Chapter 1

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The London Mercury, Vol. I, Nos. 1-6, November 1919 to April 1920 This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook. Title: The London Mercury, Vol. I, Nos. 1-6, November 1919 to April 1920 Author: Various Editor: Sir John Collings Squire Release date: March 11, 2014 [eBook #45116] Most recently updated: October 24, 2024 Language: English Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45116 Credits: Produced by David Clarke, Charlie Howard, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries) *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LONDON MERCURY, VOL. I, NOS. 1-6, NOVEMBER 1919 TO APRIL 1920 *** THE LONDON MERCURY Edited by J. C. Squire Volume I 1919 November to April 1920 [Illustration] London The Field Press Ltd PRINTED AT THE FIELD PRESS WINDSOR HOUSE BREAM'S BUILDINGS LONDON E·C4 INDEX TO VOLUME I M·CM·XIX NOVEMBER APRIL M·CM·XX REGULAR ARTICLES page AMERICA, A Letter from 232 Bibliographical Notes 73, 194, 325, 458, 581, 718 BIBLIOGRAPHIES OF MODERN AUTHORS: Beerbohm, Max 626 Belloc, Hilaire 366 Bridges, Robert Seymour 753 Brooke, Rupert 123 Chesterton, G. K. 496 Clutton-Brock, Arthur 366 Davies, W. H. 122 De La Mare, Walter 122 Flecker, James Elroy 239 Freeman, John 497 Hardy, Thomas 122 Hewlett, Maurice 625 Meynell, Alice 754 Saintsbury, George 238 Book Production Notes 231, 359, 495, 621, 752 Books of the Month 78, 201, 332, 468, 593, 727 Correspondence 77, 198, 329, 462, 585, 721 DRAMA, The: Calvinists of the Drama, The 112 _Candida_ 755 Children's Plays 498 Demand and Supply 501 _Duchess of Malfi, The_ 368 _Grierson's Way_ 755 Intellectual Drama, The 241 _John Ferguson_ 755 _Living Corpse, A_ 111 _Marriage à la Mode_ 627 Materialism and Poetry 242 _Medea_ 755 Miniature Ballet 755 Pantomime, The Change in the 499 Poetic Drama, The 240 _Pygmalion_ 755 Theatre, The Influence of the Existing 113 _Three Sisters, The_ 755 _Young Visiters, The_ 755 EDITORIAL NOTES: American Copyright 131, 389 Art, Ugliness, and Incomprehensibility 385 Auction Room Knock-Out, The 516 Literature of 1919, The, and the Prospects of Literature 257 Ministry of Fine Arts, A 513 National Theatre, The 641 Objects of the LONDON MERCURY 1, 129 FINE ARTS, The: Black Country, The 634 Comic Drawing, British 373 Epstein, Recent Sculpture by Jacob 633 Fine Arts, The 116 Goupil Gallery Salon 375 Grant, Paintings by Duncan 634 Group-making and Group-breaking 245 London Group, The 247 Matisse, M. Henri 374 Meaning of Impressionism, The 759 National Gallery, The 632 Nevinson's Exhibition, Mr. 246 New English Art Club, The 504 Renoir, Auguste 759 War Pictures at Burlington House 503 FRANCE, A LETTER FROM: The Present State of the French Novel 105 The French Poetry of To-day 360 The Young Reviews 622 Learned Societies, etc. 108, 235, 363, 465, 590, 724 LITERARY INTELLIGENCE: Andreef, Leonid, Death of 136 Bullen, A. H., Death of 647 Burne-Jones, Lady, Death of 520 Chesterton, G. K. 263 Cummings, Bruce, Death of 135 Dehmel, Dr. Richard, Death of 519 _Dial, The_ 392 Dobson, Austin, Eightieth Birthday of 391 Flecker, James Elroy 263 Gosse, Edmund, Seventieth Birthday of 136 Hardy, Thomas, Presentation to 135 New Edition of his Works 263 James, Henry, Letters of 263 Micro-organisms in Paper 264 Osler, Sir William, Death of 391 Smith, G. D., Death of 648 Thomas, Edward, Memorial to 519 MUSIC: Audience, The Function of the 764 Beecham Opera, The 248 Concerts 377 Covent Garden 376 Naturalisation of Opera in England, The 763 Promenade Concerts, The 119 Purcell and His Orchestra 637 Purcell and Shakespeare 635 Resurrection of an Opera, The 635 Rubinstein's Recital, Mr. Arthur 506 Scriabin Recital, A 508 Spanish Music, Modern 507 Surrey's Opportunity, The 764 Publications, Select List of 124, 251, 379, 509, 638, 766 OCCASIONAL CONTRIBUTIONS IN PROSE ARCHITECTURE as Form in Civilisation 574 Autographs, A Collection of 320 Barbellion, W. N. P. 543 Blake as a Prophet, On 283 Blind Thamyris 403 Bridges' Lyrical Poems, Robert 708 Butler, Samuel 164 Classic of the Future, A Little (Somerville and Ross) 555 Crane, Stephen: A Note without Dates 192 Creatures, The 275 Crystal Vase, The 176 Donne, John 435 Eighteenth-Century Poetry 155 Eliot, George 34 English, The Teaching of 62 Foreshore of London, The 663 Future Poet and Our Time, The 44 James, Henry--I 673 Jonson, Ben 184 Mackenzie, The Novels of Mr. Compton 448 Misadventures 149 Music, On Interpretation in 694 Particles, An Article on 71 Photography and Art 301 Prose and Mortality 312 Prose, On 671 Psycho-Analysis and the Novel 426 Records, A Case for 685 Rhyme, The Romance of 416 Satirists, Forgotten 565 Servants, On 533 Shelley and His Publishers 291 Smile of the Sphinx, The 16 Walpole, Horace 52 POEMS Almswomen 525 Beechwood 656 Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan! 396 Buzzards, The 138 Coming of Green, The 523 Country Mood, A 272 Draft for "A First and Last Song" 271 Early Chronology 11 Evening Sky in March, The 12 _Fortunatus Nimium_ 393 Gallipoli, Lines Written in 267 Glimpse from the Train, A 265 Going and Staying 7 Hippolytus, The Modern 524 House That Was, The 14 Inglis, Elsie 531 Intimacy 527 Ishak's Song 137 It's Not Going to Happen Again 7 Love's Caution 13 Moon, The 139 Nature's Fruitfulness 524 Night Rapture 529 _Nobis cum Pereant_ 655 November 268 Rock Pool, The 12 Scirocco 273 Search for the Nightingale, The 8 Senses, The 521 Shadow, The 394 Shobeensho 662 "Skindle's" in Poperinghe 649 Soldier Addresses His Body, The 527 Sorrowing for Childhood Departed 532 Storm and Stars 662 Suppose 14 Tarantella 266 To E. G. 394 Weir, By the 395 INDEX OF AUTHORS Armstrong, Martin: _The Buzzards_ 138 _The Senses_ 521 _The Coming of Green_ 523 Beerbohm, Max: On Servants 533 Belloc, H.: _Tarantella_ 266 Beresford, J. D.: Psycho-Analysis and the Novel 426 Binyon, Laurence: _The House That Was_ 14 _Storm and Stars_ 662 Blunden, Edmund: _Almswomen_ 525 Brett Young, Francis: _Scirocco_ 273 Bridges, Robert: _Fortunatus Nimium_ 393 Brooke, Rupert: _It's Not Going to Happen Again_ 7 Burrows, Francis: _Nature's Fruitfulness_ 524 Chesterton, G. K.: The Romance of Rhyme 416 Clutton-Brock, A.: On Blake as a Prophet 283 Conrad, Joseph: Stephen Crane: A Note without Dates 192 Davies, W. H.: _Love's Caution_ 13 De la Mare, Walter: _Suppose_ 14 The Creatures 275 Dent, Edward J.: Music 119, 248, 376, 506, 635, 763 Dobson, Austin: _To E. G._ 394 Flecker, James Elroy: _Ishak's Song_ 137 Freeman, John: _The Evening Sky in March_ 12 The Novels of Mr. Compton Mackenzie 448 _Beechwood_ 656 Gibson, Wilfrid Wilson: _By the Weir_ 395 Gosse, Edmund, C.B.: George Eliot 34 Henry James--I. 673 Graves, A. P.: _Shobeensho_ 662 Graves, Robert: _A Country Mood_ 272 Hannay, Howard: Photography and Art 301 The Fine Arts 503, 632, 759 Hardy, Thomas, O.M.: _Going and Staying_ 7 _A Glimpse from the Train_ 265 Hastings, Major L. M.: _"Skindle's" in Poperinghe_ 649 Henschel, Sir George: On Interpretation in Music 694 Hewlett, Maurice: The Crystal Vase 176 _Elsie Inglis_ 531 Huxley, Aldous: Ben Jonson 184 Forgotten Satirists 565 Ingpen, Roger: Shelley and His Publishers 291 Jenkinson, Hilary: A Case for Records 685 Kennard, Sir Coleridge, Bart.: _Draft for "A First and Last Song"_ 271 Leigh, The Rev. Canon N. Egerton: A Collection of Autographs 320 Lethaby, Professor W. R.: Architecture as Form in Civilisation 574 Lindsay, Nicholas Vachel: _Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan!_ 396 Lynd, Robert: Horace Walpole 52 John Donne 435 Mason, J. H.: Book-Production Notes 231, 359, 495, 621, 752 Meynell, Alice: An Article on Particles 71 Moore, T. Sturge: Blind Thamyris 403 Nash, John: The Fine Arts 116, 245, 373 Newbolt, Sir Henry: _Nobis cum Pereant_ 655 Nichols, Robert: The Smile of the Sphinx 16 _November_ 268 _Night Rapture_ 529 Rickword, Edgell: _Intimacy_ 527 _The Soldier Addresses His Body_ 527 Rushby, Kenworth: _The Modern Hippolytus_ 524 Saintsbury, George: Eighteenth-Century Poetry 155 Sassoon, Siegfried: _Early Chronology_ 11 Shanks, Edward: _The Rock Pool_ 12 Samuel Butler 164 _The Shadow_ 394 W. N. P. Barbellion 543 Shaw-Stewart, Patrick: _Lines Written in Gallipoli_ 267 Smith, L. Pearsall: Misadventures 149 Squire, J. C.: The Future Poet and Our Time 44 _The Moon_ 139 Prose and Mortality 312 Robert Bridges' Lyrical Poems 708 Stobart, J. C.: The Teaching of English 62 Thibaudet, Albert: A Letter from France 105, 360, 622 Tomlinson, H. M.: The Foreshore of London 663 Turner, W. J.: _The Search for the Nightingale_ 8 _Sorrowing for Childhood Departed_ 532 The Drama 111, 240, 368, 498, 627, 755 Van Deijssel, L.: Of Prose 671 Williams, Orlo: A Little Classic of the Future 555 REVIEWS Accounts Rendered of Work Done and Things Seen, _Buchanan_ 494 Actor, Problems of the, _Calvert_ 502 Addresses in America, _Galsworthy_ 480 Anaphylaxis and Anti-Anaphylaxis, _Besredka_ 228 Appreciations of Poetry, _Hearn_ 93 Archaic England, _Bayley_ 616 Argonaut and Juggernaut, _Sitwell_ 206 Art, Essays on, _Clutton-Brock_ 344 Athenian Days, _Byron_ 83 Athletics, Success in, _Webster, Jenkins_, and _Mostyn_ 224 Balkan Problems and European Peace, _Buxton and Leese_ 351 Banner, The, _Spender_ 733 Battle Line in France, The Romance of the, _Bodley_ 606 Before the War, _Haldane_ 487 Boche and Bolshevik, _Price_ 96 Books in the War, _Koch_ 738 Botany, Applied, _Ellis_ 230 Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, Rupert, _De la Mare_ 215 Butler, Samuel: A Memoir, _Festing-Jones_ 164 Carmina Rapta, _Fairfax_ 207 Catalysis in Theory and Practice, _Rideal and Taylor_ 101 Catherine of Siena, St., _Pollard_ 484 Cervantes, _Schevill_ 737 Challenge, A., _Hardyman_ 82 Chemistry and Its Mysteries, _Gibson_ 357 Chemistry from the Industrial Standpoint, _Thorne_ 230 Childhood in Brittany Eighty Years Ago, A, _Sedgwick_ 482 Children of No Man's Land, _Stern_ 337 Chorus-Girl, and Other Stories, The, _Tchehov_ 476 Christian Ideas, First, _Selwyn_ 746 Clintons and Others, The, _Marshall_ 598 Clown of Paradise, The, _Creston_ 207 Coal Mining and the Coal Miner, _Bulman_ 744 Colloid Chemistry, Theoretical and Applied, _Ostwald_ 491 Colloids, The Chemistry of, _Zsigmondy_ 491 Comrades in Captivity, _Harvey_ 743 Cosmogony and Stellar Dynamics, _Jeans_ 619 Cottage Building in Cob, Pisé, Chalk and Clay, _Williams-Ellis_ 354 Country Sentiment, _Graves_ 728 Cousin Philip, _Ward_ 208 Coutts, The Life of Thomas, _Coleridge_ 482 Critic in Pall Mall, A, _Wilde_ 91 Dawn and Night, Poems of the, _Mond_ 82 Dickens, Reade, and Collins, _Phillips_ 606 Discovery 751 Diversions of a Man of Letters, Some, _Gosse_ 89 Dodington, George Bubb: Patron and Place-Hunter, _Sanders_ 348 Domus Doloris, _Leith_ 481 Donne's Sermons: Selected Passages with an Essay, _Pearsall Smith_ 213 Douglas, Collected Poems of Lord Alfred 81 Ducks and Other Verses, _Harvey_ 596 Easter Island, The Mystery of, _Routledge_ 355 Economic Consequences of the Peace, The, _Keynes_ 487 Efficiency, Everyday, _Lindsay_ 228 Eli of the Downs, _Peake_ 733 Emerson and His Philosophy, _Hill_ 226 Empire and Commerce in Africa, _Woolf_ 616 Engineering, Foundations of, _Spikes_ 230 Engines of the Human Body, _Keith_ 618 English Course for Schools, An, _Mais_ 62 Europe, The Expansion of, _Abbott_ 93 Europe, Fifty Years of, _Hazen_ 217 Every Man in his Humour, _Jonson_ 243 Far East, The Mastery of the 98 Financial Problems, War-Time, _Withers_ 99 First Plays, _Milne_ 115 Fleurs-de-Lys, _Thorley_ 731 Flora, _Bianco_ and _De la Mare_ 468 Flowers in the Grass, _Hewlett_ 727 Forgotten Places, _Mackenzie_ 81 Fox, Henry: First Lord Holland, _Ilchester_ 608 Friend to Friend, From, _Ritchie_ 739 Full Circle, _Hamilton_ 473 Galloper at Ypres, A, _Butler_ 606 Garret, In the, _Van Vechten_ 477 General William Booth Enters into Heaven, _Lindsay_ 335 Georgian Poetry, 1918-1919 201 Glory of the Coming, The, _Cobb_ 486 Gold and Iron, _Hergesheimer_ 337 Greek Anthology, Echoes from the, _Legge_ 83 Guild State: Its Principles and Possibilities, The, _Taylor_ 100 Gyroscopic and Rotational Motion, A Treatise on, _Gray_ 226 Hamlet, The Problem of, _Robertson_ 92 Handmaiden of the Navy, The, _Doorly_ 223 Heartbreak House, _Shaw_ 114 Herschel, _Macpherson_ 751 How the War Came, _Loreburn_ 97 Hygiene for Training Colleges, A Text Book of, _Avery_ 750 If All These Young Men, _Wilson_ 208 Illustration, _Meynell_ 375 Images of War, _Aldington_ 594 Imperfect Mother, An, _Beresford_ 733 India, The Government of, _Macdonald_ 490 Industry and Trade, _Marshall_ 220 Inflation, _Nicholson_ 222 Interim, _Richardson_ 473 Invisible Kingdom, An, _Lilly_ 225 Invisible Tides, _Seymour_ 473 Ions, Electrons, and Ionising Radiations, _Crowther_ 618 Ireland a Nation, _Lynd_ 353 Irish Impressions, _Chesterton_ 222 Italian Peasants, Among, _Cyriax_ 478 Jacopone Da Todi, _Underhill_ 346 Jeremy, _Walpole_ 84 Jesus Chapel, Cambridge, The Stones and Story of, _Morgan_ 743 Jonson, Ben, _Smith_ 184 Keats' _Endymion_, An Interpretation of, _Notcutt_ 737 Kiel in the _Hercules_, To, _Freeman_ 96 Kossovo, _Rootham_ 730 Kut Prisoner, A, _Bishop_ 606 League of Nations, A Handbook of the, _Butler_ 489 Leagues of Nations, _York_ 615 Legend, _Dane_ 208 Lehmann, The Life of Liza, _Lehmann_ 486 Limbo, _Huxley_ 598 Lincoln, Abraham: The Practical Mystic, _Grierson_ 218 Lines of Life, _Nevinson_ 729 London Venture, The, _Arlen_ 477 Madeleine, _Mirrlees_ 208 Man: Past and Present, _Keane_, _Quiggin_, and _Haddon_ 747 Manners of My Time, The, _Dempster_ 741 Mansoul or The Riddle of the World, _Doughty_ 593 Mask, The, _Cournos_ 208 Matter, Some Wonders of, _Mercer_ 357 Measures of the Poets, The, _Bayfield_ 601 Middle Life, Thoughts in, _Locker-Lampson_ 481 Miscellany of Poetry, A, _Seymour_ 471 Modern Science and Materialism, _Elliot_ 493 My Kingdom for a Horse! _Allison_ 96 Napoleon, _Trench_ 83 National Finance, A Primer of, _Higgs_ 101 Nationalisation of the Mines, _Hodges_ 744 Nevill, The Life and Letters of Lady Dorothy, _Nevill_ 219 New Decameron, The, _Various Authors_ 88 New Outlook, The, _Cecil_ 615 New Poems, _Williams_ 205 Night and Day, _Woolf_ 337 October and Other Poems, _Bridges_ 708 Over and Above, _Gurdon_ 88 Oxford Scholar, An: Ingram Bywater, 1840-1914, _Jackson_ 349 Pagan and Christian Creeds, _Carpenter_ 747 Paravane Adventure, The, CORNFORD 487 Paths of Glory, The 732 Peace in the Making, The, _Harris_ 615 Pedlar and Other Poems, The, _Manning-Sanders_ 729 Peel, Recollections of Lady Georgiana, _Peel_ 611 Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant, _Frankau_ 598 Phillpotts, One Hundred Pictures from Eden, _Brewitt_ 740 Physicists, Ten British, _Macfarlane_ 103 Pilgrim in Palestine, A, _Finley_ 479 Playwright, Problems of the, _Hamilton_ 758 Poems, Collected, _Hardy_ 333 Poems, 1916-1918, _Brett Young_ 332 Poems, Selected, _Sackville_ 596 Poetical Works, Excluding the Eight Dramas, _Bridges_ 708 Poland and the Poles, _Boswell_ 223 Poor Relations, _Mackenzie_ 84 Power of a Lie, The, _Bojer_ 337 Prelude, _Nichols_ 598 Race and Nationality, _Oakesmith_ 99 Realities of Modern Science, The, _Mills_ 357 Reconstructors and Reconstruction, _Oxon_ 100 Records, _Fisher_ 607 Responsibilities of the League, The, _Percy_ 489 Revolt of Youth, The, _Hobson_ 88 Reynard the Fox, _Masefield_ 78 Richard Kurt, _Hudson_ 84 Riddle of the Ruthvens, The, _Roughead_ 347 Roast Beef, Medium, _Ferber_ 733 R. L. S., A Book of, _Brown_ 216 Romantic Roussillon, The, _Savory_ 345 Rousseau and Romanticism, _Babbitt_ 604 Russia in Rule and Misrule, _Ballard_ 615 Sacred and Profane Love, _Bennett_ 244 Saint's Progress, _Galsworthy_ 208 Science and Life, _Soddy_ 750 Seals and Documents, _Poole_ 742 Second Country, My, _Dell_ 614 September, _Swinnerton_ 84 Seven Men, _Beerbohm_ 212 Seventeenth-Century English Verse, _Massingham_ 470 Seventeenth-Century Life in the Country Parish, _Trotter_ 351 Shakespeare, Contemporaries of, _Swinburne_ 92 Shakespeare's Versification, A Study of, _Bayfield_ 601 Side Shows, In the, _Benn_ 353 Sir Limpidus, _Pickthall_ 337 Skilled Labourer, The, _Hammond_ 352 Skylark and Swallow, _Gales_ 729 Smith, William: Potter and Farmer, _Bourne_ 744 Social Theory, _Cole_ 745 Soldier Poets, Some, _Sturge Moore_ 215 Soldier to His Son, Any, _Willis_ 83 Sorley, The Letters of Charles 343 South Sea Foam, _Safroni-Middleton_ 214 Springtime and Other Essays, _Darwin_ 605 Station Platform and Other Poems, The, _Mackenzie_ 83 Story of Purton, The, _Richardson_ 741 Submarines and Sea-Power, _Domville-Fife_ 487 Superhuman Antagonists, The, _Watson_ 79 Supreme Adventure, The, _Macandrew_ 101 Sussex in Bygone Days, _Blaker_ 478 Tank Corps, The, _Williams-Ellis_ 217 Tender Conscience, The, _Lynch_ 84 Thomson of Duddingston, The Life of John, _Napier_ 247 Time and Eternity, _Cannan_ 84 Tolstoy, _Noyes_ 737 Trade Unionism, The History of, _Webb_ 612 Turks in Europe, The, _Allen_ 484 Twenty-fifth Division in France and Flanders, The, _Kincaid-Smith_ 486 Ulster and Ireland, _Good_ 100 Unhappy Far-Off Things, _Dunsany_ 345 Unmarried, The Great, _Gallichan_ 99 Valmouth, _Firbank_ 473 Vector Algebra, Projective, _Silberstein_ 230 Verse, _Kipling_ 333 Verse-Craft, Lessons in, _Ford_ 601 Verses, _Meynell_ 596 Victorian Recollections, _Bridges_ 485 Village Libraries, _Sayle_ 738 Walpole, Letters of Horace 52 War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon, The 206 War Poetry, A Treasury of, _Clarke_ 336 Wheels, 1919 334 Worms and Epitaphs, _Garrod_ 594 Young Physician, The, Brett _Young_ 84 THE LONDON MERCURY Vol. I No. 1 November 1919 EDITORIAL NOTES With these notes we introduce the first number of the LONDON MERCURY. It might, beyond denial, appear in more tranquil and comfortable days. We have just been through a crisis which has brought us within sight of the basic realities of life--food, clothing, housing, security against violence. As soon as the paper was projected we were forced to visualise the likelihood of a time in which paper would be almost unprocurable, printing impossible (save in an amateur way at home), and the distribution of literature a matter of passing sheets from hand to hand. We have had a glimpse into the abyss of disorganisation, and, for the time being at all events, we have managed to keep on the solid ground. But, having conceived this journal, its conductors would have been reluctant to abandon their plans whatever confusion might have supervened. They may fairly claim to have formulated a scheme which, when it is perfectly executed, will meet all the demands of the public which reads old or new books, and of that other and smaller public which is chiefly concerned with the production of new works of the imagination. The more intense the troubles of society, the more uncertain and dark the future, the more obvious is the necessity for periodicals which hand on the torch of culture and creative activity. Literature is of the spirit; and by the spirit man lives. Our traditions are never more jealously to be cherished than when they are threatened; and our literature is the repository of all our traditions. * * * * * We think that, with our list of contents before us, we may reasonably say that there has never been in this country a paper with the scope of the LONDON MERCURY. We have had periodicals which have exercised a great critical influence, such as the _Edinburgh Review_ of Jeffrey's and Macaulay's day. We have had periodicals which have published an unusual amount of fine "creative work," such as Thackeray's _Cornhill_. We have at this day the _Times Literary Supplement_, which reviews, with the utmost possible approximation to completeness, the literary "output" of the time; we have weekly papers which review the principal books and publish original verse and prose, and monthly papers which diversify their tables of contents with articles on Molière or Chateaubriand, Byron or Mr. Alfred Noyes. But we have had no paper which has combined as the LONDON MERCURY will do all those various kinds of matter which are required by the lover of books and the practising writer. In our pages will be found original verse and prose in a volume not possible to the weekly paper; full-length literary essays such as have been found only in the politico-literary monthlies; a critical survey of books of all kinds recently published; and other "features," analogues to some of which may be found, one by one, here and there, but which have never before been brought together within a single cover. The LONDON MERCURY--save in so far as it will publish reasoned criticisms of political (as of other) books--will avoid politics. It will concern itself with none of those issues which are the field of political controversy, save only such--the teaching of English, the fostering of the arts, the preservation of ancient monuments are examples--as impinge directly upon the main sphere of its interests. But within the field that it has chosen it will endeavour to be as exhaustive as is humanly possible. The present number is an earnest of its intentions; in early future numbers other sections will be added which will steadily bring it nearer to the ideal that it has set out to reach. * * * * * That ideal comprehends the satisfaction of the current needs of all those who are intelligently interested in literature, in the drama, in the arts, and in music. We shall attempt to make known the best that is being done and, so far as literature is concerned, to assist the process by the publication of original work. But thus far we have mentioned no more than the LONDON MERCURY'S functions as what may be called a "news" paper, an organ for the recording and dissemination of things that have already happened or been done. Its functions, as its conductors conceive them, will include--and this will be the chief of them--the examination of those conditions which in the past have favoured, and in the future are likely to favour, the production of artistic work of the first order, and the formulation and application of sound critical standards. * * * * * It is not a matter of attempting to make universal the shibboleths of some coterie or school, or of carrying some technical "stunt" through the country as though it were a fiery cross. We do not propose to maintain (to give concrete examples) that literature _should_ be didactic or that it _should_ be a-moral. We are not interested in urging that the couplet is exhausted, that the sonnet should be revived, that plays should have four or three acts, that rhyme is essential or that it is outworn, that lines should or should not be of regular lengths. We are tied to no system of harmony; we have no dogmas as to the dominance of representation in painting; we would make no hard-and-fast rule about the desirability of drawing a vertical wall as sloping at 45 degrees or of painting a man's face magenta and sage-green. As convenient descriptions we do not object (save sometimes on grounds of euphony) to the terms Futurist, Vorticist, Expressionist, post-Impressionist, Cubist, Unanimist, Imagist: but we suspect them as banners and battle-cries, for where they are used as such it is probable that fundamentals are being forgotten. Our aim will be, as critics, to state and to reiterate what are the motives, and what must be the dominant elements, of all good art, whatever the medium and whatever the idiosyncrasies of the artist, even if he find it convenient to draw on papier-mâché with a red-hot poker, and even if his natural genius impels him to write in lines of one syllable. The profoundest truths about art, whether literary or pictorial, are crystallised in maxims which may have been more often reiterated than understood, but which have undeniably been so often repeated that people now find them tiresome. Of such are "fundamental brainwork," "emotion recollected in tranquillity," "the rhythmical creation of beauty," and "the eye on the object." Each of these embodies truths, and there is indisputable truth also in the statements that a poet should have an ear and that a painter should paint what he sees. These things are platitudes; but a thing does not cease to be true merely because it is trite, and it is disastrous to throw over the obvious merely because it was obvious to one's grandfather. Yet men--and even women--do such things. We have had in the last few years art, so called, which sprang from every sort of impulse but the right one, and was governed by every sort of conceptions but the right ones. We have had "styles" which were mere protests and revulsions against other styles; "styles" which were no more than flamboyant attempts at advertisement akin to the shifting lights of the electric night signs; authors who have forgotten their true selves in the desperate search for remarkable selves; artists who have refused to keep their eyes upon the object because it has been seen before; musicians who have made, for novelty's sake, noises, and painters who have made, for effect's sake, spectacles, which invited the attention of those who make it their business to suppress public nuisances. We have had also theories in vogue the effects of which on mind and heart were such, and were foredoomed to be such, as to wither many talents in the bud. A single positive trend in English literature we do not ask and it is not necessarily desirable. We have heard the complaint from critics of the Gallic school that even in the days of the marvellously fertile English "Romantic generation" there was no one "movement," no Ten Commandments, and everybody was at sixes and sevens. That is the national way, and it probably accounts for our possession of the greatest and most varied imaginative literature that exists. Nevertheless, anarchy is not desirable, nor that worthy frame of mind which extends toleration not merely to the good of all kinds, but to the good and the bad, the intelligent and the foolish indifferently. And surely this toleration has been too commonly in evidence in this country in our time. Is the contention disputed? Is the fact other than self-evident? Is it necessary to explain and to accentuate the confusion which for the last ten years has been evident in the creative and in the critical literature of this country? There have been, as there always are, writers who have cheerfully continued writing as their predecessors have written, serious parodists of Milton, of Tennyson, and of George Eliot. These least of all can be said to be in the tradition of English letters; for that tradition has been a tradition of constant experiment and renovation. There has been a central body of writers--from Mr. Hardy, Mr. Bridges, and Mr. Conrad to the best of the younger poets--who have gone steadily along the sound path, traditional yet experimental, personal yet sane. But there has been also a large number of young writers who have strayed and lost themselves amongst experiments, many of them foredoomed to sterility. Young men, ignoring the fundamental truth expressed in the maxim, "Look in thy heart and write," have attempted to make up poems (and pictures) "out of their heads." Others, defying the obvious postulate that all good writing will carry at least a superficial meaning to the intelligent reader, have invited us to admire strings of disconnected words and images, meaningless and even verbless. Others, turning their backs on those natural affections and primary interests the repudiation of which means, and must always mean, the death of the highest forms of literature, have concentrated