest text in the Bible in : 
 " Be not righteous over much ; neither make thyself 
 over wise : why shouldest thou destroy thyself ? Be 
 not over much wicked, neither be thou foolish : why 
 shouldest thou die before thy time ? " On the subject of 
 knowing what gives us pleasure he quotes from his great 
 namesake, not once nor twice: "Surely the pleasure 
 is as great of being cheated as to cheat." So long as 
 there is discomfort somewhere it is all right. Of 
 prayer he says that prayers are to men as dolls are to 
 children : it is not easy to take them very seriously. 
 In the chapter labelled " Higgledy-Piggledy " we get 
 a potpourri or hotchpotch of good things, none of them 
 
SAMUEL BUTLER 209 
 
 without value, many of them never to be forgotten 
 once they are read. He writes of his notes here that 
 they were not meant for publication. The bad ones 
 were to serve as bread for the jam of the good ones. 
 Certainly there is little except jam at any rate in this 
 part of the book. Witness such an excellent piece of 
 advice as : "It does not matter much what a man hates 
 so long as he hates something." 
 
 In an apology for the devil he tells us to remember 
 that it must be remembered that we have only heard 
 one side of the case. God has written all the books. 
 
 With regard to the time in which we now live it does 
 us good to think that everything matters more than we 
 think it does, and at the same time nothing matters so 
 much as we think it does. The merest spark may set 
 all Europe in a blaze, but though all Europe be set in 
 a blaze twenty times over, the world will wag itself 
 right again. It is important to those of us who want 
 to gain a full picture of the man to realise that Nature 
 not only meant to him mountain, rivers, clouds and 
 undomesticated animals and plants but also — and much 
 more — the works of man and man himself. Return- 
 ing to the subject of Providence, he tells us that to put 
 one's trust in God is only a longer way of saying that 
 one will chance it, and as to Providence himself, if he 
 could be seen at all, he would probably turn out to 
 be a most disappointing person — a little wizened old 
 gentleman with a cold in his head, wandering aimlessly 
 about the streets, poking his way about and loitering 
 continually at shop windows and second-hand book- 
 stalls. 
 
 To understand a proposition thoroughly, in Butler's 
 words, we must put it on its head and shake it like a 
 purse, and we shall then be surprised to find how much 
 comes out of it. 
 
210 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Often we find that Butler expresses something we 
 have frequently thought but never been able to put 
 into words. An illustration of this may be found in his 
 note on that psalm in which David says that he has 
 more understanding than his teachers. " If his teachers 
 were anything like mine," says Butler, " this need not 
 imply much understanding on David's part. And if 
 his teachers did not know more than the Psalms . . . 
 Heaven help them." 
 
 On the top of this comes one of the most poignantly 
 truthful and wise remarks he ever penned : "To live 
 is like to love — all reason is against it — all healthy 
 instinct for it." 
 
 It is surp rising to read immediately after this, from 
 so stern an ascetic, that he had come to the conclusion 
 that life is, au fond, sensual, say what we will. This 
 utterance must have been forced out of him by that 
 undeviating power to state at all costs the truth and 
 nothing but the truth, but it must have been a harder 
 saying to him than almost anything else he ever wrote. 
 The courage of the rigid Puritan who refused to sell his 
 eyes however much the truth hurt him is one of the 
 finest things in all modern literature. The next note 
 may, to a certain extent, explain this a little more 
 clearly. It is called Women and Religion. 
 
 " It has been said that all sensible men are of the 
 same religion and that no sensible man ever says what 
 that religion is. So all sensible men are of the same 
 opinion about women and no sensible man ever says 
 what that opinion is." 
 
 He concludes the Higgledy-Piggledy section by a 
 note which is never out of my mind when I stand on 
 a platform saying good-bye to some loved friend who 
 is leaving me alone and miserable : "I can generally 
 bear the separation, but I don't like the leave-taking." 
 
SAMUEL BUTLER 211 
 
 What a world of feeling is contained in that cold, steel- 
 like aphorism ! Shakespeare never got nearer to a 
 universal truth than Butler does in those twelve short 
 words. 
 
 In the section on Titles and Subjects we get some 
 glimmering idea of what we have missed owing to 
 Butler's squanderings. What a book he would have 
 made of Tracts for Children, warning them against the 
 Virtues of their Elders or The Elements of Immorality, 
 for the Use of Earnest Schoolmasters. 
 
 What we would not give to be able to read his novel 
 about a freethinking father who has an illegitimate 
 son, which he considers the proper thing ; he finds this 
 son takes to immoral ways — e.g. he turns Christian, 
 becomes a clergyman, and insists on marrying. 
 
 How ably he would have edited the letters of people 
 who have committed suicide together with those of 
 people who only threaten to do so. 
 
 We get an insight into Butler's own mode of life 
 from his simile of the cow. " A man, finding himself 
 in the field of a profession should do as cows do when 
 they are put into a field of grass. They do not like 
 any field : they like the open prairie of their ancestors. 
 They walk, however, all round their new abode, survey- 
 ing the hedges and gates with much interest. If there 
 is a gap in any hedge they will commonly go through 
 it at once, otherwise they will resign themselves con- 
 tentedly enough to the task of feeding." 
 
 It is with a discontented, wretched feeling that we 
 never have taken the trouble to explore our gaps that 
 we close a volume of Butler : he at least was filled 
 eternally with that divine Wander-Lust which is the 
 germ of all progress and without which no great work 
 can be done or immortal fame earned. Butler at least 
 has this great advantage : he never leaves you where 
 
212 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 he found you ; he points the way to the gaps and gates 
 which we had been too slack or too busy grazing to 
 notice for ourselves, and few indeed ought to be those 
 who, inspired by his example, fail to explore the country 
 that lies beyond the calm, monotonous meadowland 
 of our ordinary vocation. 
 
 XI 
 
 It is in the chapter on First Principles that he 
 recounts for our benefit that inimitable story of the 
 freethinker who exclaimed : "I am an atheist, thank 
 God ! " which runs close to being the best short anecdote 
 in the world. 
 
 With regard to his readers he says : " It is the 
 manner of gods and prophets to begin : Thou shalt 
 have none other god or prophet but me. If I were to 
 start as a god or a prophet I think I should take the 
 line : Thou shalt not believe in me. Thou shalt not 
 have me for a god. Thou shalt worship any damned 
 thing thou likest except me. This should be my first 
 and great commandment and my second should be like 
 unto it. If my readers must believe in anything, let 
 them believe in the music of Handel, the painting of 
 Giovanni Bellini, and in the thirteenth chapter of St 
 Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians. 
 
 " It is not the church in the village that is the source 
 of mischief, but the rectory. I would not touch a 
 church from one end of England to the other." It 
 almost recalls the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy to 
 read, apropos of theist and atheist, that the fight 
 between them is as to whether God shall be called 
 God or shall have some other name. 
 
 This section on Rebelliousness is full of carping at 
 
SAMUEL BUTLER 213 
 
 orthodox Christianity. " As there is a peace more 
 comfortable than any understanding, so there is an 
 understanding more covetable than any peace," which 
 is a point of view never before put into words, but no 
 less true in every whit than the more famous words of 
 the collect from which Butler found the origin of his 
 note. 
 
 When Butler gets on to the subject of cant and 
 hypocrisy we see more clearly than ever the legiti- 
 mate line between Swift and Shaw. " Gratitude like 
 revenge," he opens, " is a mistake unless under certain 
 securities. We have organised a legitimate channel 
 for lust and revenge by the institution of marriage and 
 the law courts. 
 
 " So it is with the professions of religion and medicine. 
 You swindle a man as much when you sell him a drug 
 of whose action you are ignorant as when you give him 
 a bit of bread and assure him that it is the body of His 
 Lord and then send a plate round for a subscription." 
 This passage, unpalatable as it may be, is simply a 
 transcript from A Tale of a Tub, written even more 
 concisely and straightforwardly than Jonathan Swift 
 wrote. It is inevitable that a man who writes so fear- 
 lessly as Butler should be frequently misquoted by his 
 opponents, and on the subject of drunkenness it has 
 often been adduced against him that he advocated it. 
 
 What he actually said was that in spite of his hating 
 drunkenness he was convinced that the human intellect 
 owed its superiority over that of the lower animals 
 to the stimulus which alcohol gives to the imagina- 
 tion or illusion, which is a quite different thing and 
 undeniably true. 
 
 After having listened to innumerable persons hope- 
 lessly entangling themselves in their endeavour to 
 explain the sin against the Holy Ghost, it is an immense 
 
214 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 relief to turn to a wise man like Butler and read his 
 rendering of the meaning of this difficult passage. 
 
 " What Christ meant was that a man may be 
 pardoned for being unable to believe in the Christian 
 mythology, but that if he made light of that spirit 
 which the common conscience of all men. whatever 
 their particular creed, recognises as divine there was 
 no hope for him. No more there is." 
 
 And yet, in spite of this note, there are men and 
 women who maintain that Butler is an atheist, a 
 blasphemer and a blackguard. What a crime it is in 
 England to possess an organic mind and dare to follow 
 St Paul's advice about proving all things before you 
 accept any. 
 
 As he himself explains, he does not fall foul of 
 Christians and their religion, but for what he held to be 
 their want of religion, for the low views they take of 
 God and of His glory and for the unworthiness with 
 which they try to serve Him. 
 
 " When I was young," he continues, " I used to 
 think that the only certain thing about life was that 
 I should one day die. Now I think that the only 
 certain thing about life is that there is no such thing 
 as death." If this is not the utterance of a truly 
 devout man, I have still to learn what devout means. 
 
 In " The Life of the World to Come," of all strange 
 places, we hit upon another introspective, personal 
 touch about himself, which is, after all, our main object 
 of search. " I do not read much," he says. " I look, 
 listen, think and write. I note what my friends say, 
 think it over, adapt it and give it permanent form. 
 They throw good things off as sparks ; I collect them 
 and turn them into warmth." 
 
 Talking of fictional characters (quaintly enough, in 
 the same note) he points out what Spender noticed in 
 
SAMUEL BUTLER 215 
 
 his comments of Bagshot, that bravery, wit and poetry 
 abound in every village. " There is not a village of 
 five hundred inhabitants in England but has its Mrs 
 Quickly and Tom Jones. These good people never 
 understand themselves, they go over their own heads, 
 they speak in unknown tongues to those around them, 
 and the interpreter is the rarer and more important 
 person. The votes sacer is the middleman of mind." 
 This section is a weird medley of inconsequent notes, 
 but none the less invaluable on that account. It is here 
 that we come upon that splendid note on " My Son," 
 which no one but Butler could ever have imagined, 
 much less written. 
 
 " I have often told my son that he must begin by 
 finding me a wife to become his mother, who shall 
 satisfy both himself and me. We should never have 
 got on together : I should have had to cut him off with 
 a shilling either for laughing at Homer, or for refusing 
 to laugh at him, or both, or neither. So I settled the 
 matter long ago by turning a deaf ear to his impor- 
 tunities and sticking to it that I would not get him at 
 all. Yet his thin ghost visits me at times and though 
 he knows that it is no use pestering me further, he looks 
 at me so wistfully and reproachfully that I am half- 
 inclined to turn tail, take my chance about his mother 
 and ask him to let me get him after all. But I should 
 show a clean pair of heels if I said ' Yes.' Besides, he 
 would probably be a girl." 
 
 Now ask yourself candidly and honestly, is not this 
 more satisfying, truer and more pregnant with pathos 
 than Lamb's Dream-Children ? Of course it is. It 
 might also be made the touchstone on which you can 
 test your appreciation of Butler. If this passage leaves 
 you cold, go back to your Tennyson ; Butler is not 
 for you. If, however, you are among that quickly 
 
216 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 increasing colony of Erewhon lovers you will only read 
 on feverishly — and as a result be brought up sharp 
 by one of those astringent surprises which Butler 
 delights to keep in store for some such moment as this 
 by meeting a page of statistics about the sale of his 
 works. 
 
 Apparently he lost money on every book he wrote 
 except Erewhon, increasing his debit account from £350 
 to close on £800. On the opposite page to this in- 
 teresting list of book-keeping we read : " If I deserve 
 to be remembered, it will not be so much for anything 
 I have written, or for any new way of looking at old 
 facts as for having shown that a man of no special 
 ability, with no literary connections, not particularly 
 laborious, fairly, but not supremely, accurate as far as 
 he goes, may yet, by being perfectly square, sticking to 
 his point, not letting his temper run away with him, 
 and biding his time, be a match for the most powerful 
 literary and scientific coterie that England has ever 
 known. I hope it may be said of me that I discomfited 
 an unscrupulous, self-seeking clique, and set a more 
 wholesome example myself. To have done this is the 
 best of all discoveries. 
 
 " I am not one of those who have travelled along 
 a set road towards an end that I have foreseen and 
 desired to reach. I have made a succession of jaunts 
 or pleasure trips from meadow to meadow. Neverthe- 
 less I have strayed into no field in which I have not 
 found a flower that was worth the finding." 
 
 He then catalogues the seventeen different things that 
 he has left for the world to judge him by. among the most 
 important being the emphasising the analogies between 
 crime and disease, the emphasising the analogies between 
 the development of the organs of our bodies and those 
 which are not incorporate with our bodies and which 
 
SAMUEL BUTLER 217 
 
 we call tools or machines, the clearing up the history 
 of the events in connection with the crucifixion of Our 
 Lord, the perception that personal identity cannot be 
 denied between parents and offspring without denying 
 it as between the different ages and moments in the 
 life of the individual, the exposure of Charles Darwin 
 and Wallace, the perception of the principle that led 
 organic life to split up into animal and vegetable, the 
 perception that if the Kinetic theory holds good, our 
 thought of a thing is in reality an exceedingly weak 
 dilution of the actual thing itself, the finding out that 
 the Odyssey was written at Trapani by a woman, and 
 the elucidation of Shakespeare's sonnets. Not a bad 
 life's work for any man ! 
 
 XII 
 
 It would be foolish to leave this fascinating subject 
 without a word as to Butler's poems. The Psalm of 
 Montreal is by far the most famous, on account of the 
 glorious, breezy, unconventional finish to each stanza 
 which everybody knows : " O God ! O Montreal ! " 
 
 The reason for this outburst is not so well known. 
 The first stanza will explain : 
 
 Stowed away in a Montreal lumber-room 
 The Discobolus standeth and turneth his face to the wall ; 
 Dusty, cobweb-covered, maimed and set at naught, 
 Beauty crieth in an attic and no man regardeth : 
 O God ! O Montreal ! 
 
 " Beauty crieth in an attic and no man regardeth." 
 That was Butler's complaint against humanity, as it 
 has been the poets' despairing cry all through the ages. 
 
218 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 In his next poem, To Critics and Others, he imitates 
 Walt Whitman with conspicuous success : 
 
 O critics, cultured critics ! 
 
 Who will praise me after I am dead, 
 
 Who will see in me both more and less than I intended, 
 
 But who will swear that whatever it was it was all perfectly 
 
 right : 
 You will think you are better than the people who, when I 
 
 was alive, swore that whatever I did was wrong 
 And damned ray books for me as fast as I could write them ; 
 But you will not be better, you will be just the same, neither 
 
 better nor worse, 
 And you will go for some future Butler as your fathers have 
 
 gone for me. 
 Oh ! How I should have hated you ! 
 
 I should very much like to quote more of this refresh- 
 ing poem ; it is so exceedingly good for us to be ridi- 
 culed in advance like this. Even after his death he 
 manages to sting, and he warns us not to thrust him 
 down the throats of the public of our or any other age. 
 " You, Nice People ! who will be sick of me because the 
 critics thrust me down your throats, but who would 
 take me willingly enough if you were not bored about 
 me . . . neglect me, burlesque me, boil me down [that's 
 what I've done, being no critic], do whatever you like 
 with me, but do not think that, if I were living, I should 
 not aid and abet you. There is nothing that even 
 Shakespeare would enjoy more than a good burlesque 
 of Hamlet." 
 
 It would require an exceedingly able man to " rag," 
 parody or burlesque Butler, and he most certainly 
 knew it ; but he failed if he thought that by writing 
 this poem he would stop critics from writing about him. 
 
 It has been his good or ill fortune to have been the 
 subject of innumerable lectures and articles and even 
 
SAMUEL BUTLER 219 
 
 books in recent years, and by a quaint irony he seems 
 to have had fewer bad ones than most men. Gilbert 
 Cannan and John Harris have each of them been 
 thoroughly imbued with the spirit of Butler, and have 
 certainly made the way easier for those who have failed 
 to find him hitherto. Anything which drives people to 
 read the man for themselves is so much to the good, for 
 the education of a well-read man may very well be quite 
 incomplete if he has missed the works of the author of 
 Erewhon. But Butler is nothing if not unexpected. 
 
 Immediately following upon this nasty brick thrown 
 into the camp of the critics we find a translation into 
 Greek verse of Mrs Gamp's best remark about Mrs 
 Harris, which would delight the hearts of any but the 
 most conservative members of a Common Room. 
 
 To those who believe that Shakespeare's sonnets 
 were merely artificial I would recommend Butler's 
 tremendous counterblast, purposely, with almost 
 hideous malignity, called An Academic Exercise : 
 
 We were two lovers standing sadly by 
 
 While our two loves lay dead upon the ground : 
 
 Each love had striven not to be the first to die, 
 
 But each was gashed with many a cruel wound. 
 
 Said I : " Your love was false while mine was true." 
 
 Aflood with tears he cried : " It was not so, 
 
 'Twas your false love my true love falsely slew — 
 
 For 'twas your love that was the first to go." 
 
 Thus did we stand and said no more for shame 
 
 Till I, seeing his cheek so wan and wet, 
 
 Sobbed thus : " So be it : my love shall bear the blame 
 
 Let us inter them honourably." And yet 
 
 I swear by all truth human and divine 
 
 'Twas his that in its death throes murdered mine. 
 
 It would be hard to deny sincerity and passion to 
 this ; it would not disgrace the pages of any anthology 
 
220 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 of English poetry that I know, and yet, so far as I can 
 recollect, it is included in none. 
 
 It is certainty very far removed from mere versifying 
 if it cannot be claimed as great poetry. 
 
 Once again we are reminded of Rupert Brooke's 
 poetry in the concluding couplet of the sonnet entitled 
 A Prayer, in which he asks that his open sins should be 
 forgiven and cleansed first, " they being so gross," and 
 let the others wait : 
 
 And cleanse not all even then, leave me a few, 
 I would not be — not quite — so pure as you. 
 
 I know of no one except some of the very youngest 
 poets of our time who have this power of leading up to 
 a daring climax and then turning the tables suddenly, 
 and so leave you with a point of view at once unexpected, 
 startling, brilliant and yet true. 
 
 I have never heard it suggested that Brooke owed 
 anything to Butler, nor can I find any definite proof of 
 it, but in the light of the concluding lines of the above 
 and the next two sonnets I for one refuse to believe 
 that Brooke did not know his Butler. 
 
 In Life After Death the last couplet runs : 
 
 Yet meet we shall, and part, and meet again, 
 Where dead men meet, on lips of living men ; 
 
 and last of all in Handel, " best lov'd of all the dead 
 whom I love best, : ' he finishes on a note of panegyric 
 that is rare indeed : 
 
 Methinks the very worms will find some strain 
 Of yours still lingering in my wasted brain. 
 
 We are now at the end of our journey and I have 
 obeyed Butler's own advice in boiling him down rather 
 than criticising him, for the sole purpose of driving 
 
SAMUEL BUTLER 221 
 
 those to whom he is still but a name to cull from the 
 vineyard whence I have just gathered a sample cluster 
 of grapes. 
 
 His great value to us of to-day is his exhilarating 
 irreverence, his amazing candour and entire absence of 
 self- consciousness. He washes us clear from all taint of 
 the dishonesty that clings round our stereotyped views 
 on Christianity, money and sex. He stands alone 
 among the masters of irony, Swift, Newman and 
 Meredith, the torch-bearer of that unique gift to a 
 generation not at all at home in its clear, rarefied 
 atmosjohere. His sense of detachment enables him to 
 become our greatest commentator on life, by one who 
 looks on. As Mr Harris says : " In a sense he stands for 
 civilisation looking at itself and laughing in the realisa- 
 tion of how funny it all is." This capacity for laughter 
 on all occasions is one of his most lovable traits, for 
 whatever else he was Samuel Butler was at all times 
 lovable, owing to his large-hearted humanity, his 
 never-failing kindness and undeviating sincerity. He 
 preached in what is the only possible palatable way 
 nowadays, a light-hearted, humorous vein. Everything 
 made him "chuckle" ; every twist and turn in the world 
 about him left him immensely astonished and intensely 
 amused. He had, as Shakespeare had, the experiencing 
 mind ; everything was grist to his mill ; he forgot 
 nothing, because he had the good sense to take notes 
 whenever and wherever a thought or scene struck him 
 as worth committing to paper. 
 
