When Winter Comes to Main Street. Grant M. Overton
and even the camel drivers peered from the backs of the great beasts to find out what it was which gleamed in the sun. They were curious about this last gift for which all the caravan had waited.
“And the young king took a toy from his hand and placed it upon the sand. It was a dog of tin, painted white and speckled with black spots. Great patches of paint had worn away and left the metal clear, and that was why the toy shone in the sun as if it had been silver.
“The youngest of the wise men turned a key in the side of the little black and white dog and then he stepped aside so that the kings and the camel drivers could see. The dog leaped high in the air and turned a somersault. He turned another and another and then fell over upon his side and lay there with a set and painted grin upon his face.
“A child, the son of a camel driver, laughed and clapped his hands, but the kings were stern. They rebuked the youngest of the wise men and he paid no attention but called to his chief servant to make the first of all the camels kneel. Then he picked up the toy of tin and, opening the treasure sack, placed his last gift with his own hands in the mouth of the sack so that it rested safely upon the soft bags of incense.
“ ‘What folly has seized you?’ cried the eldest of the wise men. ‘Is this a gift to bear to the King of Kings in the far country?’
“And the young man answered and said: ‘For the King of Kings there are gifts of great richness, gold and frankincense and myrrh.
“ ‘But this,’ he said, ‘is for the child in Bethlehem!’ ”
v
Editor of the London Mercury, J. C. Squire has the light touch of the columnist but limits himself somewhat more closely to books and the subjects suggested by them. Very few men living can write about books with more actual and less apparent erudition than Mr. Squire. Born in 1884, educated at Cambridge, an editor of the New Statesman, a poet unsurpassed in the field of parody but a poet who sets more store by his serious verse, Mr. Squire can best be appreciated by those who have just that desultory interest in literature which he himself possesses. I have been looking through his Books in General, Third Series, for something quotable, and I declare I cannot lift anything from its setting. It is all of a piece, from the essay on “If One Were Descended from Shakespeare” to the remarks about Ben Jonson, Maeterlinck, Ruskin, Cecil Chesterton and Mr. Kipling’s later verse (which I have nowhere seen more sensibly discussed).
Well, perhaps these observations from the chapter “A Terrifying Collection” will give the taste! It appears that an anonymous donor had offered money to the Birmingham Reference Library to pay for the gathering of a complete collection of the war poetry issued in the British Empire. After some preliminary comment, Mr. Squire concludes:
“If that donor really means business I shall be prepared to supply him with one or two rare and special examples myself. I possess tributes to the English effort written by Portuguese, Japanese and Belgians; and pæans by Englishmen which excel, as regards both simplicity of sentiment and illiteracy of construction, any foreign composition. Birmingham is not noted for very many things. It is, we know, the only large city in the country which remains solidly Tory in election after election. It produced, we know, Mr. Joseph and Mr. Austen Chamberlain. It has, we know, something like a monopoly in the manufacture of the gods in wood and brass to which (in his blindness) the heathen bows down; and there are all sorts of cheap lines in which it can give the whole world points and a beating. But it has not yet got the conspicuous position of Manchester or Liverpool; and one feels that the enterprise of this anonymous donor may help to put it on a level with those towns. For, granted that its librarians take their commission seriously, and its friends give them the utmost assistance in their power, there seems every reason to suppose that within the next year the City of Birmingham will be the proud possessor of the largest mound of villainously bad literature in the English-speaking world. Pilgrims will go to see it who on no other account would have gone to Birmingham; historians will refer to it when endeavouring to prove that their own ages are superior to ours in intelligence; authors will inspect it when seeking the consoling assurance that far, far worse things than they have ever done have got into public libraries and been seriously catalogued. The enterprise, in fact, is likely to be of service to several classes of our fellow-citizens; and it cannot, as far as I am able to see, do harm to any. It should therefore be encouraged, and I recommend anyone who has volumes of war-verse which he wishes to get rid of to send them off at once to the Chief Librarian of Birmingham.”
Oh, yes! Books in General, Third Series, is by Solomon Eagle. Mr. Squire explains that the pen name Solomon Eagle has no excuse. The original bearer of the name was a poor maniac who, during the Great Plague of London, used to run naked through the streets with a pan of coals of fire on his head crying, “Repent, repent.”
Too late I realise my wrongdoing, for what, after all, is Books in General as compared to Mr. Squire’s Life and Letters? As a divertissement, compared to a tone poem; as a curtain-raiser to a three-act play. Life and Letters, though not lacking in the lighter touches of Mr. Squire’s fancy, contains chapters on Keats, Jane Austen, Anatole France, Walt Whitman, Pope and Rabelais of that more considered character one expects from the editor of the London Mercury. This is not to say that these studies are devoid of humour; and those chapters in the volume which are in the nature of interludes are among the best Mr. Squire has written. Unfortunately I have left myself no room to quote the incomparable panegyric (in the chapter on “Initials”) to the name of John. Read it, if your name is John; you will thank me for bringing it to your attention.
vi
One expects personality in the daughter of Margot Asquith, and the readers of the first book by Princess Antoine Bibesco (Elizabeth Asquith) were not disappointed. The same distinction and the same unusual personality will be found in her new book, Balloons. Princess Bibesco’s I Have Only Myself to Blame consisted of sixteen short stories the most nervously alive and most clearly individualised of feminine gestures. The quality of Princess Bibesco’s work, in so far as purely descriptive passages can convey it, may be realised from these portraits of a father and mother which open the story called “Pilgrimage” in I Have Only Myself to Blame:
“My father was one of the most brilliant men I have ever known but as he refused to choose any of the ordinary paths of mental activity his name has remained a family name when it should have become more exclusively his own. If anything, my mother’s famous beauty cast far more lustre on it than his genius—which preferred to bask in the sunshine of intimacy or recline indolently in the shady backwaters of privacy and leisure. And yet in a way he was an adventurer—or rather an adventurous scientist. He was often called cynical but that was not true—he was far too dispassionate, too little of a sentimentalist to be tempted by inverted sentimentalism. Above all things he was a collector—a collector of impressions. His psychological bibelots were not for everyone. Some, indeed, lay open in the vitime of his everyday conversation but many more lay hidden in drawers opened only for the elect.
“Undoubtedly, in a way, my mother was one of his masterpieces. Her beauty seemed to be enhanced by every hour and every season. At forty suddenly her hair had gone snow white. The primrose, the daffodil, the flame, the gold, the black, the emerald, the ruby of her youth gave way to grey and silver, pale jade and faint turquoise, shell pink and dim lavender. Her loveliness had shifted. The hours of the day conspired to set her. The hard coat and skirt, the high collar, the small hat, the neat veil of morning, the caressing charmeuse that followed, the trailing chiffon mysteries of her tea-gown, the white velvet or the cloth of silver that launched her triumphantly at night, who was to choose between them? Summer and winter followed suit. Whether you saw her emerging from crisp organdy or clinging crepe de chine, stiff grey astrakan or melting chinchilla always it was the same. This moment you said to yourself, ‘She has reached the climax of her loveliness.’
“My father delighted in perfection. He had discovered it in her and promptly made it his own. I don’t know if he ever regretted the unfillable quality of her emptiness. Rather I think it amused him to see the violent passions she inspired, to hear her low thrilling voice weigh down her meaningless murmurs with significance. To many of her victims the very incompleteness of her