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The New Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 2  Spring 1926  Page: 5
 
 Editorial
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EDITORIAL
 
LET us begin by thanking Sir Edmund Gosse for devoting one of his Sunday Times articles to a book which, to our loss, we should otherwise have probably missed, i.e., Dans les Sentiers de la Renaissance Anglaise, by Professor Emile Legouis. We make this polite little curtsey all the more gladly, because as a rule the volumes which Sir Edmund disinters week by week in our amiable but scarcely vivacious contemporary could be read by us, if at all, only during several years of seclusion on a desert island. But we have not waited to be marooned before allowing Professor Legouis to delight us with his taste, his ingenuity and his scholarship (rare combination). What he offers us is an anthology of the best English poems from Sidney to Waller, united by what he modestly calls “un mince filet de commentaire,” and accompanied by French translations in verse. We remember how our young and impetuous Imagist friends used to insist that the French always translate foreign poetry into prose, and a whole volume of the unfortunate Yerhaeren was turned into English on this pseudo-Gallic principle. For if its advocates had given the matter about half an hour’s study, and produced fewer shapeless versicles about sea-foam, rose-leaves and what not, they would have discovered, possibly with strong disapproval, that there are numerous rhymed French versions of foreign poetry. (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Rossetti, to take only a few instances, have all been rendered into French rhyme.) And now Professor Legouis provides further and even more strikingly successful examples of the same method. Here is Spenser, reproduced in archaic French, and Donne, most ingeniously made to speak a language which we should have otherwise believed too delicate for his harsh accents; here, too, are Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton and Herrick. Yes, we certainly are grateful to Sir Edmund Gosse for not permitting us to overlook the work of Professor Legouis.

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Of course, it might have been guessed that the above paragraph was not prompted solely by the desire to be polite to
The New Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 2  Spring 1926  Page: 6
 
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Sir Edmund Gosse, nor even to praise the attainments of Professor Legouis. The fact is that his book (how, by the way, do they manage to publish it for seven francs?) provides an instructive example of French activity and enterprise. Its preface announces it as the first of a series, the purpose of which will be to present, in a systematic manner, some of the best products of modern European literature, the original texts, as in the first volume, being given with the translation. Here is another proof that France is rapidly becoming less insular, and we shall be interested to see how this series develops. Mr. B. H. Blackwell, it may be recalled, tried a similar experiment with his admirable Sheldonian Series, but unless we are mistaken, he was not precisely encouraged to continue it. We should be surprised, however, if the French series come to a premature end.

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Let us hasten to add that we by no means adopt an attitude of critical devotion to the works of French writers. On the contrary, we are well aware that bluff and snobbery are terms which literary Paris has found itself obliged to borrow. For do not young gentlemen such as Monsieur Jean Cocteau flourish there? And was not Proust compelled to publish at his own expense, and then to pass almost unnoticed for several years? Still, if a French writer of the calibre of C. M. Doughty, for instance, were to die, he would receive at least as much space as the account of a hockey match or meditations on a slump in tallow, chiefly because there would be an abundance of periodicals in which his work could be adequately discussed. There is, for example, that remarkable weekly, Les Nouvelles which has a circulation of several hundred thousand. In London the only paper at all comparable with it is the Times Literary Supplement, which, however, resembles it about as closely as Cromwell Road resembles the Boulevard St. Michel. And of these two thoroughfares we must confess that, with all its drawbacks, we prefer the latter.

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Again, why is it not possible for an English publisher to produce a literary annual such as L'Ami du Lettré, the 1926 edition of which we have just obtained for 12 francs? Here is a record of last year’s literary production, arranged with the
The New Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 2  Spring 1926  Page: 7
 
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completeness and precision of Whitaker's Almanac or The Statesman's Year Book. The classification of the material is thorough without being pedantic. Every branch of literature is dealt with, and the survey even passes beyond the borders of literature, including, as it does, publishers and even booksellers. One of the most commendable features of the volume, which, by the way, is the joint work of a committee of French reviewers, consists of the critical appreciation of new writers, and there are also some lively pages on literary polemics of the bygone year. But we cannot enumerate here all the items which have held our attention in the book. We can only once more ask rather despairingly why such things do not appear in England.

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The answer probably is that in France they take literature seriously, while in England they scarcely take it at all. Why, we do not even possess a proper critical survey of recent and contemporary English literature (as far as it is describable in print). The French have René Lalou’s Histoire de la Française Contemporaine and Bernard Faÿ’s brief but excellent Panorama de la Littérature Contemporaine. (The Germans, we may mention in passing, have quite half a dozen such books, the most elaborate of which is Albert Soergel’s Dichtung und Dichter der Zeit, a work in two volumes, containing 1,760 pages and 687 illustrations.) And while we are on this humiliating topic, we may as well admit that the best book on the modern English novel is Abel Chevalley’s Le Roman Anglais de Notre Temps, with Walter F. Schirmer’s Der Englische Roman der Neuesten Zeit a fairly good second. The moral which we draw from all this is that a depreciated currency is not the worst catastrophe which may befall a nation — a conclusion which can be confirmed by a perusal of H. L. Mencken’s Americana.

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We will now proceed to praise an English book, and we will praise it highly. The book in question is Whom God Hath Sundered, by Oliver Onions, which Martin Seeker recently issued at 7/6. When In Accordance with the Evidence, The Debit Account and The Story of Louie (the work of a single year!) first appeared, they aroused in us an enthusiasm which has
The New Coterie  Volume 1   Issue: 2  Spring 1926  Page: 8
 
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survived until now, and which accordingly made it possible for us to reread the trilogy in its new one-volume form. It is particularly interesting to observe the skill with which the author has dovetailed the three parts into one, thus achieving a triumph of technique. But apart from that, we have here one of the most remarkable modern works of imagination produced by an English writer, and perhaps by any writer. If Oliver Onions were a Russian whose novels had just been translated into English, he would no doubt become the subject of much highbrow jabber. Dostoyevsky’s name would probably crop up in reference to him, and then perhaps it would be announced in one thousand five hundred words or so that he has written a variation on the theme of “Crime and Punishment.” So he has. But the odd thing is that, having accomplished this (and, indeed, much more than this) he still remains unknown to a large section of the intelligent reading public, and in a recent book on the English novel of today by a well-known London critic he is not even mentioned. Why this should be so, we cannot pretend to understand, still less to explain. For he has written such novels as Good Boy Seldom (what English novel portrays the rise and fall of a self-made man more convincingly than this?); Mushroom Town (what English novelist has displayed a shrewder understanding of the Welsh? ); Little Devil Doubt (has the big newspaper syndicate ever inspired more crushing satire?); Widdershins (what contemporary writer improve on this treatment of the supernatural?). And so on. We might fill another page with similar notes and queries, without doing complete justice to Oliver Onions. But, to be sure, the compilers of social snippets do not comment raptly upon his hair-oil and fancy waistcoats.

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We take this opportunity of expressing a somewhat belated gratitude to certain artists and publishers who generously made it possible for the first number of THE NEW COTERIE to contain material, the use of which would otherwise have been beyond our means.