University of Virginia Library

From The Bookman of London
by
Arthur Sherbo

The first number of The Bookman (October 1891), the periodical of that name published in London, bore, as would all subsequent numbers, the running head "I am a Bookman. James Russell Lowell." It was founded by W. R. Nicoll, for many years its editor, and is not to be confused with The Bookman, a Review of Books and Life . . . published in New York by Dodd, Mead and Company. The London Bookman appeared without any editorial manifesto but with a prefatory list of contributors, the first number listing, among others, J. M. Barrie, A. C. Benson, Oscar Browning, Thomas Hardy, Nicoll himself, Walter Pater, A. T. Quiller-Couch ("Q"), and Lord Selborne. Contributors to later volumes included W. B. Yeats, G. K. Chesterton, Alfred

Noyes, Walter de la Mare, T. J. Wise, Katherine Tynan and a growing number of academics. Some notice has been taken in author bibliographies of the writings of these and other contributors, although many, especially reviews and letters, have been neglected. A random check of a number of the articles in The Bookman reveals that the compilers of the CBEL and of the NCBEL have, for the most part, overlooked much that should have been noted, including some letters.

The editor of The Bookman asked a number of "representative authors, artists, and men and women eminent in English public life" to favour him with a note of

Among those responding and whose replies were printed in the February 1912 number were Thomas Hardy and G. K. Chesterton. I quote them in order of appearance. G. K. Chesterton's reply was described as "brief but emphatic."

Hall Caine's autobiographical My Story (1968) has a chapter on his friendship with John Ruskin and one on his friendship with Wilkie Collins. He quotes no letters from Ruskin to him but he does quote passages from letters of Collins to him. The first letter from Collins, from which Caine quotes the last four paragraphs (20:319-320), is undated, but the entire letter, dated March 15, 1888, is printed in full in volume twenty (August 1901) as part of a long article on Caine by J. E. Hodder Williams (20:138-146). This letter from London is of primary interest for its light on Collins as a critic of the novel. He had received a copy of Hall Caine's The Deemster

and thus had led him to compare it to Caine's The Shadow of a Crime. He wrote, He then looked forward to Caine's next book and had this advice for him.

He closed by assuring Caine that he had not yet written his best book. Caine quotes fragments from what would appear to be two more letters from Collins, the first being an invitation for Caine to visit him: "If you don't object to a room without a carpet or a curtain, I can declare myself still possessed of a table and two chairs, pen and ink, and brandy and water, and I should be delighted to see you" (20:320-321). The second fragment is actually the second paragraph of the March 15, 1888, letter (20:334-335). The letter from Ruskin (20:140-141) is known; there is no edition of Collins's letters.

The October 1892 number prints two more letters from Wilkie Collins in a piece titled "An Interview with Mr. A. P. Watt" (3:20). Watt was a prominent literary agent the walls of whose office "on the first floor of 2 Paternoster Square" were covered with photographs of his clients. Among these was one of "the late Wilkie Collins, and beside it the following note— a codicil which was found after his death attached to his will":

Watt commented,

The answering letter concludes the part about Collins in the interview.

Kenneth Robinson, in Wilkie Collins. A Biography (1952), acknowledges that "The Executors of the late Alexander Pollock Watt, who was the first literary agent and Wilkie Collins' literary executor have given me permission to publish Collins' letters in this biography; and the present partners in the firm of A. P. Watt & Son have allowed me to read a number of his other letters" (p. [9]). Although Robinson refers to the preservation of Collins's letters to Watt and mentions Collins's appointing Watt as his literary executor, he does not quote the codicil or the letter (pp. 299-300).

The first volume of The Bookman (Dec. 1891) contained an article titled "The State Recognition of Authors" (pp. 97-98), the first two sentences of which read, "In the recent controversy between Mr. Besant and the Spectator as to the desirability of titles and distinctions being conferred by the State on eminent men of letters, the voices of those most directly interested in the matter, with the exception of Mr. Besant, have not been kind. For this reason we asked a few distinguished literary and scientific men to express their opinions on the subject." There were replies from F. Max Müller, John Tyndall, Selborne, Walter Lecky, and Thomas Hardy. Hardy wrote,

Only F. Max Müller thought the suggestion a good one, since honors and distinctions were accorded literary men in Germany.