 This is an age of much writing and omnivorous read- 
 ing, but as in art the process of selection is one of the 
 hardest to attain, so in reading ; if we choose this we 
 must miss that. Woe to that man who wantonly and 
 wilfully omits to make the acquaintance of Samuel 
 Butler, for he will have lost a chance of making a life- 
 
222 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 long friend of one of the most penetrating, courageous 
 and original men of letters which England has ever had 
 the good fortune to produce. 
 
 We owe Bernard Shaw to him ; our feeling on re- 
 reading his works for the twelfth time is one of 
 wonder that he has not left, not one foster-son only, 
 but a score or more, each of them as much superior 
 to Shaw as Butler was to him. 
 
 For all who wish to leave behind them some work 
 which shall outlive their own lifetime, a careful study 
 of Butler's works is not only a pleasure but a prime 
 necessity. He will give them fresh ideas and renew 
 their courage and shower on them hints about life and 
 its meaning and how to transcribe its effect on them 
 more abundantly than any other writer of whatever age. 
 
VIII 
 RICHARD MIDDLETON 
 
 NOW that six years have elapsed since the un- 
 timely death of one of the most promising of 
 the young geniuses of the century there seems 
 some danger lest, in the storm and stress of the age in 
 which we live, Richard Middleton should be neglected 
 and forgotten by all save his few disciples and enthusi- 
 astic foster-children, which would be an incalculable 
 loss to English letters, for there are few enough in these 
 days who will dare to stand up and preach the gospel 
 of the worship of the beautiful, and fewer still who are 
 able to transport us, as Kenneth Grahame does, to the 
 days when every tree was green, to our own golden 
 age of infancy, to those dream-days of halcyon contents 
 and immeasurably happy moments of early childhood. 
 Never has there been a time when we so acutely 
 realised the worth of the priceless heritage which we 
 have lost by growing up as now ; and anyone who will 
 sing to us one of the songs of our own innocence, who 
 will remind us of our own childish Arcadia, has a value 
 far above rubies in a time of war. 
 
 Richard Middleton was that evanescent, shapeless 
 thing, a meteor ... he founded no school, he imitated 
 no man, he carried on no tradition. I can recollect no 
 one in the least like him ; he flashed into our ken 
 suddenly, without warning, in 1910. In 1911, failing 
 to make the world perceive that beauty and poetry 
 were essential to man's welfare and recognising that he 
 himself had failed by too much dreaming and too little 
 action, he determined to seek adventure in the unknown 
 223 
 
224 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 and committed suicide in Brussels at the age of twenty- 
 nine. 
 
 He was educated at St Paul's School, and then went 
 into an insurance office in the City, afterwards giving 
 up " a large salary," to quote his own words, " in order 
 to write poetry." He became a sub- editor under Mr 
 Frank Harris, but his casual, cheerfully unpunctual 
 nature hardly suited the profession he had now entered, 
 so he threw it up in order to confine his attention wholly 
 to poetry, all of which so pleased Mr Harris that he had 
 no difficulty in getting it printed in the j3apers over 
 which from time to time his editor had control. In 
 Contemporary Portraits Mr Frank Harris gives us 
 valuable first-hand impressions of a man who seems 
 to have been known only to the few. 
 
 He had thick black hair, a furrowed forehead, shrewd, 
 wistful, penetrating eyes (like Conrad), had never shaved 
 in his life, and was devoted to, and beloved of, all 
 children. He was deeply read in English, and possessed 
 an astonishingly sure judgment of other men's work : 
 of his own he had the self-criticism of the masters. 
 His prose was always the prose of the singer — limpid, 
 musical, rhythmic, almost too perfectly rounded. And 
 yet in it there is the magic that makes words live ; all 
 his thoughts pass through the testing crucible of artistic 
 perception and come out changed, winged, eternal. 
 
 Whether it be that famous story of The Ghost Ship, 
 where we seem really to see the fairy barque sailing away 
 over the turnip field, through the windy stars, its port- 
 holes and bay-windows blazing with lights to the accom- 
 paniment of singing and fiddling on deck on the part 
 of all the village ghosts who have been inveigled away 
 on it, or that incident in The Brighton Road, where the 
 dead boy is eternally condemned to go on tramping — 
 tramping ... in all his stories there is an uncanny 
 
RICHARD MIDDLETON 225 
 
 something which makes them take wing beyond the 
 author's conception, that elusive quality which, for 
 want of a better word, we call genius. 
 
 His stories are woven like delicate spiders'-webs, be- 
 sprinkled with dew ; they are pure gossamer, unbeliev- 
 ably beautiful ; but touch them and they fall to pieces 
 in your hand. They must be read in their entirety to 
 be appreciated : quotation in this case is like Dr 
 Johnson's brick, no criterion whatever of the excellence 
 of the building. 
 
 The effect is always heightened by a sure sense of 
 humour which crops up in all sorts of unexpected places 
 throughout his work. 
 
 What a quantity of wisdom is hidden in this para- 
 graph on his own schooldays. ;< You're only here for 
 a little spell," he said ; " you'll be surprised how short 
 it is. And don't be miserable just because you're 
 different. I'm different ; it's a jolly good thing to 
 be different" — and then, after a pause — "All the 
 same, I don't see why you should always have dirty 
 nails. ..." Or, again, in this story of the author, who, 
 having finished his great book, " read it to his friends, 
 who made suggestions that would have involved its 
 re-writing from one end to the other ; he read it to his 
 enemies, who told him that it Avas nearly good enough 
 to publish ; he read it to his wife, who said that it was 
 very nice, and that it was time to dress for dinner." 
 
 It is this faculty which must have so endeared him to 
 children. Certainly no other man, Kenneth Grahame 
 and Sir James Barrie alone excepted, ever entered so 
 completely into the thoughts and ways of childhood. 
 
 No man has so faithfully transcribed the best moments 
 and those hidden thoughts of our early days which we 
 imagined were forgotten or a part of ourselves that was 
 dead before we came across this book. How perfect 
 
226 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 and yet how characteristic is the sentence uttered 
 almost unconsciously by the small boy in the wood. 
 " All the wasted moonlight," he cried ; " the grass is 
 quite wet with it," 
 
 He brings back all the secret longings and untellable 
 ecstasies of our early youth which we never breathed to 
 the Olympians for fear of ridicule. Childhood's loves 
 are strange loves but they are very real ; uncanny to 
 the adult mind, but so natural to the infant intelligence 
 as scarcely to need comment. The majority of us are 
 nowadays scarcely enamoured of the lawn-mower, but 
 have we forgotten the day when " the very appearance 
 of the thing was cheery and companionable, with its 
 hands outstretched to welcome mine and its coat of 
 green more vivid than any lawn. To seize hold of its 
 smooth handles was like shaking hands with an old 
 friend, and as it rattled over the gravel path it chattered 
 to me in the gruff tones of a jovial uncle. Once on the 
 smooth lawn its voice thrilled to song tremulous and 
 appealing and filled with the throbbings of great wings. 
 And cheered by that song I might drive my chariot 
 where I would. Not for me the stiff, brocaded pattern 
 beloved of our gardener : I made curves, skirting the 
 shadows of the tall poplars or cutting the lawn into 
 islands and lagoons : with the cold inhumanity of youth 
 I would marvel at the injudicious earthworms that 
 tried to stay my progress and perished for their pains." 
 
 Surely that wakes a responsive chord in our minds of 
 days when we burnt witches on the rubbish heap, when 
 we coiled the garden hose round our legs, Laocoon- 
 like, when we, too, launched our Argonauts, braving 
 Farmer Bates' terrible wrath, by sailing past his for- 
 bidden meadow, when we too tramped through the 
 woods in search of the magic pool by night. 
 
 There are only too few books that are able to transport 
 
RICHARD MIDDLETON 227 
 
 us back to those golden hours when we played cricket 
 (real cricket, when you were out if you hit the ball into 
 the next garden, and stopped playing if you broke a 
 window), owned pirate-ships and magic carpets, and 
 founded secret societies in the secrecy of the lumber- 
 room. 
 
 Whenever we feel that nostalgia of childhood which 
 overtakes each of us so often amid the worries and cares 
 of life to-day, which causes us to batter vainly at fast- 
 locked nursery doors, or to look sadly at the gaudy 
 toy- shops, robbed by the cynical years of their fit halo, 
 at such a time if we can find no children to play with 
 and our hearts yearn for the fairy laughter of playing 
 infants, to take down a volume of Richard Middleton's 
 child fancies will do much to appease our longing and 
 cause us to live over again those magic hours which we 
 have now for ever lost. Everyone knows that the finest 
 joys he experiences are just the most incommunicable : 
 who can harness Pegasus to describe the sensation 
 of a man who has just made a mighty, almost im- 
 possible tackle at " Rugger," brought off a long- 
 practised shot of great difficulty at billiards, sung a 
 song in such a way as to thrill his audience with a 
 magnetism so great that they forget to applaud, climbed 
 a hitherto inaccessible peak, written the last word of a 
 play, novel or poem which he knows to be a living force, 
 eternal, incorruptible: who, I repeat, can hope to 
 express life's great moments even when we have reached 
 years that perhaps have brought the power of self- 
 expression ? 
 
 How much less can we hope to regain exactly or ever 
 to reproduce in the minds of other people the days of 
 our Golden Age : at the most absurd moments, while 
 hurrying into school at the last moment, while catching 
 a train, on a route march, in the middle of worrying out 
 
228 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 a mathematical problem, some insidious sound, a cock 
 crowing, the scrunch of a wheelbarrow, the haycutter 
 in the fields, the pack of hounds giving tongue, some 
 wave of recollection sweeps over us and on the instant 
 we are back in that old garden, chasing the guinea-fowl, 
 penetrating the meadow brook to the forbidden haunts 
 of the pixy-ridden mill and the deep trout pool, seated 
 in the cleft of the blasted oak looking out over 
 Westward Ho ! and Lundy for a sight of Amyas Leigh 
 and Salvation Yeo, for John Silver and Captain 
 Bartholomew Roberts ; some friends show us over 
 their house, and having penetrated every recess, we say, 
 to their complete mystification : " May I see the attic 
 now, please ? " and coldly wondering at the lunatic 
 they harbour as their guest they push us into the raftered 
 room full of apples. In a moment we are thousands of 
 miles away on a lonely sea, plying our raft, with rations 
 given out and hope lost . . . when suddenly the cry 
 goes up : " A sail ! a sail ! " and we are taken on board 
 the friendly sloop and swear eternal vows of comrade- 
 ship with the pirate chief, whose incarnadined face, 
 bandage-hidden, haunts our dreams a thousand nights. 
 Such tricks do our senses play us, and how pitiable are 
 those (if there exist any such, which I much doubt) who 
 are never betrayed by the smell of leaves on a November 
 night, by the sight of a Guy Fawkes bonfire, by the 
 chestnut roasting on All-Hallows E'en, when they 
 gaze into the fire and build again those gorgeous palaces 
 which were once so real — so real . . . but I am lost 
 myself. You see the effect of Middleton : he drives 
 you back willy-nilly, and life becomes for a few precious 
 moments all sunshine, laughter and innocence, and war 
 and separation are no more. 
 
 But there is another side to Middleton which it is 
 necessary to understand before we can pretend to have 
 
RICHARD MIDDLETON 229 
 
 in our minds a picture of the complete man. He 
 recurs to it again and again both in his prose and his 
 poetry — and in its essence we might call this trait the 
 lament of the writer, the tragedy of the artist ; an over- 
 powering sense of the inadequacy of the word-maker 
 and the dreamer in comparison with the man of action 
 seems an ever-present topic in the mind of Middleton 
 as it was in the mind of Robert Louis Stevenson. 
 
 While ordinary efficient men and women are enjoying the 
 promise of the morning, the fulfilment of the afternoon, the 
 tranquillity of evening, we are still trying to discover a fitting 
 epithet for the dew of dawn. For us Spring paves the woods 
 with beautiful words rather than flowers, and when we look 
 into the eyes of our mistress we see nothing but adjectives. 
 Does a handful of love-songs really outweigh the smile of 
 a pretty girl, or a hardly-written romance compensate the 
 author for months of lost adventure ? We have only one life 
 to live, and we spend the greater part of it writing the 
 history of dead hours. 
 
 Few of us are fortunate enough to accomplish anything 
 that was in the least worth doing, so we fall back on the 
 arid philosophy that it is effort alone that counts. 
 
 And then, in a passage pregnant with real introspec- 
 tion, he gives us a rare insight into his own character. 
 It had been raining, he said, one morning, and while 
 watching from his window he suddenly became con- 
 scious of a wet morning years before when he was eight 
 years old, a real wet, grey day, when he heard the rain 
 dripping from the fir-trees on to the scullery roof and 
 the wind every now and then drove the rain down on 
 the soaked lawn with a noise like breaking surf; he 
 remembered thinking how nice it would be if it rained 
 really hard and flooded the house so that they would 
 all have to starve for three weeks, and then be rescued 
 excitingly in boats . . . behind him in the room his 
 brothers were playing chess and his sister was patiently 
 
280 STUDIES IN LITEEATURE 
 
 beating a doll in a corner. The clock on the mantel- 
 piece ticked very slowly and he realised that an eternity 
 of those long seconds separated him from dinner-time. 
 
 He thought he would like to go out. The enterprise 
 presented certain difficulties and dangers, but none that 
 were insuperable. He would have to steal down to the 
 hall unobserved : he would have to open the front door 
 without making a noise and he would have to run down 
 the front drive under the eyes of many windows. Once 
 beyond the gate, however, he would be safe. 
 
 In the wood near the house he might meet the 
 magician for whom he had looked so often in vain on 
 sunny days, for it was quite likely that he preferred 
 walking in bad weather when no one else was about. 
 Then he thought of the probable punishments that 
 would ensue, but they did not trouble him much, at 
 any rate in retrospect. And yet he did not go out : 
 he stayed dreaming until the golden moment for action 
 had passed and he was called back to a prosaic world by 
 the shrieks of the chess-players, who were suddenly 
 locked in battle. And this later morning, as he stood 
 at the window again watching the rain, Richard Middle- 
 ton indulges in the vain wish that he had then set forth 
 to seek adventure. He would have met the enchanter 
 in the wood and he would have taught him to conquer 
 worlds, and to leave the easy triumphs of dreams to 
 madmen, philosophers and poets. He would have 
 made him a man of action, a statesman, a soldier, a 
 founder of cities or a digger of graves. 
 
 And then comes the crucial passage. He concludes 
 the essay thus : 
 
 It seems to me likely enough that that moment of hesita- 
 tion before the schoolroom window determined a habit of 
 mind that has kept me dreaming ever since. For all my life 
 I have preferred thought to action : I have never run to the 
 
RICHARD MIDDLETON 231 
 
 little wood : I have never met the enchanter. And so this 
 morning, when Fate played me this trick and my dream was 
 chilled for an instant by the icy breath of the past, I did not 
 rnsh out into the streets of life and lay about me with a 
 flaming sword. No : I picked up my pen and wrote some 
 words on a piece of paper, and lulled my shocked senses with 
 the tranquillity of the idlest dream of all. 
 
 My life, my beautiful life all wasted : 
 
 The gold days, the blue days to darkness sunk. 
 
 The bread was here, and I have not tasted : 
 The wine was here, and I have not drunk. 
 
 I feel that in one sense this is the most tragically 
 true, the most artistically great of all Middleton's 
 writing. 
 
 It is absolutely impossible to read it without trans- 
 ferring the whole idea over to oneself. It is oneself 
 who has failed, who has stood at the window, and 
 through inertia, panic or for whatever cause, has let the 
 golden moment go by, and instead of sallying forth 
 sword in hand to rid the world of some abuse we have 
 preferred the more comfortable fire and attempted to 
 delude ourselves with the obvious lie that after all, 
 perhaps, there was no wizard in the wood. 
 
 Sanity, we have been told, is simply a capacity for 
 becoming accustomed to the monstrous ; and Middle- 
 ton's tragedy lies as much as anything in the fact that 
 though he refuses to call ugliness beautiful, yet he is 
 too much of a dreamer to sally forth sword in hand as 
 the avenger of wrongs. 
 
 Most of us forget our early frantic anger at the need- 
 less horrors that abound on every side ; we have our 
 fight against it young, are thoroughly well cowed and 
 are lucky if in the end we not only agree with and 
 defend the existing chaos and mistake it for order, light 
 and beauty, but quite definitely throw our whole weight 
 
232 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 on the side of ugliness and make a religion of it. Not 
 so Richard Middleton : 
 
 When a young man first awakens to a sense of the beauty 
 and value of life, it is natural that he should be overwhelmed 
 by the ugliness of the inheritance that his ancestors have 
 forced upon him. He finds in the civilisation that he has 
 had no place in devising a tyranny against which it appears 
 almost impossible to make any resistance, a dogma which he 
 is told everyone except a young fool must accept as a truth. 
 . . . He may, for instance, think that it is better to grow 
 and love roses in a cottage garden than to reign in an 
 umbrella factory ; but this briefest of the illusions of youth 
 will be shattered forthwith by what appears to be the first 
 law of civilised life : that a man can only earn his living by 
 the manufacture of ugliness. 
 
 He then shows you the young man turning for com- 
 fort to latter-day prophets and philosophers, who spend 
 their time, he finds (in Middleton' s glorious phrase) in 
 scheming little revolutions on a sound conservative basis : 
 only in the poets can the young man find solace. 
 
 It is unnecessary, he goes on, to point out that the 
 dangerous revolutionary spirit which worships lovely 
 things is not encouraged in our national schools. 
 
 The children of the State are taught to cut up flowers 
 and to call the fragments by cunning names, but they 
 are not invited to love them for their beauty. 
 
 Their lips lisp dates and the dry husks of history, but 
 they have no knowledge of the splendid pageant of 
 bygone kingdoms and dead races. 
 
 The cheaper newspapers, which alone are read by the 
 people, as a whole seek out and dilate on ugliness with 
 passionate ingenuity . . . only in the poets ... I 
 repeat, can a young man find solace. 
 
 And would you know how to be a poet in Middleton's 
 words ? 
 
 " Take something — I would say take anything — and 
 
RICHARD MIDDLETON 233 
 
 love it, and thereafter, if he were a child of his century, 
 I should have to tell him of love, the rude, uncivilised 
 force that has inspired all the deeds worth doing, that 
 has made all the things worth making. I should tell 
 him that it was nonsense to speak of anything or any- 
 body being worthy of his love, that the question was 
 whether he could make his love worthy of any shadow 
 of an idea that penetrates his education. I should tell 
 him — to what end ? That he might see life as he would 
 have made it, and weep his years away ; that he might 
 find beauty and fail to win it ; that he might cry his 
 scorn of ugliness on the hills and have never a hearer 
 for his pains ? Pooh ! It were kinder to let him snore 
 with the others. There are too many unhappy people 
 already." 
 
 Yet Middleton himself, with his eyes open, chose the 
 better way : it is as a poet that he lives for the majority 
 of his readers, one who ever strove to keep the sun upon 
 the western wall. 
 
 Roses and lilies blowing fair, 
 A sunny castle in old Spain, 
 A lock of my beloved's hair, 
 A tale that shall be told again, 
 Joy and sorrow, heaven and hell — 
 These are all the wares I sell. 
 
 As one of his critics has said, the visible world and the 
 passions of men and women were all his care. 
 
 Mr Frank Harris declares that The Bathing Boy is 
 finer than anything in Herrick. 
 
 His theory of poetry is to be found definitely, clearly 
 and finally in that remarkable passage in The Poet's 
 Allegory : 
 
 So he pulled out his pipe and made a mournful song to 
 himself of the dancing gnats and the bitter odour of the 
 bonfires in the townsfolks' gardens. And the children drew 
 
234 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 near to hear him sing, for they thought his song was pretty, 
 until their fathers drove them home, saying : " That stuff 
 has no educational value." 
 
 u Why haven't you a message ?" they asked the boy. 
 
 " I come to tell you that the grass is green beneath your 
 feet and that the sky is blue over your heads." 
 
 " Oh ! But we know all that ! " they answered. 
 
 " Do you ! Do you ! " screamed the boy. " Do you think 
 you could stop over your absurd labours if you knew how blue 
 the sky is ? You would be out singing on the hills with me." 
 
 et Then who would do our work ? " they said, mocking him. 
 
 "Then who would want it done ? " he retorted. 
 
 When I lived I sought no wings, 
 Schemed no heaven, planned no hell, 
 But, content with little things, 
 Made an earth, and it was well. 
 Song and laughter, food and wine, 
 Roses, roses red and white, 
 And a star or two to shine 
 On my dewy world at night. 
 Lord, what more could I desire? 
 With my little heart of clay 
 I have lit no eternal fire 
 To burn my dreams on Judgment Day ! 
 
