Q U I E T P L E A S E

QUIET PLEASE

“All things are corrupted and decay with time. Saturn never ceases to devour those whom he generates; insomuch that the glory of the world would be lost in oblivion if God had not provided mortals with a remedy in books. Alexander, the ruler of the world; Julius, the invader of the world and the city, * * * the faithful Fabricius, the rigid Cato, would at this day have been without a memorial if the aid of books had failed them.”

Thus wrote the good Bishop De Bury in his book “Philobiblon” completed in the year of his death in 1345, at a time when he had the largest private library in England. His book, the earliest book about books I know, has made him the patron saint of good bookmen everywhere. It marks the origin of that pleasant literature which treats of the lore and lure of books, of the affection which men bear them and of the pleasures of the chase reserved specially for book-hunters.

In youth he tutored the Prince of Windsor, later to be Edward the III, in whose reign he rose to high positions of trust, being at one time Lord Chancellor of England. In or out of office he was in much demand as a skilled diplomatic messenger to the great courts of Europe, and always and everywhere he hunted books, taking due advantage of his exceptional opportunities.

Speaking editorially he says that after first giving attention to the affairs of the kingdom:

“an easy opening was afforded us, under the countenance of royal favor, for freely searching the hiding places of books. For the flying fame of our love had already spread in all directions, and it was reported not only that we had a longing desire for books and especially for old ones, but that anybody could more easily obtain our favor by quartos than by money.”

He tells of going about on tedious embassies and in perilous times carrying with him, as he says,

“that fondness for books which many waters could not extinguish, for this like a certain drug sweetened the wormwood of peregrination; this after the perplexing intricacies, scrupulous circumlocutions of debate, and almost inextricable labyrinths of public business, left an opening for a little while to breath the temperature of a milder atmosphere.”

De Bury was not by strict standards a scholar, but he had great joy in books.

He retells the story out of the Noctest Atticae of Aulus Gellius of a queer old lady who appeared before Tarquin the Proud, a legendary King of Rome, offering him nine books at a price so astoundingly high that he told her she was mad.

Offended, she tossed three books into the fire and asked as much for the rest. Again refused, she threw three more to the flames, and asked the same price for the three that remained.

Tarquin, overcome with amazement, bought these for the price for which he might have had all. These were the Sybilline books, long consulted and revered by the Romans as divine oracles.

The modern bookseller or collector might marvel at the old lady’s restraint in the face of increasing rarity.

Less than a century after De Bury, Thomas à Kempis sat in a bare little cell and wrote:

“Everywhere have I sought peace but nowhere have I found it except in a nook with a book.”

Two things enter into this familiar but ever beneficent formula -- a book and a nook.

Were I the master of my days, I would have me a quiet library as a haven of refuge from the harassments of the outer world, where, in the words of Caxton, the first English printer, “Reading should be for making the time pass pleasantly.”

I would have about me quiet books -- books which soothe and entertain without tiring or troubling -- I would have about me no wars, no deeds of violence, no pirates, no storm tossed shipwrecks, no cannibals, no ferocious beasts, no bandits or highwaymen, no Indians in the regalia of battle, no two-gunmen from the West that once was wild, no Munchausen, with his swashbuckling mendacity, and no crimes. There will be no Hawkshaw tracking fiendish culprits through my peaceful retreat.

Little Lord Fauntleroy may sit with folded hands and gaze demurely on my modest bookish treasures, but Peck’s Bad Boy will be where he would want to be, somewhere else. What will he ever come to? He will probably grow up to be an overprivileged individualist with a plethoric bank account.

Little Cedric that was will meet Alice and they will have much good talk about the castle of his crusty old grandfather, the Earl, and of Wonderland and how Humpty Dumpty came to fall. They will be too young to know that they are right smack in a greater wonderland than Alice and yet seen, a wonderland filled with surprises and delights which no one, not even an Oxford mathematics Professor, could crowd into one small volume.

