Monk's Orchard, Upton, Nov. 8, 1904

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_ DEAR HERBERT,--I have been trying to read the letters of T. E. Brown. Do you know anything about him? He was a Manxman by birth, a fellow of Oriel, a Clifton Master for many years, and at the end of his life a Manxman again--he held a living there. He wrote some spirited tales in verse, in the Manx vernacular, and he was certainly a poet at heart. He was fond of music, and a true lover of nature. He had a genius for friendship, and evidently had the gift of inspiring other people; high-minded and intelligent men speak of him, in the little memoir that precedes the letters, with a pathetic reverence and a profound belief in the man's originality, and even genius. I was so sure that I should enjoy the book that I ordered it before it was published, and, when it appeared, it was a very profound disappointment. I don't mean to say that there are not beautiful things in it; it shows one a wholesome nature and a grateful, kindly heart; but, in the first place, he writes a terrible style, the kind of style that imposes on simple people because it is allusive, and what is called unconventional; to me it is simply spasmodic and affected. The man seems, as a rule, utterly unable to say anything in a simple and delicate way; his one object appears to be not to use the obvious word. He has a sort of jargon of his own--a dreadful jargon. He must write "crittur" or "craythur," when he means "creature"; he says "Yiss, ma'am, I'd be glad to jine the Book Club"; he uses the word "galore"; he talks of "the resipiscential process" when he means growing wiser--at least I think that is what he means. The following, taken quite at random, are specimens of the sort of passages that abound:--

"Rain, too, is one of my joys. I want to wash myself, soak myself in it; hang myself over a meridian to dry; dissolve (still better) into rags of soppy disintegration, blotting paper, mash and splash and hash of inarticulate protoplasm."

I suppose that both he and his friends thought that picturesque; to me it is neither beautiful nor amusing--simply ugly and aggravating.

Here again:--

"On the Quantocks I feel fairies all round me, the good folk, meet companions for young poets. How Coleridge, more especially, fits in to such surroundings! 'Fairies?' say you. Well, there's odds of fairies, and of the sort I mean Coleridge was the absolute Puck. 'Puck?' says you. 'For shame!' says you. No, d--n it! I'll stick to that. There's odds o' fairies, and often enough I think the world is nothing else; troops, societies, hierarchies--S.T.C., a supreme hierarch; look at his face; think of meeting him at moonlight between Stowey and Alfoxden, like a great white owl, soft and plumy, with eyes of flame!"

I confess that such passages simply make me blush, leave me with a kind of mental nausea. What makes it worse is that there is something in what he says, if he would only say it better. It makes me feel as I should feel if I saw an elderly, heavily-built clergyman amusing himself in a public place with a skipping-rope, to show what a child of nature he was.

I cannot help feeling that the man was a poseur, and that his affectations were the result of living in a small and admiring coterie. If, when one begins to write and talk in that jesting way, there is some one at your elbow to say, "How refreshing, how original, how rugged!" I suppose that one begins to think that one had better indulge oneself in such absurdities. But readers outside the circle turn away in disgust.

The pity of it is that Brown had something of the Celtic spirit--the melancholy, the mystery of that sensitive and delicate temperament; but it is vitiated by what I can only call a schoolmaster's humour--cheap and silly, such as imposes on immature minds. When he was quite serious and simple, he wrote beautiful, quiet, wise letters, dealing with deep things in a dignified way; but, as a rule, he thought it necessary to cut ugly capers, and to do what can only be described as playing the fool. I wish with all my heart that these letters had not been published; they deform and disfigure a beautiful spirit and a quick imagination.

Pose, affectation--what a snare they are to the better kind of minds. I declare that I value every day more and more the signs of simplicity, the people who say what they mean, and as they mean it; who don't think what they think is expected of them, but what they really feel; who don't pretend to enjoy what they don't enjoy, or to understand what they don't understand.

I may be all wrong about Brown, of course, for the victory always remains with the people who admire, rather than with the people who criticise; people cannot be all on the same plane, and it is of no use to quench enthusiasm by saying, "When you are older and wiser you will think differently." The result of that kind of snub is only to make people hold their tongues, and think one an old-fashioned pedant. I sometimes wonder whether there is an absolute standard of beauty at all, whether taste is not a sort of epidemic contagion, and whether the accredited man of taste is not, as some one says, the man who has the good fortune to agree most emphatically with the opinion of the majority.

I am sure, however, you would not like the book; though I don't say that you might not extract, as I do to my shame, a kind of bitter pleasure in thinking how unconsciously absurd it is--the pleasure one gets from watching the movements and gestures, and listening to the remarks of a profoundly affected and complacent person. But that is not an elevated kind of pleasure, when all is said and done!

"We get no good,
By being ungenerous, even to a book!"

as Mrs. Browning says. . . .--Ever yours.

T. B. _

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