 But we, the great British public, had no use for song 
 and laughter, the sweet beauty of roses in those pre- 
 war days : it is only now that poets can sell their wares 
 and so continue to exist. 
 
 First John Davidson and then Richard Middleton — 
 great singers both — had to leave a world grown old and 
 cold and weary and plunge into the unknown, and in 
 one last piteous cry Middleton takes his farewell of us : 
 
 So here's an end ; I ask forgetfulness 
 Now that my little store of hours is spent, 
 And heart to laugh upon my punishment. 
 Dear God, what means a poet more or less ? 
 
IX 
 
 THE GENIUS OF JOHN MASEFIELD 
 
 THOSE of us who were at Oxford between 1905 
 and 1909 have good cause to be thankful for 
 many things, but above all, for the fact that 
 we were then waking to the reality that we really were, 
 without hyperbole, living in an age of Renaissance. 
 On a certain gloomy November afternoon, long to be 
 remembered, I went to the Corn Exchange to witness 
 the production of some plays of Celtic origin, by 
 W. B. Yeats, of whom we knew something, and of 
 one, John Millington Synge, of whom we and the world 
 about us knew practically nothing. 
 
 To have seen The Playboy of the Western World acted, 
 with Miss Maire O'Neill as " Pegeen Mike," before any- 
 one on this side of the Irish Sea knew of it, ranks us 
 with the Elizabethan theatre-goers who first saw 
 Hamlet, knowing not whether it was to be good or bad. 
 Three or four years later it did not matter. Every- 
 one recognised a master spirit in the Irish playwright, 
 and an unfailing topic of conversation over any dinner- 
 table was the ability of the Abbey Theatre Players to 
 show us what acting really meant. 
 
 What mattered was that we were among the pioneers. 
 Now we smile from our fastnesses at the way English 
 critics "lap" up Synge's plays, and books appear at every 
 turn, books of panegyric that by their indiscriminating 
 eulogies must make the playwright turn in his grave. 
 
 Much in the same way nothing can deprive us of the 
 pride of having been one of the first to read and love 
 John Masefield. In 1905 his name, it can safely be 
 
 235 
 
236 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 said, was absolutely unknown to the great majority of 
 thinking men and women in this country, and yet there 
 are among us several who are certain that he has 
 written nothing so fine or lasting (except August, 1914, 
 which is by far the best poem yet written on the war) 
 since that time, and those who assert this are not carp- 
 ing critics. But I wish to expand that statement later. 
 
 Those of us who were lucky enough to come into the 
 circle of Masefield-lovers while that circle was still one 
 of small compass feel a thrill of joy and pleasure to 
 think that we recognised the capabilities of the poet 
 and came under his spell before the mass of readers had 
 even heard his name. 
 
 The diversity of the man now is bewildering. First 
 we knew him as a writer of lyrics and ballads, one or 
 two of which are unlike anything else in the English 
 language. Shortly after this we found him blossoming 
 out into a novelist; Captain Margaret, Multitude and 
 Solitude and The Street of To-Day are the novels of a 
 poet, it is true, but they are still able to hold their own 
 in that particular niche, a small one, which contains the 
 novels we keep to read again. And A Tarpaulin Muster 
 — a book of short stories — must not be forgotten. 
 
 No sooner had we recovered from the astonishment 
 of this than we found him proffering us a second 
 Treasure Island, beating Stevenson on his own ground. 
 I know of many boys who prefer Jim Davis and 
 Lost Endeavour to any other stories of buccaneers, 
 pirates and adventure yet written. 
 
 Then those who have seen Pompey the Great, Nan and 
 Philip the King acted declare that all other contem- 
 porary drama is insipid in comparison. He has the 
 dramatist's true touch and absolute realisation of the 
 exigencies of the stage. Nan without doubt is a play 
 that will outlive all the other dramas of its age. 
 
JOHN MASEFIELD 237 
 
 But it is not to my purpose here to discuss Mr 
 Masefield as a dramatist, as a novelist, or as a writer 
 of boys' adventure stories. 
 
 It is his fate to have become the most popular poet 
 of the age at a bound, and it is possible now, with the 
 mass of material he has produced, to find reasons for 
 this, and to come to some sort of conclusion as to 
 whether it has benefited his art so to have been taken 
 up as a craze. 
 
 In nearly every case it has been truly said of poets 
 that their genuine success always varies inversely with 
 their contemporary success. Martin Tupper, Byron 
 and Longfellow are outstanding instances of versifiers 
 who drew crowds to pay homage while they were alive, 
 whereas Milton, Keats and Shelley — to select a few 
 great names at random — were absolutely unrecognised 
 by the great mass of readers of their age, and made no 
 sort of impression on their contemporaries. 
 
 As I have a sort of thesis to propound, it will be better 
 for my scheme not to take all the poems in chronological 
 order, but to arrange them in the best possible way for 
 my argument. 
 
 In one of the lesser known, but most valuable, of 
 Mr Masefield' s works, A Mainsail Haul, published on 
 the 1st June 1905, occur these verses : 
 
 I yarned with ancient shipmen beside the galley range, 
 And some were fond of women, but all were fond of 
 
 change ; 
 They sang their quivering chanties, all in a fo'c's'le drone, 
 And 1 was finely suited, if I had only known. 
 
 I rested in an ale-house that had a sanded floor, 
 
 Where seamen sat a-drinking and chalking up the score ; 
 
 They yarned of ships and mermaids, of topsail sheets and 
 
 slings, 
 But I was discontented ; I looked for better things. 
 
238 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 I heard a drunken fiddler, in Billy Lee's Saloon, 
 I brooked an empty belly with thinking of the tune ; 
 I swung the doors disgusted as drunkards rose to dance, 
 And now I know the music was life and life's romance. 
 
 The poem gives a wondrous sight into the mind of 
 the author ; in all of his poems there is that insatiable 
 hankering after the sea ; it is dragged in even at the 
 end of Daffodil Fields, of all unlikely places. 
 
 The poem has practically nothing to do with the sea, 
 but the author cannot resist the temptation to make 
 the story a legend common among sailors ; hence this 
 last stanza that you may rise from reading, as from all 
 his other poems, with a strong taste of salt in the 
 mouth. 
 
 But these introductory verses to A Mainsail Haul 
 show us something more. They explain his right to be 
 considered The Genius of the Ale-house. He must for 
 ever confine his genius to that section of society whose 
 vocabulary is nearly limited to " Hell," " By Crimes," 
 " Bloody " and other even less savoury expletives. 1 
 
 Imitators of Mr Masefield, and these have already 
 been many, have based their forms of flattery nearly 
 entirely upon this phase, forgetful of the fact that it is 
 the lyrical beauty in the background of the poems that 
 makes the poet what he is, and not the daring (it will 
 soon cease to be that) innovation of employing bargee 
 and bricklayer terms to heighten the sense of reality. 
 
 The language, customs, manners and traits of the 
 drunkard and sottish are to him " life and life's 
 romance." He is " finely suited " in describing the 
 ways of the doxy and the labourer's mistress. 
 
 1 It is not because he likes it that he does this, but because his 
 hypersensitive nature so abhors oaths that he is fascinated against 
 his will, much in the same way as Anglo-Indian children are 
 fascinated by the venomous beauty of snakes.- 
 
JOHN MASEFIELD 239 
 
 In a book published even earlier, Salt-Water Ballads 
 (1902), we find this hymn of Consecration : 
 
 Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and the mirth, 
 The portly presence of potentates goodly in girth : 
 Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the 
 earth ! 
 
 Theirs be the music, the colour, the glory, the gold ; 
 Mine be a handful of ashes, a mouthful of mould. 
 
 Of the maimed, of the halt and the blind in the rain and 
 the cold — 
 Of these shall my songs be fashioned, my tales be told. 
 
 What plainer statement of intention can man wish 
 than that ? For eleven years did Mr Masefield cling 
 to his ideal. 
 
 Bearing this in mind, I propose now to take in turn 
 the larger portion of his recent output, most of which 
 has appeared from time to time in The English Review. 
 
 The Everlasting Mercy came out in October, 1911. 
 It tells the story of a young rip, Saul Kane, and starts 
 in this promising fashion : 
 
 From '41 to '51 
 
 I was my folk's contrary son ; 
 
 I bit my father's hand right through 
 
 And broke my mother's heart in two. 
 
 I sometimes go without my dinner 
 
 Now that I know the times I've gi'n her. 
 
 It continues in the same easy strain to explain how he 
 fought with a fellow-poacher, Billy Myers, on whose 
 preserves he had been working. 
 
 . . . we whom Jesus died to teach 
 
 Fought round on round, three minutes each, 
 
 By the fluke of his enemy spraining his thumb, 
 Saul gained a totally unmerited victory. 
 
240 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 All the company of spectators and victor then 
 proceed to " The Lion " to celebrate the event. On 
 the way up the dark stairs he accosts the barmaid, a 
 mistress of his, and arranges an assignation. 
 
 A riotous scene ensued : 
 
 Jack chucked her chin, and Jim accost her 
 With bits out of the " Maid of Gloster." 
 And fifteen arms went round her waist. 
 (And then men ask. Are Barmaids chaste ?) 
 
 This last line reads more like the heading of a letter 
 to a daily newspaper than a serious contribution to 
 contemporary poetry. 
 
 After the company had drunk themselves silly, Saul 
 drunkenly meditates on life. At last 
 
 A madness took me then. I felt 
 I'd like to hit the world a belt. 
 I felt that I could fly through air, 
 A screaming star with blazing hair — 
 
 Instead of that he t; tore his clothes in shreds," flung 
 his boots through the windows and dashed downstairs, 
 smashing lamps on the way. Then he rang the fire- 
 bell. 
 
 This having roused the populace, he proceeded to 
 harangue them, urging them to chase him, which they 
 do. Owing to his fleetness of foot he easily escapes and 
 manages to sleep till half-past two in the following 
 afternoon. 
 
 Then a second frenzy takes him and he goes once 
 more into the street. By luck he meets the parson, and 
 in a long socialistic speech denounces the universe. 
 
 The parson, one in a thousand, quietly argues for the 
 present state : 
 
 You think the Church an outworn fetter ; 
 Kane, keep it, till you've built a better. . . . 
 
JOHN MASEFIELD 241 
 
 To get the whole world out of bed 
 
 And washed, and dressed, and warmed, and fed, 
 
 To work, and back to bed again, 
 
 Believe me, Saul, costs worlds of pain. 
 
 These last four lines are worth all the rest of the poem 
 put together. It is the first time that that universal 
 truth has been stated quite so boldly and yet with such 
 unerring accuracy. 1 
 
 Meanwhile (the parson continues), 
 
 my friend, 'twould be no sin 
 To mix more water with your gin. 
 We're neither saints nor Philip Sidneys, 
 But mortal men with mortal kidneys. 
 
 It is a joy for once, by the way, to find a parson winning 
 all along the line. 
 
 He finds himself a little later in the market-place, 
 talking to a small boy who had lost his mother. Then 
 follows a scene of real poetry and pure delight, gossamer- 
 like in its flimsy flights, but having the true ring about 
 it. 
 
 I told a tale, to Jim's delight, 
 
 Of where the tom-cats go by night. 
 
 But it is all too short and Mrs Jaggard comes hastily on 
 to the scene, and reviews Saul's and her own past life 
 in a whirl of words truly woeful. 
 
 . . . this old mother made me see 
 The harm I done by being me. . . . 
 So back to bar to get more drink . . . 
 
 This time Miss Bourne, the friend, upbraids him : the 
 whole poem is a succession of sermons. But for the 
 
 1 It is really extraordinary how often Masefield reminds us of 
 Pope. I have not space to expand this, but cp. Biography with 
 Pope's best couplets ; it will bear the test. 
 
 Q 
 
242 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 first time we hit upon a mysticism that reminds us of 
 The Ancient Mariner : — 
 
 I got a glimpse of what it meant, 
 How she and I had stood before 
 In some old town by some old door 
 Waiting intent while someone knocked 
 Before the door for ever locked . . . 
 
 Out into the darkness he sped like Christy Mahon to 
 discover his own soul. In Nature's own wondrous 
 beauty he discovers peace : old Callow, the ploughman, 
 gives him the clue to salvation. So ends the poem that 
 made Mr Masefield famous as a poet. 
 
 Sufficient time has now passed for our judgments to 
 be cooled ; wherein lies the appeal of this strange novel 
 in verse ? It reads at times like a Salvation Army 
 tract, a Revivalist conversion hymn. The story is 
 graphic and real enough. Such things have happened, 
 do happen daily and are to be read in The Christian 
 World and The Family Herald. 
 
 There are traces of the passionate lyricism that 
 marked the young John Masefield, but we tremble for 
 what he is going to make of himself. 
 
 His carelessness in metre and rhyme is appalling. I 
 have already given several instances. Here are some 
 more : — 
 
 "clock for you " is succeeded by "crock for you," 
 "fly 'un" by "Lion," "sons" by "once," 
 "merry all" by "burial," "black" by "back," 
 "floodin'" by "sudden," "is and was" by " Caiaphas," 
 "mistakes" by "stakes," " bewild'rin' " by "children," 
 "knows his" by "disposes" and "here boy, or" by 
 " blubber for." 
 
 One could multiply these by ten and yet not exhaust 
 the list. He has taken a leaf out of Byron's book, and 
 that not a good one. 
 
JOHN MASEFIELD 248 
 
 In The Widow in the Bye Street, which followed close 
 on the heels of The Everlasting Mercy, published in 
 The English Review of February, 1912, he forsakes the 
 octosyllabic couplet for a seven-line decasyllabic stanza, 
 rhyming ababbcc ; a vastly improved vehicle for 
 expressing a long story in verse. 
 
 It treats of the trials of a widow whose only son falls 
 into a very obvious trap laid for him by a woman of no 
 reputation, his passionate misplaced love for her, which 
 results in his murder of her paramour, Shepherd Ern, 
 and his consequent execution. 
 
 The whole treatment and finish is vastly superior to 
 The Everlasting Mercy ; the tragedy is heightened and 
 the verses are less diffuse and more carefully thought 
 out. The first part of the poem quickly gives you the 
 barest facts of the lives of each of the principals, and 
 ends thus : 
 
 So the four souls are ranged, the chess-board set, 
 
 The dark, invisible hand of secret fate 
 
 Brought it to come to being that they met 
 
 After so many years of lying in wait. 
 
 While we least think it he prepares his Mate. 
 
 Mate, and the King's pawn played, it never ceases 
 
 Though all the earth is dust of taken pieces. 
 
 This verse, as a matter of fact, might equally well be 
 placed at the head of all his longer poems. 
 
 There is something of Thomas Hardy's fatalism in all 
 Mr Masefield's work. 
 
 Follows a description of the Fair where Jim Gurney, 
 the hero, meets his Anna and the beginnings of his 
 passion for her : 
 
 Love is a flame to burn out human wills, 
 
 Love is a flame to set the will on fire, 
 
 Love is a flame to cheat men into mire, 
 
 One of the three, we make love what we choose. 
 
244 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 He . . . swept out, repeating one sweet name, 
 "Anna, oh Anna," to the evening star. 
 Anna was sipping whisky in the bar. 
 
 The Sophoclean irony of the last two lines is very dear 
 to Mr Masefield. 
 
 Jim is led into deceiving his mother, and buying 
 trinkets for his Anna, till at last there follows the 
 inevitable scene, where his mother tries to make him 
 see that he is throwing his love away on a light woman. 
 The dialogue is dramatic, tense and real, and shows the 
 enormous advance the poet has made in technique on 
 his earlier work. It's all no use. 
 
 People in love cannot be won by kindness 
 And opposition makes them feel like martyrs. 
 
 It is in one of the soliloquies that follow that there occurs 
 one of the imperishable thoughts that have never been 
 so expressed before, and for which Mr Masefield is 
 bound to outlive this age. The poor old mother, 
 finding her pleading of no avail, in bitter anguish cries : 
 
 Life's a long headache in a noisy street. 
 
 Anna, meanwhile, is using Jimmy merely as a bait to 
 bring back her former lover. Shepherd Em, who had 
 been errant during the fair, owing to the attractions of 
 Gipsy Bessie ; she was entirely successful, and then 
 immediately has no more use for Jim, who first suspects, 
 then 
 
 Raging, he hurried back to learn the truth. 
 
 He rushes in on the discovered pair, is knocked 
 out by the Shepherd and makes off swearing 
 revenge. 
 
 It reads like a play written for the cinematograph. 
 
JOHN MASEFIELD 245 
 
 He ran down to the water, sensuous thoughts half 
 killing him. 
 
 All through the night the stream ran to the sea, 
 
 The different water always saying the same. 
 
 Cat-like and then a tinkle, never glee, 
 
 A lonely little child alone in shame. 
 
 Another snapped a thorn twig when he came, 
 
 It drifted down, it passed the Hazel Mill, 
 
 It passed the Springs : but Jimmy stayed there still. 
 
 It is in a stanza such as this that we realise the vein of 
 truth and beauty, bursting to be expressed, that runs 
 through Mr Masefleld. 
 Whoever bettered that 
 
 Lonely little child alone in shame ? 
 
 Having stayed out all night, Jim goes to work, and 
 ill, distraught, asks for the sack, gets it, drinks himself 
 mad while his mother is searching for him, and would 
 have found and saved him but for a cruel, malicious 
 stroke of fate : 
 
 Whether she'd go to th'inn and find her son, 
 Or take the field and let the doom be done. 
 
 Of course she takes the field, while Jim rushes to his 
 destiny. He kills Ern with one blow of a " spudder " ; 
 again we are irresistibly reminded of the Playboy ; and 
 then at once he becomes sane again. 
 
 Man cannot call the brimming instant back : 
 Time's an affair of instants spun to days ; 
 If man must make an instant gold, or black, 
 Let him, he may, but Time must go his ways. 
 Life may be duller for an instant's blaze, 
 Life's an affair of instants spun to years ; 
 Instants are only cause of all these tears. 
 
 He is tried, convicted, converted and hanged. Again it 
 
246 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 falls to the mother to utter one of Masefield's immortal 
 lines : 
 
 God warms his hands at man's heart when he prays." 
 
 She is left comfortless., beaten, but alive : 
 
 Some of life's sad ones are too strong to die, 
 
 and we are left on a note of pure poetry to watch the 
 wandering witless ways of the old woman as she walks 
 singing sad songs to remind her of Jim who is coming 
 back to her soon. 
 
 The stars are placid on the evening's blue, 
 Burning like eyes so calm, so unafraid 
 Of all that God has given and man has made. 
 Burning they watch, and moth-like owls come out, 
 The redbreast warbles shrilly once and stops ; 
 The homing cowman gives his dog a shout, 
 The lamps are lighted in the village shops. 
 Silence : the last bird passes : in the copse 
 The hazels cross the moon, a night-jar spins, 
 Dew wets the grass, the nightingale begins. 
 
 No finer description than that can be found in any 
 poetry of our day, and he who denies that Mr Masefield 
 is a poet has to reckon not with a solitary instance like 
 this, but with stanza after stanza of a like beauty. 
 
 The whole poem shows an advance in every depart- 
 ment of Mr Masefield's power. He has a better grip 
 of his subject, he digresses and moralises less, though he 
 still does so too much ; there is more real beauty, less 
 licence and carelessness, and greater cohesion altogether 
 than in The Everlasting Mercy. 
 
 In May, 1912, he published a little known poem, 
 entitled Biography, of inestimable value to all those 
 who would know something of the man behind the 
 artist. Of course, as we expect, there is the usual 
 panegyric on oceans : 
 
JOHN MASEFIELD 247 
 
 By many waters and on many ways 
 I have known golden instants and bright days. 
 The night alone near water when I heard 
 All the sea's spirit spoken by a bird. 
 
 There ought to be little danger of our forgetting, but 
 lest we should, he adds : 
 
 When I am dust my penman may not know 
 Those water-trampling ships which make me glow, 
 But think my wonder mad and fail to find 
 Their glory, even dimly, from my mind, 
 And yet they made me. 
 
 His Ballads and Poems, if nothing else, would be 
 sufficient to prove to any critic gifted with common- 
 sense, that his Coram Street days were not his happiest. 
 
 London has been my prison : but my books, 
 
 Hills and great waters, labouring men and brooks, 
 
 Ships and deep friendships and remembered days 
 
 Which even now set all my mind ablaze — 
 
 — I felt the hillside thronged by souls unseen, 
 
 Who knew the interest in me and were keen 
 
 That man alive should understand man dead 
 
 — And quickened with strange hush because his comer 
 
 Sensed a strange soul alive behind the summer. 
 