I like the literature of charm -- charm, that indefinable something which makes the heart glad, the “je ne sais quoi” of Chesterfield. Who ever heard of a charming murder? I can do without literary counter irritants.

Could it be so, my library, like that of old Montaigne, would be a round room in the top of a tower, the ivory tower which still stands as a monument to one who doesn’t need it. Izaak Walton, Addison, Sterne, Goldsmith, Burns, Lamb and other cheering companions would be there, and there would be ladies present.

Charm is inexplicable, but those who had the grace to consort with the literary folk in my library would, in the idiom of à Kempis, feel it even though they did not know its definition.

I would be governed in the main by the wisdom of Charles Lamb expressed in his essay, “Detached Thoughts on Books”, in which he says:

“In this catalogue of books which are no books -- biblia a biblia -- I reckon court calendars, directories, pocket books * * * scientific treatises, almanacks, statutes at large, the works of Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie, Soame Jenys, and, generally, all those volumes which ‘no gentleman’s library should be without,’ the Histories of Josephus * * * and Paley’s Moral Philosophy.”

I will have in my library to be no books which are “no books.”

I would not have it thought that I overlook or undervalue useful books, the tools of a business, trade or profession, books that teach, inform or guide in school or out, or those that record what has been thought and said about the universe or the atom and all that’s in between, or that tell us what has happened or has been done that we may hazard a guess as to what is to come or what might well be done, in short, the books that enable us to live s we do and to get on to the extent we do. These we must have.

To take but a single example, it is quite indispensable that we should have books which show precisely and reliably how to win friends and influence people.

All of us have reason to be deeply grateful to useful books and at times we are even more grateful that there are others.

For the present grandiose purpose, I hold to the view that the generality of men like to get off the job now and then and to do things not clearly identifiable with their primary tasks.

The busman’s holiday is, I admit, a time-honored precedent to the contrary, but should not, I think, be regarded as controlling because not supported by adequate research in the modern manner.

A recent statistical survey tends strongly to show that bricklayers lay very few bricks after getting home from work, and brings out even more clearly what had long been surmised, that the average plumber shamefully neglects his homework. The discussion need not be prolonged.

If it be noticed that I treat only of familiar matters, I may say that this is not due solely and exclusively to my own limitations, although that is imaginable, but in some measure to the thought that you would be more pleased to be reminded of what you know than of what you don’t know.

In accounting for a few favorites I will avoid technical literary criticism as I have in the past avoided channel swimming, and for substantially the same reasons.

Montaigne, the presiding genius of French letters, was a man of proper taste. He said:

“For my part, I like only easy and amusing books which tickle my fancy, or such as give me counsel and comfort. * * * When young, I studied for show; later to make myself a little wiser; and now, for pleasure. And never for profit.”

And at another point:

“My library is my kingdom, and here I try to make my rule absolute -- shutting off this single nook from my wife, daughter and society. Elsewhere I have only a verbal authority, and vague. We should all of us set apart for ourselves a little back-shop, wholly free and our own -- there to establish our true liberty, our solitude and retreat.”

Montaigne is one of the most vitally interesting and pleasantly unusual characters who ever lived.

His early education was unique. He neither spoke nor heard any language but Latin until he was six years old. When he was in the cradle, his father hired a German tutor who spoke no French, and strictly enjoined him to speak only Latin to the boy and to permit no one to do otherwise. Latin was then the Esperanto of science and scholarship, but the vernacular served in the ordinary concerns of life much as it does today, and the boy’s parents had to learn enough Latin to enable them to form a speaking acquaintance with their own son.

The father, in spite of his unusual educational theories, was a humane man. During childhood Montaigne was awakened every morning not by the horrendous jangling of some demoralizing ancestor of a Big Ben, but to the strains of sweet music. He lived to say:

“Both by nature and judgment I mortally hate cruelty as the worst of vices.”

