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VI

SIR EDWARD COOK

N Literary Recreations Sir Edward Cook touches

on a most important point in criticism when he

states that one of the only reasons for a man daring to write a book about books is his desire or power of communicating to his readers the very sincere pleasure he has found in them himself. "My desire," he says, "is the sole reason for my undertaking so Herculean a task": his power is obvious from the first page of his book to the last.

His first paper, on "The Art of Biography," teems with brilliant ideas. A good biographer must have, like Boswell, an instinct for what is interesting and characteristic, and know how to arrange, select, plan, and present. The rules to be observed are "Brevity and Relevance," to keep the man in the foreground, to make him stand out as a person from the background of event, action, and circumstance (which is why the best biographies are more often of men of letters than of men of action). A book which proclaims itself the Life and Times of Somebody is a hybrid, little likely to possess artistic merit as biography. The true biographer will similarly beware of Somebody and His Circle. His work is to be relevant to an individual.

Sir Edward Cook finds the conventional first chapter on Ancestry "as tiresome as the introduction to a Waverley novel." Researches into hereditary influences are too often a snare to the biographer;

he "tends to see significance in everything: characteristic carelessness if the hero drops his pipe: and characteristic carefulness if he picks it up again." How much worse to trace back characteristics to ancestors! Another danger of irrelevance lurks in a Life and Letters. Again, the man who writes a biography full of irrelevant good things will have them picked out by others who will fit them into their proper places. He does but open a quarry. "He who writes with strict respect for the conditions of his art may carve a statue."

Next to Relevance come Selection and Arrangement: it must be understood that not everything that is relevant can be included: it is, however, just as easy to err by leaving out as by putting in.

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To tell 'sacred' things aright requires the nicest tact, but to leave them altogether untold is to strip the biography of the things best worth telling. It is to turn the key on the heart of the subject."

Arrangement again calls for very great care. In the case of a full and varied life, the severely chronological method, consistently applied throughout, is almost certainly the worst. It becomes worse if letters, too, are given in mere chronological order. The object of the biographer is to produce an ordered impression, not the effect of a kaleidoscope. Again, he must be honest. Sir Edward Cook rightly finds fault with Dowden's Life of Shelley as savouring of a partiality passing the bounds of common sense. "The sugar-candied mood is as dangerous as the too candid."

A good subject is a sine qua non, but moral goodness is not in itself a sufficient recommendation. There are excellent biographies and autobiographies of rascals, and there are very dull books about saints. The

first qualifications of a good subject are that the life of the man or woman should be really memorable, that there should be a marked personality behind the actions, that the character should be distinctive and interesting.

A second element in the goodness of biographical subject is the existence of material of self-expression, clothed in attractive and intelligible language. Such material may exist in the shape of diaries, memoranda, letters, or recorded conversations.

Again, contrasts and foils are often useful a hero postulates a villain: it is one of the ironies of the art of biography that the lives which, from some points of view, are best worth writing are those which nobody will read and which, therefore, are seldom written, for as George Eliot said: "the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts : and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs."

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As Ruskin's most able editor we should expect Sir Edward Cook to write well on Ruskin's style, which is the subject of his second paper. First he cites other men's views: Mr Asquith's epithets of "intellectual independence," spiritual insight," and goldentongued eloquence": Lord Morley's "one of the three giants of prose style in the nineteenth century," and Lord Acton's "doubled the opulence and significance of language and made prose more penetrating than anything but the highest poetry.'

"The secret of Ruskin's style at bottom," says Sir Edward Cook, "nearly all comes to this: that he had something to say, that he said it in the way that was natural to him, and that nature had endowed him

man.

with exquisite sensibility." The essential features are underived and incommunicable: the style is the His gift was of nature: the glow, the colour, the music, the exuberance of language are found in his notes and diaries no less than in his finished books. Throughout his working life he saw with his own eyes, he felt with his own heart, and what he learnt was knowledge at first hand. He read widely and discursively, but always in the original texts, which accounts for some of his waywardness and ingenious perversity although it preserved his intellectual independence. In his autobiography he tells us that his literary work was done as quietly and methodically as a piece of tapestry, but he took infinite pains in getting the stitches right. His command of language was due to the constant habit of never allowing a sentence to pass in which he had not considered whether, for the vital word in it, a better could be found in the dictionary. There is an interesting story of Ruskin's father telling his son's publisher to send in a separate account for corrections to him. "Don't let my son know: John must have his things as he likes them: pay him whatever would become due, apart from corrections, and send in a separate bill for them to me." Paragraphs and chapters were written over and over again before they satisfied him. There is, however, as Sir Edward Cook notices, a danger in taking overmuch thought over one's style: "The mischief comes, not from taking pains about the manner of saying a thing, but only when the manner begins to be of more moment than the matter, a mischief from which Ruskin, in his earlier work, did not escape. All my life,' he says, 'I have been talking to the people, and they have listened, not to what I say but to how I say it.""

Too much attention was called to the manner of his style by palpable display, but later "he became master not more of rhetorical pomp and of the long rolling sentence than of concentration, closely packed with thought. He revised and elaborated in order to clarify, to chasten, to deepen, and to impress." It is the very number of his gifts that so astonishes us in Ruskin. "Not only was he possessed of acute sensibility and of a most original mind, but he had a great mastery of language; he was something of a botanist, geologist, and mineralogist, and I doubt whether he ever sat down to describe anything with the pen which he had not spent hours in drawing with the pencil." Sir Edward Cook finishes his most suggestive critical study of the great stylist by recommending five examples of his prose style as especially worthy of our study: the chapter on "The Region of the Rain Cloud," the description of the narcissus fields on the mountain-side about Vevay, the description of the old tower of Calais Church, all in Modern Painters, the description of an old boat at the beginning of The Harbours of England, and the description of the Rhone at Geneva in Præterita.

The Art of Indexing is to me the most charming of these papers. "There is no book," he begins, "so good that it is not made better by an index, and no book so bad that it may not by this adjunct escape the worst condemnation." He rightly goes on to assert that the importance of the art of indexing is little understood: "Many people do not know that it is an art at all."

even

Two classes of books in particular should always have a good index-the best books and the most unreadable books. "The best books, because there is so much in them that a reader will want to find again: