THE WORLD OF BOOKS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3672, 29 July 1924, Page 67

THE WORLD OF BOOKS.

[All Rights Reserved.]

HALF-HOURS IN A LIBRARY.

By

A. H. Grinling.

LXXI.—ON THE GARNETTS. The announcement that Mr David Garnett, author of “Lady Into Fox,” and winner of the “Hawthornden” prize, and the “James Tait Black Memorial Prize,” has written a new book called “A Man in the Zoo,” both books being illustrated with wood cuts by R. A. Garnett, sent me searching into the literary ancestry of a famous family. William Garnett, paper manufacturers of Otley, Yorkshire, had three sons—Richard, born in 1789 and died in 1850; Jeremiah, born in 1795 and died in 1870; and Thomas, born in 1799 arid died in 1878. Of these three brothers, Richard was a philologist, Jeremiah a journalist, and Thomas a manufacturer and naturalist. Richard was originally intended for a commercial career; but while at home, assisting his father in the factory, he was studying for the Church. He started as a schoolmaster, and in his leisure time he learned sufficient Greek and Latin and divinity to secure ordination at the hands of the Archbishop of York. He made the acquaintance of Southey, who called him “a very remarkable person,” adding “He did not begin to learn Greek till he was twenty, and he is now, I believe, acquainted with all the European languages of Latin or Teutonic origin, and with sundry Oriental ones. I do not know any man who has read so much which you w r ould not expect him to have read.”

In 1836, Richard Garnett was presented to the living of Chebsey, near Stafford; this he relinquished two years later on being appointed assistant-keeper of printed books at the British Museum. Garnett succeeded Henry Francis Cary, the translator of Dante, and thereby hangs a tale of a bitter controversy. Some eight years earlier Cary, being an unsuccessful applicant for a vacancy in the antiquities department of the British Museum, was appointed assistant-keeper of printed books ; and he was entrusted with the poetry section of a classed catalogue of the library then in course of preparation. The death of his wife in 1832 affected Cary’s health, and when, five years later, the post of chief librarian of printed books became vacant, he was deemed physically unfit for promotion by all save his family and himself. The appointment of a foreigner, Antonio Panizzi, to the vacancy raised a great outcry, and Cary resigned, thus creating the vacancy which Richard Garnett filled. Garnett was twice married, his second wife being Rayne, daughter of John Wreaks, Esq., of Sheffield, and of that union was born on February 27, 1855, in Beacon Street, Lichfield, a son also called Richard, and who was destined to follow in his father’s footsteps.

Richard Garnett the second was only three years old when his father removed to London on becoming assistant-keeper of printed books at the British Museum. “Young Richard Garnett showed exceptional intellectual precocity as a boy,” writes Sir Sidney Lee in the “Dictionary of National Biography.” “He inherited his father’s faculty for acquiring languages. Before he was fourteen he had read for his own amusement the whole of the ‘Poetae Scenici Graeci,’ Deodorus Siculus's History, the works of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, and the stories of Tieck and Hoffmann. All his life he studied not only the classics but the literature of France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.” After the death of his father in 1850, young Richard Garnett, thanks to the good offices of Anthony Panizzi, secured a position as assistant in the British Museum Library; henceforth his career was closely associated with the British Museum. After twenty years of subordinate labours, he was appointed in 1875 assistant keeper of printed books and superintendent of the reading room. In 1882 Richard Garnett was an unsuccessful candidate for the Librarianship of the Bodleian Library, Oxford; but his ambitions were fully satisfied when he was promoted to the headship of his department in the British Museum. In 1883 he was made LL.D. by the Edinburgh University, and he was made C.B. in 1895. He died at his home at Hampstead, London, in 1906.

I treasure one little book by Richard Garnett; it is called “De Flagello Myrteo,” and contains a collection “In prose form but of poetic temper,” of three hundred and sixty “Thoughts and Fancies on Love,” exceedingly subtle in their tone. Dr Garnett started life with poetic intentions which were never entirely abandoned, and on the fly-leaf of this little collection is a sample of his verse:— This little World of Love was made for thee, O thou whose love make 3 World a heaven for me. i Idle the task, the labour unnepaid, Lit not thy sunny smile its sacred shade. To bowers with Libya’s myrtle-bloom beset Bring in thyself a sweeter violet: The secret dells explore, the summit’s bright Ascend; nor dread to meet another’s sight. Though many a maze allure thy curious tread, Yet, ever roaming, ne’er wilt thou be led To World in other than thy image made, Or Love in other guise than thine arrayed. In 1889, a year before the regulation age for retirement, Dr Richard Garnett resigned his post at the British Museum, after 48 years of service, and largely on account of his wife’s failing health. Besides his contributions to poetic literature, his prose work was prolific and

