Sales catalogue 444: Maggs Bros

Date:: 1923

Reference:: WA/HMM/CM/Sal/13/25

Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sales catalogue 444: Maggs Bros. Source: Wellcome Collection.

38/350 (page 368)

Lowell (James Russell)—continued. 1927 ———— Men, Women, Philosophy and Books. An important Series of six Autograph Letters, addressed to Mrs. W. K. Clifford, Author and Playwright. Comprising together 19 pp., Svo, and dated from London and America between 1884 and 1890. Handsomely bound (with artistic title- page, transcripts, etc., tnserted) in new half morocco, lettered on back. £32 Apr unique series of Lowell letters of exceptional literary and philosophical interest. Mrs. William Kingdom Clifford (née Lucy Lane), to whom they are addressed, has attained fame both in England and America, by her charming stories and plays. These letters extend over some six years, and are full of gossip about Men, Women, Philosophy and Books; mentioning Keats, Wordsworth, ‘Tennyson’s “ Becket,” Browning, Scott’s “ Red Gauntlet,” etc., and a most interesting appreciation of Kipling; also an amusing adverse criticism of the Lord Mayor’s Show. The following few extracts will tend to show the absorbing interest of the whole collection : “Tf have been thinking that the decay of nature is far more beautiful than that of man, that autumn is rather pensive than melancholy, that the fate of the leaf does not work such dilapidation on the forest as on us the fate of the hair, but gives its victims a new beauty. “T am quite willing you should prefer disagreeable men (there are enough of them!) provided you will tolerate me. For my part, I prefer agreeable women. I must keep copies of my letters if I would understand the answers to them. Could I have been such an ass as to ask if [ was charming? It is out of the question. Even if I thought I was, £ should be too clever to enquire too wisely about it, for I- hold with my favourite Donne that “Who knows his virtue’s name & place, hath none.’ And yet I should infer from your letter that I had been stupid enough to ask something of the kind. Nothing in my life has ever puzzled me so much as my popularity here in England—which I have done nothing & been nothing to deserve. No, the Lord Mayor’s show was pure Circus & poor Circus at that. It was cheap & the other adjective that begins with N. ’Twas an attempt to make poetry out of commonplace by contract. “T'was antiquity as conceived by Mr. Sanger. Why, I saw the bottoms of a Norman Knight’s trousers where they hal been hitched up into a telltale welt round the ankle by his chain armour! There was no pretence at illusion nay, every elephant, every camel, every chariot was leaden with disillusion. It was worth seeing for once, to learn how dreary prose can contrive to be when it has full swing. But you are finding my prose dreary? *Tis nothing to what I could do if I would. Suppose | should write in verse! You will be glad to hear that a man once devoted an entire volume to the exposure of my solecisms or whatever he chose to call them. I never read it—lest it should spoil my style by making it conscious. A Scotsman, too, gave me a dressing, I am told—but I don’t mind their theories about English (which is always a foreign tongue to them) & besides he liked me all the same. By the way a Scotsman had the ill manners one day to compliment me on my Jinglish. ‘Why, I shouldn’t know you weren’t an Englishman. Where did you get it.’ I couldn’t resist & answered with a couple of verses from a Scottish ballad— “T gat it in my mither’s wame, Whaur. ye’ll get never the like! ” He will never compliment me again, I fear. ** What did I learn out of that sentence about Keats, quotha? I am sure I don’t know—