upon the subversion of every belief by which man lives. They have sapped at the bases of every loyalty, and sneered at every code, oblivious to both social welfare and social experience. They have been, such of them as profess the moralistic preoccupation, very contemptuous of "clean living and no thinking," but the dirty living and muddled thinking that they have offered as a substitute have been no great improvement. They have been, such of them as have the preoccupation of the artist, so anxious to look at the abnormal and the recondite that they have forgotten what are and must be the main elements of man's life and what the most conspicuous features in man's landscape. We have had an orgy of undirected abnormality. The old object of art was "what oft was said but ne'er so well expressed"; the object of many of the new artists has been what was never said before and could not possibly be expressed worse. The tricks of abnormality have been learnt. Young simpletons who, twenty years ago, would have been writing vapid magazine verses about moonrise and roses have discovered that they have only to become incoherent, incomprehensible, and unmetrical to be taken seriously. Bad writers will, without intellectual or æsthetic impulse, pretend to burrow into psychological (or physical) obscurities which are no more beyond the artist's purview than anything else, provided he responds to them, but which have the advantage for an insincere writer that they enable him to talk nonsense that honest unsophisticated readers are unable to diagnose as nonsense. Year after year we have new fungoid growths of feeble pretentious impostors who, after a while, are superseded by their younger kindred; and year by year we see writers who actually have some intelligence and capacity for observation and exact statement led astray into the stony and barren fields of technical anarchism or the pitiful madhouse of moral antinomianism. At bottom vanity and pretence are the worst of vices in a young writer, but they may be encouraged or discouraged, even these; and we have seen times and places in which black was called white. * * * * * Amid this luxuriant confusion the voices of critics at once sane and informed have been few. For the most part our older critics have tended to treat the younger generation as a howling menagerie of insensate young beasts, and have failed to keep sufficiently closely in touch with production to discriminate between the traditional and the anarchistic, the sincere and the pretentious, the intelligent and the stupid, the healthy and the vicious, the promising and the sterile. We have ourselves been frequently amused and irritated at finding elderly men of letters alarmed at the "revolutionism of the young," as manifested in Mr. A. or Mr. B., or asking, bewildered, "why the young take Miss C. so seriously," when as a fact A. and B. are merely rowdies of whose foolish books even the young buy only fifty or sixty copies, and the fair C. is a person taken seriously by no serious person of her own generation. Those critics, again, who are constantly in touch with the fruits of the printing press have for the most part got into a state of puzzlement in which they are not merely afraid to make mistakes (lest what looks like a frog may turn out to be an angel), but in which they have almost lost the habit of using their senses for the purpose for which they were meant to be used. Everything is treated with respect. Platitudinous rubbish--so welcome perhaps because it is so easily understood--is treated as though Wordsworth had written it; hectic gibberish of the silliest kind is honoured, at worst, with the sort of deferential reprimand that is applicable to great genius when great genius shows a slight tendency to kick over the traces. Even those of our reviews which do not ignore the best contemporary work more often than not allocate just as much space to the humbug and the _faux bon_. "The public, though dull, has not quite such a skull," as Swinburne's limerick put it. Many bad authors are much talked about but very little read, and critics who never write a line are frequently sound when most of the professionals have gone clean off the rails. Moreover, it is arguable--though we should not, without long consideration, accept the argument--that no amount of misleading criticism or bad example will ruin a man of strong natural genius, which implies perceptions which will not be denied, and a well-defined positive character. Nevertheless, even if we do not exaggerate the ill effects of haphazard and timid or haphazard and reckless criticism, it is surely obvious that both artists and their publics must gain if some of the rubbish can be cleared away. The ship moves in spite of all the barnacles, and it does not lose direction, but its progress might be less troublesome. We have often met persons who have distrusted all reviews because they have bought books on the strength of extravagant reviews and been once bit. We have often met people, too, who have procured what somebody (undeniably "intellectual") has told them to be the latest and most vigorous and representative work of imaginative literature, and, finding it distasteful, have come to the conclusion that the "poets of the day" or the "novelists of to-morrow" are not for them: turning back, then, to their Dickens or Browning or Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the mood of that ghastly pessimist who said that whenever a new book came out he read an old one. These readers are typical of many, and the result of their existence is that the dissemination of the best contemporary literature is (1) less wide than it might be and (2) less rapid than it might be. There is, as a rule--in the economists' term--far too great a "time-lag" in the making of the best reputations. A man often writes for years before he is heard of by the mass of the cultivated readers who are naturally predisposed to like his work, and do like it when at last they meet it. In a nation so large, and with so immense a volume of literary production, such numerous and diverse news-sheets, and such congested and ill-arranged bookshops, this phenomenon is bound to exist in some degree. But it may be minimised, and although we of the LONDON MERCURY cannot hope, and do not desire, to be judged by our aspirations rather than by our performances, we may at least be permitted to say that we shall do our utmost to contribute towards that end. * * * * * Even to disclaim an ambition for an infallible pontificate of letters must savour of impertinence. We can only say that what our journal can do in the way of affirming and applying principles of criticism, and giving a conspectus of the best contemporary work, we shall attempt to do. Our other functions we have already outlined, and a beginning is made in this number. We have made no endeavour to arrange a dazzling shop-window of names or "features" for our first number; whatever may be our readers' views concerning this number we can at least assure them that the contributors to subsequent numbers will be not less representative than those here found, and that only a beginning has yet been made towards the complete scheme that we have in view. _Going and Staying_ The moving sun-shapes on the spray, The sparkles where the brook was flowing, Pink faces, plightings, moonlit May, These were the things we wished would stay; But they were going. Seasons of blankness as of snow, The silent bleed of a world decaying, The moan of multitudes in woe, These were the things we wished would go; But they were staying. THOMAS HARDY _It's Not Going to Happen Again_ I have known the most dear that is granted us here, More supreme than the gods know above, Like a star I was hurled through the sweet of the world, And the height and the light of it, Love. I have risen to the uttermost Heaven of Joy, I have sunk to the sheer Hell of Pain-- But--it's not going to happen again, my boy, It's not going to happen again. It's the very first word that poor Juliet heard From her Romeo over the Styx; And the Roman will tell Cleopatra in hell When she starts her immortal old tricks; What Paris was tellin' for good-bye to Helen When he bundled her into the train-- Oh, it's not going to happen again, old girl, It's not going to happen again. RUPERT BROOKE Château Lake Louise, Canada, 1913. _The Search for the Nightingale_ (_To S. S._) 1 Beside a stony, shallow stream I sat In a deep gully underneath a hill. I watched the water trickle down dark moss And shake the tiny boughs of maidenhair, And billow on the bodies of cold stone. And sculptured clear Upon the shoulder of that aerial peak Stood trees, the fragile skeletons of light, High in a bubble blown Of visionary stone. 2 Under that azurine transparent arch The hill, the rocks, the trees Were still and dreamless as the printed wood Black on the snowy page. It was the song of some diviner bird Than this still country knew, The words were twigs of burnt and blackened trees From which there trilled a voice, Shadowy and faint, as though it were the song The water carolled as it flowed along. 3 Lifting my head, I gazed upon the world, Carved in the breathless heat as in a gem, And watched the parroquets green-feathered fly Through crystal vacancy, and perch in trees That glittered in a thin, blue, haze-like dream, And the voice faded, though the water dinned Against the stones its dimming memory. And I ached then To hear that song burst out upon that scene, Startling an earth where it had never been. 4 And then I came unto an older world. The woods were damp, the sun Shone in a watery mist, and soon was gone; The trees were thick with leaves, heavy and old, The sky was grey, and blue, and like the sea Rolling with mists and shadowy veils of foam. I heard the roaring of an ancient wind Among the elms and in the tattered pines; Lighting pale hollows in the cloud-dark sky, A ghostly ship, the Moon, flew scudding by. 5 "O is it here," I cried, "that bird that sings So that the traveller in his frenzy weeps?" It was the autumn of the year, and leaves Fell with a dizzying moan, and all the trees Roared like the sea at my small impotent voice. And if that bird was there it did not sing, And I knew not its haunts, or where it went, But carven stood and raved! In that old wood that dripped upon my face Upturned below, pale in its passionate chase. 6 And years went by, and I grew slowly cold: I had forgotten what I once had sought. There are no passions that do not grow dim, And like a fire imagination sinks Into the ashes of the mind's cold grate. And if I dreamed, I dreamed of that far land, That coast of pearl upon a summer sea, Whose frail trees in unruffled amber sleep, Gaudy with jewelled birds, whose feathers spray Bright founts of colour through the tranquil day. 7 The hill, the gully, and the stony stream I had not thought on when this spring I sat In a strange room with candles guttering down Into the flickering silence. From the Moon Among the trees still-wreathed upon the sky There came the sudden twittering of a ghost. And I stept out from darkness, and I saw The great pale sky immense, transparent, filled With boughs and mountains and wide-shining lakes Where stillness, crying in a thin voice, breaks. 8 It was the voice of that imagined bird. I saw the gully and that ancient hill, The water trickling down from Paradise Shaking the tiny boughs of maidenhair. There sat the dreaming boy. And O! I wept to see that scene again, To read the black print on that snowy page, I wept, and all was still. No shadow came into that sun-steeped glen, No sound of earth, no voice of living men. 9 Was it a dream or was it that in me A God awoke and gazing on his dream Saw that dream rise and gaze into its soul, Finding, Narcissus-like, its image there: A Song, a transitory Shape on water blown, Descending down the bright cascades of time, The shadowiest-flowering, ripple-woven bloom As ghostly as still waters' unseen foam That lies upon the air, as that song lay Within my heart on one far summer day? 10 Carved in the azure air white peacocks fly, Their fanning wings stir not the crystal trees, Bright parrots fade through dimming turquoise days, And music scrolls its lightning calm and bright On the pale sky where thunder cannot come. Into that world no ship has ever sailed, No seaman gazing with hand-shaded eyes Has ever seen its shore whiten the waves. But to that land the Nightingale has flown, Leaving bright treasure on this calm air blown. W. J. TURNER _Early Chronology_ Slowly the daylight left our listening faces. * * * * * Professor Brown with level baritone Discoursed into the dusk. Five thousand years He guided us through scientific spaces Of excavated History; till the lone Roads of research grew blurred; and in our ears Time was the rumoured tongues of vanished races, And Thought a chartless Age of Ice and Stone. * * * * * The story ended. Then the darkened air Flowered as he lit his pipe; an aureole glowed Enwreathed with smoke; the moment's match-light showed His rosy face, broad brow, and smooth grey hair, Backed by the crowded book-shelves. In his wake An archæologist began to make Assumptions about aqueducts (he quoted Professor Sandstorm's book); and soon they floated Through desiccated forests; mangled myths; And argued easily round megaliths. * * * * * Beyond the college garden something glinted; A copper moon climbed clear above the trees. Some Lydian coin?... Professor Brown agrees That copper coins _were_ in that culture minted; But, as her whitening way aloft she took, I thought she had a pre-dynastic look. SIEGFRIED SASSOON _The Rock Pool_ (_To Miss Alice Warrender_) This is the sea. In these uneven walls A wave lies prisoned. Far and far away, Outward to ocean as the slow tide falls, Her sisters, through the capes that hold the bay, Dancing in lovely liberty recede. Yet lovely in captivity she lies, Filled with soft colours, where the waving weed Moves gently and discloses to our eyes Blurred shining veins of rock and lucent shells Under the light-shot water; and here repose Small quiet fish and the dimly glowing bells Of sleeping sea-anemones that close Their tender fronds and will not now awake Till on these rocks the waves returning break. EDWARD SHANKS _The Evening Sky in March_ Rose-bosom'd and rose-limb'd, With eyes of dazzling bright, Shakes Venus mid the twined boughs of the night; Rose-limb'd, soft-stepping From low bough to bough, Shaking the wide-hung starry fruitage--dimmed Its bloom of snow By that sole planetary glow. Venus, avers the astronomer Not thus idly dancing goes Flushing the eternal orchard with wild rose. She through ether burns Outpacing planetary earth, And ere two years triumphantly returns And again wave-like swelling flows; And again her flashing apparition comes and goes. This we have not seen, No heavenly courses set, No flight unpausing through a void serene: But when eve clears, Arises Venus as she first uprose Stepping the shaken boughs among, And in her bosom glows The warm light hidden in sunny snows. She shakes the clustered stars Lightly, as she goes Amid the unseen branches of the night, Rose-limb'd, rose-bosom'd bright. She leaps: they shake and pale; she glows-- And who but knows How the rejoiced heart aches When Venus all his starry vision shakes: When through his mind Tossing with random airs of an unearthly wind, Rose-bosom'd, rose-limb'd, The mistress of his starry vision arises, And the boughs glittering sway And the stars pale away, And the enlarging heaven glows As Venus light-foot mid the twined branches goes. JOHN FREEMAN _Love's Caution_ Tell them, when you are home again, How warm the air was now; How silent were the birds and leaves, And of the moon's full glow; And how we saw afar A falling star: It was a tear of pure delight Ran down the face of Heaven this happy night. Our kisses are but love in flower, Until that greater time When, gathering strength, those flowers take wing, And Love can reach his prime. And now, my heart's delight, Good night, good night; Give me the last sweet kiss-- But do not breathe at home one word of this! W. H. DAVIES _The House That Was_ Of the old house, only a few crumbled Courses of brick, smothered in nettle and dock, Or a squared stone, lying mossy where it tumbled! Sprawling bramble and saucy thistle mock What once was firelit floor and private charm Where, seen in a windowed picture, hills were fading At dusk, and all was memory-coloured and warm, And voices talked, secure from the wind's invading. Of the old garden, only a stray shining Of daffodil flames amid April's cuckoo-flowers, Or a cluster of aconite mixt with weeds entwining! But, dark and lofty, a royal cedar towers By homely thorns: whether the white rain drifts Or sun scorches, he holds the downs in ken, The western vale; his branchy tiers he lifts, Older than many a generation of men. LAURENCE BINYON _Suppose ..._ Suppose ... and suppose that a wild little Horse of Magic Came cantering out of the sky, With bridle of silver, and into the saddle I mounted To fly--and to fly; And we stretched up into the air, fleeting on in the sunshine, A speck in the gleam On galloping hoofs, his mane in the wind out-flowing, In a shadowy stream; And, oh, when, all lone, the gentle star of evening Came crinkling into the blue, A magical castle we saw in the air, like a cloud of moonlight, As onward we flew; And across the green moat on the drawbridge we foamed and we snorted; And there was a beautiful Queen Who smiled at me strangely, and spoke to my wild little Horse, too-- A lovely and beautiful Queen; Suppose with delight she cried to her delicate maidens: "Behold my daughter--my dear!" And they crowned me with flowers, and then to their harps sate playing, Solemn and clear; And magical cakes and goblets were spread on the table; And at window the birds came in; Hopping along with bright eyes, pecking crumbs from the platters, And sipped of the wine; And splashing up--up to the roof tossed fountains of crystal; And Princes in scarlet and green Shot with their bows and arrows, and kneeled with their dishes Of fruits for the Queen; And we walked in a magical garden, with rivers and bowers, And my bed was of ivory and gold; And the Queen breathed soft in my ear a song of enchantment-- And I never grew old.... And I never, never came back to the earth, oh, never and never; How mother would cry and cry! There'd be snow on the fields then, and all these sweet flowers in the winter Would wither and die.... Suppose ... and suppose.... WALTER DE LA MARE THE SMILE OF THE SPHINX By ROBERT NICHOLS I. Long, long ago there dwelt in the pleasant City-of-Towers a young princess of immense riches and of such exceeding beauty that none other could be compared to her. So famous, indeed, became the riches of her beauty and her possessions, that were only less than her beauty, that she was sought in marriage by every kind of personage. In three moons the train of her suitors, or mounted upon gold-stencilled elephants, tassel-fringed camels, palfries of Arabia, ponies of Astrakhan, mules of Nubia, or faring but upon the Sandals-of-Nature along the Road-of-Advantage, became so huge that the citizens of the City-of-Towers being eaten (albeit at no small price) out of hearth and home, petitioned the princely father of the damsel to mitigate, in whatever sort he should think fit, the good fortune of their city, which, possessing such a treasure as the princess Sa-adeh, the Bestower-of-Felicity, admitted to finding its pleasure rather in reflecting upon the value of their jewel than in entertaining those who came to steal it. The ever-benevolent Prince accordingly issued a decree that no suitor was to approach the Princess save on the understanding that if he failed to win her affections his head should pay the forfeit. Forthwith ensued so remarkable a diminution in the number of her suitors that, in a short while, only those whom the Light-of-Love's-Eyes had guided or those whom the Three-thonged-Scourge-of-Need had driven remained mounted or standing before the palace gates. Nor did these linger overlong, for the heart of the Princess was less easily softened than that of the Executioner, who with one sweep of the scimitar relieved the Lover of the Burden-of-Love or severed the Needy from the Vessel-of-Need. Then the beautiful Sa-adeh, the Bestower-of-Felicity, not unfatigued by such a succession of maidenly preoccupations, determined that for a little she would forget the Bonds-of-Necessity and atone somewhat to the citizens of the City-of-Towers for the inconveniences she had brought them. To this end she caused a special litter of cedar wood to be constructed, and, mounting therein, sallied forth to bestow upon the citizens of the City-of-Towers the hitherto-unseen and almost-unendurable beauty of her face. Now it happened that in this city there was then dwelling a young scribe by name Es-siddeeh, that is the Very Veracious. This youth, the height of whose beauty was almost as remarkable as the depth of his wisdom, had spent the greater number of his days in study; so much so, in fact, that he had never cast his eyes upon a woman to love her, and this in spite of the possession of an enchanting smile, Nature's gift to him, of the power of which he was hardly conscious. Surrounded by parchments, having hung about his neck many little scrolls, with his tablet laid across his knees, daily he sat in his window and, while the traffic flowed by and the crowd shrilled more loudly than a flock of parokeets, raised not his eyes from his papyrus nor regarded any sound but the squeaking of his stylus-reed. Thus, then, was he sitting when the troating of horns and the bombilation of gongs proclaimed the nearing of the Princess in her progress. But Es-siddeeh paid this din no attention and, though the fantastic shadows of many majestically-apparelled persons fell across his page, lifted not the Gatherers-of-Knowledge from the Leaves-of-Enlightenment. Meanwhile Sa-adeh, lying in her litter, enjoyed a certain satisfaction in the pleasurable recognition the gracious bestowal of the sight of her countenance procured the citizens. This satisfaction she told herself, as the procession advanced, was increased rather than diminished by the spectacle of certain bleared scribes, who, with ears already attached by cobwebs to the lintels of their doors, never lifted eyes as she passed. "For," she reflected, "such insensibility affords me a scale by which to gauge the pleasure I bestow elsewhere." At this moment she arrived opposite Es-siddeeh's window. Then the young scribe, feeling the gaze of another fixed upon him, looked up. And the eyes of Es-siddeeh exchanged thoughts with the eyes of Sa-adeh. When he bent to the tablet again, behold the words were to him but foolishness. All the afternoon he sat there wondering why he had spent his youth upon such things as now appeared to him the very vanity of vanities, colourless and the occupation of the myopic. At evenfall, driven abroad by a terrible restlessness, he wandered outside the walls of the city, but the murmuring of the breeze through the groves did but increase his distraction. Toward midnight he returned and, after spending the remainder of the night without sleep, informed his parents of his intention to turn suitor. Greatly perturbed, they besought him to relinquish so hopeless a project. In vain! at the third hour he proceeded to the palace. The gates were shut. When they did at last open he found himself face to face with the Executioner. Involuntarily he recoiled. "No alms will be given to-day," said the Reliever-of-Headaches. "I have not come for alms. I wish to see the porter." "I am the porter." "I thought you were----" "So I was. But now that job is at an end. The capacity to love as our forefathers loved is passing away. Even a spirit of commercial enterprise is lacking. The world goes from bad to worse. Yesterday I cut off the heads of princes; to-day I open the door to mendicants. On no one is Fortune harder than I." "I find that last reflection," returned the scribe, "so general that I grow convinced it must be true. But be of good cheer. Strange as it may seem, I am the bearer of good tidings. There is every likelihood of your shortly resuming your distinguished office--I have come as a suitor to the Princess." "Have you, indeed? Ha, ha, ha! The coin is as good as earned.... However ... excuse my entertainment. I should not laugh; for understand my heart goes out to you in your public-spirited endeavour not to permit my office to lapse. Ah, if there were only more men of your kidney, and yet ... I regret to have to add that you will not profit me much. For make no mistake, I am a Republican; I believe that handsome is as handsome does. It is therefore my custom to request a little honorarium, in ratio to the means of my customer, in return for the service I render him. For this is a service which is unique, in that he probably has no servant in his suite trained to perform this duty for him, and it is besides a service for which the requirement of one small fee cannot be described as extortionate since the duty is one which being once satisfactorily performed does not require to be repeated." "But I have not yet incurred the penalty." "You will. Be reassured and, having no troublesome misgivings on this count, hand me that which in a few hours it will be too late for me to ask." Es-siddeeh smiled. "Are you not paid by the Court?" he asked. "I am," replied the other, softening, "and a beggarly wage it is, too, which compels me to make these requisitions. However, since you seem, for all your queer dress, a pleasant fellow, I will reduce my charge." "Good. I feared I should never be able to pay--my means are so scanty." "I should inform you that it is as well to pay because, if you do not, my arm, unstrengthened by the sinews of charity, may not perform its office with quite that address which is at once a delight to the spectators and a matter of self-gratification to my customer." "Your magnanimity," replied the scribe, giving the man a coin, "does indeed bear witness to the superiority of your mind to its present situation and deserves a reward. I hope you will see that I am not disappointed of an interview." Thereupon the Executioner conducted him into the palace and, leaving him in an inner apartment, acquainted one of the attendant damsels with the object of the scribe's visit. For some time the maid regarded his dress dubiously. "I should be grateful if you would inform the Princess of my arrival, for I cannot say that I find the sound of the Executioner in the courtyard below sharpening his scimitar on a wheel affords me as much pleasure as by his expression it affords him." She vanished through the curtains, and the following conversation was borne to Es-siddeeh's ears: "A young man calling himself the Very Veracious has arrived and sues for an interview on the same subject as his forerunners." "I cannot see him." The maid returned. "Tell her," said Es-siddeeh, "that she is as beautiful as one red rose in a garden of lilies." "The compliment," he heard the Princess remark, "is a new one and is graceful. Nevertheless dismiss him." "Tell her," said Es-siddeeh, "that her wisdom has the wings of the rukh, the eye of the falcon, the talons of the osprey, and the voice of the dove." "It is very remarkable," he heard the Princess remark, "that he should so accurately describe my characteristics. He must