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From The London Mercury by Arthur Sherbo
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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).

16 Blandford Square, London, N.W.

My dear Friend—I was delighted to have your letter this morning bringing me good news not only of a literary but of a personal kind. It is pleasant to know that your labours on Adam have been so far appreciated; but I think it is pleasanter still to know that Maman has had the comfort of seeing her son Charles this Christmas, and that your prospects concerning him are hopeful. I begin, you know, to consider myself an experienced matron, knowing a great deal about parental joys and anxieties. Indeed I have rather too ready a talent for entering into anxieties of all sorts.

Mr. Lewes is very much obliged to you for sending him the prospectus and additional information, which he has already dispatched to Mr. Trollope. It will be a valuable widening of his opportunities for choosing a foreign school. I was not aware till I gathered the fact from your letter that Emile Forgues had "analysed" the Mill for the Revue des deux Mondes, for Mr. Lewes, knowing that it would vex me, had carefully concealed it. It is an impudent way of getting money—this cool


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appropriation of other people's property without leave asked—which seems to have become a regular practice with him. Pray consider me responsible for nothing but what you find in the Tauchnitz edition. I never alter my books after they are printed —never alter anything of importance even in the course of printing, and ce n'est point mon histoire que j'écris, or whatever else you may find in M. Forgues' edition that is not in the English is due to the gratuitous exercise of his own talents in improving my book. I can well imagine that you find the Mill more difficult to render than Adam, but would it be inadmissible to represent in French, at least in some degree, those intermédiaires entre le style commun et le style élégant to which you refer? It seems to me that I have discerned such shades very strikingly rendered in Balzac, and occasionally in George Sand. Balzac, I think, dares to be thoroughly congenial, in spite of French strait-lacing. Even in English this daring is far from being general: inferior writers are hardly ever capable of it, and in the great mass of English fiction, from Bulwer down to the latest young lady scribbler, you find scarcely anything but impossible dialogue—the character speaking as no man or woman ever spoke, except on the stage. The writers who dare to be thoroughly familiar are Shakespeare, Fielding, Scott (when he is representing the popular life with which he is familiar), and indeed every other writer of fiction of the first class. Even in his loftiest tragedies, in Hamlet, for example, Shakespeare is intensely colloquial. One hears the very accent of living men. I am not vindicating the practice, I know that is not necessary to you who have so quick a sensibility for the real and the humorous, but I want to draw your attention to what you may not have observed—the timid elegance (alias unnaturalness) of inferior English writers. You may not have observed it, because naturally you don't read our poorer literature. You, of course, have knowledge as to what is or can be done in French literature beyond any that my reading can have furnished me with. I am glad that you think there are any readers who will prefer the Mill to Adam. To my feeling there is more thought and a profounder veracity in the Mill than in Adam; but Adam is more complete and better balanced. My love of the childhood scenes made me linger over them in epic fashion, so that I could not develop as fully as I wished the concluding "Book" in which the tragedy occurs, and which I had looked forward to with much intention and preparation from the beginning. My books don't seem to belong to me after I have once written them, so I find myself delivering opinions about them as if I had nothing to do with them. I am not afraid that you will be unable to distinguish that frankness from conceit. I cannot write very boastfully about our health; both Mr. Lewes and I are very middling, easily upset, easily put out of order. But in all other respects our happiness grows daily. Our dear boy Charles is more and more precious to us, and seems to delight in pouring all his young affection out in tenderness to me. Thornton, the second, is going on well and happily with his studies at Edinburgh, and seems to have profited morally and physically by the change. I don't know how to describe our locality otherwise than by saying that it lies very near Regent's Park, westward. It is a quiet situation for London—alas, not quiet for me, who dream of still fields! London is hateful to me, and I sometimes think we shall hardly have come to stay in it three years. Mr. Lewes and I constantly recall Geneva—and for us Geneva means all that is associated with you and Maman. It was a vivid pleasure to me that he felt his liking and admiration go out to you both quite apart from the fact that you were my friends. He desires to share in all assurances of affection that I send you. But I send you few assurances. Are they necessary?