Hardy figured prominently in the second volume, as Nicoll, the editor, reported on a recent conversation someone had had with Hardy. He was asked "why he gave 'Tess' so sad an ending."

Here, better than any second-hand or more remote account, are Hardy's ipsissima verba, as reported by Nicoll.

A "Symposium on the Republication of Newspaper Articles" designed to elicit replies "on the desirability of seeking a more permanent audience for journalistic work" prompted a reply from Andrew Lang, surely one of the most prolific journalists of his time.

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, not yet knighted, to be sure, contributed a number of pieces over the years. He contributed an appreciation of J. M. Barrie to the first volume of the Bookman (1:169, 171) and reviewed Barrie's novel The Little White Bird ten years later (23:49-51). One of the pieces in the first number of volume two (April 1892) was "A Talk With Mr. Quiller-Couch—'Q'" (14-15; quoted below). When the Scots scholar-critic, biographer, and editor of Sir Walter Scott's poetry Walter Minto died, "Q" was one of those asked to contribute an obituary notice to the Bookman (4:13). In addition he wrote a number of other reviews: Vol. 21, E. A. Bennet, Fame and Fiction . . . (21-22); Letters of John Richard Green, ed. Leslie Stephen (85-86); Augustine Birrell, Miscellanies (95); Patrick Walker, Six Saints of the Covenant . . . (138-139); Irving Bacheller, D'ri and I . . . (140-141); G. K. Chesterton, The Defendant (168-169). Vol. 22, The Victorian Anthology, ed. M. E. Grant Duff (19-20); Margaretta Byrde, The Searchers (99-100); William Watson, Coronation Ode . . . (130-137); Charles G. Harper, The Holy Road . . . (207-208). Vol. 23, Austin Dobson, Side-Walk Studies (60-61); fourteen novels (94-96); Sidney Lee, Queen Victoria (152-153). Vol. 24, Emile Zola, Truth (20-22); Elsworth Lawson, From the Unvarying Star (66); Joseph Conrad, Typhoon and Other Stories (108-109).

I have insisted, so far privately, on the importance of reviews, and take this as one opportunity to explain my reasons, if, indeed, reasons be needed. While some bibliographers and fewer biographers list all or some of the reviews of their authors, most do not (the Soho bibliographies for the most part being exceptions). F. Brittain, for example, lists some of Q's reviews in his biography but overlooks those written for The Bookman—among others.[2] One reads the essay on J. M. Barrie in volume one and the review of The Little White Bird in volume twenty-three with keener appreciation of Q's words when one knows the relationship between the two men. Barrie was on the staff of The Speaker when Q was assistant editor; Q dedicated his novel Ia to him; Barrie spent much of his honeymoon in Fowey and "spent many happy hours at The Haven" (Q's home in Fowey); the two contemplated collaborating on a play; and, to summarize, although more could be mentioned, in 1903 Barrie wrote, "I think it is the truth to say that in these 40 years I have met no man who has meant as much to me," and in 1909, "On the whole I've cared for you more than any other of our calling" (Brittain, pp. 19, 31, 33, 42, and 45). Although there was some constraint in their later relationship, Q could write to a friend on Barrie's death, "For all that, our affection held, unstrained, to the end. A few months before his death he dined with us at Queen Anne's Mansions and talked away till past midnight—loth to go then, as he told us, rather wistfully" (Brittain, p. 141). But Q could be objective about the weaknesses in Barrie's work in the early essay, though in the review, ten years later, he outdid himself in praise of The Little White Bird.