be a diviner; since, as far as I know, he has never seen me nor spoken to me. Nevertheless dismiss him." "Tell her," said Es-siddeeh--but he could not think of anything to tell her and was sadly cast down. For his love, continuing to pain him, tortured him as a sweet fire in his bosom. At length, bethinking himself of his wisdom, he said in as brusque a tone as he could summon, "Tell her that I know the answer to all secrets and that she will regret it if she dismiss me." "How now?" cried the Princess, "is he so clever, and has such courage? He will indeed be the Very Veracious if, possessing these answers, he depart immediately, for then my womanish regret will indeed be sharp; since of all humours, he has had the wit to see, this humour of curiosity is the one most deeply implanted in us. Of what complexion is he?" "He is of spare build; his hair is black and glossy as that of a black panther; in his eyes there is a dark fire. His clothes are by no means new, his fingers are stained with ink, and about his neck there is a necklace of little scrolls." "A necklace of little scrolls, did you say? Send him in." Then Es-siddeeh stepped into her presence, and it was to him as if he were a little planet drawn for the first time into the orbit of the sun. She commanded him to be seated and plied him with various questions concerning the value as an amulet of this or that precious stone, of the pedigree of famous horses, music as Emotional Sound or as an Architecture, and many other matters of a similar nature. All these questions he answered not only discreetly, but with wit. For some time she rested her eyes upon his face in a musing fashion. Then, with a strange inflection, she asked, "What is love?" "I have but just beheld the cause," he returned; "give me a little space and I infer its properties as a consequence. At present I am troubled to know whether the same vessel can contain both cause and consequence." Not without haste, she assured him that she would consider her question answered, and enquired, "Does it become thee to risk so wise a head at the bidding of so foolish a heart?" "It lay not, and does not lie, with me to make it becoming." This answer did not appear to please her, for, moving her head, she proceeded with an instant change of tone, "One thing I have ever desired to know. What is the secret of the smile of the Sphinx?" He was taken aback. "What? Canst thou not answer, thou who didst assert that thou hadst in thy bosom the answer to all secrets, O Very Veracious one?" Seeing her smiling, he replied, "I have not seen the Sphinx unless I see her now." "I perceive that thou canst not answer. Yet because of thy youth and thy beauty I will spare thee." "Spare me not, since before thou hast not spared me." "Upon one condition:--that shouldst thou wish again to see me thou shalt bring with thee the secret of the Sphinx's smile. And now, before thou leavest me, because thou wert not as insensible as most scribes are wont to be, but wast willing to assay to gain some knowledge of perfection from life as well as from thy scrolls, I will give thee a token to take with thee." At these words, as if some beneficent and invisible djinn had escaped from his bottle, a spirit of strange sweetness seemed to fill the room. Strength forsook the body of Es-siddeeh. "Come hither," she murmured. So Es-siddeeh went to her and bowed down with his face to the floor. Then the Princess took him very gently in her arms and, raising his head, placed one hand beneath his locks and the other over his eyes, and so kissed him. Now when Es-siddeeh felt the touch of her hands, cool as water lilies upon him; smelled the delicate smell of her bosom, more mysterious than any perfume of the mages; tasted her mouth's nectar, more precious than the combed honey of the blessed in Paradise, then indeed he knew there to be such a seal coldly pressed upon his heart that the stamp of it would not be erased all the days of his life. "Ah, merciless," said he, "thou hast indeed not spared me. Now must I inevitably return." "It was for that reason I gave it thee," she said. II. He hurried home. He sold all his belongings. His father, seeing him about to depart, cried, "Thou wilt break thy mother's heart." He could not reply. His mother, watching him set out upon his mule with a slender bag of coin in his hands, cursed him and the Princess. He did not look back. III. After a journey of three moons he arrived before the Sphinx. His first impression was that her countenance contained no such difficult riddle as he had been led to suppose. The body of the Sphinx was huge, her paws stretched in front formidable, her shoulders heavy. Her bandeletted head sustained a wedge-fronted tiara. All this he took in at a glance. Then he turned to the face. He had not expected it to be so close to the ground and so open to inspection. The forehead he could see was ample. The eyebrows, albeit contracted in a slight frown, were high, arched, and wide, which lent the upper part of the face a frank expression; but the reverie of the eyes, fixed on space, seemed somewhat dimmed--as if an impalpable hand had interposed itself between the gazing orbs and the sun. The smoothness and delicate moulding of the cheeks and chin were remarkable. The nose astonished by the firm subtlety of its outline, which gave to the face a simultaneous expression of suavity and undeviating determination. If the nose had provoked wonder the mouth was yet more amazing. The lips, which might have been gracious and full when parted, were so closely compressed in their smile as to modify the whole effect of the other features. "I must go nearer," said Es-siddeeh. He established himself almost between the paws of the monster, for monster she had become to him who now beheld her mien more clearly--a mien disfigured, yet seeming uncaring for its own disfigurement, and--greatest horror of all--a mien in which the eyes possessed irises but seemingly no pupils. For a little he considered returning. Then he said to himself, "No; to see her afar off gives a false impression. One should see her as she is, and earnestly scanning the visage wrestle in thought till one discovers the secret of the smile." In this he instinctively knew himself to be right. But he was not long in finding that the more and the closer he stared the more difficult the problem became. To begin with the blemishes distracted him overmuch. The main cast of the face appeared, though subtle, simple and grand enough, but the fissures between the blocks that composed it, the discolorations, and the crevices that ran from side to side confused his eye. "If it were only perfect, all would be much easier to discover," he murmured. Then, too, the expression of the Sphinx and the import of the smile seemed to vary with the changes of the weather. On fresh-blowing sunny days the image beamed on him with a shadow-dappled, bleached cheerfulness of resignation. But when the sun raged the face, too, raged as with an inward fury; its lineaments shook in the heat-eddies that arose from the sand, and every grain glowed like a particle of fire. Nor did its rage abate during the succeeding night. The rising of the tropic moon gave to its complexion, streaked with violet shadows, an ashen hue: the pallidity of an unappeasable and frustrated anger. On lowering days it blackly scowled, and the swollen nostrils and imperious mouth assumed the similitude of being endowed only with the bitterest irony, a constancy of cruelty and an unquestionable scorn. Then he hated it.... At last, perceiving that the secret was not to be gained in a few days or even in a few moons, he resolved to settle in the desert opposite the Sphinx. Three years passed. Day by day and night by night Es-siddeeh watched the Sphinx. Daily the sun, shining upon the surface of the mask, seemed to make it more impenetrable, and nightly the moon, deepening the shadows in the crevices, increased its mystery. Round about the knoll, which the pilgrim had selected for his station, the sand gave off a glare more deadly than the bed of a furnace or, rising in whirlwind-spouts whose tops spattered ashes upon him, circled his island like monstrous and infuriate djinns. Toward sunset the clouds, gathered in an awful and silent grandeur, discharged, with stunning clap and reverberations as of mountains overthrown, their lightnings, a shower of blue arrows, to all quarters of the fluttering horizon. Once indeed Es-siddeeh awoke to behold a body of dense vapour launch itself wrathfully downward against the head of the brooding Sphinx and wreath it with a crown of crackling fire. The scribe leaped up, and, despite the pressure of the blast, succeeded in gaining, not without considerable risk to himself, a position before the base of the monster. His courage was unrewarded. Upon that obstinate mien, livid in the tawny light, the rain glistened as if there had indeed started from the stony pores a ghastly dew; but the thin lips were as tightly compressed as ever. "Hideous Sphinx!" exclaimed the youth, "thou cruelty incarnate, cannot even the ire of the gods subdue thee? Shall I never, from some motion of thy visage, learn what secret thou hidest?" As the winter approached the wilderness, utterly denuded of weed or moss, grew vaster and more bleak. The nights turned frosty. Overhead the constellations increased in splendour and number until every quarter of the empyrean shone encrusted with stars. Against these brilliant galaxies and the diffused, pervasive effulgence of countless further bodies the forehead of the Sphinx outlined itself in desolate and stubborn majesty. Then was it that, alone amid the desert, under the gaze of those myriad and so distant lights, facing the figure of the Sphinx, now blacker and more impenetrable than ever, Es-siddeeh reached the climacteric which is despair. Baffled, without any sensation but an exasperation that gnawed his very reins and made giddy his temples, he spent his days and nights in complete dejection. At length, wishing, to terminate his sufferings once and for all he approached the Sphinx and, vehemently hammering its breast with his fists, cried in a terrible voice, "_What is the secret of thy smile, O Sphinx?_" But the Sphinx did not answer. At dawn, impotent before the titan, he perceived upon the surface of her bosom bloodmarks hitherto unobserved. Other hands beside his own, then, had knocked upon that stony breast. He returned to his hovel and stretched himself down in a sleep that was like a stupor. On waking he determined to climb the bandelettes of the Sphinx and to cast himself from its forehead. He had scarcely taken a step when, exhausted by privation and prolonged anguish of mind, he fell, and lying helpless found himself fronting a face mirrored in a pool, the product of a shower which had fallen while he slept. The face was the face of one whose visage was slowly approximating to that of the Sphinx, but it lacked the smile, and in its eyes there was the light of imminent insanity. For a space he gazed without realising the apparition to be but his own reflection. Then--stiffening his arms that he might raise his head and shoulders, extended, as he was, upon the desert like a Syrian puma whose bowels are transfixed by an arrow and who is about to die--he rallied his strength for a last effort. Before him, a quivering tigress in the meridian sunshine, crouched the colossal Sphinx. The frustrated eyes of the scribe, nigh starting from their sockets, bent upon it such a glare as sought to penetrate its very soul. Yet at the last, heaving himself forward, with nostrils wrinkled and teeth bared as if in the very coughing frenzy of a fighting death, he could but ejaculate "Sphinx, now had I entreated thine aid!--hadst thou not rendered me too proud, who have discovered thee to be but stone." Then the Sphinx answered in a voice of thunder: "O man, aid thyself!" IV. A company of Bedawi, journeying across the desert, discovered him lying senseless. Him they succoured as a madman, and therefore sacred to the gods. For a while he rested in a pleasant city, enjoying the support of a good man, who did not understand the cause of his afflictions, but at once realised their intensity and the deep importance to Es-siddeeh of the search on which he was engaged. His health mended at length and undeterred by the solicitations of his host, troubled to see him in such haste, he resumed his investigations. This time he did not attempt to wrestle the secret from the Sphinx herself, but determined to prosecute his enquiries among the learned. With this end in view he interrogated the chief scholars of that district, but, coming to the conclusion that they were too provincial, he made his way to Jerusalem. Here no answer at all was given him--save that by the study of the particular law made for a particular tribe and containing, as he himself was obliged to admit, the most admirable rules for the preservation of an individual or a clan, he would attain to a knowledge of all things. He determined to go to Greece, the fountain-head of knowledge. But in Athens he fared not much better. The majority of the inhabitants, the fascination of whose minds he had nevertheless to admit, seemed given up to the fervour of local politics, money-making, the quarrels of the law-courts, the consideration of athletics, the technique of the chase, and the refinement of trivial or voluptuous delights: pursuits which he told himself could scarcely further true knowledge. There were, however, a number of persons, given to the study of natural law as revealed in nature, who enquired whether he had weighed the Sphinx or examined her molecules beneath the magnifying crystal. He was compelled to reply that he had done neither of these things. Whereat they retorted that it was therefore impossible for them to build a theory as to the constituents of her smile and verify it in experiment. "Moreover," they continued, "even the data you have given us appear not only insufficient but contradictory, since you state that the smile is at once sweet and sour. Direct opposites cannot be reconciled in science. We think it therefore best to direct you to the school of metaphysics opposite, where, if we are to judge from the uproar which occasionally disturbs our precincts, we believe this feat to be daily accomplished." ... Es-siddeeh accordingly lost no time in entering the school opposite. After a lengthy session, the clamour of which somewhat bewildered him, a young man with a high complexion and a shrill voice approached him and said, "As far as can be ascertained (for there are the usual number of qualifications and reservations of opinion amongst us) we are of a mind that the secret of the Sphinx is that she has no secret--at least no secrets from us." Es-siddeeh did not stop to enquire further, for it appeared to him that he could not gain by it and, moreover, he was much fatigued. So, taking boat, he sailed through the Pillars of Hercules and, turning north, descried, after an arduous voyage, the extreme Western Isles enshrouded in a perpetual prismatic fog. On these coasts he landed and, penetrating inland, in a short while discovered a university situated on the chief river of the main island. Having struck up an acquaintance with the courteous master of the chief college, he poured out his tale. The Disseminator-of-Truth, after prolonged thought, replied, "Without wishing in any way to influence your conduct, I should, since you seem to be enamoured of the lady, inform her that the secret is anything you happen to have in your head at the moment (as well it may be), provided the matter be of such obscurity that that instinct which is peculiar to females, and which on the best authority (namely, their own) I am given to understand is infallible, will instantly assure her that she understands it even better than you do." "But you would not have me deceive her?" "Indeed, no. For recollect--what she believes to be true will _per contra_ be true to her." "It seems to me, then, that you are asking her to deceive herself." "Not at all," answered the Sage somewhat impatiently; "all is, you must know, relative, and any conclusion is as relative to enquiry as any other." "But not to truth!" returned Es-siddeeh with heat. The great man smiled. "An irritating preoccupation this, when the search itself is so intriguing." Es-siddeeh, the Very Veracious, experienced a curious sensation in which pleasure certainly played a part. "That is perfectly true," he remarked; "I am finding more interest in the search than I expected. Nevertheless I wish to return to Sa-adeh, the Bestower-of-Felicity" (and at her name he was conscious of an inexplicable spasm of contrition), "and to present her with my conclusion--the Truth." "Here I think we part," said the other suddenly. "Farewell." Then, as he turned away, the elder flung over his shoulder, "For myself, old-fashioned being that I am, I am inclined to think the truth is that the secret of the smile of the Sphinx is not one that should be repeated to a lady." It was some time before Es-siddeeh recovered from the shock of this interview. When he had done so, he hastened to leave the country and to betake himself to the Furthest East. The voyage lasted three years. But, when he posed his question to the head of a Manchu university, what was his surprise to be countered with just such a suggestion as had been put to him in the extreme Isles of the Western Hemisphere! "But you forget my name," he exclaimed. "No; for indeed so eager have you been to enquire of me the secret of the Sphinx and to narrate to me the story of your quest that you have forgotten to acquaint me with your name." "I am named Es-siddeeh, which, being translated, is the Very Veracious." "Then, my middle-aged young man of redoubtable veracity, I advise you to abandon your quest and to despair at once. It is much quicker. In such a mood you will discover yourself becoming most pleasantly the prey of one of the unmarried maidens who abound hereabout and who, I assure you, are not less beautiful and certainly less exacting than your friend. For women, according to the sage's experience, are much the same the whole world over--a morsel of honey in which the bee has left his sting: without the sting no honey, and no honey no sting." "Sir," replied the scribe, "I am much indebted to you, but you know neither Sa-adeh nor the secret of the Sphinx." "I do not indeed, but I venture to think that to propose to oneself a question that cannot immediately be answered is not the conduct of a wise man and may very well give offence to Powers of which we are becomingly ignorant." Utterly wearied by the enquiries he had prosecuted among the learned, Es-siddeeh turned over in his mind the many types he had encountered in his wanderings and, recollecting the lively intelligence of those Athenians who were not of the learned professions, he determined to live after their manner that perchance he might hap upon the secret. Several years were spent in acquiring sufficient money. The subsequent spending taught him that his mind was apt to wander from the problem in the mere enjoyment of the moment. Before, however, he could make finally sure whether he was any nearer gaining a solution he found himself ruined. Turned soldier, he took part in many notable engagements and distinguished himself not a little. The itch of the excitement of the search was for the time being eclipsed by the perils and responsibilities of war. There were, too, other distractions, nor were these invariably the bodiless preoccupations of the mind.... It was the somewhat unpleasant termination of one of these episodes which plunged him into reverie upon the past. At midnight, silently rising from his rose-strewn couch, he determined there and then to bring to the contemplation of the Sphinx that store of varied knowledge which he had gathered in the course of his wanderings. Arrayed, then, in a dress similar to that which he had worn as a youth and encircling his neck with a necklace of scrolls he set out alone for the desert. Since the way was long and he no longer young, a year passed ere he approached his goal. Then once again Es-siddeeh stood before the Sphinx. V. In the moonlight it seemed to him that during his thirty years of absence the image had grown larger. That his eyes, accustomed to watch for unexpected perils, played him no tricks he was certain, yet he now observed the brow of the Sphinx to be wreathed in a faint vapour as if its crest had attained the altitude of no inconsiderable hill. The fissures between the stones seemed slightly to have filled, but the crevices across the face were both more numerous and more deeply scored. The pits of the eyes, too, had become immensely more cavernous. And--could he be mistaken?--was not the smile less ambiguous? Surely he did not remember the visage as so noble, or had it grown nobler in his absence? How was it that, though the aspect remained as unflinching as ever, the expression now seemed less hard and more magnanimously stern? The cheeks had undoubtedly sunk further, but did not the muscles appear tightened less in impatience than in endurance of suffering? The nostrils no longer breathed scorn; they laboured with the indrawing of breath that, like fire, was at once painful and inspiriting. To the brow there had been added, he thought, a faint line, and its coming had softened the contraction of the brows so that the creature appeared even more majestic and wiser than of yore. And lastly--he took long to discover this--in the shadow under the brows the orbs seemed to stir with a mysterious and darkling life. "O mighty Sphinx," he murmured, leaning his head upon her bosom, "what has come to thee? How art thou changed! Much I fear thou hast passed beyond so small, feeble, and ignoble an intelligence as I and that now I shall never learn the secret that, behind thy lips, lies locked in thy heart. O Sphinx, if I speak wilt thou answer? Time was when I came to thee and, impatiently stamping my foot upon the mound of thy illimitable desert, beating with my fists thine unanswering flesh, conjured thee in a voice of thunder to yield up thy secret. But to-night, nestling against thy bosom, how shall I speak to thee?--I, of less account among men than one of the myriad morsels of dust out of which thou art compounded; I, whose voice is to thine ears hardly louder than the scratch of the beetles that crawl about thy base; I, lost in the shadowy cleft between thy breasts? O Sphinx, I will not cry out to thine unregarding face, lost in such a reverie as transcends the thought of such as myself, but leaning here my fevered forehead against thy cool stones, as in a dream and scarcely expecting an answer, let me whisper to thy heart, '_What is the secret of thy smile, O Sphinx?_'" Then from within the Sphinx arose a deep murmuring as of a multitude of nigh-forgotten voices; a handful of vapour parted from the lips to wither in the glacial moonshine. "Scarcely am I changed," said the Sphinx. "'Tis thou art changed. Look in thy heart: there is my secret." So low had been the sound, so immense was the night, so lonely the desert, that Es-siddeeh doubted whether it was not his own heart that had spoken. Then, placing both hands against the breast of the colossus, he cried in a despairing voice, "Is that thy all, O Sphinx?" But there was no answer. With spirit heavy as death, Es-siddeeh wrapped him in his cloak and laid him down to sleep between the paws. "Alas," said he to himself, "how brief, how obscure, and how profitless seem all the answers given to man!" Yet, when the morning came, it occurred to him that, if the Sphinx had indeed spoken, he would do well to ponder the words. So for three moons he sat pondering: "_Scarcely am I changed. 'Tis thou art changed. Look in thy heart: there is my secret._" Those who crossed the desert marked him, sunk in the deepest travail of thought. "Why do you not look at the Sphinx?" they asked. "I begin to know something about it: that is why," he replied. "If I gazed at it always in the present and never in memory I should learn nothing." One day a young scribe of great beauty approached the Sphinx and in a low tone enquired: "_What is the secret of thy smile, O Sphinx?