Men and Their Memories

AMERICAN publishers occasionally import English sheets of a book and then bind them most unattractively. An example of this is the Memoir of Sir George Otto Trevelyan (Longmans, Green, $4.00) by his son, George Macaulay Trevelyan. Outward appearances are against it; and this is unfortunate, for the younger Trevelyan’s study of his father’s long and useful life is much more than commonly interesting. The elder Trevelyan once said that he did n’t wish his life to be written — though he later relented and told his son he could use his own judgment. Accordingly, the book is brief and strictly to the point.

Sir George Otto was the nephew of Macaulay, whose life he admirably wrote. He was a scholar from the day he left his crib: student and prize winner at Harrow; second in the Classical Tripos of 1861 at Trinity College, Cambridge; author, M.P., and a great gentleman. The portrait is complete. Perhaps he is too long in growing up: but then, the friendships of Harrow and Cambridge are humanly real, and the letters and personal recollections of Shilleto, his tutor, of Macaulay, J. Henry Montagu Butler, and many others, are rich and quick. His two undergraduate satires in verse, ’Horace at Athens’ (which has resisted the years by successive reprintings) and ‘The Cambridge Dionysia,’ are included in an appendix. It is surprising to find him writing light verse comparable to W. S. Gilbert and A. P. Herbert.

The last pages of the book are concerned with public life; with such men as Disraeli, Gladstone, Carlyle, and Roosevelt. The wit of the father has not been lost upon the son. He has written as an amateur, but saved in consequence much that a professional might have lost.

The Journal of Arnold Bennett, 1896—1910 (Viking, $4.00), like any good journal, is primarily a bedside book. Again, the binding is pretty horrible, but the format is good, the type excellently suited to the patches of paragraphs in which it is arranged. How much of a thesis there is in anyone’s entries of the sort it is hard to say. Certainly one finds no noticeable difference here between the early portions and the last— in subjects or performance. The man is not visibly growing up, though it is reasonable to believe that in the second and third projected volumes attitudes and ideas will appreciably alter. The original journal contained 1,000,000 words written out of a busy life in about thirtyfour years. This is therefore more than the heart of a journal: it is the full body.

Bennett was a sharp observer and accurate recorder. Outwardly there is little method in what he has written here; not always, even, the sequence of days. But place and method are vigorously implied. Success is estimated, money counted (though ‘I find I am much less interested in money than Phillpotts and Wells’). Room temperature; health; his attitude toward people; their attitudes toward him; reports of how other writers live; what they make; precise estimates of books read — all these things reaffirm the philosophy of a man who lived sharply on twenty-four hours a day.

Call it provocative, lucid, and done with not too much conceit, though with painfully much self-concern. One feels his exaggerated respect for Mr. Boulton, for example, who at seventy-one answered '20 or 30 letters before breakfast’; for Somerset Maugham, who smoked two cigarettes while Bennett smoked one and then had the rigid will to refuse a third. His contempt perhaps more honest: ‘Preserve me from all peculiar people, high self-conscious people, vainly earnest people.’ But I care less for his violent likes and dislikes than for his finely recorded flash of what someone said to him on a London street, what he saw in a café in the Place clichy, the shrewdest speculation over some utterly trivial occurrence. ‘ I read the first act of Othello last night and it did me good.’ Every sentence thus relates to himself.

With his eye on the public, I doubt, however, whether Bennett ever intended this for publication. The tone is too soft, and the words set down with that ease in which he abandons reading a book by Henry James, He criticizes himself, but as god to god. I see a man hungry, tactile, of good brain, small heart; an artist-statistician in the laboratory of life. Bennett is too exact. When he says, ’ I wrote so many hundred thousand and forty words this year,’ then art has become an industry. He fools himself. In 1904, he records of the third Jack Stoat story: ‘It is a bad story well done.’ Finally, I see compassion for the world, but a weak sympathy in friendship.

The second volume of Mena and Memories (CowardMcCann, $5.00), by Sir William Rothenstein, continues the life of the painter from 1900 to 1922. The gorgeous tapestry moves on. To anyone interested in the last fifty years of art and letters in England and Prance, Men and Memories will remain the exquisitely intimate and personal guide. It is startling to find a man with such breadth of vision, such wide, huge friendships, such catholic, dispassionate interests. Rothenstein mixes the arts as they were intended to be mixed and rarely are; brings health and color and a natural joy of living to his book, shaming the crude strangled little lives with which our animalistic schools are still concerned. I find this all as warm as Bennett’s journal is cold. This book has beautiful things about Rodin, Augustus and Ida John, W. H. Hudson, Max Beerbohm, Joseph Conrad, Epstein, Gordon Craig, Orpen, Masefield, André Gide, T. E. Lawrence, Anatole France, and a hundred more; a little too much of the Michael Fields, not enough of Hudson. But these are no lives touched at a tangent, ‘one letter acquaintances. From Winter, who made ‘little speculative busts,’ to his long intimacy with John, Rothenstein has stripped the famous to the human being. He is very witty; and wise in his philosophy. ‘ A disciplined ecstasy,’he says, ‘is the finest gift of the gods to man; it is likewise the best an artist can give to the work of his hands,’ Of this work the book is filled — chiefly drawings of artists and writers, and a few caricatures by Beerbohm. A superb, congenial utterance, complemented by the sort of letters that even artists, I suspect, are losing the ability to write.

DAVID McCORD