BOOKS AND BOOKMEN

Evening Star, Issue 19800, 25 February 1928, Page 15

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN

VERSES HELEN, When Helen walked upon the Trojan wall, The old men, seeing her, marvelled not at all That out of Greece came all those swords astir. And all that mist of blood because of her. There came not only Menelaus, led By envy gotten on an empty bed, But lo! the great Achilles came, and then Nestor, and Agamemnon, King of Men, And Ajax and Odysseus, strong and wise, Drawn by the things they heard of Helen’s eyes. So ten years passed, and Simois ran red, And slow Scamander syllabled the dead, Till in one night the towers of Troy came clown, And fire and anger wantoned in the town. And now three hundred times ten years lie over The fighting men, and Helen, and her lover; The years draw in, and pride and beauty fall; And we, like the old men, marvel not at all. —Gerald Gould, in the ‘ Observer.’ THE JOURNEY. As I set out in sunlight, Happy as a boy, 1 raced through a wonderland All alone with joy. But when 1 was breathless, Along before noonday, i knew another traveller Was walking my way. Without the beat of footfall i knew that he was there; That he was sober-minded, i was well aware. Ho seemed to have no business But just to tramp along, No chuckle for my laughter, No echo fpr my song. 1 plod the shadowed highway With less of laughter now, But with a turn for musing And with a calmer brow. Still my reserved companion Keeps up the dogged pace; He is the sort of walker That wins in every race. Ho is alone as I am, We’re nearly side by side; i go as proud as he does And with as bold a stride. At some appointed moment, All shrouded in the mist, He will reach sudden forward And catch me by the wrist. Duncan Campbell Scott, in London ‘ Mercury.’ JOHN RUNYAN'S TERCENTENARY I STHL A MODERN The tercentenary of John Bunyan fails this year. Mr Augustine Birrell writes in the ‘ Bookman ’; No one can read that masterpiece of John Bunyan, ‘ The Life and Death of Mr Badman,’ without continually making the fatuous remark: “How modern!” The theology may have gone out of fashion, but everything else is, to use one of its author’s pet phrases, “ as pat to the purpose ” as if it had been written yesterday. Mr Badman was a financial rogue of extravagant personal habits, and felt the absolute necessity of 1 ‘ getting . money by hatfuls.” How he did this in Bedford in the seventeenth century Bunyan tells I us as plainly as ever Balzac explained ! how it was done in Paris in the nineteenth and how wo know now it is done in the twentieth;— “ When ho had well feathered his nest with other men’s goods and money, ! after a little while ho breaks, while he had by craft and knavery made so sure of what ho had that his creditors could not touch a penny. Ho sends mournful sugared letters to them desiring them not to be too severe with him, for he bore towards all men an honest mind, and would pay them as far as he was able. Ho talked of the badness of times, the greatness of the taxes, his losses by bad debts, and he brought them to "a composition of five shillings in the £. His release was signed and sealed, and Mr Badman could now put his head out of doors again, and be a better man than when he shut up shop by several thousand pounds.” There was once a master at Harrow, a great Latin scholar, who filled eight volumes with bad English, who yet had the effrontery to call the writer of the above quotation “an illiterate thinker.” Nevertheless the observance of the centenaries, bicentenaries, and, when you can get them, tercentenaries of authors serves one good purpose, for it reminds a race of men somewhat apt to think too well of themselves of their literary mortality. Take the case of centenaries; for any author to continue alive as an author for a hundred years after the date of his natural birth is a severe test of literary longevity, though not so severe a tost as it would be were ho still alive a hundred years after his natural death. Thus the centenary of Dr Johnson’s birth occurred iu 1809 when there were many living who had heard him talk and bad themselves gone on talking about him ever since, but when in 1884 the centenary of his death came round there was no one living who had set eyes upon him. Dr Martin Routh, of Magdalene, wffio died aged a hundred in 1854 (in consequence, so his kindly college friends alleged, of the sudden fall in his Russian securities), was amongst the last of these eye-witnesses. So that in 1884 the memory of Johnson had to be confided to his portrait by Sir Joshua, his life by Boswell, and his own wmrks and letters. No living author can expect such luck as this. When it comes, as iu the case of John Bunyan, to tercentenaries, anyone who seeks publicly to celebrate a tercentenary, either of birth or death, of an author must have great confidence in his skill as a resurrectionist or choose a man very carefully out of an ill-filled bag. There is, of course, nothing surprising in this,” for I cannot suppose there is any living author conceited enough to suppose that his tercentenary will be publicly celebrated, say, in the year of our Lord 2170. We say publicly, because purely local celebrations sometimes take place after amazingly long periods of time. Parish churches require reroofing, and there is no more -Wilful a. resurrectionist than a hard-up and enthusiastic vicar. But three hundred years is a long time. Bedford has already done very well out of her most distinguished townsman, and 1 dare say will not overlook his tercentenary, but all will admit that this is no local affair and that the author of ‘ The Pilgrim’s Progress From This World To That AVhich Is To Come,’ delivered under the similitude of a Dream, published by Nath. Ponder at the “ Peacock ” in the Poultry, near Cornhill, 1678,. meets his tercentenary with his reputation unimpaired.

