Sassoon. To some such sequence may seem fantastic, but the judgement of the world takes little account of periods, and there is little real difference between the poets of the sixteenth and of the twentieth centuries. They all love the same England: they are all, if with varying accents, masters of the same incomparable tongue.' The patriotism sounds homelike. Perhaps it has contracted the range of this anthology a little. Here is Browning's Oh! to be in England,' but not the still more characteristic Italian companion piece. Some poems too that can scarce be spared are spared as being already gathered into that Anthology of Modern Verse, of which we grow jealous while we grow ever fonder of this excellent new collection. The alphabetic arrangement quite approves itself. Strange it is how little one feels the difference of time while the difference of personal style strikes clearer. Cowley's 'Well then! I now do plainly see runs on easily from Cory's Mimnermus': Donne and Drayton have the breadth of the sky between them. The alphabet and the anthology open well with A.E. and ' a hearth fire blazing through it all, a home without a circling wall.' Matthew Arnold comes next with modern discontent upon him, all scattered in a moment by 'the frail-leaf'd white anemony, dark bluebells drench'd with dews of summer eves, How gently that brings back his country boyhood to a Dick Whittington. That is poetry, the gay art; and in this large collection (yet a pocket book) he will indeed be dull who finds not plenty to renew youth. Let it be added that one sad defect in the Golden Treasury is not found here. Poems about God and faith and divine love have place here with the rest. Quite naturally they come : no need to distinguish them as religious: they are just an expected element in the infinite life to which poetry gives form. The Letters of Henry James, selected and edited by PERCY LUBBOCK. 2 vols. (Macmillan. 1920.) 36s. net. A GOOD many people read Henry James with relish, yet are modest enough to admit that he puzzles them: they do not always see what he would be at. These letters will enlighten them. He says a great deal here about his idea of the storyteller's aim and method. Some of his friends would send him their books and he tells them how he would like to do the subject. He enlarges genially and fills a page or two with patient and vigorous effort to explain himself. And when something of his meaning has been caught a fresh interest is added to all the letters; for he writes all as he would write a story, winding in and in, creating a bounded world of relations with the friend he addresses, gathering strands persistently together and drawing the knot of association tight. No doubt that is the reason why these friends are so distinct: they live like persons in a story: you do not need their own letters to understand them. And there are delightful bits of criticism of other authors which all fit into his idea and are all good-natured, for he says that the only criticism worth making is enjoyment appreciation interpretation if he ever does find fault and merely fault it is with some book he sees no use in and will not dwell upon. And it is agreeable to find this touch of our common humanity in him, that he is tender towards the authors who are bound to him by personal acquaintance. There, it might seem, is one reason why he qualifies his respect for George Meredith: he knew Meredith but slightly. Still there is more than that. The difference between them was essential. James' ambition was to write prose, he hardly cared even to read poetry: and Meredith was all but wholly poet, his poems were what he wrote for pleasure, his novels are for all time in proportion as they are suffused with poetry. And Meredith's passion was for mother earth the loves and heroisms of man are commingled with the spirit of universal nature which was for him certainly divine. But James has no such large feeling for nature. In these letters there are very many exquisite little pictures, lovely notes from Italy in the first volume, then even better of England and America. You can hardly read the book without making an index for yourself of perfect phrases of description. But there is the limit. The neat description not the rapture is what James catches. He does it just as Horace does: a charming way but detached and simple. In fact we get hereby rather a surprising hint about Henry James' whole range of thought. He elaborates, but always on a simplified theme: it is urbanity unperturbed by the vastness and mystery of nature. And though he knew he simplified and meant to, it seems as though he did not know how much he was preordained for this by innate carelessness towards the mind in nature which is not dependent on the minds " of men. 'The walks are innumerable, the pleasant" wildness of the land (universally accessible) only another form of sweetness, and the light, the air, the noble graceful lines etc., all of the first order. It's classic-Claude-Virgil.' Of course he knew, and knew profoundly, that Vergil stands for more than that. And when he says 'classic' he carries his thought on far beyond the pretty sentences just written. His own art is classic. It is in the intellectual Latin line, as these letters with their enthusiasm for Italy, and their steadier returning sympathy with France, so constantly shew. And his art is very serious. Artist: he was that above all. How hard he worked to become ever a better artist, more accomplished, more sincere. How intensely he enjoyed that labour. The style is part of the art. In the novels the style is disciplined to utmost perfection of conversational ease. No one since Plato has written so nearly like Plato. Very attentively therefore do we follow the structure and diction of these letters in which the style is quite as conscientious, but runs