MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
ANTHOLOGIES, especially personal anthologies, offer many diverse kinds of pleasure. It is agreeable to be reminded of passages we had forgotten, or which had hitherto remained hidden from us like cyclamen in the grass. It is interesting td observe the texture of another person's taste. It is convenient to discover in the early autumn an easy solution to the problem of Christmas presents. And the doriphores- (meaning thereby those prigs and parasites who nibble at the leaves of others and vaunt their own knowledge and precision) —the doriphores, I repeat, experience ecstasy from discovering misprints, let us say in a poem by Verlaine, or in reflecting how far more classy and erudite their own'anthology would have been. I have been sent this week a splendid anthology of words and pictures compiled by Mr. John Hadfield. It is called A Book of Beauty, and is finely produced by the Hulton Press for the price of seventeen and sixpence. Mr. Hadfield, some time ago, was stricken down by illness. During what he calls " the sabbatical year " of suffering and convalescence he observed that his sensibilities were enhanced, and that the stimulus he had always derived from the beauties of literature, music and art became during his enforced detachment intensi- fied as an inner flame. He occupied his slow hours by com- piling this anthology. " I made it," he writes, " to please myself, and to provide the house of my imagination with a few convenient windows through which I could look upon life." His selection of the things that gave him pleasure was not in any sense guided by the morbid imaginings of an invalid: he asked himself what it was that rendered life and health so eminently desirable, and he found the answer in the one word " Beauty." His watchword was that of Richard Jefferies : " The longer we can stay among these things, so much more is snatched from inevitable Time."
* * * * He has sought, in this selection of pictures, drawings, music, poetry and prose, to express the emotions of " a poet in his Joy." His book is divided into two sections, the first reflecting the exhilaration experienced by the artist in the exercise of his Own power, the second reflecting the delight occasioned by the prospect of the external world. In the first section we are gently led from childhood, through youth and manhood, to the calm of old age. In the second section we are reminded of " all the fire-folk sitting in the air," of the " sweet content- ments " that we enjoy through the senses, of wind and light and flowers and foam, of dappled things, of " the expression by man of pleasure in labour," of the abiding satisfaction given to us by great works of art. In arranging the flowers in his album Mr. Hadfield has much enjoyed himself by composing con- trasts and correspondences : for instance, Soame Jenyns' poem on " all the scaly breed " is faced by an excellent reproduction Of Arthur Devis' portrait of Lady Caroline Leigh angling demurely, and Henry Vaughan's requiem is confronted by Paul Nash's sketch for " Urn Burial." Much ingenuity, and some daring, has also been expended in finding captions for the several extracts; these titles would not always have pleased .the authors quoted, but they do add a touch of personal Judgement, a note of continuity, to a selection that is arbitrary, and rightly so, rather than inchoate. We are conscious through- out of the presence of a man of taste and fastidiousness, choosing with pleasure and amusement a strand here and a strand there from the large basket at his side. The scholar allows us to'see his quirks.
, Mr. Hadfield agrees with Shelley that " poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man." His personal 1/1.' clination is to prefer the human to the supernatural, the Commonplace to the sublime; his predilections are for simple, gentle things; he has no liking for the grandiose. Although his Major affections centre around the lyric poets of the seventeenth century, his tastes are catholic and embrace both Feller% Hemans and Mr. John Betjeman. His expert knowledge of the Staffordshire potters induces him to include among his illustrations some ghastly reproductions of earthenware, depicting mottled cows being milked under impossible trees or four squat people huddled round a table drinking tea. I warmly approve of these cottage intrusions; an anthologist has., every right to include among his exhibits some exposure of his own eccentricities. Yet the continuing impulse of his selection. the note that recurs again and again, is the delight that he takes in sudden spurts of pure or absolute poetry. We are told that some sequences of words, some sudden phrase, occur to poets in their moments of inadvertence, and that it is around such momentary inspirations that the perfect lyric, as A. E. Hous- man has confessed, is painfully composed. To Edmund Waller, walking in his garden, the words floated " Go, lovely Rose," and the pattern of a great poem was born. " My heart is like a singing bird " flashed into Christina Rossetti's mind followed by " And peacocks with a hundred eyes " and thereafter the finest ornament of her poetry was conceived. To Tenny- son came suddenly the line " Now lies the Earth all Dana to the stars " and around it grew the loveliest of all his lyrics. Such sudden intimations settle unexpectedly as butterflies. bringing with them what Hugo called "the idea of virgin flight, still glistening with the azure blue."
To the convalescent in his sick-room these suggestions of vitality, the shouts of children in the orchard, or even the creak of a barrow on the path, reflect intensely " the shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades." He is filled with wonder, and the world outside assumes for him an excitement never before realised. He can understand even how it came"' that Charles Lamb " shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life." It is in such a mood of elated detachment that the best anthologies, and perhaps also the best diaries, can be composed. The squalor of illness, the feeling of precariousness, that it produces, tempt us to seek solace in the reception of sounds from the living world and in the belief that beauty is a constant, unaffected by human mutability or decay. We can comprehend, as never before, the tranquil resignation of George Herbert or the troubled melancholy of 111 Matthew Arnold and John Clare.' We are not at such times, attuned to dramatic or philosophic poetry; the majesty of "Para- dise Lost," "The Inferno," or the "Prelude" is too much for our exhausted mind; it is the smaller and more delicate flowers that we handle with rapture and from which, as health returns, A we compose our grateful anthology. Such, I suppose, was the I mood in which John Hadfield compiled his Book of Beauty; it is the special sensibility created by his sabbatical year that gives the book such unity and charm. Then health returns, we resume our mundane life, the buses nose past each other in Fleet Street, and we are reminded sadly of the words of Edward Thomas: "And shall I ask at the day's end once more what beauty is and what I can ever have meant by happiness ? "
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I have been told by Sir Kenneth Clark, whose mind I respect, that Leonardo da Vinci did not, as I had believed, write "Cosa bella mortal passa; ma non d'arte." It seems that this magni- ficent phrase rests on a misreading of the original manuscript. 11! Mr. Hadfield would agree with me that, if Leonardo did not write these lapidary words, he ought to have done so. Since, when illness comes to blur our activity, when we can no longer -11 hustle and bustle in the streets, it is an encouragement to reflect that beauty in all its forms is in and out of time and that we shall find it waiting for us again when we get well. I do not - agree that beauty is the sole purpose of life; but I do believe that it is one of life's most stable consolations. I also, if 4 condemned to a sabbatical year, shall compile my anthology.
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