Page:The Yellow Book - 05.djvu/249
its well-known subtlety of satire, remarked that, 'Mr. Hartmann West's extraordinary vogue among the shop-girls of Bermondsey, and the junior clerks of Peckham, will probably be maintained by a volume which is even richer than its predecessors in shoddy sentiment and machine-made epigram.' The Hour has now discovered that Mr. West's work presented 'a remarkable combination of imaginative veracity and distinction of utterance,' and the Gazette mourns him as 'a writer whose death breaks a splendid promise, but whose life has left a splendid performance.' The style of these belated eulogists is their own; but their substance seems to have been borrowed from this journal, which in reviewing the 'pretentious shoddy' and 'machine-made' work, spoke of it as 'one of those books which make life better worth living by revealing its possibilities of beauty, which touch us by their truth not less than by their tenderness, in which the lovely art is all but lost in the lovely nature which the art reveals, which make us free of the companionship of a spirit finely touched to fine issues.' I am not apt at sudden post-mortem eloquence, and I have nothing to add to these words, written while Hartmann West was still alive, and able to appreciate the sympathy he was so ready to give."
"Well, I never could have believed," said a young member of the Shandy Club, "that Mackenzie wrote that review of poor West's Phantasies."
The current issue of Noon had just come in, and, though it was before luncheon, Major Forth, who had contracted bad habits in Africa and elsewhere, was refreshing himself with whisky and potash. He looked at the speaker, slowly emptied his tumbler, and replied, "I don't believe it now."