Criticism like this is not merely a comment on technique; it is a guess of the spirit, emphasising the primitive and universal elements which make Love in the Valley probably the most enduring of Meredith's works.

I do not think Mr. Clutton-Brock is so happy when he writes of Meredith as a novelist. He goes too far when he suggests that Meredith's witty characters, or mouthpieces, are "always subsidiary and often unpleasant," like the wise youth in Richard Feverel. Meredith, he declares, “does not think much of these witty characters that he cannot do without." He "would never make a hero more witty than he could help, for he likes his heroes to be either men of action or delightful youths whom too much cleverness would spoil. He himself was not in love with cleverness, and never aimed at it." This is only partly true. It is partly true in regard to Meredith's men, and not true at all in regard to his women. Diana of the Crossways alone is enough to disprove it. Meredith's heroes were conventions; his heroines were creations; and he liked his creations to be witty. He loved wit as his natural air. His Essay on Comedy is a witty Mr. Clutton-Brock

dithyramb in praise of wit.

seems to me to make another mistake in regard to Meredith when he says that "if he had had

less genius, less power of speech, less understanding of men, he might have been an essayist." As a matter of fact, Merdith was too proud to be an essayist. There are no proud esssayists, though many vain ones. Mr. Belloc is the nearest thing to a proud essayist that one can think of, and his pride is really only a fascinating arrogance.

It will be seen that Mr. Clutton-Brock excites to controversy, as every good critic who attempts a new analysis of an author's genius must do. Were there space, I should like to dispute many points in his essay, "The Defects of English Prose," in which, incidentally, he accepts the current over-estimate of the prose-the excellent prose of Mr. Hudson. The purpose of criticism, however, is to raise questions as much as to answer them, and this Mr. Clutton-Brock continually does in his thoughtful analysis of the success and failure of great writers. He is an expositor with high standards in life and literature, who worships beauty in the temple of reason. His essays, though slight in form, are rich in matter. They are fragments of a philosophy as well as comments on authors.

VI

HENLEY THE VAINGLORIOUS

Henley was a master of the vainglorious phrase. He was Pistol with a style. He wrote in order to be overheard. His words were sturdy vagabonds, bawling and swaggering. "Let us be drunk," he cried in one of his rondeaux, and he made his words exultant as with wine.

He saw everywhere in Nature the images of the lewd population of midnight streets. For him even the moon over the sea was like some old hag out of a Villon ballade:

Flaunting, tawdry and grim,

From cloud to cloud along her beat,

Leering her battered and inveterate leer,

She signals where he prowls in the dark alone,
Her horrible old man,

Mumbling old oaths and warming

His villainous old bones with villainous talk.

Similarly, the cat breaking in upon the exquisite dawn that wakes the "little twitter-and

cheep" of the birds in a London Park becomes a picturesque and obscene figure:

Behold

A rakehell cat-how furtive and acold!

A spent witch homing from some infamous dance-
Obscene, quick-trotting, see her tip and fade
Through shadowy railings into a pit of shade!

Or, again, take the description of the East Wind in London Voluntaries:

Out of the poisonous East,

Over a continent of blight,

Like a maleficent influence released

From the most squalid cellarage of hell,

The Wind-fiend, the abominable

The Hangman Wind that tortures temper and light

Comes slouching, sullen and obscene,

Hard on the skirts of the embittered night;

And in a cloud unclean

Of excremental humours, roused to strife
By the operation of some ruinous change,
Wherever his evil mandate run and range,
Into a dire intensity of life,

A craftsman at his bench, he settles down
To the grim job of throttling London Town.

This is, of its kind, remarkable writing. It may not reflect a poetic view of life, but it reflects a romantic and humorous view. Henley's humour is seldom good humour: it is, rather, a

sort of boisterous invective. His phrases delight us like the oaths of some old sea-captain if we put ourselves in the mood of delight. And how extravagantly he flings them down, like a pocketful of money on the counter of a bar! He may only be a pauper, behaving like a rich man, but we, who are his guests for an hour, submit to the illusion and become happy echoes of his wild talk.

For he has the gift of language. It is not the loud-sounding sea but loud-sounding words that are his passion. Compared to Henley, even Tennyson was modest in his use of large Latin negatives. His eloquence is sonorous with the music of “immemorial," "intolerable," "immitigable," "inexorable," "unimaginable," and the kindred train of words. He is equally in love with "wonderful," "magnificent," "miraculous,' "immortal," and all the flock of adjectival

enthusiasm.

Here in this radiant and immortal street,

he cries, as he stands on a spring day in Piccadilly. He did not use sounding adjectives without meaning, however. His adjectives express effectively that lust of life that distinguishes him from other writers. For it is lust of life, in contradistinction to love, that is the note of