 ■&' 
 
 The whole poem is a revelation and leads one at last 
 to what we had been expecting for so long : the epic 
 of the sea, the prologue, Ships, appearing in July, 1912, 
 and the poem itself, Dauber, in October of the same 
 year. 
 
 The former is a catalogue of the great ships of yore 
 that made the Mersey famous through the world : 
 
 I cannot tell their wonder nor make known 
 Magic that once thrilled through me to the bone, 
 But all men praise some beauty, tell some tale, 
 Vent a high mood which makes the rest seem pale, 
 Pour their heart's blood to nourish one green leaf, 
 Follow some Helen for her gift of grief 
 
248 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 And fail in what they mean, whate'er they do : 
 You should have seen, men cannot tell to you 
 The beauty of the ships of that my city. 
 
 Dauber is The Ancient Mariner of the twentieth century, 
 with these differences. Mr Masefield knows the sea as 
 no poet ever has before ; Falconer in his Castaway is 
 the nearest approach, and he is poles removed. 
 
 The poem tells the story of a young farmer who 
 refused to carry on the tradition of his fathers, but 
 went to sea in order to paint it from the inside. 
 
 It's not been done, the sea, not yet been done, 
 From the inside by one who really knows, 
 I'd give up all if I could be the one, 
 But art comes dear the way the money goes. 
 
 He had to work his way out in a vessel rounding Cape 
 Horn, and in pursuing his art to encounter the gibes, 
 and worse, of his mates, who with some of the Public 
 School instinct towards what it cannot understand, 
 did all in their power to harass and upset him. 
 
 Three reefers slashed his canvases to ribbons, as a 
 result of which he made an ineffectual appeal to the 
 captain and became the laughing-stock of the crew. 
 
 To one of the reefers, however, he communicates in 
 a confidential mood his life story, how he had broken 
 his father's heart for this whim, this passion, this 
 insensate craving for painting and the sea : 
 
 That's what I loved, water, and time to read. 
 
 One day he got a job below the bridge, and then saw 
 for the first time a clipper. 
 
 That altered life for me : I had never seen 
 A ship before, for all my thought of ships : 
 And there was this great clipper like a queen, 
 With a white curl of bubbles at her lips, 
 All made of beauty to the stern's ellipse, 
 
JOHN MASEFIELD 249 
 
 Her ensign ruffling red, her bunts in pile, 
 Beauty and strength together, wonder, style. 
 I wasn't happy then : I felt too keenly 
 How hard it is to paint : but when I saw 
 Her masts across the river rising queenly, 
 Built out of so much chaos brought to law, 
 I learned the power of knowing how to draw, 
 Of beating thought into the perfect line, 
 I vowed to make that power of beauty mine. 
 
 Many storms were encountered before they reached 
 the Horn, all which tested Dauber's manhood and 
 stirred him on to high effort, so that by suffering pain 
 a little hour he might be able to draw that line of sailors' 
 faces sweating the sail, their passionate play and change, 
 their might, their misery, their tragic power in order 
 that men the world over should understand their 
 feeling through his power of portrayal. 
 
 Then follows that wonderful fifth canto, telling of 
 the rounding of the Horn, in which the poet rises to 
 heights he never reached before, and which alone would 
 suffice to give him a reputation above all living writers 
 had he written nothing else. No description of a 
 storm at sea has ever approached this one ; the words 
 pour out, wild, passionate, pell-mell, pregnant with 
 reality, comparable only with passages in The Inferno : 
 it is far too long to quote : I can only implore anyone 
 who has not yet read it to buy, borrow or steal a copy 
 to-day. 
 
 Scenes of horror are ushered in by this superb 
 couplet : 
 
 then from the sea 
 Came a cold sudden breath that made the hair 
 Stiff in the neck as though Death whispered there. 
 
 The reader feels the ghastly dizziness that assails the 
 neophyte when he finds himself for the first time in the 
 
250 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 rigging in a gale : the frozen hands, the cold sweat of 
 fear, and all the tortures of the damned that Dauber 
 had to undergo. Somehow he survived, but with a 
 peculiar irony as dear to Mr Masefield's heart as to 
 Thomas Hardy's, he escapes only to fall from the fore- 
 topgallant yard weather arm shortly afterwards in the 
 last gale before Valparaiso : he just breathed : " It will 
 go on," not knowing his meaning rightly, but he spoke 
 
 With the intenseness of a fading soul 
 
 Whose share of Nature's fire turns to smoke, 
 
 Whose hand on Nature's wheel loses control. 
 
 u It will go on/' he cried aloud, and passed. 
 
 And almost at once afterwards they reached the haven. 
 
 Altogether this is the most powerful poem that Mr 
 Masefield has written, because his whole heart and soul 
 were in his work : he has the passion to paint for us in 
 words what Dauber would have painted on canvas, the 
 lives and ways of those who go down to the sea in ships 
 and occupy their business in great waters. 
 
 Yet w T ith it all, as in the later work of Shakespeare, 
 there is an incredible carelessness as if he could not 
 restrain his flow of words but had written the whole 
 poem at a sitting. Unnecessary alliterations, stupid 
 repetitions of words like "multitudinous," extraordinary 
 and gross tamperings with the metre, all serve to weaken 
 the general effect and give the reader the impression 
 that it is the result of one gigantic effort inspired 
 nearly throughout, but so good as not to be retouched 
 again. " By God ; it is good, take it or leave it," 
 he might say with Ben Jonson, and leave it we must 
 at that. 
 
 The Daffodil Fields followed in February, 1913, not 
 in February, 1912, as Mr Masefield says in his reprinted 
 edition, published in October, 1913. This, like all his 
 
JOHN MASEFIELD 251 
 
 later work, is in the seven-lined stanza of The Widow 
 in the Bye Street. 
 
 It is in epitome Enoch Arden retold and incidentally 
 very much better. It starts with the dying request 
 of Nicholas Gray that his two friends, Occleve and 
 Keir, should look after his wayward son, Michael, after 
 his death, and if possible see that he married Keir's 
 daughter Mary, who was passionately devoted to him. 
 They give their promise ; the old man dies — Michael 
 comes home, but not for long. 
 
 I want to go 
 Somewhere where man has never used a plough, 
 Nor ever read a book ; where clean winds blow, 
 And passionate blood is not its owner's foe, 
 And land is for the asking for it. 
 
 He decides to go to the Plate, but in a scene of superb 
 beauty makes love to Mary and secures her promise to 
 wait three years for him. 
 
 Mr Masefield has seldom written more exquisite 
 poetry than that in which he describes the night of their 
 leave-taking. 
 
 Still as high June, the very water's noise 
 
 Seemed but a breathing of the earth : the flowers 
 
 Stood in the dim like souls without a voice. 
 
 The wood's conspiracy of occult powers 
 
 Drew all about them, and for hours on hours 
 
 No murmur shook the oaks, the stars did house 
 
 Their lights like lamps upon these never-moving boughs. 
 
 June's very breast was bare this night of nights. 
 Moths blundered up against them, grays and whites 
 Moved on the darkness where the moths were out, 
 Nosing for sticky sweet with trembling uncurled snout. 
 
 Would that the poet would give us more of this. 
 The whole scene is worthy to rank with Richard 
 
252 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Feverel's immortal meeting with Lucy. It is all too 
 short : in a few stanzas 
 
 The flag waved, the engine snorted, then 
 Slowly the couplings tautened, and the train 
 Moved, bearing off from her her man of men ; 
 She looked towards its going, blind with pain. 
 
 He soon forgets her, however, in the new country and 
 lives with a Spanish beauty, not even answering his 
 first love's letters. By a rather strained poetic licence 
 Mary's ardent but earthy, steadfast, disappointed 
 lover at home, Lion Occleve, has bred a wonderful 
 bull, which he takes to Michael's country to sell, meets 
 him, implores him to give up his mistress and come back 
 to Mary, who is wasting away for want of him, all, 
 however, to no purpose. Lion returns to Mary with 
 his woeful tale, and after months of pleading he manages 
 to make her marry him. 
 
 Michael hears of the wedding and immediately 
 realising all that he is losing, impetuously rushes home, 
 and after failing to find her in her own house, into 
 which he crept, his better nature urges him to go away ; 
 he meets her by accident and the tragedy hastens to its 
 finish. At once Mary returns to Lion's house, throws 
 her ring on the table and, deaf to all entreaties and 
 threats, goes off to live with Michael. Lion is then 
 roused and the end, though curiously protracted, is near. 
 
 One day Lion meets Michael and offers him his 
 hedging-hook as a weapon, himself using a stake drawn 
 from the hedge. Michael, who has obviously some- 
 thing of vast importance to say, is effectually prevented 
 from uttering it until each has mortally wounded the 
 other : then only has he time to gasp out in his dying 
 breath that Mary and he had agreed to separate, that 
 she was at that moment on her way to rejoin Lion. 
 
JOHN MASEFIELD 253 
 
 She comes, sees Michael dead and, weeping bitterly, 
 laments the murder of her only real love : her heart 
 breaks and the tragedy bed is loaded with three corpses. 
 
 A gruesome story, curiously uneven. The language 
 which the disputants employ is half that of the cultured 
 scholar, half that of the farmer ; never consistent. 
 
 There is, too, the quaint conceit of the daffodil fields 
 brought in as a last line to every canto, quite un- 
 necessarily : the title has really no bearing on the tale 
 whatever,' except that Mr Masefield likes to digress as 
 to a point of seasons whenever a fresh nail is driven 
 into the coffin of the luckless trio. 
 
 There is again much carelessness and a redundancy 
 that threatens to become an obsession. Here is one 
 example out of about thirty : 
 
 A spring comes bubbling up there, cold as glass,, 
 
 It bubbles down, crusting the leaves with lime, 
 
 Babbling the self-same song that it has sung through lime. 
 
 Here is one even worse : 
 
 Counting the dreary time, the dreary beat 
 Of dreary minutes dragging through the day. 
 
 Surely Mr Masefield cannot believe that such tricks 
 make for effectiveness. His powers of description are 
 not dulled, he has wonderful fertility of language and 
 brings his characters to play their puppet parts with 
 the best possible skill that verse can command, but 
 there is still something lacking. 
 
 It is not these long poems at all that make Mr Mase- 
 field the great poet. I have purposely left his great 
 work, and curiously enough his least known and earliest, 
 till the last. 
 
 Ballads and Poems were published years before any 
 of the long poems, and some of the best stuff in them 
 
254 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 was written, he tells us, in his adolescence, under the 
 influence (it is obvious) of Rudyard Kipling. 
 
 This little volume, containing just one hundred pages, 
 has more real poetry in it than all his other output 
 added together : the true magic is rung in nearly every 
 line : words of most ordinary significance assume a 
 heightened sense, and music of a more poignant and 
 haunting fragrance than we meet with elsewhere in his 
 writings, so much so that, admire as we do his narrative 
 poems, we feel (most of us) certain that his true voca- 
 tion is the short lyric, not the metric annals of the sordid 
 and the wretched. 
 
 On the first page we light on a verse totally unlike 
 anything in the longer poems. It is called The Ballad 
 of Sir Bors. 
 
 Would I could win some quiet and rest and a little ease, 
 
 In the cool grey hush of the dusk, in the dim green place of 
 
 the trees, 
 Where the birds are singing, singing, crying aloud 
 The song of the red, red rose that blossoms beyond the seas. 
 
 There is more than a flash of resemblance to La Belle 
 Dame Sans Merci in that stanza. Further on in the 
 same poem we come across the line, 
 
 A star will glow like a note God strikes on the silver bell, 
 
 a line that lives in the memory when all thought of Jim 
 Gurney, Saul Kane, Michael Keir, and the rest of them, 
 is entirely obliterated. How different, again, is Cargoes, 
 now better known owing to the music that has been 
 written for it. 
 
 Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir, 
 
 Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine, 
 
 With a cargo of ivory, 
 
 And apes and peacocks, 
 
 Sandalwood, cedarwood and sweet white wine. 
 
JOHN MASEFIELD 255 
 
 Dirty British Coaster with a salt-caked smoke-stack, 
 
 Butting through the Channel in the mad March days, 
 
 With a cargo of Tyne coal, 
 
 Road-rails, pig-lead, 
 
 Firewood, iron-ware and cheap tin trays. 
 
 It is easy to cavil at this sort of thing because it is new 
 and offends the susceptibilities of some critics, but 
 there can be little doubt that no truer picture has been 
 painted in less words. 
 
 Then there are ballads, The Old Bold Mate of Henry 
 Morgan, that John Silver ought to have sung. 
 
 Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch recognised the durability 
 of one of his poems when he included Beauty in The 
 Oxford Book of English Verse. 
 
 I have seen dawn and sunset on moors and windy hills 
 
 Coming in solemn beauty like slow old tunes of Spain : 
 1 have seen the lady April bringing the daffodils, 
 
 Bringing the spring grass and the soft warm April rain. 
 I have heard the song of the blossoms and the old chant 
 
 of the sea, 
 And seen strange lands from under the arched white sails 
 
 of ships : 
 But the loveliest things of beauty God ever has showed 
 to me, 
 Are her voice and her hair and eyes, and the dear red 
 curve of her lips. 
 
 The whole feminine race may envy the woman to whom 
 that, in common with everything he has written, is 
 dedicated. Panegyric and love could rise no higher. 
 His three sonnets : — 
 
 and 
 
 (i.) Her heart is always doing lovely things, 
 (ii.) Being her friend I do not care, not I, 
 
 (hi.) Born for nought else, for nothing but for this, 
 
256 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 just accentuate the beauty of the quoted hymn of 
 adoration. 
 
 True poetry has been defined as the retelling of 
 great events remembered in passivity, heightened by 
 language that could be uttered in no other way, musical, 
 magic, from the soul. 
 
 For Mr Masefield this is the true touchstone. Each 
 event seen and lived through, leaves its impress on his 
 poetic soul, and he strives to express in words what has 
 thrilled him through and through with beauty. 
 
 He may thank God for the perceptive vision, he is 
 endowed with divine powers ; those of us who love him 
 most watch with trepidation lest he should be led from 
 the path in which his real genius lies to prostitute his 
 talents and pander to a taste which revels in his 
 " bloodies," his audacious sensuality, his excerpts 
 from the lowest Sunday papers. 
 
 Meanwhile we hug the few Ballads and Poems we 
 own the closer, reading and rereading them until he 
 comes back to us. 
 
 We would leave him with one final warning. Could 
 he but read the reams of rubbish with which his so- 
 called imitators are flooding their studies, he would 
 pause before pursuing his present path further. 
 
 As a playwright of poetic drama, he has no living 
 equal, neither has he peer in ballad or lyric. Let him 
 realise his limitations, and give us in the years to come 
 more of the Coram Street and Tettenhall genius and 
 less of the world-famous original poet of these last four 
 years. 
 
X 
 
 RUPERT BROOKE 
 
 A young Apollo, golden-haired, 
 
 Stands dreaming on the verge of strife, 
 
 Magnificently unprepared 
 
 For the long littleness of life. 
 
 IN the first throes of anguish which every man 
 who knew the poet experienced on hearing that 
 Rupert Brooke was dead it seemed incredible 
 that one so absolutely the incarnation of youth and 
 spring could have vanished from us for ever ; but later 
 this feeling gave way to another which will probably 
 remain as the more lasting ; it now seems equally im- 
 possible that he could ever have lived ; he was almost 
 too good to be true ; he was certainly one of those 
 Avhom the gods love, ev^s koI eufiaOrjs. 
 
 The son of a house-master at Rugby, he was himself 
 educated there, and was successful both as a youthful 
 poet and as an athlete, for he gained his colours for 
 cricket and football in addition to winning the school 
 English Verse Prize. In after years, at King's College, 
 Cambridge, he took a second-class in the Classical 
 Tripos, and was elected to a fellowship as the result of 
 a thesis on Webster. 
 
 Deciding to travel, he was led by the spirit of Steven- 
 son " across the plains " to the South Sea Islands, and 
 wrote vivid prose impressions, which were printed in 
 The Westminster Gazette. He eventually returned with 
 the idea of settling down at the old Vicarage, Grant- 
 chester, in order to lecture to undergraduates of his 
 university. The war put a stop to this, however, and 
 
 R 257 
 
258 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 he joined the Royal Naval Division instead, underwent 
 the horrors of Antwerp, came back unscathed, and 
 after a short training at Blandford was sent out to the 
 Dardanelles. Early in April, 1915, he contracted sun- 
 stroke ; septicaemia then mysteriously set in, and he died 
 aboard a French hospital ship on Shakespeare's supposed 
 death-day, and lies buried in the Island of Lemnos, the 
 greatest poet of his time. It reads like legend ; it is so 
 exactly what each of us would have demanded of our 
 fairy godmother had we had the chance. 
 
 That nothing should be denied him, to his great 
 intellectual gifts were added an exceptional charm of 
 manner and beauty of form. This bodily beauty had, 
 I think, a direct influence on his work. In common 
 with many thinking men of his age (he was only twenty- 
 seven when he died), he lived in a state of continual 
 protest against the merely pretty ; he was in deadly 
 fear of falling into a flattered literary career, of winning 
 fame as one more beautiful poet of beautiful themes, 
 so he ran counter to the accepted tradition into violence 
 and coarseness for salvation. The same tendency may 
 with equal certainty be traced in the work of Masefield, 
 Cannan, D. H. Lawrence and Wilfrid Gibson. 
 
 The temptation to generalise on this point is insidious 
 but futile. I will, however, attempt to sum up in one 
 sentence what I believe to be the guiding principle of 
 the twentieth-century poet with regard to this : "A 
 thing is not necessarily beautiful because the majority 
 think it to be so ; the only way to arrive at a sense of 
 real beauty is to cast out fear, become an iconoclast, to 
 prove all things and to hold fast that which we find to 
 be good." 
 
 The result of such a point of view on the world can 
 easily be imagined ; strange labels are attached by the 
 conventional critic to the poetry which makes him un- 
 
RUPERT BROOKE 259 
 
 comfortable, to the work which he cannot understand. 
 Cannan is alliteratively styled cynic, Lawrence bour- 
 geois, Masefield blasphemous and Brooke hard, savage, 
 realistic, loveless. " Shamelessly undodgy," said Henry 
 James of the younger generation. It is worth while 
 seeing how far this applies to Rupert Brooke. 
 
 He will write you a sonnet on Dawn, starting with the 
 arresting line : 
 
 Opposite me two Germans snore and sweat, 
 
 written in the train between Bologna and Milan, second- 
 class. He describes the windows, slimy-wet with a 
 night's fcetor, the age-long night in the stuffy, foul 
 carriage, the effect on his companions : 
 
 One of them wakes and spits and sleeps again. 
 
 In Wagner he pictures the effect of music on the fat, 
 greasy sensualist : 
 
 The music swells. His gross legs quiver. . . . 
 
 And all the while, in perfect time, 
 
 His pendulous stomach hangs a-shaking. 
 
 Menelaus and Helen almost ranks with Troilus and 
 Cressida as a gross attack on all that we hold most 
 precious in legend and myth. No Darby and Joan 
 about this famous pair when they fall into the sere and 
 yellow leaf : 
 
 Often he wonders why on earth he went 
 Troyward, or why poor Paris ever came. 
 
 Oft she weeps, gummy-eyed and impotent ; 
 
 Her dry shanks twitch at Paris' mumbled name. 
 
 So Menelaus nagged ; and Helen cried ; 
 
 And Paris slept on by Scamander side. 
 
 Even more famous are his Channel Passage, with its 
 physically disgusting descriptions of the sea-sick lover, 
 
260 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 and Jealousy, where we are shown unlovely love- 
 making grown old. 
 
 To Brooke it was hypocrisy to restrain the direct 
 expression of himself out of consideration for others. 
 This side of his work is important as reflecting the 
 natural ebullition of youthful spirits. Mr Harold 
 Monro calls all these poems ;t jokes " ; a good joke, he 
 says, is, after all, more stimulating than the best piece 
 of advice. It is the most necessary thing for a poet to 
 be able to laugh well. His principal failing seems to 
 have been a sort of fear lest he should be taken seriously. 
 If he thought he had loved too well he would laugh 
 away his feelings in a horrible poem like Jealousy or 
 Ambarvalia. 
 
 In point of fact, despite Henry James's label of 
 " shamelessly undodgy " as applied to the youthful 
 poets of to-day as if it were a new thing, not one of 
 these poems in conception is new at all. I know that 
 it is commonly accepted that the genius of the twentieth 
 century owns to no masters in his craft ; he must be 
 above all things a pioneer, hacking his way ruthlessly 
 through virgin jungle ; but Rupert Brooke, at any rate, 
 is in this entirely at variance with his contemporaries. 
 What makes his work shine so far beyond that of any 
 other man of his age is just this characteristic : he does 
 lean upon two giants, John Webster and John Donne, 
 great geniuses both, but each, unfortunately for his 
 reputation, overshadowed by a greater man. Webster 
 is only second to Shakespeare in tragic intensity ; 
 Donne is only not the finest poet of the seventeenth 
 century because Milton happened to live about the same 
 time. 
 
