THIS BOOK AND THAT
By E. L. WOODWARD
NCE I was held up for four days by rain and snow in a Swiss hotel. There was in the salon a single shelf full books left by earlier visitors. I read all these books, starting n the left and working through to the end of the shelf. The st three books were Dean Burgon's Twelve Good Men, a rench translation of Lady Chattel ley's Lover, and something lied L'Amour chez les Bolsheviks.
I am now reading again at haphazard, and this time in ains. Train-travelling is even more interesting than in peace- me, but not always as comfortable as it was. It is useless ring to read books which make you yawn or want to stretch our legs. On my railway at least you cannot stretch very ar to the right or left or in front of you. Hence you must ke care to choose your books. I choose mine in haste, just ore starting to catch the train, and my standards of choice e concerned more with the size than the content of a book. he book must fit, for better or Worse, into a bag stuffed with apers.
Therefore, if I recount my reading, you must not expect wisely planned and logical sequence. I began with two slim olumes of Crabbe's poems. I recommend them, although hropshire in the 1890's, even if every word of Housman is rue, must have been a paradise of sober living and rustic 'nue compared with East Anglia in Crabbe's day. More .oung men came to bad or drunken ends in one street of Ideburgh than ever filled Ludlow gaol, and the boldest of ueen Victoria's lancers was a mere milksop before an .ghteenth-century Suffolk fisherman.
Next I took the Oxford Book of Latin Verse: a very good ook, but I found it disconcerting that, after reading C,atullus, could see in Horace only an extreme dexterity in the manipulation of words (saving the superb ode Eheu Fugaces). ly next book was a combined edition of yob and Ruth. It attered little that I could not read the notes—the pedantry f learned commentators on the Old Testament is almost limit- ess. One does not need any notes for either of these books. s a child, I had of course associated Ruth with church-going ; uth gleaning in the fields called up a picture of the vicar's ife in gardening gloves. I was therefore astonished to find t she—Ruth—was a minx. She and Naomi together knew the wiles of this world. They planned things very neatly with none of the garrulity of the women in Shaw's plays), and I was glad that they came off so well.
No words are needed to commend the book of Job. Every me I read the chapters, I know them as masterpieces, but, am, every time I am appalled by Job's friends. Appalled, cause these friends are eternal to humanity. The rise and fall of civilisations are as nothing to them. They represent e type which survives ; the type of man who always serves n committees, who inspires confidence because he sees life teadily, and sees it all wrong ; the type which finds truth as a mean between two lies.
After Job I gave myself a change. I read two books on urope by women journalists. Good books after their fashion, d lively enough in their descriptions of the Grand Tour ollowed by journalists, Class I, in recent years. The usual ers ; the usual luncheons ; the usual tohu-bohu of Big oises, big houses, and big hotels. Not much subtlety, but great deal of courage, and—above all—a sensitive under- tanding of the Commons of England. Next I tried, by ontrast, Newman's sermons. A bad choice: I could not ear them, or Newman. I closed the book, remembering meone's phrase about another holy man who could con- mplate, in the Divine scheme of things, the spectacle of unbaptised babies crawling on the floors of hell." I soon ave up Newman, and took with me Sesame and Lilies. I uppose that no one under forty-five ever teads Ruskin, but ere it is ; I can read pages of him, and allow the old dear o be as dogmatic as he chooses. Anyhow, after Newman and S dreadful early Fathers, it is a relief to read Ruskin's wild generalisations such as "The clergyman does not usually want to be made a bishop only because he believes that no other hand can, as firmly as his, direct the diocese through its difficulties. He wains to be made bishop primarily that he may be called 'My Lord.'" Moreover, if you cannot read Ruskin's text, you may turn to the charming entries in his index. For example you find, under the heading "English Character," the following sub-headings: " apathy : avarice: incapacity for thought: childishness : recklessness: still capable of noble passion: our imaginary Christianity: science, literature, art, nature, compassion despised by us." Or, under the heading "girls," the words "not to be fettered ": "religious enthu- siasm of, takes the place of work ": "to help the poor in food and dress ": "to be silent on theological subjects." Or, under Turner: "works of, at Kensington, no one looks at."
I happen to have Matthew Arnold in small and slim volumes, so I have thrown several of these into my bag. I wish Arnold were less imitative, less of a prig, and not so grievously given to self-pity. He must have been a tiresome man to meet after breakfast in London, because he begins one of his poems thus :
"One morn as through Hyde Park we walked My friend and I, by chance we talked Of Lessing's famed Laocoon" . . .
(The italics are mine. If you have ever tried to get through the famed Laocoon, you will agree that these italics are neces- sary. After dinner, perhaps, but after breakfast, no.) Notwithstanding Lessing's Laocoon, I went on with Arnold. I read Sohrab and Rustum. In spite of the stage scenery, it is a very moving poem, and the end: "But the majestic river floated on" is magnificent. Unfortunately, I turned next to Balder Dead. I am not a Valhalla man myself, and Balder Dead is, for me, too much like Wagner and the ineffable Sieges Allee, or the eyrie at Berchtesgaden. Also I do not believe any horse—even a Walhallischer horse—could have leapt over that hurdle and landed without a fall on the slippery ice. (I doubt whether Matthew Arnold had ever seen the Grand National.) Yet once again "notwithstanding," I read on. I read Dover Beach, and the set of poems on Switzerland. The theme is real ; the poems are real, and only a real poet could have written them.
I wish I had stopped at this point, but I was encouraged to begin Empedocles on Etna. Empedocics is terrible—a sort of Fiffirer-headmaster, sad, cultured, and superior. And the player Cafficles, touching his harp, &c., sings, "unseen from below," of the aged centaur Chiron tutoring (there is no other word for it) the young Achilles. Chiron tells Achilles all that he should know about Etna. Then he says (via Callicles): "0 boy, I taught this lore
To Peleus, in long distant years."
0 boy. 0 Peleus. 0 Matthew.
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