March 28, 19 18 
Land & Water 
19 
Life and Letters ^jJ.C^Souire 
A Contemplative Mind 
CAPTAIN GERALD WARRE CORNISH, whose 
volume Beneath the Surface has just been pub- 
lished by W. Grant Richards (6s. net), was 
killed in France on September i6th, 1916. He 
was not a professional author ; his writings, 
spread over twelve years, consisted of a few "sketches" and 
stories. He desired them to be collected and published ; 
but, says Mr. Desmond MacCarthy, in his delicate little 
introduction, "without any memoir or account of himself." 
The reader who has finished the book will understand this 
wish : the author was not principally interested in himself. 
If he had ambition, it would not be ambition for fame, but 
ambition to do well the thing he was trying to do. He was 
far too concerned— one might almost use the hard-driven 
word obsessed — with the eternal problems of man and the 
Universe to attach much importance to the dates and daily 
actions of his own life ; and if, as a meditative man must, 
he took an interest in his own personality, it would not be 
because it was his own but because it was the nearest and" 
most observable of many millions, all equally mysterious 
and valuable. Where the first personal pronoun occurs in 
this book it is used merely as a convenience. 
He was, that is, what is called an objective writer ; he had 
the seeing eye and "the visiting mind." The term "objec- 
tive," however, is most frequently applied to men who are 
largely preoccupied, in a hard scientific way, with outward 
appearances. From these he was poles apart. -Spirit, not 
matter, was the "object" of his contemplation; not the 
surface, but what lies "beneath." He was far from blind 
to material beauty, and in "A Visit" he paints a mellow and 
charming scene for its own sake. But he cannot rest on the 
surface long. He is continually, like the bookbinder in 
The Poet and the Atheist, seeing visions, terrible or exquisite, 
through fissures in the face of things. Minor truths occupied 
bim less than the greatest truth of all ; " and, being human, 
all he could do with that was to grope after it. 
The most remarkable and the longest of his stories faces 
this directly. If any novelist has ever made so ambitious 
£in attempt, I can only say that I do not know him. The 
attempt to tell how the explorer Fin Lund travels up the 
Euphrates, sailing simultaneously backwards up the stream 
of creation, to penetrate, actually in the body, to the source 
from which life flows over the earth, is not a complete success : 
it could not be. But it is an astonishing failure ; and had 
the author contented himself with recording phenomena, and 
made fewer attempts at disclosing a metaphysical hypothesis 
which could not be fully comprehended either by him or by 
us, it would have been more remarkable still. As it stands, 
he has done far more than could have been expected : 
created, convincingly and without cheap dodges, a man of 
more than normal powers, and infected us with his own 
vision, however fragmentary, of the process of creation. 
This is certainly the part of the book which gives one the 
greatest respect for his possibilities as a writer ; but there is 
not one of the stories which a person of reflective habit 
would not read more than once and more than twice. 
equally real, are seen from the same point of view, and with 
equal sympathy and comprehension ; and . the details of 
their backgrounds are no more fully suggested in one case 
than in the other. Most writers, when "reconstructing" 
ancient history, tend to concentrate too much on the trap- 
pings. They think that if only they produce enough exotic 
names, beasts, accoutrements, jewels, fabrics, designs in 
wood and stone, they will produce the illusion of another 
civilisation. It would clearly have bored Gerald Cornish 
to go to museums and archa;ological books to accumulate 
such masses of material detail as, for instance, Flaubert did 
when he was writing Salammho. "Now," he writes, 
the Greeks were armed. Their .six-deep line was a mass of 
armour, stretching for half a mile and more inland from the 
river, and shining with the dull blue glow of well-oiled, well- 
tended steel. The rows of round-casqued, plumeless helms 
pulled down over the faces, with two eyeholes in each vizor, 
presented a terrifying and savage aspect. It seemed as if some 
common wave of national hatred, sharper and deeper than aH 
ordinary feelings, had risen to the surface, and was holding 
them motionless and set like a steel-toothed trap, ready to snap 
and spring. 