_" "Speak louder. She will not hear you," called his companion. Es-siddeeh leaped to his feet. "Who sent thee hither?" he cried. "Sa-adeh, the Bestower-of-Felicity," answered the youth; and turning to his comrade, "If you wish to know why I do not shout, know that it is because I have read the early work of a certain scribe Es-siddeeh. It is very evident that, as with many persons of original mind, he scarcely recognised the full import of what he was at the time writing. Had he been acquainted with more scholars and had more experience of life he would have spoken with greater certainty. He would have also realised, too, I do not doubt, that his work was not so vain as it then appeared to him. But he disappeared and none knows whither, since his parents never spoke of him again. I, taking up his work, have already carried it further, I think, than he had when he abandoned it. Nevertheless I, too, have ceased to labour at it and am come hither for the purpose thou knowest." "Sa-adeh," echoed Es-siddeeh, waking as if from a dream; "I seem to remember that name. Tell me now, how did you----" But the stranger, receiving no reply from the Sphinx, had departed. Es-siddeeh sat him down again in dejection. That night he did not sleep. The memory of Sa-adeh overcame him with tears. All his life passed in review. Never had his reverie seemed so bitter, his questioning so futile as on that midnight, yet toward dawn he suddenly stood up with a shout. An immeasurable serenity flooded his being. "I have it," he cried; "I have solved the secret of thy smile, O Sphinx!" At that moment the tropic sun arose, and in its rays he beheld the face of the tormentor shine with an equable and golden splendour. The eyes, no longer lacking pupils, possessed sight, and from the smile had vanished all that he detested. VI. A new porter, a garrulous and slipshod wastrel, had taken the place of the old. It appeared that nowadays the Princess had but few visitors despite the fact that she was acknowledged almost as beautiful as ever, albeit in a different style. Her temperament, he learned, was difficult, her wealth greater than ever. After but short delay he found himself in the antechamber. He acquainted the damsel with his mission. She vanished through the curtains, and the following conversation was borne to Es-siddeeh's ears: "An old man, calling himself the Very Veracious, has arrived and sues for an interview on the same subject as his forerunners." "I cannot see him." The maid returned. "Tell her," said Es-siddeeh, "that she is as beautiful as one red rose in a garden of lilies." "The compliment," he heard the Princess remark, "though graceful, is not new; in fact so old that I scarcely distinctly recollect when I made a fashion for it. Dismiss him." "Tell her," said Es-siddeeh, "that her wisdom has the wings of the rukh, the eye of the falcon, the talons of the osprey, and the voice of the dove." "The Very Veracious," he heard the Princess remark, "is there very much in the wrong. If I have learned nothing else in my life I have at least learned that my wisdom has no such enviable characteristics. Dismiss him." "Tell her," said Es-siddeeh, suddenly overcome with a novel misgiving, "that I know the answer to all secrets, including the secret of the smile of the Sphinx." "How original!" cried the Princess. "Does he really know the secret of the Sphinx's smile? Send him in." Es-siddeeh went in and bowed down. "Though changed," he said, "O Sa-adeh, you are as beautiful as ever." "Your beard has grown so long and so white," she answered, "that--surely thou _art_ the (what is the name?) the Es-siddeeh I once knew, are you not?" "I am." "And you know all secrets?" "I do." Then she plied him with various questions concerning the value as an amulet of this or that precious stone, of the pedigree of famous horses, of music as an Emotional Sound or as an Architecture, and many other matters of a similar nature. All these questions he answered with such a considerable wealth of detail that Sa-adeh appeared confused. Both fell silent. After her eyes had rested for some time upon his face in a musing fashion, she asked with a strange inflection, "What is love?" He was dumbfounded. "I believe you have forgotten," she said, and in the intonation of her voice there was a hint of the equivocal. His eyes filled with tears. "I have not forgotten," he said; "perhaps I am only just beginning to learn." She gave him a curious look; then, moving her head, proceeded with an instant change of tone, "Well, what is the secret of the smile of the Sphinx?" A wave of emotion swept over him. He smiled and arose. "With the details of my enquiry I will not trouble you. Suffice it to say that for nearly forty years I have been searching." "So long as that?" "Many hard early days I spent in the desert and endured great privations." "Indeed? I am sorry. Forget them." "I would not if I could--they were the price of knowledge. At one time I came near losing my wits." "So? I am sorry." "Then I spent some years interrogating the wisest of earth." "Oh?" "But met with no answer." "Ah." "Then I spent further years in acquiring money--years of misery they were and years of degradation--that I might discover the secret. I was ruined. I repeat, I was ruined." "Pardon me. Yes, you were ruined. I am sorry." "I served as a soldier. I received wounds. I was captive. I was beaten. I escaped. I rose to power. I exploited all modes of living and fulfilling myself, but my experiments brought me no nearer the secret." "No nearer...." "Then I set forth on a dreary journey to renew my memory of the Sphinx's face. I sat down beside her. For a long time I learned nothing--the smile seemed hardly less mysterious than it had ever been. Then--but you are not listening...." "My friend, I am indeed; you were on a dreary journey and----" "At length one day a youth--but I will not burden you with that, though it was strange...." "Why do you look so at me? I am listening." "That night I learned the secret of the Sphinx." "At last!" "I learned it indeed." "Yes. Well, what is it?" "A difficult matter. You must listen most carefully, so subtle is its sense; yet in its comprehension lies hid the whole secret of man's possible happiness." "I am listening." There was a great stillness in the chamber. Es-siddeeh closed his eyes to concentrate his thought. Then, opening them, he began: "I learned the secret--that smile is the secret." "So I supposed." "Hush, or I shall begin to think that you do not know how to value this gift of my whole life, which I am making you. It is very difficult, but if all men would listen to me their lives would be easier." "I thought the secret was for me--yet no matter. Proceed. You see how serious I am." "I learned its secret." His lips trembled. He could hardly speak; at last with a great effort he said, "Now it comes--_upon maintaining that smile, which is the sign of the power of her existence, all her energy is bent_. She did not tell me, but I found it written in my heart. For what is she? _In the Sphinx, with her ravaged countenance and mutilated smile, I behold Life itself--Life in mysterious might, ignorant of its own origin, conscious only of its own beauty, couchant amid the wilderness of space and eternity._" "Is the smile of the Sphinx all that indeed? I somehow thought it was something more intimate. But how serious you look! Do not frown--I would not offend you for the world." "Should I not smile?" he said bitterly. "Yes, like the Sphinx." "Quick! How, did you know that?" "Don't frighten me. I was but speaking idly." "Idly?" "Seriously then, if you like--since you attach such importance to it. Women always work by miracles and never know when they have performed one.... Excellent, you are smiling, though your smile is ambiguous." "I do but obey her." "Not me?" "That smile which we behold on her face is the smile we see everywhere about us; only in her it has become more august--first by reason of her greater consciousness of isolation in the Desert and beneath the Stars, and, secondly, by consciousness of her strength." "Will you hand me my fan? Thank you." "For what are not the properties of the smile--the sovereign beauty, the witness of power--in Nature? Wise indeed the man who knows the bounds of what it is capable. When we are born the first thing we behold is a smile: the Nurse smiles at us, and in that smile we should read--were we then capable--the self-satisfaction of Nature, proud of her reproductive powers, who dandles us in her hands with the assurance that she knows what is best for us. Ah, how universal is the smile! Think of the variety of smiles that exist. 'Tis all for smiles this life! And that is at once its apparent cruelty and its final justification. On the blackness of Eternity it expands in a smile like a rainbow--a rainbow whose arch begins and ends, as rainbow arches do, uncertain where. And this blossoming in Infinity justifies itself.... How? By the beauty of its smile. Therefore smile. Smile and be in harmony with--if not the spirit of the Universe (for the unknown looking down from the Hill of Heaven upon the Rainbow may for all we know smile also, and on the import of that smile opinion may be divided), and be in harmony at least with the beauty of that fragment of the Universe which, if we do not wholly comprehend, we can at least worship and imitate.... But you are yawning." "No, obedient to you, I was--smiling." "And for how long? Until we are resolved--as the drops of the rainbow are resolved after refracting supernal colours. Yet as a raindrop glitters, ere it evaporate upon the flower and be again (who knows?) drawn up in the immense cycle, with some reflection of the glory which its passage served to make, so should we maintain that smile to the moment of our dissolution. As indeed I, whose stormy aerial passage is nearly over, shall do till I attain to mine. For what commoner solace do we hear than that '_he died with a smile upon his face_'? Such a smile may each have at his passing! How happy our friends will be to see it, how confounded our enemies! How comforted, too, the philosophers, who will not fail to perceive in it the reflection of whatever faith they hold: the ineffable joy of one whose beatified wings even now mingle with the wings of other spirits in divine assumption; the satisfaction of the racked, whom never again the torturers Joy and Sorrow will wake from endless sleep; the profound irony of one who never expected his pleasures to last for ever; and the disdain, too proud to curve itself in a full sneer, of one who opposes to the silent smile of the unknown a smile yet more silent!" He paused. "I have been thinking," said the Princess. "You wish to know more? Shall I explain?" "No. It is unnecessary; all this amounts to that you wish to marry me, and the announcement that you have earned the right to do so, but I should inform you that since you were last here a gentleman, who as a matter of fact once occupied a position menial enough but of importance in this household, has by signal honesty and perseverance arrived at a position where--well, in fact, to put it shortly, I have formed another attachment." "Madam, am I reft of my senses? You astonish me! Who?" "The Executioner." "Ah, heavens! Well, let me inform you, madam, that I, too, have formed another attachment." "You say that to my face! How dare you? But I saw directly you entered this room that you had long ago forgotten what true love is. Your long absence from me bears it witness. Who, may I ask, is now the object of your affections?" "Do not smile--or smile, madam, if you can; I love the Sphinx." He had but that moment discovered it. The Princess shrieked and at the sound he bent upon her such a smile as in memory effectually prevented her ever mentioning the Sphinx and its secrets again to anyone. Then he walked out. VII. He returned to the Sphinx. While yet afar off he was puzzled beholding a mountain range arisen in the wilderness. As he drew nearer he recognised it for the Sphinx. If during his thirty years' wanderings she had appeared to increase in size, to what dimensions had she not attained during his brief absence! The vapours of the desert, rising about her, had collected upon her shoulders in a strata of billowy cloud, and her head, unimaginably exalted, had now reached such an altitude that the features were almost indistinguishable in the blaze of the sun. Night had fallen by the time that he stood within the canyon of her breasts. For a little he rested his head upon the rock. A great weariness descended upon him. Physical infirmity, the inevitable sequel of all he had suffered in body and in soul, now made him its prey. His mind and spirit, however, remained keen and unquenchable as ever. He wrapped himself in his cloak and lay down. At midnight he awoke. For the first time the Sphinx, speaking in a voice of more than mortal tenderness, had made utterance without being addressed, "Art thou returned, my lover?" "Thou seest me. All I love I have given thee." "Few have bestowed upon me so much as thou. Fewer still have arrived where thou hast arrived, while yet possessing the eye not wholly dimmed and the tongue not altogether palsied. One thing, however, thou hast kept from me--the seal that is on thy heart." "Ah, Sphinx," replied Es-siddeeh, "that I cannot give; it is part of myself. Nor would I--for it was that which first brought me hither to scan thy face and to read thy riddle." "I am a jealous lover." "I know it. Yet what care I? Thy jealousy is a measure of my reward; for though I have discovered thy secret in general, yet it is a secret which no man perhaps will ever fathom in all particulars. Happy the hero who attains as far as I, happier yet he who can gaze unwinkingly upon thee as I do now, and hourly fathom something further!" "I am a jealous lover. Thou hast not much longer to gaze." "No matter. Eyes do not perish with me, and for myself I am rewarded." Then was it that for Es-siddeeh the body and the face of the Sphinx achieved a final apotheosis. Her limbs throbbed with a deep and terrible energy. From her breast issued an all embracing warmth similar to that of the earth. Her breathing became distinct as an august and stupendous rhythm resembling the ascent and descent of waters from firmament to firmament. Her cheeks flushed with a youthful elation. Into her eyes arose an immense light fixed upon unforetold futurities, and all her face, so worn and beautiful, became more ravaged and even more beautiful--for the very deepening scars, wasting and remoulding the features, gradually resolved the visage into an ethereal harmony hitherto unknown. Around her head, entangling in its mesh the nearer planets, there wreathed itself an enormous halo, iridescent as that which encircles the frosty moon. Her whole being exuded a supreme lustre until she became one living and colossal crystal which distributed in refraction all the colours of the rainbow and which palpitated with powers unguessed. And to Es-siddeeh, who beheld her through the tears of one who momentarily expects to be parted, the spectra and the palpitance appeared in triple. "O Sphinx, O Life the Enchantress," he cried, "my true and only love, take if thou wilt my heart and the seal upon it, for thine am I only, thee only would I aid, thee only do I love, thee only would I worship!" * * * * * A band of Arabs, journeying across the desert, found him, when dawn came, lying between the paws of the giant--dead, more cold than the stone which surrounded him and which now began to kindle in the morning rays. Though there had been no dew, his garments were deluged as with the falling of an immense tear. Upon his face there lingered a fixed smile, and, gazing upward, they beheld its double in the sunlit face of the familiar Sphinx. HERE ENDS THE STORY OF THE SMILE OF THE SPHINX. MAYEST THOU ALSO LEARN ITS SECRET. GEORGE ELIOT By EDMUND GOSSE In and after 1876, when I was in the habit of walking from the northwest of London towards Whitehall, I met several times, driven slowly homewards, a victoria which contained a strange pair in whose appearance I took a violent interest. The man, prematurely ageing, was hirsute, rugged, satyr-like, gazing vivaciously to left and right; this was George Henry Lewes. His companion was a large, thick-set sybil, dreamy and immobile, whose massive features, somewhat grim when seen in profile, were incongruously bordered by a hat, always in the height of the Paris fashion, which in those days commonly included an immense ostrich feather; this was George Eliot. The contrast between the solemnity of the face and the frivolity of the head-gear had something pathetic and provincial about it. All this I mention, for what trifling value it may have, as a purely external impression, since I never had the honour of speaking to the lady or to Lewes. We had, my wife and I, common friends in the gifted family of Simcox--Edith Simcox (who wrote ingeniously and learnedly under the pen-name of H. Lawrenny) being an intimate in the household at the Priory. Thither, indeed, I was vaguely invited, by word of mouth, to make my appearance one Sunday, George Eliot having read some pages of mine with indulgence. But I was shy, and yet should probably have obeyed the summons but for an event which nobody foresaw. On the 18th of December, 1880, I was present at a concert given, I think, in the Langham Hall, where I sat just behind Mrs. Cross, as she had then become. It was chilly in the concert-room, and I watched George Eliot, in manifest discomfort, drawing up and tightening round her shoulders a white wool shawl. Four days later she was dead, and I was sorry that I had never made my bow to her. Her death caused a great sensation, for she had ruled the wide and flourishing province of English prose fiction for ten years, since the death of Dickens. Though she had a vast company of competitors, she did not suffer through that period from the rivalry of one writer of her own class. If the Brontës had lived, or Mrs. Gaskell, the case might have been different, for George Eliot had neither the passion of _Jane Eyre_ nor the perfection of _Cranford_, but they were gone before we lost Dickens, and so was Thackeray, who died while _Romola_ was appearing. Charles Kingsley, whose WESTWARD HO! had just preceded her first appearance, had unluckily turned into other and less congenial paths. Charles Reade, whose IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND (1856) had been her harbinger, scarcely maintained his position as her rival. Anthony Trollope, excellent craftsman as he was, remained persistently and sensibly at a lower intellectual level. Hence the field was free for George Eliot, who, without haste or hesitation, built up slowly such a reputation as no one in her own time could approach. The gay world, which forgets everything, has forgotten what a solemn, what a portentous thing was the contemporary fame of George Eliot. It was supported by the serious thinkers of the day, by the people who despised mere novels, but regarded her writings as contributions to philosophical literature. On the solitary occasion when I sat in company with Herbert Spencer on the committee of the London Library he expressed a strong objection to the purchase of fiction, and wished that for the London Library no novels should be bought, "except, of course, those of George Eliot." While she lived, critics compared her with Goethe, but to the disadvantage of the sage of Weimar. People who started controversies about "evolutionism,"--a favourite Victorian pastime,--bowed low at the mention of her name, and her own sound good sense alone prevented her from being made the object of a sort of priggish idolatry. A big-wig of that day remarked that "in problems of life and thought which baffled Shakespeare her touch was unfailing." For Lord Acton at her death "the sun had gone out," and that exceedingly dogmatic historian observed, _ex cathedrâ_, that no writer had "ever lived who had anything like her power of manifold but disinterested and impartial sympathy. If Sophocles or Cervantes had lived in the light of our culture, if Dante had prospered like Manzoni, George Eliot might have had a rival." It is very dangerous to write like that. A reaction is sure to follow, and in the case of this novelist, so modest and strenuous herself, but so ridiculously overpraised by her friends, it came with remarkable celerity. The worship of an intellectual circle of admirers, reverberating upon a dazzled and genuinely interested public, was not, however, even in its palmiest days, quite unanimous. There were other strains of thought and feeling making way, and other prophets were abroad. Robert Browning, though an optimist, and too polite a man to oppose George Eliot publicly, was impatient of her oracular manner. There was a struggle, not much perceived on the surface of the reviews, between her faithful worshippers and the new school of writers vaguely called preraphaelite. She loved Matthew Arnold's poetry, and in that, as in so much else, she was wiser and more clairvoyant than most of the people who surrounded her, but Arnold presented an attitude of reserve with regard to her later novels. She found nothing to praise or to attract her interest in the books of George Meredith; on the other hand, Coventry Patmore, with his customary amusing violence, voted her novels "sensational and improper." To D. G. Rossetti they were "vulgarity personified," and his brother defined them as "commonplace tempering the stuck-up." Swinburne repudiated _Romola_ with vigour as "absolutely false." I daresay that from several of these her great contemporaries estimates of her work less harsh than these might be culled, but I quote these to show that even at the height of her fame she was not quite unchallenged. She was herself, it is impossible to deny, responsible for a good deal of the tarnish which spread over the gold of her reputation. Her early imaginative writings--in particular _Janet's Repentance_, _Adam Bede_, the first two-thirds of _The Mill on the Floss_, and much of _Silas Marner_--had a freshness, a bright vitality, which, if she could have kept it burnished, would have preserved her from all effects of contemporary want of sympathy. When we analyse the charm of the stories just mentioned, we find that it consists very largely in their felicity of expressed reminiscence. There is little evidence in them of the inventive faculty, but a great deal of the reproductive. Now, we have to remember that contemporaries are quite in the dark as to matters about which, after the publication of memoirs and correspondence and recollections, later readers are exactly informed. We may now know that Sir Christopher Cheverel closely reproduces the features of a real Sir Roger Newdigate, and that Dinah Morris is Mrs. Samuel Evans photographed, but readers of 1860 did not know that, and were at liberty to conceive the unknown magician in the act of calling up a noble English gentleman and a saintly Methodist preacher from the depths of her inner consciousness. Whether this was so or not would not matter to anyone, if George Eliot could have continued the act of pictorial reproduction without flagging. The world would have long gazed with pleasure into the camera obscura of Warwickshire, as she reeled off one dark picture after another, but unhappily she was not contented with her success, and she aimed at things beyond her reach. Her failure, which was, after all (let us not exaggerate), the partial and accidental failure of a great genius, began when she turned from passive acts of memory to a strenuous exercise of intellect. If we had time and space, it would be very interesting to study George Eliot's attitude towards that mighty woman, the full-bosomed caryatid of romantic literature, who had by a few years preceded her. When George Eliot was at the outset of her own literary career, which as we know was much belated, George Sand had already bewitched and thrilled and scandalised Europe for a generation. The impact of the Frenchwoman's mind on that of her English contemporary produced sparks or flashes of starry enthusiasm. George Eliot, in 1848, was "bowing before George Sand in eternal gratitude to that great power of God manifested in her," and her praise of the French peasant-idyls was unbounded. But when she herself began to write novels she grew to be less and less in sympathy with the French romantic school. A French critic of her own day laid down the axiom that "il faut bien que le roman se rapproche de la poésie ou de la science." George Sand had thrown herself unreservedly into the poetic camp. She acknowledged "mon instinct m'eût poussée vers les abîmes," and she confessed, with that stalwart good sense which carried her genius over so many marshy places, that her temperament had often driven her, "au mépris de la raison ou de la vérité morale," into pure romantic extravagance. But George Eliot, whatever may have been her preliminary enthusiasms, was radically and permanently anti-romantic. This was the source of her strength and of her weakness; this, carefully examined, explains the soaring and the sinking of her fame. Unlike George Sand, she kept to the facts; she found that all her power quitted her at once if she dealt with imaginary events and the clash of ideal passions. She had been drawn in her youth to sincere admiration of the Indianas and Lelias of her florid French contemporary, and we become aware that in the humdrum years at Coventry, when the surroundings of her own life were arduous and dusty, she felt a longing to spread her wings and fly up and out to some dim Cloud-Cuckoo Land the confines of which were utterly vague to her. The romantic method of Dumas, for instance, and even of Walter Scott, appealed to her as a mode of escaping to dreamland from the flatness and vulgarity of life under the "miserable reign of Mammon." But she could not achieve such flights; her literary character was of a totally different formation. What was fabulous, what was artificial, did not so much strike her with disgust as render her paralysed. Her only escape from mediocrity, she found, was to give a philosophical interest to common themes. In consequence, as she advanced in life, and came more under the influence of George Henry Lewes, she became less and less well disposed towards the French fiction of her day, rejecting even Balzac, to whom she seems, strangely enough, to have preferred Lessing. That Lessing and Balzac should be names pronounced in relation itself throws a light on the temper of the speaker. Most novelists seem to have begun to tell stories almost as early as musicians begin to trifle with the piano. The child keeps other children awake, after nurse has gone about her business, by reeling off inventions in the dark. But George Eliot showed, so far as records inform us, no such aptitude in infancy or even in early youth. The history of her start as a novel-writer is worthy of study. It appears that it was not until the autumn of 1856 that she, "in a dreamy mood," fancied herself writing a story. This was, I gather, immediately on her return from Germany, where she had been touring about with Lewes, with whom she had now been living for two years. Lewes said to her, "You have wit, description, and philosophy--those go a good way towards the production of a novel," and he encouraged her to write about the virtues and vices of the clergy, as she had observed them at Griff and at Coventry. _Amos Barton_ was the immediate result, and the stately line of stories which was to close in _Daniel Deronda_ twenty years later was started on its brilliant career. But what of the author? She was a storm-tried matron of thirty-seven, who had sub-edited the _Westminster Review_, who had spent years in translating Strauss's _Life of Jesus_ and had sunk exhausted in a still more strenuous wrestling with the _Tractatus Theologico-Politicus_ of Spinoza, who had worked with Delarive at Experimental Physics in Geneva, and who had censured, as superficial, John Stuart Mill's treatment of Whewell's _Moral Philosophy_. This heavily-built Miss Marian Evans, now dubiously known as Mrs. Lewes, whose features at that time are familiar to us by the admirable paintings and drawings of Sir Frederick Burton, was in training to be a social reformer, a moral philosopher, an apostle of the creed of Christendom, an anti-theological professor, anything in the world rather than a writer of idle tales. But the tales proved to be a hundred-fold more attractive to the general public than articles upon taxation or translations from German sceptics. We all must allow that at last, however tardily and surprisingly, George Eliot had discovered her true vocation. Let us consider in what capacity she entered this field of fiction. She entered it as an observer of life more diligent and more meticulous perhaps than any other living person. She entered it also with a store of emotional experience and with a richness of moral sensibility which were almost as unique. She had strong ethical prejudices, and a wealth of recollected examples by which she could justify them. Her memory was accurate, minute, and well-arranged, and she had always enjoyed retrospection and encouraged herself in the cultivation of it. She was very sympathetic, very tolerant, and although she had lived in the very Temple of Priggishness with her Brays and her Hennells and her Sibrees, she remained singularly simple and unaffected. Rather sad, one pictures her in 1856, rather dreamy, burdened with an excess of purely intellectual preoccupation, wandering over Europe consumed by a constant, but unconfessed, nostalgia for her own country, coming back to it with a sense that the Avon was lovelier than the Arno. Suddenly, in that "dreamy mood," there comes over her a desire to build up again the homes of her childhood, to forget all about Rousseau and experimental physics, and to reconstruct the "dear old quaintnesses" of the Arbury of twenty-five years before. If we wish to see what it was which this mature philosopher and earnest critic of behaviour had to produce for the surprise of her readers, we may examine the description of the farm at Donnithorne in _Adam Bede_. The solemn lady, who might seem such a terror to ill-doers, had yet a packet of the most delicious fondants in the pocket of her bombazine gown. The names of these sweetmeats, which were of a flavour and a texture delicious to the tongue, might be Mrs. Poyser or Lizzie Jerome or the sisters Dodson, but they all came from the Warwickshire factory at Griff, and they were all manufactured with the sugar and spice of memory. So