END PAPERS

By BERNARD LINTOT

THE BOOM IN ANTHOLOGIES

VER since Meleager made the first Greek Anthology, in the year One B.C., the literary "Garland" has been popular. In England these pleasant collections and selections of poems and prose have been popular since Shakespeare's day and earlier. Books like the Witt's Recreation with its "ingenious conceits" and "merrie medecines for the melancholie," which included the early appearance of so merry a bard as Herrick, went through many editions. Popular also were the famous seventeenth century Poems of Affairs of State and Pills to Purge Melancholie. The eighteenth century had its "Miscellanies" and "Beauties," and the nineteenth, its innumerable "Keepsakes " and "Treasuries," culminating in Palgrave's immaculate Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics.

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UT our own age exceeds all others in output of anthologies. The treasures of literature are scattered over so vast an area of print that some sort of expert-selection has become mperative if the busy man or woman is to enjoy them. Thus the kindly anthologist has come into his kingdom. This is the hey-day of the artist in selection. No publisher's list is complete without its batch of anthologies, and succeeding book-seasons add to the harvest in ever-increasing numbers. The present season is like to outbid them all. Every post brings new anthologies or rumours of anthologies.

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NTHOLOGIES may be of two kinds, each with its particular uses. One, chronological, classifying and containing within reasonable bounds the literary work of a person or a period, or of several periods. Such works are interesting or uninteresting according to taste; but they are always valuable if

adequately produced for the same reason that an encyclopædia is valuable. When fine taste goes with exact judgment (the two are subtly related), as it did, for instance, in the making of the Golden Treasury, a work of art as well as a chronology of poetic may supervene. But chronological anthologists are not always geniuses, nor have they often a Tennyson at call, as Palgrave had, to sustain and restrain. Perhaps it is as well: such useful work demands laboriousness rather than brilliancy. It is enough that a compendium of the kind should be a useful piece of goods; other qualities than exactitude and fitness to purpose must be accepted graciously, for they are "make-weight" and not part of the bargain, still less the usage of the trade.

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OOKS of the kind are in the nature of stocktakings. They arise naturally out of the plethora of good things showered on us by bard and story-teller and historian, and with the spread of education and culture (which are widely different), when everybody who has anything to say or sing says or sings it, literature must inevitably become increasingly anthologised. This is more and more evident. The present boom in anthologies is no mere freak of fashion-it is an evolution-an efflorescence and a consummation. Anthologists are gardeners, they order and arrange for convenience or delight. The chronological or regional anthology is the kitchen-garden, and sometimes even the market-garden. It is utilitarian and, like an allotment, often ugly: Alfred H. Miles's Poets and Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, say, or Sir Egerton Brydges's Restituta and Censura Literaria, or even the tangled but admirable Dodsley, especially in the agreeable format of the 1765 six-volume edition-preferably in contemporary calf. In recent years there have been good crops of the kind: The Clarendon Press series containing excellent selections from Donne's Sermons, Boswell's Johnson, and more useful because more unusual in our day, Characters from the

Histories and Memoirs of the Seventeenth Century. In the "World's Classics" and "Everyman "libraries there are several good garners of short stories, poems, speeches, letters and essays; and Mr. Marsh in his Georgian Poets has done for the era of our George what Dodsley did for the first three of Thackeray's Georges, but with a keener sense of selection-so keen, indeed, as to be exclusive to unfairness.

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OR the second class, the ego-centric anthologies; the, in

last century term, "subjective,” and inspired by personal whim, fancy, fad, caprice or even chagrin, and sometimes, high spiritual resolve, there is big and good choice. These are the flower-gardens-gardens of Epicurus. The Spirit of Man, by Dr. Robert Bridges, holds its head serene and high among them -a noble and inspiring book—a modern Bible; although it does not please all, for upon showing the first edition to a friend he hurled it across the room with strange oaths because it contained no William Watson. The Spirit of Man shattered a Tanagra figure in its flight-but it was worth it-for my friend was a bard and rich, and the Poet Laureate's omission grave. But that is the snag "with anthologies-somebody is always left out! Then of the kind and of our time are George Saintsbury's goodly Letter Book, and, companioning it, E. V. Lucas's The Gentlest Art, Edward Thomas's Pocket Book of Poems and Songs for the Open Air and This England; Logan Pearsall Smith's Treasury of English Prose, an exquisite compendium; Poems of To-day, made for the English Association, and most recent of all, Shorter Lyrics, made by W. H. Davies, together containing many of the choicest blooms from the contemporary garden of verses; Mr. H. J. Massingham's Seventeenth Century Poems, in the Golden Treasury Series; for modernist verse, of which there is a definitive collection, we have to bide our time with the Catholic Anthology (no connection with the Church, Roman or otherwise), and Mr. Conrad Aiken's Modern American Poets.

N the past the choice is wide and varied, and must be free and personal: what is one man's anthology is another man's poison. My taste is varied though, perhaps, limited, for I find supporting one another on the same shelf which happens to be very accessible to an easy chair, the Witt's Recreation (1667), The Syren, an eighteenth-century duodecimo of sheer delight containing, in its own pleasant words, "a choice collection of the most esteemed and favourite songs performed at the theatres and public places with a collection of the most approved sentiments"; The Beauties of the Anti-Jacobin (1799), good reading for the ironic; and Edward Fitzgerald's Polonious and Frederick Locker's Patchwork, two books which triumph over familiarity. I name these, however, for an indication of personal taste, which for each of us is after all the sole criterion. Let our motto in this matter be to every man the anthologies he prefers, and finallyevery man his own anthologist, for is not that the end of all good reading?

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