 Neither man is even yet recognised at his true worth, 
 although Charles Lamb did his best for the one, and 
 Browning for the other. 
 
RUPERT BROOKE 261 
 
 In Webster, Rupert Brooke found realism — there are 
 passages in The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi 
 much more shamelessly undodgy than anything in 
 Brooke— vigour, and an intellect as scintillating as his 
 own. a writer whose thoughts toppled over pell-mell 
 into a wealth of simile and metaphor as sane and apt 
 as those of Shakespeare and Arnold, an exuberance of 
 beauty made all the more conspicuous by the brusque, 
 harsh, unmusical lines that compassed it about, a 
 genius so audacious that he could afford, like Shake- 
 speare in his famous five " nevers " in King Lear, to 
 rise to those heights of sublimity that are so perilously 
 near the ridiculous as to make us shiver with apprehen- 
 sion while we read, only to thrill with ecstasy afterwards 
 when we realise that the dramatist has o'ertopped man's 
 expectations and for a moment given us a glimpse into 
 the unknown. Everyone knows the lines : 
 
 Vittoria. I am lost for ever. 
 
 Brachiano. How miserable a thing it is to die 
 'Mongst women howling. 
 
 or the : 
 
 I have caught an everlasting cold : I have lost my voice 
 most irrecoverably, 
 
 in The Duchess of Malfi. 
 
 Rupert Brooke owed much to a dramatist whose sure- 
 ness of touch could lead him to write the line that has 
 been said to be the high- water mark of Romanticism : 
 
 Cover her face : mine eyes dazzle : she died young, 
 
 to a man who could heap horror on horror, gloomy 
 fatalism on melancholic madness, and yet know that 
 he was one of those rare spirits who had achieved the 
 supreme ideal of tragedy in purging the emotions by 
 terror and pity. 
 
262 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 You can trace quite easily all these different facets 
 of Webster's craft in Rupert Brooke's work, but his 
 allegiance to John Donne was even more loyal, his debt 
 infinitely greater. 
 
 When in the fulness of time justice is done to the 
 burning vitality, the clarity of vision, the fertility of 
 imagination, the amazing intellectual versatility, the 
 heightened humour, and the true sense of beauty per- 
 vading all Brooke's work, then and then only will the 
 part that Donne played in the making of Rupert Brooke 
 be adequately understood. 
 
 What drove Brooke to Donne was, of course, his 
 recognition of the similarity of their tastes ; just as the 
 Victorians saw nothing in Donne, because he was as 
 diametrically opposed to their point of view as Samuel 
 Butler and Meredith were, so any individual man or 
 clique will, in spite of Ruskin's advice, try to find 
 inspiration in the genius to whom he or it most naturally 
 approximates. Though this is a truism, it needs say- 
 ing ; for there is every likelihood of some such absurd 
 myth as the following becoming part of the stock-in- 
 trade of Brooke's critics. 
 
 Donne's first published poem was written while 
 serving in the Royal Naval Division under the Earl of 
 Essex before Cadiz, and is dedicated to a Cambridge 
 man whose name was Brooke : "A unique coincidence 
 with scarcely a parallel in the world of letters. This is 
 what drove Brooke of 1914 to Donne " ! Of course it 
 is unique ; all coincidences are ; but it is most decidedly 
 not what drove Rupert to John. Rupert Brooke is 
 simply John Donne come to life again, a reincarnation. 
 We are told by Professor Grierson that Donne's intense 
 individuality was always eager to find a North-West 
 Passage of its own, pressed its curious and sceptical 
 questioning into every corner of love and life and 
 
RUPERT BROOKE 263 
 
 religion, explored unsuspected depths, exploited new dis- 
 covered paradoxes, and turned its discoveries always into 
 poetry of the closely packed, artificial style which was 
 all his own. Here is a poem of Brooke's, called Heaven: 
 
 Fish (fly-replete, in depth of June, 
 
 Dawdling away their wat'ry noon) 
 
 Ponder deep wisdom, dark or clear, 
 
 Each secret fishy hope or fear. 
 
 Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond : 
 
 But is there anything Beyond ? . . . 
 
 We darkly know, by Faith we cry, 
 
 The Future is not Wholly Dry. . . . 
 
 But somewhere, beyond Space and Time, 
 
 Is wetter water, slimier slime. . . . 
 
 Unfading moths, immortal flies, 
 
 And the worm that never dies. 
 
 And in that Heaven of all their wish, 
 
 There shall be no more land, say fish. 
 
 Doesn't this exactly fit the criticism applied to 
 Donne ? Here, too, are what Doctor Johnson called 
 " the quaint conceits " and " the blasphemous obscenity 
 of the metaphysical school." " Almost too clever," 
 says Gilbert Murray, " to be poetry at all " ; there is in 
 this that astringency which we associate with ammonia 
 in the bath ; we find it in Donne, Meredith, Swift, 
 Browning, Dryden, Pope, Churchill, Byron, Butler and 
 Burns (a mere handful of names) and practically no- 
 where else in English literature. To label it as satire 
 and merely to leave it at that is to miss half the point 
 of it. It is worth noting that Donne, too, had looked 
 not at heaven but at love from the fish's point of view 
 in a parody of Marlowe's exquisite Come live with me 
 and be my love, for it but adds a fresh rivet to my 
 theory of debts and reincarnation. 
 
 It has also been said of Donne that he burst passion- 
 ately and rudely into the enclosed garden of sentiment 
 
264 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 and illusion, pulling up the gay-coloured tangled weeds 
 that choked thoughts, planting the seeds of fresh in- 
 vention. Where his forerunners had been idealist, 
 epicurean, or adoring, he was brutal, cynical and 
 immitigably realist. 
 
 How can we find ? How can we rest? How can 
 We, being gods, find joy, or peace, being man ? 
 We, the gaunt zanies of a witless Fate, 
 Who love the unloving, and the lover hate, 
 Forget the moment ere the moment slips, 
 Kiss with blind eyes that seek beyond the lips, 
 Who want, and know not what we want, and cry 
 With crooked mouths for Heaven, and throw it by. 
 
 You can see it in Kindliness : 
 
 When Love has changed to kindliness. . . . 
 That time when all is over, and 
 Hand never flinches, brushing hand : 
 And blood lies quiet, for all you're near ; 
 And it's but spoken words we hear, 
 Where trumpets sang : when the mere skies 
 Are stranger and nobler than your eyes ; 
 And flesh is flesh, was flame before ; 
 And infinite hungers leap no more 
 In the chance swaying of your dress. 
 
 Or in The Wayfarers : 
 
 Each crawling day 
 Will pale a little 3-our scarlet lips, each mile 
 Dull the dear pain of your remembered face. 
 
 In The Beginning : 
 
 I'll curse the thing that once you were, 
 Because it is changed and pale and old, 
 (Lips that were scarlet, hair that was gold). 
 
 The underlying thought in all these comes straight 
 from Donne. I could quote a thousand instances. 
 I Tore is one : 
 
RUPERT BROOKE 265 
 
 Who would not laugh at me if I should say 
 I saw a flash of powder last a day ? 
 
 or : 
 
 Changed loves are but changed sorts of meat : 
 And when he hath the kernel eat 
 Who doth not fling away the shell ? 
 
 Or, to hark back for a moment to the series which I 
 quoted on Brooke's realism, does not this strike a 
 harmonious chord : 
 
 And like a bunch of ragged carrots stand 
 The short swollen fingers of thy gouty hand ? 
 
 How he huddles a new thought on the one before it, 
 before the first has had time to express itself ; how he 
 sees things and analyses emotions so swiftly and subtly 
 himself that he forgets the slower comprehensions of 
 his readers ; how he always trembles on the verge of 
 the inarticulate ; how his restless intellect finds new 
 and subtler shades of emotion and thought invisible 
 to other pairs of eyes, and cannot, because speech is 
 modelled on the average of our intelligence, find words 
 to express them. This might be a criticism of Brown- 
 ing ; it really is a criticism of Donne, and it exactly 
 describes such a poem of Brooke's as Dining-Room Tea. 
 
 But you will have noticed here that a new note has 
 crept in. I have already commented on his fear of 
 becoming the beautiful poet of beautiful themes ; he 
 hated most, I imagine, the decadents and their school ; 
 but he has another not less awful dread ; you see it in 
 Menelaus and Helen and in Kindliness : the thought 
 that he might one day grow old, that a time might 
 conceivably come " when infinite longings leap no 
 more," terrified him. 
 
 This constantly recurring obsession would have 
 driven him mad (he was, in common with many other 
 
266 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 young men of great strength, given to appalling fits 
 of nervous breakdown) had it not been that, like 
 Shakespeare, who was probably as restless as he was, 
 and unlike Milton, who most decidedly was not, he had 
 the saving grace of a sense of humour ; I say " saving " 
 advisedly, for I believe that humour is the only antidote 
 known to this form of mental depression. 
 
 In the hills north-west of Ottawa, he wrote, there 
 grows a romantic light purple-red flower which is 
 called fireweed, because it is the first vegetation to 
 spring up in the prairie after a fire has passed over, and 
 so might be adopted as the emblematic flower of a sense 
 of humour. A parable — a piece of pure autobiography. 
 Ever and always you will see in Brooke's poems how 
 fascinating, how explanatory, how wistful and faithful 
 a follower is this will-o'-the-wisp, humour. It brings 
 him back with a jerk from the inane pursuit of the 
 abstract ("there's little comfort in the wise") to the 
 direct simplicity of actualities. 
 
 Think how Gray or Collins would have treated this 
 threnody on The Funeral of Youth : 
 
 Folly went first, 
 
 With muffled bells and coxcomb still revers'd ; 
 
 And after trod the bearers, hat in hand — 
 
 Laughter, most hoarse, and Captain Pride with tanned 
 
 And martial face all grim, and fussy Joy, 
 
 Who had to catch a train, and Lust, poor, snivelling boy ; . . . 
 
 The fatherless children, Colour, Tune, and Rhyme, 
 
 (The sweet lad Rhyme) ran all-uncomprehending. . . . 
 
 Beauty was there, 
 
 Pale in her black ; dry-eyed ; she stood alone. . . . 
 
 Contentment, who had known Youth as a child 
 
 And never seen him since. . . . 
 
 All, except only Love. Love had died long ago. 
 
 Webster is here in the line on Beauty ; Donne too, 
 the Donne of the general reader, the Donne known of 
 
RUPERT BROOKE 267 
 
 all, the Donne of " a bracelet of bright hair about the 
 
 °This poem really marks a sharp cleavage in Brooke's 
 work It appears probable that two schools, widely 
 divergent, are likely to rise in the future: those who 
 pin their faith to the later Brooke and look on all his 
 early work as so much youthful excrescence, a sort ot 
 impurity which had to be sweated out before the poet 
 could express the greatness which he undoubtedly had 
 in him but which perforce lay dormant, weighted under 
 this savage, satiric bent of his; and those who look 
 on his early work as the final expression of his genius, 
 who reoard the last poems as a sad falling away into 
 a distorted romanticism consequent upon untoward 
 circumstances. 
 
 It all depends upon what exactly you expect to get 
 out of poetry. Most of us would agree that our object 
 in reading it is to ascertain what the seer has to say 
 about the vastlv important matters of Death, Beauty 
 and Love; if Rupert Brooke had nothing strikingly 
 sincere to say about these things he would have no 
 claim, however brilliant his brain-power might be, 
 upon our attention as a great poet. 
 
 As it happens, however, he has something poig- 
 nant, refreshing and inspiring to say on all these 
 
 * Inthis part of his work he reminds me of three other 
 geniuses in English literature. He has the same 
 passionate sense of rhythm and beauty that Marlowe 
 had, the same tendency to extravagant hyperbole, as 
 can be seen at once in a poem like Mummia : 
 
 Helen's the hair shuts out from me 
 
 Verona's livid skies ; 
 Gypsv the lips I press ; and see 
 
 Two Antonys in your eyes, 
 
268 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 the same unlawful desires to pry into the hidden 
 recesses even at the risk of losing his own soul : the 
 same love of words for words' sake only. 
 
 It is not because of the fortuitous accident of dying 
 young and in Greece, nor because he was inordinately 
 fond of swimming in the dark, that he reminds me of 
 Byron ; he was possessed by the same exuberant and 
 defiantly adventurous spirit, the same protesting passion 
 of revolt, and the same delight in real existence : 
 
 I shall desire and I shall find 
 
 The best of my desires ; 
 The autumn road, the mellow wind 
 
 That soothes the darkening shires. 
 
 And laughter, and inn-fires. 
 
 His claim to be called the Shelley of our day 
 is less obvious ; there is no doubt, however, that he 
 had in him much of that clear, ethereal vision that 
 so endears Shelley to us, much of that intellectual 
 hypersensitiveness peculiar to Shelley which acts as 
 so strong and biting an antidote to sentimentalism 
 in thought and melodious facility in writing ; there 
 are, moreover, times when we feel that had Rupert 
 Brooke lived he could have left just such another poem 
 as The Cenci. But the Shelley an influence is most 
 noticeable in two sonnets dealing with the Beyond : 
 
 Not with vain tears, when we're beyond the sun, 
 We'll beat on the substantial doors, nor tread 
 Those dusty high-roads of the aimless dead 
 Plaintive for Earth ; but rather turn and run 
 Down some close-covered by-way of the air, 
 Some low sweet alley between wind and wind, 
 Stoop under faint gleams, thread the shadows, find 
 Some whispering ghost-forgotten nook, and there 
 Spend in pure converse our eternal day ; . . . 
 
RUPERT BROOKE 269 
 
 In another sonnet he compares the dead to clouds : 
 
 I think they ride the calm mid-heaven, as these, 
 
 In wise majestic melancholy train, 
 And watch the moon, and the still raging seas, 
 
 And men, coming and going on the earth. 
 
 When the war broke out he began naturally to write 
 more and more about Death ; he felt certain that he 
 was not to be permitted to return alive, and he has left 
 behind a series of sonnets which threaten to become his 
 best-known work, so often have they been quoted of late : 
 
 War knows no power. Safe shall be my going, 
 Secretly armed against all death's endeavour : 
 Safe though all safety's lost; safe where men fall ; 
 And if these poor limbs die, safest of all. 
 
 Even here he has not forgotten his master ; the 
 sonnet is almost a direct plagiarism from Donne : 
 
 Who is so safe as we ? 
 
 In another he begins characteristically : 
 
 Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour, 
 To turn . . . glad from a world grown old and cold and weary, 
 Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move, 
 And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary, 
 And all the little emptiness of love. 
 
 You see what a hold this early hatred of false love 
 keeps on a man of fastidious delicacy like Brooke. 
 There is a touch reminiscent of Shelley's iC love's sad 
 satiety " in the comparison of love's emptiness with the 
 dirty, dreary songs of half -men. 
 
 But by far his most famous war sonnet is The Soldier, 
 which recalls exactly Masefield's verse about those who 
 
 Died (uncouthly, most) in foreign lands 
 
 For some idea, but dimly understood, 
 
 Of an English city never built by hands, 
 
 Which love of England prompted and made good. 
 
270 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 If I should die, think only this of me : 
 That there's some corner of a foreign field 
 That is for ever England. There shall be 
 In that rich earth a richer dust concealed ; 
 A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, 
 Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, 
 A body of England's, breathing English air, 
 Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. . . . 
 
 It has been said that in this poem he fell a victim 
 to that very romanticism which he so detested ; a 
 notable successor of Donne's at St Paul's has com- 
 mented adversely on the " materialism " underlying 
 the thought ; it has also been described as infinitely 
 the most inspired poem written since August, 1914. 
 I do not know ; we are, perhaps, a little too near the 
 big event to be able to judge calmly or rationally of 
 the lasting power of war poetry. What there 
 can be no possible doubt about is the beauty of the 
 conception and the perfection of the execution. The 
 very repetition of the word " England " here is like 
 the repetition of a majestic chord in a peculiarly fine 
 piece of music. It should be noted, however, that his 
 love of country found expression in Grantckester as long 
 ago as 1912, and at the very beginning of the war he 
 wrote in a prose essay in The New Statesman : 
 
 The word " England" seems to flash like a line of foam. 
 
 But for myself I must confess that I prefer The 
 Treasure, which is comparatively unknown, to any of 
 the five sonnets : 
 
 When colour goes home into the eyes, 
 
 And lights that shine are shut again 
 
 With dancing girls and sweet birds' cries 
 
 Behind the gateways of the brain ; 
 
 And that no-place which gave them birth, shall close 
 
 The rainbow and the rose : — 
 
RUPERT BROOKE 271 
 
 Musing upon them ; as a mother, who 
 
 Has watched her children all the rich day through, 
 
 Sits, quiet-handed, in the fading light, 
 
 When children sleep, ere night. 
 
 This poem is all the more precious when we compare 
 it with his no less beautiful but more juvenile descrip- 
 tion of the orthodox heaven : 
 
 All the great courts were quiet in the sun, 
 And full of vacant echoes : moss had grown 
 Over the glassy pavement, and begun 
 To creep within the dusty council-halls. 
 An idle wind blew round an empty throne 
 And stirred the heavy curtains on the walls. 
 
 Or contrast it with that restrained, agonising cry (so 
 like T. E. Brown's Dora) in The Vision of the Arch- 
 angels : 
 
 (Yet, you had fancied, God could never 
 Have bidden a child turn from the spring and the sunlight, 
 And shut him in that lonely shell, to drop for ever 
 Into the emptiness and silence, into the night). . . . 
 God's little pitiful Body lying, worn and thin, 
 And curled up like some crumpled, lonely flower-petal. . . . 
 
 He seems to have cast off that preciosity so dear 
 to the heart of the intellectual young graduate, that 
 hard brilliance which almost becomes synonymous with 
 soullessness ; his beauty becomes deeper and more 
 mellow with advancing years ; the outspokenly sensual 
 and cruelly cynical stage with him, as with Domie, 
 was not lasting ; it just marked the stage of transition 
 from scintillating coruscations of wit to the tranquil 
 heights of recollected emotions made trebly more tender 
 by the calm peacefulness that permeates them ; now 
 indeed does he feed on thoughts that voluntarily move 
 harmonious numbers. 
 
272 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 You see it in The Charm : 
 
 You, asleep, 
 In some cool room that's open to the night 
 Lying half-forward, breathing quietly, 
 One white hand on the white 
 Unrumpled sheet, and the ever-moving hair 
 Quiet and still at length. 
 
 You see it in Day that I have Loved : 
 
 From the inland meadows, 
 Fragrant of June and clover, floats the dark, and fills 
 The hollow sea's dead face with little creeping shadows, 
 And the white silence brims the hollow of the hills. 
 
 But you see it most of all in Grantchester, the one 
 poem by which the poet was generally known before 
 the war : 
 
 Just now the lilac is in bloom, 
 
 All before my little room ; 
 
 And in my flower-beds, 1 think, 
 
 Smile the carnation and the pink ; 
 
 And down the borders, well I know, 
 
 The poppy and the pansy blow. . . . 
 
 Oh ! there the chestnuts, summer through 
 
 Beside the river make for you 
 
 A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep 
 
 Deeply above ; and green and deep 
 
 The stream mysterious glides beneath, . . . 
 
 Du lieber Got! ! 
 Here am I, sweating, sick, and hot, 
 And there the shadowed waters fresh 
 Lean up to embrace the naked flesh. . . . 
 eWe yevoLjx-qv . . . would I were 
 In Grantchester, in Grantchester ! — ... 
 Oh, is the water sweet and cool, 
 Gentle and brown, above the pool ? 
 And laughs the immortal river still 
 Under the mill, under the mill ? 
 Say, is there Beauty yet to find ? 
 And Certainty ? and Quiet kind ? . . . 
 
RUPERT BROOKE 273 
 
 This exquisite cameo, this perfect setting of an 
 English landscape, this final expression of a passionate 
 local patriotism, is one of those poems the fate of which 
 is absolutely sure. It enters into that select list which 
 contains V Allegro, Fancy, Corinna and Friar Bacon 
 and Friar Bungay. Here is the seeing eye, the in- 
 evitable word, the god speaking through the lips of 
 man ; it is true magic, gossamer-like, almost unbeliev- 
 ably beautiful. It makes one get a faint glimmering 
 of what that critic meant who said that had it not been 
 for Keats we should have had no Brooke. If the 
 process of pruning on which I touched at the beginning 
 of this paper enables a man to rebuild his conceptions 
 of beauty as effectively as this, from henceforward I 
 belong to the iconoclasts. 
 
 I come now to my final stage, the discussion of 
 Brooke's attitude to Love. 
 