versatile, and he wrote extensively and on all manner of subjects for a number of periodicals. His most important books were “Relics of Shelley,” published in 1862, and “The Twilight of the Gods,” in 1903; he also collaborated with Mr Edmund Gosse in the four-volumed “Illustrated Record of English Literature,” the first and second volumes being the fruit of Garnett's pen. He also lent Ms name as editor to “The International Library of Famous Literature,” a pretentious anthology organised by an American syndicate, and issued in Great Britain in 1901. Richard Garnett married in 1863 Olivia Nainey, daughter of Edward Singleton, of County Clare, Ireland, his wife dying in 1903. The family consisted of three sons and three daughters, and the father’s literary proclivities descended to the second son, Edward, who was born in 1868. Like his father, Mr Edward Garnett exhibits in his writing a considerable versatility; he is critic, dramatist, and satirist, but he is likely to be known to fame as the man who encouraged Joseph Conrad to persevere with his first book, “Almayer’s Folly.” The way in which that story*was first conceived, afterwards persisted in, and the strange adventures which overtook the manuscript are delightfully recounted by Conrad himself in “A Personal Record,” but for some reason he omits to mention the part played by Mr Edward Garnett in the publication of the book. The omission, however, is supplied by Mr Richard Curio in his study of Joseph Conrad. Mr Curie, lamenting that so little good criticism of Conrad’s work has been published, says: “But, indeed, it is to Edward Garnett that readers of Conrad owe the greatest debt. For he was the first to ‘discover’ him —if I must use such an offensive expression. That his earliest work should have fallen into the hands of this eclectic and uninsular critic is something to be thankful for. For Conrad has told me himself that if ‘Almayer’s Folly’ had been rejected, he would never have written another book.” To which Mr Curie adds: — In 1894 Conrad finally left the sea. He had never fully recovered from a severe fever that had invalided him from the Congo, and his health was now more or less broken. He did not know what to do with himself (he had still some idea of going to sea again), but almost as an after thought, he sent in to Fisher Unwin the novel which he had begun about ISB9, and which he had completed in odd moments —the novel of “Almayer’s Folly.” After waiting for three or four months, he heard, to his intense surprise, that it was accepted (Edward Garnett as reader was responsible), and from henceforth his life is mainly the history of his books. That Conrad realised to the full his obligation to Edward Garnett is made plain by a passage in Mr Gerald Cumberland’s “Written in Friendship.”. Mr Cumberland cites several cases in which the encouragement—or the opposite—held out by an older writer to a younger man has had marked result. “I sent,” he writes, “a copy of a book of my short stories to Joseph Conrad. I obeyed a blind impulse, not stopping to analyse the motives that prompted me, but feeling a deep craving for the approval of a great and fine spirit. . . At the conclusion of a long letter Conrad wrote: ‘When, after finishing Almayer’s Folly, I hesitated at the parting of the ways, not at all from literary ambition, but because of the strong hold my old life bad still on me, I admit that it was Edward Garnett who tipped the balance. His words were, “You have the style, you have the temperament. Why not write another?” ’ You will believe that be said nothing about the pursuit of literature—whatever that may mean. He simply said—‘Why not write another?’ And I really believe that I can do no better than pass on these words to you.” The fact should be realised that but for the timely interposition of Mr Edward Garnett, Joseph Conrad, instead of embarking upon a literary career, might have gone back to sea, and the modern novel would have lost its most brilliant exponent.

Apart altogether from his encouragement of Conrad. Mr Edward Garnett merits attention for his own sake. It has been said that liis most important work as “reader” for Fisher Unwin has been the discovery of new writers; but his dramatic work, notably “The Breaking Point,” and “The Trial of Jeanne D’Arc,” have attracted deserved attention. The satires issued in 1919 under the title “Papa’s War,” created a literary sensation ; but it is by his critical work that Edward Garnett is destined to live. He is a keen student of Russian literature, and his studies of Turgenev and Tolstoy arih among the best of their kind. In this direction he lias had the wholehearted co-operation of his wife, Mrs Constance Garnett, who has done invaluable work in rendering the classics of Russian literature available to English readers in her translations of the novels of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tchekhov. It may be remembered that the early English versions of the Russian novelists, published by Walter Scott, were done from French translations; Mrs Constance Garnett was the first to translate direct from the Russian, and her translations are to-day recognised as both accurate and authorised. In the popularisation of the great masterpieces of Russian literature, Mr Edward Garnet* and Mrs Constance Garnett have done work of tlie highest importance, since it is universally admitted that for a proper understanding of the complexities of the present situation in Russia, a knowledge of the outstanding works of the Russian writers is essential. The wideness of Mr Edward Garnett’s literary sympathies is seen in Ills book of criticisms and appreciations, issued a

