A MODERN RECLUSE.*
THE publication of a new work by the author who calls himself John Halsham is an event which cannot leave cold that small but select body of readers who want a book to be responsible, —who like to feel that behind every word is sincerity. Idlehurst quickly became a classic ; Lonewood Corner, its sequel, or second volume, will stand beside it, we fancy, on most shelves where the earlier book has established its footing. If not on all, it is because of a slight suggestion of what is not exactly bitterness, but is rather like it—an added hint of aloofness—that may not be to the palate of all. Something of the kind may be found in Idlehurst, but it is more marked here. Idlehurst was younger, and the world has not grown less mad. For, taken as a whole, Lonewood Corner is a
lament ; and laments are not popular ; there is, indeed, no reason why they should be. It is the voice of one crying in the wilderness. It is an epitaph on not exactly merrie England, but unsophisticated England,—an England unbe- devilled by democratic ideals, an England, to use one of the author's metaphors, whose excrescences have escaped the jack-plane of progress.
For variety we have occasional and subtle descriptions of Nature, and are introduced to an elderly bookworm, a young
officer, a pretty and stout-hearted girl, two old ladies of the Cranford type, a strong-minded farming widow, and a few shrewd Sussex villagers with long memories ; but the woof
and warp of the book are melancholy,—a feeling of world- weariness, a sense of despondency. Such a frame of mind may in smaller observers easily become mawkish and tire- some ; but Mr. Halsham is too wise, too clear-sighted, and has too much humr.ur, ever to allow such a result. None the less, it would not surprise us to learn that the fastidious scepticism and pessimism of much of the work were found very irritating by many readers. Nor would it, we are sure, surprise the author, who indeed in his opening chapter anticipates many kinds of hostile criticism.
Technically, we think the book an advance on Idlehurst.
'The passages of description and fancy are finer. Here is the praise of the woodlanders :—
"Their life is astonishingly simple and archaic, and one of the wholesomest in the world ; dry-shod in dead leaves and fern while the ploughman splashes along the drenched furrows, snug by the stick fire in the low hollow while the snow-wind nips the shepherd on the down, these 'leather-lagged chaps,' the 'clay and coppice people,' as Cobbett called them, are still, as they were at the time of the Rural Rides,' most favoured of all who live on the land. The billhook is almost the only tool they need ; a felling-axe may be wanted for the larger saplings, and a draw- knife for shaving the thatching-rods; the wood itself furnishes all the rest: chopping-blocks, levers, wedges, bonds for the faggots, are all made as they are wanted from the material every- where lying at hand ; the little 'lodge' or shed for rough weather is built of faggots and thatched with hoop-shavings. Nothing is wasted; the very chips and litter make the fire over which the kettle sings, hung on a handy hazel crook stuck into the ground.
• Lonetcood Corner : a Countryman's Horisons. By John Halaham. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. [Is. net.] As it happened, I found myself there only a night or two afterwards, and sat for ball an hour on a bough of the fallen giant, with a score of his fellows glimmering about me in the dusk on the flower-strewn slope, and the clean raw smell of the oak sap filling the air. I had nodded and roused myself once or twice, when all at once I saw the souls of the trees, the Dryads, gathered together in &company, coming down the wood- men's path, sighing as they came with a thin echo of their old tree-top music and pacing slowly amongst their shattered boughs. They were shepherded by Hermes, who bore a felling-axe in place of his wand. At the brow where the path drops steeply to the sallow-grown bottoms of the wood, they met with Pan, who seemed to complain of the wrong done to his realm and the exile of his people. 'That I have charge to bring them over Styx is true,' I heard Hermes say ; but shall there not be oaks in the under-world, and souls to inhabit them sufficient for the wood- lands of the blest? Doth not Jove take thus at their season the tree, and the hyacinths beneath it, and the grass, so that there may be no lack of shade there, nor of soft lying, nor of garlands for those who rest? These, and many another sort of good things beside, I convey from men's sight into the darkness ; or how should they, when they have been ferried over, find all that the poets told them should be there? And so, fair son, let me on with my flock.' With that he passed on, and when I rubbed my eyes and looked after them, there was nothing there but a wreath of mist rising from the hidden turns of the brook, and no sound but the cry of the plover from the fallow beyond the wood. I left the lopped trunk and the litter of withering leaves, pleasing myself with the fancy that somewhere the soul of the tree was budding freshly, and the well-remembered shadow was falling across the wood-violets and anemones in the light of a fairer sky."
