111COUIV

Compton Mackenzie

APRIL is the loveliest name in English, Latin, French, Italian or German that any month in the calendar possesses. Under the influence of its beauty some of the early Victorian etymologists made an attempt to establish its derivation from Aphrodite in the shape of Aphrilis. How- ever, the Latin aperire to open seems certain, though I could wish that Skeat in giving the derivation did not add ' see Aperient.'

Whanne that Aprille with his shoures sote • The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote. '

I rejoice that the Canterbury Tales were told in April, and that Shakespeare was born in April.

It is Shakespeare who seems to get the sharpest verbal thrill from the word itself :

When proud-pied April dressed in all his trim Hath put a spirit of youth in everything.

0 l how this spring of love resembleth The uncertain glory of an April day

Chaucer, Shakespeare and Spenser made the month masculine, but by the nineteenth century April had become feminine, and, when William. Watson sang of her, objectionably feminine:

April, April Laugh thy girlish laughter, Then the moment after, Weep thy girlish tears I

With all the magic of boyhood's Easter holidays in my memory I still feel that Browning was being sentimental when he sang from Italy :

Oh, to be in England Now that April's there.

April is an enchanting month anywhere in Italy, and it is to be noted that Browning did not leave Italy to have the I" pleasure of contemplating the lowest boughs round the elm- tree bole in tiny leaf. It is in the Aegean, however, that April is the supremely perfect month, and I advise those who wish to cruise in the Aegean to choose that month of still seas and sunshine of exactly the right temperature. I wrote once of " this Aegean April weather when spring is falling asleep in the arms of summer," and that is an accurate metaphor for it. , It was left to Mr. T. S. Eliot to put a galoshed-boot on April :

April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring dull roots ' With spring rain.

' This is April accompanied by a saxophone : with all the - dignity of its depression it is in the mood of the emotional defeatism of the 1920s expressed by crooners.

," Thanks to the dignity of Mr. Eliot's depression, his procla- mation of April's cruelty will be found in English and American quotation books when the ' babies ' who failed to keep their ' dates' with the synthetic Don Jose's of Tin Pan Alley have long been dust. I beg Don Jose's pardon: it is unlikely that any contemporary ' croonuch ' would have the ,. guts to stick a knife into a nyloned .Carmen that rejected his whining addresses. verse ? And it is nothing less than impudence to quote as the solitary example of James Joyce the title of his book Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. If these two deplorable examples of academic skittishness have been removed from later editions, I apologise in advance.

In spite of what some will think an excessive attention to American writers Stevenson's Book of Quotations is incom- parably superior in its material and in the arrangement of it to the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. I find that few of my confreres know of Stevenson's work, which was published on this side of the Atlantic 'by Cassell.

One of the best tricks played by April weather was played in 1908. The people at Kew had been displaying a certain amount of scepticism about some of the plants and shrubs exhibited by Cornish gardeners. They simply could not believe that they were all grown in the open without artificial protection. The Cornish gardeners were piqued by this lack of faith and invited a delegation of horticultural experts to visit Cornwall and see for themselves that there was no deception. The invitation was accepted for the second half of Easter week„ and the experts set out on St. Gborge's Day to see the gardens of Cornwall in their glory. The great blizzard started simultaneously and somewhere near Camborne the train with the horticultural experts on board ran into a snowdrift from which it was dug out eight hours later. The picture of those experts, who had been lured away from the temperate house at Kew to view the triumphs of sub-tropical gardening, shivering on that snow-bound train has always beguiled my fancy.

An April blizzard struck south-east England three or four years ago, but the lamentable failure of the Annual Register nowadays to live up to its task makes it a waste of time to search therein for an exact date. The slow deterioration of the Annual Register from 1900 to 1918 and the rapid deteriora- tion since' then, culminating in the emaciated and anaemic volume of today, is a tragedy of the bookshelf. Ichabod !

The Annual Register will celebrate its bicentenary in four years' time. What an opportunity that will offer for the publishers to revive that departed glory. Still even in the days of its glory the Annual Register can let one down. I looked up 1819 to see what the weather was like at Chichester that April. Keats in his magical fragment ' The Eve of St. Mark ' suggests that it must have been a cold one when

The chilly sunset faintly told Of unmatured green valleys cold.

Then I consulted Mr. Robert Gittings's admirable book John Keats: The Living Year, and discovered that Keats was painting the landscape of that unusually mild January of 1819 when in fact he was in Chichester. I had always been puzzled by Keats's April landscape, and thanks to Mr. Gittings the puzzle has been solved for me. He had just been making January such an icy affair in ' The Eve of St. Agnes' that the mild January of 1819 must have seemed like April in comparison.

We still remember Hallow E'en as an occasion for super- natural manifestations, but no family in the remotest cottage riddles out the ashes on the hearthstone overnight in the expectation of seeing in them next morning the footprint of any one of the family who is to die during the year. That macabre custom must have vanished a century since. The superstition about St. Mark's Eve of which Keats was presumably going to write if he had gone on with his poem was that those who stood and watched in the church porch from eleven till one would behold the apparitions of those who were to be buried in the churchyard during the ensuing year. I think of that .eve of St. Mark in 1915 when how many gallant phantoms must have passed across the beaches of Gallipoli. s.