O Temporal O Mores!

MEMORIES AND OPINIONS -- "Q" --Cambridge University Press ($1.50).

The late Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (rhymes with hooch) was best known to Americans not as the author of nearly 60 volumes of novels, essays and poetry, but as editor of The Oxford Book of English Verse, one of the world's best-selling anthologies (500,000 copies since 1900). To Victorian contemporaries Sir Arthur was the pseudonymous "Q," whose tales of adventure (The Splendid Spur, I Saw Three Ships) made him one of Britain's most popular storytellers at the turn of the century. To Cambridge students, from 1912 until his death last year, he was the sharp-faced, crusty Professor of English who invariably lectured in immaculate frock coat and striped trousers.

To the people of Cornwall, Q was not only a favorite regional novelist, but also local magistrate, school councilor, alder man, freeman of three Cornish towns onetime mayor of Fowey (rhymes with joy), his birthplace and home. When Q said of Samuel Johnson: "He never saw literature but as a part of life," he was stating his own, classically inspired ideal of the author as citizen.

" 'Q,' " said the London Times appreciatively, "turned his back on London, its tea parties, its logrolling, its cliques . . .

to look at the world from his Cornish window." Q put what he saw into stately poems, rolling ballads, romances, respect ful essays on Shakespeare and the ancients. Occasionally he published lectures which he felt were colored by a "colloquial style" -- though one critic complained that the nearest thing in them to a colloquialism was "the repeated intrusion of the word 'Gentlemen.'" As dean of British belles-lettres, Q was not popular with the younger poets, whom he carefully omitted from the revised Oxford Book of 1940 and attacked as dispirited pessimists ("What are they for he cried, "if they cannot hearten the crew with auspices of day light?").

Q had finished only five chapters of his autobiography when he died. But they are the most important chapters of his life, because they show clearly the shaping of the citizen-classicist through childhood and youth (1863-86). The stately prose, and the way of life it describes, may seem to 1945 readers as strange and faraway as Horace--which is just what makes Memories and Opinions worth reading.

Latin & Cock Feathers. Son of a Cornish doctor, grandson of famed Cornish Ichthyologist Jonathan Couch (History of the Fishes of the British Islands), Q received his first Latin at the age of seven ("I went home as one baptized into a cult"), in the Misses Harriet and Jemina Lutman's seminary, or "dame school." These "excellent ladies" also taught him Euclid and "globes," introduced him to Reading without Tears and Little Arthur's History of England. He learned by heart the questions & answers in the 48th edition of The Child's Guide to Knowledge, by a Lady ("Question: What bird furnishes military plumes? Answer: That beautiful bird, the common cock of our farmyards: the long streamer feathers of his neck and back, and the stiffer ones of his tail, are formed by industrious females into a variety of elegant shapes, according to regimental regulations").

"A small prig I must have been in those days," muses Q, "conscious of some sublime but undefined mission." When the choir of ancient St. Petroc's Church chanted: "And thou, Child, shall be called the prophet of the highest," Q would blush and drop his eyes. He devoured Shakespeare, Jules Verne, Sir Thomas Browne, Shelley, boy's annuals.

The Cardinal's Bathtub. At 14 he entered Clifton College, which was noted for its "Roman stoicism and service suffused with Christianity." Though "it left too little room for the individual to develop ... there could hardly have been a cleaner school in England." New Boy Q decorated his room with knickknacks. Next day, the Housemaster pinned a notice on the school board: "The House is reminded that Corinthian embellishments consort ill with its tradition of Doric austerity."

Oxford was the next stop. Q lived in Cardinal Newman's old rooms, bathed in His Eminence's old tin bath. He paid the customary Sunday calls on fellow undergraduates in morning dress and top hat. He watched Poet Matthew Arnold (in lavender kid gloves) "slipping through the Balliol gateway" on visits to Platonist Benjamin Jowett (who seemed to be always "hurrying, like Puck, to 'hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear'"). He saw Lewis Carroll "flitting, flitting like a shy bird into some recess of Christ Church." He sat at the feet of Esthete Walter Pater, whose mustaches hung "pendulous in the shadow." He became stroke of the Trinity boat. During vacations he read the classics, climbed the mountains of Cumberland and relished "the monotony of sweet mountain mutton and 'Mr. Pendlebury's Pudding' (known to us as 'Pendlebags'), a delicious compound of farm milk, tapioca and raisins."

"What was the feeling in the provincial towns when Caesar had crossed the Rubicon?" asked the examiner when Q came up for his viva. "Well, at first they hardly knew which way to turn," said Q hopefully. "That will do, Sir. Good morning," said the examiner. Q failed to get a "first" (equivalent to summa cum laude) but was given an Oxford lectureship, with Virgil and Aristophanes as his subjects ("I tried to communicate my delight in them rather than to discuss niceties of textual criticism").

The Golden World. Soon Q "set out a quire of virgin folio paper" and, under the influence of Robert Louis Stevenson, wrote his first adventure story (Dead Man's Rock). He also "asked the lady of my affection to be my wife. We had halted . . . beside a low wall coped by a quantity of wild thyme, on a tuft of which I rested a hand as I spoke and waited for her answer. To this day, halting before a tuft of the plant I press it and it recalls that answer in its fragrance." In "the general security of life . . . 'we fleeted the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world': with tennis and cricket ... dances . . . supper picnics beside the river, return on the ebb with laughter [and] soft choruses muted to a twilight mood and to the rhythm of oars that dipped into pools of phosphorescence [with the] young and fair moving in bevies and clusters on a green lawn in frocks of sprigged muslin . . . wide floral hats . . . sunshades of all bright colors . . . scarves that lift or float in a light breeze as they meet, part, draw together again. . . ."

This was as far as 80-year-old Q got in his autobiography. Strolling on the highway in the harsh wartime world of 1944, he was struck down by a jeep.

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