Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 10.djvu/365

12 s.x. APRIL is, 1922.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 299 in their slow elaboration of their thesis, something of that precision on which he lays so much emphasis. For all that, the book stands out not as perfect, not even always authoritative, but as a genuine, deliberate piece of work, which, if it may sometimes irritate, does not trifle. Mr. Murry does not treat literature as a business of haphazard emotions and half-considered views, but as a serious matter; again and again he takes pains to remember and to return, in explication or elaboration, to propositions previously set forth. While this is a solid piece of analytical work, which does not disdain subsequent construction, it does not profess to be complete; it seeks "to ventilate a few of the actual problems that confront a literary critic." Though the author delivered the lectures at Oxford he did not drop his natural role for that of the professor: "I am not expanding a doctrine, I am engaged on a voyage of discovery." Of other men's definitions of style which he quotes he declares his preference for Stendhal's "Le style c'est ajouter a une pensee donnee toutes les circonstances propres & produire tout 1'effet que doit produire cette pensee." This, from his own angle of vision, becomes " the expression that is inevitable and organic to an individual mode of experience." Such style Mr. Murry pronounces " the very pinnacle of the pyramid of art." Both are allied to Pater's " The one word for the one thing, the one thought, amid the multitude of words, terms that might just do : the problem of style was there ! the unique word . . . absolutely proper to the single mental presentation or vision within." But a definition's function is to describe. Mr. Murry is looking for the inner secret of style. The main value of his book (and a study of it should be valuable to all those who not only desire but one day will be able to write) is in the fourth and fifth chapters, where he searches for this secret. His guiding thread is one word in Stendhal's definition, pensee, which, he insists, must not be confined to intellectual activity, but, as in our common and loose use of the word thought, must cover the whole of our inner experi- ence. Hazarding the generalization that so far as pure literature is concerned " thought is always the handmaid of emotion," he gradually unfolds his theory that a writer's essential task is to convey precise emotional suggestion. Those two adjec- tives contain the core of his literary doctrine, which is to be turned into reality by a process which he calls " crystallization." In the fifth chapter he subtly analyses this process ; briefly its result may be described as a perception with a felt content as contradistinguished from that dreariest of literary failures, a mere list of things SCI-H. This vital distinction he illustrates wittily by quotations from living novelists. A not less striking example might be found in two modern poets, in Mr. Munro's ' ' Everything,' a depressing catalogue if ever there was one, and that elusive quatrain, ' Les roses dans la coupe,' which Albert Samain prefixed to ' Le Chariot d'Or.' On the side of form as apart from content, Mr. Murry reminds us and it is an apt warning to-day of the constant tendency of language to attrition, as a coin passing from hand to hand in time loses its image and superscription; arguing, therefore, that a writer has not finished when he has felt his perception, but must revitalize this perishing speech of ours, and that, if a creative writer alone can coin new words, the obligation still lies on lesser writers to use language recharged with native vitality. We may note in passing that his protest against " the familiar suggestion " that the English Bible is the highest level of English prose was uttered almost at the moment when the Departmental Committee inquiring into the Place of English in English Education was pleading the unique value to the nation's youth of acquaintance with the Authorized Version a not uninteresting coinci- dence. Since Mr. Murry is not antique, his indictment of " the modern mind " is singularly refreshing : " Democracy, liberty, resolution, honour none of the people who use these words seem to have the faintest notion what they mean, or a desire that they should mean anything . . . the flabbiness of modern thinking is not really com- parable to the sloppiness of modern feeling." If this be true, how shall the modern mind be saved ? Mr. Murry is in no doubt. For him, there is one supreme poet, supreme in matter and style, above Homer, above all others Shakespeare. " If we wish to learn some of the secrets of creative style . . . it is to Shakespeare that we must go." If that be exaggeration, it tends in the direction whither his face is persistently set, for his use to the present moment's literary feebleness, with its undirected, go-as-you-please ideals and methods, lies in his resolute refusal to lower the standard, in his irrevocable conviction that it is "a funda- mental fact that there is a hierarchy in literature, and therefore in literary style," which is perhaps another way of saying that out of his hoard of treasures he has brought out more old things than new. Place-Names of the Orange Free State. By Charles Pettman. (Queenstown, South Africa.) WE do not wonder that the author's friends, reading this compilation as a series of articles in a Bloemfontein paper, desired to have them in book form. Mr. Pettman, whose earlier works on the speech of South Africa are well known to everyone interested in the subject, interweaves a good deal of geographical and historical informa- tion with his account of the names, and, we hope, has set the matter in such a light that some care will henceforth be taken both to preserve interesting old names and to invent interesting new ones. It would be useful to disseminate copies of this work among members of the Bail- way Department of the Free State for we learn with dismay that they had proposed to substitute the ugly and unmeaning word " Suttonville " for Uijsklip, the name of the spot where Petrus Uijs, leader of the first Voortrekkers, made his treaty with Morka the Baralong chief. Bushmen, Hottentots, and, above all, the Basuto have con- tributed many names some of them sonorously beautiful derived largely from the physical appearance, or use, or fauna of the spot. The Dutch names are of the usual colonial kind, commemorative of victories or other remarkable events, reminiscent of places in the mother-land or given in honour of some great man. Colonel Robert Jacob Gordon gave its modern name to the Orr.nge River in 1 779 in honour of William IV.