University of Virginia Library

From The London Mercury
by
Arthur Sherbo

The National Union Catalogue gives the various titles enjoyed by the periodical which started as The London Mercury (hereafter LM) and which retained that name for its first thirty-nine volumes. It ran monthly from November 1919 to April 1939. The first editor (November 1919-September 1934) was John Collings Squire (later to be knighted)—poet, critic, editor, anthologizer, historian, and miscellaneous writer. He was succeeded by Rolfe Arnold Scott-James, described in the Dictionary of National Biography as "journalist, editor, and literary critic." After volume 39 the periodical became Life and Letters. Although the LM is well-known and by no means rare, and although very many of the then or now famous English (and some American) writers contributed to it, it has been ignored or forgotten by many bibliographers, biographers, editors, and literary critics. Some poems which appeared originally in it never were reprinted. Others underwent revisions, some slight, some extensive; these revisions have, for the most part, gone unnoted. The reviews of some writers have been noted by bibliographers and biographers; those of others have been overlooked. And there are letters to the editor of which some notice should have been taken. Finally, here are a long letter by George Eliot, not in her collected correspondence, some fragments of letters by Thackeray and the original draft of a poem by him, a short letter by Charles Lamb, and a longer one by "Barry Cornwall."

Because the George Eliot letter may command most interest I quote it first. It forms part of a piece by Canon N. Egerton Leigh titled "A Collection of Autographs" printed in the January 1920 number (1:321-323).

Recourse to Gordon S. Haight's George Eliot: A Biography (1968) makes it possible to identify the recipient as Francois D'Albert-Durade and to date the letter at some time soon after Christmas, 1860, when George Eliot and George Henry Lewes had moved to 16 Blandford Square (p. 334). Students of George Eliot's work will welcome her remarks on French and English writers as well on Adam Bede and on The Mill on the Floss.

Gordon N. Ray's edition of Thackeray's letters includes a single letter from the Reverend William Henry Brookfield to Thackeray of date 26 February 1850, announcing the birth of a daughter.[1] The letter is described as "Hitherto unpublished." The letter was published in the April 1925 LM (11:613) as part of a piece titled "The Melancholy Humorist and His Friends. A Victorian Scrap Book" Part II, by "Lieut.-Col. C. B. Thackeray, D.S.O." Thackeray replied by return post the same day, addressing his letter to the newborn child, Magdalene Brookfield, in an envelope addressed to the Rev. W. H. Brookfield. "On the inside of the flap of the envelop," I am quoting Lieut. Col. Thackeray, "is the following:—My dear Vieux, I give thee joy. Will you kindly enclose the enclosed. Ever yours, W.M.T." (11:613-614). "The enclosed" was the letter to Magdalene, designated by Gordon Ray as also "Hitherto unpublished" (2:639). The congratulatory message to the father is not in Ray's edition. Nor is what Lieut. Col. Thackeray describes as

The date of the letter must be 1852, the date of publication of Henry Esmond; the recipients are unknown as is the identity of Horris [Horace?] Mansfield, no Mansfield of that name figuring in the literature on Thackeray, unless he is the "Mansfield" of Thackeray's diary for 1858 (4:393). Neither Arthur or Charles Mansfield of the Letters is identifiable as "Horris" because of the date.

The asterisk to the above fragment is keyed to a footnote which reveals the existence of another Thackeray letter not listed in Ray's edition:

There is no index listing for the Duchess of St. Albans in Ray's edition.

The Reverend Mr. Brookfield was also able to preserve the original version

of the ballad, Mrs. Katherine's Lantern, written in a Lady's Album. I allow him to tell the story in his own words. The considerably revised and expanded version (46 lines as opposed to the 32 of the fragment) is easily accessible for comparison. Lines 15-17 and the last five lines of the fragment are retained verbatim, and there are other part lines and phrases that go into the revised poem. The difference in the number of lines between the two versions is the result of the addition of fourteen lines to the end of the text in the fragment.

"The Melancholy Humorist and His Friends," encountered in volume 11, was continued and concluded in volume 12 (pp. 54-68). The Reverend Mr. Brookfield's letters are quoted as are some to him and to his wife. One letter was given to Mrs. Brookfield by the editor of the Athenaeum, C. W.

