BACK WITH THE VICTORIANS: ON WITH THE GEORGIANS.

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 133, 26 August 1927, Page 12

BACK WITH THE VICTORIANS: ON WITH THE GEORGIANS.

OF magazines there are millions; magazines ponderous and magazines gaseous; magazines plutocratic and magazines penny-plain. S'ow and then an old name drops out, is did “Temple Bar” with its lingering flavour of Sala-ism, notably, as one thances to recall, Sala’s own queer and, in a sense, proto-Georgian novel, “The Seven Sons of Mammon.” It had a fluffy little vampire in it and a cold, porcupiny heroine, both very unlike the ever saintly, sweet, and pettable Victorian maiden. Still, the wild little vampire was pettable, and the chilly porcupine was at least fond oi illuminating saint-books with gold paint. But the Victorian proper threw large and stately shadows, and these shadows pass and re-pass in this file of last year’s “T.P.’s and Cassell’s Weekly,” which lies before me now. A gossipy, gallant, kindly fellow is “T.P.,” kind yet to the great ghosts he saw as living people, and willing to let them take the air of earth again, thronged with the living phantoms of our own hectic day. “T.P.” is an exponent of a delectable practice that brings modernism back to its beginnings with a round turn. Take a novel of 50 or SO years back; run it as a serial, and see how its leisurely periods fit with the age of wireless and television. Here is such a serial, some years short of its half-century, but in itself a survival in it 3 own questing decade. Hardy's “Mayor of Casterbridge,” monumentally, essentially Early Victorian, roughhewn out of gold-streaked granite, with the saga-like inexorability of Wessex as Hardy sees it. Hardy lives yet, a Tithonus who always saw the shades of Fate and Ragnarok nearer than the golden curls of Eos the Dawn-Bride. To read in early youth the Casterbridge epic of destiny and a man and to re-read it to-day is to see how a world of Forsytes and Raingoes is littering up creation with the broken road-metal of the Ten Commandments. The large simplicities of Elizabeth Jane and her mother —are they to be found in Wessex now? There is something of a blood-tie between this novel and its creator; for Hardy was born three miles out of Casterbridge (Dorchester) in 1840, and those who bless not “Tess” nor “Jude” linger tenderly over this tragedy of a man at grips with the Recorder, the Recorder that would not erase the story of a drunken boy-husband selling his blameless girl-wife at a fair. Yes, and the strong, stark Saxon was broken at last. The years elapsed since this novel saw the light are bridged for us by John Drinkwater, who dramatised it last season. One wonders how the spare, precise hand that interpreted Lincoln’s unhewn grandeur to England

This drawing is one of the most recent portrait studies of the author of “Abraham Lincoln.”

fared with those colloquial slabs of Saxon peasant life that are all as strange and far-away to post-war Englishmen. Two Victorians who break their early matrimony at a fair, and are stalked by Fate as mice by a cat till all is through: two who marry late and easily in the Georgian way, and part as easily in Somerset Maugham’s way. In his modern story of the East, “P. & 0.,” the perfectly domestic and wholly unthrilling life of Mr and Mrs Hamlyn comes to a deadlock in Yokohama. At 52 the husband finds his other self and demands his freedom. Not lightly does the awakened wife accord it; but she does. Nothing new in all this, but much new in the husband’s plea. At 20 one expects to love for ever; at 50 one knows love lasts so short a while that not a day must be lost of what may have faded in six months’ time. It is the MaughamGeorgian gospel in a nutshell: the apothesis of the hour. Eternity is long: leave the long things till we get there. Dickens gossip is ever in season in “T.P.’* Somebody moots the question of a possible Welsh origin, partly from the fact that Dickens is a surname not infrequently met in West and South Wales, partly from the emotionalism met in his books. The evidence is on a par with Bram Stoker’s famous string of hypotheses which, all granted, would prove Queen Elizabeth to have been a man. It is good to learn, howeVer, that England has judges still who grew’ up with the ageless brain-children of Dickens, real to them still. Here Judge Parry tells us how Micawber’s ghost still haunts the Country Courts, but in this gentler age he rarely goes to prison* The psychology of the auman debtor is complete in every detail in the portrait of Wilkins Micawber, and exasperating as he must be to business traders, he still knows how to give them medicines that make them love him. Does one need to be a judge in embryo to be captivated by the beautiful faithfulness of Tim Linkinwater? Dickens was the poet-laureate of English clerkdom: Newman Noggs, Regk nald Wilfer, Bob Cratchit, Tim Linkinwater, and their peers—no two alike, not one divested of the peculiar patience of men whos_s lives are lived by

