My Commonplace Book
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QJarnell Unioeroitg ffiihtarg BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF HENRY W. SAGE 1891 Cornell University Library PN 6081.H12 3 1924 027 665 524 Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027665524 MY COMMONPLACE BOOK MY COMMONPLACE BOOK T. HACKETT J. ^ " ' Omne meum, nihil meum T. FISHER UNWIN LTD LONDON : ADELPHI TERRACE n First publication in Great Britain .... 1919- memories ! O past that is ! George EuoT DEDICATED TO MY DEAR FRIEND RICHARD HODGSON WHO HAS PASSED OVER TO THE OTHER SIDE Of wounds and sore defeat I made my battle-stay ; Winged sandals for my feet I wove of my delay ; Of weariness and fear I made my shouting spear ; Of loss, and doubt, and dread, And swift oncoming doom I made a helmet for my head And a floating plume. From the shutting mist of death, From the failure of the breath I made a battle-horn to blow Across the vales of overthrow. O hearken, love, the battle-horn I The triumph clear, the silver scorn I O hearken where the echoes bring, Down the grey disastrous morn. * Laughter and rallying ! Wn^uAM Vaughan Moody. From Richard Hodgson's Christmas Card, 1904, the Christmu before bis death I cannot but remember such things were. That were most precious to me. Macbeth, IV, 3. PREFACE* A I/ARGE proportion of the most interesting quotations in this book was collected between 1874 and 1886. During that period I was under the influence of Richard Hodgson, who was my close friend from childhood. To him directly and indirectly this book is largely indebted. Hodgson (1855-1905) had a remarkably pure, noble, and lovable character, and was one of the most gifted men AustraUa has produced. He is known in philosophic circles from some early contributions to Mind and other journals, but is mainly known from his work in psychical research, to which he devoted the best years of his life. Apart from his great abiUty in other directions, he was endowed, even in youth, with fine taste and a clear and mature Uterary judgment. This will appear to some extent in the quotations over his name, and the note on p. 208 will give further particulars of his career. He was from two to three years older than myself , and guided me in my early reading. There- fore, indirectly, he has to do with most of the contents of this book. But, more than this, about one-third of the main quotations (not including the notes which I have only now added) came direct from Hodgson. He left Australia in 1877, but we maintained a voluminous correspondence until 1886. This correspondence contained most of the quotations referred to, and the remainder * To the readers of the Adelaide edition (which Was issued only in Australia) I should explain why the book is now so much enlarged. The first issue was prepared hastily and. without sufficient care. (The proceeds were to go to the Australian Repa- triation Fund, and the book was hurriedly put together and printed to be ready for a Repatriation Day which was announced but actually was never held.) It was my first experience in publishing, and I did not realize the care and consideration required in issuing a book even of this character. Hence (i) part of my manuscript was entirely overlooked 1 failed to see that many quotations would be improved by adding their ; (2) great mass of Hodgson's context ; (3) I did not go properly through the correspondence ; and (4) I, wrongly, as I now think, excluded many quotations because 1 thought certain subjects were unsuitable for the book. Besides extending the scope of the collection by including those subjects I now have no longer restricted myself to the seventy -eighty period. The notes also add materially to the size of this volume. (ix) — ; X PREFACE Hodgson gave me in London on the only occasion I met him after he left Australia. (After 1886 he became so inmiersed in psychical research, and I in legal work, that our correspondence ceased to be of a literary character.) Thus directly and indirectly Hodgson has much to do with the book—and, if it had been practicable, I would have placed his name on the title-page. This book is simply one to be taken up at odd moments, like any other collection of quotations. But there are two reasons why it may have some special interest. One reason is that it includes passages from a number of authors who appear to have become forgotten, or, at any rate, to be passing Lethe-wards. We, who dwell in the underworld,* cannot, of course, have a complete knowledge of what is known or forgotten in the inner literary circles of England. We can depend only on the books and periodicals that happen to come to our hands, and perhaps should not rely too much on such sources of information. Yet I cannot but think that Robert Buchanan, for example, has become largely forgotten, and apparently this is the case also with a number of other authors from whom I quote. Because of this, thave retained all the passages I had from such authors. It must be remembered that this book is not an anthology. A commonplace book is usually a collection of reminders made by a young man who cannot afford an extensive library. There is no system in such a collection. A book is borrowed and extracts made from it ; another book by the same author is bought and no extract made from it. On the one hand a favourite verse, although Veil known, is written out for some reason or other on the other hand hundreds of beautiful poems are omitted. So far from this being an anthology, I have, as a matter of course, omitted many poems that since the seventy-eighty period have become general favourites ; and, as regards the most beautiful gems of our literature, they are almost all excluded. There are for example, only a few lines from Shakespeare. Some exceptions have, however, been made. In a series of word-pictures, a few of the best-known passages will be foimd. A few others have been included for reasons that will readily appear ; they either form part of a series or the reason is apparent from the notes. Apart from these I have retained Blanco White's great sonnet and " The Night has a thousand eyes," written by F. W. Bourdillon when an undergraduate at Worcester College, Oxford, because with regard to these I had an interesting and instructive experience. I accidentally discovered that of four well-read men (two at least of them more thorough students ** * See Tennyson's Princess " : Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail That brings our friends up from t c underworld. PREFACE xi of poetry than myself) two were ignorant of the one poem and two of the other. Seeking an explanation, I turned to the antho- logies. I could not find in any of them BourdiUon's little gem until I came to the comparatively recent Oxford Book of Victorian Verse and The Spirit of Man. The Blanco White sormet I could find nowhere except in collections of sonnets, which in my opinion are Uttle read. It wiU be observed that in anthologies alone can Blanco White's one and only poem be kept alive. The second reason why this book may have a special interest is that it may serve as a reminder to my contemporaries of our stirring thoughts and experiences in the seventies and eighties. How interesting this period was it is difficult to show in a few lines._ In pure Uterature, books of value simply poured from the press." In the closing year, 1889, "One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward " died on the day that his last book, Asolando, was pubUshed, leaving Tennyson, an old man of eighty, the sole survivor of the poets of a great period. At almost the same moment " Crossing the Bar " was published. Apart from Uterature, the seventies and eighties were an eventful period in science and reUgion. Darwinism was still causing its tremendous upheaval, and the supposed conflict between religion and science exercised an enormous effect on the minds of men. Evolution had explained so much of the processes in the history of life, that the majority of thinkers at that time imagined that no room was left for the super-natural. Science was supposed to have given a death-blow to religion, and the greatest wave of materialism ever known in the history of the world swept over England and Europe. It is strange how many great thinkers missed what now appears so obvious a fact, that causality still stood behind all law, and that Darwin, like Newton, had merely helped to show the method by which the universe is governed. (It seems to me that J ames Martineau stood supreme at that time as a man of genius who saw clearly the inherent defect of the whole materalist movement.) However, agnosticism, materialism, positivism flourished and triumphed. Science, whose dignity had been so long unrecog- nized, came into her own, and, in her turn, usurped the same dogmatic, superior attitude she had resented in ecclesiasticism. On the one hand pessimistic literature and philosophy poured from the press ; on the other hand new religions arose to take the place of the old.