LITERARY MEMORIES.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1166, 17 June 1911, Page 9

LITERARY MEMORIES.

In his new book, "Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections," Mr. Fort! Madox Hueffor has some drastic tilings to say of those mock disciples who made ludicrous tho new spirit of the prcRaphaelites, and what he says is true of others, who hanrj on to movements and spoil them by their absurd antics.

"About tho inner circle of those who fathered and sponsored the Aesthetic Movement there was absolutely nothing of the languishing. They were," to a man, rather burly, passionate creatures, extraordinarily enthusiastic, extraordinarily romantic, and most impressively quarrelsome, Neither about liossetti nor about

Burne-Jones, neither about William Morris nor P. P. Marshall—and these were the principal upholders of the firm _ of Morris Company which gave aesthcticism to tho Western world—was there any inclination to live upon the smell of the lrly. It was the outer ring, the disciples, who developed this laudable ambition for poetic pallor, for clinging garments, and for ascetic countori::iccs. And it: was, I believe, Mr. Oscar Wilde who first formulated this poetically vegetarian theory of 'life in Madox Brown's studio at Fitzroy Square. No, there was little of the smell of the lily about the leaders of this movement!

"It was the strong personalities that made them bicker constantly, hut it was the strong personalities that gave them their devotion to their art, and it was the devotion to their art, that held them all together. It is for this reason that these pointers and these poets, distinguished by singular merits and by demerits as singular, made upon the English-speaking world a mark such as perhaps no body of men has made upon intellectual AngloiSaxondom since tho clays of Shakespeare. For it is one of the saddening things in Anglo-Saxon life that any sort of union for an aesthetic or for an' intellectual purpose seems to be almost an impossibility." Hero is an interesting paragraph about style ;-

"I remember once hearing Stephen Crant«-the author of 'The Red Badge of Courage' and of 'The Opcu Boat,' which is tho finest volume of. (rue short stories in the English language—l romerob?r hearing him, with his wonderful eye flashing and his extreme vigour and intonation, comment upon a sentence of Robert Louis Stevenson that he was rending. The sen•tenco was:—'With interjected finger ho delayed the motion of the timepiece.' 'By , poor dear!' Crane exclaimed. 'Tha't man put back the clock of English fiction fifty years.' I do not know that this is exactly what Stevenson did do. I should say myself that the art of writing in English received the numbing blow of a sandbag when Rossetti wrote, at the ago of eighteen. 'The Blessed Damozel.' From that time forward and until to-day—and for .how many years to come!—the idea has been inherent in the mind of the English writer that writing was a matter of digging for obsolete words with which to express ideas for ever dead and gone. Stevenson did this, of course, as carefully as any pre-Raphaelite. though instead of going to medieval bSolts he ransacked the seventeenth century. But this tendency is unfortunately not limited to authors misusing our very excellent tongue."