long as George Eliot lived in the past, and extracted her honey from those wonderful cottage gardens which fill her early pages with their colour and their odour, the solidity and weight of her intellectual methods in other fields did not interfere, or interfered in a negligible way, with the power and intensity of the entertainment she offered. We could wish for nothing better. English literature has, of their own class, nothing better to offer than certain chapters of _Adam Bede_ or than the beginning of _The Mill on the Floss_. But, from the first, if we now examine coldly and inquisitively, there was a moth sleeping in George Eliot's rich attire. This moth was pedantry, the result doubtless of too much erudition encouraging a natural tendency in her mind, which as we have seen was acquisitive rather than inventive. It was unfortunate for her genius that after her early enthusiasm for French culture she turned to Germany and became, in measure, like so many powerful minds of her generation, Teutonised. This fostered the very tendencies which it was desirable to eradicate. One can but speculate what would have been the result on her genius of a little more Paris and a little less Berlin. Her most successful immediate rival in France was Octave Feuillet; the _Scenes of Clerical Life_ answer in time to _Le Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre_, and _Monsieur de Camors_ to _Felix Holt_. There could not be a stronger or more instructive contrast than between the elegant fairy-land of the one and the robust realism of the other. But our admirable pastoral writer, whose inward eye was stored with the harmonies and humours of Shakespeare's country, was not content with her mastery of the past. She looked forward to a literature of the future. She trusted to her brain rather than to those tired servants, her senses, and more and more her soul was invaded by the ambition to invent a new thing, the scientific novel, dealing with the growth of institutions and the analysis of individual character. The critics of her own time were satisfied that she had done this, and that she had founded the psychological novel. There was much to be said in favour of such an opinion. In the later books it is an undeniable fact that George Eliot displays a certain sense of the inevitable progress of life which was new. It may seem paradoxical to see the peculiar characteristics of Zola or of Mr. George Moore in _Middlemarch_, but there is much to be said for the view that George Eliot was the direct forerunner of those naturalistic novelists. Like them, she sees life as an organism, or even as a progress. George Eliot in her contemplation of the human beings she invents is a traveller, who is provided with a map. No Norman church or ivied ruin takes her by surprise, because she has seen that it was bound to come, and recognises it when it does come. Death, the final railway station, is ever in her mind; she sees it on her map, and gathers her property around her to be ready when the train shall stop. This psychological clairvoyance gives her a great power when she does not abuse it, but unfortunately from the very first there was in her a tendency, partly consequent on her mental training, but also not a little on her natural constitution, to dwell in a hard and pedagogic manner on it. She was not content to please, she must explain and teach as well. Her comparative failure to please made its definite appearance first in the laboured and overcharged romance of _Romola_. But a careful reader will detect it in her earliest writings. Quite early in _Amos Barton_, for instance, when Mrs. Hackit observes of the local colliers that they "passed their time in doing nothing but swilling ale and smoking, like the beasts that perish," the author immediately spoils this delightful remark by explaining, like a schoolmaster, that Mrs. Hackit was "speaking, we may presume, in a remotely analogical sense." The laughter dies upon our lips. Useless pedantry of this kind spoils many a happy touch of humour, Mrs. Poyser alone perhaps having wholly escaped from it. It would be entirely unjust to accuse George Eliot, at all events until near the end of her life, of intellectual pride. She was, on the contrary, of a very humble spirit, timorous and susceptible of discouragement. But her humility made her work all the harder at her task of subtle philosophical analysis. It would have been far better for her if she had possessed less of the tenacity of Herbert Spencer and more of the recklessness of George Sand. An amusing but painful example of her Sisyphus temper, always rolling the stone uphill with groans and sweat, is to be found in her own account of the way she "crammed up" for the composition of _Romola_. She tells us of the wasting toil with which she worked up innumerable facts about Florence, and in particular how she laboured long over the terrible question whether Easter could have been "retarded" in the year 1492. On this, Sir Leslie Stephen--one of her best critics, and one of the most indulgent--aptly queries, "What would have become of _Ivanhoe_ if Scott had bothered himself about the possible retardation of Easter? The answer, indeed, is obvious, that _Ivanhoe_ would not have been written." The effect of all this on George Eliot's achievement was what must always occur when an intellect which is purely acquisitive and distributive insists on doing work that is appropriate only to imagination. If we read very carefully the scene preceding Savanarola's sermon to the Dominicans at San Marco, we perceive that it is built up almost in Flaubert's manner, but without Flaubert's magic, touch by touch, out of books. The author does not see what she describes in a sort of luminous hallucination, but she dresses up in language of her own what she has carefully read in Burlamacchi or in Villari. The most conscientious labour, expended by the most powerful brain, is incapable of producing an illusion of life by these means. George Eliot may even possibly have been conscious of this, for she speaks again and again, not of writing with ecstasy of tears and laughter, as Dickens did, but of falling into "a state of so much wretchedness in attempting to concentrate my thoughts on the construction of my novel" that nothing but a tremendous and sustained effort of the will carried her on at all. In this vain and terrible wrestling with incongruous elements she wore out her strength and her joy, and it is heart-rending to watch so noble a genius and so lofty a character as hers wasted in the whirlpool. One fears that a sense of obscure failure added to her tortures, and one is tempted to see a touch of autobiography in the melancholy of Mrs. Transome (in _Felix Holt_), of whom we are told that "her knowledge and accomplishments had become as valueless as old-fashioned stucco ornaments, of which the substance was never worth anything, while the form is no longer to the taste of any living mortal." The notion that George Eliot was herself, in spite of all the laudation showered upon her, consciously in want of some element essential for her success is supported by the very curious fact that from 1864 to 1869, that is to say through nearly one quarter of her whole literary career, she devoted herself entirely to various experiments in verse. She was so preternaturally intelligent that there is nothing unlikely in the supposition that she realised what was her chief want as a writer of imaginative prose. She claims, and she will always be justified in claiming, a place in the splendid roll of prominent English writers. But she holds it in spite of a certain drawback which forbids her from ever appearing in the front rank as a great writer. Her prose has fine qualities of force and wit, it is pictorial and persuasive, but it misses one prime but rather subtle merit, it never sings. The masters of the finest English are those who have received the admonition _Cantate Domino!_ They sing a new song unto the Lord. Among George Eliot's prose contemporaries there were several who obeyed this command. Ruskin, for instance, above all the Victorian prose-writers, shouts like the morning-star. It is the peculiar gift of all great prosaists. Take so rough an executant as Hazlitt: "Harmer Hill stooped with all its pines, to listen to a poet, as he passed!" That is the chanting faculty in prose, which all the greatest men possess; but George Eliot has no trace of it, except sometimes, faintly, in the sheer fun of her peasants' conversation. I do not question that she felt the lack herself, and that it was this which, subconsciously, led her to make a profound study of the art of verse. She hoped, at the age of forty-four, to hammer herself into poetry by dint of sheer labour and will-power. She read the great masters, and she analysed them in the light of prosodical manuals. In 1871 she told Tennyson that Professor Sylvester's "laws for verse-making had been useful to her." Tennyson replied, "I can't understand that," and no wonder. Sylvester was a facetious mathematician who undertook to teach the art of poetry in so many lessons. George Eliot humbly working away at Sylvester, and telling Tennyson that she was finding him "useful," and Tennyson, whose melodies pursued him, like bees in pursuit of a bee-master, expressing a gruff good-natured scepticism--what a picture it raises! But George Eliot persisted, with that astounding firmness of application which she had, and she produced quite a large body of various verse. She wrote a Comtist tragedy, _The Spanish Gypsy_, of which I must speak softly, since, omnivorous as I am, I have never been able to swallow it. But she wrote many other things, epics and sonnets and dialogues and the rest of them, which are not so hard to read. She actually printed privately for her friends two little garlands, _Agatha_ (1868) and _Brother and Sister_ (1869), which are the only "rare issues" of hers sought after by collectors, for she was not given to bibliographical curiosity. These verses and many others she polished and re-wrote with untiring assiduity, and in 1874 she published a substantial volume of them. I have been reading them over again, in the intense wish to be pleased with them, but it is impossible--the root of the matter is not in them. There is an _Arion_, which is stately in the manner of Marvell. The end of this lyric is tense and decisive, but there is the radical absence of song. In the long piece called _A College Breakfast Party_, which she wrote in 1874, almost all Tennyson's faults are reconstructed on the plan of the Chinese tailor who carefully imitates the rents in the English coat he is to copy. There is a Goethe-like poem, of a gnomic order, called _Self and Life_, stuffed with valuable thoughts as a turkey is stuffed with chestnuts. And it is all so earnest and so intellectual, and it does so much credit to Sylvester. After long consideration, I have come to the conclusion that the following sonnet, from _Brother and Sister_, is the best piece of sustained poetry that George Eliot achieved. It deals with the pathetic and beautiful relations which existed between her and her elder brother Isaac, the Tom Tulliver of _The Mill on the Floss_: His sorrow was my sorrow, and his joy Sent little leaps and laughs through all my frame; My doll seemed lifeless, and no girlish toy Had any reason when my brother came. I knelt with him at marbles, marked his fling Cut the ringed stem and make the apple drop, Or watched him winding close the spiral string That looped the orbits of the humming-top. Grasped by such fellowship my vagrant thought Ceased with dream-fruit dream-wishes to fulfil; Myaëry-picturing fantasy was taught Subjection to the harder, truer skill That seeks with deeds to grave a thought-tracked line, And by "What is" "What will be" to define. How near this is to true poetry, and yet how many miles away! At last George Eliot seems to have felt that she could never hope, with all her intellect, to catch the unconsidered music which God lavishes on the idle linnet and the frivolous chaffinch. She returned to her own strenuous business of building up the psychological novel. She wrote _Middlemarch_, which appeared periodically throughout 1872 and as a book early the following year. It was received with great enthusiasm, as marking the return of a popular favourite who had been absent for several years. _Middlemarch_ is the history of three parallel lives of women, who "with dim lights and tangled circumstances tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement," although "to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness." The three ineffectual St. Theresas, as their creator conceived them, were Dorothea, Rosamond, and Mary, and they "shaped the thought and deed" of Casaubon and Ladislaw and Fred Vincy. _Middlemarch_ is constructed with unfaltering power, and the picture of commonplace English country life which it gives is vivacious after a mechanical fashion, but all the charm of the early stories has evaporated, and has left behind it merely a residuum of unimaginative satire. The novel is a very remarkable instance of elaborate mental resources misapplied, and genius revolving, with tremendous machinery, like some great water-wheel, while no water is flowing underneath it. When a realist loses hold on reality all is lost, and I for one can find not a word to say in favour of _Daniel Deronda_, her next and last novel, which came out, with popularity at first more wonderful than ever, in 1876. But her inner circle of admirers was beginning to ask one another uneasily whether her method was not now too calculated, her effects too plainly premeditated. The intensity of her early works was gone. Readers began to resent her pedantry, her elaboration of allusions, her loss of simplicity. They missed the vivid rural scenes and the flashes of delicious humour which had starred the serious pages of _Adam Bede_ and _The Mill_ like the lemon-yellow pansies and potentillas on a dark Welsh moor. Then came _Theophrastus Such_, a collection of cumbrous and didactic essays which defy perusal; and finally, soon after her death, her _Correspondence_, a terrible disappointment to all her admirers, and a blow from which even the worship of Lord Acton never recovered. Of George Eliot might have been repeated Swift's epitaph on Sir John Vanbrugh: Lie heavy on him, earth, for he Laid many a heavy load on thee. It was the fatal error of George Eliot, so admirable, so elevated, so disinterested, that for the last ten years of her brief literary life she did practically nothing but lay heavy loads on literature. On the whole, then, it is not possible to regard the place which George Eliot holds in English literature as so prominent a one as was rather rashly awarded her by her infatuated contemporaries. It is the inevitable result of "tall talk" about Dante and Goethe that the figure so unduly magnified fails to support such comparisons when the perspective is lengthened. George Eliot is unduly neglected now, but it is the revenge of time on her for the praise expended upon her works in her life-time. Another matter which militates against her fame to-day is her strenuous solemnity. One of the philosophers who knelt at the footsteps of her throne said that she was "the emblem of a generation distracted between the intense need of believing and the difficulty of belief." Well, we happen to live, fortunately or unfortunately for ourselves, in a generation which is "distracted" by quite other problems, and we are sheep that look up to George Eliot and are not fed by her ponderous moral aphorisms and didactic ethical influence. Perhaps another generation will follow us which will be more patient, and students yet unborn will read her gladly. Let us never forget, however, that she worked with all her heart in a spirit of perfect honesty, that she brought a vast intelligence to the service of literature, and that she aimed from first to last at the loftiest goal of intellectual ambition. Where she failed, it was principally from an inborn lack of charm, not from anything ignoble or impure in her mental disposition. After all, to have added to the slender body of English fiction seven novels the names of which are known to every cultivated person is not to have failed, but to have signally, if only relatively, succeeded. THE FUTURE POET AND OUR TIME By J. C. SQUIRE Here is our world in motion. We see a corner of it through our eyes. A man will march down a street with a crowd, or watch the politicians' cabs turning into Palace Yard, or make speeches, or stand on the deck of a scurrying destroyer in the North Sea, or mount guard in a Mesopotamian desert. A minute section of the greater panorama passes before him. In imagination he will, according to his information and his habit of mind, visualise what he sees as a part of what he does not see: the human conflict over five continents, climates and clothes, multitudes, passions, voices, states, soldiers, negotiations. Each newspaper that he opens swarms with a confusion of events and argument, of names familiar and unfamiliar--Wilson, Geddes, Czecho-Slovakia, Yudenitch, Shantung, and ten thousand more. For the eye there is a medley, for the ear a great din. As far as he can, busy with his daily pursuits, a man usually ignores it when it does not intrude to disturb him. When most unsettled, the life of the world is most fatiguing. The spectacle is formless and without a centre; the characters rise and fall, conspicuous one day, forgotten the next. The newspapers mechanically repeat that we are at the greatest crisis of history, and that "a great drama is being unrolled." We are aware that the fortunes of our civilisation have been and are in the balance. But we are in the wood and cannot see it as we see the French Revolution. It is difficult, even with the strongest effort of imagination, to visualise the process as history will record it. To pick out those episodes and those persons that will haunt the imagination of posterity by their colour and force is more difficult still. An event, contemporaneously, is an event; a man is a man who eats, drinks, wears collars, makes speeches, bandies words with others, and is photographed for the newspapers. Yet we know that a time will come when these years will be seen in far retrospect as the years of Elizabeth or of Robespierre are now. The judgments of the political scientist and the historian will be made: these men will arrange their sequences and their scales of importance. They will deduce effects and measure out praise and blame. With them we are not concerned. But others beyond them will look at our time. We shall have left our legacy for the imagination. What will it be? Who of contemporary figures may we guess as likely to be the heroes of plays and the subjects of poems? Which of the multitudinous events of these years will give a stock subject to Tragedy? Which of the men whom we praise or abuse will seem to posterity larger than human, and go with gestures across their stages, clad in an antique fashion? For to that age we shall be strange; whether our mechanical arts have died and left us to haunt the memory of our posterity as a race of unquiet demons, or whether "progress" along our lines shall have continued, none of our trappings will have remained the same. But the soul of man will have remained the same. Those elements in events and persons which fascinate and stimulate us when we are looking at our past will stir them when they brood on their past, which is our to-day. And neither contemporary reputation, nor worldly position, nor conquests in themselves, nor saintliness in itself, can secure for a man a continued life in the imagination of the race. * * * * * Contemplate our own past in the light of this conception. Who are the men of whom poets and playwrights and story-tellers have made fictions and songs? Augustus Cæsar when he lived was the greatest man in the world: but who since Virgil has panegyrised him and who--unless some ingenious psychologist of the second-rate like Browning--would make a dramatic poem out of him? William Wilberforce was a very good man, but his deeds and his name have survived his personality, and he will not be the hero of an epic. The Thirty Years' War was a long and very devastating war; Gustavus and Wallenstein, in their degree, survive the purposeless series of its disasters; and of all its events that which most vividly lives in the memory is the small thing with which it began: the flinging of two noblemen from a tower. What is it in things and men that gives them permanently the power of stirring the imagination and the curiosity of the artist? A quality of splendour and of power that grows more certain when the dust that was its receptacle has gone to dust. The artist who shall succeed with a historical personage may make whatever implicit or even explicit commentary he likes, but in choosing his subject--or being chosen by it--moral judgment or scientific estimate will not influence him. He will be the victim of an attraction beyond the will and beyond the reason. Consider who are the figures that truly, imperatively, live in the political story of the past. Not only and not all the Cæsars who fought over the known world; not only such chivalric souls as saw, and obeyed, the visions of Domrémy, and died when the echoes of the last horn faded over Roncesvalles. The Crusades, as a whole, were a great poem, but few of the Crusaders won more than an ephemeral name in art. Cœur de Lion has been in our own time the hero of a romance, but no man is likely again to write of even a Godfrey of Boulogne. The great age of historic Greece passed and left imperishable monuments, "one nation making worth a nation's pain," but how few of her soldiers and philosophers recur to the creative imagination! Those stories and figures from history and pre-history which do so recur are a strangely assorted collection. The Trojan War and its leading personages are a fascination and an inspiration perennially, and among those personages Helen, Hector, Achilles, Ulysses; but not Paris or the sons of Atreus, who live but as appendages. Coldly arguing, men may ask now as they asked then, why the Greeks should take so much trouble to recover a worthless woman, why a Hector should die to keep her, why ten thousand should perish in such a cause. But to the imagination Hector, Achilles, Helen, the divine unreason of that ten years' war, make an appeal that never comes from worthier struggles and wiser people. That is true also of Antony and Cleopatra: their story to the historian and the moralist is one of ruinous folly, to the poet a Portentous melody of what giants wasting Near death, on what a mountainous eminence Still, in the proud contempt of consequence, The wine of life with jubilation tasting. The figure of St. Francis has been created and recreated in art; like those of Nero, Philip II., and Mary Stuart. With the mythical who are but names we can do what we will; Lear and Hamlet Shakespeare could cast in the sublimest mould; with the historical we are tied by the historical, and few are great enough to come through the sieve. Poets have attempted and failed to make great characters of Becket, of Wolsey, of Strafford, and Charles I.; their degree of failure has varied, but they have failed as certainly as Keats would have failed with King Stephen. The material was not there. Cromwell and Frederick the Great at least equalled Philip II. in achievement, and excelled him in intelligence. But Carlyle's two heroes were no true heroes for an artist; we are too uncertain about Cromwell's inner man, his direction; for all his battles he could cast no colour over his surroundings; and as for Frederick there was no tragedy about him--that was left for his neighbours. A great Cromwell, in one sense, would be an invented Cromwell; and we cannot invent a Cromwell because of the documents. But Philip II., the intense, narrow, laborious, dyspeptic bigot, sitting in a cell of his great bleak prison on the plateau, trying to watch every corner of the world, and contriving how to scourge most of it; he was contemptible, full of vices, a failure, but there was that in him which has compelled the gaze of poets in seclusion from the seventeenth century down to Verhaeren and Verlaine. He had a virtue in excess. There was a touch of sublimity about him. The setting counts for much; monarchs are on pinnacles. But where is Philip IV., except for his horse-face on the canvases of Velasquez? Where even, as against the man he beat, is William the Silent, who waged a great fight against odds and died by the dagger; but was a cool Whig, excessive in nothing but self-control? He is scarcely alive; but Satan, as Milton saw him, reigns in hell. We must have splendour of a sort. The normal man loves a conflagration, though he will lend a hand in putting it out; and if he is putting it out the inmost heart of him will rejoice if it be a large fire and there are very few firemen. Vivid force, moral or non-moral, must be there; a Borgia, though he be as wicked as a Nero, cannot compete with him before the imagination; he was commonplace and sordid and there is no response to him. Such passages and such people kindle us in the records of the past. How, from this point of view, will the last five years, crowded and full of strife, look when we are the materials for art? * * * * * Will the decline of Turkey command interest? To the historian, not to the poet, so not, ultimately, to the generality of mankind. There is no emergence there of the human spirit at an exalted pitch; very new and surprising things must come out about Enver if he is to rank with the great adventurers of the stage. Men may try it--they have tried most things--but Constantinople has failed the artist before and will again. There is something pathetic, there might be something tragic, in the collapse of the House of Hapsburg after so many centuries, but so far as we know at present (and our statements are avowedly conjectures) there was no incident of that fall, compassed and witnessed by small intriguing men, which can redeem it from squalor and insignificance; and not all our reiterated assurances that this is a tremendous and tragic catastrophe can invest it with the high romantic quality which comes from passion in many men or in one man, strength and a heroic struggle. The League of Nations may be the salvation of mankind, but it has come in such a way, so slowly, so reluctantly, so haphazardly, so sensibly, that (unless comedy) nothing vital will be written of its birth. Can we see a subject for a Shakespeare or a Milton in the domestic struggle here, or the fluctuations of the Balkans, or the entry of the East into the war? These things made their differences, but will they to the artist be more than facts? And the men. There have arisen from the populations of all countries men, many of them "great" by virtue of position, influence, achievement; many of them disinterested and ethically admirable. The mind passes from one to another; over some it flits, over others it hesitates and hovers. There is something of the sublime about M. Clemenceau, the old fighter, symbolising France at the last barrier: a man who, in early novels now forgotten, formulated, or refused to formulate, a philosophy of despair, and depicted a universe without principle, order, or hope, in which the stronger beast, to no end, preyed