With his endowments, Montaigne might have been a man of great public consequence in his own day, but he retired early to his tower and became one of the immortals. At that he was once mayor of Bordeaux, then the third city of France; but one fancies he would rather sit in his tower room and watch the cat playing with his garter than deal with public business.

He is undoubtedly the most self-revealing of all great writers, and I have heard of a man named Pepys. Lord rest his soul. Montaigne didn’t use shorthand either. He wrote for all the world to see -- the world of his own day.

He himself said of his essays:

“It is the only book of its kind in the world. * * * I have no other aim but to disclose myself. * * * It is not my deeds I write, it is I and my essence.”

Emerson says that he laid down the “Essays” with a feeling that he himself had written the book. Montaigne reminds me of the patent medicine ads I used to see in country newspapers. The reaction upon reading him is that one has all the symptoms. What does that prove? Merely that one is a member, not necessarily in good standing, of B.L.T.’s “So Called Human Race.”

It is often said that literature holds the mirror up to life. Montaigne holds the mirror up to himself and he is of the very core of life. We who are privileged to peer over his shoulder see not only him but ourselves.

Within the bounds of a pervasive underlying human dignity, Montaigne had a wide range, from the grave to the gay, from the witty to the sententious, and from the sublime to what might pass for the ridiculous, but always he is genuine and never, well hardly ever, does he take himself seriously. Hear him:

“I look upon myself as ordinary in every way except in the fact that I look upon myself as ordinary.”

Let us take further soundings. Let Montaigne talk on at random, and had we but time we might learn more of him thus than we could from a folio of scientific criticism.

“A mind which has no set goal loses itself. To be everywhere is to be nowhere. No wind serves the man bound for no port.”

* * *

“You must play the fool a little, if you would not be thought wholly a fool.”

* * *

“I don’t remember that I ever had the itch, yet scratching is one of Nature’s sweetest gratifications, and right in your hand.”

* * *

“Ask a Spartan whether he would rather be a good orator or a good soldier -- but don’t ask me, for I would rather be a good cook if I didn’t already have one.”

* * *

“I have a great curiosity to pry into the soul and real opinions of my authors * * * I would rather hear what Brutus said to his friends in his tent the night before a battle, than the harangue he gave next morning to his army.”

So much for Montaigne, the inventor of the essay whose original model has never been improved upon.

In the Philobiblon Bishop De Bury said:

“And, if it pleases us to speak figuratively we shall be able to adapt the best sayings of every writing whatsoever to books.”

Let us see: Izaak Walton in The Complete Angler quotes Sir Henry Wotton on angling, thus:

“‘Twas an employment for his idle time, which was then not idly spent for Angling was, after tedious study, ‘a rest to his mind, a cheerer of his spirits, a diverter of sadness, a calmer of unquiet thoughts, a moderator of passions, a procurer of contentedness’ and ‘that it begat habits of peace and patience in those that professed and practiced it.’”

To the biblical injunction, there has been added another,

“Be ye also fishers of books.”

Dear Izaak Walton, great apostle of peace and the good way of life, of whose book Lowell declared that he knew of,

“No other in which this quality of self revelation without pretence or apology is as modest and engaging -- unless it be the Essays of Charles Lamb or those of Michel De Montaigne.”

and of whom Henry Van Dyke said:

“He produced an imperishable classic read with delight by thousands who have never wet a line.”

Any affection which I may have for fishing derives not from success but from Walton.

At one time or another we have all felt the lure of travel, sometimes a mirage, happily sometimes not. I will sit one day in my library and make one of the pleasantest journeys that was ever made on white paper -- it will be “A sentimental journey through France and Italy” and Laurence Sterne will be along.

I should like to have been along on another journey. Once upon a time a stage coach was returning to London and paused for a moment at a town in Kent. A woman clambered up and shouted to the coachman, “Are you full?” Charles Lamb stuck his head out of the window and said, “Yes, madam, I am very full.” But it is only fair as some do not, to let Lamb finish. He went on to say, “That last piece of pudding at Gilman’s did the business for me.”