couple of years ago under the title of “Friday Nights.” The contents include essays on Nietzsche, and W. 11. Hudson’s Nature Books, on Tchekhov and his art and on Ibsen and the English. There follow three papers, each on Mr Joseph Conrad and Mr C. M. Doughty, and Mr Garnett’s versatility is illustrated in his dealing consecutively with writers as far apart as D. H. Lawrence, Richard Jefferies, Henry Lawson, Sarah Orme Jewett, and Robert Frost, tlie American poet. The final essays in this volume contrast American and English fiction, and American and English criticism, together with some critical notes on American poetry, and a comment on two American novelists, Joseph Hergesheimer and Sherwood Anderson. Mr Garnett’s last word—and it is a wise one—-defines the duties and acknowledges the limitations of “The Contemporary Critic.” The quality of Mr Garnett’s criticism may be judged by his essay on “Henry Lawson and the Democracy,” which has new interest in the fact that since it was written in 1896, Lawson has crossed the divide; and that he is having a resurrection in the issue in pocket reprint form of all his prose and poetry. Mr Garnett holds the opinion that Lawson will not live by his poetry. “His verse, to put it bluntly, is the verse of a thousand and one vigorous versifiers of to-day, writing humorously or picturesquely it may bo, but producing work thereby which shares the stamp of the literary artisan rather than that of the artist.” Mr Garnett, however, while criticising Lawson’s verse as that of a third-rate writer, exalts Lawson’s prose as “that of a writer who represents a continent.” His concluding eulogy is characteristic: — If Lawson’s tales fail to live in another fifty years—and where will be much of Kipling’sj Stevenson’s, Hardy’s, and Henry James’s fiction then?—it will be because they have too little beauty of form, and there is too much crudity and roughness in their literary substance. Henry Lawson’s matter is more interesting than his form, and matter in general only survives through its form. This admitted, it may be claimed for Lawson that he of the Australian writers best pictures for us and interprets democratic Australia to-day, and that lie is one of the very few genuinely democratic writers that the literature of “Greater Britain” can show. In the May issue of Mr John Middleton Murry’s charming periodical, “The Adelphi,” Mr Garnett has a paper on “The Work of Allan Monkhouse.” I possess a book of Allan Moukhouse’s which I prize because it bears the imprint of Elkin Mathews and John Lane, and is dated 1894; the “List of Books in Belles Lettres,” published by that now defunct firm in March, 1894, and inserted at the end of the volume, is an education on the literature of thirty years ago. Mr Monkhouse’s opinions on Meredith’s poems and plays, on George Borrow, on Turgenev' and Ibsen, and on Stevenson’s and Henley’s plays are interesting to read after the lapse of three decades. Mr Garnett begins by saying:—“Two of the contemporary creative talents whose works have received least recognition in proportion to their merits are Mr Charles Marriott and Mr Allan Monkhouse.” I remember twenty years ago when Mr Marriott’s first novel, “The Column,” created a literary sensation, since when I seemed to lose sight of him, although he has a score or so of stories to his credit. In 1915, he published “Davenport,” a story with an occult trend which held my attention, and his two later stories, “The Grave Impertinence,” and “An Order to View,” I regard as a couple of the cleverest and ablest novels of recent years. With the work of Allan Monkhouse, his plays and stories, I have only a slight acquaintance, but one effect of Mr Garnett’s criticism will be to lead me to study them more carefully.

I now CQme to the Garnetts of the present generation ; David Garnett and R. A. Garnett, author and illustrator respectively of “Lady Into Fox,” and “A Man in the Zoo.” I tnke it, though I have no absolute authority for the statement, that David Garnett is the son of Mr Edward Garnett. I have seen it stated that R. A. Garnett, who is responsible for the exquisite wood-cuts, is Mrs David Garnett, formerly Miss Rachel Marshall, wellknown as illustrator of a number of children’s hooks, including “A Ride on a Rocking Horse,” “The Happy Testament,” and* “The Imp of Mischief.” There is not space to discuss in detail Mr David Garnett’s charming extravaganzas. “Lady Into Fox” is the story of a lady who, suddenly turned into a fox, is eventually killed in lier husband’s arms by a pack of hounds. “A Man in the Zoo” is the story of a man who became an inmate of the zoological gardens. Both books have excited controversy, and critics differ considerably as to tlieir literary merit. The best test of tlieir popularity is that they have been parodied by tlie issue of “Gentleman Into Goose," a brochure thus described: — Gentleman into Goose, being the exact and true account of Mr Timothy Teapot, Gent., of Puddleditch in Dorset, that was changed to a Great Grey Gander at the Wysh of his Wife. How, though, a Gander, he did Wear Breeches and smoko a pipe. How he near Lost his Life to his Dog Tyger. You have. also, an account of his Gallantries with a Goose, very Diverting to Read, with many other Surprising Adventures, full of Wonder and Merriment, and a Full Relation of the Manner of his Dismal End. Worthy to be had in all Families for a Warning to Wives, and by all Bachelors intending Marriage, by Christopher Ward. With Wooden Engravings by C. W. and O. W. Junior.