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.


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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

A fragment of a letter follows, in what the dealers call "the sloping hand-writing," to distinguish it from his more usual small upright hand-writing, which is almost as much a joy to look at as an old illuminated manuscript. *

We—like good old folks as we are beginning to be—for, look, are not the young ones growing up—and our place in the rear rank is marked out for us—

They have paid me back my money at the bank—that's a little comfort, isn't it?

And I have got the first sheets of Col. Esmond in my pocket—finished in a very nice type and looking very handsome. And I have been to dine at Holland House . . .

I have begun a little of a new story and now I think you have seen my little budget of news.

O ladies how hungry I am! and how absurd it is of Horris Mansfield not to dine till 8 o'clock, God bless you two, and give my love to your girls and remember that I am always yours and yours,

W. M. T. (p. 614)

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:

In Sotheby's list for November, 1922, one of the items, belonging to the Duchess of St. Albans, in a letter from W.M. Thackerary to Mr. Hallam, dated 1852, with a postscript. "I forget whether I have ever had the honour of writing to you in my old original hand writing, but the above used to be my hand, and I find myself returning super antiquas vias."

He adopted the small upright handwriting in order to save space in his MSS.

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


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of the ballad, Mrs. Katherine's Lantern, written in a Lady's Album. I allow him to tell the story in his own words.
Dickens's daughter, Mrs. Perugini is, happily, still with us. It was to her that Thackeray addressed the verses Mrs. Katherine's Lantern, written in a Lady's Album. A little scrap of note-paper, with its scores and erasures, lies before me, on which he began these lines. The fragment differs from the finished ballad, and it may be of interest to compare it with the published version. Thackeray's verse flowed from his pen less readily than his prose, which he wrote with extraordinary fluency and very few corrections, in his exquisite handwriting. Here is the original: An old lantern battered, black
Bruised and scarred with flaw and crack
A bad lot I know it is
Why then should I purchase this
Queer old specimen of disreputable bric-a-brac?
Passing through a gloomy Court
Where the Israelites resort
This old lamp I chanced to see
With initials K & E
And I pondered who was she
Erst the Mistress of this wreath
And that anagram beneath
The mysterious K & E?
Full a hundred years are gone
Since the little beacon shone
From a Venice balcony—
Towards the window where it burned
Ah what eager eyes were turned
Celebrating K & E!
Braving storm and night and wind
How the lover yearned and pined
Gazing at the little flame
Hark in the canal below
Sure you hear the plash of rowers?
Yes they rest upon their oars
Underneath the balcony
And a thrilling voice begins
To the sound of mandolins—
Begins singing of amore
And delire and dolore
O the ravishing tenore! (p. 617)
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.


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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.

Many thanks for your letter—for your active support of Charles Lamb—and for all your kindness. I regret your suggestions that I should not write to you. I see that you are afraid of "The Parson of the Parish"—whom however I shall hope to elude. Altho' he professes to like your present on his birthday—I yet see that he is a little uncomfortable that you should retain any regard for poor Lamb. I shall therefore proceed very cautiously, and shall express nothing at present, beyond the gratitude and pleasure your note has given me.

You will read all this, as a mere joke, my dear Mrs. Brookfield, from a dashing young fellow rusticated from London. But wait!—see what time will produce. How—when London shall "loom" upon me as well as on the Zealander, I hope to tell you some day, personally, how pleasant and sunshiny your letter was. Everybody as far as I know has been good-natured to the poor book. Everybody liked Lamb, and I do not conceal from myself that much of what has been said is out of regard for the subject of the book, rather than for the author.

(My hand is so old that I can scarcely form the letters.)

Are you very pastoral in Lincolnshire? Do you feed the lambs there? Have you a Good Shepherd? Innocent sheep?

I waive all answer to these queries on condition that you and the Rev. W. H. B. keep (as I hope you now are) well and happy. Believe me very sincerely your obliged,

B. W. PROCTER. (12:61)

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",


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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,


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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


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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.