That may call to mind the story told by Edward A. Newton in one of his long series of entertaining books about books of Steele -- Richard Steele, I mean, of the firm of Addison and Steele, Essayists Extraordinary by Appointment to His Majesty the discerning reader. Steele once got off a letter to his wife which ran something like this:

“Dear Prue: I am too drunk to come home but I am not too drunk to send you my love.”

Let us hope that Prue had enough of divinity to forgive and that Steele’s home was not like the one in Tam O’Shanter under closely allied circumstances, the “hame,”

“Whare sits our sullen sulky dame,

Gatherine her brows like gathering storm,

Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.”

and that she had something of the essential goodness of Bobby Burns in his address to the Unco Guid or the Rigidly Righteous, in which he said:

“Then gently scan your brother man,

Still gentler sister woman,

Tho’ they may do a kennin*wrang,

To step aside is human.”

Of all the permanent denizens of my library none will be more welcome than Oliver Goldsmith. Who could be more delightful, more human? Who could do more to revive the jaded spirit than this most amazing itinerant literary jack of all trades and master of most? To his credit is a great novel, a great play, and a great poem, each an outstanding classic, and what is something else, each a living classic. Beyond this he wrote fine essays, histories of Greece and England, biographies, a grammar, an inquiry into the state of polite learning,

*A little bit of

a survey of experimental philosophy, the Chinese Letters, children’s books, translations from the French, and so on.

He could do, and do well, almost anything that could be done with a pen, except to write a good check. When he died he owed two thousand pounds, and Dr. Johnson rightly remarked “Was ever a poet so trusted?” But in spite of his ill-managed life, Johnson sincerely admired him, admired him enough to say on occasion that he was a great man, “a very great man.”

Johnson once entered his life in rather dramatic fashion. Let the good doctor himself report on it.

“I received one morning a message from poor Goldsmith that he was in great distress, and as it was not in his power to come to me, begging that I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent him a guinea, and promised to come to him directly. I accordingly went as soon as I was dressed, and found that his landlady had arrested him for his rent, at which he was in a violent passion. I perceived that he had already changed my guinea, and had got a bottle of Madeira and a glass before him. I put the cork in the bottle, desired he would be calm, and began to talk to him of the means by which he might be extricated. He then told me that he had a novel ready for the press, which he produced to me. I looked into it and saw its merit; told the landlady I should soon return, and having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds. I brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent, not without rating his landlady for having used him so ill.”

That novel was the Vicar of Wakefield and early in the Hoover administration what was said to be the only known presentation copy of the first edition sold at auction for $6,600.

There will be other guests in my library: Chaucer and Mat. Prior, Gray and Browning, John Masefield, Austin Dobson and A.E. Housman, friendly human poets in the main who, in spite of anything you may have heard, flatter the understanding more than most modern poets do. Dickens may come on occasion, always provided that Cratchit and Tiny Tim are with him. Irving’s Sketch-Book will gain him easy entrance, he being well assured that the allotted slumbers of Rip Van Winkle will be in nowise disturbed. The urbane Chesterfield with his Letters and the pithy Bacon with his Essays will have places reserved for them. Our world being what it is, it may be well to have some eye to the seemly and the expedient, even though we mean only to be good and to be comfortable. Leigh Hunt and Anthony Trollope will be expected, each with an autobiography under his arm. A truck will be sent around for Trollope’s novels upon his arrival. And there will be still others, do not fear, Galsworthy for one.

It is a harsh, ungenerous and unfriendly rule that will not abide an occasional exception. In spite of the menacing rumble of the cannons of Waterloo, Thackeray will be on hand to regale the company with that best of tales, Vanity Fair.

