Reviews of Boofe
JUDICIAL VERSE On the Oxford Circuit, and Other Verses. By Sir Charles John Darling. With illustrations by Austin O. Spare. Smith, Elder & Co., London. Pp. 80. (5s. net.) MR. JUSTICE DARLING is chiefly known in this country from occasional refer ences in the English journals to his lively sense of humor and to his versatility and learning as one of his Majesty's judges. This little book shows him in the light of a poet of no ordinary accomplishments. For he evi dently is a writer of verse of better quality than that most commonly encountered in the literary mart of today. There seem to have been some lawyers who have dabbled in verse, among them Blackstone, Bacon, and Eldon, but the number of poets who have forsaken the law and turned to literature is so large that the law could doubtless successfully maintain, solely on proof of this desertion, an action against literature for the dissolution of any vinculum matrimonii between them. Poetry and the law seem to suffer from incompatibility of temper. Poetry is made up of the less nutrient and useful materials, the fat part of life, while the law, on the contrary, is a builder of the tissues of private rights and social justice, and may be called the lean of life. The lawyer is so concerned with the lean part of life that, like Jack Spratt, he can eat no fat. The poet, like Jack Spratt's wife, can eat no lean. And so, between them both, one would suppose an ideal relation of domestic harmony to exist. The reason, however, for the incom patibility is found not in the difference be tween tastes, but in defects of digestion. The lawyer finds difficulty in digesting poetry, and the poet in digesting law. Something is assuredly wrong, for all seemingly conflicting interests of life are reconcilable, and the duty of well-balanced humanity is that of reducing to a logical unity the baffling and irritating complexities of the world. Man is supposed to live not by meat alone, nor by vegetables alone, but is omnivorous, and he ought like wise in his mental habits to be able to com prehend and assimilate whatever comes along, and to derive equal benefit from every whole some variety of intellectual pabulum. If we
are not much mistaken, the tendency of the time is not so much toward the narrow kind of specialization as it is toward that general specialization which is synonymous with a real liberal education; and growing keenness of appreciation and sympathy will inevi tably, sooner or later, break down the barrier between the law and belles lettres, which are apt to have many impulses and thoughts in common. We are glad to see a judge writing good verse, which as regards technique does not tempt quibbling criticism, and which other wise considered derives added interest from a breadth of worldly experience not generally found among men of letters. We are glad that Mr. Justice Darling, through such a poem as "On the Oxford Circuit," is able to furnish his brethren of the bench and bar with so admirable an illustration of the truism that there is no reason why a lawyer should not aim at high literary distinction, and suc cessfully attain it, without endangering his prestige as a legal luminary. What, for example, could more saliently emphasize the indifference of our leading poets to the lawyer's and publicist's themes than this graceful wording of pregnant thoughts, by way of comment on the maxim, necessitas non habet leges f — Rare the complaint in that laborious age When little satisfied the frugal thief; Content to win a barely living wage, Nor to his parish turn for out-relief. Law now rules all; and these of right demand For every want reward, as legal due; Need holds by Law—because as statutes stand Le nfcessaire veut dire le superflu. With the criticism advanced by one re viewer (in London Law Times, July 24, 1909), that when Mr. Justice Darling "has shaken the dust of law entirely from his feet we find him coming nearest to that inner light, that constellation of language which is poetry," we find that we cannot agree. The dramatic and sensitive "On the Oxford Circuit" is facile princeps in this collection, and its elo quent beauty overshadows that of the admir able lines suggested by sport and fine art. Let us hope that the author of "Scintillae Juris," "Meditations in the Tea Room," and
