No cloud in your skies of blue,
Sunshine all the happy day, etc.
These rhapsodies tend to become a little tedious. But one feels the warm touch of reality in
I want to snuggle, I want to snuggle,
I know a cosy place for two.
I want to snuggle, I want to snuggle,
I want to feel that love is true.
Take me in your arms as lovers do.
Hold me very tight and kiss me too.
I want to snuggle, I want to snuggle,
I want to snuggle close to you.
This is sound; but it does not come up to the best of the popular lyrics. The agonized passion expressed in the words and music of “You Made Me Love You” is something one does not easily forget, though that great song is as old as the now distant origins of ragtime.
The Poetry of Filial Devotion is almost as extensive as the Poetry of Amour. McGlennon teems with such outbursts as this:
You are a wonderful mother, dear old mother of mine.
You’ll hold a spot down deep in my heart
Till the stars no longer shine.
Your soul shall live on for ever,
On through the fields of time,
For there’ll never be another to me
Like that wonderful mother of mine.
Even Grandmamma gets a share of this devotion:
Granny, my own, I seem to hear you calling me;
Granny, my own, you are my sweetest memory …
If up in heaven angels reign supreme,
Among the angels you must be the Queen.
Granny, my own, I miss you more and more.
The last lines are particularly rich. What a fascinating heresy, to hold that the angels reign over their Creator!
The Poetry of Recollection and Regret owes most, both in words and music, to the hymn. McGlennon provides a choice example in “Back from the Land of Yesterday”:
Back from the land of yesterday,
Back to the friends of yore;
Back through the dark and dreary way
Into the light once more.
Back to the heart that waits for me,
Warmed by the sunshine above;
Back from the old land of yesterday’s dreams
To a new land of life and love.
What it means, goodness only knows. But one can imagine that, sunk to a slow music in three-four time—some rich religious waltz-tune—it would be extremely uplifting and edifying. The decay of regular churchgoing has inevitably led to this invasion of the music-hall by the hymn. People still want to feel the good uplifting emotion, and they feel it with a vengeance when they listen to songs about
the land of beginning again,
Where skies are always blue …
Where broken dreams come true.
The great advantage of the music-hall over the church is that the uplifting moments do not last too long.
Finally, there is the great Home motif. “I want to be,” these lyrics always begin, “I want to be almost anywhere that is not the place where I happen at the moment to be.” M. Louis Estève has called this longing “Le Mal de la Province,” which in its turn is closely related to “Le Mal de l’au-delà.” It is one of the worst symptoms of romanticism.
Steamer, balançant ta mâture,
Lève l’ancre vers une exotique nature,
exclaims Mallarmé, and the Folk, whom that most exquisite of poets loathed and despised, echo his words in a hundred different keys. There is not a State in America where they don’t want to go. In McGlennon we find yearnings expressed for California, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, and Georgia. Some sigh for Ireland, Devon, and the East. “Egypt! I am calling you; oh, life is sweet and joys complete when at your feet I lay [sic].” But the Southern States, the East, Devon, and Killarney are not enough. The Mal de l’au-delà succeeds the Mal de la Province. The Folk yearn for extra-mundane worlds. Here, for example, is an expression of nostalgia for a mystical “Kingdom within your Eyes”:
Somewhere in somebody’s eyes
Is a place just divine,
Bounded by roses that kiss the dew
In those dear eyes that shine.
Somewhere beyond earthly dreams,
Where love’s flower never dies,
God made the world, and He gave it to me
In that kingdom within your eyes.
If there is any characteristic which distinguishes contemporary folk poetry from the folk poetry of other times it is surely its meaninglessness. Old folk poetry is singularly direct and to the point, full of pregnant meaning, never vague. Modern folk poetry, as exemplified in McGlennon, is almost perfectly senseless. The Elizabethan peasant or mechanic would never have consented to sing or listen to anything so flatulently meaningless as “Back from the Land of Yesterday” or “The Kingdom within your Eyes.” His taste was for something clear, definite and pregnant, like “Greensleeves”:
And every morning when you rose,
I brought you dainties orderly,
To clear your stomach from all woes—
And yet you would not love me.