Thoreau’s Walden is a volume which holds a considerable place in my affections. Much real enjoyment has come to me through the contemplation of this book. It lurks pleasantly in the archways of my consciousness. Some day I may read it. I never have. But on the whole I think I never shall, for fear it might turn out not to be what I have so long admired. Somewhere Charles Lamb has said that it is good to love the unknown, and I think it better in this instance to preserve the status quo.

And what of Horace? No, Horace will not be there. He will be everywhere, in the pocket, on the bedside table, in hand during the vacuous unassigned periods between business and dinner and in those still hours of the night after the sheep are all present or accounted for; a good companion on long journeys, during interminable half hours in railroad stations, in dull restaurants, on the water, in the country, in hazy periods of convalescence, and, indeed, a pleasing resource whenever and wherever there comes a hiatus in life’s ever shifting and somewhat disjointed program.

Stevenson knew the grateful, healing virtues of this true physician of the spirit. Once when he lay ill, low in mind and health, he cried out, “For God’s sake, can anyone bring me a Horace?”

Save for the work of a genius yet to be named, The Education of Henry Adams, too well known to this membership to require more than passing mention, and Gissing’s, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, are for me the finest books of this century.

For the greater part of his career George Gissing led a life as dreary and cruel and sordid as could fall to the lot of a man of talent; now in a dirty tenement or a wretched basement; for a while in a London jail; in habitual poverty; frequently in circumstances of acute personal embarrassment and social estrangement; at one time near suicide at Niagara; and at another nearer starvation in Chicago. At last fortune looked his way and smiled and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft is an enchanting expression of the peace and contentment which he found at the end of his days in a little cottage in rural England, revelling in the joys of his garden, his flowers and his books. To him that cottage and its environs were more of Heaven than he had ever hoped for, and his pleasure is shared to a remarkable degree by those who read his most fascinating book.

And now to the ladies:

I have often been impressed with the beginnings of great books. Here is the opening sentence of Price and Prejudice:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

And this the first sentence of The Vicar of Wakefield:

“I was ever of the opinion that the honest man who married and brought up a large family did more than he who continued single, and only talked of population. From this motive I had scarce taken orders a year before I began to think seriously of matrimony, and chose my wife, as she did her wedding gown, not for a fine, glossy surface, but for such qualities as would wear well.”

But for another point of view, let us dip into the opening paragraph of Cranford, an all time favorite with me, the first paragraph introducing the prim, elderly ladies who lived in genteel poverty in that tranquil village, where as has been said, nothing happened and everything happened. Note this,

“‘A man’ as one of them observed to me once, ‘is so in the way in the house.’”

I have a talent such that, being first endowed with veracity, I could interest you deeply were I to relate how a king had been smiled off his throne, or how Mussolini, in spite of a sprained ankle, had won through to the finals in the Wimbledon singles. So has everyone else.

But there is a special, a real and a rare talent which depends not upon great deeds or events but upon itself, that of setting down faithfully, entertainingly, convincingly, yes even dramatically, the quiet inconsequentialities of everyday life, which in the end bulk larger, are more significant and form a better index to human character and life as it really is than anything which gets into the headlines.

This Jane Austen could do better perhaps than anyone else and with a nice sense of proportion which brought her characters into perfect focus.

No one who has not lived in the country can fully appreciate or understand the wealth of dramatic interest in rural and small town life which comes from concentrated attention to the details of the character and conduct of a limited circle of relatives and neighbors never out of mind and rarely out of sight. Some people were surprised that “Pride and Prejudice” made a good play.

Jane Austen spent nearly all her life in quiet villages. She wrote only of things and people she knew and knew intimately and completely as only a small town dweller could, but her amazing skill and tact in depicting the littlenesses and the variables in what went on in her peaceful English countryside has given her an enduring place in literature.

Where was Jane Austen on Tuesday, March 14, 1826? She was dead. On that day Sir Walter Scott sat down and wrote in his diary a paragraph which must have been quoted more widely than any other prose paragraph he ever wrote, in which he said of Jane Austen:

“That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful thing I have ever met with. The big Bow-Wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!”