Dilke, to whom it was addressed. The date is given as 1833 and the letter is from Charles Lamb: "Dear Sir, My address is no longer 'Enfield'; but 'Mr. Walden's Church Street, Edmonton': so you see I mean to remain your obligee for pleasant Athenaeums; my poor sister is very bad with her old illnesses. In haste and trouble. Yours, C. LAMB." Lieut. Col. Thackeray comments, "The address is of interest in view of the concern shown by the public when the sale of Lamb's last home [he died in 1834] was announced the other day" (12:65).[2] Another and longer letter is that of Bryan Waller Procter ("Barry Cornwall") to Mrs. Brookfield. Procter and the Brookfields had a mutual friend in Thackeray. Procter's book on Charles Lamb had just been published, thus the date of the letter would have to be between July 16 and August 9, 1866, when Procter was seventy-nine years old. The dates are of letters from Procter to John Forster who published the book on Lamb, the latter letter indicating that the book had been published.[3] Procter and his daughter Adelaide were friends of the Brookfields, something one would not learn from Armour's biography, but which is quite evident from this letter.

A number of poems printed in LM do not appear in the Collected, Selected, or Complete Poems of various writers. Vita Sackville-West's Collected Poems, Volume One was published in 1933 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press in London. There was no subsequent volume. Among the acknowledgments "for having published my work in the first instance" is that to LM. Miss Sackville-West's contributions to LM were Winter Song (7:128-129); Three Poems (Moonlight, Song, "If I had only loved your flesh",

Song "Little I asked—but that little denied me") (8:8-9); Making Cider and Bee-Master (8:567-570); Tuscany (9:461-462); Woodcraft (11:567-569); Black Tarn (15:458-459); and Illusions (20:556), which was actually part of her King's daughter and is in the Collected Poems (p. 317). Black Tarn is also included in the Collected Poems, with, incidentally, two changes, line 13 in LM reading, "May scan the head of the mountains dwelling in the mist" for which 1933 has "Their heads, mist-dwelling." "The dull" of line 25 in LM becomes "Dull" in 1933.

What is of especial interest is the text of Bee-Master which appeared in the issue for October 1923. Its next appearance was as part of the section Spring in The Land (1926), a text with ten lines added at the end, a text which was reprinted in Selected Poems (1941). The LM text was much revised, for not only were ten lines added at the end but another ten were added to become lines 15 to 24 of the expanded poem. One has, then, three, texts: the 94 lines in LM, the 104 lines in The Land, and the 114 lines in Selected Poems (1941). The poem is not included in the Collected Poems of 1933.[4]

I proceed with the other examples of revisions ignored. The greatest of the revisers among the poets contributing to LM was Walter de la Mare. He contributed twelve poems over the years; ten were revised (sometimes, a single line). I shall relegate some of the slighter revisions to footnotes; the order is LM first and Complete Poems (1969) second.[5] Sotto Voce (4:346-347) (1969 adds To Thomas Edwards to the title) is more extensively revised than the other two poems in volume four.[6] There are three revisions in The Last Coachload (5:121-123).[7] While there are five revisions in The Encounter (17:354), they, too, may be relegated to a footnote.[8] Episodes appeared in volume 27 (p. 489).[9] There are but two changes in The Cherry Trees (35:105).[10] The revisions in Swallows Flown (35:106) transform this little poem of but six lines: l. 1, the/that; l. 2, That has haunted me so of late?/Haunting the livelong day?; l. 3, The absence of something scarcely heeded/This void,

where sweetness, so seldom heeded; l. 4, Yet with me, early and late/Once ravished my heart away?" l. 5, wait./stay?. finally, the poem Memory (37:110-112), to which de la Mare added twenty lines (78-97) in revising the LM text (de la Mare has two poems titled Memory; this one is on pages 373-375 of 1969).[11]

Padraic Colum was also given to revising his poems, in the instance of his poem Nests in LM (7:239) he not only revised the text but also the title, i.e., to The Poet. His poems were collected in 1932; those readings are second: l. 1 nest/om; l. 2 nests/om.; l. 3, They're . . . said he/They are . . . he said; l. 5, Here/There; l. 5 is/om.; l. 6, A mark in the/Marks an; l. 9, By the inland lake, its shore/By shore of the inland lake; l. 10, the/om.; l. 12, the/om; l. 12, cattle's/cattles'; l. 16, a/om; l. 19, the briar/briars; l. 22, take widest way/have widest sway; l. 24 bred with their/reared with. LM has a penultimate stanza not in 1932: "Till you own like other peoples; / Till the breath of your need be stopped; / Till your salt shall lose its savour, / And your virgin soil be cropped."