Dear Sir,

—I am deeply grateful to Mr. Max Kenyon for disabusing me of the notion that Mozart did that very ordinary bandmaster's job, the concert ending to Gluck's Iphigenia overture.

And now may I put in a plea for the concert performances of the overture to Don Giovanni? It also is provided with a very similar finish, no doubt by the same Johann Schmidt. This was considered necessary in the days when overtures as concert pieces had to end, in the key in which they began, with the usual tonic and dominant rum-tum-bang burlesqued by Beethoven and finally relegated to the dustbin by Wagner. The overture, in D, suddenly and very arrestingly leaves that key and leads to the opening scene of the opera by a close in F. Why should it not be played so and left so? Nobody will rise in the audience and protest against it not closing in D. Nobody wants a vulgar ending to be substituted for a beautiful one with a promise in the last chord. Schmidt has had his day; now let us have Mozart.

Faithfully
G. BERNARD SHAW (12:532)

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]

Sir,

—May I correct the rather unfortunate impression unintentionally conveyed by Mr. A. C. Hannay's article, "Inns, Horses and Dogs" in the December issue of The Bookman? I have not been "reduced" to adopting a pseudonym in order to "persuade"


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my publisher to accept my forthcoming "straight" novel, Cat o' Mary. The pseudonym was adopted at my own suggestion and, if anything, rather against Mr. Gollancz's inclinations, as a matter of pure convenience to the public. Whether they prefer their novels "straight" or detective, I think readers have a right to know beforehand which they are getting. The simplest way to ensure this is to make a plain ruling that all "Dorothy L. Sayers" books shall be detective and all "Johanna Leigh" books straight. The fact that my own name has been attached to all preliminary announcements of Cat o' Mary shows that neither Mr. Gollancz nor myself finds any need for secrecy in the matter. (31:379)

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.

Sir,

—The writer of your "Letter from America," in the December number, commits himself to the astonishing statement that "Mr. Nicholas Vachel Lindsay is the one American writer of verse whose work shows signs of genius." Such a statement should not pass unchallenged. It is as if an American writer, visiting England, were to remark that Mr. Rudyard Kipling is the only English writer of verse with signs of genius. The parallel is quite exact. Lindsay has the same free-and-easy facility, the same preference for ragtime rhythms, the same tone of vulgar optimism, the same desire to preach a gospel, as the author of Mandalay. The only difference is that Lindsay is rather more limited in his range, if anything. He has never succeeded in doing but one type of poem—the ragtime exhortation. To say that he and he alone in America shows genius is preposterous.

What about Robert Frost, whose work and influence were paramount in the development of Edward Thomas?—a fact admitted by a recent biographer. What about Edwin Arlington Robinson, a poet who comes nearer to Hardy than anyone in America? What about Conrad Aiken, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, Alfred Kreymborg, Maxwell Bodenheim? All of these authors have shown signs of genius, each in an entirely different and quite individual way. They have not repeated themselves into tedious stereotype as the magazine writers of vers libre, or as Mr. Lindsay has. Without any desire to belittle Mr. Lindsay's clever but superficial talent, I should respectfully suggest to "R. E. C." that some of his remarks about the conventionality of American writers apply very strongly to Lindsay. They do not apply to the men I have just mentioned.—Yours, etc.,

John Gould Fletcher. 37 Crystal Palace Park Road, Sydenham.
(1:329-330)

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


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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


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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

 
[1]

The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, 4 vols. (1945), 2:638.

[2]

The letter is not in E. V. Lucas's 3-vol. edition of the Lambs' letters (1935). A later edition, printed at the Cornell University Press, covers letters written through 1817 only and would seem to have been abandoned, as the third volume (1809-1817) is dated 1978.

[3]

See R. W. Armour, Barry Cornwall: A Biography of Bryan Waller Procter . . . (1935), pp.310,313.

