28 MARCH 1931, Page 36

John Clare

Sketches in the Life of John Clare. By Himself. Edited by Edmund Blundell. (Cobden Sanderson. 68.) FAME, that cruel flirt, was in her most capricious mood when she kissed John Clare : for she deserted him soon after,

leaving him in such a plight of discontent that he tried to regain his self-respect by claiming to have written the works of Shakespeare, Milton, and Byron, and to have won the battle of Waterloo. The ruse did not woo the lady back, and poor Clare was put into a mad-house, and died there twenty years later. By that time his work was forgotten, as though it had been the outpourings of a mere fashionable novelist.

This injustice was left unremedied until Mr. Edmund Blunden and Mr. Alan Porter piously undertook to edit and annotate Clare's poetry. By so doing they have corrected one of the ugly mistakes which history is too prone to make. For no work more justly deserved to survive than does the delicate, utterly original, and often divinely inspired verse of that rustic contemporary of Shelley and Keats.

So direct was the charm, so rill-water-like the flavour of those poems, that when Taylor and Hessey published the first volume in 1820, the London literary fancy was immediately taken, and the book ran into several editions. Clare was fetched to town, and gently lionized, so far as such a simple and grateful personality would lend itself to such treatment. Noble lords gave him gifts of money; while Hazlitt, Coleridge and Lamb received him into their select circle. That he was shrewd enough to appreciate the latter honour you may see from his pen-portraits of those immortals. Look at Hazlitt, whose "eyes are always turned towards the ground, except when one is turned up now and then with a sneer that cuts a bad pun and a young author's maiden table talk to atoms." And now look at Lamb, "a long remove from his friend Hazlitt in ways and manners. He is very fond of snuff, which seems to sharpen up his wit every time he dips his plentiful finger into his large bronze-coloured box ; and then he sharpens up his head, throws himself backward in Isis chair, and stammers at a joke or pun with an inward sort of utterance ere he can give it speech, till his tongue becomes a sort of packrnan's strop turning it over and over till at last it comes out whetted as keen as a razor."

Would we not welcome a whole gallery of such inspired portraiture ? Alas, Clare never met Keats; whose last book was brought out by the same publisher that year, and lingered on in the first edition until the middle of the century !

As for his self-portrait, which Mr. Blunden edits with various letters written to Taylor when Fame was cooling, we discover an extremely ingenuous character, politically unintelligent, somewhat abject in social sense and generally very like a quiet farm-worker except for the gift of poetry ; a gift which attracted the Syren's notice, and so brought disaster and despair upon his innocent heart.