point. Asked about a rival poet, William Watson, who like himself was an unsuccessful contender for the Poet Laureateship, Swinburne said contemptuously: ‘He made an assault on a Princess’s horse in order to qualify for the laureateship.’
He spoke of Meredith, saying: ‘I cannot read Meredith. I can’t stand the literary flowers which disfigure his style on every page. How affected he is, and what a snob. There is too much gentility in Meredith for a novelist or for any man.’ He asserted that he himself was a Jacobite: ‘All my ancestors were Jacobites. I pride myself that they were in all the rebellions. I have carried on the torch, yes, and I have made converts.’
Rolfe was a highly disciplined and prolific journalist who imposed strict regulation on his three children – Marie was seven years older than Anne, John two years younger. He was a self-consciously intellectualfigure, which helps to explain his weighty, indeed often leaden, prose style. Yet his work won contemporary respect. His first book, Modernism and Romance , was published in 1908, when he was twenty-eight, and was widely and generously reviewed. Two years later, he produced a plodding account of a summer canoe trip, entitled An Englishman in Ireland . ‘The chill mist and the distressing rain-clouds which had covered England for half the summer were gone,’ he wrote in a characteristic passage. ‘There was a transparency in the air by which every visible object gained a fine edge, and a kind of vast decorativeness in the delicately-tinted scene as if Nature had bathed and come forth glittering.’
How Rolfe persuaded Dent to publish this atrocity (for the narrative gets worse) seems mysterious to a modern reader, but the book attracted surprising enthusiasm from critics at the time. The young author became friendly with Norman Douglas, greatest travel writer of his generation. In 1912 Rolfe visited America, contributing accounts to the Morning Leader of Theodore Roosevelt’s unsuccessful presidential re-election campaign. Most of the trip, however, was devoted to studying US newspapers for his book published the following year, The Influence of the Press . This was ponderous in tone, often absurd in substance. Almost all poor Rolfe’s judgements reflected a monumental naïveté. He convinced himself, for instance, that Britain’s newspaper proprietors had suddenly discovered God, and seen the error of their past ways:
The controllers of the popular Press have learnt the market-value of decency. They have discovered that accurate information pays; that an irresponsibly sensational manner no longer makes a sensation; that news must be news; that the largest newspaper audience in the world is not devoid of common-sense. This is the amazing discovery which has recently been dawning upon the world; and it has emanated, not from ‘respectable’ England, but from the Press which had once been called the ‘Yellow’ Press…Assuredly I hold no brief for the Daily Mail , but it seems to me a fact of extraordinary significance that the most popular organ in England should be adopting a policy of decency.
In the First World War, Rolfe won a Military Cross as a captain in the Royal Artillery, and published several articles about the work of the heavy guns. Norman Douglas wrote to him from his sanctuary on Capri, appropriately named Casa Solitaria, in July 1916: ‘Hope you are all right? It is very pleasant here – a great calm. Dim rumours of war going on somewhere far away. No foreigners.’ Rolfe himself, by contrast, spent almost two years on the Western Front. One of his daughter Anne’s earliest memories was of being awakened in the small hours at the family’s holiday lodgings in the little village of Burghfield Common, near Reading, by her father’s return on leave from France. Many rural communities did their best to ignore that war, and cared astonishingly little for those who were fighting it. The countryside and its people, in
He spoke of Meredith, saying: ‘I cannot read Meredith. I can’t stand the literary flowers which disfigure his style on every page. How affected he is, and what a snob. There is too much gentility in Meredith for a novelist or for any man.’ He asserted that he himself was a Jacobite: ‘All my ancestors were Jacobites. I pride myself that they were in all the rebellions. I have carried on the torch, yes, and I have made converts.’
Rolfe was a highly disciplined and prolific journalist who imposed strict regulation on his three children – Marie was seven years older than Anne, John two years younger. He was a self-consciously intellectualfigure, which helps to explain his weighty, indeed often leaden, prose style. Yet his work won contemporary respect. His first book, Modernism and Romance , was published in 1908, when he was twenty-eight, and was widely and generously reviewed. Two years later, he produced a plodding account of a summer canoe trip, entitled An Englishman in Ireland . ‘The chill mist and the distressing rain-clouds which had covered England for half the summer were gone,’ he wrote in a characteristic passage. ‘There was a transparency in the air by which every visible object gained a fine edge, and a kind of vast decorativeness in the delicately-tinted scene as if Nature had bathed and come forth glittering.’
How Rolfe persuaded Dent to publish this atrocity (for the narrative gets worse) seems mysterious to a modern reader, but the book attracted surprising enthusiasm from critics at the time. The young author became friendly with Norman Douglas, greatest travel writer of his generation. In 1912 Rolfe visited America, contributing accounts to the Morning Leader of Theodore Roosevelt’s unsuccessful presidential re-election campaign. Most of the trip, however, was devoted to studying US newspapers for his book published the following year, The Influence of the Press . This was ponderous in tone, often absurd in substance. Almost all poor Rolfe’s judgements reflected a monumental naïveté. He convinced himself, for instance, that Britain’s newspaper proprietors had suddenly discovered God, and seen the error of their past ways:
The controllers of the popular Press have learnt the market-value of decency. They have discovered that accurate information pays; that an irresponsibly sensational manner no longer makes a sensation; that news must be news; that the largest newspaper audience in the world is not devoid of common-sense. This is the amazing discovery which has recently been dawning upon the world; and it has emanated, not from ‘respectable’ England, but from the Press which had once been called the ‘Yellow’ Press…Assuredly I hold no brief for the Daily Mail , but it seems to me a fact of extraordinary significance that the most popular organ in England should be adopting a policy of decency.
In the First World War, Rolfe won a Military Cross as a captain in the Royal Artillery, and published several articles about the work of the heavy guns. Norman Douglas wrote to him from his sanctuary on Capri, appropriately named Casa Solitaria, in July 1916: ‘Hope you are all right? It is very pleasant here – a great calm. Dim rumours of war going on somewhere far away. No foreigners.’ Rolfe himself, by contrast, spent almost two years on the Western Front. One of his daughter Anne’s earliest memories was of being awakened in the small hours at the family’s holiday lodgings in the little village of Burghfield Common, near Reading, by her father’s return on leave from France. Many rural communities did their best to ignore that war, and cared astonishingly little for those who were fighting it. The countryside and its people, in
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