BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

Evening Star, Issue 14036, 17 April 1909, Page 10

BOOKS AND BOOKMEN.

‘One Immortality.’ By H. Fielding Hall. London: Macmillan and Co. . • Hall having secured a reputation for the excellence of his literary work, it was in order that his publishers should revise and reissue his earlier efforts. Such, at least, we understand to be the origin of ’; whether the resurrection pays in other than financial ways is, of course, always a doubtful question. Seine minds, swayed by the glamor of a writer’s later and approved work, will be apt to find in whatever else he may have done more than is really there, while the commonplace not impossibly will be exalted to an untenable height. There is nothing exceptional in ‘One Immortality.’ It is not so much a novel as a series of discursive conversations—the themes whereof are love and marriage—carried on by three men and three women on the deck (first class, of course) of an eastward-bound steamer and on hotel verandalis. To these three men we might add two others—Othello and Hamlet, so nicknamed—who think they are in love with an Indian Princess, and a German professor who is certain he knows pore about human love, its symptoms .and its effects, _ than any other "learned antiquarian of them all. And to the three women may be added four nuns and a lady who has made an unhappy marriage. But it is mainly two of the three men and two of the three women who keep up the story. The men are bachelors, and of the women one is a happy wife and the other is known ■as ‘‘ the girl.” These constitute the dramatis person®. Their work is to talk, and in their talk to develop (Mr Hall’s thesis, which is thus set forth: “There are three loves that make and keep the world—the love that, binds man and woman into one flesh and soul, the love that draws families into nations, the love that holds the world to God . . . this book is about the first.” Apart from the conversations, there is little action; the characters do not do things, hut they sit and talk and walk and talk and eat and talk. They are all philosophers, they all have views, and they all speak as we can imagine few persons speaking anywhere out of a book. That human love is the most desirable thing on earth : that it cannot be forced or seized or gained, but must be given; that marriage without love is not marriage; that some are born who can neither feel nor know love; that marriage is the fruit of love and the crown of its development; that, failing the gift of loving, it is better to concentrate one’; life to other work than mar it ’by a conventional marriage—these and other admirable sentiments, prettily if artificially expressed, make up the sum and snbsl/.nee of ‘One Immortality’—i.e., two hearts, one the complement of the other, perfected by marriage, and henceforth one immortality. The tale, if tale it he, is lightened here and there by an arresting sentence: “We live upon an island, and we make islands of ourselves ” ; “we make a science of the body and forget we all have souls which are immortal ”; “ the world is formed and governed by men, but mainly on women’s ideals,” and the like. At times we are tempted to contradict and to smile. _ Air Hall’s philosopher-lover and “ the girl ” are not always and at all times above making themselves ridiculous, and we are not certain that they really know what it is to love. There is too much preliminary conjugation of the verb. SWINBURNE AND SHAKESPEARE. —‘King Lear.’— The first chapter of Swinburne's recently published ‘ Three Plays of Shakespeare”’ (a hook of some eighty pages) renews its author’s old contention that in ‘ King Lear’ Shakespeare showed himself “a spiritual :f not a political democrat and Socialist.” The play, he reiterates, “is the fir-b great utterance of a cry from the heights and depths of the human spirit on behalf of the outcasts of the world—on behalf of the social sufferer, clean or unclean, innocent or criminal, thiall or free. . . . Not political reform, but social revolution as beneficent and as bloodless, as absolute and as radical, as enkindled the aspiration and the faith of Victor Hugo, is the keynote of the creed and the watchword of the gospel according to Shakespeare.” We cannot accept these characteristically fervid and sweeping assertions. It is almost irresistible to try to fasten on Shakespeare, as his views, the noblest wo find coming from characters of his, as judged by us; but that way lies the madness which would find at last a vegetarian Shakespeare in Aguecheek’a note of the harm that beef did to bis wit, or <on antivegetarian Shakespeap’ in Doll Tearsheet’s scorn for a diet of pokes and prunes, or an anli-rivisectionist/Shakespeare in someone’s suggestion,'An ‘ Cymbeline,’ that a queen who ti ies poisons upon cats and dogp may presently be trying them “up higher.’’ But it is not for exact or close, critical thought that on© most looks to Air Swinburne: rather for his splendid incidental finds of poetic gold in words and passages where others had overlooked it. He noses out stuff of quality as the right dog finds truffles; as you read him, on the most familiar of plays, you may be sure of coming now and then, with a start of pleasure, on some delight you had missed. —‘ Richard ll.’ Both the sureuess of perception of poetic values and the unsureneas in critical reasoning and moral mensuration are shown in the new notes on ‘Richard H.’ Like the other critics, with the handsome exception of Pater, he takes a hanging judge’s line with Richard from the opening of the trial ; and time has not softened hi~ auger; from being “somewhat pitiful but not unpitiable ” in 1879, Richard’s character is now “beyond all reach of manly sympathy or compassion unqualified by scorn”; “loathing and abhorrence” are all that it gets. Somewhat bitter words these for a character half formed and then gone wrong, but still with some strains of fineness; and Air Swinburne seems to take no interest in what is most serious in Richard—that, unlike other people in Shakespeare who have lovely things to say, he is shown as himself the conscious artificer of their loveliness, a craftsman at work, a dealer on the fit image and the right turning of a phrase, bent, as he says, on “ hammering out ” expression to its perfect form, like the Flaubert and the Stevenson who described themselves in their ktters. But even a passion of dislike for Richard cannot keep Air Swinburne from pouncing down with a reluctant delight on the most beautiful passages of his speeches; his sense of relative values in the unit or poetry—the single image, the line, the clause—comes at last to impress you as something almost scientific in. its rightness; his mind tests for poetry as a chemist tests for arsenic—with that kind of working certitude. He can take ‘ Richard H.’ and Alarlowe’e ‘ Edward H ’ and go through the two, marking values as he goes, and cany you with him the whole tune, whatever your prepossession was and however you may be ruffled by his whirl of superlatives. —‘ Othello.’— The third play is ‘ Othello,’ and here Air Swinburne’s wish is to show what, and Shakespeare changed in Cinthio*s preexisting story. The explanation is nearly always acute, .and convinces you ; thus on”° of the gems of Cinthio’s spirited dialogue was surely cut out because it would have coarsened Shakespeare’s Othello, thou"h it was the best thing in Cinthio’er Moor Another big change was prettv clearly made to ennoble Emilia. But his explanation of Shakespeare’s revision of the handkerchief episode os told in the story, where the original of iago steak the handkerchief from Desdemona’e girdle while she is embracing a baby girl of his, is not convincing. “In Shakespeare’s world as in Nature’s it is impossible that monsters should propagate: that lago should bemrt or that Goneril or Regan should brim' forth.” What then are we .to say of Sycorax, who brought forth Caliban, or of Lady Macbeth, who had children, eke what meaning have her words: I have given suck and know How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks one? (s not Mr Swinburne’s sweeping universal negative, which breaks down so soon, perhaps an instance of the lengths to which the purely literary critic of drama is often driven, by his habit of seeking explanations .everywhere except in the practical conditions of -theatrical representation? It »' that Shakespeare

abolished the baby simply because babies are kittle cattle to drive on a whether you hare them real or of sawdust; the one m ‘ The Winter’s Tale ’is a pest, and audiences nearly always laugh at it. One feels sure that Mr Swinburne himself, had he been writing an ‘ Othello.’ would have scorned to omit or include a baby for any reason winch had not deeper roots in the moral soil, and he honorably attributes to Shakespeare no motive that he won'd himself disdain. But Shakespeare wan an actor and a manager, and theve have a law and prophets of their own. though men of letters will not see it, even men who hive themselyes written great literature in semi-dramatic form. —Textual Criticisms,— At act v., scene ii.. line 316 of‘Othello,’ ho offers an emendation. The line is; Othello : 0 villain ! Classic : Most heathenish and mod ittoss. “ The sense.” Mr Swinburne writes. “ ie improved and tlm metre is rectified when wo perceive that the original pi.liter misUiok thewoid ‘ viilanie ’ lor the word ‘ villaine.’ Such rorrectioiis of an nnrevised text may seem slight and trivi.il inatupa to KngUsnmsn who give tbnaks fcr the like labor when lavished on f.mom'-iat.i oi third-rata pools of chwicul antiquity: the toil J.eetowed by a Bentley or a B.nsoa on Enipidns or lioia.-e must naturally, in the judgment of universities, seem wasted on Shakespeare or on Shelley.” The truth is that the emendation which Mr Swiaba;ne oilers as new, with his sconi for univci.sities, wra made in 1031 in the ‘T.'.irvaid ’ text, edited by Mr 11. N. Hudson. and it is dulr recorded (though rot era bodied in the text) in the second edition of the ‘Cambridge’ Shakespeare, published in 1892. Whatever their past enois. the universities, and particularly Cambridge, have done some noble sendee in late years to the text of Shakespeare, of Beaumont and FletcL'i, and of other English pee to. But oversights like this in Mr Swinburne will certainly scam slight and trivial matteir, to Englishmen who know how to set the right value ou Shakespearian criticism like his—full of exaggerations, inconsequences, spluttering over-emphasis, headlong positive-jk-ss. but still as different from the common perfunctory gush or rant about Shakespeare ‘V? sunlight from gas. \\ hen a Hue in Shakespeare gees to Mr Swinburne's head, and he raves about it. he somehow makes you fori as if you had seen Shakespeare wnte the Hue and then put clown the pen and slap his thigh.—C.E.M. in the ‘Manchester Guardian.’ WINK AND POETRY. Mr Richard Lo Gallienne, who has foi many yearn now taken un his abode in America, discusses in the ‘New York Times,’ apropos of the centenary of Edgar Allan Poo, the question of alcohol as the servant of a man of genius. Personally. i!r Le Gallienne is the most temperate of men, and states ’hat he wrote his version of the ‘Rubaiyat’ and the ‘Odes of Hafiz’ under the infiuer.ee of milk. He is not, however, prepared to prescribe that beverage for all poets. But here is his philosophy of the matter. Speaking of Ernest Dowson he says: "I knew the poor fellow. He and I belonged to a Rhymer s Club in London. Lionel Johnson was another member. Both of thcc-e men wrote exquisitely, both of them drank—and both of them are dead. I am the only survivor of that little London club. It is rather a melancholy showing, is it not? Naturally you say: ‘lf Dowson and Johnson had not used alcoholic stimulant they might be alive to-day.’ Possibly ; but would they have written their poetry? If Poo had been a teetotaler would he have written ‘The Raven,’ ‘Annabel Lee, ‘The Bells ? If Shakespeare had never known inebriety would not some of the most human passages in his dramas be cancelled? Imagine a Burns to whom ‘ usquebaugh ’ was unfamiliar. ‘ They all shortened tht-ir lives,’ you say, ‘by their excesses. They might have lived to turn out more work had they been teetotalers.’ But what kind of work would it have been I wonder! If the stimulus of alcohol creates a poet, a rhapsodist who lives for one gorgeous moment in a region of eternal beauty and leaves the vision of what ne sees there to posterity, does it matter 'f this sane stimulus kills the man in the poet? ■ —Cocktails Won’t Do.— These who invoke tire vinous god may enjoy the inspiration that they seek for a brief space ; but in accepting this deity’s aid they are entering upon a Alephisiophelian contract, the terms of which are inexorable, and must be paid in the end uith a man s life-blood. I have sung the praise of rose gardens, of vine” clad grottoes, of bubbling wine—their modem equivalents appear to be the saloon and the cocktail. And from these latter there flows an inspiration that is deadly to the ethereal imaginings of poetic genius. There are so many other artificial stimuLints the use of ■vrliich there comes.no death-dealing aftermath! The sight of a book that one loves, for instance, the play of, light on a familiar object, the pure breath of morning across a dew-washed meadow, the adoration of a woman’s beauty —these must be an unfading stimulus to a poet, an open sesame to finer worlds than will ever yield their secrets to the invocation of alcohol. The ideal stimulus to poetic genius is surely something of the sublime sort that one thus imagines. Manv a poet—Shelley, for worked under its beneficent influence. But there are othens, whose verse is equally an immortal gift to mankind, to whom inspiration lias come through the artificial stimulus of such strange aids as wine, opium, tobacco, tea, coffee. Keats drank claret wliile he wrote. Balzac relied on coffee, Schiller craved the odor of decayed apples. What has the moralist to do * with such cases? Let him judge onlv bv results, fay the actual work of such mem Too often tiis poet finds himself chained t-o a physical organisation whose weaknesses impede his flight up the steeps of Parnassus. In his hunger to feel the full force of his nature, to restore it to its normal condition, he discovers what he needs in alcohol or some ocher stimulant. That is probably the genesis of drink in such men as Poe or LOiendge. If they suffer ultimately from the ties of such deadly aids they at least attain their goal, the enjoyment of ‘one crowded hour of glorious life that is worth an age without a name.' And in their achievement, bought at no matter how dear a price, mankind is surely the richer and the wiser.” MISCELLANEOUS. On what may be called the neutral ground of the University Magazine.’ which is published at Montreal, Mr Stephen Leacock, a Canadian, writes on ‘Literature and Lducaaon in America,’ and the burden of his discourse is the backwardness of American literature, with the possible causes for tae bngnting or of its genius. • • ■_ -‘h’ Leacock race met a gentleman from Kentucky in a railway train,"to whom he broached what is perhaps his favorite theme, and this gentlernSa said: ‘‘l am afraid, sir, you are imperfectly acquainted with the work of our Kentucky poets.” A friend of Mr I-eacock’s from Maryland has assured him that before the North and South War that State had seen the mostremarkable literary development since Plato’S time; and ‘it is asserted that the theological essays which are put together in Prince Edward Island challenge comparison with those of any age or country. Messrs Georcre Allen are nearing the completion of their library edition of Rusworks. They published volumes 56 and 37 the last week in February. There is only one volume to follow. In this edition eighty-seven tons of- hand-made paper have been used and 1,5091b of ink. The weight of the type amounted to nine tons ; the cost of the special fount of type was £1,500; and the volumes contain 930 fullpage plates and over 100 fac-similes of MSS. * A new series is about to be started bv the publishing house of Bell, under the title Masters of Literature.’ The volumes will give representative passages from the works of great writers in "prose and verse not fragments, but passages of some length chosen as being typical each case there will be biographical and critical introductions and notes by authorities. Thus Professor Saintsbury does this service for a Fielding anthology, and Professor Grant for a Scott one; and those two volumes are nearly ready.