THE WORLD OF BOOKS.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 18195, 4 October 1924, Page 11

THE WORLD OF BOOKS.

HALF-HOURS IN A LIBRARY. (SPICIALLT WaiTTIW JOB ,I THB PEiSS.") By A. H. Gbilling. LXXXI.—OX LITERATURE AXD JOURNALISM. One among many notable incidents of tlie Imperial Press Conference held in London in 1909 was a discussion on Literature and Journalism, with Lord Morley, Lord Milner, Mr "Winston Churchill, Mr Augustine Birrell, Mr T. P. O'Connor, Mr W. L. Courtney, and Sir Edward Russell as principal speakers. All the speakers found difficulty in defining exactly where literature ends and where journalism begins, or in deciding the point at which journalism merges into literature. Sir Edward Russell probably caine near the truth when he said, quoting Lord Morley as an example, that the best journalists go into journalism from the. love of literature. Championing the cause of the working journalists represented at the Frees Conference Sir Edward Russell said: This is the fact that lies at the beginning or the career of meat of us. We did not go into journalism from a love of disseminating news; we did not go into journalism with, any very extraordinary practical ideas as to the influence a newspaper might have upon the world. But we did go into journalism with the instincts of literature and the desire to cultivate literature .arid practise literature. And I go a step further and eay that the hest journalists are those who hive kept up thai ambition. .Without that ambition our profession is but a poor- avocation. And I will venture to say that the love of literature 13 tho .best antiseptic of tho Press. If a man loves literature, has the love of literature in him, he will shrink from an unworthy use of his position. Those of us who will cast our minds back into the experiences wo hnve had will find that tho journalists who have rendered the best services to their, time are those who have kept ieterature most in their minds. It. is these men who have had a sense of self-respect and who have prevented the degradation of literature.

Sir Edward Russell also said that journalists not only have the opportunity of keeping alivo what love of literature prevails in the community but also of very greatly increasing the love of literature. Thinking these things over it occurred to me that in H. W. Massingham there was an '.utstanding example of a journalist who has done much to increase the love of literature in the community. Since his death full justice has been done to Massinghara's journalistic flair, but his genuine love for literature has to a great extent been, passed over in silence. To many readers, the charm of "Tho Nation" was in its uniformly high literary level. This was in keeping with Massingham's own journalistic tradition. When Mr T. P. O 'Connor left the "Star" he was succeeded as editor by H. W. Massingham, who made it his business to enlist in the service of his paper such literary lights as Richard Le Gallienne and Bernard Shaw. Le Gallienne wrote as "Log-Roller," and he helped to make a good many literary reputations during the middle nineties. As "Cirno di Bassetto" Bernard Shaw discussed matters musical, making a specialty of Wagner, whose cult was then assuming popularity. In "The Press and Its Story" Mr Jas. D. £?ymon says: "It. was very courageous of a halfpenny paper, aimed not primarily at the educated. classes,, to devote so-much space nightly to the. things that make for culture, but it did not seem in any way to interfere with the commercial success of the journal." When Massingham left the "Star" to edit the Daily Chronicle" he carried on the same literary tradition. Massingham, says Mr Symon, "immediately gave the paper a literary interest possessed by no modern journal of that time. The so-called literary page of that paper was developed into a firstclass instrument of literary criticism." In "The Nation" also Massingham gave prominence to fresh poetic writings and to attempts to revive the literary essay as well as to short studies in fiction. One of "The Nation's" literary successes was the serialising of H. G. Wells's "Mr Britling Sees it Through." There may not be much in a name, but there is a good deal in an initial: besides H. W. Massingham, editor of "The Nation," there is H. J. Massingham, nature lover and essay writer; I am not certain whether the two are related, but I have saen it stated that H.W. is father to H.J. I am bound to confess that I have been inclined to confuse them, especially since essays by H.J. were one of the literary features of "The Nation." For a good while I made the mistake of thinking that H.W. and not HJ. was the compiler of "A Treasury of Seventeenth Century English Verse"

from the death 01" Shakespeare in 1616, to tho Restoration in 1360. Tins little book, issued in 1919 as a -volume, Macmillan's ''Golden Treasury"' series, is dedicated "in veneration'' to "YY. Hudson. It contains a number of very cboioc sems, many of them quite neweven to the well-informed and widelyread. A perusal of H. J. Massingham's introduction as well as the copious lutes appended to the poems shows that the process of compilation must have been, a labour of love. H. J. Massingham gives reason? for restricting the scope and range ot' his anthology to the 44 years between 1616 and 1660. "In the lirst place." he writes, "the yield is genuinely poetic; secondly the period has r, strong personal interest for me. and lastly it is the most neglected of any in English literature." He omits altogether tho "towering figures" of Herriek and Milton, since these poets are already sufik'icntly before the public "in cheap reprints and in numerous anthologies.'' For the rest, "the whole process of collecting these poems has been both a lengthv and a difficult one, and if I have not pleased (to beg the it has not been for want of trying. Since, again, this period has not received it's fair share of appreciation, I have found it necessary to write short biographical, bibliographical, explanatory, and critical notes to its poets and anonymous poems. I-or the anthologist. I agree, 'silence is best —where he tramps the turnpike road." The introduction is such a scholarly piece of work that it merits perusal in entirety "It mav interest readers to know," writes H. J. Massingham, "that to the best of my knowledge many fat a rough guess more than a fourth) of these poems are entirely new to the modern anthology; that a large number of the rest have appeared either in expensive, out-of-print, old, special, or otherwise not easily accessible collections, and that in consequence this collection, being the most complete survey of the period between the death of Shakespeare and the Restoration, does introduce to lovers of poetry a solid mass of new material." H. J. Massingham points out the intimate fellowship which exists between the poetry 0? the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, and he says:— We live indeed in a materialist age, but rather at the end of its triumph and the beginning of its nemesis. ISo • that the twin passions of seventeenth century poetry—its fascinated dwelling upon Death and that strange gladness which makes its poets dance in the sepulchre to meet a life more intense than the most radiant poetry—lay the subtlest spell -upon U3:— "When, then our services we apply To our own wants and poverty, When wo look up in all distress And our own misery confess, Seeding both wants and prayers aboveThen though we (Jo not know, we love." Thus they spoke and we can speak, for the more remote from us, the more tenderly the spirit is invoked. Thus, the broken fragmentary idealism of the seventeenth century is more to us than the frank materialism of the eighteenth century, thai l the Apollo-like pursuit of Daphne, of life by the Renaissance, or even the concrete imaginative unity of the Middle Ages. They, too, lived under the shadow of corruption and disintegration, and their poetry as well as oura feels, fears, and runs from the darkness. They could have understood, if they did not consciously expre® Anatole France's —"the life of a people is a succession of miseries, crimes, and follies." • Even their grotesquenesses, if queer to us in the actual shape tliey took, have a meaning for U3; like their poems are experimental in rhythm, Tapidly transitional in effect a.nd uncertain in technique.