Strange as it seems there have been differing views as to Jane Austen.

I like Mark Twain. At his best he is magnificent and at his worst his potboiling is apt to be more diverting than the current magazine racks, but it tests one’s faith to know that he once remarked that,

“Every library is a good library which does not contain a set of Jane Austen.”

and that on another occasion he said,

“When I take up one of Jane Austen’s books, such as ‘Price and Prejudice,’ I feel like a barkeeper entering the kingdom of heaven. I know what his sensations would be and his private comments. He would not find the place to his taste, and he would probably say so.”

And yet Mark had his weaker moments. His hide was not full-grained rhinoceros throughout. Remember well that Joan of Arc was his favorite among his own books. I rejoice in the possession of his copies of “Little Men” and “Little Women,” both duly inscribed by him.

Before Mark Twain, Emerson had written,

“I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit or knowledge of the world.”

Emerson, who once referred to Edgar Allen Poe as “that jingle man,” may not have been an infallible critic.

For my own part, I would rather hear Jane Austen talk about the weather than hear Emerson describe the glories of the universe. See how she does it in a letter to her sister Cassandra:

“What a dreadful hot weather we have. IT keeps one in a continual state of inelegance.”

The place of Jane Austen as a supreme literary artist and as a humorist of the first rank is now secure. There is nothing you or I may do about it.

As for her art, no one has described it so patly as she herself has done in comparing it to work with a fine brush on a “little bit of ivory” two inches wide.

As for her humor, Leonie Villard, the French critic, says:

“With Jane Austen alone, humor instead of being am ode of expression employed on occasion and in certain circumstances, appears on every page.”

I cannot find it now but I have faith that somewhere Kipling has a verse about Jane climbing up the golden stairs with Shakespeare and Cervantes on either hand waiting to greet her at the top.

Macaulay said that Jane Austen approaches Shakespeare more nearly than any other English writer in drawing character, and that is what Shakespeare was supposed to be able to do beyond everything and everyone. That is why he overtops the world.

Jane Austen led a remarkably eventless life, remote from either the world of society or the world of letters. Compared to her, the shy and lonely Charlotte Bronte was a pampered and feted literary idol -- Charlotte knew Thackeray and Mrs. Gaskell, the author of Cranford, and Harriet Martineau. She had met Carlyle and had dined with Barry Cornwall and the Proctor ladies of his family. She had grimly faced admiring lords and ladies who crowded about to do her honor in the heart of fashionable London. Perhaps, the most important man Jane Austen ever met was not a writer but a sailor, her brother, who died in 1865 at the age of ninety-three, as Sir Francis Austen, the Senior Admiral of the British Navy, known to all lovers of Pinafore as the “Queen’s Navee.”

Jane Austen’s nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, who, as he tells, was the youngest mourner at her funeral in 1817, wrote an important memoir of her life and works in 1870, in which he said:

“Though in the course of fifty years I have forgotten much, I have not forgotten that ‘Aunt Jane’ was the delight of all her nephews and nieces. We did not think of her as being clever, still less of her being famous, but we valued her as one always kind, sympathizing and amusing.”

At another point in this memoir he says that she

“lived in entire seclusion from the literary world; neither by correspondence, nor by personal intercourse was she known to any contemporary authors. * * * I doubt whether it would be possible to mention any other author of note, whose personal obscurity was so complete.”

Jane Austen commenced Price and Prejudice in 1796, when she was not quite twenty-one, and completed it within ten months. Her father’s attempts to find a publisher ended in failure, and it did not reach the light until 1813, her first published novel, “Sense and Sensibility”, having preceded it by two years.

Jane Austen’s name never appeared on any of her books while she lived, but in her last years her authorship was known to those who cared. In her first book she signed herself, “By a Lady.” Nothing could have been more appropriate.

