Charles Doughty (1843–1926)

CHARLES DOUGHTY (1843-1926) BARKER FAIRLEY JT is putting it mildly to say that Charles Doughty is not a widely read author. Even Trauels in Arabia Deserta-the best known of his books-was out of print for fifteen out of the fifty years or so that have passed since its appearance, nor is it easy today to find any who have more than a nodding acquaintance with it.. His other books-poems almost entirely-are following the same slow pattern. Slow, but not, it would seem, stationary. Arabia Deserta i~ its entirety was reprinted by Jonathan Cape in 1921 after an interval of thirty-three years; now in the present year-the centenary year of Doughty's birth-another long work, The Dawn in Britain, has been reprinted by the same publisher after an interval of thirty-six years. It remains to be seen whether Adam Cast Forth, first published thirty-five years ago, will follow the same course. This may seem a curious phenomenon, but it is not without a certain logic. Those who kriow Doughty will probably agree that the purpose and character of his work is more intelligible to us now than it was when he wrote and that there is less excuse today for not understanding him. In a very real sense-though not one that will be immediately apparent to the hurried reader-his work belongs to the upheaval that we are now passing through and that he in his own way foresaw; and this is perhaps why instead of shrinking in the stress of events, as so many recent writers have done, he rises easily to the occasion, gains more than loses by what is now happening, and becomes, as it were, one of ourselves, sharing anq-spiritually-helping to solve our common problem. The evidences of this are not all of one sort. To begin withthough this is only a minor aspect of the question-it will be dear to any who care to look at his two poems of modern England, TheC /i.ffs and The Clouds-both written before 1914--that he knew the kind of wars we were in for in the twentieth century far better than most ofhis contemporaries and set it all down-rudely enough, but with considerable force-as a warning to his country, and, while this does not constitute his chief claim on our attention, it offers an obvious point of departure at the moment. What he treats of in these poems is nothing less than the invasion of England by a 14 CHARLES DOUGHTY (1843-1926) 15 European power, which, if not explicitly named, can be no other than Germany. In the first poem, The Cliffs, the danger of invasion is only threatened, but in The Clouds it becomes a reality, and the rout and retreat of the population through devastated countrythe like of which has recently been enacted in other parts-takes place on E nglish soil. It is worth noting in 1943, though it seemed far-fetched once, that the invasion is made possible by a double attack with airplane and with submarine-not preceded by a declaration of war-on the British fleet, thus depriving it at a blow of its command of the sea. But, remarkable in content as these poems are, they will scarcely be held to occupy anything like a central place in Doughty's work. Far from it. They impress us rather as things that he stepped aside from his main purpose to write, even sacrificing something of IUs poetic integrity-too much, one is tempted to say-in order to deliver an urgent message. But it may be that for him the disparity between this phase of his work and the rest was not as pronounced as it is for us, because he had spent no inconsiderable part of his life-and recently whole years at a stretch-over The Dawn in Britain, a poem t hat treats of other invasions and chiefly of the invasion of Celtic Britain by the Romans, and it was open to him to say that in composing The Cliffs and The Clouds he was only shifting from the first century...