The review of Zola's Truth (Verité) is important in that in it Q expresses some of his most dearly-held beliefs. As prelude, however, I should point out that Q had reviewed Zola's Lá Debâcle in The Speaker for September 23, 1892 (reprinted in Adventures in Criticism [1925], pp. 107-111). There he had written that the novel stifled him as did Zola's later books (p. 108). Q was Church of England and a Liberal, an active one, Brittain writing of his "life-long fidelity to Liberalism" (p. 51). One of Q's Cambridge lectures, "Tradition and Orthodoxy," published in 1934 as one of the essays in The Poet as Citizen and Other Papers, was in reply to T. S. Eliot's who had used the phrase, "a society like ours, worm-eaten with Liberalism." Q wrote that what Eliot meant by Liberalism was "anything which questions dogma: which dogma, to be right dogma, is the priestly utterance of a particular branch of a historically fissiparous Church" (quoted in Brittain, pp. 141-142). Thus, when one goes back to the Zola review in The Bookman, thirty-one years before the publication of the volume in which the lecture was printed, one sees, retrospectively, how very strongly Q felt. Indeed, I believe the relevant part of the Zola review is the strongest statement, couched in the strongest language, Q ever made on the subject. The review, as with others of his reviews, is material for biographers, and, of course, for bibliographers. Q's mention of his lifting "a humble voice at the time of the Rennes trial" of Alfred Dreyfus would not be known from Brittain's biography, and the locus of his remarks remains to be discovered.

E. A. Bennet's Fame and Fiction. An Enquiry into Certain Popularities (1901), reviewed by Q, had a chapter on "Mr. J. M. Barrie" in which Bennet wrote, among other statements, that "when we return to the best parts of 'A Window in Thrums,' we are apt to remark that we care not whether Mr. Barrie is a literary artist or not, he is an undefined. Something that we enjoy." Q, who had quoted this statement, wrote that Bennet's "shrewdness" had deserted him in the chapter on Barrie, adding that "the business of the critic is to define these undefined somethings, and to expound the pleasure which he has had the capacity to feel" (21:21). Given what I have already written above about Q and Barrie, one can understand Q's reservations about Bennet's chapter on Barrie. One of Q's associates on The Speaker, the periodical of which he was assistant editor, was Augustine Birrell, whom he disliked. "'That man takes himself much too seriously and nothing else seriously enough' he once wrote to Wemyss Reid; but at another time he described Birrell as 'representing Fife [for which he was MP] as it ought to be represented—by wind'" (Brittain, p. 19). Despite his dislike of the man, Q praised the volume of essays, Miscellanies, in his review of it, writing of the "enjoyment" afforded by "this wise and witty volume" (21:95). William Watson was another of Q's associates on The Speaker, and Q's review of Watson's Coronation ode is laudatory with but one flaw noted, an "untrue" conceit (22:130-131).

I do not know how many interviews Q granted, and hence reprint this one from the Bookman, especially as here one gets his off-the-cuff remarks

about a number of authors. I omit the first two paragraphs and begin with Q's answer to the question of how he would justify the existence of a critic. Blathwayt then asked what the general trend in English fiction was today. Do men or women most respond to the spirit of the age? Q said it was decidedly men. And when Blathwayt confessed he couldn't understand Meredith, Q replied The rest of the interview was largely about Q's own books. Q confessed he attached real value only to Noughts and Crosses, which led him to consideration of the supposed wane of the vogue of the novel. The interview, one of many Blathwayt conducted, evidently made but little impression on him for there is no mention of Q in the chapter "Some people I have met" in his autobiography, Through Life and Round the World, the Story of My Life (1917).

The relevance of reviews for a more complete understanding of the reviewer's critical opinions, as well as the possible addition of new or complementary biographical information, can be seen in the reviews Q wrote for the London Bookman. Should one resurrect all the reviews Q wrote for the periodicals, one would have a large body of material upon which to call. Q was a most prolific writer, but those of his reviews which have been forgotten, whatever their number and extent, should be added to his bibliography and studied for whatever light they may throw upon him as man and critic.

Notes