He sees it clearly ; he makes us see it clearly ; he does not 
destroy his effect by labouring the shapes of greaves or the 
names of the animals from whose hides straps were made, 
or the order in which the countless tribes of Asia were lined. 
He gives enough for the reader's imagination to catch hold 
of ; and succeeds in conveying a complete picture, material 
and mental, whilst he is doing the thing he does always : 
communicating his awe and wonder before the endless stream 
of guttering life and the deep mysteries below it. 
****** 
It was natural that so sincere and so unselfconscious a 
man should write both simply and originally. One may be 
fond of the pomp of magniloquence, the careful music of the 
poet, the tumultuous music of the inspired enthusiast, without 
wishing Gerald Cornish's writing anything else than it was : 
straightforward prose which says precisely what he wants it 
to say without ever reminding one that there is a writer 
behind it, crossing out weak words in favour of strong ones, 
concocting verbal melodies, seeing to it that his paragraphs 
begin and end effectively, laying himself out to make the 
reader exclaim: "This man knows how to do it." As his 
writing is, so is his approach and his "forrn." Me at least 
he never reminds of any other writer. A man putting on 
paper the vacuity of that hunting M.P. and the way in 
which he spent his day might well have succumbed to the 
influence of Mr. Galsworthy, who has frequently done that 
sort of thing. Had he so succumbed, he would have con- 
tracted Mr. Galsworthy's over-emphasis of the trivial and 
sordid aspects of his subject, and he would have lost that 
sympathy which Cornish felt for the man he was analysing 
— analysing as a fellow-creature, not as an offensive insect. 
The Anabasis might have been done like Flaubert ; Beneath 
the Surface invited treatment in the manner of Mr. Wells, or 
even in that of Henry James. Cornish escapes all these 
beckoning influences ; he writes as though nobody had 
written before. And for the reason of it we return whence 
we started: he was- interested in his subject matter; and 
in his krt only secondarily as an instrument for dealing 
with it. It is difficult not to speculate about what a man 
with his intellect and his temper might have gone on to do 
had he survived. 
It is a slight book. And it is not, one may frankly say, 
a book for everybody. It is dramatic ; but its drama is 
subtle. It has incident ; but the incidents and adventures 
are not of the gross theatrical kind ; and though a steady 
spiritual ardour, which deserves the name of passion, is 
throughout present, the fires that commonly appropriate 
that name are not. Many, phases of life and action are 
seen and recorded : there are battles, travels, fox-hunts, 
scenes in poor cottages and ships, recreations of Persia, 
Babylon, and Rome. Hosts of men fight and kill on the 
plains of Mesopotamia ; work or strike under the smoke of 
English industrial districts. But there is strange absence 
of noise. All these things are seen, as it were, through a 
veil of meditation, which softens, deadens, gives every age 
and spectacle a common tone, a certain uniformity, something 
of the quality of dream. As he shows them, his cottagers and 
his hunting M.P. in Lancashire are no nearer, and no farther, 
no more and no less "vividly" imagined in their surroundings 
than Horace on his sabine farm and Cyrus on Xenophon 
during the campaign against Artaxerxes. The people are 
The main incidents of the French Revolution have pro- 
vided material for many novelists, and what may be termed 
the subsidiary incidents have also been often dealt with. 
In Sir Isumbras at the Ford, by D. K. Broster (John 
Murray, 6s.) the rising in La Vendee and the expedition from 
Southampton in 1795 to aid the Royalist cause in France 
provide the framework of a good story, and one that deals 
with a phase of the revolutionary activity which is, so far as the 
novelist is concerned, very nearly virgin soil. Fortune de la 
Vireville, the central character of the story, is a fitting figure 
for a romance of this kind, and the author has made a stirring 
narrative of his adventures — and his quixotry. Vireville, 
sentenced to be shot, and waiting his execution, gives scope 
for a fine piece of descriptive work ; again, he and Raymonde, 
the heroine, alone in the fog together, enact a scene shown 
with real power — these as instances out of many, for the 
author writes in such a way as to make his characters alive. 
The sense of the period is evident throughout the book, 
though, in spite of fidelity to historical fact, this is not so much 
a story of a period as of men and women brayely facing life. 