But if one wishes for a passage absolutely typical of this writer's method and attitude, one gets it rather here, where he rounds off one of his favourite discussions with the Warden on some problem of life :—
"And there, the talk having reached a familiar anchorage, I find it is time to be gone homewards. From the square drifts the savour of the old men's dinners. Em Brazier has taken her sewing indoors, and the honest cowman is working with uncommon energy to 611 up his tale of trusses, making the hay-knife Sash in the sun as he digs into the rick. The school-bell jangles from the far end of the village, and Mr. Dempster is resuming his national function with the ladle and the jar. The world is spinning still, and we must needs renew our little vortices in its wake. But as I mount the meadow-path for home, I look back on the green quad of the Almshouse, saying over to myself the Warden's Montaigne text over his study fireplace : J'essaye de soustraire ce coing h in tempeste publique, comma je fais un autre eoing en mon gine '; and once more I commend the specta- torial attitude, the taste for standing out, setting one's back to the containing wall of things, and giving one's eyes their chance, at least, of seeing something of the course of time."
Yet though the writer is so determined a dweller apart, out of the world, his book is symptomatic of the times. It is of this century. To compare it and its companion with Our Village and Cranford is very interesting. Our Village and Cranford, both in their ways good, and so happy, and optimistic, were not exactly superficial—certainly Cranford was not— but were written for a time when cheerful semblance& were more than sombre facts. Mr. Halsham may be said to have translated both into modern terms. We have in his pages similar types, but the latter-day author looks through them into immensity, if not negation ; relates them to society ; makes each the excuse for a mood of whimsical irony or pro- found unhappiness. Never positively anti-social, and some- times very human and kindly, he is yet a little repellent : on the unsympathetic side : a solitary : and a thought too pleased with his own company for the ideal essayist. We do not make this a charge against him ; after all, does lie not call the book Lonewood Corner, thus suggesting not only the recluse, the spectator ab extra, but also adding a hint of angularity ? We merely state it to explain to the new reader what to expect. The old will know, and for such modifications as have come upon Mr. Halsham in the interval since Idlehurst was pub- lished he himself prepares them in the opening chapter, a chapter containing some of the best writing in the book, so lucid and unambiguous, and enriched at wise intervals by fine imaginative imagery. Mr. Halshain always writes well : always considers the word as the servant both of truth and of rhythm ; we can think of no one who is more scrupulous to state accurately his mental attitude ; but this opening chapter reaches, we think, his high-water mark as a critic of self and life. Its close, which we quote, is indeed in • a manner of which we should be grateful for more. It has a flavour of old wine :— "You see that I have been beforehand with a variety of excep- tions, possible to be taken by you and the critics which you so kindly typify for me. If these defences fail, I retire to my impregnable, hold ; the book is a pa.rergon, as all literature of the tertiary rank and under should be. Say it is vapid, irritatingly cocksure, precious, strains after humour, meddles with matters above its range ; lay on and spare not; you do not touch me. You know all the time that my business is with my turozips and onions, my Beurre pears, my pansies and long-tailed columbines. The book goes out by itself, a sub-product of the spade and hoe : you may remember my old opinion that all authors would be the better for an independence earned among saladings and worts. For critics, too, something of the back-bending discipline would often be very salutary; it would, for one thing, show them the true place and possibilities of a parergon. There is, in the Itinera Phantastica ' of Carbonarius Secundas, a story of a hermit of Lower Egypt, who cultivated onions near his cell by the side of the Nile. Ile wrote a treatise on the bulb, wherein he praised God for all its virtues of taste and smell and comely proportions and healthful properties, and for all the meanings mystically contained in it—its spherical, tunicated form, its aroma, so mixed of bitter-sweet that as he said he contemplated it ScurpudEr yoltuar. He extended his thanksgiving to ninety-nine articles, and for all his pains was unable to excogitate a hundredth clause. One morning he woke to find that an angelic hand had filled in the hiatus in his papyrus : he had forgotten to give thanks for that onions were made with tails to hang them up by. There is a moral of uses here which I leave to your apprehension, though you may never have bunched your onions in September sun, nor found occasion to trouble your head to think what devices a man may remove in after-works, at the second or the third remove."
We should like to have from Mr. Halsham's pen a volume of detached essays on many subjects. We would have him a trifle more objective in them ; it would do him no harm to turn aside a little from himself. We should like to see him re-entering the world. He has done as much work from the point of view of the receder from society as he need.
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