MEMOIR OF MONTAGUE

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 120, 16 November 1929, Page 21

MEMOIR OF MONTAGUE

GREAT ENGLISH WRITER

FAMOUS LATE IN LIFE

(By "Sextus Redux.")

• * But for the war there is a doubt whether the world outside a circle of more or less intimate friends and the companionship of journalism would ever have known mucli of C. E. Montague. He had written a couple of novels, with a background of journalism, were highly esteemed among the craft for the qualities of intellectual truth and fine literary workmanship that every good journalist admires, if he cannot always aeliiove. Ho had published a collection of essays similarly appreciated, but read by no wider a circle. He had been, when the war broke out, leader-writer for the ' "Manchester Guardian" for over twenty years, and as such had helped to make public opinion, but this was all anonymous, and had Montague continued to the end in the same way he would in all probability never have become better known than he was "then. Montague joined up at the age of 47 . as a private in the British Army, and went through it in France as much as anylnan. He was seriously wounded m the Battle pf the Somme, and after seeing war from the ranks, "saw it again from the angle of the staff in the latter part of the fighting. He gave the. world the quintessence of his experience in the collection of articles which first appeared separately in ■ the '"Manchester Guardian" and /were afterwards republished under the title oi "Disenchantment." After all the patriotic piffle and propaganda of the actual war period,- and immediately after, "Disenchantment" was soon recognised by . those who ' had been through the fire and by the discerning Clitics who bad not, but knew instinctively what was true, that this was the real thing... To-day it.is classed with "All Quiet on the "Western Front" as one' of the- few great books on the war, certainly the best in the Eng-' lish language. Thus Montague began his rise, to fame. "Disenchantment" was followed by a novel, ".Rough Justice," also about the war. Then came "Fiery Particles," a sheaf of short stories, some of which wijl surely be immortal.. About this time Montague resigned from the Guardian," where too long he had been overshadowed by his great editor father-in-law Mr. C. P. Scott, who still occupied the chair at eighty,and only retired early this year. The loss to journalism was literature's immense' gain. One feels that' Montague must have known that his days were numbered, probably as the result of his war injuries, for he wrote hard, adding another novel, "Right Off the Map," another series of short stories and a collection of essays, with a binding thread of motive, under the title "The' Right Place.". His reputation grew with every new work, and when he died in .1928 he had already been admitted by at least the'verdict of his contemporaries to the select band, of the immortals; in English literature. Ana yet but for the war he would havo gone on writing leaders—doubtless the most, ephemeral pf .all the fugitive products that filf the daily paper—until the end, .at the best rising ito be a distinguished editor. t These few facts—one quotes them as such from memory, which may be fallible—are available just because pubhe interest in a man rising to renown deman&ed something of the kind precisely as in the case of the famous O..Henry (Sydney Porter), recognised also late m life, there grew up a legend around the meagre details ' gleaned from all sorts of sources. Not that the Jwo writers were in any sense alike, except that they were both, masters of the short story. Montague ■was a university man, an Oxford man, and went straight from Balliol College to leader-writing on the "Guardian" in smoky Manchester. His great adventure was the war. O. Henry had many adventures, and bore the sears of a chequered career both on body and soul until his early decease. THE MAN FROM HIS WORKS. . Can one build up a true image of a man from his writings? One should be able to do so, if it is a fact that the style is the man, as the French mot is. usually anglicised. Whether the image be true or not, most readers fall into a muse about favourite authors and wonder what they are like. Certainly the mina of the writer, if not his face ana figure,, comes "to take shape and thus we do get the real essence, the.spirit disembodied from its fleshlytrappings, and that is really all that matters. Inevitably a writer who has something to say does project himself into his books, which are his records lor the more or less sensitive reproducing apparatus of the reader's mind to interpret, each in his own way. A ■writer who has the conscience of ah artist will know, his subject and, this being-so/-he: will always tend to write about things -with which he is most •familiar, if they are proper subjects for art. Thus Conrad writes about the sea ana the Eastern Archipelago, for he iras a sailor, ana 'about anarchists and . the Continent, because he was born in Rusßian Poland and spent his early life among the people he describes. It « because Bennett knows his Five Towns best that his best books are about them, and' Wells, with all his vast survey in time and space, is most convincing in ringing the changes on the theme of "Kipps," the story of his own early life. „^°. °* Montague. He emerges from his not too voluminous published works firstas the incarnation of the best qualities of the English character with its instinct of justice, its tradition of tolerance, live and let live, liberty for the individual if it hurts nobody else, and its clinging to the good that it has with its mixture of evil ratier than a -revolution that may. lose all. Then Montague presents the bpst that has to give, which intellectually Is the training of the scholar in the search for truth in. the humanities1, with the presentatidn of a fair statement of the case, th» essence of it, if truth is still in abeyance. These qualities are hard to define, but no reader .of .Montague will miss what is meant. Having something to say, Montague v will go to infinite pains to express it with the utmost exactitude, with the transcendent honesty and loving care o£ a grer.t artist in literature. Every writer, cannot but admire the genius of a man who is content with no chance shot of second best. Montague probably did not travel far afield. He knew his England and its variety of charm, and he loved the Alps and the ventures of climbing. And he came to know all about the trade of war from the raw recruit to the commander-in-ehief. Thert is nothing about the Empire except, in "Disenchantment," a, tribute of admiration for the fighting qualities of the Australians. He has, unlike Galsworthy and his. Foggartism, no panacea for England's ailments in the shape of a Migration -'that leaves out of calcula-tion-the mind' of the Dominions. It is in.the best tradition of Oxford not to rush things' of thia kind, a sort of i