D. H. Lawrence contributed two poems to LM, one in volume 21 (November 1929-April 1930), Bells, p. 893; the other in volume 22 (May-October 1930), The Triumph of the Machine. Both were revised. Warren Roberts, editor of the Soho bibliography (1963) of Lawrence's works, notes that "revisions and changes are frequently indicated" (p. 10), but there is no indication that these two poems were revised. The revisions are not slight. LM readings are followed by those in the Complete Poems of 1972: Bells, l. 1, om/that; ll. 2 and 5, obscure/obscene; l. 7, in a . . . mouth/in . . . mouths; l. 11, fingers . . . fists/finger-fist; l. 12, om./old; l. 14, when/where; l. 16, thickets/thicket; l. 17, cave/core. The editors of the Complete Poems print both the original and revised versions of The Triumph of the Machine, but either fail to note the revisions in Bells or think them unimportant (see their page 24).

A poem by Leigh Hunt, To Shelley, was printed in the November 1922 LM with this footnote: "For this unpublished poem by Leigh Hunt we are indebted to the kindness of Messrs. Chaundy & Cox of 40 Maddox Street, who possess the MS. The mood and manner suggest that the lines were written about the date of Hunt's book, 'The Religion of the Heart,' 1853. 'One other sweet fervid voice' is, probably, that of Vincent Hunt, whose death in 1852 deprived Leigh Hunt of his favourite child.—Editor" (7:16). The poem is printed among the Notes in the 1923 Poetical Works, edited for the Oxford University Press by H. S. Milford, who writes, "By the kindness of Mr. Trevor Leigh-Hunt I am enabled to print for the first time the following blankverse poem" (p. 719). The texts are substantively identical. Mr. Milford was not the first to print the poem, nor did he suggest any probable date for the poem or the identity of the "Other sweet fervid voice." Some measure of Hunt's grief at the death of his son may be had from his Autobiography

where he writes "My son's Christian name was Vincent. This is only the second time I have dared to write it. He died at the close of October, in the year 1852, and was buried in beautiful Kensal Green, my own final bedchamber, I trust, in this world" (p. 541 in the World Classics edition). Vincent, who died of tuberculosis, wrote verses. Is it fanciful to equate these facts with "sweet fervid voice"?

I have chosen a few of the letters to the editor because of their authors and because, of course, letters to editors are usually not included in editions of the correspondence of writers. Some of George Bernard Shaw's letters to various editors have been reprinted,[12] but so many of his letters have had to be excluded from the four-volume edition of his correspondence that exclusion of other letters to editors has been mandatory. There is a profusion of riches; hence one more letter may seem superrogatory. Max Kenyon, musicologist, author of Harpsichord Music (1905) and the later Mozart in Salzberg (1959), wrote "To the Editor of the London Mercury and Bookman" to protest Shaw's statement that Mozart had written the conclusion to Gluck's overture to Iphigenia in Aulis and to clear up the matter (37:532). Shaw's letter of gratitude was printed below Kenyon's.

I have not located the source of Shaw's pronouncement on Gluck's overture; it is not in his "Gluck in Glastonbury" in the May 6, 1916, Nation.

A second letter, this one to the editors of the LM and the Bookman of London, is by Dorothy Sayers and is of interest in that she not only explains her use of the pseudonym Johanna Leigh but more than implies that she will write more "straight" novels under that name. In the event, her straight autobiographical novel Cat o' Mary was never finished and hence never published, although it had been announced as to be published.[13]

Evidently there were to have been more "Johanna Leigh" books.

The third letter to the editor I have chosen is by John Gould Fletcher. In his autobiography, Life is My Song (1937), Fletcher explains the circumstances which prompted him to write his letter to the editor of LM, J. C. Squire. Writing of the popularity in England of Vachel Lindsay's poetry, he remarked that "the foremost of the academic pontiffs, J. C. Squire, had led off his London Mercury of that month [Dec. 1919] with the 'Bryan' poem [by Lindsay] in its entirety, and had followed this up with critical remarks to the effect that Vachel Lindsay was the only American poet who mattered, inasmuch as he was the only one whose attitude and subject matter were totally and exclusively American" (p. 281). Gould, as is evident from his letter, did not think too highly of Lindsay's poetry at that time, although he later changed his opinion. Here is the letter.

Gould named Frost, Robinson, Aiken, Sandburg, Stevens, Kreymborg, and Bodenheim as American poets equal to or better than Lindsay. Evidently the matter rankled, for soon thereafter, Gould contributed a thirty-one page

article, "Some Contemporary American Poets," to The Chapbook. A Monthly Miscellany (May, 1920) edited by Harold Munro. Gould discussed, in this order, the poetry of Robinson, Frost, Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, Sandburg, Lindsay (whom he praises for his humor, and for nothing else), Ezra Pound, Aiken, Stevens, and Kreymborg. What is more, the article was followed by poems by all those poets discussed with the exception of Ezra Pound.

