Books and Persons | Page 2

AUDOUX 305
JOHN MASEFIELD 311 LECTURES AND STATE
PERFORMANCES 315 A PLAY OF TCHEHKOFF'S 321 SEA AND
SLAUGHTER 325 A BOOK IN A RAILWAY ACCIDENT 328
"FICTION" AND "LITERATURE" 331
INDEX 333

1908

WILFRED WHITTEN'S PROSE
[_4 Apr. '08_]
An important book on an important town is to be issued by Messrs.
Methuen. The town is London, and the author Mr. Wilfred Whitten,
known to journalism as John o' London. Considering that he comes
from Newcastle-on-Tyne (or thereabouts), his pseudonym seems to
stretch a point. However, Mr. Whitten is now acknowledged as one of
the foremost experts in London topography. He is not an archæologist,
he is a humanist--in a good dry sense; not the University sense, nor the
silly sense. The word "human" is a dangerous word; I am rather
inclined to handle it with antiseptic precautions. When a critic who has
risen high enough to be allowed to sign his reviews in a daily paper
calls a new book "a great human novel," you may be absolutely sure
that the said novel consists chiefly of ridiculous twaddle. Mr. Whitten
is not a humanist in that sense. He has no sentimentality, and a very
great deal of both wit and humour.
* * * * *
He is also a critic admirably sane. Not long ago he gave a highly
diverting exhibition of sanity in a short, shattering pronouncement upon
the works of Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson and the school which has
acquired celebrity by holding the mirror up to its own nature. The
wonder was that Mr. Benson did not, following his precedent, write to
the papers to say that Mr. Whitten was no gentleman. In the days before
the Academy blended the characteristics of a comic paper with those of
a journal of dogmatic theology, before it took to disowning its own
reviewers, Mr. Whitten was the solid foundation of that paper's staff.
He furnished the substance, which was embroidered by the dark grace
of the personality of Mr. Lewis Hind, whose new volume of
divagations is, by the way, just out.
* * * * *
But my main object in referring to Mr. Whitten is to state formally, and
with a due sense of responsibility, that he is one of the finest prose
writers now writing in English. His name is on the title-pages of several
books, but no book of his will yet bear out my statement. The proof of
it lies in weekly papers. No living Englishman can do "the grand
manner"--combining majestic dignity with a genuine lyrical
inspiration--better than Mr. Whitten. These are proud words of mine,

but I am not going to disguise my conviction that I know what I am
talking about. Some day some publisher will wake up out of the coma
in which publishers exist, and publish in volume form--probably with
coloured pictures as jam for children--Mr. Whitten's descriptions of
English towns. Then I shall be justified. I might have waited till that
august moment. But I want to be beforehand with Dr. Robertson Nicoll.
I see that Dr. Nicoll has just added to his list of patents by inventing
Leonard Merrick, whom I used to admire in print long before Dr.
Nicoll had ever heard that Mr. J.M. Barrie regarded Leonard Merrick as
the foremost English novelist. Dr. Nicoll has already got Mr. Whitten
on to the reviewing staff of the Bookman. But I am determined that he
shall not invent Mr. Whitten's prose style. I am the inventor of that.
[_2 May '08_]
A few weeks ago I claimed to be the discoverer of Mr. Wilfred Whitten
as a first-class prose writer. I relinquish the claim, with apologies.
Messrs. Methuen have staggered me by sending me Mrs. Laurence
Binyon's "Nineteenth Century Prose," in which anthology is an
example of Mr. Whitten's prose. Though staggered, I was delighted. I
should very much like to know how Mrs. Binyon encountered the prose
of Mr. Whitten. Did she hunt through the files of newspapers for what
she might find therein, and was she thus rewarded? Or did some
tremendous and omniscient expert give her the tip? I disagree with
about 85 per cent. of the obiter dicta of her preface, but her anthology
is certainly a most agreeable compilation. It shows, like sundry other
recent anthologies, the strong liberating influence of Mr. E.V. Lucas,
whose "Open Road" really amounted to a renascence of the craft.
And here is the tail-end of the extract which Mrs. Binyon has perfectly
chosen from the essays of Mr. Whitten:
"...The moon pushing her way upwards through the vapours, and the
scent of the beans and kitchen stuff from the allotments, and the
gleaming rails below, spoke of the resumption of daily burdens. But let
us drop that jargon. Why call that a burden which