[4]

And there are the following differences between LM (given first) and the other two texts: l. 4, on/to; l. 9, Practical and/om.; l. 12, their/om; l. 13, And/While; l. 30, sense/l. 40, guess; l. 34, Ashake/l. 44, Shaking; l. 49 Sussex/l. 59, Kentish; l. 51, blunder/l. 61, wander; l. 60, migratory/l. 70, om.; l. 63, if you/l. 73, om.; l. 64; Then/l. 74, And; l. 83, Still start a fresh/l. 93, Still silly bees; l. 87, their/l. 97, in.

[5]

Fog (4:344): l. 9, height/space; l. 29, 'Yond/Beyond. The Son of Melancholy (4:345-6): l. 4, slumbrous/sunlit; last l. nought but/only. Suppose (1:14-15): l. 9, all lone/at last; l. 17, Suppose with delight she cried/And she cried with delight—and delight.

[6]

L. 7, fairest hair/a child's fair hair; l. 9, on/in; l. 16, from midst/amidst; l. 25, that/a; l. 30, Through spicy air mellifluent/A husht, far, wild, divine lament; l. 31, As/When.

[7]

L. 19, Buzzed the bright flies/The bright flies buzzed; l. 41, Oh/On; l. 42, This wondrous coach, this vale of buds and bells/O wondrous vale of jocund buds and bells.

[8]

L. 2, thee/you; l. 6, golden, fair/golden and fair; l. 7, Cupid/Eros; l. 11, oblivion sweet and dim/divine oblivion dim; l. 13, colour/beauty.

[9]

L. 4, even/yet; l. 5, Of bounteous/Even of; l. 7, as in/with; l. 16, wan/cold; l. 19, coldly/on, from; l. 29, athrill/a thrill; l. 31, lips/lip.

[10]

L. 2, As when cherry trees in orchard were a-blow/When in wild beauty, cherries were in blow; l. 3, And, just as fancy/And, as sweet fancy.

[11]

The other revisions are: l. 28, in truth/it's true; l. 67, What was till then/The relics of; l. 68, oh/ah; l. 71, She leaves/They are left; l. 82, wise/l. 102, sage; l. 92, om./l. 112, ev'n; l. 93, Ev'n than in/l. 113, Than those of; l. 95, om./l. 115, What.

[12]

Bernard Shaw Agitations Letters to the Press, 1875-1950, ed. Dan H. Laurence and James Rambeau (1985).

[13]

James Brabazon, Dorothy L. Sayers (1981), p. xvii.

[14]

Belloc wrote to the editor in volume 19 to point out a printer's error in his book on James II, an error that made nonsense of a sentence (p. 409).

[15]

Also by Golding in the LM: What is So Odorous Here and Kindled from Deep Darkness (8:467 and 468), Battlefield (10:347), All Her Beauty is a Ghost (12:578).

[16]

Stephen Wheeler, ed. The Poetical Works of Walter Savage Landor, 3 vols. (1937), p. v, states that he excludes poems attributed to Landor, but "certainly not written by him." Which poems, and why "certainly"?

[17]

Included in Selected Poems (1930) but not in Collected Poems (1954).

[18]

By Lester E. Dennon in The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, ed. Paul A. Schilpp (1944).

[19]

The reviews are of Jack B. Yates, The Ameranthers; Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza; G. M. Sargeaunt, The Classical Spirit (34:176, 269, 464-465); New Writing (2), ed. John Hayward, and The Agamemnon of Aeschylus, trans. by Louis MacNeice (35:83-84, 214); Louis MacNeice, Out of the Picture and The Complete Works of Isaac Rosenberg, ed. E. W. Harding and Gordon Bottomley (36:291-292, 386-387); Francis Berry, The Iron Christ (37:658).

[20]

See Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser (1987), pp. 25 and 127.

[21]

Also worthy of mention: A. C. Benson, "Blanche Warre-Cornish" (8:145-158), and a memoir of the recently dead Oscar Browning by Alec Macdonald (9:6-7).