BOOKS
Penguin Prose
BY GRAHAM HOUGH FOR many years now anthologies have been under a cloud. Undeservedly, in my judgement; but I can suggest two reasons for it. One is the thirty-year-old polemic of Laura Riding and Robert Graves, which has bullied the literati into the fear that using anthologies is faintly disrepu- table, like belonging to a book club. The other is that reviewers hate them. Reviewers are addicts of the personality cult, and anthologies have no personalities. They are indeed very awkward to handle. Unless one has spent almost as long on the job as the anthologist, the proportions, and the reasons for them, are extremely hard to discern; and there is always the temptation to take refuge in vague approbation, vague mis- giving, or petty cavils. Why have eight pages been devoted to Lord de Tabley while Aurelian Townsend is so poorly represented? Why indeed! Until the relative merits of authors can be reduced to a numerical calculus there is no answer to sUch questions.
Meanwhile the common reader uncorrupted with literary Prejudice remains unmoved, and anthologies proliferate. The good verse ones have obvious justifications. Most poetry needs selection, and few general readers have the time and the Capacity to do it for themselves. On the whole, within the necessary limits of length, the best poems by the best poets do get into the omnibus collections; if they excite anyone sufficiently he will want to read more. And the best anthologies have been a real force in accustoming people to new literary experiences, or persuading them to take a fresh look at the Old ones.
So one can reasonably remain unmoved by the Pamphlet against Anthologies, as far as verse is concerned. Prose is a different matter. The verse anthologist is after all presenting Whole poems, self-sufficient works of art; and this the prose anthologist can hardly do. He is presenting extracts, snippets, nu one of which can have absolute msthetic value as it stands. His proper purpose therefore remains necessarily more Obscure. He may aim at a sort of pageant of English life and letters, with a strong emphasis on social history : wimples and Pardoners for the Middle Ages, coffee houses for the eighteenth century, honest doubt and the poor laws for later on. He may offer, as a publisher once suggested to Ezra Pound, 'something more in the nature of gems,' the well-known purple patches ('Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation. . . .' 'Now since these dead bones have already outlasted the living ones of Methuselah. . . ."She is older than the rocks among Which she sits ') Both are legitimate aims in their way; Often they are half-consciously confused. And here the anti- anthologist's prejudice begins to justify itself. Pageants are not the best way to present the progress of life and letters; Whatever prose may be, it is certainly not a collection of elaborate rarities; and a prose literature is not well represented by reportage alternating with rhetorical set pieces. A far better object is to illustrate the development of prose style— what could be done with English prose at various stages of its history, and what means were available for doing it. This seems to be the main objective of the new. Pelican Book of English Prose,* and an excellent job it makes of it. It is I should say, quite the best collection of its kind that exists— the London Book of English Prose by Herbert Read and Bonamy Dobree, to which the Pelican editors pay tribute, is its only rival; and that is arranged on a different plan, functional rather than historical.
One volume of the Pelicans is given to Elizabethans and Jacobeans, one each to the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- turies, one to the Romantics and one to the Victorians. But the whole does not degenerate into a mere chronological jumble sale, for the volumes are subdivided on a different plan. One section is devoted to a picture of the age—scenes, personalities and events, one to the movement of ideas, one to imagination and invention, and one to the criticism of the arts. There is, I am happy to say, no division into `scientific' and 'emotive' prose, the most pernicious of recent critical categories; and the divisions are made by common sense and literary judgement, not by the ghastly passion for doctrinaire distinction. There is an introduction to each volume, and though all are useful, these are of varying interest. Much of what they have to say has necessarily been said before, but they are all scholarly, and they present some valuable pieces of technical information, such as the distinction between the Ciceronian and the Senecan ideal. Mr. Allott's piece on Victorian prose is a particularly brilliant summing up of the quality of an almost impossibly diverse period.
The main principle in the choice of extracts has been to take passages interesting for their subject-matter, in the faith that this will inevitably illustrate all the prominent kinds of prose style; and to go for the normal, central manner rather than for detachable bits of fine writing. (Sound, I am sure, but it would be nice some time to have an anthology consisting entirely of purple patches.) The pageant principle is not entirely absent, since the first part of each volume is given to the portrait of the age; but more especially commendable is the excellent selection of the prose of argument and ideas (F. H. Bradley on Arnold's religious philosophy, Leslie Stephen on Theosophic moonshine). The confirmed anthology dram-drinker will find plenty to please him, both familiar and unfamiliar. Among the familiar things Lord Shaftesbury's account of the way of life of Mr. Henry Hastings (1551-1650) is always. good to have around, just to remind us that in spots at least Merry England once really existed; among the un- familiar (to me) is Sydney Smith on Catholic emancipation. which should be required reading for all governments reluctant to make concessions that in the end they will have to make anyway. One can hardly indicate the content of a mixed anthology of nearly half a million words; may I instead recom- mend the following fragments : To tea-drinkers :
Chaa, what it is. . . . Only water with a kind of herbe boyled in itt. It must be Drancke warme and is accompted wholesome.
Peter Mundy, in Canton, 1637.
To educationists : -
When a boy comes to school, with dirty face or hands, and it seems to be more the effect of habit than accident, a girl is appointed to wash his face in the sight of the whole school. This usually creates much diversion. . . . One punishment of this kind has kept the boys' faces clean for two Tears.
Joseph Lancaster, The British System of Educatktz, 1810. To trade-unionists : 'Brethren,' said a voice that seemed a presiding one, 'before we proceed to the receipt of the revenue from the different districts of this lodge, there is I am informed a stranger present, who prays to be admitted into our fraternity. Are all robed in the mystic robe? Are all masked in the secret mask?'
'All !
'Then let us pray.'
Michael Radlett's admission to a trade union, from Disraeli's Sybil, 1839. The idle reader will find his curiosity stimulated, and the more purposeful will find plenty to get his teeth into. Above all, both will find prose that is about something, and a happy deficiency of those beautifully formed china eggs that clutter up so many of the literary show-cabinets; there is more Hume than Addison and more Coleridge than Landor.
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