“Outlaws”

The Observer, 27 February 1921, page 4, 1,247 words

[This transcript is based on a muddy facsimile provided by Newspapers.com; I have noted illegible words to be transcribed later from physical media.]

Outlaws. By Nancy Cunard. (Elkin Mathews. 5s net.)

(By George Moore.)

Of a certainty there will be a few who will be attracted to “Outlaws,” for there are always a few, but only a few, in each generation who are attracted to books that are not like other books, the literary standard of the common reader being the resemblance of the book that has come from the printing press to the books with which he is already acquainted. Nor is this preference so strange as it would first seem to be, for man cannot separate himself easily from the conventions and prejudices in which he has grown up and to which he has become attached. It is only the few amongst us who see with their own eyes and hear with the ears; the majority of men and women hear and see with the ears and eyes that have preceded them, and are therefore not only unable to appreciate the new, but resent the new, for the reason that any departure from accepted standards seems to them not only an impertinence, and ostentation, but an unpinning of previous beliefs in what is good and right and true, and of all, implying a lack of deference for the opinions of the reader. Man is not a reasonable animal and forgets that whosoever writes from Nature and not from books is original:in other words, a heretic, and heresies are not fashionable in the beginning. Moreover, Nature is suspect; the great, mysterious Goddess of God within us, without us, above us, beneath us, has become sin, like Wagner’s Venus, described by Baudelaire as having grown diabolic among ogres that would not accept her as divine.

***

This little exordium was inspired by the title of the book that has come to us for review. We have done no more than to explain it, and we hold that we have done well to do this, for Miss Nancy Cunard is her book: she looks upon it as outlawed, and herself, too: not the apparent woman, perhaps, but the spiritual. Whether she also reached this conclusion by the same ways as we have, we have no opportunity of knowing, but it seems to use that all we have said must have been in her mind when she chose so original a title as “Outlaws” and one so suitable to her book, in which there is much more genius than there is in the great mass of her contemporaries, and much less talent. By genius we mean a special way of feeling and seeing that separates a man or woman from the crowd, and by talent we mean handicraft, tact, judgment. Genius cannot be acquired: we have it or we have it not; but talent can be, and we hope that Miss Nancy Cunard will not be satisfied with her genius, but will apply herself at once to the acquisition of talent, a much rarer thing than is commonly supposed. In early youth a streak of genius is often recognisable in writers, but genius wastes if it be not supported by talent. A frail thing is genius, even as the soul, and will not survive the age of thirty if ample provision of talent be not made for it.

***

But doctrine without example is like a candle without matches to light it, so we turn to the first lines of “Outlaws” for exemplification of our doctrines: —

There is a curious legend of two lovers

That thrills within the heart of every man;

Ghostly they are, yet living, and the span

Allotted them by fate no end discovers.

There was a man, adventurous and free,

Evil of soul, grown into league with hell,

Loved by a woman that no fear might quell;

There lives rose as the waves grow out at sea,

Wild as the glory of a desert lion,

Dark as the sombre magnitude of death,

Heavy with memories as the storm that saith

Aloud its toll of corpses….

No one, we think, will question the spring, the exaltation of these lines, but the syntax! Or it may be the punctuation that has gone wrong. A full-stop should come after “quell,” and a comma after “sea,” else we fail to understand. And assuming that we are right in revising the punctuation of the passage, we have no hesitation in saying that the beauty of the book is marred by much negligent writing, despite which the book dropped upon our knees, and our thoughts into questions. We asked ourselves where we had heard this impulsive music before, always in such easy modulations that the verses seem like thoughts passing in the mind. In what forgotten book or dream, or was it in our own soul that we met it?

***

It will seem to many a surfeit of praise if we speak of Héloïse, St. Teresa and Emily Brontë, but to omit to mention these three glorious names would be an injustice to Miss Nancy Cunard, for there were often in our mind whilst reading her book. For “Outlaws” is instinct with personal passion; the writer’s inward life heaves and heaves again till it vents itself upon paper, careless of everything except music, her temperament for the moment forbidding a [illegible] of verses. If the syntax comes out right, well and good; if it doesn’t, it can’t be helped. This is well enough in a first book, but ultimate genius is not in explosions but in restraints. It is not enough to believe that earth is as beautiful as heaven — it is necessary to write over the study door: “the correction of form is virtue.” Shelley, the most inspired of all our poets, could [illegible], and whosoever doubts this let him read the first draft of the “Epipsychidion.”

***

The poem in “Outlaws” that gave us most pleasure are the lines on “The River Nene”: —

Oh the eternal sweetness of the river

Under mysterious sunsets, creeping on

Through meadows flowerless and low; to-day

Sleeping they stretch in silent mellowness.

No April flowers are here, nor butterflies

Trifling on spotted cowslips, for to-day

Nature's communion with the darkening season

Sets amber berries glowing, clustered birds

Whispering in autumn hedgerows. In the sky

Clouds meditate and slowly pass to westward;

The velvet greens are smoothed — I have walked long

Illumined by the purity of sunset

Soft as a kiss; stood on the gentle hills

And wondered at the world, this delicate

Sweet solitude of midland river valley

That wanders as a dream. I have gone by

The murmurous mill, the greyness of a village,

And loved the vesperal merging of the day

Into completed acquiescent night;

Found here the long reposeful altitudes

That guide the soul to heavens temporal.

Even to Miss Nancy Cunard’s tempestuous heart the tranquillity of a river seen at evening brings peace, but not enough to allow her to remember that trilling in modern English means wavering sound and never wavering wings. The use of the word to express motion is not in our opinion altogether happy. The poem in which this licentiousness occurs is not the most original in the book in thought or in music, but it is probably the most perfect, and we quote it in its entirety, for if we failed to do this our review of “Outlaws” might leave the impression that it would be as well to overlook Miss Cunard’s first book and to wait for her second.