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

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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

wakes up, but Arnold Bennett rouses him to active irony.

"Bennett was rather short, thin, hollow-eyed, prominent-toothed. He wore a white waistcoat and a billycock hat very much awry, and he had a manner of complete self-assurance....

"I notice,' said I, 'that you continue writing for The New Age in spite of their violent attacks on you."

"Yes,' he answered laconically, and he looked dizzily over my left shoulder." The account of the breakfast given in Manchester by G. H. Mair to Arnold Bennett and Houghton is very well told: the whole hour was spent in a tedious and protracted discussion about a cabman, a very large trunk, and strangulated hernia. "A great writer," concludes Mr Cumberland: "no doubt, a very great writer: but you might gaze at him across a railway carriage for hours at a time and never suspect it."

There is a delightful story of G. K. Chesterton emerging from Shoe Lane, hurrying into the middle of Fleet Street, and abruptly coming to a standstill in the centre of the traffic. "He stood there for some time, wrapped in thought, while buses, taxis and lorries eddied about him in a whirlpool and while drivers exercised to the full their art of expostulation. Having come to the end of his meditations he held up his hand, turned round, cleared a passage through the horses and vehicles and returned up Shoe Lane." When Mr Cumberland lies, he lies like Falstaff, for which I love him. Of Masefield, too, he has something interesting to tell us. "He has an invincible picturesqueness: he is tall, straight, and blue-eyed, with a complexion as clear as a child's. His eyes are amazingly shy, almost

furtive. His manner is also shy . . . He speaks to you as though he suspected you of hostility, as though you had the power to injure him and were on the point of using that power. You feel his sensitiveness and you admire the dignity that is at once its outcome and its protection. . . . His mind is cast in a tragic mould, and his soul takes delight in the contemplation of physical violence. . . . I believe he is intensely morbid, delighting to brood over dark things, seeing no humour in life, but full of a baffled chivalry, a nobility thwarted at every turn.”

It is pleasing to think that A. A. Milne, whose judgment in these things most of us respect immensely, did not find Mr Cumberland at all to his liking. It is amusing to hear that Mr Cumberland considers his own English prose style more correct, more lucid, and more distinguished than that of Newman in the Apologia.

On the subject of "Intellectual Freaks" he is quite worth reading: he starts by making fun of certain members of the Theosophical Society: "they were cultured without being educated, credulous but without faith, bookish but without learning, argumentative but without logic. The women, serene and grave, swam about in drawing-rooms, or they would stand in long, attitudinising ecstasies, their skimpy necks emerging from strange gowns, their bodies as shoulderless as hock bottles." These ladies talk like the Duke in G. K. Chesterton's Magic.

He is equally contemptuous of "the vast throng of people who arise at eight or thereabouts, go to the City every morning, work all day, and return home at dusk; who perform this routine every day, and every day of every year; who do it all their lives; who do it without resentment, without anger, without even a