Odious Creatures
Bookman's Holiday. By Holbrook Jackson. (Faber and Faber. 10s. 6d.)
A GOOD game could be played with this agreeable book by reading aloud extracts, with names omitted, and making your hearers guess whom they are about. Thus: " His travelling equipage was rather a singular one . . . seven servants, five carriages, nine horses, a monkey, a bull-dog and a mastiff, two cats, three pea-fowls and some hens . . ." Whose? Of course, Byron's. " In the after- noon to Henry VII's Chapel, where 1 heard a sermon and spent (God forgive me) most of my time in looking upon Mrs. Butler." Of course, Pepys. " I cannot imagine that Dr. Johnson's reputation will be very lasting." Naturally, Horace Walpole. These are easy : some are less obvious. " He is delightfully grumpy. He mentions thing after thing which is commonly believed, and says that, of course, it's not so. He's always right." Sir Walter Raleigh on Robert Bridges. " An utterly shallow and wretched segment of a human creature, incapable of understanding anything in the ultimate conditions of it." Raskin on Mill. " I always think of him as a soft, kind cat." Jane. Harrison on Pater. " The London Literati appear to me to be very much like little potatoes, that is . . . a compost of nullity and dullity." Coleridge. " A damned humbug." Byron on Shakespeare. "How odious all authors are." Henry Fox, in 1821.
Possibly they are. But they have mostly said some good things and done some odd and amusing ones. In any case, it is usually entertaining to hear and read about them, and their doings and sayings have always been recorded and perused with eagerness. Now Mr. Holbrook Jackson 1.as compiled a delightful collection of their sayings and doings, of how they have spent their time, what they looked like, talked like, the odious things they have said about one another and one another's works, the wise and silly things they
have said about life and themselves. Here is George Moore boasting fatuously that he has written the first serious novels in English and the first containing adultery ; Ruskin kissing flowers ; Arnold Bennett gloating (as well he might) over his year's earnings ; William Blake turning pale with horror when money was offered him ; Ruskin being disgusted by the Mill on the Floss and J. R. Lowell heartily .sick of Typee ; Shaw writing his plays in the train ; Trollope writing his allotted number of pages between bouts of seasickness ; Walpole with gout ; Mrs. Browning drunk on Cyprus wine ; all kinds of authors in all kinds of plights and moods. It is an extremely amusing collection of odds and ends, into which every dip is a lucky dip. Isaac D'Israeli would have enjoyed it. Mr. Holbrook Jackson's researches cover a wide field ; their only limitation is racial ; his authors are all British or American ; he might compile another volume some day about foreigners. It would be unfair to complain of omissions from a collection which only claims to be a selection, and is such an excellent selection ; but I could wish that Mr. Jackson had included some of Anthony a Wood's acidities, such as this of Robert Green: "He wrote to maintain his wife, and that high and loose course of living which poets generally follow," and, of another author, " He wrote trite things merely to sustain him and his wife." It is not surprising to note that Mr. Daniel George gave some assistance in this compilation ; it is very much his cup of tea.
ROSE MACAULAY.
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