In the fourth volume of,•• "Modern English Essays," edited by Ernest Rhys, H. W. Massingham has a place with an essay on "Shaw and Swift." Mr Rhys says of this contribution Ihat he with Henry W. Nevinson "serves to call up another review, 'The Nation and Athenaaum,' which has maintained the periodical-review withrsome verse." In the fifth volume of the same series H. J. Massingham has a place with "The "Venice of England," an essay the latter half of which appeared as a "Nature Study" in "The Nation" of August sth *1922, under the titile "A Littoral City." In an "Editor's Note" to the volume M*r Rhys says: "There are veterans in the book like the late W. H. Hudson, who was writing almost up to the days of his death. There are new essayists like H. J. Massingham, another devoted bird-lover and writer on wild life." H. J. Massingham compiled an anthology called "Poems About Birds," which had an introduction by Mr J. C. Squire. He collected a number of his fugitive essays in volumes bearing such titles as "Dogs, Birds, and Others," "Some Birds of the Countryside," "Untrodden Ways," and "Country Essays." The essay selected by Mr Rhys is thoroughly representative of Massingham's strong prose style encompassing his love of lonely places, his passion for wild life, and his intense sympathy with all .bird life. From the opening, the middle, and the end of the essay I have selected the following paragraphs: — Than Biakeney on th© north coast of Norfolk there is no lonelier place in England so lone and level that the sua vaults over' it in one majestic sweep from east to west, like a grasshopper bounding over a strip of lawn. Under the cupola of the heavens the eye rests on nothing but a hut or an old hulk stranded 111 the mud of the tidal creaks, and they, are stars in a void the emptier for them, while sky and land and sea are interpenetrated each with the other, mingling tueir essences io a partnership of Titan substance, which seems to be designing the birth of new worlds. And elemental birth there is, for these calm solitudes are the theatre of an intense energy condensed into * speck of geological time, a grandiose parade and strife of forces, a procreant urge, a crest and subsidence of being that lay thß ferment of creation bare to our wonder. ... And the colours of Biakeney, the Venice of England, if, as Dr. Oliver says, Venice be not the Biakeney of Italy, are truly the sparks and flares of the elemental factory. The land moves not only in the mirage of the heat-hazes undulating light; the eilver-grey foliage of tho Beapurslane shifting to pink through the young leaves like a young ■ hare's transparent ear, and to lavender in the shadows is n 1 tiny reflection of the huge mobility of colour in the full landscape. The ultra-marine of sky paling to turquoise in the horizon, of "the sea shot like silk with green; tho metallic emerald of the aigne on the mud flats; the umber of the sand hills; the yellow, orange, sreen, and white of the flowers • the pearls of the shells sewn like jewels into the shingle-pell, exchange their glowiug robes every minute according to the drying of the ground in tho density of vapour in different places, and in their flushing or pallor, with all the grades of tone between, seem to dramatise in their medium all the moods of passionate life, of becoming, of being, and of dying, j. . • Of this creative power and vehemence, seen in its very discharge, the trees are tho perfect art and expression. They are the absolute of bird-life in the sense that their inhuman loveliness, though the most highly finished of that of any bird known to me, is 7 et elemental, making one reflect that in evolution we do not get rid of the elemental, but see further into it. They are elemental in Nature's wheel, as Blake is in ours, the elysian flower or the rough roots of things, so fair, free and frail that tney might well be the substance hovering on the border between sense ' ar.d spirit, of wind, wave and "Argentine vapour. if tnev were souk, thev would yet enjoy the earth; if creatures of flesh, theirs to an immaterial world. The experience of walking among their "airy legions in the full breeding season is one of the richest and strangest. At Biakeney Point and in the Salt-house' marches at its heel some four thousand of them were nesting m 1922 among blackheaded v gnlls, . oyster-catchers, ringed ri i ov er. sheld:duck, and red shink. jive species in all, the Common, the Arctic, the Sandwich, the Little, and the Boseate Tern the last (one pair) faint-flushed with'rose beneath for tho dazzling white of the Sandwich and the pearls of the others, with longer streamers and even finer build, carrying tern-stnicture to the extreme' point of art in delicacy of line and shape. A little more, one feels, and this varied being would be resolved back into mist and Bjpras.