 It is by no mere coincidence that Browning was the 
 greatest love poet England has ever had ; that Browning 
 was merely the Victorian edition of Domie ; that 
 Brooke is the Georgian reincarnation of the same man ; 
 there is no fallacy in these premises. Doctor Johnson 
 would not have been alone in stigmatising these lines : 
 
 I'll write upon the shrinking skies 
 The scarlet splendour of your name 
 
 as %i extravagantly hyperbolical," but that does not 
 prove that they are not true. There can be no 
 hyperbole in real love. These lines are no more 
 than the naked truth to a man of Rupert Brooke's 
 temperament. Just as he only discovered real beauty 
 by smashing up the seemingly beautiful, so he found 
 real love only after many ghastly experiments with 
 the false. 
 
274 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 I said I splendidly loved you ; it's not true. 
 Such long swift tides stir not a land-locked sea. 
 On gods or fools the high risk falls — on you — 
 The clean clear bitter-sweet that's not for me. 
 But — there are wanderers in the middle mist, 
 Who cry for shadows, clutch, and cannot tell 
 Whether they love at all. . . . 
 
 They doubt, and sigh, 
 And do not love at all. Of these am I. 
 
 How absolutely Donne-like is this almost too clever 
 twist in the tail. You see it again in this favourite 
 selection of two such different critics as Gilbert Murray 
 and Charles Whibley : 
 
 Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill, 
 Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass. 
 You said, "Through glory and ecstasy we pass; 
 Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still, 
 When we are old, are old. . . ." 
 
 Life is our cry. " We have kept the faith ! " we said ; 
 " We shall go down with unreluctant tread 
 Rose-crowned into the darkness ! " . . . Proud we 
 
 were, 
 And laughed, that had such brave true things to say. 
 — And then you suddenly cried, and turned away. 
 
 In Mummia, another love poem which would have 
 caused Doctor Johnson qualms, he says : 
 
 So I, from paint, stone, tale, and rhyme, 
 
 Stuffed love's infinity, 
 And sucked all lovers of all time 
 
 To rarefy ecstasy, 
 
 and goes on to pray that his love may be the quint- 
 essence of all the great lovers of distant ages : 
 
 For the uttermost years have cried and clung 
 To kiss your mouth to mine. 
 
RUPERT BROOKE 275 
 
 At another time he imagines himself to be a paralytic 
 in love — Brooke, of all people ! 
 
 — And you 
 Flower-laden, come to the clean white cell, 
 And we talk as ever — am I not the same ? 
 With our hearts we love, immutable, 
 You without pity, I without shame. 
 
 But the most pregnant of all these is The Voice, where 
 the lover goes out into the woods : 
 
 And I knew 
 That this was the hour of knowing, 
 And the night and the woods and you 
 Were one together, and I should find 
 Soon in the silence the hidden key 
 Of all that had hurt and puzzled me — 
 Why you were you, and the night was kind, 
 And the woods were part of the heart of me. 
 
 You came and quacked beside me in the wood. 
 You said, "The view from here is very good ! " 
 You said, " It' s nice to be alone a bit ! " 
 And, "How the days are drawing out ! " you said. 
 You said, "The sunset's pretty, isn't it?" 
 
 By God ! I wish— I wish that you were dead ! 
 
 I know of nothing quite so stirring as this in his 
 many poems where he harps on the insatiable wants of 
 man, who knows not what he wants but cries with 
 crooked mouth for heaven, only to throw it by. But 
 love of women was not Rupert Brooke's greatest love : 
 
 I have been so great a lover : filled my days 
 So proudly with the splendour of Love's praise, 
 The pain, the calm, and the astonishment, 
 Desire illimitable, and still content. . . . 
 
 You tremble here, as one critic has said, on the verge 
 
276 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 of the hectic nineties ; you imagine that he is about 
 to describe his Cyneras and Jennys. Not so. 
 
 These have I loved : 
 White plates and cups, clean-gleaming, 
 Ringed with blue lines ; and feathery, faery dust ; 
 Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light ; the strong crust 
 Of friendly bread ; and many-tasting food ; 
 Rainbows ; and the blue bitter smoke of wood ; 
 And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers ; 
 
 O dear my loves, O faithless, once again 
 
 This one last gift I give ; that after men 
 
 Shall know, and later lovers, far-removed, 
 
 Praise you, "All these were lovely " ; say, "He loved." 
 
 Walt Whitman himself never exulted in so sustained 
 an anthem ; it is the benedicite of all lovers of Nature. 
 How instantly and surely does Brooke show us the 
 captivation of the sudden flowering miracle of the 
 ordinary. 
 
 We, too, go out after reading this, and for a moment 
 gaze spellbound in ecstasy with new eyes at the beauty 
 of boys bathing in a pool, of the lighted cottage window 
 at dusk, the dim religious light of an abbey crowned 
 by the crescent moon ; we, too, have our immortal 
 moment in lilac and laburnum time, when we picture 
 some old song's lady, a snatch of a forgotten tune, the 
 echoing laughter of our best beloved who may be far 
 away or dead ; we, too, stand on the heights unpinioned 
 and gaze out over the empurpled hills, razor-like in their 
 majestic nakedness, and for a million years enraptured, 
 god-like, appreciative ; we, too, can sec visions of 
 Arthur setting out for that distant vale of Avilion, 
 where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, nor ever wind 
 blows loudly ; we, too, can hear the voice of many 
 waters, of the breeze, of the lark ; the scent of sweet- 
 brier and of peach has the power to drive even us almost 
 
RUPERT BROOKE 277 
 
 mad with infinite longings . . . but for the most part 
 we are content to crawl homewards with downcast eye, 
 oblivious of beauty, forgetful of love ; it is in these arid, 
 never-ending, viewless deserts that we need most of all 
 the poets, our souls' tin-openers, that we may open our 
 eyes to see, our ears to hear ; to see in the long melan- 
 cholic train of clouds our dead friends hovering, to hear 
 in the joyous trilling of birds our loved ones' happy 
 laughter. We, too, need to have something of that 
 magnificent unpreparedness for the long littleness of 
 life which is only to be learnt of poets. Rupert Brooke, 
 perhaps more than any poet of our era, is able to teach 
 us something of the things that matter. It was not 
 for nothing that Ben Jonson styled Donne the first 
 poet in the world for some things. So is his disciple, 
 Brooke. If you require a corrective for lazy thinking 
 and facile writing, turn to Donne or Brooke ; if that 
 kind of wit which is one long succession of disconcerting 
 surprises refreshes you and inspires you, you will find 
 it in each of these ; if you are willing or able to let 
 beauty come to you as it comes to the Alchemist who 
 • ' Glorifies his pregnant pot, If by the way to him befall, 
 Some odoriferous thing or medicinal," you will be helped 
 again by reading these two men, you will forgive the 
 frequently bizarre, the sometimes even repellent tone 
 that creeps in almost unconsciously, because of that 
 rare intensity of feeling which pervades their whole 
 outlook on life. If you love Browning, but are too 
 troubled to acquiesce without question in his too 
 comfortable " God's in His Heaven — All's right with 
 the World," or his non-proven optimism about reunion, 
 " I shall clasp thee again, O thou soul of my soul, and 
 with God be the rest," turn to Brooke and you will find 
 the same erudition, the same packed intricacies, the 
 same multitudinous beauties and whimsical phraseology, 
 
278 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 but none of his annoying sophistry. There is always 
 latent that surest of all foundations, a perfect blend 
 of reason and imagination, each restraining the other 
 so that reason does not become unsympathetic hard- 
 ness nor imagination degenerate into what Words- 
 worth so well called mere fancy. 
 
 If your criterion of a poet be that he should possess 
 fire, a joy in life, a classical taste, an Hellenic eye for 
 beauty and grace, a sense of the lovely, and be able to 
 differentiate that best of all things, Love, from that 
 worst travesty, Sentimentalism, you will be among 
 those who will turn for solace and true enjoyment to 
 Rupert Brooke. 
 
 There has passed away through his death a glory 
 from the earth ; each of us is the poorer by the loss of 
 a man whom all his friends idolised and his readers 
 revered. He died as he had lived ; as England had 
 lavished on him all the gifts in superabundance that 
 mortal man can desire, so he was willing to renounce 
 them as a sacrifice on the altar of honour. " Proud 
 then, clear-eyed and laughing, go to greet Death as a 
 friend." Of him it can truly be said as of few others : 
 
 Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail 
 Or knock the breast ; no weakness, no contempt, 
 Dispraise or blame ; nothing but well and fair, 
 And what may quiet us in a death so noble. 
 
 A young Apollo, golden-haired, 
 
 Stands dreaming on the verge of strife, 
 
 Magnificently unprepared 
 
 For the long littleness of life. 
 
XI 
 THE POETRY OF THOMAS HARDY 
 
 WE have always regarded the Golden Treasury 
 Series as a garner-house in which was stored 
 all the choicest flowers from the classics. 
 Messrs Macmillan have now extended their scope to 
 include (for the first time) selections from the work 
 of a genius still, happily, alive, and it is a compliment 
 to a great poet that his work should be considered 
 worthy to find a place in this august library, and also a 
 tribute to the critical powers of the publishers that they 
 should have chosen so rare and precious an artist as 
 Thomas Hardy with whom to inaugurate their departure 
 from their original scheme. For it may be confidently 
 stated that for every hundred of his readers as a novelist 
 he has but one as a poet. Even the most cultured 
 among us would think twice before daring to assert 
 that Thomas Hardy, the greatest living writer of fiction, 
 (which few would dispute) was also among the first 
 three poets of his age. 
 
 It is curious how many novelists are also poets. It 
 would be hard to recall many instances of famous 
 poets who were also novelists, but there are numerous 
 cases of the converse of this. Compton Mackenzie 
 will certainly outlive his generation as an artist in 
 prose, but he is secondarily by no means to be despised 
 as a poet. D. H. Lawrence, who made his name as a 
 novelist, has yet written much poetry which would be 
 included in any anthology of contemporary poetry. 
 St John Lucas, who has earned our lasting gratitude in 
 The First Round and April Folly, is also a poet of no 
 279 
 
280 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 inconsiderable merit. Ivy Low . . . but there are far 
 more famous instances than these ; Robert Louis 
 Stevenson and George Meredith, George Eliot and 
 the Brontes, Kipling and Goldsmith, Scott — the list 
 is unending. The difficulty is to find an exception, 
 whereas it is hard to imagine those who are primarily 
 poets writing novels at all. What sort of a novel 
 should we expect from Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, 
 Rupert Brooke, Swinburne, Tennyson, Browning, 
 Robert Bridges, Yeats, Noyes, Walter de la Mare, 
 Drinkwater or Flecker ? 
 
 Naturally we read with unqualified delight and 
 interest all that our favourite novelists put into poetry, 
 for we there find their philosophy crystallised, we find 
 more of themselves, for, broadly speaking, the average 
 novel is objective and dramatic whereas poetry is 
 subjective and reflective. We get a far closer insight 
 into the workings of our novelist's mind if he writes 
 poetry, for there at least we can be certain of finding 
 the man himself. So just as all true lovers of Meredith 
 read his poetry with no less avidity than his novels, 
 so all disciples of Hardy will be grateful for this 
 exceedingly well-chosen collection of his poems now 
 published. 
 
 The book, which is all too slim, and contains less than 
 one hundred and fifty short poems, is divided into three 
 parts — Lyrical, Narrative and Martial — written in every 
 conceivable sort of metre. For Hardy is nothing if not 
 experimental ; he ranges from the severely classical 
 Sapphic to the most formless of modern metric devices ; 
 he achieves beauty in nearly every case, but he is 
 obviously never satisfied that he has found the best 
 mould in which to cast his thoughts ; he repeats 
 himself less than any contemporary poet, whether in 
 language or form. On the other hand his philosophy, 
 
THOMAS HARDY 281 
 
 the essence of his work, is stable and uniform ; the 
 fatalism which we have come to regard as his most 
 pronounced characteristic is softened to a considerable 
 extent. We could no longer imagine Mr G. K. 
 Chesterton, for instance, comparing him in this instance 
 with " the village atheist blaspheming over the village 
 idiot." 
 
 Browning, to take a typical example, might well have 
 written On the Departure Platform,, with its theory of 
 the transitory nature of human happiness. 
 
 And why, young man, must eternally fly 
 A joy you'll repeat, if you love her well ? 
 
 — O friend, nought happens twice thus ; why, 
 I cannot tell ! 
 
 and Browning above all men was dear to the heart of 
 Chesterton. It is a mistake to suppose that Hardy 
 has not experienced his ecstatic moments in common 
 with the most thoughtless of us. 
 
 A Day is drawing to its fall 
 
 I had not dreamed to see ; 
 The first of many to enthrall 
 
 My spirit, will it be ? 
 Or is this eve the end of all 
 
 Such new delight for me ? 
 
 I journey home : the pattern grows 
 
 Of moon shades on the way : 
 "Soon the first quarter, I suppose," 
 
 Sky-glancing travellers say. 
 I realize that it, for those, 
 
 Has been a common day. 
 
 This scarcely fits in with our preconceived theories 
 about the pessimistic ugliness of the author of Tess. 
 
 The truth is rather that Hardy is of all living poets 
 the most sensitive to the appeal of beauty ; out of the 
 
282 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 simplest hack phrases of conversation he seems to 
 evolve a magical melody. 
 
 Let me enjoy the earth no less 
 
 Because the all-enacting Might 
 That fashioned forth its loveliness 
 
 Had other aims than ray delight . . . 
 
 is a brave verse, and certainly not the despairing cry 
 of the village atheist blaspheming. "Life offers — to 
 deny," he sings in YelV ham- Wood's Story, but that is 
 merely the cry of a heart that will not allow reason to 
 be overpowered by plausible blind emotion ; he refuses 
 to blink the fact that life is tragic, poignant, illogical 
 and uncomfortable. 
 
 He merely wishes to put on record his experience that, 
 given the time and the place and the loved one all to- 
 gether, there still lurks some secret thing which prevents 
 man from seizing the golden opportunity. He pictures 
 in At an Inn two lovers left alone as " Love's own pair " 
 who had resigned all for " love's dear ends." 
 
 The kiss their zeal foretold, 
 
 And now deemed come, 
 Came not ; within his hold 
 
 Love lingered numb. 
 Why cast he on our port 
 
 A bloom not ours ? 
 Why shaped us for his sport 
 
 In after-hours ? 
 
 As we seemed we were not 
 
 That day afar, 
 And now we seem not what 
 
 We aching are. 
 O severing sea and land, 
 
 O laws of men, 
 Ere death, once let us stand 
 
 As we stood then ! 
 
THOMAS HARDY 283 
 
 At times he jerks out uncouth words at us with 
 malicious intent; " unsight," " enray," " enarch," 
 " unease " and " disennoble " all occur in two sequent 
 stanzas, but when he employs terms like these we feel 
 somehow that he does so for some hidden jDurpose of his 
 own, not from slackness, not because he is deaf to 
 their sound, not because there were no other more 
 legitimate and pleasant-sounding words that would 
 do instead, but because by them alone could he attain 
 exactly the atmosphere he required at that moment. 
 
 His most intimately personal, beautiful and moving 
 poems are those written on his wife's death. Here we 
 have sheer beauty of sentiment allied with perfect, 
 simple expression : 
 
 Why did you give no hint that night 
 
 That quickly after the morrow's dawn, 
 And calmly, as if indifferent quite, 
 
 You would close your term here, up and be gone 
 Where I could not follow 
 With wing of swallow 
 To gain one glimpse of you ever anon ' 
 
 Never to bid good-bye, 
 
 Or give me the softest call, 
 Or utter a wish for a word, while I 
 Saw morning harden upon the wall, 
 Unmoved, unknowing 
 That your great going 
 Had place that moment, and altered all. 
 
 Why do you make me leave the house 
 
 And think for a breath it is you I see 
 At the end of the alley of bending boughs 
 Where so oft at dusk you used to be : 
 Till in darkening darkness 
 The yawning blankness 
 Of the perspective sickens me ! 
 
 Even more, harping on the same strain, that of his wife's 
 death, in Without Ceremony, do we see how he gets a 
 
284 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 supremely exquisite effect with the common phraseology 
 of every day transmuted into music by the genius of 
 the poet : 
 
 It was your way, my dear, 
 To be gone without a word 
 When callers, friends, or kin 
 Had left, and I hastened in 
 To rejoin you, as I inferred. 
 
 And when you'd a mind to career 
 Off anywhere — say to town — 
 You were all on a sudden gone 
 Before I had thought thereon, 
 Or noticed your trunks were down. 
 
 So now, that you disappear 
 For ever in that swift style 
 Your meaning seems to me 
 Just as it used to be : 
 " Good-bye is not worth while ! " 
 
 It is worth while analysing this poem in detail, if 
 you would discover Hardy's mastery over the common- 
 place. Notice the intricate rhyme - scheme, the 
 ordinariness of " when you'd a mind to career off 
 anywhere — say to town " ; could anything be more 
 conversational, more like the speech of every day ? 
 How Wordsworth would have delighted in this con- 
 summate proof of the efficacy of his theory of poetic 
 diction : it requires more than common courage to 
 risk such bare simplicity, for if you fail, your fall is 
 seen at once by even the dullest critic ; conversely, 
 if you succeed, as there is no doubt Hardy does here, 
 your success is due to genius alone, unaided by any 
 cloying sweetness, or exotic, fair-sounding words that 
 lull the senses and put all one's critical faculties to 
 sleep. 
 
THOMAS HARDY 285 
 
 Could anything be more simple than his two superb 
 poems to his dead wife, At Castle Boterel and The 
 Phantom Horsewoman*! 
 
 Queer are the ways of a man I know : 
 
 He comes and stands 
 
 In a careworn craze, 
 
 And looks at the sands 
 
 And the seaward haze 
 
 With moveless hands 
 
 And face and gaze, 
 
 Then turns to go. . . . 
 And what does he see when he gazes so ? 
 
 They say he sees as an instant thing 
 
 More clear than to-day, 
 
 A sweet soft scene 
 
 That once was in play 
 
 By that briny green : 
 
 Yes, notes alway 
 
 Warm, real, and keen, 
 
 What his back years bring — 
 A phantom of his own figuring. 
 
 A ghost girl-rider. And though, toil-tried, 
 
 He withers daily, 
 
 Time touches her not, 
 
 But she still rides gaily 
 
 In his rapt thought 
 
 On that shagged and shaly 
 
 Atlantic spot, 
 
 And as when first eyed 
 Draws rein and sings to the swing of the tide. 
 
 It will surprise many of those people who for years 
 have denounced Hardy for his miserable lack of hope 
 or faith to find that he comes into line with all the 
 youngest soldier-poets of to-day, who sing incessantly 
 of the future life when their spirits will return to the 
 places they had learnt to love best. 
 
286 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 My spirit will not haunt the mound 
 
 Above my breast, 
 But travel, memory-possessed, 
 To where my tremulous being found 
 
 Life largest, best. 
 
 This scarcely fits in with the accepted ideas about 
 pessimism. The truth is, Hardy was as capable of 
 experiencing the finest passions as any great genius is ; 
 life's peerless moments of bliss had come his way too 
 and he had not despised them. His love for his wife 
 is as self-evident as Browning's was ; only the inevit- 
 able reaction came. " Too fragrant was Life's early 
 bloom, Too tart the fruit it brought." Just as he 
 was capable of loving much so was he condemned, 
 as all great lovers are, to suffer in exactly the same 
 proportion. 
 
 Brush not the bough for midnight scents 
 
 That come forth lingeringly, 
 And wake the same sweet sentiments 
 
 They breathed to you and me 
 When living seemed a laugh, and love 
 
 All it was said to be. 
 I did not know 
 That heydays fade and go, 
 But deemed that what was would be always so. 
 
 Is not this rather the awakening of the optimist to a 
 sense of this world's shortcomings ? 
 
 I think it was Chesterton who first pointed out that 
 the pessimist was really more optimistic than the 
 optimist because he was not content with things as 
 they are but saw in his visions a much finer world and 
 spent his whole life in trying to bring it into being. 
 In To an Unborn Pauper Child we get this point of 
 view exactly : 
 
THOMAS HARDY 287 
 
 and such are we — 
 Unreasoning, sanguine, visionary — 
 That I can hope 
 Health, love, friends, scope 
 In full for thee ; can dream thou'lt find 
 Joys seldom yet attained by mankind. 
 
 " Unreasoning, sanguine, visionary " are not the 
 adjectives we should normally apply to Hardy, but no 
 picture of him can claim to be complete which harps 
 only on his fatalistic side, the side that produced that 
 terrible poem on The Titanic. 
 
 Well — while was fashioning 
 
 This creature of cleaving wing, 
 The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything 
 
 Prepared a sinister mate 
 
 For her — so gaily great — 
 A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate. 
 
