He certainly did not keep up the dignity of the Sacred Grove, an important critical organ which he acquired one day--by saying "snap"--for eight hundred pounds. He got it "lock, stock and barrel"--under one or other of which three aspects the editor was included. Even at that price it didn't pay. If you are a literary person you will remember the bright new cover he gave that representative organ of British intellectual culture, and how his sound business instincts jarred with the exalted pretensions of a vanishing age. One old wrapper I discovered the other day runs:--"THE SACRED GROVE."
Weekly Magazine of Art, Philosophy, Science and Belles Lettres.
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HAVE YOU A NASTY TASTE IN YOUR MOUTH?
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YOU NEED ONE TWENTY-THREE PILL.
(JUST ONE.)
NOT A DRUG BUT A LIVE AMERICAN REMEDY.
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CONTENTS.
A Hitherto Unpublished Letter from Walter Pater.
Charlotte Bronte's Maternal Great Aunt.
A New Catholic History of England.
The Genius of Shakespeare.
Correspondence:--The Mendelian Hypothesis; The Split Infinitive;
"Commence," or "Begin;" Claverhouse; Socialism and the Individual; The Dignity of Letters.
Folk-lore Gossip.
The Stage; the Paradox of Acting.
Travel Biography, Verse, Fiction, etc.
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I suppose it is some lingering traces of the Bladesover tradition to me that makes this combination of letters and pills seem so incongruous, just as I suppose it is a lingering trace of Plutarch and my ineradicable boyish imagination that at bottom our State should be wise, sane and dignified, that makes me think a country which leaves its medical and literary criticism, or indeed any such vitally important criticism, entirely to private enterprise and open to the advances of any purchaser must be in a frankly hopeless condition. These are ideal conceptions of mine.
As a matter of fact, nothing would be more entirely natural and representative of the relations of learning, thought and the economic situation in the world at the present time than this cover of the Sacred Grove--the quiet conservatism of the one element embedded in the aggressive brilliance of the other; the contrasted notes of bold physiological experiment and extreme mental immobility.
VI
There comes back, too, among these Hardingham memories, an impression of a drizzling November day, and how we looked out of the windows upon a procession of the London unemployed.
It was like looking down a well into some momentarily revealed nether world. Some thousands of needy ineffectual men had been raked together to trail their spiritless misery through the West Eire with an appeal that was also in its way a weak and insubstantial threat: "It is Work we need, not Charity."
There they were, half-phantom through the fog, a silent, foot-dragging, interminable, grey procession. They carried wet, dirty banners, they rattled boxes for pence; these men who had not said "snap" in the right place, the men who had "snapped" too eagerly, the men who had never said "snap," the men who had never had a chance of saying "snap." A shambling, shameful stream they made, oozing along the street, the gutter waste of competitive civilisation. And we stood high out of it all, as high as if we looked godlike from another world, standing in a room beautifully lit and furnished, skillfully warmed, filled with costly things.
"There," thought I, "but for the grace of God, go George and Edward Ponderevo."
But my uncle's thoughts ran in a different channel, and he made that vision the test of a spirited but inconclusive harangue upon Tariff Reform.
