Some Autumn Revivals
DASHING into the battle of cliches, having read Mr. S. Potter's latest treatise, I will not say that Miss Irma A. Richter's Selections from the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Oxford University Press. The -World's Classics Series. 5s.) is either " rewarding " or " fascinat- ing "—though it] is both—but I will hail it instead as one of the most welcome, most thoroughly absorbing, and, relative to its contents, one of the cheapest books to be published this autumn. ,Miss Richter has taken her selections from the rare limited edition of The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci by her father, the late J. P. Richter, and herself, which was published in 1938. Retaining many of Leonardo's drawings, she has succeeded in showing the general character of the notebooks, and has produced a pocket-size volume that everyone who was stirred by the fourth centenary celebrations, especially by the Burlington House exhibition, will be glad to possess.
An entry in the register of St. Florentin, Amboise, dated August 12th, 1519, sets out some of Leonardo's qualities : " In the cloister of this church was buried MC Leonard de Vincy, noble Milanese, first painter, engineer and architect of the King, State mechanist, and sometime director of painting of the Duke of Milan." The artist in him predominated, and directed the course of his scientific studies into paths that, in Renaissance Florence, only an artist could fully explore. As Miss Richter says, "being an artist Leonardo .steered a course guided by visual experience. His intelligence was free and wholly devoted to inquiry." But from observations on the proportions of the human body or the structure of birds' wings we turn, in the notebooks, to philosophic aphorisms and reflections on life (" He who fears dangers does not perish by them ")—many of which are as paradoxical and as stimulating as Samuel Butler's. There is, here and there, much sound advice : " Patience serves us against insults precisely as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more garments as the cold increases, the cold cannot hurt you ; in the same way increase your patience under great injuries, and they cannot vex your mind." But one could go on reading a quoting this book indefinitely.
The renewal of interest in the Victorian author Augustus J. Hare, the subject of a recent essay by Mr. Somerset Maugham the •Cornhill, is likely to be carried a stage further by the publicatio of The Years With Mother, a drastic abridgement of the first thr volumes, covering the years 1834 to 1870, of his Story Of My Li (Allen and Unwin. 25s.). Hare was a prolific writer of guide-boo and memoirs, a talented water-colourist, a keen collector of boo and pictures, but his massive autobiography is now his chief clai to fame, containing as it does—to quote Mr. Malcolm Barnes, why` has prepared this " potted " version with admirable skill anti attention to detail—" an extraordinarily vivid record of social life in the upper strata " of Victorian society. Inevitably much has bee lost in reducing Hare's six volumes to two—for a second volume promised shortly—but there was much in them that could be spare and it is vastly better to have the autobiography in print in this for than out of print altogether. The Years With Mother is warm recommended to anyone with the remotest interest in the Victori period—he is bound to enjoy it ' • and the publishers must be co gratulated on having made such a seemly book, illustrated b engravings from Hare's water-colours, out of the three origin volumes.
The book is a mine of curious information and anecdote picke up by Hare during his explorations on the Continent and in Victori. society. He retails not only what he observed personally but mu that he learned at second-hand. Thus one of his most fruitf encounters was with charming old Lady Wenlock, who had see Nelson himself, " the wonderful little man." And on other pa we may catch glimpses of Landor throwing out of the window excellent dinner cooked for him by Mrs. Browning's maid (" it w too English, he said "), or of a black cat falling from the roof o St. Margaret's on to the hem of Newman's white surplice (" New man's face never changed a muscle," but we are not told what ha pened to the cat). Incidentally, Augustus's uncle, Julius Hare, t Archdeacon, cuts a much less attractive figure in his nephew's auto biography than he does in an earlier context, bathing at Ostend with . his Trinity friend Praed.
Compared with Hare's voluminous record of his Victorian travels, the story of Hogarth's Peregrination, a century earlier, which has been edited with an introduction by Charles Mitchell (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 15s.) makes a slim, compact little volume. Yet the contemporary account of Hogarth's five-day excursion in Kent in 1732, with his tavern companions John Thornhill, Samuel Scott, William Tothall and Ebenezer Forrest, is very well worth reading, both for the unaffected gusto of Forrest's account of a Bohemian wandering and for the unusual insight it' affords into eighteenth- century manners and customs. At Sheerness fort, " Scott was Laughed at for Smelling to the Touchholes of Some of the Guns lately Discharged and so was Hogarth for Sitting Down to Cutt his Toe Nails in the Garrison." And there is plenty more hearty detail of this order. The new edition is the first to print the text of the British Museum manuscript virtually as it was written—it is sometimes mildly Rabelaisian—and includes the illustrations drawn at the time by Hogarth, Scott and John Thornhill, together with William Gostling's account of the tour in Hudibrastic verse. A delightful gift for anyone who honours a great English artist and wishes to see him " in the round," as he lived and enjoyed himself with his friends.
After all these riches, I was not in the mood for reprints of escapist fiction. Thus The Complete Professor Challenger Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Murray. 16s.) seemed to me much less stimulating than tin mind of Leonardo. In the right mood, how- ever, I have enjoyed the Professor, and I do not doubt that he will divert many thousands yet. On the other hand it would take a very long railway journey, or an exceedingly bleak desert island, to get me through Marcus Clarke's For the Term of his Natural Life (Oxford University Press. The World's Classics. 7s. 6d.). But I did gO far enough to discover that the bulk of the story, with its echoes of Hugo and Reade, had merits which are not to be found in the melodramatic prologue. In this exacting and discriminating mood I next rediscovered Dorothy Bussy's translation of Andre Gide 's short novel La Porte Etroite (Strait is the Gate. Penguin Books. 2s.) and here 1 was once again entirely satisfied. This story of young love
turned to tragedy by a girl's religious mania is beautifully told—and with deep feeling. It should be widely read, not least by those who arc sceptical of the claims of its author. For though Gide is con- tinually criticised, and often—one way or another—deserves criti- cism, those who criticise him should at least understand that his reputation rests on a firm foundation of careful craftsmanship.
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