on the weaker; a man, nevertheless, so full of vital energy, and so certain of the one thing he loved, that he desired nothing better than to continue furiously struggling under the impending cope of darkness. There are, to some of us, disagreeable things about him; stripped of the non-essential there is something central, that is, elemental and fine. But were he of the kind that becomes legendary, should we feel that central something as still uncertain, and would it have needed a war at the age of nearly eighty to have revealed something of grandeur in him? Is he, at bottom, clear and forcible enough; or, alternatively, does he feel with sufficient strength, does he want anything, plan or place or spectacle, with sufficient passion? We cannot be certain: he may be forgotten. Something of doubt colours also one's view of America's entry and the career of President Wilson, in some regards a close analogue to that of Lincoln. The lines of that story are simple--the watching pose, the gradual approximation to war, the President's mental struggle, his decision to throw America's weight into the scale, his manifestos to the world in the names of liberty, honesty, and kindness, his determination that the war, if possible, should be the last. But the man at the centre of this tremendous revolution of events, the mouthpiece of these great sentiments, has he that last abandonment of feeling which alone captivates the imagination of those who hold the mirror up to certain aspects of Nature? Without denying that it may be a great blessing that he lacks that force, without presuming to know all about him that may later be revealed, I feel doubtful. Death, more particularly violent death, before the end, might have enabled artists to impute to him something that perhaps was not there, to give him the benefit of the doubt. But very likely for our good, possibly with the greatest wisdom, he compromised at Paris. A more spontaneous man might have ruined us all; but if compromise is excellent in politics, it is of small use to poets. I doubt if the President will take his place with St. Francis, Philip II., and Nero. * * * * * There will survive from the war, and from the other events of our day, certain episodes which will, as by accident, draw the notice of artists and be, as we speak, immortalised. A few of the countless heroic and self-sacrificing actions which men have performed in every country and by every sea will be snatched from oblivion. Tragedians, in all probability, will brood on the story of Miss Cavell. The names of a subaltern and an airman, fortuitously selected, will live as live those of Hervé Riel and Pheidipiddes. But this is not what we call history. I think that the Rupert Brooke legend will develop. He was beautiful and a poet, and he died in arms, young. He had wandered to the islands of the Pacific, and his comrades buried him in an island of the Ægean. About him they will write poems, plays even, in which, their colour given by actions and sayings which are recorded, he will pass through experiences which were never his, and thoughts will be imputed to him which possibly he never had. Two older artists have taken a more prominent part in the war and its politics, a part that may indisputably be called political. Of Paderewski I know nothing, except that a man's progress could not easily have a setting more superficially romantic; the strength of the man may be guessed at by stray tokens. A person of whom fame in art may more certainly be predicted is d'Annunzio, a man not in every way admirable, but of a demoniacal courage, who has crowned a career full of flamboyant passages with actions that, as a spectacle, are magnificent: orations pulsating with ardour for the glory and power of the Latin genius, words that were pregnant of acts, and following these, after years of reckless flying, the sudden theatrical stroke at Fiume. As a "character" he justified himself by that lawless blow; his rhetoric finally proved itself the rhetoric of real passion, a lust for violent life, self-assertion at the risk of death, the flaunting of the Italian name; and, felt as such, it has moved a whole army and a whole people. Whatever the results of analysis applied to his character or the ultimate outcome of his splendid panache, he cannot but become, to the artists of one nation at least, a hero, the material for romance. There may be others. But, projecting myself as well as I am able, I cannot see on the larger stage, amid the great fortunes of peoples and their rulers, more than two subjects on which I think we may be positive that they will pass into the company of material to which artists return and return, subjects which already outline themselves with some clarity to the imagination and have the air of greatness. One is the fall of the German Empire. Were it shortly to be restored, the force with which its calamities will appeal to us would be diminished: for an end must be an end. But if what seemed to happen really has happened there is a spectacle there which will appear more prodigious and more moving as time goes on--that triply-armed vainglorious kingdom pulling the world down on itself; the long, desperate, ruthless fight against enemies ultimately superior; the "siege"; the quality, proud and assured if barbaric, of the Prussian spirit which filled the ruling caste and determined at once its fight and its fall. The tale is tragic, and almost epic; the persons are not yet revealed who shall be capable of being made, on the stage or in books, the instruments for telling it. Certainly, though men, misguidedly, will attempt to make Wilhelm II. sustain an artistic load to which he is not equal, the Kaiser will make no great hero or hero-villain. Possibly in some Hindenburg or other general will be found the strength, the simplicity of belief or resolve, which make a great figure; or possibly this will be of the tragedies in which the individual humans are all pigmies subordinate to the main theme. Elsewhere, I think, is to be found a man who has about him the certain atmosphere of imaginative life. He is Vladimir Ulianoff, Lenin. I talked a few weeks ago with a Russian in exile, a Conservative, an official of the old regime, and (I think) a Baltic Baron. He was not, therefore, sympathetic to the Bolsheviks or to Lenin; he hated, though he understood, them and he loathed him. "Lenin has ruined Russia," he said, taking no pains to conceal his desire that Lenin should die. Then the imaginative man in him awoke, as it has a way of doing in intelligent Russians of all kinds, and he suddenly added vehemently: "But a hundred years hence a Hero of Legend, like Peter the Great and the Prince who first introduced Christianity into Russia." I felt immediately that he had spoken not merely a truth, but an obvious one. Englishmen may have all sorts of opinions about Lenin; few have heard much beyond rumour of him, but even those who are most avowedly ignorant of him or most leniently inclined to him would scarcely like to find him in their midst. Yet there is that flavour of vitality, of greatness, about him that is lacking in many who have caused misery to none and even in some of the most potent benefactors of mankind. We feel it almost unconsciously; the recognition of it is, as it were, instinctive; a picture of him, growing from stray scraps of news and rumour, has been forming in our minds, a picture almost from the first differentiated from that, say, of his equally active colleague, Trotsky. Trotsky, one feels, might disappear to-morrow and leave but a name and some wreckage. But the other man, if he be not in the line of Tolstoi (as some of his adherents seem to suppose him to be), is in the line of the great oriental despots, of Tamerlane and Genghiz Khan. And we shall know more of him, far more, than we shall ever know of Tamerlane and Genghiz Khan: as much very likely as we know of Napoleon. He has no physical attributes and no material accoutrements which might lend him adventitious aid as the centre of a pageant of power, struggle, or woe: a short, bowed man in a black coat, vivacious, hedged by no formalities of ceremonial. Yet to the imagination--and it must surely be so when he is seen backward--this little fanatic, who for twenty years was hunted from exile to exile, and returned to overthrow a government and enthrone himself on the ruins of a great Empire, is the centre of Russia, seated in the middle of that enormous web of conflict and suffering like an impassive and implacable spider. We hear this and that of him. He is genial in conversation. He is not personally cruel. He is willing to slaughter thousands at a blow to realise his ideas, for he looks at human affairs historically, if with but one eye. He is a poor speaker, but his words whip audiences into enthusiasm. He thought he would be overturned in three weeks, but adapted himself with instant decision when a longer lease was offered. This man and that is jealous of him and has tried to upset him; he has said this or that about his success and his failure; he will fly; or he knows he will be executed. The reports contradict each other, but the picture remains and strengthens, the picture of a man in the grip of an idea, with one of the strongest wills in the world, indifferent to the pains and pleasures of ordinary people. That ugly little face, with its swollen bald forehead, its slanting lids closing on straight penetrating eyes, its squat nose, its fleshy mouth between moustache and goatee, its smile mechanical as a mask's, will be more familiar to our descendants than to us. They will see in reverie the revolution, with vast ancient Russia as its background, and this doctrinaire tyrant as its centre, with his ragged armies, his spies and Chinamen, his motley gang of clever Jews, brigands, and mild, bearded, spectacled professors around him. They will feel his magnetism, and, whether as "hero of legend" or devil of legend, they will celebrate him. Of these things perhaps men will write two hundred or two thousand years hence. But the duration of human life on our planet is measured, as we suppose, in tens of thousands of years. We go to the grave. The sunlight comes into this room; it shines on the table and the books and the papers. I listen to the twittering of the birds, shorter lived than ourselves, and the intermittent rushing of the wind, which, while life lasts, goes on always the same. A car moans past; its noise begins, swells, and dies away. The trees wave about; a horse's feet plod by; the sunlight sparkles on the river and glorifies the mud. Clouds come over. The sun, unseen, sets; the evening grows bluer and lamps twinkle out over the misty river. So, noiselessly, proceeds time, and the earth revolves and revolves through its alternations of sun and shade. These airs, these lights and sounds, will be the same; but we, alive and immortal as we feel, shall have gone and the clamour that we made will recede. To an epoch we shall be the coloured strutters of history and of legend; to a later age, however remote and whatever the accumulation of our records, we must become august shadows like the dim kings and fabulous empires that passed before Babylon and Egypt. "Truly ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you." The sentence was written more than two thousand years ago; the author is unknown and receding. Yet, obliterated in the end though all remembrance of us may be, we shall not even on this earth die with our bodies, and for some interval, not to be computed, certain actions at this moment in progress will endure in a sublimated state, and certain men with whom we may even have spoken will enlarge to a more than human stature and communicate, as they could never do in life, their essence to the enduring tradition of men. Are they those whom we have mentioned; or are they, as they may be, others who to us are insignificant and obscured? HORACE WALPOLE[1] [1] _Letters of Horace Walpole; Oxford University Press, 16 vols., 96s. Supplementary Letters, 1919; Oxford University Press, 2 vols., 17s._ By ROBERT LYND Horace Walpole was a dainty rogue in porcelain who walked badly. In his best days, as he records in one of his letters, it was said of him that he "tripped like a pewit." "If I do not flatter myself," he wrote when he was just under sixty, "my march at present is more like a dabchick's." A lady has left a description of him entering a room, "knees bent, and feet on tiptoe as if afraid of a wet floor." When his feet were not swollen with the gout, they were so slender, he said, that he "could dance a minuet on a silver penny." He was ridiculously lean, and his hands were crooked with his unmerited disease. An invalid, a caricature of the birds, and not particularly well dressed in spite of his lavender suit and partridge silk stockings, he has nevertheless contrived to leave in his letters an impression of almost perfect grace and dandyism. He had all the airs of a beau. He affected coolness, disdain, amateurishness, triviality. He was a china figure of insolence. He lived on the mantelpiece, and regarded everything that happened on the floor as a rather low joke that could not be helped. He warmed into humanity in his friendships and in his defence of the house of Walpole; but if he descended from his mantelpiece, it was more likely to be in order to feed a squirrel than to save an Empire. His most common image of the world was a puppet-show. He saw kings, prime ministers, and men of genius alike about the size of dolls. When George II. died, he wrote a brief note to Thomas Brand: "Dear Brand--You love laughing; there is a king dead; can you help coming to town?" That represents his measure of things. Those who love laughing will laugh all the more when they discover that, a week earlier, Walpole had written a letter, rotund, fulsome, and in the language of the bended knee, begging Lord Bute to be allowed to kiss the Prince of Wales's hand. His attitude to the Court he described to George Montagu as "mixing extreme politeness with extreme indifference." His politeness, like his indifference, was but play at the expense of a solemn world. "I wrote to Lord Bute," he informed Montagu; "thrust in all the _unexpecteds, want of ambition, disinterestedness, etc._, that I could amass, gilded with as much duty, affection, zeal, etc., as possible." He frankly professed relief that he had not after all to go to Court and act out the extravagant compliments he had written. "Was ever so agreeable a man as King George the Second," he wrote, "to die the very day it was necessary to save me from ridicule?" "For my part," he adds later in the same spirit, "my man Harry will always be a favourite; he tells me all the amusing news; he first told me of the late Prince of Wales's death, and to-day of the King's." It is not that Walpole was a republican of the school of Plutarch. He was merely a toy republican who enjoyed being insolent at the expense of kings, and behind their backs. He was scarcely capable of open rudeness in the fashion of Beau Brummell's "Who's your fat friend?" His ridicule was never a public display; it was a secret treasured for his friends. He was the greatest private entertainer of the eighteenth century, and he ridiculed the great, as people say, for the love of diversion. "I always write the thoughts of the moment," he told the dearest of his friends, Conway, "and even laugh to divert the person I am writing to, without any ill will on the subjects I mention." His letters are for the most part those of a good-natured man. It is not that he was above the foible--it was barely more than that--of hatred. He did not trouble greatly about enemies of his own, but he never could forgive the enemies of Sir Robert Walpole. His ridicule of the Duke of Newcastle goes far beyond diversion. It is the baiting of a mean and treacherous animal, whose teeth were "tumbling out," and whose mouth was "tumbling in." He rejoices in the exposure of the dribbling indignity of the Duke, as when he describes him going to Court on becoming Prime Minister in 1754: On Friday this august remnant of the Pelhams went to Court for the first time. At the foot of the stairs he cried and sunk down; the yeomen of the guard were forced to drag him up under the arms. When the closet-door opened, he flung himself at his length at the King's feet, sobbed, and cried, "God bless your Majesty God preserve your Majesty!" and lay there howling and embracing the King's knees, with one foot so extended that my Lord Coventry, who was _luckily_ in waiting, and begged the standers-by to retire, with, "For God's sake, gentlemen, don't look at a great man in distress!" endeavouring to shut the door, caught his grace's foot, and made him roar with pain. The caricature of the Duke is equally merciless in the description of George II.'s funeral in the Abbey, in which the "burlesque Duke" is introduced as comic relief into the solemn picture: He fell into a fit of crying the moment he came into the chapel, and flung himself back in a stall, the Archbishop hovering over him with a smelling-bottle; but in two minutes his curiosity got the better of his hypocrisy, and he ran about the chapel with his glass to spy who was or was not there, spying with one hand and mopping his eyes with the other. Then returned the fear of catching cold; and the Duke of Cumberland, who was sinking with heat, felt himself weighed down, and turning round found it was the Duke of Newcastle standing upon his train to avoid the chill of the marble. Walpole, indeed, broke through his habit of public decorum in his persecution of the Duke; and he tells how on one occasion at a ball at Bedford House he and Brand and George Selwyn plagued the pitiful old creature, who "wriggled, and shuffled, and lisped, and winked, and spied" his way through the company, with a conversation at his expense carried on in stage whispers. There was never a more loyal son than Horace Walpole. He offered up a Prime Minister daily as a sacrifice at Sir Robert's tomb. At the same time, his aversions were not always assumed as part of a family inheritance. He had by temperament a small opinion of men and women outside the circle of his affections. It was his first instinct to disparage. He even described his great friend Madame du Deffand, at the first time of meeting her, as "an old blind debauchée of wit." His comments on the men of genius of his time are almost all written in a vein of satirical intolerance. He spoke ill of Sterne and Dr. Johnson, of Fielding and Richardson, of Boswell and Goldsmith. Goldsmith he found "silly"; he was "an idiot with once or twice a fit of parts." Boswell's _Tour of the Hebrides_ was "the story of a mountebank and his zany." Walpole felt doubly justified in disliking Johnson owing to the criticism of Gray in the _Lives of the Poets_. He would not even, when Johnson died, subscribe to a monument. A circular letter asking for a subscription was sent to him, signed by Burke, Boswell, and Reynolds. "I would not deign to write an answer," Walpole told the Miss Berrys, "but sent down word by my footman, as I would have done to parish officers with a brief, that I would not subscribe." Walpole does not appear in this incident the "sweet-tempered creature" he had earlier claimed to be. His pose is that of a school-girl in a cutting mood. At the same time his judgment of Johnson has an element of truth in it. "Though he was good-natured at bottom," he said of him, "he was very ill-natured at top." It has often been said of Walpole that, in his attitude to contemporary men of genius, he was influenced mainly by their position in society--that he regarded an author who was not a gentleman as being necessarily an inferior author. This is hardly fair. The contemporary of whom he thought most highly was Gray, the son of a money broker. He did not spare Lady Mary Wortley Montagu any more than Richardson. If he found an author offensive, it was more likely to be owing to a fastidious distaste for low life than to an aristocratic distaste for low birth; and to him Bohemianism was the lowest of low life. It was certainly Fielding's Bohemianism that disgusted him. He relates how two of his friends called on Fielding one evening and found him "banqueting with a blind man, a woman, and three Irishmen, on some cold mutton and a bone of ham, both in one dish, and the dirtiest cloth." Horace Walpole's daintiness recoiled from the spirit of an author who did not know how to sup decently. If he found Boswell's _Johnson_ tedious, it was no doubt partly due to his inability to reconcile himself to Johnson's table manners. It can hardly be denied that he was unnaturally sensitive to surface impressions. He was a great observer of manners, but not a great portrayer of character. He knew men in their absurd actions rather than in their motives--even their absurd motives. He never admits us into the springs of action in his portraits as Saint-Simon does. He was too studied a believer in the puppetry of men and women to make them more than ridiculous. And unquestionably the vain race of authors lent itself admirably to his love of caricature. His account of the vanity of Gibbon, whose history he admired this side enthusiasm, shows how he delighted in playing with an egoistic author as with a trout. "So much," he concludes, "for literature and its fops." The comic spirit leans to an under-estimate rather than an over-estimate of human nature, and the airs the authors gave themselves were not only a breach of his code, but an invitation to his contempt. "You know," he once wrote, "I shun authors, and would never have been one myself if it obliged me to keep such bad company. They are always in earnest and think their profession serious, and will dwell upon trifles and reverence learning. I laugh at all these things, and write only to laugh at them and divert myself. None of us are authors of any consequence, and it is the most ridiculous of all vanities to be vain of being _mediocre_." He followed the Chinese school of manners and made light of his own writings. "What have I written," he asks, "that was worth remembering, even by myself?" "It would be affected," he tells Gray, "to say I am indifferent to fame. I certainly am not, but I am indifferent to almost anything I have done to acquire it. The greater part are mere compilations; and no wonder they are, as you say, incorrect when they were commonly written with people in the room." It is generally assumed that, in speaking lightly of himself, Walpole was merely posturing. To me it seems that he was sincere enough. He had a sense of greatness in literature, as is shown by his reverence of Shakespeare, and he was too much of a realist not to see that his own writings at their best were trifles beside the monuments of the poets. He felt that he was doing little things in a little age. He was diffident both for his times and for himself. So difficult do some writers find it to believe that there was any deep genuineness in him that they ask us to regard even his enthusiasm for great literature as a pretence. They do not realise that the secret of his attraction for us is that he was an enthusiast disguised as an eighteenth-century man of fashion. His airs and graces were not the result of languor, but of his pleasure in wearing a mask. He was quick, responsive, excitable, and only withdrew into the similitude of a china figure, as Diogenes into his tub, through philosophy. The truth is, the only dandies who are tolerable are those whose dandyism is a cloak of reserve. Our interest in character is largely an interest in contradictions of this kind. The beau capable of breaking into excitement awakens our curiosity, as does the conqueror stooping to a humane action, the Puritan caught in the net of the senses, or the pacifist in a rage of violence. The average man, whom one knows superficially, is a formula, or seems to live the life of a formula. That is why we find him dull. The characters who interest us in history and literature, on the other hand, are perpetually giving the lie to the formulæ we invent, and are bound to invent, for them. They give us pleasure not by confirming us, but by surprising us. It seems to me absurd, then, to regard Walpole's air of indifference as the only real thing about him and to question his raptures. From his first travels among the Alps with Gray down to his senile letters to Hannah More about the French Revolution, we see him as a man almost hysterical in the intensity of his sensations, whether of joy or of horror. He lived for his sensations like an æsthete. He wrote of himself as "I, who am as constant at a fire as George Selwyn at an execution." If he cared for the crownings of kings and such occasions, it was because he took a childish delight in the fireworks and illuminations. He had the keen spirit of a masquerader. Masquerades, he declared, were "one of my ancient passions," and we find him as an elderly man dressing out "a thousand young Conways and Cholmondeleys" for an entertainment of the kind, and going "with more pleasure to see them pleased than when I formerly delighted in that diversion myself." He was equally an enthusiast in his hobbies and his tastes. He rejoiced to get back in May to Strawberry Hill, "where my two passions, lilacs and nightingales, are in bloom." He could not have made his collections or built his battlements in a mood of indifference. In his love of mediæval ruins he showed himself a Goth-intoxicated man. As for Strawberry Hill itself, the result may have been a ridiculous mouse, but it took a mountain of enthusiasm to produce it. Walpole's own description of his house and its surroundings has an exquisite charm that almost makes one love the place as he did. "It is a little plaything house," he told Conway, "that I got out of Mrs. Chenevix's shop, and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set in enamelled meadows, with filigree hedges: A small Euphrates through the piece is roll'd, And little finches wave their wings in gold." He goes on to decorate the theme with comic and fanciful properties: Two delightful roads that you would call dusty supply me continually with coaches and chaises; barges as solemn as barons of the exchequer move under my window; Richmond Hill and Ham-walks bound my prospect; but, thank God, the Thames is between me and the Duchess of Queensberry. Dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all around, and Pope's ghost is just now skimming under my window by a most poetical moonlight. I have about land enough to keep such a farm as Noah's when he set up in the Ark with a pair of each kind. It is in the spirit of a child throwing its whole imagination into playing with a Noah's Ark that he describes his queer house. It is in this spirit that he sees the fields around his house "speckled with cows, horses, and sheep." The very phrase suggests toy animals. Walpole himself declared at the age of seventy-three: "My best wisdom has consisted in forming a baby-house full of playthings for my second childhood." That explains why one almost loves the creature. Macaulay has severely censured him for devoting himself to the collection of knick-knacks, such as King William III.'s spurs, and it is apparently impossible to defend Walpole as a collector to be taken seriously. Walpole, however, collected things in a mood of fantasy as much as of connoisseurship. He did not take himself quite seriously. It was fancy, not