EDWARD THOMAS.*

Tan wrapper of this volume states that it is a collection of fifteen of Edward Thomas's latest papers, and therefore it is surprising, on looking inside, to find that five of them are dated from nineteen to twenty-five years ago. The inclusion of these early attempts will do no service to Thomas's literary reputation, and yet there is something to be said for it, for from their presence the book takes on something of the character of a document, the record of the development of a personality. It is always a dangerous thing to attempt to deduce, as an analyst may deduce from dreams, the charac- teristics of a man's personality from his writings, for though style and choice of theme are undoubtedly conditioned by personality, these things are to a large extent consciously con- trolled and influenced by factors which are absent in the case of dreams. But the temptation so to interpret a character is always peculiarly alluring, and when, as in the present case, we have specimens covering a wide period, and when, by superimposing them, as it were, one on another (as Gallon superimposed photographs of facial types) we discover that certain salient features emerge, it is at least permissible to record the results for what they may be worth.

It is interesting, then, to compare two of the earliest papers in the book, one dated 1897 the other 1899, the two as unlike as chalk and cheese ; for we find the two characteristics which they represent persisting throughout Thomas's work.

In "Felix" Thomas is discovered playing the sedulous ape to Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetes. The story is a triumph of languid preciosity skilfully executed and—let us be candid about it—quite insufferable. Felix is a youthful prince who has recently inherited from his father a beautiful and remote realm.

"Ills chestnut-coloured hair—with paler lights as in the grain of a chestnut—

Cast in a thousand snares and rings For Love's lingers and his wings, falling lightly and massily upon his shoulders, lay there in changeful curls. His flesh was like a white rose where habitually clothed, like a red rose upon his cheeks."

If Thomas himself actually planned the inclusion of this story in Cloud Castle we must conclude that he did so because

he had come to regard it is a huge joke, and it has value here because it underlines qualities which, in a mitigated form, persisted in his work—namely, a weakness for the escape pro- vided by the unreal and the fantastic, and a somewhat self- conscious formality of phrase and selection of epithet by which prose may so easily be made to topple over into pose. This he obviously caught from Stevenson and also, perhaps (more remotely and also more profitably), from the great prose writers of the seventeenth century.

The other youthful paper, "A Man of the Woods," was written two years earlier, and shows another persistent side of Thomas's character—that of the nature-lover. here there is a reality, an actuality, as there always is when he writes of nature, which is entirely absent in the other form, but there peeps out even here the self-conscious young man marshalling his phrases, rounding his glib antitheses : "Had he been a

worse keeper, he would never have made so good a poacher ; a worse poacher, and he were a useless keeper." Six years

later the preciosity still persists. In " Bronwen " he can still write such stuff as : "Sweetly they talk of the sweets of silence, they brood sweetly in silence over the sweets of past speech." The Eu_phuists never went further. But in" Seven Tramps," a study of nature and rough folk corresponding to the earlier "Man of the Woods," his style has grown sterner and cleaner, and when we come down to the latest work there are some delightful things. " Helen " is a poignant story told in twelve short pages with great economy of language and detail ; and equally good is "Aunt Ann's Cottage," a picture full of the ancestral country atmosphere, executed in the simplest phrases and the vividest details. The cottage

"was hidden by ivy which grew through the walls, up between the flagstones of the floor, and flapped in at the windows ; it grew also over the panes, and was so dense that the mice ran up and down it, and you could see their pale silky bellies as they crossed the glass, if they did not look in over the sill and enter."

This, at last, is true style, for now style and the writer are one. He has ceased to cultivate it and is able and content simply to express himself. But though style and the man are

• Cloud Castk, and Other Papers. By Edward Thomas. London : Duckworth. is. 01.1

reconciled, life and the man, we feel, are not. In "Morgan" we read of a man who, after devoting himself to social reform in London, "drew back because he could not understand the town life, and it was absurd to reform what he could not understand." He retired into the country and built himself a tower upon a hilltop in which he set himself "to think about life before he began to live." Here lie lived in solitude, walking alone upon the hills, and sometimes sleep- ing there under the winds and stars :—

" Looking on a May midnight at Algol rising out of the mountain, the awe and the glory of that first step into the broad heaven exalted him ; a sound rose as of the whole of tinic making a music behind him, a music of something passing away to leave him alone in

silence, as if he also were stepping up into the blue air—always to stumble back."

At last in his desolation he returns to London, but he returns to it like a creature from another sphere, detached, unable to realize anything but the beauty of its river and mists and seagulls, and, soothed by their beauty into what he believes to be a harmony with himself, he returns to the mountains and his tower, thinking

"that they had made ready his brain, that on the mountains he would find fulness of beauty at last, and simplicity, so he went away and never returned. There, too, among the mountains was weariness, because he also was there."

And after a period of lonely life in his tower he took a woman as strange, lonely and outcast as himself to share his loneliness.

Some of the old preciosity peeps out in the description of

her : " Angharad, the shy and bold and fierce Angliarad, whose black eyes radiated light and blackness together." The marriage brought no happiness to either, it seems, and

Morgan remained the restless creature he had always been. "He was seen at all hours, always far off, on the high paths of the mountains. His hair was as black as when he was a boy." It would have been better, perhaps, if there had been some grey among the black.

We see in " Morgan " that restless detachment, that mis- trust of human actuality, which at first showed itself in " Felix " as a youthful dip into the fantastic. In "Morgan" it was soothed but never quite satisfied by nature, so that he was driven to pursue happiness in those higher, more rarefied regions where happiness either vanishes with a last flash of wings or is found only in religious mysticism.

The book is prefaced by the fragment of a Foreword written for it by W. H. Hudson and found unfinished among his papers at the time of his sudden death. Its beautiful prose increases the worth of the book.