scientific humanism that will suspend judgment until all the .essential facts are marshalled; Moreover, years of leader-writing on a paper like the '''Manchester Guardian" must have made Montague still more careful in Ms choice of words and export in summing up .a. situation -without' overstepping the limit of the conclusion to bo drawn 'from limited facts, one of the arts of a good journalist. . fv. A PERSONAL LIGHT. But after all this may be tlie sort of surmise* in which Montague himself would not indulge very far. For this reason readers will be grateful for a book which throws a'personal light on the late:author, and that is Dr. Oliver Elton's "0. E. Montague: A Memoir" (published by Cliatto . and Windus, London). 'Dr..Elton, of ' Manchester University, was a close friend of .Montague, and this memoir -gives us a picture which it .would bo rather unfair to reveal to the reader now. Let him read the book himself. -But one cannot forbear to quote at least this, which shows Montague's modesty: I really think no one can ercr have read so few books as I. It's my constant experience to .flnctj people conversationally assuming that I have rend at least somo one page of Gibbon, Hume, Peacock, Landor, Coleridge, Montaigne, Southey, Pascal, Corneillc, Itacine, Goethe, Dante (here follow two lesser living writers), and, so forth, and then making desperate .efforts not to show impolite astonishment* at my having never opened them. How do people read so much? Most of my reading consists of what I heard F. (F. C. M.)- quote during our youth. . . All those little snippets and gobbets of quotation tickled me so much at the time that they always come into my head now when I attempt the "homely, slighted writer's trade"; and I see from reviews of nry •output..that on .some innocent minds I actually make the impression of a well-read person whereas anything Irquoto from a celebrated author is usually the whole mass of my reading. of him, or of what I have heard some more lettered p&son quote from him. AST ARTIST IN LITERATURE. What Montague wrote" is probably fairly widely .read.in New Zealand, and readers .'will have, their own .opinions as to what is his best work. Personally, I would put -"Disenchantment" first, then "The Right Place,", and then again the short stories. The novels are entertaining and full of fine passages,'.but Montague had been too long at leader-writ-ing to manage a really great novel; he could not refrain from comment when action was wanted. But of Kis greatness as a thinker and a writer there can be no doubt.- He-had studied the technique of writing, its rhythms, cadences and tempo, ana after a lifetime in. the hurry-scurry of work for a newspaper, he never allows himself to get into a rut. ( Every sentence has something fresh in the phrasing, even when the theme, action, or thought may not be far-from the commonplace. Something of what he was may be gathered from this^ample sentence from "The Right Place," quoted by Dr. Elton: Fleet Street- when the lamps are beiiiß lit on a clear evening; Southwark, its.ramshackle wharves and mud foreshore, seen from Waterloo Bridge at five o'clock on a sunny' June morning, the eighteenth-century bank of the bank; the Temple's enclaves of peace where the roar of the Strand comes so softened, you hear the lowest chirp of a sparrow, twenty yards away, planted clear and edgy, a little fore-' ground figure, on that dim background of sound; the liberal arc of a mighty circle qf buildhigs massed above tile Embankment, drawn upon the darkness in dotted lines of flight, as a night train brings you in to Charing Cross; the long line of big ships dropping noiselessly down the silent river, past Greenwich and Grays, 8n the ebb of a midnight high tide—o, there are endless courses to this feast. „--.. And finally the lover of England: My England is the Strand and Waterloo Bridge and all the Thames and the Pennine Hills here, and the crowd at a League lootball match, the Midland farmers talking like Shallow and Silence .about the price of beasts and the-look of the common soldier in France at anything new, and the special kind of goodtemper and humour and relenting decency that the man of the working classes has here.. That isjMontague.