 And as the smart ship grew 
 
 In stature, grace, and hue, 
 In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too. 
 
 Till the Spinner of the Years 
 
 Said " Now ! " and each one hears, 
 And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres. 
 
 There shines forth the intellect that refuses to be 
 hoodwinked, that will not allow itself to be soothed 
 with vain, false words of comfort. 
 
 How perfectly he merges that clear, critical faculty 
 into the musical can be seen at once in his tribute to 
 Swinburne : 
 
 — It was as though a garland of red roses 
 Had fallen about the hood of some smug nun 
 When irresponsibly dropped as from the sun, 
 In fulth of numbers freaked with musical closes 
 Upon Victoria's formal middle time 
 
 His leaves of rhythm and rhyme. 
 
 He is like Wordsworth in this, that he does mean 
 so very much more than he says. There is a whole 
 
288 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 parable of life in the poem on the tradition of the oxen 
 kneeling on Christmas Eve. 
 
 I feel 
 If someone said on Christmas Eve, 
 1 ' Come ; see the oxen kneel 
 In the lonely barton by yonder coomb 
 
 Our childhood used to know," 
 I should go with him in the gloom, 
 Hoping it might be so. 
 
 How Wordsworthian, again, is The Bear, in which 
 he describes his chance meeting on the hill-tops with 
 a maiden, " one fain would guard from every hazard 
 and every care " : 
 
 I wondered how succeeding suns 
 
 Would shape her wayfarings, 
 And wished such Power might take such ones 
 
 Under its warding wings. 
 
 He then greeted her: "Commiserate still. 'Good 
 morning, my Dear ! ' I said." She replied that she was 
 not his dear and passed him by . . . and ... "I 
 did not try to make her understand." 
 
 It is easy enough to misread such a poem altogether 
 and dismiss it with a sneer, but it is a mistake into which 
 we often fall, this of attributing to genius intellects not 
 very far superior to our own. We have to remember 
 too, that, unlike many great poets, Hardy has a very 
 finely developed sense of humour and is not likely to 
 be led astray into writing rubbish. 
 
 Some of his narrative poems have as their theme 
 the most commonplace incidents, which yet become 
 pregnant with meaning when seen through the eyes of 
 the seer. Few who have read Beyond the Last Lamp : 
 beyond Tooting Common (of all unpoetic places) will 
 easily forget the impression made on them by the story 
 
THOMAS HARDY 289 
 
 of the miserable couple pacing up and down " heedless 
 of the night and rain." 
 
 One could but wonder who they were 
 And what wild woe detained them there. 
 
 Thirty years after, the poet still sees them when 
 nights are weird and wet ... it is this interest in all 
 the world about him that makes the only true criterion 
 by which we can judge our poet. 
 
 The Face at the Casement is more definitely tragic. 
 
 The lover passes with his beloved under the window 
 of the dying man, who had also loved her, but in vain. 
 
 He wished to marry me, 
 So I am bound, when 1 drive near him, 
 To enquire, if but to cheer him, 
 How he may be. 
 
 Her message is sent up to the sick man, who thanks 
 her extravagantly for coming, and they drive on. 
 The favoured lover then designs a deed of hell : know- 
 ing his rival to be gazing out of the lattice upon their 
 receding figures, he puts his arm about her that he 
 might see, nor doubt her "my plighted Love." The 
 poem then ends on a note quite foreign to our old idea 
 of Hardy : 
 
 Love is long-suffering, brave. 
 Sweet, prompt, precious as a jewel : 
 But O, too, Love is cruel, 
 Cruel as the grave. 
 
 It seems hard to believe that he would concede so 
 much to love as to allow her those five all-conquering 
 attributes, especially when we remember that in an 
 earlier poem he had definitely stated that it would be 
 better for mankind to cease without love's kindling 
 coupling-vow rather than to learn what her sway 
 meant. 
 
290 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 A third narrative poem, longer than the others, 
 called The Burghers (Casterbridge, 17 — ), tells of a man 
 who caught his wife on the point of running away with 
 a man ; instead of killing them, as his friend advises, he 
 heaps on her all his possessions and sees them quietly 
 off the grounds. 
 
 It was my friend. " 1 have struck well. They fly, 
 
 But carry wounds that none can cicatrize." 
 
 "Not mortal?" said he. " Lingering — worse/' said I. 
 
 Once only, in In Tenebris, does he lament his loneli- 
 ness and separation from mankind ; once only, just as 
 Meredith let us see his deep agony in his letters. 
 
 The poem is more self- revelatory than anything else 
 Hardy ever wrote — it is wrung out of him. 
 
 He begins by quoting Psalm 141 : " Considerabam 
 ad dexteram, et videbam ; et non erat qui cognosceret 
 me." 
 
 When the clouds' swoln bosoms echo back the shouts of the 
 
 many and strong, 
 The things are all as they best may be, save a few to be right 
 
 ere long, 
 And my eyes have not the vision in them to discern what to 
 
 these is so clear, 
 The blot seems straightway in me alone ; one better he were 
 
 not here. 
 Let him in whose ears the low-voiced Best is killed by the 
 
 clash of the First, 
 Who holds that if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full 
 
 look at the Worst, 
 Who feels that delight is a delicate growth cramped by 
 
 crookedness, custom, and fear, 
 Get him up and be gone as one shaped awry : he disturbs 
 
 the order here. 
 
 So we get our Hardy humanised even more than we 
 thought ; he does care, he does suffer horribly under 
 
THOMAS HARDY 291 
 
 the false accusations made against him. It is the lot 
 of the seer, the prophet and the teacher, "to disturb 
 the order here ' ' ; the whole of progress lies in our 
 poets' capacity for making us readjust our values and 
 test our standards anew from time to time ; were it not 
 for the many severe shakings that they administer we 
 should contentedly settle down, apathetically take 
 things as they come, and give assent to that immoral 
 doctrine that all is for the best in this best of all possible 
 worlds ; if that is so we must be pessimists indeed. 
 Like Alexander we might be forgiven if we sat down 
 and wept as there are no more worlds to conquer. It is 
 the optimist who forges ahead, feeling that delight is a 
 delicate growth, cramped by crookedness, custom, and 
 fear, to worlds where delight may be jmre and unalloyed. 
 But after all In Tenebris is only a mood ; luckily all 
 poets know in their hearts that they are right and the 
 world is wrong. In the final poem of Part II. of this 
 volume we see him once more his true self, out of the 
 depths, serene. 
 
 For loud acclaim he does not care 
 By the august or rich or fair, 
 Nor for smart pilgrims from afar, 
 Curious on where his hauntings are, 
 
 and he finishes on this triumphant note of thankfulness : 
 
 Whatever his message — glad or grim — 
 Two bright-souled women clave to him. 
 
 There is little here of the village atheist blaspheming 
 over the village idiot. 
 
 The last part of the book is given up to war poems 
 and lyrics from The Dynasts. 
 
 Here again he refuses to blink his eyes to the facts, 
 and just because he is clear-sighted he can foresee a time 
 
292 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 when patriotism, grown God-like, will scorn to stand 
 bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas. War 
 is so amazingly futile and purposeless. 
 
 Yes ; quaint and curious war is ! 
 
 You shoot a fellow down 
 You'd treat if met where any bar is 
 
 Or help to half-a-crown. 
 
 and yet . . . and yet . . . 
 
 Is it a purblind prank, O think you. 
 
 Friend with the musing eye, 
 
 Who watch us stepping by 
 
 With doubt and dolorous sigh ? 
 Can much pondering so hoodwink you ! 
 Is it a purblind prank, O think you, 
 
 Friend with the musing eye ? 
 
 Nay. We well see what we are doing, 
 
 Though some may not see — 
 
 Dalliers as they be — 
 
 England's need are we : 
 Her distress would leave us rueing, 
 Nay. We well see what we are doing, 
 
 Though some may not see. 
 
 This is a good note on which to leave this all too 
 slim volume. Hardy himself has never been in any 
 doubt as to his aims — it is only we who are in blinkers 
 when we attribute to such an intellect ' ' purblind 
 pranks " or the inspissated gloom of the cursing atheist. 
 
 He has found life very sweet, and as a quite natural 
 corollary he has also found it exceeding bitter ; he 
 reveals himself in all his moods ; at one moment he 
 turns from the trees to human companionship : 
 
 Since, then, no grace I find 
 
 Taught me of trees, 
 Turn I back to my kind, 
 
 Worthy as these. 
 
THOMAS HARDY 298 
 
 There at least smiles abound, 
 
 There discourse trills around, 
 There, now and then, are found 
 
 Life-loyalties. 
 
 At another he seeks the Wessex Heights to escape 
 from the ghosts that continually haunt him in the 
 lowlands : 
 
 Mind-chains do not clank where one's next neighbour is 
 
 the sky. 
 There are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly 
 
 hand 
 For thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand, 
 Say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls Neck westwardly, 
 I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be. 
 So I am found on Ingpen Beacon, or on Wylls Neck to the 
 
 west. 
 Or else on homely Bulbarrow, or little Pilsdon crest, 
 Where men have never cared to haunt, nor women have 
 
 walked with me, 
 And ghosts then keep their distance : and I know some 
 
 liberty. 
 
 Curiously enough, Hardy's superb descriptions of the 
 beauties of the Dorset which he has made all his own 
 are reserved for his prose epics ; he never approaches 
 the majesty of the opening chapters of The Return of 
 the Native in any of his descriptive poems ; he is rarely 
 in his poetry merely descriptive at all. At his sweetest, 
 he uses the scenery, say, of the Cornish coast as a back- 
 ground and a setting for his wife's portrait. Not that 
 he cannot crystallise in the most exquisite form any 
 mood of Nature which he wants to pin down, more 
 particularly, of course, her harsher ones. 
 
 I leant upon a coppice gate 
 
 When Frost was spectre-grey, 
 And winter's days made desolate 
 
 The weakening eye of day. 
 
294 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 The tangled bine-stems scored the sky 
 
 Like strings of broken lyres, 
 And all mankind that haunted nigh 
 
 Had sought their household fires. 
 The land's sharp features seemed to be 
 
 The Century's corpse outleant, 
 His crypt the cloudy canopy, 
 
 The wind his death-lament. 
 The ancient pulse of germ and birth 
 
 Was shrunken hard and dry, 
 And every spirit upon earth 
 
 Seemed fervourless as I. 
 
 His wonderful manipulation of diverse metrical 
 forms, his passionate love for his wife and his never-to- 
 be-forgotten sense of loss when she died, beautifully 
 expressed in imperishable verse, his keen, penetrating 
 philosophy, his delight in the mere telling of a story, 
 all combine to make this all too slim body of work of 
 rare and lasting value. 
 
 His sense of the musical was evident to anyone who 
 studied the lyrics in The Dynasts, but his amazing 
 successes with every sort of metrical and rhythmical 
 experiment that he tried are not so commonly recog- 
 nised. The point most to be kept in mind is that he 
 attains that success with the ordinary, everyday speech 
 of us all. Here is none of the dreamy, sensuous 
 language of Keats or Coleridge, heavy with romance 
 words ; his is the vocabulary of the satirist, of Swift, 
 Anglo-Saxon, monosyllabic, intellectual, bare . . . he 
 has followed no school and founded none. He dis- 
 dains to employ any tricks to cajole the multitude to 
 listen to his pipings ; consequently, the Caesar to whom 
 he appeals for judgment is posterity. He will never 
 create a furore among his contemporaries ; he has 
 remained isolated and aloof all these years and may be 
 well content to remain so for the remainder of his life. 
 
THOMAS HARDY 295 
 
 He already has to suffer, while alive, the doom of being 
 a classic, and therefore talked about and not read by 
 the million, in his novels. He has to endure the vitriolic 
 abuse of the orthodox, who see in his intellectual 
 straightness and hard-won theories of life only the 
 vapourings of a village atheist, and finally, like so many 
 other great poets, he has failed altogether to obtain 
 recognition for his purest work owing to the blindness 
 or slackness of contemporary criticism. 
 
XII 
 O. HENRY 
 
 I CANNOT claim to be among that select band who 
 found and loved O. Henry's short stories before 
 the present boom set in. I owe my knowledge 
 of him entirely to Stephen Leacock's eulogistic essay, 
 in which he prophesies that the time is coming when 
 the whole English-speaking world will recognise in 
 O. Henry one of the great masters of modern literature. 
 I read him to refute this amazing paean ; I read every 
 word he published ; I read a great deal of him aloud, 
 and I may say, in passing, that he gains infinitely by 
 being read aloud. Now comes an authentic biography 
 of him from a Professor of English in the University of 
 Virginia, who says that in O. Henry non- critical readers 
 find a range of fancy, an exuberance of humour, a 
 sympathy, an understanding, a knowledge of the raw 
 material of life, an ability to interpret the passing in 
 terms of the permanent, an insight into individual and 
 institutional character, a resolute and pervasive desire 
 to help those in need of help) — in a word, a constant and 
 essential democracy that they find in no other short- 
 story writer. 
 
 I fear that the two professors, in their enthusiasm 
 over their hero, are likely to overshoot the mark and 
 drive away many timid readers who, carefully enticed, 
 might have become devotees of this remarkable writer ; 
 for however much the method of " thrusting down the 
 throat " may succeed in America, it ;; cuts very little ice " 
 in England. 
 
 We are told that his adherents across the Atlantic 
 
 296 
 
O. HENRY 297 
 
 can be counted in millions, which rather tends to make 
 the cultured, academic mind of this country avoid so 
 successful a genius. He thinks fretfully of those writers 
 who count as best sellers in the British Isles. So far 
 from being a point in their favour, such evidence only 
 militates against them here, for the most popular writers 
 are rarely the masters and are but seldom among those 
 who have any new message to deliver. 
 
 Respecting, however, the calm verdict of so obviously 
 sane a critic as Professor Leacock, they buy one volume 
 of O. Henry's, ready to find fault, and within a few 
 minutes they have found a dozen or a score of tactical 
 errors that rankle. 
 
 They object to his slap-dash style, his far-fetched 
 metaphors and similes with which he besprinkles nearly 
 every sentence. He is as fond of a ridiculous illustra- 
 tion as Shakespeare was of puns. They cavil at his 
 impossible exaggerations as palpable and false as 
 Falstaff' s ; his wit, which degenerates only too often 
 into buffoonery ; at a thousand things which an English 
 writer would have left unsaid ; at the constant irruption 
 of the narrator into the story ; the " take it or leave it," 
 high-handed tone which he takes with his readers ; at 
 the blatancy of the tricks he plays upon the imagina- 
 tion — at a thousand little details. 
 
 Many quite acute critics never get beyond this stage, 
 and give O. Henry much too short a trial, only to turn 
 from him in disgust before they penetrate to the real 
 writer at all. It must be allowed at once that the 
 pure gold, of which there is much, is hidden beneath a 
 good deal of dross. There are twelve volumes of these 
 stories, and in each volume there are over two dozen 
 separate tales. It is not to be expected that of these 
 two hundred and seventy odd experiments all will 
 succeed. I would guarantee to select fifty which would 
 
298 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 make an irresistible appeal to the most exacting and 
 captious critic, but these fifty would have to be chosen 
 with great circumspection, and they are to be foimd in 
 no two or three volumes. They are scattered hap- 
 hazard in between stories that are merely dull, point- 
 less or insipid, and to the full appreciation of them a 
 knowledge of the salient points of O. Henry's life would 
 be necessary ; so this I propose to give now. 
 
 His biographer, Professor Alphonso Smith, devotes 
 a great many unnecessary pages to his ancestors and 
 other irrelevant matter. He has written a book which 
 is not at all to be commended to those who would 
 understand the true Henry, and yet without it we 
 should be apt to miss a great deal that is important if 
 we wish fully to understand the appeal that his best 
 stories ought to make. 
 
 In the first place, as most people know, his name was 
 not O. Henry at all, but William Sydney Porter. He 
 was born at Greensborough, North Carolina, in 1862, 
 and as a boy in his native town gained a good deal of 
 local approbation as a cartoonist. After leaving school 
 be became apprenticed to his uncle, and spent five years 
 in a drug store, and completed his education by reading 
 omnivorously. Among his favourite books were The 
 Arabian Xights, The Anatomy of Melancholy, the novels 
 of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Charles Reade, Bulwer 
 Lytton, Wilkie Collins, Victor Hugo and Dumas. His 
 health, however, was not strong (he came of a con- 
 sumptive stock), and so at the age of eighteen he was 
 sent to Texas in order to learn the art of ranching. 
 His thirst for knowledge during this period seems to 
 have been unquenchable. History, fiction, biography, 
 science and magazines of every sort were devoured and 
 talked about with eager interest. Tennyson and 
 Webster's Unabridged Dictionary were his two most 
 
O. HENRY 299 
 
 frequent companions. Though he was always shy and 
 somewhat of a dreamer, he absorbed, apparently with 
 little effort, the different accomplishments which he 
 was now called upon to learn — lassoing cattle, dipping 
 and shearing sheep, shooting and the management of 
 horses. 
 
 Just as the confinement in the Greensborough drug 
 store had whetted his appetite for the freedom of the 
 ranch, so now, after two years, the isolation of ranch life 
 began to pall and he became eager for the social contact 
 of city life. So he now migrated to Austin, where he 
 became, in turn, occasional clerk in a tobacco store and 
 later in a drug store, book-keeper for a real estate firm, 
 draftsman in a land office, paying and receiving teller 
 in a bank, member of a military company, singer in 
 the choirs of the Presbyterian, Baptist and Episcopal 
 churches, actor in private theatricals, editor of a 
 humorous paper, serenader and cartoonist. 
 
 It was at this time that he acquired his lifelong 
 taste, which was afterwards to stand him in such good 
 stead, of going " bumming " — that is, of night-prowling 
 in the streets. He used to watch and get into conversa- 
 tion with every sort of person in the streets, with the 
 result that out of work hours he lived in a constant state 
 of adventure. 
 
 Like Dostoieffsky and all the great Russians, he was 
 an incorrigible romancist, and was always on the look 
 out for what was " round the corner " in life. 
 
 In 1887 he married Miss Athol Estes, a seventeen- 
 year-old girl, unfortunately, like himself, of con- 
 sumptive parentage. Owing to the refusal of the girl's 
 parents, on the ground of health, to allow the couple to 
 get married, they eloped, but were ultimately recon- 
 ciled. Mrs Porter appears to have given him exactly 
 the incentive he needed. The year of his marriage was 
 
300 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 also the year in which he began to rely on his pen as 
 a supplementary source of income. There was born 
 during this period his only daughter, Margaret Worth 
 Porter, who is now herself making a name in America 
 as an author. 
 
 In 1894 he started a paper called The Rolling Stone, 
 which lived for exactly a year. He then accepted a 
 job on the staff of The Houston Daily Post, which he 
 held from October, 1895, to June, 1896, when he was 
 suddenly recalled to Austin to answer a charge of 
 embezzlement while acting as teller at the bank. That 
 he was innocent no one now doubts, but he committed 
 what he afterwards called the one irretrievable error of 
 his life by running away. He took train from Houston, 
 obviously with the intent of standing his trial, but at 
 Hempstead his too imaginative mind betrayed him, and 
 he got out and took the night train to New Orleans, a 
 fugitive from justice. He went on by fruit steamer to 
 Honduras, and there met the leader of a notorious gang 
 of train robbers, whom he joined, and together this 
 strange pair circled the entire west of South America. 
 He wrote regularly to his wife, and was full of plans for 
 the education of his daughter in Honduras, when 
 suddenly he learnt that his wife was dangerously ill. 
 He immediately returned and gave himself up in order 
 to be near her. She died in July, 1897, and his trial 
 was held in February of the following year. He pleaded 
 not guilty, but appeared to be indifferent as to the result. 
 
 One peculiar feature of the indictment was that he 
 was accused of stealing money in November, 1895, 
 nearly a year after he had left the bank ! This appears 
 not to have been commented on at all. Like " Lord 
 Jim," O. Henry appears to have been crushed by his 
 one great mistake, in running away. The rest of the 
 matter did not appear to concern him. He was 
 
O. HENRY 301 
 
 sentenced to five years' imprisonment, but came out in 
 1901, after three years, owing to his flawless record in 
 prison. He acted during these years as drug clerk 
 in the penitentiary, and Professor Smith includes in 
 his biography a great number of letters written to his 
 daughter during this time, over which it is not necessary 
 now to dwell. He retained no trace of bitterness at the 
 hardness of his lot. The years had left an ineradicable 
 mark upon his character, and he came out into the 
 world again a changed man, nobler, of infinite charity 
 and kindliness, with an intense sympathy for all his 
 fellow- creatures . 
 
 It was at this time that he began to write under an 
 assumed name, the name by which he is now known 
 to practically every intelligent person in the English- 
 speaking countries. 
 