One pleasing distinction came to her the year before she died. During an illness of her brother in London he was attended by a physician from the staff of the Prince Regent (later George the Fourth) who told her that the Prince had read and admired her books and kept a set at each of his residences, and further that he desired that Mr. Clarke, the Librarian of Carlton House, should “wait upon her and show her every attention.” Mr. Clarke took her through the library and the apartments and then told her that if she had any novel forthcoming she might dedicate it to the Prince.

“Emma” was then on the press and the dedication was made. In due course she sent her royal patron a copy through channels, and received his thanks through Mr. Clarke “for your handsome book.” She then wrote her publisher to tell him that the Prince liked his work whatever he thought of hers.

Two of Jane Austen’s six novels were not published until the year after her death.

Mary Webb (born Meredith), a native of Shropshire, died in 1927 at the age of forty-six. She too has six novels to her credit. Her husband, whom she married in 1912, was a Cambridge man who had held a minor teaching position in a country place, but was never much at making a living.

Two years after their marriage they were working as truck gardeners near Shrewsbury. They lived in a little cottage rented for thirteen pounds a year, in which she is said to have written in three weeks her first novel “Golden Arrow.” This was published in 1916, and was followed in 1917 by “Gone to Earth” which some regard as her finest work. “Precious Bane,” her most popular novel, appeared in 1924.

During the writing of her first novels, Mary Webb, to supplement the family income, sold flowers from her garden at a stall in Shrewsbury, getting up well before dawn, walking nine miles to market, and then walking back. Both she and her husband were addicted to bad health and modest circumstances.

In the early twenties her husband took a position in London where some years later the editor of the Atlantic Monthly visited her in a house which has been described as being “about twice as wide as the front door.” Her husband was ill and there was every evidence of adversity and distress. When the editor left he went to Galsworthy and told him that

“A woman of very great talent was dying almost of starvation a mile away.”

She did die within a few months.

Even today Mary Webb as an individual is rather a dim figure. Caradoc Evans, an English writer who knew her well, tells of the first time he saw her. He says,

“I met a spindly earthy little woman who might be a gnomish office cleaner. Her feet were biggish, her fingers were thin and trembly and houseworky, her nose was hooked and her neck was goitred, and her eyes were brilliant bulging balls.”

Later he told her that she was the greatest living woman novelist and remarked “Shropshire must be proud of you.”

“I have just come back from there,” she said, “And I didn’t meet a single person who had ever heard of my books.”

She too received a tardy mark of distinction. At Christmas, 1926, as Stanley Baldwin was leaving Downing Street for the holiday, a secretary handed him a copy of “Precious Bane” which he liked so much that on his return he wrote her a brief note of kind appreciation. He never met Mary Webb any more than Jane Austen met the Prince Regent, but after her death the Prime Minister made a speech praising her work and expressing pleasure that he had been able to send her a few words of recognition before she died. The current editions of “Precious Bane” carry a foreword by Stanley Baldwin.

Before her death, John Buchan, now Lord Tweedsmuir and Governor General of Canada, said

“She is about one of the best of living writers, and nobody buys her books.”

Eventually, but not till she was gone, her books became best sellers in England. They can be had in America.

While she was writing, and with exceptions remarkable because they are exceptions, she was ignored almost as completely by the literary supplements as was Jane Austen by the reviewers of her day. I may add, and I do not do so defensively, that there is not a line about Mary Webb in the latest revised edition of the Britannica.

No one who doesn’t write as Mary Webb wrote, and no one does, can describe the extraordinary beauty and the smooth though at times vaguely tremulous, and the restrained but compelling, vitality of her writing.

She died poor and almost unknown, but is slowly but surely, and I doubt not inevitably, coming to be recognized as another of the world’s great artists. Her peculiar gift for blending humanity and nature is as startling as it is delightful and effective. Her work has a haunting fascination, an unreal, boding reality, which makes it linger in the memory long after her book has been laid aside. She clothes the simplest minutiae of rural life with a griping, dramatic interest not to be imagined or even suspected until experienced.