Could anything be more logical and to the point? But we, instead of logic, instead of clarity, are provided by our professional entertainers with the drivelling imbecility of “Granny, my own.” Can it be that the standard of intelligence is lower now than it was three hundred years ago? Have newspapers and cinemas and now the wireless telephone conspired to rob mankind of whatever sense of reality, whatever power of individual questioning and criticism he once possessed? I do not venture to answer. But the fact of McGlennon has somehow got to be explained. How? I prefer to leave the problem on a note of interrogation.
VIII: BIBLIOPHILY
Bibliophily is on the increase. It is a constatation which I make with regret; for the bibliophile’s point of view is, to me at least, unsympathetic and his standard of values unsound. Among the French, bibliophily would seem to have become a kind of mania, and, what is more, a highly organized and thoroughly exploited mania. Whenever I get a new French book I turn at once—for in what disgusts and irritates one there is always a certain odious fascination—to the fly-leaf. One had always been accustomed to finding there a brief description of the “vingt exemplaires sur papier hollande Van Gelder”; nobody objected to the modest old Dutchman whose paper gave to the author’s presentation copies so handsome an appearance. But Van Gelder is now a back number. In this third decade of the twentieth century he has become altogether too simple and unsophisticated. On the fly-leaf of a dernière nouveauté I find the following incantation, printed in block capitals and occupying at least twenty lines:
Il a été tiré de cet ouvrage, après impositions spéciales, 133 exemplaires in-4. Tellière sur papier-vergé pur-fil Lafuma-Navarre, au filigrane de la Nouvelle Revue Française, dont 18 exemplaires hors commerce, marqués de A à R, 100 exemplaires réservés aux Bibliophiles de la Nouvelle Revue Française, numérotés de I à C, 15 exemplaires numérotés de CI à CXV; 1040 exemplaires sur papier vélin pur-fil Lafuma-Navarre, dont dix exemplaires hors commerce marqués de a à j, 800 exemplaires réservés aux amis de l’Edition originale, numérotés de 1 à 800, 30 exemplaires d’auteur, hors commerce, numérotés de 801 à 830 et 200 exemplaires numérotés de 831 à 1030, ce tirage constituant proprement et authentiquement l’Edition originale.
If I were one of the hundred Bibliophiles of the Nouvelle Revue Française or even one of the eight hundred Friends of the Original Edition, I should suggest, with the utmost politeness, that the publishers might deserve better of their fellow-beings if they spent less pains on numbering the first edition and more on seeing that it was properly produced. Personally, I am the friend of any edition which is reasonably well printed and bound, reasonably correct in the text and reasonably clean. The consciousness that I possess a numbered copy of an edition printed on Lafuma-Navarre paper, duly watermarked with the publisher’s initials, does not make up for the fact that the book is full of gross printer’s errors and that a whole sheet of sixteen pages has wandered, during the process of binding, from one end of the volume to the other—occurrences which are quite unnecessarily frequent in the history of French book production.
With the increased attention paid to bibliophilous niceties, has come a great increase in price. Limited éditions de luxe have become absurdly common in France, and there are dozens of small publishing concerns which produce almost nothing else. Authors like Monsieur André Salmon and Monsieur Max Jacob scarcely ever appear at less than twenty francs a volume. Even with the exchange this is a formidable price; and yet the French bibliophiles, for whom twenty francs are really twenty francs, appear to have an insatiable appetite for these small and beautiful editions. The War has established a new economic law: the poorer one becomes the more one can afford to spend on luxuries.
The ordinary English publisher has never gone in for Van Gelder, Lafuma-Navarre and numbered editions. Reticent about figures, he leaves the book collector to estimate the first edition’s future rarity by guesswork. He creates no artificial scarcity values. The collector of contemporary English first editions is wholly a speculator; he never knows what time may have in store.
In the picture trade for years past nobody has pretended that there was any particular relation between the price of a picture and its value as a work of art. A magnificent El Greco is bought for about a tenth of the sum paid for a Romney that would be condemned by any self-respecting hanging-committee. We are so well used to this sort of thing in picture dealing that we have almost ceased to comment on it. But in the book trade the tendency to create huge artificial values is of a later growth. The spectacle of a single book being bought for fifteen thousand pounds is still sufficiently novel to arouse indignation. Moreover, the book collector who pays vast