the tick of the clock. But again it 13 good when a judge confesses from his knowledge of Whitehall that “not all the Barnacles are yet scraped off the bottom of the ship of State.” From open confession we may come to grace, not unhustled by that Great Eastern of a nation now so busy scraping off itself the barnacles of five thousand recorded years. Who are the most hectic and the most paradoxical of once staid Engfand*3 hectic and paradoxical hour? A certain R.E.M. answers his own question: “Who are the Three Sitwells?” by adding: “The Stormy Petrels of Literature.” Curiously hard and yet distantly bland looks down the face of Edith Sitwell on a “posing world,” that has to be lectured on its sandals, its Morris dancing, and its sitting on floors without chairs. To us, simple in our insular bareness of stage properties, the accusation sounds parochial. At all events, we are perversely desirous to stamp as parochial three people who have on their father's side descended from Saxon earls and Norman barons of the 11th century, while their mother derives from John of Gaunt. Admirals, generals, marquises, lords, bishops, knights have all boiled dow r n to the Jaek-o’-Lantern

free verse of Edith Sitwell, and her freer fireworks in prose; to the kindred satire of her brother Osbert, and the harking back to Italian art of Sacheverell Sitwell. It comes as a shock to hear that, of these Siamese triplets of the Georgian Parnassus, one, and that the youngest, has detached himself sufficiently to marry As the classical one of the trio, Sacheverell has been less of a Jack-o’-Lantern than the other two; but he, too, shares in his sister’s complacent verdict. “We all have the remote air of a legend.” But were there no posers in the days of the giants? It comes with an odd ghostliness when Horace Vachell confesses that his first novel was inspired by reading Quida, and that, on wise advice, he made an offering of it to the fire gods. Probably no two women contemporaries ever wrote on lines more diverse than Duida and George Eliot. That renders more piquant the quite serious adjuration of the survivor: “You must make much of me, for now George Eliot is gone there is no one else who can write English.” The young Vachell saw Ouida in Florence about 1879: I thought her very ugly, with beautiful hands and feet. Out of a sallow face sparkled a pair of blue eyes; her pale hair hung down her back; she wore white satin and white shoes. It is forgotten in these days that Ouida had a pen that swayed 10,000 hearts in such outlaw idylls as “Bimbi,” “Two Little Wooden Shoes,” and “A Dog of Flanders.” For the rest, it was well that her naughty laurels were laid safe upon her quiet breast before England saw Georgian flappers writing novels that by comparison relegate “Moths” and “Friendships” to a Sunday school prize shelf. Who, finally, is this, dome-browed and bold, whiskered, plump, and spectacled? Not a master stockbroker, though vou might think it, but the great Edward Lear, creator (surely while he wore Eton jackets) of that child-classic “The Owl and the Pussycat Went to Sea.” Somehow an innocent colonial heart had always imagined this magnum opus one of these unfathered fragments that make up the folk lore heritage of centuries. When, in a sumptuous new edition of Edward Lear’s poems, “The Owl and the Pussycat” came alive in black and white (one had fancied it had slipped by Caxton and his heirs), and the author was listed as still much alive, it seemed the next thing to meeting one of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. But the name of Lear goes to immortal fame on his limericks. He did not create the limerick, which dates back a long uncertain while; he was. however, its Victorian godfather. The limerick was an old friend, but what are these desperately up-to-date verses that take up the succession? They bewilder eye and ear in equal measure. Where is the sonorous roll of the immortal “Old Man of Tobago? - ’ Where the tragic, flowing grace of the “Young Lady From Riga,” and where the swinging defiance of “The Old Man of Whitehaven?” The limerick of our childhood was neither a tongue-twister nor an eye-twister; thess Georgian fireworks are both. Of a whole column, but one is quotable: A brave mother do g of Corstorphine Once swallowed a large dose of morphine, Thus preventing her pup From gobbling it up— Would you like to adopt a sweet orphine? Truth to tell, the little Victorians lived on sparse, plain fare. They had no friendly Beatrix Potter, no glorious A. A. Milne, no mystical Walter de la Mare. Nor need the grown Georgian starve; there is sweet writing and gallant writing still. Yet often does the competent critic, He of the Duster, to wit, go forth with Diogenes, torch in hand, to find it. JESSIE MACKAY. Cashmere.