 The stories that were written in prison, under the 
 stress of so great suffering, mark the transition from 
 journalism to the domain of literature proper. 
 
 In the spring of 1902 came the call to him to go to 
 New York. From that time forward he found that he 
 could not work outside of the city which he now made 
 his own and which claims him as her most inspired 
 lover. " If ever," writes Professor Smith, " in American 
 literature the place and the man met, they met when 
 O. Henry strolled for the first time along the streets 
 of New York." 
 
 Conqueror-like, he began to rechristen the city of his 
 choice. " Little Old Bagdad-on-the-Subway," " The 
 City of Too Many Caliphs," " Noisy ville on the Hudson," 
 " Wolfville on the Subway " and " The City of Chame- 
 leon Changes" will give some idea of the impression this 
 vast Manhattan made on its greatest lover. He made 
 many and valuable friends, but was very much averse 
 from any tendency that might be shown to lionise him. 
 
302 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 He was nearly always penniless, owing to his lack of 
 thrift and his incurable habit of promiscuous charity, 
 but he was never tempted by golden offers to swell his 
 coffers. On one occasion a very famous publishing 
 firm, who had refused many of his short stories when he 
 was unknown, now came forward and sent him a cheque 
 for a thousand dollars, asking him for something from 
 his pen — anything. His reply was to send back the 
 cheque without further comment. 
 
 There were but two things that could be really 
 counted upon to offend him — a salacious story and the 
 proffer of a plot. He preferred to get his plots for him- 
 self by mixing with shop girls and salesmen, by roaming 
 at all hours of the day and night along the river front 
 and talking with anyone who would condescend to do so. 
 He seems never to have wanted " copy." 
 
 " If I could have a thousand years," he writes, in one 
 of his short stories — " just one little thousand years — 
 more of life, I might, in that time, draw near enough to 
 true Romance to touch the hem of her robe. 
 
 " Up from ships men come, and from waste places, 
 and forest and road and garret and cellar to maunder 
 to me in strangely distributed words of the things they 
 have seen and considered. The recording of their tales 
 is no more than a matter of ears and fingers. There 
 are only two fates I dread — deafness and writer's 
 cramp." 
 
 To one of his stories, Madame Bo-Peep, of the Ranches, 
 he owes his second wife, Miss Sallie Coleman of Asheville, 
 North Carolina. She had written to him about this 
 story and told him of her own ambition to write. 
 
 His reply is illuminating and quite extraordinarily 
 helpful, not only to a true understanding of the romantic 
 trait which is O. Henry's predominant and most charm- 
 ing characteristic, but also as a piece of advice to the 
 
O. HENRY 303 
 
 thousands of young adventurers of to-day who, like the 
 cat in the adage, are hesitating. 
 
 " Now I'll tell you what to do," he says. " Kick 
 the mountains over and pack a kimono and a lead- 
 pencil in a suit-case and hurry to New York. Get a 
 little studio three stories up with mission furniture and 
 portieres, a guitar and a chafing-dish and laugh at 
 fate and the gods. There are lots of lovely women 
 here leading beautiful and happy lives in the midst of 
 the greatest things in this hemisphere of art and music 
 and literature, on tiny little incomes. You meet the 
 big people in every branch of art, you drink deep of 
 the Pierian spring, you get the benefit of the earth's 
 best." 
 
 Was ever good advice more succinctly or more 
 charmingly given ? It is the root of the whole matter. 
 Seize your opportunity, he seems to say, in both 
 hands ; don't fear for the result. Vegetate no longer in 
 the country, where your talents will only run to seed, 
 but come up to town, where real life is to be lived and 
 enjoyed. Those only live who are willing to take the 
 risk. 
 
 This wise maiden took the risk, and in November, 1907, 
 she became the second Mrs Porter. He now entered 
 upon his most prolific period. 
 
 In 1904 he produced sixty-five, and in 1905 fifty 
 short stories. In 1906 appeared the volume entitled 
 The Four Millions, with this illuminating foreword : 
 
 " Not very long ago someone invented the assertion 
 that there were only ' Four Hundred ' people in New 
 York City who were really worth noticing. But a 
 wiser man has arisen — the census-taker — and his 
 larger estimate of human interest has been preferred in 
 marking out the field of these little stories of the ■ Four 
 Million.* 
 
304 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 Here we get the clue to O. Henry's greatness, his 
 kinship with Dickens and Shakespeare and all great 
 writers. He was the born, large-hearted democrat who, 
 with the utmost sincerity, can lay his hand upon his 
 breast and say : "Humani nihil a me alienum puto." 
 
 Each succeeding year, until 1911, saw the publication 
 of two collections of his stories touching on every sort 
 of topic, treating of every kind of life. 
 
 In 1909 he showed signs of breaking up, and in the 
 autumn of that year he returned to Asheville, only to 
 return to his beloved city in the following March. On 
 the evening of the 3rd of June he was taken to the 
 Polyclinic Hospital, and on the following Sunday 
 morning, just before sunrise, with a whimsical smile 
 and a jest upon his lips — " Turn up the lights : I don't 
 want to go home in the dark " — he died. 
 
 Such is the life story of a man who has been variously 
 styled " The American Kipling," " The American de 
 Maupassant," " The American Gogol," " Our Fielding a 
 la mode;' " The Bret Harte of the City," " The Y.M.C.A. 
 Boccaccio," " The Homer of the Tenderloin," " The 
 Twentieth Century Haroun Al-Raschid," " the Greatest 
 Living Master of the Short Story." 
 
 It remains to see how far he has justified these extra- 
 ordinary titles. 
 
 First, then, as to technique. 
 
 No man has made so much his own the art of the 
 nuexpected ending. He begins quietly, yet arrestingly, 
 but you are unable to tell whether you are to be let in 
 for a tragic or comic denouement, a defeat or victory. 
 In the second stage, that of the first guess, you begin to 
 discover the plot ; something definite and resultant seems 
 to be on the way ; you can't guess the end, but you 
 can't help trying to. 
 
 The third stage shows you that your guess was wrong. 
 
O. HENRY 305 
 
 This is the stage of the first surprise. Something has 
 happened that ought not to have happened if the story- 
 was to end according to your expectations. 
 
 The last stage is marked by light out of darkness. 
 
 "W e are surprised, happily surprised, and then surprised 
 again that we should have been surprised at first. 
 
 He always worked a triple-hinged surprise 
 To end the scene and make one rub one's eyes. 
 
 The sting in the tail, the entire volte-face from what 
 one expected, is amazingly in the vein of Rupert Brooke, 
 and adds tremendously to the charm of the narrative, 
 but it is, after all, a trick, mechanical and often tiresome 
 after one gets accustomed to it. But there is some- 
 thing much deeper than this : there is the art which 
 yet makes the unexpected the inevitable. You go over 
 the stories a second time and then begin to perceive the 
 mastery with which the tricks are forged. It is all of 
 a piece. There are no loose ends, no irrelevancies. 
 All O. Henry's stories are marked by a fierce economy 
 of detail which at once put him on a plane far different 
 from that occupied by the average teller of short stories. 
 
 The next point to be noticed is his gift of observation 
 mingled with what Bagehot called the experiencing 
 mind. Not only did he watch with meticulous careful- 
 ness all the idiosyncrasies of every sort of person with 
 whom he came into contact, but he was further obsessed 
 with a passionate interest in and sympathy with every 
 type of man. 
 
 He is particularly fond of turning the tables on 
 Haroun Al-Raschid. Not only does he let the rich 
 wander incognito among the poor, but he gives his 
 imagination rein and, Pippa-like, bestows upon the 
 poverty-stricken clerk a day when he can become one 
 with the rich. Again and again he returns to this 
 u 
 
306 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 subject, every time to treat of it from a fresh and 
 inspiring point of view. 
 
 We see it in the story of the salesman who saved up 
 ten dollars every seventy days in order to masquerade 
 as a man about town for one night. He meets a girl 
 who is masquerading as a shop girl for amusement ; 
 he takes her out to dinner and talks of his bridge and 
 yachts and golf . . . and other aimless amusements of 
 the life that he pretends to belong to. They separate, 
 and we see her at the close of the story lamenting that 
 she could find it in her heart to love a man who was 
 chivalrous and kind to poor shop girls, but never one 
 who wasted his life in expensive amusements. 
 
 Habit was another favourite topic. O. Henry was 
 very interested in the question of relapse. 
 
 The Pendulum is perhaps the best in this vein. 
 
 There we have a man who gets tired of the monotony 
 of home life, and so forms the habit, at eight-fifteen 
 every night, of leaving his wife alone and going off to 
 a game of " pool " with his male companions. 
 
 One night on returning from work he finds a note from 
 his wife saying that she has been called away to see her 
 mother, who is ill. He immediately begins to feel 
 conscience-stricken ; he has treated his wife abominably. 
 ^When she comes back he will spend the rest of his life in 
 making up for his desertions. He is ruminating on all 
 this when she suddenly returns ; her mother was not 
 so bad as she had been led to expect. Immediately 
 the husband looks up at the clock. Eight-fifteen ! He 
 gets up, preparatory to leaving the house. Querulously 
 his wife asks where he is going. " Thought I'd drop up 
 to M'Closkey's," he replied, " and play a game or two of 
 pool with the fellows." 
 
 But by far the most insistent note in O. Henry's 
 stories is that searching for what is " round the corner," 
 
O. HENRY 307 
 
 as I indicated before : the insatiable thirst for romance 
 which every right-thinking man ought to encourage. 
 44 At every corner," he writes, " handkerchiefs drop, 
 fingers beckon, eyes besiege, and the lost, the lonely, 
 the rapturous, the mysterious, the perilous, changing 
 clues of adventure are slipped into our fingers. But few 
 of us are willing to hold and follow them. We are grown 
 stiff with the ramrod of convention down our backs. 
 We pass on ; and some day we come, at the end of 
 a very dull life, to reflect that our romance has been a 
 pallid thing of a marriage or two, a satin rosette kept in 
 a safe-deposit drawer, and a lifelong feud with a steam 
 radiator." 
 
 In the story from which this is taken we have an in- 
 corrigible romantic who is given, by a negro in a street, 
 a ticket with " The Green Door " written on it. He 
 passes him again in the crowd, and is again given a 
 ticket with the same name on it. He enters the house 
 opposite which the negro is standing, and upstairs finds 
 a door of the right colour, opens it, and finds a pretty 
 shop girl fainting for want of food. This he instantly 
 procures for her, and promises to come and see her 
 again. As he goes out he notices that all the doors in 
 the house are painted green. He accosts the negro 
 outside and asks him why he gave him the ticket. The 
 negro points down the street to a neighbouring theatre, 
 over which is flashed out the title of the play then 
 running, The Green Door. 
 
 Another favourite theme is Destiny. 
 
 1 go to seek on many roads 
 What is to be. 
 True heart and strong, with love to light — 
 Will they not hear me in the fight 
 To order, shun or wield or mould 
 My Destiny ? 
 
308 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 The answer is : No. Destiny awaits you. You 
 cannot " order, shun or wield or mould "it. 
 
 " It ain't the roads we take : it's what's inside of us 
 that makes us turn out the way we do." 
 
 But Henry's true venturer dares Fate in its blindest 
 manifestations : the true venturer does not ask a 
 schedule and map from Fate when he begins a journey. 
 What he wants is to encounter an adventure to which 
 he can predict no conclusion. 
 
 But he attains the topmost pinnacle of his fame only 
 when he writes about the shop girl. It is as the little 
 shop girl's true knight-errant that O. Henry stands 
 most vividly before us. 
 
 Of all social problems (and social problems were the 
 very life blood of O. Henry), that of the conditions under 
 which the shop girl lives, and of her outlook on life, 
 interested him most. 
 
 In A Lickpenny Lover we see her, beautiful, shrewd, 
 cunning, with vision limited behind the counter in a 
 glove store. To her comes Irving Carter, painter, 
 millionaire, gentleman, and falls immediately in love 
 with her. Summoning up courage, he suggests that he 
 should call on her people. 
 
 "Carter did not know the shop girl. He did not 
 know that her home is often either a scarcely habitable 
 tiny room or a domicile filled to overflowing with kith 
 and kin. The street-corner is her parlour, the park is 
 her drawing-room ; the avenue is her garden walk ; yet 
 for the most part she is as inviolate mistress of herself 
 in them as is my lady inside her tapestried chamber." 
 
 He meets her in the streets and implores her to marry 
 him, drawing a perfect picture of Venice and India, 
 Persia and the ends of the earth to which he will take 
 her. 
 
 To her bosom friend next she recounted the episode. 
 
O. HENRY 309 
 
 " Say, Lu, what do you think that fellow wanted me 
 to do ? He wanted me to marry him and go down to 
 Coney Island for a wedding tour." 
 
 In Elsie in New York we have the story of a girl look- 
 ing for work, who is met on the threshold of each place 
 by some self-styled charity organisation which prevents 
 her from accepting without providing her with anything 
 else. In the end she falls a victim to the worst type of 
 scoundrel. 
 
 In The Guilty Party Liz is driven to the streets and 
 ruin simply because her father would do nothing to 
 make her home attractive for her. 
 
 An Unfinished Story dwells on the underpayment of 
 working girls and their ultimate ruin owing to their 
 quite natural love of adornment. It finishes thus : 
 
 " I dreamed that I was standing near a crowd of 
 prosperous-looking angels, and a policeman took me by 
 the wing and asked if I belonged to them. 
 
 " ' Who are they ? ' I asked. 
 
 "'Why,' said he, 'they are the men who hired 
 working girls, and paid 'em five or six dollars a week 
 to live on. Are you one of the bunch ? ' 
 
 " ' Not on your immortality,' said I. 'I'm only the 
 fellow that set fire to an orphan asylum, and murdered 
 a blind man for his pennies.' " 
 
 In Brickdust Row we are reminded of Shaw in 
 Widowers' Houses. The shaft is aimed at those who 
 compel girls to meet men on the boats, in church, 
 in the park or on the street. 
 
 " A girl has got to meet the men," says Florence to 
 the man who has fallen in love with her but doesn't 
 understand the sort of life she is forced to live ; " the 
 first time one spoke to me on the street, I ran home and 
 cried all night. But you get used to it. I meet a good 
 many nice fellows at church." 
 
310 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 The hero finds that he owns the very block of flats 
 in which the girl lives. His lawyer suggests making 
 reception rooms. 
 
 " Man," replies the agonised lover, " it's too late, I 
 tell you. It's too late. It's too late. It's too late." 
 
 In The Trimmed Lamp we see two shop girls and the 
 devoted lover. One of the girls, caring only for ostenta- 
 tion and finery, throws him over, and he mates with the 
 other. At the end we are shown the flashy girl, led 
 astray by baubles, expensively clad, with diamond rings 
 and all the paraphernalia of her new profession, crouch- 
 ing down by a dark fence, sobbing, with a plainly dressed 
 working girl by her side who was doing her best to 
 console her. 
 
 Another main feature of O. Henry is his study of 
 cities. 
 
 " He studied cities as women study their reflections in 
 mirrors : a city was a thing with a soul, an individual 
 conglomeration of life, with its own peculiar essence, 
 flavour and feeling," he says of Raggles, in The Making 
 of a Xew Yorker, " Chicago seemed to swoop down 
 upon him with a breezy suggestion of Mrs Partington, 
 plumes and patchouli, Pittsburg impressed him as the 
 play of Othello performed in Russian in a railroad station 
 by Dockstader's minstrels. Xew Orleans simply gazed 
 down upon him from a balcony, Boston seemed to him a 
 white, cold cloth that had been bound tightly round 
 his brow to spur him on to some unknown but 
 tremendous mental effort." 
 
 New York seemed to ignore him altogether until he 
 had been knocked down by a motor car, when he dis- 
 covered how, underneath the surface, she stood kindly, 
 human, sympathetic, a veritable mother city. 
 
 In A Municipal Report, which Professor Leacock 
 admires more than all his other stories, he tries to show 
 
O. HENRY 311 
 
 that romance may be found in even the dullest and most 
 unlikely remote corners of the globe. In Nashville, 
 Tennessee, he found the most romantic story he ever 
 wrote. To the seeing eye all cities are story cities. 
 
 He has painted for us Latin America, the South, the 
 West and the North, all with consummate skill ; his 
 sense of atmosphere is as sure as his sense of romance, 
 satire or humour, on all three of which he is a past 
 master. 
 
 He is as happy in his description of the land of the 
 lotus-eaters, where " The climate was as balmy as that 
 of distant Avalon ; the fetterless, idyllic round of en- 
 chanted days ; the life of the indolent, romantic people 
 — a life full of music, flowers, and low laughter ; the 
 influence of the imminent sea and mountains, and the 
 many shapes of love and magic and beauty that bloomed 
 in the white tropic nights," as he is in his truer home 
 of Wall Street, where harassed brokers are so busy 
 that they even forget that they are married the day 
 after. 
 
 Whether the air was languorous with the scent of 
 jasmine and orange blossoms, or cold and dank, as in 
 Manhattan, he was equally able to make it live again in 
 the pages of his books, so that you are transported there 
 in a moment and feel the very climatic conditions as 
 you read. Like our own English humorist, now, alas ! 
 dead (Mr H. H. Munro), he had the gift of exactly 
 fitting his characters with apt names. 
 
 Who does not conjure up at once an exact vision of 
 Don Senor el Coronel Encarnacion Rios, Monteleon y 
 Dolorosa de los Santos y Mendez, or John de Graffen- 
 reid Atwood, from their names alone ? 
 
 He is for ever bursting out into the ridiculous, strain- 
 ing humour beyond the bounds to which we as a nation 
 allow it to stretch, as in " Omnia Gallia in tres partes 
 
312 STUDIES IN LITERATURE 
 
 divisa est : which is the same as to say ; we will need all 
 of our gall in devising means to tree them parties.'' 
 
 Again he lets slip from time to time, usually apropos 
 of nothing, little passages of philosophy which, once 
 read, we are likely to carry with us to the grave. Of 
 these the one that I remember most clearly runs thus : 
 c You can't write with ink, and you can't write with 
 your own heart's blood, but you can write with the 
 heart's blood of someone else. You have to be a cad 
 before you can be an artist." 
 
 In The Country of Elusion we see his hatred of the 
 sham Bohemia of the New Yorker. 
 
 " You know how the Bohemian feast of reason keeps 
 up with the courses. Humour with the oysters ; wit 
 with the soup ; repartee with the entree ; brag with 
 the roast ; knocks for Whistler and Kipling with the 
 salad ; songs with the coffee : the slapsticks with the 
 cordials. Freedom is the Tyrant that holds our 
 Bohemians in slavery." 
 
 I notice that no writer on O. Henry dares to conclude 
 without asserting violently his preference for one story 
 over the rest. Perhaps so great a choice (out of two 
 hundred and seventy) eggs one on to do a thing like this. 
 Anyway, I will try my hand at the game too. For 
 pure humour I place Let Me Feel Your Pulse easily 
 first. It has an appeal which none of the others has 
 for the purely English reader. It is freer of exaggerated 
 jargon ; it is purer in style (O. Henry was no stylist, 
 at any rate, in diction), and has, as all good humorous 
 stories should have, a quite pregnant climax. It obeys 
 the laws laid down by Meredith for the Comic Spirit : 
 it makes us laugh at human follies ; it satirises and 
 ridicules and yet it does us quite active and appreciable 
 good. It is an anodyne in itself for all bodily ailments, 
 an infallible prescription from an unerring doctor. 
 
O. HENRY 313 
 
 For pathos I place The Furnished Room and Past 
 One at Rooneifs as exquisite examples of what drama 
 it is possible to convey through the medium of the 
 short story, and for a picture of the life which 0. Henry 
 was most fond of, that of the New York shop girl, I 
 think most readers might wander farther and fare worse 
 than contenting themselves with The Third Ingredient, 
 but all of the stories which I have mentioned are of the 
 kind that one reads only to reread with greater enjoy- 
 ment every time one comes back to them. 
 
 That O. Henry is one of the world's great geniuses 
 is probably not true. That he was a vastly diverting 
 raconteur, poignant in his pathos, terrible in his tragedy, 
 witty, urbane and kindly in his humour, is an estab- 
 lished fact which no sane critic can deny. Luckily 
 (for us) his reputation is growing day by day, and 
 whether the whole English-speaking world come to 
 recognise in him one of the greatest masters or not, the 
 time is surely not far distant when everyone will get to 
 know him well enough to offer up a prayer of gratitude 
 that we should have been privileged to come under 
 the influence of so eminently sane, human, and healthy 
 a writer. 
 
UNIVERSITY OF N.C. AT CHAPEL HILL 
 
 0003219371 
 
 This book must not 
 be taken from the 
 Library building. 
 
 THIS TITLE HAS 
 
 BEEN MICROFILMED