Belles-Lettres

BELLES-LETTRES Criticism.—The publication of works of pure scholarship, and new editions with critical apparatus, was seriously affected by the expenses of production during the War and post-War period. Nevertheless, a considerable number of important standard edi tions, especially through the university presses, were published, notably Prof. Grierson's Donne (1912) , the first volumes of C. H. Herford's and Percy Simpson's Ben Jonson (1925), some volumes of the Cambridge Shakespeare (a new text embodying the results of the bibliographical researches of A. W. Pollard and J. Dover Wilson [1920]), P. W. Chapman's exhaustive Jane Austen (1923) and T. Earle Welby's pioneering edition of Lan dor in process of publication in 1928. The Cambridge History of English Literature (1907-16) was brought to a conclusion and Prof. Oliver Elton published his massive Survey of Modern English Literature (1912 and 1920). Prof. Caroline Spurgeon's Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion (1925), in three volumes, was an outstanding example of the specialized literary research work which is largely superseding the older kind of academic criticism. Miss Helen Waddell's The Wander ing Scholars (1927) was a delightfully discursive recreation of mediaeval life.

Among critical studies of a less encyclopaedic kind, the most substantial were done by the older men, notably Sir Edmund Gosse (d. 1928) and George Saintsbury. Sir Edmund Gosse, enjoying an Indian summer, produced numerous volumes of collected papers in which he illuminated authors and movements, ancient and modern, English and foreign, incorporating anecdote and personal sidelights with incomparable ease and grace, and delighting his readers by the suppleness, wit and pictorial bright ness of his clear and idiomatic style. The most important of his later publications was The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne (1917), a model of brilliant portraiture, compact narrative and sane criticism. George Saintsbury, who retired from his Edin burgh professorship in 1915, completed his edition of the Minor Caroline Poets (1905-21), added a History of English Prose Rhythm (1912), A History of the French Novel (1917-19) and The Peace of the Augustans (1916) to the prodigious pile of his historical works; and made delightful use of his vast erudition and full-stored memory in several miscellanies including two about wine. At Oxford Sir Walter Raleigh and at Cambridge Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch lectured brilliantly and published the best of their lectures. Standard lives of Keats and Byron were pro duced by Sir Sidney Colvin and Ethel Colburn Mayne; and theoretical treatises of a high order were Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction (1921), E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel (1928), Christopher Hussey's The Picturesque (1928), and Geoffrey Scott's The Architecture of Humanism (1914) . The death of Arthur Clutton-Brock, in 1924, prematurely removed one of the most luminous and sensible of the literary jour nalists who abounded in the period. Others who did good critical work were Edward Garnett, a notable discoverer of talent, John Freeman, Lascelles Abercrombie, Harold Nicolson, Gerald Gould, R. Ellis Roberts, Arthur McDowall, Robert Lynd, T.

Sturge Moore, J. B. Priestley, Osbert Burdett, Lytton Strachey, Edward Shanks, Maurice Baring, Virginia Woolf ; and, among critics of the drama, A. B. Walkley and Desmond MacCarthy.

Miscellaneous Literature.

The essay flourished in the period, but mainly in a modern form. The old leisurely manner was practised with perfect success by Max Beerbohm in Seven Men (1919), And Even Now (1920) and other collections. A caricaturist and parodist of genius, Beerbohm wrote with an awareness that made him extremely careful to secure the last degree of accuracy and flavour in his language, to arrange the cadence of his sentences, to exhaust his subject as it presented itself to his mind, the mind of a humorous, witty and tender con noisseur of life and particularly of highly civilized urban life. Alice Meynell also wrote essays on the major scale, profound in thought, exquisite in phrasing, austere in temper yet iridescent in hue, which posterity cannot neglect. The typical modern essayist of the time wrote regularly every week to fill a column in a daily newspaper, or a page in a weekly : the remarkable thing is the merit of much of the writing done under these limitations of time and space by such men as G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, E. V. Lucas and Robert Lynd, and, in his last years, Maurice Hewlett.

Vivid and powerful sketches of travel were written by R. B. Cunninghame Graham and H. M. Tomlinson ; Francis Brett Young, in Marching on Tanga (1919), wrote a narrative prose poem on the Africa he saw during the War. With Henry William son in Tarka the Otter (1928) appeared (although the prose was rather congested) a true successor to Jefferies and Hudson. Works difficult to group are the Earlham (192 2) of Percy Lub bock, a picture of childhood's memories of a place and people; L. Pearsall Smith's Trivia (1902-18), brief prose compositions full of wit, candour and pictures, and Sacheverell Sitwell's All Summer in A Day (1926), an enchanting piece of retrospection. The Puppet Show of Memory (1922) by Maurice Baring, one of the most versatile writers of his time, was an autobiographical work of great charm and interest, conspicuous among recent memoirs for its good manners. Max Beerbohm's A Christmas Garland (1912) was a masterly volume of parodies of modern prose writers. Among other parodists, Sir Owen Seaman having resigned the art, E. V. Knox (Evoe) was conspicuous; his work in Punch, together with that, both in prose and in verse, of A. P. Herbert, was a mainstay of the chief English humorous journal.

Historical works, deserving the appellation of literature, were few in the period. G. M. Trevelyan completed his Garibaldian trilogy, H. Belloc published in several volumes a controversial but suggestive History of England, and Philip Guedalla wrote an amusing book about Napoleon III., The Second Empire (1922). Sir John M. Fortescue's History of the British Army, concluded in 1920, more than 20 years after its inception, was a massive work written in excellent English. The most interest ing work in biography was not to be found in the two or three volume political biographies, such as G. E. Buckle's continuation of W. F. Monypenny's Disraeli, and Lord Ronaldshay's Lord Curzon, excellent though several of these were, as in such works as Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918) and Queen Vic toria (1921), works tinged with irony and partial perhaps, but seminal books, because of their brevity, their concentration of the essentials of a great mass of material, the excellence of their portraiture and the impeccability of their epigrammatic and coloured prose.