Doughty Centennial

One hundred years ago last fortnight was born an English writer who modestly proposed to restore to strength and purity the English language, which he held had been debased by all English writers since Edmund Spenser. In his own monumental writing Charles Montagu Doughty succeeded. But grateful readers and writers of the English tongue did not crowd around to give Restorer Doughty thanks. Few of them have even read his most famed book, Travels in Arabia Deserta.

Said the London Times last fortnight in its Literary Supplement: "A book so real, austere, singular, rugged and wild as the world it depicts, as though hewn from the basalt rock, such monumental sculpture as Travels in Arabia Deserta cannot be forever ignored. Yet it needed a world war to awaken the English people to their possession of a treasure which may stand an age and beyond like Stonehenge. . . . He could make no compromise with the English he called 'Victorian and Costermongery.' Forty years ago he wrote to Doctor Hogarth: 'My main intention was not so much the setting forth of personal wanderings among a people of biblical interest as the ideal endeavour to continue the older tradition of Chaucer and Spenser, resisting to my power the decadence of the English language.'"

After the completion of Arabia Deserta, Doughty went on to write what he considered his real life work -- a series of epics (The Dawn in Britain, The Clouds, The Titans, Mansoul). In 1926 Doughty died.

In 1943 he is read scarcely more than in 1926. But his admirers, who have numbered most of the discriminating writers and readers since Doughty's day, have kept his patient fame alive, expect that some day he will be recognized as one of the great wielders of English words.

Sample Doughty prose (opening sentences of Arabia Deserta):

"A new voice hailed me of an old friend when, first returned from the Peninsula, I paced again in that long street of Damascus which is called Straight; and suddenly taking me wondering by the hand, 'Tell me' said he, 'since thou art here again in the peace and assurance of Ullah, and whilst we walk, as in the former years, toward the new blossoming orchards, full of the sweet spring, as the Garden of God, what moved thee, or how couldst thou take such journeys into the fanatic Arabia?' "

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