connoisseurship, that made him hang up Magna Charta beside his bed and, opposite it, the Warrant for the execution of King Charles I., on which he had written "Major Charta." Who can question the fantastic quality of the mind that wrote to Conway: "Remember, neither Lady Salisbury nor you, nor Mrs. Damer, have seen my new divine closet, nor the billiard-sticks with which the Countess of Pembroke and Arcadia used to play with her brother, Sir Philip," and ended: "I never did see Cotchel, and am sorry. Is not the old wardrobe there still? There was one from the time of Cain, but Adam's breeches and Eve's under-petticoat were eaten by a goat in the ark. Good night." He laughed over the knick-knacks he collected for himself and his friends. "As to snuff-boxes and tooth-pick cases," he wrote to the Countess of Ossory from Paris in 1771, "the vintage has entirely failed this year." Everything that he turned his mind to in Strawberry Hill he regarded in the same spirit of comic delight. He stood outside himself, like a spectator, and nothing gave him more pleasure than to figure himself as a master of the ceremonies among the bantams, and the squirrels and the goldfish. In one of his letters he describes himself and Bentley fishing in the pond for goldfish with "nothing but a pail and a basin and a tea-strainer, which I persuade my neighbours is the Chinese method." This was in order to capture some of the fish for Bentley, who "carried a dozen to town t'other day in a decanter." Among the various creatures with which he loved to surround himself, it is impossible to forget either the little black spaniel, Tony, that the wolf carried off near a wood in the Alps during his first travels, or the more imperious little dog, Tonton, which he has constantly to prevent from biting people at Madame du Deffand's, but which with Madame du Deffand herself "grows the greater favourite the more people he devours." "T'other night," writes Walpole, to whom Madame du Deffand afterwards bequeathed the dog in her will, "he flew at Lady Barrymore's face, and I thought would have torn her eye out, but it ended in biting her finger. She was terrified; she fell into tears. Madame du Deffand, who has too much parts not to see everything in its true light, perceiving that she had not beaten Tonton half enough, immediately told us a story of a lady whose dog having bitten a piece out of a gentleman's leg, the tender dame, in a great fright, cried out, 'Won't it make him sick?'" In the most attractive accounts we possess of Walpole in his old age, we see him seated at the breakfast-table, drinking tea out of "most rare and precious ancient porcelain of Japan," and sharing the loaf and butter with Tonton (now grown almost too fat to move, and spread on a sofa beside him), and afterwards going to the window with a basin of bread and milk to throw to the squirrels in the garden. Many people would be willing to admit, however, that Walpole was an excitable creature where small things were concerned--a parroquet or the prospect of being able to print original letters of Ninon de l'Enclos at Strawberry, or the discovery of a poem by the brother of Anne Boleyn, or Ranelagh, where "the floor is all of beaten princes." What is not generally realised is that he was also a high-strung and eager spectator of the greater things. I have already spoken of his enthusiasm for wild nature as shown in his letters from the Alps. It is true he grew weary of them. "Such uncouth rocks," he wrote, "and such uncomely inhabitants." "I am as surfeited with mountains and inns as if I had eat them," he groaned in a later letter. But the enthusiasm was at least as genuine as the fatigue. His tergiversation of mood proves only that there were two Walpoles, not that the Walpole of the romantic enthusiasms was insincere. He was a devotee of romance, but it was romance under the control of the comic spirit. He was always amused to have romance brought down to reality, as when, writing of Mary Queen of Scots, he said: "I believe I have told you that, in a very old trial of her, which I bought for Lord Oxford's collection, it is said that she was a large lame woman. Take sentiments out of their _pantoufles_, and reduce them to the infirmities of mortality, what a falling off there is!" But see him in the picture-gallery in his father's old house at Houghton, after an absence of sixteen years, and the romantic mood is uppermost. "In one respect," he writes, speaking of the pictures, "I am very young; I cannot satiate myself with looking," and he adds, "Not a picture here but calls a history; not one but I remember in Downing Street or Chelsea, where queens and crowds admired them." And, if he could not "satiate himself with looking" at the Italian and Flemish masters, he similarly preserved the heat of youth in his enthusiasm for Shakespeare. "When," he wrote, during his dispute with Voltaire on the point, "I think over all the great authors of the Greeks, Romans, Italians, French, and English (and I know no other languages), I set Shakespeare first and alone and then begin anew." Not that it is possible to represent him as a man with anything Dionysiac in his temperament. The furthest that one can go is to say that he was a man of sincere strong sentiment with quivering nerves. Capricious in little things, he was faithful in great. His warmth of nature as a son, as a friend, as a humanitarian, as a believer in tolerance and liberty, is so unfailing that it is curious it should ever have been brought in question by any reader of the letters. His quarrels are negligible when put beside his ceaseless extravagance of good humour to his friends. His letters alone were golden gifts, but we also find him offering his fortune to Conway when the latter was in difficulties. "I have sense enough," he wrote, "to have real pleasure in denying myself baubles, and in saving a very good income to make a man happy for whom I have a just esteem and most sincere friendship." "Blameable in ten thousand other respects," he wrote to Conway seventeen years later, "may not I almost say I am perfect with regard to you? Since I was fifteen have I not loved you unalterably?" "I am," he claimed towards the end of his life, "very constant and sincere to friends of above forty years." In his friendships he was more eager to give than to receive. Madame du Deffand was only dissuaded from making him her heir by his threat that if she did so he would never visit her again. Ever since his boyhood he was noted for his love of giving pleasure and for his thoughtfulness regarding those he loved. The earliest of his published letters was until recently one written at the age of fourteen. But Dr. Paget Toynbee, in his supplementary volumes of Walpole letters, recently published, has been able to print one to Lady Walpole written at the age of eight, which suggests that Walpole was a delightful sort of child, incapable of forgetting a parent, a friend, or a pet: Dear mama, I hop you are wall, and I am very wall, and I hop papa is wal, and I begin to slaap, and I hop al wall and my cosens like there pla things vary wall and I hop Doly phillips is wall and pray give my Duty to papa. HORACE WALPOLE. and I am very glad to hear by Tom that all my cruatuars are all wall. and Mrs. Selwen has sprand her Fot and gvis her Sarves to you and I dind ther yester Day. At Eton later on he was a member of two leagues of friendship--the "Triumvirate," as it was called, which included the two Montagus, and the "Quadruple Alliance," in which one of his fellows was Gray. The truth is, Walpole was always a person who depended greatly on being loved. "One loves to find people care for one," he wrote to Conway, "when they can have no view in it." His friendship in his old age for the Miss Berrys--his "twin wives," his "dear Both"--to each of whom he left an annuity of £4000, was but a continuation of that kindliness which ran like a stream (ruffled and sparkling with malice, no doubt) through his long life. And his kindness was not limited to his friends, but was at the call of children and, as we have seen, of animals. "You know," he explains to Conway, apologising for not being able to visit him on account of the presence of a "poor little sick girl" at Strawberry Hill, "how courteous a knight I am to distrest virgins of five years old, and that my castle gates are always open to them." One does not think of Walpole primarily as a squire of children, and certainly, though he loved on occasion to romp with the young, there was little in him of a Dickens character. But he was what is called "sympathetic." He was sufficient of a man of imagination to wish to see an end put to the sufferings of "those poor victims, chimney-sweepers." So far from being a heartless person, as he has been at times portrayed, he had a heart as sensitive as an anti-vivisectionist. This was shown in his attitude to animals. In 1760, when there was a great terror of mad dogs in London, and an order was issued that all dogs found in the streets were to be killed, he wrote to the Earl of Strafford: In London there is a more cruel campaign than that waged by the Russians: the streets are a very picture of the murder of the innocents--one drives over nothing but poor dead dogs! The dear, good-natured, honest, sensible creatures! Christ! how can anybody hurt them? Nobody could but those Cherokees the English, who desire no better than to be halloo'd to blood--one day Samuel Byng, the next Lord George Sackville, and to-day the poor dogs! As for Walpole's interest in politics, we are told by writer after writer that he never took them seriously, but was interested in them mainly for gossip's sake. It cannot be denied that he made no great fight for good causes while he sat in the House of Commons. Nor had he the temper of a ruler of men. But as a commentator on politics, and a spreader of opinion in private, he showed himself to be a politician at once sagacious, humane, and sensitive to the meaning of events. His detestation of the arbitrary use of power had almost the heat of a passion. He detested it alike in a government and in a mob. He loathed the violence that compassed the death of Admiral Byng and the violence that made war on America. He raged against a public world that he believed was going to the devil. "I am not surprised," he wrote in 1776, "at the idea of the devil being always at our elbows. They who invented him no doubt could not conceive how men could be so atrocious to one another, without the intervention of a fiend. Don't you think, if he had never been heard of before, that he would have been invented on the late partition of Poland?" "Philosophy has a poor chance with me," he wrote a little later in regard to America, "when my warmth is stirred--and yet I know that an angry old man out of Parliament, and that can do nothing but be angry, is a ridiculous animal." The war against America he described as "a wretched farce of fear daubed over with airs of bullying." War at any time was, in his eyes, all but the unforgivable sin. In 1781, however, his hatred had lightened into contempt. "The Dutch fleet is hovering about," he wrote, "but it is a pickpocket war, and not a martial one, and I never attend to petty larceny." As for mobs, his attitude to them is to be seen in his comment on the Wilkes riots, when he declares: I cannot bear to have the name of Liberty profaned to the destruction of the cause; for frantic tumults only lead to that terrible corrective, Arbitrary Power--which cowards call out for as protection, and knaves are so ready to grant. Not that he feared mobs as he feared governments. He regarded them with an aristocrat's scorn. The only mob that almost won his tolerance was that which celebrated the acquittal of Admiral Keppel in 1779. It was of the mob at this time that he wrote to the Countess of Ossory: "They were, as George Montagu said of our earthquakes, _so tame you might have stroked them_." When near the end of his life the September massacres broke out in Paris, his mob-hatred revived again, and he denounced the French with the hysterical violence with which many people to-day denounce the Bolshevists. He called them "_inferno-human_ beings," "that atrocious and detestable nation," and declared that "France must be abhorred to latest posterity." His letters on the subject to "Holy Hannah," whatever else may be said against them, are not those of a cold and dilettante gossip. They are the letters of the same excitable Horace Walpole who, at an earlier age, when a row had broken out between the manager and the audience in Drury Lane Theatre, had not been able to restrain himself, but had cried angrily from his box, "He is an impudent rascal!" But his politics never got beyond an angry cry. His conduct in Drury Lane was characteristic of him: The whole pit huzzaed, and repeated the words. Only think of my being a popular orator! But what was still better, while my shadow of a person was dilating to the consistence of a hero, one of the chief ringleaders of the riot, coming under the box where I sat, and pulling off his hat, said, "Mr. Walpole, what would you please to have us do next?" It is impossible to describe to you the confusion into which this apostrophe threw me. I sank down into the box, and have never since ventured to set my foot into the playhouse. There you have the fable of Walpole's life. He always in the end sank down into his box or clambered back to his mantelpiece. Other men might save the situation. As for him, he had to look after his squirrels and his friends. This means no more than that he was not a statesman, but an artist. He was a connoisseur of great actions, not a practiser of them. At Strawberry Hill he could at least keep himself in sufficient health with the aid of iced water and by not wearing a hat when out-of-doors to compose the greatest works of art of their kind that have appeared in English. Had he written his letters for money we should have praised him as one of the busiest and most devoted of authors, and never have thought of blaming him for abstaining from statesmanship as he did from wine. Possibly he had the constitution for neither. His genius was a genius, not of Westminster, but of Strawberry Hill. It is in Strawberry Hill that one finally prefers to see him framed, an extraordinarily likeable, charming, and whimsical figure. Back in Strawberry Hill, he is the Prince Charming among correspondents. One cannot love him as one loves Charles Lamb and men of a deeper and more imaginative tenderness. But how incomparable he is as an acquaintance! How exquisite a specimen--hand-painted--for the collector of the choice creatures of the human race! THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH By J. C. STOBART There is no doubt whatever about the need for it. Search high or low in our social world, you will find it full of laments and dissatisfaction. In the Services Commanding Officers complain that their subalterns, even though they have been through the Classical course at Public Schools and Universities, cannot write a clear report. Headquarters themselves issue their orders and regulations in barbarous, unintelligible jargon. Government Departments, manned by Greatsmen, wrap themselves in phrases of pompous obscurity, and Cabinet Ministers couch their decisions or agreements in terms of such ambiguity as to leave nobody certain of their meaning. It would, however, be unjust to attribute bad English entirely to upper-class education, classical or modern. The business man in his "esteemed favours," though he may be more terse and polite, is not always able to convey what he intends. He lays the blame, when he fails to do so, upon the faulty education of his clerks and stenographers. The masses of the public too often show in practice that they simply cannot understand printed rules and directions. It is naturally too much to expect a universal diffusion of taste or elegance in the use of our language; but even when we feel the need of fine words to express deep feeling we choose for an obituary lines like these: There's a lonely grave somewhere, Where our dear and brave boy sleeps; There's a little home in England, Where mother and all of us weep. or these: Who knew that when he went away, Departing from his door, How or when he would come back, Or whether never more? For he who went away in health, In battle soon waylaid, Which took him in the prime of life, To lie in a distant grave. No, there is little doubt of the need for teaching clearness and improving taste. As for correct and grammatical writing, one week's study of a popular daily newspaper yielded the following excerpts from a collection of two-score: In the last resort we have to depend upon a jury drawn from the people to convict the scoundrel who has tainted our public life, and unless that jury does not do its duty, unless it is backed by the public sentiment of the people.... The accused was ordered to pay £3, or a month's imprisonment in default. At Paignton, in Devon, a gigantic plum-pudding is made and distributed to the poor, which in 1897 weighed 250 lb. ... the officers closed on him. In throwing him to the ground the revolver dropped from his hand. The charge is 50 per cent. higher than the same sheet may be bought in the street just outside. But what is a penny to an American? ---- ---- had an unfortunate experience. While seated in his greenhouse it was wrecked by the wind, and on being extricated it was ascertained that both his legs were broken above the knee, necessitating his removal to the infirmary. Provocation has been given by the hostile and shifty conduct of the Tibetan authorities, since the signing of the Treaty of 1800, which would have justified earlier punishment. While riding in a hansom at Southport a runaway horse dashed into the conveyance, and the shaft of the trap penetrated her body, pinning her to the hansom, and causing almost instantaneous death. But if you come to estimate a day's work--even in foot-pounds--the woman who cleans, bakes, washes, and takes to school six children, carries water and tramps upstairs and down for sixteen hours a day, need not fear comparison as to kinetic energy even with a miner working eight hours. What is the schoolmaster doing about it? He is teaching a great variety of languages ancient and foreign, sciences, arts and crafts, and among other things he is believed to teach "English." He has found out that it does not come by nature, and that a mastery of the English language cannot be assured by teaching something quite different. But as to the best method of teaching boys and girls to write, read, and appreciate good English there is a controversy. Just as in most other branches of education there is a traditional method and a reformed method. Upon the latter some of us build hopes of extraordinarily great achievements, and if these hopes lead us into impatience we must ask for pardon. Though Mr. Mais[2] justly claims credit for originality in departing occasionally from the fixed lines of English teaching as it is practised in the Public Schools, his "Course" mainly follows the traditional modes and is directed to the preparation of pupils for the orthodox type of examination. The nature of the course is indicated by the chapter-headings; for example: "Grammar and Syntax--Analysis, Parsing and Synthesis-- Punctuation--Vocabulary--Letter-writing--Reproduction--Paraphrase-- Dictation--Précis--Prosody--Figures of Speech--Indirect Speech-- Essay-writing--Examination Papers." There are, beside these thoroughly normal chapters, six pages on Elocution, Debating, Lecturing, Acting, etc., a useful list of cheap books for a home library, more than fifty critical pages on Shakespeare, and a regrettable[3] twenty-page chapter entitled "Short History of English Literature." I think the author is trying to shake off a yoke which is not entirely congenial to him. But if he will make boys write essays on Scandinavia, explain Synecdoche, paraphrase Keats, "condense the _Vision of Mirzah_ to 300 words," he cannot complain if he is mistaken for one of the old regime and guillotined in distinguished company. [2] _An English Course for Schools_. By S. B. P. Mais, Assistant Master at Tonbridge School and Examiner in English to the University of London. Grant Richards Ltd.; 6s. net. [3] _e.g._ "R. L. Stevenson represents the incurably romantic and is followed by Kipling and Conrad." The traditional method begins with the copy-book and proceeds by way of dictation and formal exercises to its goal in the essay. Dictation is the core and kernel of it, for even when the exercise is called "composition" the subjects are so chosen that the pupil needs detailed guidance throughout and the results are practically uniform. The writing is accompanied by reading and grammar, but the reading is severely limited and the text is obscured by comment and minute explanation. Poetry is not only studied with notes: it is analysed and paraphrased and parsed. The grammar, which is also traditional, is alien both in its method and terminology. The people who invented "English" in the middle of the nineteenth century were the classical grammarians who knew only one way of teaching a language, and had been forced under pressure from indignant parents to put "English" on the syllabus. They gave it an hour a week: they spent that hour in parsing, in declining uninflected nouns, in conjugating, in insisting that because the complement of a Latin or Greek copulative verb is in concord with its subject therefore "It's _me_" must be wrong in English. They did violence to our tongue in other ways to make a Teutonic language fit a Latin system, introducing all sorts of unnecessary complications of gender, mood and case, which do not exist. They transferred to English the whole cumbrous system of Latin grammatical terminology and then set harmless English children to explain their hideous technicalities. All because they had an hour to waste and were determined to waste it in the manner to which they were accustomed. They were assisted in this ambition by the Scotch professors of rhetoric who were especially strong in figures of speech. And then they remarked with pain and surprise that their method did not succeed. Their scholars did not appreciate good literature when it was taught to them. They lacked originality in their composition. They were tongue-tied in their speaking and muddled in their writing. There was once a man who determined to teach his monkey to sing "Voi che sapete," an air of which he was inordinately fond. So he took an old stocking with a hole in the toe and two holes in the heel and turned it inside out in order to conceal the holes, and crammed it full with shavings and breadcrumbs and fried it carefully and fed the monkey on it. When he complained that the monkey's voice was no better at the end of the course, his friends used to explain that it was because he was an old man and had lived in the reign of Queen Victoria. Remember that this "English" teaching has been well tried for more than fifty years. Substantially, the course we are considering now does not differ in its methods from books like Dalgleish's _English Composition in Prose and Verse based on Grammatical Synthesis_ of 1864 or Dr. William Smith's _English Course_. The subject subsists as a shuttlecock in a perpetual game of Badminton between examiners and teachers. If you ask the examiner of English why he continues to set such stupid questions, he replies quite rightly that he is forced to do so by the stupidity of the schoolmasters who teach it. If you ask the schoolmaster why he makes his "English" the dullest subject in the syllabus, he will probably answer that he is preparing for the London Matriculation. If you look for an explanation of the method, you might surmise that the aim is to secure accuracy in grammar at all costs. But that is not the aim. Mr. Mais explains it in a paragraph which he might well set for analysis of pronouns: "Of all our failings as a nation, this is the most marked. In our talk we are reticent; in our writing we are incoherent and slipshod. Every schoolmaster knows from sad experience that the average boy cannot produce a readable essay on any subject, however hard he may try. He strives by every means in his power to instil a sense of originality in his classes, to teach his boys and girls to observe...." Originality and observation! To take the second first, every scoutmaster knows that observation can be taught, but not by dictation. Probably there is no faculty of the mind which responds so readily to training and practice. By systematic questioning a young child can be taught to notice the common objects by the wayside on his morning walk, the goods in the shop windows, the flowers in the garden, to remember them and describe them afterwards with great fidelity. A good teacher of infants can easily teach a child of six or seven to observe minute differences, to compare and contrast similar objects, such as the bulb of the iris and the corn of the crocus. This kind of observation is commonly appropriated by science, and it is indeed the same faculty which the physicist employs afterwards with his fine balances and test-tubes. But it is also, when reproduced in language, the beginning of good English. Words are the balances. Careful description in words, written and spoken, of things actually seen is, when developed fully, more than half of the business of poets, journalists, and novelists. A few gifted mortals like Balzac, Gissing, or Hardy may possess the faculty by nature, but any one may acquire it through early training and continuous practice. It can be lost almost as easily as it is won. Can originality be taught? Less easily perhaps than observation. Real originality, in the sense of creative power, or what in its highest form we call "Inspiration," cannot be taught in school. Who taught Blake to see the tiger burning bright in midmost eighteenth-century London? There are some men born, apparently, to be our masters. Ideas flow not into them but out of them. They are the mainsprings of our mechanism. We attribute their origin to the wandering breath of some holy spirit. But in a humbler sense children can certainly be trained to be original, just as they can be trained by opposite methods to be commonplace, slavish, imitative, genteel, conventional, correct, and accommodating. These virtues are taught with great diligence and success in many schools, public and private. In the earliest stage you copy in a beautiful copperplate handwriting words like "England Expects Every," and you read aloud very slowly from a little book which contains these words in immense type: SHUN THAT OX HE IS SHY. You recite in chorus after teacher, you correct your speech by mimicking her accents and gestures. You sit, stand, or march to numbers at the word of command. In the next stage you are promoted to dictation, and once a fortnight you write a composition. But as the theme is Duty or The Elephant or something about which you can hardly be expected to have connected notions, you are given the headings, told what to say, have your mistakes carefully underlined, and are then presented with a model or fair copy. Any departure from the normal, whether in spelling or in ideas, is heavily penalised, and no credit is given for positive merit. In the next stage you learn the art of letter-writing by studying celebrated models, you paraphrase good