Barker Fairley on Charles Doughty

BARKER FAIRLEY ON CHARLES DOUGHTY DOUGLAS GRANT John Hayward's recent anthology of nineteenth-century English verse includes nothing by Charles Montagu Doughty. Hayward was an excellent anthologist. He read for himself and chose sensibly, with an eye to past as weII as to contemporary taste. He included such old favourites as "Breathes there the man, with soul so dead," or "She walks in beauty, like the night," without whose customary appearance a selection of nineteenth -century verse would be like a lopped tree; but he also managed to find space for more of John Clare's verse and Thomas Hardy's than has been usual, in response to the interest of the moment. He- omitted dramatic verse in order to make room somehow, but he was not frightened of the long poem, as so many of us are. He printed the whole of "Bishop Blougram's Apology," an heroic choice; and The Pre/t,de, Don Juan, and In Memoriam are represented in decent extracts. He knew that the long poem was essential for an understanding of the poetic consciousness of the century. But even so, he included nothing by Charles Doughty: length can have had nothing to do with this exclusion, though Doughty wrote one of the longest poems of the century. Hayward's dismissal of Doughty can have caused little surprise. How many of us have read The Dawn in Britain-in the last ten years, that is? And where would we read it, if we had the will? The first edition of 1906-7, in six volumes, is not easily come by, and Barker Fairley's selection of passages from the poem, made in 1935, has long since been out of print. I think it was remaindered. Fairley expressly made his selection to introduce Doughty as a poet to a wider public and to inaugurate his deferred popularity. He must be taken to have failed. And this selection was not Fairley's first attempt to see justice done to Doughty; his critical study of Doughty had appeared eight years before, in 1927. I have no doubt he is still standing by his early, but weII-considered opinions: Fairley is a great one for sticking. He would as eagerly confirm today as he did yesterday D. G. Hogarth's judgment on The Dawn in Britain, in his admirable biography of Doughty: "It remains unread by the great majority even of lovers of literature. By many of the minority who have read it, it is judged too lengthy, and too exacting Volume XXXVI, Number 3, April, 1967 BARKER FAIRLEY ON CHARLES DOUGHTY 221 for the intrinsic interest of its theme. More is the pity! for a wealth of poetic imagination, thinking, and craftsmanship has been lavished upon it, which, quality with quantity, can hardly be credited to another single poem in English . . . By this deliberate enrichment, as also by its general purpose and the treatment of its theme, The Dawn in Britain challenges comparison with the Aeneid....'" Hogarth was a fine scholar, Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, and an Arabist- the only mark against him as a critic might be that he was not a Professor of English. As I have said, Fairley's selection from The Dawn in Britain was his second effort on Doughty's behalf. I cannot understand why Fairley's Charles M. Doughty: A Critical Study has not been reprinted. It is One of the keenest critical studies of an English author of its time, and had the subject only been John Clare or Thomas Hardy, to choose Hayward's rising favourites, it would today be readily available in paperback and be providing the solid matter for innumerable student essays. Hogarth called it a "penetrating study," and, if that authority is to be suspected of partiality, Thomas J. Assad, writing in 1964 on Doughty as a traveller, refers to its author as "a very astute critic.'" Fairley's study should be reprinted, if not for the sake of Doughty, then as a model of criticism; generous, scrupulous, intelligible-opinioned, but never opinionated. And Fairley writes an excellent, pleasant prose. But if Fairley has spent his remarkable talents on a negligible, or at the best...