66 Shy as the squirrel that leaps among the pine-tops, "The love poem of 1851," says Sir Edward Cook, "was transformed upon revision into the most beautiful of poems and lyrics of the joy of earth." Compare again Rossetti's early version of The Blessed Damozel with that of 1870 and after: The blesséd damozel leaned out is not comparable with: The blesséd damozel leaned out Her eyes were deeper than the depth It is queer to think that Rossetti thought it necessary to cancel two such beautiful lines as : Fair with honourable eyes, Lamps of a pellucid soul because Browning afterwards talked of “lustrous and pellucid soul" in The Ring and the Book, and he feared the charge of plagiarism. "This instance," says Sir Edward Cook, "should be a warning to critics who, in all ages, have been over-fond of seasoning their discovery of parallel passages with suspicion of plagiarism." Matthew Arnold made a very happy alteration in The Scholar Gipsy when he changed " Pluck'd in shy fields and distant woodland bowers" to "Pluck'd in shy fields and distant Wychwood bowers." This alteration may serve as the poet's answer in advance to one of the most perverse criticisms ever made by a man of taste. Dr Garnett thought that, though the charm of Arnold's pieces may be "enhanced for Oxonians," yet "the numerous local allusions which endear the poem to those familiar with the scenery, simply worry when not understood," to which Professor Saintsbury has retorted: "One may not be an Athenian, and yet be able to enjoy the local colour of the Phaedrus." Keats vastly improved a famous ode by substituting magic" for "the wide," and "perilous " for "keelless " in the following lines : The same that oft-times hath Charm'd the wide casements, opening on the foam Was it his own unhappy passion that induced him to change to O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, O what can ail thee, wretched wight? His second thoughts were not always the better, though his final revision of his sonnet To Sleep is infinitely finer than the earlier versions. "I have never made," says Sir Edward Cook, "a close study of Wordsworth's own second thoughts: but such as I have chanced to note are seldom improvements. After all, Wordsworth is of all great poets the most unequal, and his happiest things came by grace and not by reflection." "Beauty and truth," he concludes, "may come together and find the exactly right words in the flash of a moment, or after many attempts: yet Tennyson's saying should be remembered: Perfection in art is, perhaps, more sudden sometimes than we think, but then the long preparation for it, that unseen germination, that is what we ignore and forget.' Wordsworth wrote best when he revised least . one thing alone is certain-that poetry is an art, and that art is long." M VII SET DOWN IN MALICE R GERALD CUMBERLAND seems to have set out with the idea of treating the living as Mr Lytton Strachey in Eminent Victorians set out to treat the dead. That is to say, he seeks to earn some notoriety as an otherwise unknown man by lampooning his betters. But there is a marked divergence between the two men. Mr Strachey is pre-eminently the eclectic, the fastidious scholar, well-read, magnificently equipped with the historic sense, with an exact knowledge of what is grain and what is chaff, able to sift and weigh evidence, almost a genius at discarding irrelevancies and retaining minute features which illuminate and bring into prominence the side of the character he wishes to revivify. Mr Cumberland is just a precocious schoolboy indulging in scandalous chatter: fascinating us with saucy titbits cleverly retold, but, nevertheless, just a witty schoolboy cheeking his masters when he ought to be getting on with his work. It is significant that he begins with Shaw, himself a master craftsman in the same school. He says nothing about him that is worth putting on to paper; in fact, twenty-seven pages of twaddle have to be waded through before we arrive at any statement which could possibly mean anything more than the paragraphs in Society Snippets. Then we find something definite about. Lloyd George of all men ! "He has a wonderful gift of making you feel that he thinks you are the most interesting and most intelligent person he has ever met." I rather imagine that somebody's leg was being pulled when Mr Cumberland called on Lloyd George, and it was not the Prime Minister's. Anyway, why Set Down in Malice? Perhaps Mr Cumberland aspires to an O.B.E. Doctor Walford Davies is (forsooth) to be judged by his stock of adjectives in an after-dinner speech, which included "pernicious," "poisonous," "naughty," " unlicensed," and "immoral." Frank Harris has a whole chapter to himself, and is enthusiastically praised: no malice here, only a vague impression of a great genius, greatly generous, a lover of delicacies "from whom no gastronomic secrets were hid." There is a grotesque picture of Stanley Houghton, after closing his ledgers, jumping gymnastically on to a passing tram every night, bound for Alexandra Park. After a hurried meal, out with the MSS., the notebooks, the typescript, and to work! And how hard he did work! "He was hard; he was unimaginative; he was unromantic. But he was extraordinarily apt, and he had a neat and tidy brain. . . . He was not modest, and he could not feign modesty. His vanity was neither charming nor aggressive; it was cold and distant, without geniality, without humour. . . . He had no genius: there was not a trace of magic in him: he was merely extraordinarily clever, closely observant and possessed of an instinctive sense of form and of literary values." One remark in an interview Mr Cumberland had with Houghton sticks in my brain: it is a good illustration of his critical ability: "Only G. H. Mair, Willie Yeats and high-school] girls think Synge great, Houghton." It is not until page 69 that Mr Cumberland really |