A Consummate Craftsman
A GREAT many readers to whom C. E. Montague was only a name, though a highly honoured name, will be grateful for this memoir by Professor Oliver Elton. We advise everybody to read it. Montague had been known for a long time to journalists as a. consummate craftsman, and also to the readers of the Manchester Guardian—who had apparently taken care to find out by devious means who was the author of the scintillating leading articles which were unlike those of any other writer. But he did not burst upon the world as a story writer and essayist of peculiar quality till he was in his fifties. Professor Elton believes that experience at the front in the War brought a very appreciable addition to Montague's graphic power.
It may well be so. Although Montague's occupation had put him day by day in contact with affairs, he had lived a relatively secluded life. The War gave a determining new direction to his experience. His gallantry has already become a legend among those who know. Beyond the fighting age and looking older than his years—his hair had been white from early manhood—he got himself by persistence and artifice accepted for service in France as a private soldier. His health soon failed in the trenches, but the Intelligence Branch, to which he was transferred, has reason to remember him with pride. He had dyed his white hair when seeking enlistment, and Mr. H. W. Nevinson once said that he had heard of men whose hair had gone white in a night from fear, but he had only known one instance of a man's hair going black in a night from courage. The present writer was much impressed in France by the unusual demeanour of respect with which senior officers approached Montague. Not that Montague seemed to be aware of that or traded upon it ; his punctilious observance of every form of military discipline and subordination was indeed so noticeable as to be almost a joke.
Professor Elton disclaims any attempt at a " full-dress criticism " of Montague's style. This is a pity in a way, for few men of letters are better equipped to do what Pro- fessor Elton seems to have regarded as unnecessary. The memoir, admirably put together, nevertheless throws floods of light on a career which in its main facts will be new to most readers. Montague's father had been a Roman Catholic priest in Ireland who gave up his Orders for conscience' sake. When he married, both he and his wife decided that in the circumstances it would be best to leave the embarrassments of life in Ireland behind them, and they settled in England. They were like foreigners in their isolation. They faced facts with exemplary courage, they were honourable in every relation of life, and they devoted themselves with unfailing self-sacrifice to the education of their sons. Although Charles Montague, the subject of this memoir, had the good fortune to be under Dr. Abbott at the City of London School, he owed even more to his parents than to that inspiring teacher and practitioner of sound English. The parents made a point of reasoning out with their sons the tangled problems of conduct and knowledge. The father's bias against England as the " oppressor of Ireland explains some of the bias—we think it fair to call it so—which ran through much of Montague's writing. It seemed even to some of the greatest of his admirers that he often made the worse appear the better cause. Not that this was due to the slightest element of casuistry in his intellectual or moral make-up ; everything he said was transparently honest. But it did seem strange that he could with perfect seriousness compare the arming of Northern Ireland—an arming designed to safeguard the right to remain loyal—with the violence of Southern Ireland, to the unquestioning discredit of the North. One some- times felt that to him murder hardly seemed to be murder in the distressed South, and that to him those who stoutly refused to be forced out of their attachment in England in order that dynamiters and moonlighters might be placated were the only proper subjects for trial and execution. How- ever, Irish Nationalism was Montague's hobby. Every leading article of his provided the reader with a delightful intellectual exercise. His irony was delicious ; his choice of the telling word was deadly ; if one had been only vaguely in agreement with him at the starting-point, one could not resist the conclusion.
As Montague explains in his letters and diaries, he was not a wide reader—though modesty probably compelled him to suggest that his reading was narrower than it was—but every sentence which he read he read with a view to examining its structure. Why was a particular word in a particular position ? Why did a sentence, at a writer's bidding, seem to hang at one part and then go with a rush forwards ? Was a moving sentence an act of premeditation or a divine accident ? Montague was a slow reader. His reading was inten- sive. Swift, Goldsmith, and, above all, Shakespeare, had been his teachers. Among living persons Abbott, Nettleship, W. T. Arnold, and, of course, his parents, had formed him. Jowett did not count for much. Montague cherished the English language so affectionately that a badly constructed sentence affected him as though it were a bad smell, but a good sentence was to him as beautiful as a rose.
There is much that we should like to quote from this revealing and most interesting memoir, but we must refrain. To Montague life was a gay and absorbing adventure. He found the eyes of danger very bright. We cannot do more than indicate the unfinished meditations entitled " Inexperienced Approaches to Religion," which are printed in an appendix. These show that towards the end of his life Montague earnestly wanted some spiritual foundation on which to set his foot. He had always believed in the " inherent decency of things "—a phrase, by the way, which he borrowed from R. L. Stevenson and was not his own, as Professor Elton supposes—and ultimately he was inclined to think that there could not be a universal aspiration towards decency without some kind of universal design.
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