SOME LITERARY PORTRAITS

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 142, 16 June 1923, Page 19

SOME LITERARY PORTRAITS

"Some Impressions of My Elders." By St. John G. Ervine. London: George Allen and Unwin.

Mr. St. John Ervine, in this book, has arranged a portrait gallery of contemporary literary celebrities, 1 whose names are literary household words. He hae drawn with considerable facility the literary lineaments of Messrs. George Bernard Shaw, " A.E." (Mr. George William. Russell), Arnold Bennett, Jonh Galsworthy, Gilbert K. Chesterton, H. G. Wells, George Moore, and W. B. Yeats. They ai-e all more or less heroes to him. He came late into the Victorian age of great personalities; or rather he entered, swelling with youthful enthusiasm, into the twentieth century, and saw and admired its literary heroes, among whom were those who bear the names above mentioned. He caught some of the fire that they imparted to young men and women of the early " nineteen hundreds." Ho is not ashamed of his devotion to his heroes. In his preliminary remarks for the benefit of the readers of this book, Mr. Ervine says: " The generation to which I belong was much impressed by the men whose work and beliefs are sketched in this book. All young men, whatever their class or culture, have heroes. The world, indeed, will end when young men cease to have heroes." The ''heroes" of whom Mr. Ervine writes so well, indeed, so affectionately, " were worthy," he says, " of emulation by me and the likes of- me." George Meredith and Thomas Hardy, he thought, " were too far up the slopes of Olympus for us to hope ever to touch tbe'hem of their garments, but we were alone in the same world with them, and sometimes spoke with people who knew them.

The passages that follow are taken from Mr. St. John Ervine's appreciatory portrait studies of his heroes.

Of Mr. Shaw, he wi'ites: "He is greatly generous to young men. Like most of my contemporaries I have imposed upon his good nature, very often I am under personal obligations to him of many sorts, and I do not kn/jw of any man who so freely helps his friends and says 30 little about it. He is now sixtyfive years old, but there are no signs of age about him other than the fact that his hair and his beard., once red, have turned white. He still has the mind and eagerness of a young; man. His walk is as springy and alert as it was when I first knew him. as I am sure it has always been. His fearless, challenging spirit attracted all those who were in revolt against stagnant beliefs; and even now. when the multitude seems to have caught up with him and his views are less startling than they were a few years ago, he still stimulates the minds of the young and the eager and sends them bounding forth."

H. G. Wells: "I do not know any man who can lose his temper in print with so much effect and so entertainly as Mr. Wells can lose his. ' Mr. Wells. . . . can no more elude artistry than he can refrain from thinking. He is extraordinarily indifferent to literary style, seems almost to delight in making a, clumsy sentence rather than a, shapely one, and so far as one can discover does not spend a single second on "finding the right word." The idea is his chief concern, and he cares very little for the way in which it is expressed. Nevertheless, he remains an artist, with a .gift for apt expressions and a far greater gift for selection."

Arnold Bennett: "Mr, Bennett, of all the men cf letters with whom 1 am ncquainted, not even excluding Mr. Shaw, is the most generous and kindly to young people. Mr. Wells likes young people, but his interest in them is curiously impersonal. He likes youth in a lump, bo to speak, rather than youth in the individual, just .as he seems ta love mankind more than he likes nny man. But Mr. Bennett likes you, the youth, personally. He. is happier on the whole with jioung people than he is with their elders, and he assiduously seeks their society. He is amused by their extravagancies, but not to the extent of sneering at them. He likes youth to be dandiacal, to have an air, to be arrogant, but not to be ill-bred, or pretentious or third-rate. In spite of him notable kindness, he can be merciless to humbugs, and stories are told of devastating things said by him to presumptuous persons and fools." "A. E." (George William Russell) : "He fills a room immediately and unmistakably with the power of his personality. A tall, bearded, untidy man, with full lips and bulkily-built body, he draws attention by his deep crey eyes. When he speaks, other people listen. If you were to meet him in the street, unaware of his identity, and he were to ask you for a match with which to lijrht his pipe, you would do more than civilly comply with his request. You would certainly say to yourself, 'That's a remarkable man !' "

Gilbert K. Chesterton: "Mr. Chesterton was sent into the world by an AllJust God for the exclusive purpose of saying the opposite to Mr. Shaw. With the most complimentary intention I sn.y that Mr. Chesterton's job in the world is, when Mr. Shaw speaks, to rejily 'On the contrary ! . . ." He has to restore the balance, which Mr. Shaw vigorously disturbs. Roughly, one may say that Mr. Chesterton stands for the common aiau against the very clever man; he believes moro in the,- People than he believes in Particular Persons. As he himself would say, he trusts Man more than he trusts any man, a statement which reads better than it sounds. Me believes in tradition, even in legend, which is the wisdom accumulated by man, not out of his mind sq much as out of his experience. He believes, in the institution of private property provided that the property is widely distributed " John Galsworthy :—"Mr. Galsworthy had a lov e For beauty which permeates everything that he writes and reconciles his more critical readers to his dubious characterisation. I suppose the truth about his work is that he has not sufficiently disciplined his feelings, and for this reason allows his sympathies with his suffering people to swamp his judgments. He is. in every act and thought a chivalrous man. and' his instinct is not to examine the facts of a case, but to rush instantly and hotly to the defence pf the seemingly defenceless. An artist is nevor indifferent to the wrongs of men. but his artistry prevents hinTfrom making mistakes about the persons who are suffering the wrongs. One* fear is that -Mi. Galsworthy is inclined to allow his philanthrophy to take the place of his artistry."

William Butler Yeats: "He lias a poetic appearance, entirely physical' and owing nothing to any eccentricity of dress; for, apart from his necktie there i,= nothing odd about his clothes It i s not easy to talk with him in a familiar fashion, and I imagine that he has diffir'ultv in talking easily of common topics I soon discovered that he is not comfortable with individuals-—he needs an audience to which he ran discourse in a pontifical manner. . . \ I do not believe that anyone in this world has ever spoken famUkri-/ to him, w thai, anyone, iuiis ever slauuau him oa Mi s ba«k"iUl4

said, 'Hallo, old chap!' His relatives and near friends call him 'Willie,' but it has always seemed to me that they do so with an effort, that they feel that they ought to call him 'Mr. Yeats!'"