[2 May ’08]

A few weeks ago I claimed to be the discoverer of Mr. Wilfred Whitten as a first-class prose writer.  I relinquish the claim, with apologies.  Messrs. Methuen have staggered me by sending me Mrs. Laurence Binyon’s “Nineteenth Century Prose,” in which anthology is an example of Mr. Whitten’s prose.  Though staggered, I was delighted.  I should very much like to know how Mrs. Binyon encountered the prose of Mr. Whitten.  Did she hunt through the files of newspapers for what she might find therein, and was she thus rewarded?  Or did some tremendous and omniscient expert give her the tip?  I disagree with about 85 per cent. of the obiter dicta of her preface, but her anthology is certainly a most agreeable compilation.  It shows, like sundry other recent anthologies, the strong liberating influence of Mr. E.V.  Lucas, whose “Open Road” really amounted to a renascence of the craft.

And here is the tail-end of the extract which Mrs. Binyon has perfectly chosen from the essays of Mr. Whitten: 

“...The moon pushing her way upwards through the vapours, and the scent of the beans and kitchen stuff from the allotments, and the gleaming rails below, spoke of the resumption of daily burdens.  But let us drop that jargon.  Why call that a burden which can never be lifted?  This calm necessity that dwells with the matured man to get back to the matter in hand, and dree his weird whatever befall, is a badge, not a burden.  It is the stimulus of sound natures; and as the weight of his wife’s arm makes a man’s body proud, so the sense of his usefulness to the world does but warm and indurate his soul.  It is something when a man comes to this mind, and with all his capacity to err, is abreast of life at last.  He shall not regret the infrequency of his inspirations, for he will know that the day of his strength has set in.  And if, for poesy, some grave Virgilian line should pause on his memory, or some tongue of Hebrew fire leap from the ashes of his godly youth, it will be enough.  But if cold duck await—­why, then, to supper!”

UGLINESS IN FICTION

[9 May ’08]

In the Edinburgh Review there is a disquisition on “Ugliness in Fiction.”  Probably the author of it has read “Liza of Lambeth,” and said Faugh!  The article, peculiarly inept, is one of those outpourings which every generation of artists has to suffer with what tranquillity it can.  According to the Reviewer, ugliness is specially rife “just now.”  It is always “just now.”  It was “just now” when George Eliot wrote “Adam Bede,” when George Moore wrote “A Mummer’s Wife,” when Thomas Hardy wrote “Jude the Obscure.”  As sure as ever a novelist endeavours to paint a complete picture of life in this honest, hypocritical country of bad restaurants and good women; as sure as ever he hints that all is not for the best in the best of all possible islands, some witling is bound to come