A LITERARY CORNER

THE AIM OF THE MODERN BIOGRAPHER What the modern historian wants to describe . (writes Mr Andre Maurois, the brilliant biographer of Disraeli, in the ‘Yale Review’) is not the statue but the man. In official documents, very often he finds nothing but the statue. It may bo in the letters or the journal of an unknown woman that hq will come across the anecdote that will suddenly reveal character. Ho must hunt for details if he wants truth. Of course, the question arises, What is truth? You remember Walt Whitman’s; When I read the book, the biography famous, And is this, then (said I), what the author calls a man’s file? And so will some one, when I am dead and gone, write my life? As if any man really knew aught of my life; Why, even I myself, I often flunk, know little or nothing of my real life. Whiteman is partly rigid. If wo think of our own lives, we realise that some of our most important acts have been accomplished by us without any real motivation. Perhaps we have said words which meant more than we thought; and a few months later we found ourselves involved in actions which did not coincide with our real wishes. This is true of Byron. Byron never meant to die in Greece, or even to go to Greece. He had played with the idea because ho was bored, because he thought it would relievo him of the tedium of his Italian life. Then the moment came when words were turned into acts, and Byron lived up to them. The writer should be careful not to make the life of his hero appear too well constructed. A human life is very rarcyl of the conscious accomplishment of the will. It is that partly, but you must always leave a certain margin for the action of circumstance. A “ tale told by an idiot,” says Shakespeare. There is always something of that madness in the lives of great men of action. If you leave out the strange atmosphere of fate, you miss all the poetry of human life. At the end of his biography of Ms wife, Alice Freeman Palmer, Mr Palmer says: “If my portrait of her is conect, invigoration will go forth from it, and disheartened souls bo cheered." This should apply to any biography worth writing. Such hooks should help us to bear the difficulties of life. They should help us to understand them. Carlyle said that “a well-written hie is almost as rare as a well-spent one." This is true, but “ great men, taken up in any wav, are profitable company.” DEAN m NOVELISTS In the Christmas number of the ‘ Bookman ’ Dean Inge writes on ‘ Reticence in Fiction.’ Discussing the typical modern novel, he says; “It has, I believe-; a very pernicious influence, not by its want of reticence, to which I do not object strongly, but by the mean and sordid view of .human nature which it fosters. . . . “Most earnestly 1 plead for a return to the glorious and wholesome traditions of the English novel. Surely a novelist should select and idealise as a painter does. • There are some things which are too mean and ugly to paint, and the same is true of human character and the incidents of life. A great imaginative writer should have a worthy view of the meaning and value of lilo in this world. He should interpret superficial events in the light of .this meaning and value. If he has no vision of the eternal values—goodness, truth, and beauty, which give to the flow of events all the substance and permanent reality that they have—let him hold his peace, for he has nothing to teach us, and by painting experience in drab and dirty colors ho is destroying the faith, hope, and love which still glow in the hearts of the young, and by which alone this perplexed and troubled generation may hope once more to sot its feet on firm ground. ‘ Where there is no' vision the people perisheth.’ To rob the young of their vision is a scurvy trick for anyone, who professes to love his country and his fellow men. THE MODERN WAY The result .of the revelation of the war has been that among the novelists, the playwrights, the painters, and musicians there has arisen a type of mind that at all costs will destroy those chimeras of romance. Hence among the finest of them you get a Scriabi.no who unfolds his conception of life lor you in his music by the passage of a mood, so true that it wraps you in itself, but has none of the whole adventure of life. Amongst the painters yon get a John who refuses, to .admit the romance of beauty in a line in order to give you the blazing truth of one angle of vision upon his sitter. Iu sculpture you get an Epstein with his ‘Rima.’ Amongst the novelists you meet an Aldous Huxley describing a character who declares he would lead everyone into a hole full of “centipedes and dung.” With the playwrights Noel Coward stimulates your passion for the truth with the subtle moods of his characters, who begin nowhere and got nowhere and achieve nothing in the rousing enterprise of life . It may be the contention of the modern novelist that life itself has no resolutions. It drifts on a current, but reaches no destination. All one can do is to catch mere glimpses of it as it goes by; little intimate peepings that are just true while they arc seen and then pass out of sight. And undoubtedly that is a fact. Lile goes on in a nagging way. But people do die, and there is a certain amount of resolution about death you cannot get away from. This peeping into the dressing rooms of women’s minds is a shrewd and delicate operation. It needs wit and cleverness to do it with real vision and without offence. The modern author is fully equipped in both these qualities. Undoubtedly it is a needful item of education in the truth to know something about this lingerie of a woman’s mind. We never know when we ourselves may not be called upon to hook up or tie. But not in that flimsy attire does any woman venture forth upon the story of her life. A man does not set out in Jaegar underwear upon his discovery of the New AVorld. It seems, in fact, iu reading the modern novels, that most of the characters contained in them are but partly dressed. They-, are not ready, as one might say, to go out into the street of adventure. They keep you waiting at the hail door of expectation, and before they get downstairs the hook is finished, the tale such as it is—is told. There is indeed no tale., no adventure —no romance; only an aroma, sometimes of delicate cosmetics, sometimes merely of perspiration.—E. Temple Thurston’, in ‘John o’ London’s AA’eekly.’

MR MAScrltLO UW fuelHT There are two kinds of spoken poetry (Mr John Masefield writes in a booklet issued by the Scottish Association for the Speaking of Verse) which from the childhood of man have given deep delight to multitudes. These are narrative and dramatic, the one being the recital of heroical happenings, the other the representation of them in action and character. We have in the English tongue and its dialects many examples of these kinds of poetry. Generally speaking, they exist in the editions of the learned upon the shelves ol libraries, for the use of scholars who want to pass examinations or to help others to pass. ... We have this mass ol poetry upon library shelves, which preserve it; our speakers never bring it down to the . multitude, to kindle it. The speakers say that it they were to try such a tiling the multitude would not be kindled, but bored, having now other pleasures. As they have not yet tried the matter, they should not bo so sure. We know this of that old poetry _ of storv, that unusual men were inspired to the making of it, that, when made, it .seemed inspired to others, and that when spoken or sung it swayed the hearts of the world. ... The poets of the tradition of the present day, which may ho said to have begun with Gray, Blake, and Wordsworth, tiro not, as a rule, concerned with narrative or drama. Their poetry appeals to a small part of the populace, and can, when well spoken, move that audience profoundly. The poetry of this tradition demands a way or speech which has nothing to do the excitement of an audience with event; since its subject is the soul, with her aspirations, doubts, and enjoyments. The method used by the speakers of such poetry must be of the nature of an absorption into the spirit. . • • The poet has packed his poem with thought, beauty, and rhythm, all three at their subtlest and most glowing. No speaker, not similarly _ gifted nor similarly stirred, will bring these things to the hearts of hearers. Let all speakers put from their hearts that hateful phrase “getting it over. Usually this means substituting a bad gymnastic performance for the poem. Let them be bumbler than tins. Let the power of the poem take hold of them, so that, speaking from its heart, its beauty may bo upon them and bo seen by those near. THREE BOMS ON A DESERT ISLAND If we were to play the old game of deciding what three books we should choose to have with us on desert island, surely they would be books m which we could browse (writes .Or Albert Feel, the editor of the Congregational Quarterly’). The Bible, of course; Shakespeare if we were wise. L wonder tfbat would bo ibiid^ Some people would plump at once tor an anthology; others lor Browning (not at all a had choice) ; and maybe a lew would choose Boswell; there would not bo wanting claimants f°r Milton; an eccentric here and there would want. ‘ The Shaving of Shngpat’; and those of the type of whom it. was said; ‘ He was born a man and died a preacher ” (rather an infelicitous epigram, I always think) could not do without Peake’s ‘ Commentary. 