without anxiety: the artist's brain, which never rests, plays here and experiments at large, striking out inimitable phrases more abundantly than in his books. And so many are noble phrases. But this nobility is characteristic of the whole life. For these 413 letters with Mr. Lubbock's introductory notes to the eight groups of them form the best biography of Henry James that can ever be written. What with America and England, travels in Italy and France, the settlement at Rye, the increasing circle of notable friends, the passage from the elder to the new generation, there is plenty of incident. But the emerging of the character is the main interest. And the whole impression is of pure goodness. Here is a man much loved, who may always be counted upon to choose the right in every crisis, whose thoughts are always chivalrous, a great man and attractively modest. Strange that religious faith should seem to have had no place in his mind at all. Explanation is sufficiently provided in the Johannine theology of the Word, and it would be impertinent to invade a sacred privacy. But in the letters to and about R. L. Stevenson an unusual emotion stirs. And as the record nears the end a kind of awe rises upon the reader. Henry James' work for men was a rare work for which detachment was probably necessary. Others who gave hostages more recklessly to fortune might move the multitude, but he educated in a unique conscientiousness those fewer souls which were fashioned for his school. Nevertheless the end, which was the war, brought him at last near to the great suffering brotherhood of men, and as he drew up with them a change set in. Age, illness were all but forgotten. A new life, a more passionate season began. In the last letters it is as though the veteran artist were feeling for a formula which had not been needed before: now his deepening sense of relationships does need it. Anyhow these last letters crown the work and shew that this collection is indeed a fine biography. It is the story of a life which we read with increasing attention and at last with breathless interest: a life which sweeps onward with its own steady purpose, reacting by degrees perceptibly to larger forces around it, and finally lifted on a great tide to an unexpected and glorious fulfilment of its destiny. The Most Holy Mother of God in the Songs of the Eastern Church. Translated from the Greek by the Rev. G. R. WOODWARD. M.A. (The Faith Press. 1919.) 6s. MR. WOODWARD, 'for more than half a century an enthusiastic lover and admirer of John Mason Neale's hymns of the Eastern Church,' following in the footsteps of his master, has collected from the service books of the Greek Church and translated into English verse one hundred and thirty-six hymns addressed to or in honour of the blessed Virgin Mary. In an appendix he adds the Canon Parakletikos to the most holy Mother of God, on expectation of war,' taken from the Great Euchologion, Venice 1891. The collection is interesting and includes many pieces of great beauty. Mr. Woodward falls far short of Neale in genius for such translation: his unusual words have a very different effect from Neale's, and the general flow of his verse is undistinguished. Nevertheless he gives the sense and feels the devotion of the original. No little gratitude is due to him for opening this rich treasure of faith to Western hearts. The glossary is useful but might be fuller. The principle on which accents are attached to some but not to most transliterated words is not clear. The Poets' Life of Christ. By NORMAN AULT. (London: Oxford University Press. 1923.) 7s. 6d. net. IT is to be hoped that the singularly beautiful anthology which Mr. Norman Ault has compiled, arranged, and decorated,' under the title of The Poets' Life of Christ will receive the wide recognition that it merits. We are living in an age of good anthologies, and the standard of appreciation, in lyrical verse at least, is high. Mr. Ault's anthology, quite apart from other considerations, shews him to be peculiarly well equipped to take his place with the best of our modern gatherers. But he is more than a gleaner: he has essayed the most difficult of anthological forms, the form adopted by the Poet Laureate in The Spirit of Man, in which a coherent whole, a unity of design, emerges as in mosaic. To succeed, such an anthology calls for a comprehensive sympathy, a keen sense of appropriateness, and an intimate knowledge of the byways of good reading. These qualities Mr. Ault has brought to his task, and in our opinion he has achieved a remarkable success. His aim has been to reveal the extent to which the life and teaching of Christ have inspired the poets of the English-speaking race and not least those who are not famed for their specifically religious poetry. Over five centuries of English poetry have been drawn upon, and, so far as one can see, there is no period in this long stretch of time that has not left a rich bequest of verse for Mr. Ault's readers. What is particularly pleasing, and indeed impressive, is the range and variety of mood and experience illustrated. Old truths appear in many a new light and 'shine the brighter clad in verse.' We have the quaint simplicities of the popular ballad, as when the wicked King Herod calls out Rise up, rise up, you merry men all, See that you ready be, All children under two years old Now slain they all shall be. We recover many a lost treasure of naïve expression from old carols or the songs of the Miracle Plays, or we catch something of the sympathetic insight of the Shakespearians when the pamphleteer and dramatist Dekker closes one of his plays with the reflection that the best of men That e'er wore earth about him was a sufferer, Single pictures stand out, as when Giles Fletcher greets the A star comes dancing up the orient. VOL. XCVI.--NO. CXCII. 2 C |