All her novels are of her native Shropshire country. The scene of “Precious Bane” is laid in the meres of North Shropshire during but far removed from the Napoleonic wars, among the simplest of country people, poor and unlettered.

It is a tale of Gideon, a young farmer, driven to relentless toil by a fierce ambition to get ahead so that one day he may live in the great house in the village with maids and men to serve him and a carriage. His sister, Prue, all but completely sacrificed to her brother’s pitiless urge, but who alone survived it, lived with him and their mother, widowed early in the tale under bizarre circumstances, on a lonely farm called “Sarn.” The mother, a timid, inarticulate creature, who, to Gideon’s apparent regret, was not strong enough for field work, spent days of ceaseless woe tending errant hogs in the soggy meres.

Prue had a harelip, which made her a person of ill-omen among the simple folk who believed in witches and laid store by charms and spells, and she lived in an atmosphere which would have crushed any but a great spirit. She toiled endlessly in the fields, in the farmyard, and in the kitchen, as a devoted if not altogether willing slave to the ambition she did not share, until her brother’s death opened the way to a fulfillment of her own modest destiny.

Only Mary Webb can tell the stories that she tells, but some impression of the quality of her writing may be gained from the following passages from “Precious Bane.”

Gideon was out cutting wood. His sister Prue in the little farmhouse kitchen says:

“I went to the door to listen if he had finished chopping, and I could hear the axe barking, and the echo of it coming from across the mere. The trees were mounded up with snow, and the mere frozen till near the middle. The woods, as white as sugar, stood round the water so still, as if they were spelled, like folk in some old tale of witchcraft, so deep they were in trusses and bales of snow, and not a breath stirring. You couldna call summer to mind. You couldna think of the mere with lilies on it, and ripples. I held my breath it was so quiet, till a redshank called form the far end of the mere by the church, very sorrowful, with a sound like ‘Mute!’ ‘Mute!’”

Men of Illinois might listen to this, also from Prue, who tells the entire story of Precious Bane in the first person.

“So I watched the grain week by week, from the time when it was all one green till it began to take color, turning raddled, or abron or pale, each in his kind. And it shone, nights, as if there was a light behind it, with a kind of soft shining like glow worms or a marish light. I never knew, nor do I know now, why corn shines thus in the nights of July and August, keeping a moonlight of its own even when there is no moon. But it is a marvellous thing to see, when the great hush of full summer and deep night is upon the land, till even the aspen tree, that will ever be gossiping, durstna speak, but holds its breath as if she waited for the coming of the Lord. I make no doubt that if any read this book it will seem strange to them that a farm woman should look at the world about her in this wise, and indeed it is not many do. But when you dwell in a house you mislike, you will look out of the window a deal more than those that are content with their dwelling. So I, finding my own person and my own life not to my mind, took my pleasure when I could.”

Prue speaks of Jancis, the flower-like financee of Gideon, whose father, old Beguildy, one of the oddest characters ever to be caught between the covers of a book, had (in apparent accord with Gideon’s tacit business judgment) bound her out to a difficult family as a dairy maid for three years at eighteen pounds for the term. Prue says of Jancis:

“I used to think of her a deal. For if you thought of anybody at Sarn, you thought of them a deal, it being so quiet, especially I the winter, and time standing still, so it seemed.”

Sarn was quiet and remote:

“Christmas went by us and nought stirred the quiet, unless you count killing the pig. Nobody came Christmassing, for there was nowhere for them to come from, and nothing for them to come for.”

I cannot tell you more than that about Mary Webb. But the other evening I saw a note of her in a book by Herbert Faulkner West in which he said:

“I know of no woman, past or present, who is a greater novelist.”

I do not know if this judgment be correct. Indeed, I shall never know. However, but for Jane Austen, I would not risk my life upon the issue.