1 I am not sure that 1 would not make Bradshaw my thjrd line of defence! ft would bo different; it would .link with the past and provide hope and anticipation for the hiture: and I know' by experience how much pleasure it is possible to get out of its pages. Powder’s 1 Dictionary of 'Modern English Usage ’ I find so constantly useful, and so interesting when I take a glimpse into it, that it flashes across my mind as a possibility—but modern English would lie even less useful than Bradshaw on a desert island, and I am sure I should not get so much out of it! it strikes mo as I write that one of the most disquieting features of our time is that so few young people have a love of books or thrill when they are let loose in a library. There seems to bo little of the passion for reading that marked the despised Victorian of the “ Samuel Smiles ” generation. Now' a youth does not read ‘Oliver Twist.’ he “sees it on the pictures,” and anything which hasn’t the scares of 1 The Ringer’ “bores him stiff.” And just ns the youth is of this type, so his father, if ho he well off, never thinks of browsing, except in his newspapers. He may have a yard of Dickons and two feet of Rusk in and Carlyle nicely hound, hunt he never thinks of opening a volume. Browsing in Rockland! Foolish indeed arc they who never visit that enchanted country! Far cheaper than travel, it yet partakes of all its joys. Wise is the man who makes time for it, however busy he may he. AH AMAZING WOMAN WORKS OF HARRIET MTIHEAU Miss Naomi Royde-Smitii, in ‘Time and Tide,’ a new life of Harriet Martineau by Miss Bosanquet, says; “ A delicate and repressed young woman, already deep in the shadow' of an incurable deafness and having lived through the double tragedy of her father’s financial run and her lover’s death in a lunatic asylum, who took up her jien at the age of twenty-seven, and, anoiiymuosly, won three separate prizes offered by the Unitarian Association lor Essays designed to convert Roman Catholics, Jews, and Mohammedans, would even to day be regarded as unusually gifted. “ But that such a feat was possible to a young woman in England and in 1830 is so amazing that it almost seems incredible And as we continue to read of Jioiy subsequent career the amazement increases. For, encumbered by all the embargoes laid on the movement of tho elegant female of her day, reinforced by the even more stringent code of behaviour that was upheld in Nonfonforniist society, Harriet Martineau_ travelled to the United States; championed the Abolitionist cause; translated _ and reduced Comte’s ‘Philosophic Positive’ from ‘six volumes of ungraceful French to two volumes of clear English’; maintained herself and an invalid mother by her writings (and by a certain amount of fine needlework in the early days when her stories and essays had not made their market) ; and, when an internal trouble, which with characteristic prudery and determination she insisted on describing as heart disease, reduced her to the condition of permanent invalidism, retired to her deathbed, and from it contributed in all 1,642 leading articles to the ‘ Daily News.’ “Her manner of doing this was trenchant and inexorable, as well she deserved to make it. Jn 1861 she assured Florence Nightingale that she would write, in support of the reform of Army hygiene, ‘ a leader against the commander-in-chief every Saturday for as many weeks as there are heads of

accusation against him and his department.’'” Miss Olivo Heseltino, in the ‘Daily News,’ concludes her review;— i “Like that of Carlyle, Harriet Martineau’s success was due to her perfect, sympathy with the spirit of her times. Her morality, her earnestness, her astonishing industry, and her intellectual power, to which she added ‘ a force of conviction akin to that of a fanatic or a martyr,’ and a ‘ natural incapacity for doubt ’ made her influence irresistible. “ In the United States, where she joined the Abolitionists and exhorted American ladies to take exercise, open air, and the franchise, she passed from triumph to triumph. In London intellectual society she became a notable and honored bore. Wielding her ear trumpet, which she would lay aside whenever the conversation ‘tended in an unwelcome direction.’ she w'oulcl maintain for lengthy iperiods a steady stream of well-informed, complacent, hut not sparkling, talk. “She bored Browning, exhausted Mrs Carlyle, and outtalked Carlyle, who, when she retired to tiie sick room, calculated that ‘ this silence, forced silence, will do her much good.” . “ Yet her pen was even more industrious than her tongue. Her publications include novels, children’s stories, religious works, guides to manners, morals, domestic service, and the sick room. She was also the to build workmen's model cottages in England. DICTIONARY TASK OF 70 YEARS In an old high-pillared hall at Uxford sit twelve people .working m absolute silence on the last volume 01. the ‘ Oxford English Dictionary,' which was begun seventy years ago toi clay ” (writes the special correspondent at Oxford of the ‘Weekly Dispatch'). This colossal work was undertaken by the Philological Society at a meeting held on January 7, 1858. The duel editor was Sir James Murray, who died in 1915. The first volume, containing A and B, appeared in 1888. Few of the original staff are lell, but there is one compositor who lias worked on the sotting up of the dictionary from tho beginning:.’ Mr C. T. Onions, M.A., the present editor, started his work on the dictionary in 1895. He has edited the letters Su-Sz, X, Y, Z, and Wh-Wi, ami has now practically completed the rest of W. “Although this is perhaps tho greatest dictionary in the world,” he told me, “ there are many discrepancies caused by changes of language which were absolutely unavoidable. “For instance, the word ‘appendicitis ’ is not in the dictionary, as tho volume A appeared before the word had been even heard of. “Similarly, aeroplane, tank, jazz, vitamin, and many such words have been omitted. These we hope to include in an appendix. “Even ‘crossword,’ which has caused such a boom in the sale of dictionaries, is not included ! “ The word about which most has been written; and which took the most trouble—l did it myself—is ‘ set ’; it has so many different meanings and extensions of meaning that 30,00 U words are devoted to it alone. “ Notwithstanding the great size of the dictionary, wc have only been able to make use of one-third of the material at our disposal, which required the most careful pruning. “ New words, or new meanings to words, are accompanied by quotations to show their authenticity, in one case we quote the ‘ Weekly Dispatch as using the_ expression_ ‘wild men,' meaning political extremists. “We are not above including Americanisms. Far from it. Do you know that the expression. ‘For all one is worth,’ is of American origin-'” The total number of words in the dictionary is 414,820, with 1,827.3116 quotations. The complete work will be published early in March. ‘ THE MAKING OF AH IMMORTAL ’ GEORGE MOORE'S PLAY ON SHAKESPEARE Mr G eorge -Moore has contributed something more or less serious to the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy—if such a controversy may be said to bo still alive, it seems that, having written a play about Shakespeare, Jonson, Elizabeth, and Bacon, Mr Moore put it away in a drawer and let it remain there in manuscript _ for three years, “ foreseeing that if it were sent to a manager all sorts and kinds of proposals for cuts and transpositions would he made.” He has now issued it through Faber and Gwycr in an edition limited to 1,240 copies at three guineas. The book is called ‘ The Making of an .Immortal,’ and it sets forth that, in October, 1599, Queen Elizabeth was greatly disturbed by certain performances of ‘Richard the Second,’ not because she disliked the play, which, on the contrary, she admired, but because she suspected tho Earl of Essex of being its author, and of having “a traitor’s intent in the writing of it.” Bacon, who- had the best of reasons to know that Essex was innocent of tho jiicee, being alarmed by the Royal curiosity, consulted with Jonson how it might be allayed. Who was to appear as the writer of the plays that had been given the name of “ Shaksjiere ” ? Who better than the player in Burbage’s company, the spelling of whose name added but an “c” and an “a”? ‘ The Times Weekly Edition ’ gives some account of Mr Moore’s play;— The scene in which Jonson and Bacon persuade and buffet and flatter Shakespeare into accepting so prodigious a charge has a delicious irony. The, poor man has no wish to bo embroiled in the high scheming of the groat. He wants nothing better, if his fortune prosper, than to retire to Stratford, live on his small rents, patronise the Grammar School. But will lie not find Stratford tedious, Bacon asks, after the good company at the Mermaid? Shakespeare: Tho hours will not bo long enough for me. I think my tenants be all good and honest men, but tenants need watching, and quar-ter-day must be always at the back of a man’s mind Tenants call for repairs to be done, and repairs are worse than moths amid clothes; Holy Writ speaks of moths and rust, but repairs are your true devonrers, as 1 know, having paid many bills. Such is the man who is presented to Elizabeth by Bacon as the writer of all the plays. Elizabeth is deceived —perhaps a little too easily—and, to the consternation of Shakespeare, who knows he can write nothing, command’ | a new play of “ the fat knight in love.” But before the end, when he is assured that Bacon and Jonson will “ take the play over,” we guess how well he will perform his new part of I’nomo universale—well enough, it may he, to impose not on Elizabeth only, but on posterity.