In volume 2 Gilbert Murray and H. G. Wells wrote of the plans to start a library in the East End under the name of the YMCA Book Room (p. 81). Two Letters in volume 18 may also be mentioned. Walter de la Mare wrote to deny any part in his nephew J. de la Mare Rowley's novel The Passage in Park Lane (p. 523); John Galsworthy, writing as President of the P.E.N. Club announced the formation of a "Society called The Young P.E.N., affiliated to the London P.E.N. Club" (p. 524). Hilaire Belloc reviewed H. G. Wells's The Outline of History in volume 3 (pp. 43-62); H. G. Wells took exception to much in the review and wrote a scathing full-page letter to the editor in answer (p. 313); Belloc ended the little contretemps in LM with a firm but conciliatory letter in the next number (p. 422).[14] Wells wrote and had published five essays against Belloc's "twenty-four voluminous articles" against his Outline of History in a one-shilling book Wells titled Mr. Belloc Objects to "The Outline of History" (1926).

I pointed out that seven of Vita Sackville-West's poems originally printed in LM are not included in her Collected Poems of 1933 and that one of de la Mare's is not in his Complete Poems of 1969. Similarly, in order of appearance, poems not included in the latest collections of various poets: Padraic Colum, The Deer of Ireland (7:12); Louis Golding, No Man has Written Poetry Yet (7:130);[15] Walter Savage Landor, To Wordsworth and The Power of Sound (12:62, 63-64);[16] Richard Eberhart, Two Poems: Boulder and Hill Climber (20:238, 239); F. L. Lucas, Four Poems: In a Provincial Museum, The Last of Cynthia (From Propertius), Life and Letters, In the Hebrides (24:391-395); Edith Sitwell, Prelude. For Geoffrey Gorer (32:108-110).[17]

John Sullivan states that he limited himself in his G. K. Chesterton: A Bibliography (1958) in the section on Chesterton's "Contributions to Periodicals" to "such writings that I could trace as having appeared in book form, with the addition of a number of items which seemed to me worthy of inclusion for special reasons." He also included a section titled "Books and Periodicals containing Illustrations by G.K. Chesterton" (p. 14). He lists six contributions by Chesterton to LM (p. 145). When a complete bibliography

of Chesterton's writings is undertaken, the other contributions to LM that should be noted are The Savage as a Poet (10:288-289), The True Case Against Cliques (17:432-438), The Dean's Last Chapter (30:546-547), and a review of W. R. Inge's Vale. Chesterton provided illustrations for his friend E. Clerihew's verses titled "More Biography for Beginners" in volume 11 (pp. 53, 55). The verses deserve to be quoted: "George the Third / Ought never to have occurred / One can only wonder / At so grotesque a blunder." And, "'Dear me!' exclaimed Homer, / 'What a delicious aroma! / It smells as if a town / Was being burnt down.'" Chesterton's drawings do ample justice to the verses and are not listed in the Sullivan bibliography.

Since I have included a review by Chesterton, I should add that there are two reviews by Bertrand Russell not included in the bibliography of his works.[18] Russell reviewed Alfred J. Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic in volume 33 (pp. 541-543) and Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker in volume 36 (pp. 297-298). The bibliography of the works of C. Day-Lewis does not list reviews; that of Russell's does. Whatever other reviews Day-Lewis may have contributed to other periodicals, those he wrote for LM deserve to be known. As, indeed, the reviews written by other authors of any acknowledged importance should. In any event, Day-Lewis wrote eight reviews for R. A. Scott-James, although one would not know of his LM connection from Sean Day-Lewis's C. Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life (1980).[19] Day-Lewis and Louis MacNeice were in school together and were much in one another's company thereafter. The curious may wish to compare Day-Lewis's praise of MacNeice, both in the reviews and elsewhere, with some of MacNeice's criticism of Day-Lewis's poetry. In a piece published in 1935 MacNeice, writing about Auden, Spender, and Day-Lewis as "communists and other propagandists," noted that "Day-Lewis, who writes longer and looser works and has not much sense of humour, has committed lamentable ineptitudes while preaching for the cause." Ten years later he described Day-Lewis as "one of the most technically accomplished poets now writing in English."[20] Finally, one review by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch should be mentioned, because it is not listed in his bibliography and because it is of Sir John Squire's Shakespeare and a Dramatist (32:587-589), Sir John still editor of LM.[21]

Notes