poetry into bad prose, you analyse and parse and explain grammatical terms, you summarise and expand, you turn direct into indirect speech and generally feed your mind with a generous diet of cold minced hash. If I were a little boy trained for years and years according to this plan, I hope I should be grateful to my teachers for all the trouble they had taken with me. But, if they then turned round upon me and reproached me with not being _original_, I should be sorely tempted to commit a breach of good English and say "That is the limit!" In the pedagogical and psychological sense these methods are twenty years behind the times. They have been exploded in theory and disproved in practice. Each subject in its turn has fought its battle with the Dictation Method, and everywhere, except perhaps in religious instruction, the principle has been decided. In drawing, the freehand copy has given place to direct observation; in mathematics, mechanical working of rules and examples has been replaced by intelligence and problems. Even physical exercises are no longer mere drill. Perhaps it is in the primary school that we shall find the right principles most clearly marked, if only because with the younger children the teacher is nearer to Nature and mistakes punish themselves more visibly. There also the dead weight of tradition has been less oppressive. Before Madame Montessori's star had risen above the firmament the best teachers in English infant schools had solved the fundamental problems of how to teach good English. The principle is that what the child speaks or writes shall come from its own brain. The first medium of expression is, of course, the tongue. No children, not even English children, are tongue-tied by nature, but they are generally timid and sensitive. If they find their adult world discouraging communicativeness with anger, or sarcasm, or pedantry, they will close down upon the rock of silence like the limpet which you must smash before you move. Probably before he comes to school the child has already been silenced by a mother or father whose love will bear anything for the child except to listen to him. It is wonderful to watch the skilled teacher of infants repairing this mischief, re-establishing confidence between innocence and wisdom, unlocking hearts and tongues, creating an atmosphere of freedom in which she possesses, in reality, absolute control. Instead of limpets you behold sea-anemones full open. The children talk at great length in co-ordinate construction about their mother and the baby's tooth, and when they have finished they sit quiet listening to others. Sometimes the teacher takes up her parable and tells them about Cinderella or the King of the Golden River. In other lessons other mediums of expression appear--pencils, chalk, plastic clay, music, dance, drama. The teacher continues unobtrusively feeding the children with beautiful things, she sings and plays to them, shows them pictures and exhibits gentleness, calm, and love. Amid all the fog of controversy and all the noise of disputing cheap-jacks that surrounds the art and practice of education I see some of these infants' class-rooms as clear beacons showing the incontestably true course. I cannot see any limit of years to its progress. Many boys' and girls' schools have grasped the same principles and extended them to the age of fourteen with the same undeniable success in the results. Naturally, as the child grows the method has to be adapted, but the principle remains steadfast. I would not describe it as "freedom," because the child is not free, though he feels free. One never doubts the existence of a controlling will. But what is encouraged is authentic expression. In writing, topics are set which draw out of the child's own world the child's own thoughts. He is guided to think for himself and to speak his thoughts fearlessly. The skill of the teacher is shown mainly in the choice of subjects and the discretion with which corrections are made. Observation is translated into description, first in speech and then, when the pencil has been mastered, in writing. A child of nine may be asked to describe a corner of the class-room so that a blind man could understand exactly what is there and what it looks like. A child of twelve may be asked to describe the prettiest room she ever saw. A child of fourteen may be asked to describe the Harrow Road (_a_) on a Saturday night, (_b_) on a Sunday morning. Why stop at fourteen? As well as observation and description, the infant school trains the elements of imagination and invention. Cannot the child who at eight years old wrote on "If I were the King...." profitably be asked to write on "If I had been Oliver Cromwell...." at eighteen? In one girls' school the teacher merely wrote on the blackboard "When the Moon went out" and left the rest to the class. In the same way children can be trained to argue _pro_ and _contra_ about problems of their own lives which clearly admit of argument, like "Would you rather be six or sixteen?" "Would you rather be a boy or a girl?" People new to the method might suppose that, although the brighter children could possibly attack such themes with success, the ordinary or dull child would be left staring. It is not so. Whole classes of children trained in this way produce work which is pleasant to read. The essentials seem to be stimulating topics, authentic expression without dictation, and constant practice. To one who has seen the elementary steps there is no magic in the Perse Plays or the Draconian Poems. They are natural. It is dullness that is artificial. Real dullness, such as one finds in Common Rooms, Mess Rooms, Pulpits, and Government Offices is the fruit of a long, careful, and generally expensive education in that quality. In teaching a young person to speak and write you are also teaching him to think, because words represent thoughts. The adult may be able to think connectedly in silence, but the child generally cannot. The child's world is, however, at the largest a little one, and it is necessary to enlarge it by various means, including stories and pictures, songs and books. The book gradually becomes more prominent as the art of reading is mastered. A child constantly encouraged to express himself freely, always giving out and seldom taking in, would develop a number of unpleasant qualities. Therefore reading is only second to writing in its importance. A generous supply of good books is the second fundamental necessity of sound English teaching. So far as I know, no school has ever reached the limit in this direction. There is an excellent society which bases its method of teaching mainly on copious reading and has been able to multiply seven-fold the usual reading programme of primary schools. But they seem to put the book a little too much into the foreground. It is citizens that we seek to educate. For them books should be the background of real life. We do not all possess those opulent libraries into which Ruskin would turn his princesses to browse at will; but I subscribe to his doctrine in principle. Mere quantity of reading is a great thing. The more children read, the better they will choose their books. Now these two things alone, authentic expression and copious reading, are capable of producing good English. Children taught well in these methods can, without any formal instruction in spelling or grammar, write correctly as well as pleasantly. Something more is needed for those who seek to become scholars in English, and still more if they aim at the study of language. For such as these the teaching may gradually and progressively develop a scientific character. In the earliest stages fluency was itself a chief aim, and the teacher was compelled to be very sparing of interruptions and corrections. She had to use discretion and to judge for herself what mistakes were dangerous. She might not interpose though twenty successive clauses were joined together by "and," because she knew that it is natural for language to begin with co-ordinates and that mere mental growth combined with practice in reading and writing will cure the fault. She corrected vulgarisms, like "he done it," not with any grammatical disquisition but dogmatically. Even where the children come from homes where the King's English is never spoken, systematic speech-training in the infants' school can correct and refine language before pen is put to paper. These infant years seem to be intended by Nature for the learning of language. Ears are sharp and memories retentive. But habits once formed at that age, whether good or bad, are very difficult to eradicate later on. Perhaps pronunciation is best taught through disguised phonetics in the singing lesson and elocution in the poetry lesson. In the first written work it may be found that the spelling is all wrong. Great controversies rage on this subject. But it seems right to regard bad spelling as a disease which needs careful individual diagnosis in the earliest stages, when it can be cured so as to give no more trouble. Most often it springs from some fault in the method by which the child has learnt to read. Some people are allowed to grow up incapable of spelling because they make out the printed word by some process of guesswork and never fix the letters upon their memory. Good or bad spelling very rapidly becomes automatic. Much the same is true of grammar. As I have said before, accurate use of language can be attained by purely empirical and dogmatic methods. Grammar is no essential preliminary to good English, but nevertheless there may be a good case for teaching it later on to those who can afford the time. It is well that English boys and girls should know something of the history and structure of their language as well as their constitution. It may be necessary for the linguist to understand the common grammatical technique of all languages. Moreover, teachers naturally seek to limit the domain of mere dogma and to give explanations where they can. Thus a child can easily be cured of saying "Between you and I" merely through the teacher's command, "Say _me_." He can be cured of saying "Like I did" in the same way. He will of course be on surer ground if he understands the reason. Only let it be English grammar and not Latin grammar that is used. The reason why the child should say "I am taller than he" is, if a reason must be given, that _than_ is historically identical with _then_, not that "_quam_ takes the same case after it as before it." If we could only keep our eyes steadily fixed on the goal and discard formalism, tradition, and antiquated examinations, there is in the work of the best infants' and elementary schools a broad enough base for us to build a sound structure of English up to the University and beyond. Perhaps some day a progressive University may try the experiment of an English Arts Course in which the first part would consist solely of Advanced Reading and Writing, and the second part of options between English Philosophy, English Philology, English Poetics, or English Criticism. It need not be any lower in standard than an Oxford Greats course. We could not well spare the scholars. On the contrary, those who believe with me that English contains all things necessary to culture will be most anxious to enlist for its service the finest scholarship of the day. Some will think the fare provided in such a course as I have outlined too rich in sugar or fat and wanting in the tougher constituents which produce bone and muscle. It is essential to require more and more precision and accuracy as the child passes through the phases of adolescence. This was the real virtue of the old classical training, and it is too often wanting on Modern Sides. We must contemplate something very like the best of classical teaching applied to English Classics for big boys and girls. I write as a Pharisee of the Pharisees, brought up at the feet of Gamaliel. A man like Robert Whitelaw loved the literature of Greece and Rome with such devotion that its very forms were sacred to him. A false quantity or a false concord was to him a personal affront: it caused him physical pain. Accents and particles mattered to him and so they mattered to us. There was a right and a wrong. We did not understand why, but we knew and felt his scorn of anything careless or superficial. He read Sophocles aloud with an intensity that at first puzzled and then infected us. Occasionally, but all too rarely, it was his task to do the same with Chaucer or Browning. Why not? But at this point I labour with a sense of unreality. Is it possible to capture for our language a tithe of that old classical fervour? We have buried our Grammarian upon his peak, fronting the sunrise. He settled _hoti's_ business. I have heard him lecture for an hour upon the future sense of the optative with an enthusiasm that was drawn from some pure source in the depths. Doubtless he survives in disciples. Is it the mere mystery and power of the Word that inspires them? I will not believe that it is any inherent virtue possessed by Propertius but denied to Shelley that inspires the classical scholar. But where are our inspired teachers of English? I have an impression of critical, quizzical gentlemen, deeply learned in Elizabethan drama or Saxon dialect, but all the same terribly mild. I cannot picture one of their disciples seriously moved by a misplaced "and which" or an unrelated participle in English. Something is missing. There are thousands of genuine lovers of English literature scattered up and down the country, people who feel the thrill of delight in verbal beauty quite as keenly as any classical scholar. But they want leaders and a voice. We suffer our fools too gladly in English studies. Any lunatic is allowed to criticise, traduce, misinterpret Dryden, Carlyle, Addison, even Shakespeare, as if they were our private playthings. They are not. They are worthy of their pedestals of worship just as much as Homer and Aristotle. The issue of the War has established more firmly than ever the predominance of the English language in the world. If our schools would rise to their opportunity and raise English into a culture worthy of its qualities there seems no reason why it should not become the universal medium of civilisation for the world. The richness and variety of its literature and the simplicity and flexibility of its structure render it, as a language, amply sufficient. Whether this is visionary or not, it is no longer safe for those who cherish the humanities in education to rely upon the old impregnable position of Latin and Greek. The world has received one of those secular shocks in which tradition crumbles to dust. AN ARTICLE ON PARTICLES By ALICE MEYNELL "_Inconquerable_"--BACON A general good habit might long ago have been ruled for our national literature in the use of two negatives--"un" or "in," and "less." A good rule once made known, long ago, would surely have lasted. We might set about it even yet, though with much to chastise. Let us try. The fault of "un" and "in" is of long standing. That of a misapplied "less" is probably quite modern. What I have to suggest is an obvious enough correction, but the offence is broadcast, therefore correction cannot surely be inopportune or importunate. For who is there who does not give the teutonic "un" to the Latin or Romance word, writing "unfortunate" or "ungracious"? Or who now is careful to write "inconquerable"? Any man to-day would certainly write "unconquerable." It may not be that Bacon is always consistent; nor is Landor, who had something--but that something has proved altogether ineffectual--to say on this question of good English. We must own the incorrect use of the German particle to be the commonest thing in the world, but the incorrect use of the Latin or Romantic derivative, on the other hand, does not occur. The Teutonic "un" comes more readily to the English pen than the Latin "in," and thus is joined habitually to the wrong kind of adjective and verb and adverb. Not only, moreover, to the Romantic word, but also to the Greek. We have learnt to write "asymmetry," but not to avoid "unsymmetrical." There is also a very frequent jumble, so that "uncivil" appears in the same phrase with "incivility," and "unable" with "inability," "undigested" with "indigestible," "ungrateful" with "ingratitude"--but I need cite no more. It is worth noting that these confusions are not due to a kind of reluctance in the use of "un" for nouns. We have many nouns with the "un" (not otherwise to my purpose): "unrest," "unbelief," "unfaith," "unhappiness," "untruth," "unthrift," "unskilfulness," and so forth. Now I know well that the reader has been courteously waiting until I should draw breath for a paragraph in order to say "_Undiscovered_: Shakespeare." It is all too true. I can only repeat, murmuring, "_Inconquerable_: Bacon." There is nothing in English that we should prize more dearly than our right negative particles of both derivations, and especially our particle of German derivation in its right Teutonic place. That "un" implies, encloses so much, denies so much, refuses so much, point-blank, with a tragic irony that French, for example, can hardly compass. Compare our all-significant "unloved," "unforgiven," with any phrase of French. There are abysses, in those words, at our summons, deep calling to deep, dreadful or tender passion, the thing and its undoing locked together, grappled. But in order to keep these great significances the "un" should not be squandered as we squander it. And neither should the less closely embraced "in" be so neglected. It has its right place and dignity and is, as it were, more deliberate. It is worth while, furthermore, to enhance the value of both our negative particles (one of them, of course, shared with French) by considering how poor a negative that last-named tongue has often and often to use for lack of a better; not even a particle, but a thing unfastened, a weak separate word, a half-hearted denial--"_peu_." Let us try to keep our "un" in its right place by considering how, for instance, it makes of "undone" a word of incomparable tragedy, surpassing "defeated" and "ruined" and all others of their kind. "Undone" has the purely English faculty, moreover, of giving to a little familiar word a sudden greatness, such greatness as leaps to Lear's "every inch." This was found to be intranslatable when Rossi acted King Lear in Italian; he had to speak the phrase in English. Wonderfully well furnished as we are for all adventures, is it not then time that we reviewed and revised our habits, and restored to their proper lineage the great contemporary histories of our language by a right and left distribution of the "in" and the "un"? Our incorrect ways were never standardized, or they standardized themselves by precedent. No, it is all too late. We shall never undo the habit now, or cease to be "unconscious" in our custom. But for the other particle--"the less"--there is hope or there might be, but for Shakespeare's strange and slightly ambiguous "viewless." We might at least check new coinings. "Less" is in the construction here to be considered, though not in other combinations, fairly equivalent to the Teutonic "without." It has great value. It also locks close meanings with its word. But that word should be a noun, and not a verb. Yet it is a verb at the present day, not only in hasty column after column, but in page by deliberate page, and especially in stanza by deliberate stanza. For no doubt the perfervid poets have spread that fashion. You will find "relentless" scattered in modern verse, and "quenchless" and "tireless" frequent. Keats, instigated indirectly if not directly by Leigh Hunt, has "utterless." The misuse of "less" is even somewhat more to be resisted than that of "un" because in the case first named the grammatical construction of our English words (and we have not too many laws of construction) is violated. And beautiful words that are neglected for "quenchless" and "relentless" pass out of use; the words that have "less" for their lawful negative are cheapened; and writers of talent learn to dash and as it were to gesticulate. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES AND NEWS _Correspondence from readers on all subjects of bibliographical interest is invited. The Editor will, to the best of his ability, answer all queries addressed to him._ GENERAL NOTES We are glad to see that the Clarendon Press has published Mr. Percy Simpson's edition of _Every Man in His Humour_, a pioneer volume to the complete edition of Ben Jonson's Works, which the same editor, in conjunction with Professor Herford, has been for many years preparing. Their edition should, we think, be definitive (we use Sir Eric's magical word with extreme caution for fear of provoking the National Union of Textual Editors to down books and refuse to continue their researches). A new edition of Ben Jonson's work is certainly needed: Gifford, re-edited by Cunningham, is sadly inadequate; the text is bad and the notes explain nothing that one wants to know. One walks darkling through the _Discoveries_. Take Ben's remarks about painting--they are Hermetic. What, for instance, does this mean? "Parrhasius was the first won reputation by adding symmetry to picture.... Eupompus gave it splendour by numbers and other elegancies." We shall indeed be grateful to the new editors if they can tell us exactly how Eupompus gave splendour to art by numbers--and other elegancies. The secret might be whispered along the galleries of Burlington House. * * * * * Another interesting book that should soon, though there is no news of its immediate arrival, be coming from the Clarendon Press is the third volume of Mr. Saintsbury's _Caroline Poets_. The first two volumes of this massive anthology opened up a whole province of literature hitherto almost unknown to the general reader. In the last this great work of excavation and exploration should be completed. With the exception of Chamberlayne and the Matchless Orinda the Carolines of Mr. Saintsbury's choice have been very obscure. In the last volume, we understand, he intends to soar to the dizzy heights of eminence on which Cleveland stands. A good critical edition of Cleveland will be welcomed by all lovers of seventeenth-century literature. The early editions of his works are a piratical sort of publication. Some of his poems were, even in his own life-time, attributed to other writers, notably his _Hermaphrodite_, which was fathered on Randolph, and which he claimed as his own in an amusing little poem appended, later on, to the stolen piece. And yet, in spite of Cleveland's claim to his own property, Carew Hazlitt, in his reprint of Randolph, continues to attribute the _Hermaphrodite_ to its wrongful owner. A very unnecessary and supererogatory blunder. * * * * * While we are on the subject of the Caroline Poets we would like to express a pious hope that some day, when we are all immensely rich, the Clarendon Press, or some other great publishing institution, will bring out a complete corpus of English poetry. More than a century has elapsed since Chalmers issued his _English Poets_, and the book, in spite of bad editing and very imperfect--indeed non-existent--critical apparatus, is still an extremely useful one. It contains a complete Gower, a complete Lydgate, a complete Hawes, and a complete Skelton. The text of these older poets is indeed atrocious; but the fact remains that they are there, reprinted and easily accessible in Chalmers's stout volumes. For any study of the eighteenth century Chalmers is invaluable; everything is in him, from the _Ruins of Rome_ to the _Pleasures of Digestion_--or is it the _Art of Preserving Health_? A well-edited Chalmers would be a work of immense value. And if the Clarendon Press would go on, in the same edition, from the Carolines to the Georgians and back, through the Elizabethans and Tudors as far as the Brutians (the contemporaries of our first Trojan king), we should be for ever grateful. But before that comes to pass we must all, as has already been hinted, be immensely rich * * * * * A rather battered Purchas's _Pilgrim_ minus its title-page came into our hands recently. It appears to be the second edition, but the only actual indication of date that we can discover is to be found in the following passage, on which by a happy chance we lighted while turning over the pages of the book. "Sultan Achmet is now, Anno 1613, five and twentie yeares old: of good stature, strong and active more than any of his Court. He hath three thousand Concubines." We cannot help believing that someone had been pulling the Reverend Samuel Purchas's leg on the subject of young Sultan Achmet's harem. * * * * * The other day we bought a charming little first edition of _Candide_ (1759). The title-page is amusing: "Candide, ou l'Optimisme, traduit de l'Allemand de Mr. le Docteur Ralph"; no publisher or place, but the date MDCCLIX. It was often Voltaire's custom not to acknowledge his publications till they were a success. _Zadig_ (1749) is similarly without author's or publisher's name. * * * * * Perhaps some of our readers may be able to throw some light on a curious and interesting book, _Specimens of Macaronic Poetry_, published by J. Richard Beckley in 1831. The volume contains epics written on a single letter, like that which begins: Cattorum canimus certemina clara canumque, Odes in this style: Emma! fer chartam, calamos, et inkum, And the old Scottish Testament of Mr. Andro Kennedy, of which the first stanza runs: I Master Andro Kennedy, A matre quando sum vocatus, Begotten with some incuby, Or with some freir infatuatus; In faith I can nocht tell redely, Unde aut ubi fui natus, But in truth I trow trewely. Quod sum diabolus incarnatus. No author's name is given and we have had no time or opportunity to make researches. But perhaps, as we have suggested, some of our readers may be able to give us the information desired. * * * * * We were fortunate in recently securing a very fine copy of _Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes of the Right Honourable Fulke Lord Brooke, written in his Youth and familiar Exercise with Sir Philip Sidney_, Henry Seyle, 1633. It is high time that a new edition of these very interesting and, by moments, very great poems was published. Grosart's reprint is faulty and is, furthermore, practically unprocurable. As a matter of fact a new edition was, we understand, in process of being prepared by a very able young scholar of Christ Church, when the war broke out and the would-be editor was unhappily killed. Mr. Rose had, we believe, made considerable researches and had even discovered a certain amount of new material, but he had not committed the results of his labours to paper; so that the possible new edition of Greville has perished with him. If the rest of Greville's works could be edited as well as his Life of Sidney has been by Mr. Nowell Smith we should be very well pleased. But the prospect of getting any new edition at all seems now extremely unlikely. RECENT ADDITIONS TO LIBRARIES Some early printed books of considerable interest have recently been added to the Library of the British Museum, among them a copy of Sannazaro's _Arcadia_, Venice, 1502, in a contemporary binding of boards covered with designs printed from woodblocks. _Terentius: Comediæ cum interpretatione Donati_, Baptista de Tortis, Venice,