'Yes! Among Books That Charm'

I still rely on anthologies for a significant portion of my continuing education. A good one is a buffet that permits sampling without gorging, and you don’t have to feel guilty about nibbling on one of the entrées and finding it tastes bad. We just move along to the next selection. Among my earliest teachers was a mediocre and now forgotten poet but a gifted anthologist – Oscar Williams. Now I’m picking at The Eighteen-Nineties: A Period Anthology in Prose and Verse (ed. Martin Secker, 1948), with a rousing introduction by John Betjeman. It’s not a period I know intimately or feel particularly loyal to, though I’m surprised by the number of favorites it contains – Beerbohm, Housman, Yeats. Betjeman is encouraging: 

“Never was English more carefully written than in the nineties. Infinite pains were taken to use balanced sentences in prose, to create atmosphere, to write mellifluously, to delight in language.”

 

I’m also surprised by the number of names I don’t recognize – Hubert Crackenthorpe, Theo Marzials, Victor Plarr. The last named is author of Lives of the Fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons (1930) but is represented in the anthology by two poems, including “Ad Cinerarium,” a sort of paean to cremation. A sample stanza:  

 

“When the artificers had slowly

Formed thee, turned thee, sealed thee, burned thee,

Freighted with thy freightage holy . . .”

 

The campy quotient is rather high among the selections. Rather than taking cheap shots at the contents, I’ll celebrate the contributions of Max Beerbohm, both taken from his first book, the audaciously titled The Works of Max Beerbohm (1896). “Eighteen-Eighty” is rather tepid by Max standards but “Diminuendo” is an early triumph, a retrospective look at his undergraduate years at Oxford, with a comical focus on Walter Pater. There’s more gravitas and verve in his conclusion:

 

“Yes! among books that charm, and give wings to the mind, will my days be spent. I shall be ever absorbing the things great men have written; with such experience I will charge my mind to the full. Nor will I try to give anything in return. Once, in the delusion that Art, loving the recluse, would make his life happy, I wrote a little for a yellow quarterly and had that succès de fiasco which is always given to a young writer of talent. But the stress of creation soon overwhelmed me. Only Art with a capital H gives any consolations to her henchmen.”

 

It’s also worth noting that the volume is among the hundreds I’ve encountered from the personal library of Edgar Odell Lovett (1871-1957), the Princeton mathematician who became the first president (1908-46) of Rice Institute (now University). Who can imagine today a university president reading Beerbohm, Housman or Oscar Wilde?