George Herbert Clarke: An Obuituary

George Herbert Clarke

M.A., D.Litt, LL.D, D.C.L., F.R.S.C., F.R.S.L.

Emeritus Professor of English Language & Literature

Editor of Queen’s Quarterly 1943-53

In January, when the winter number of Queen’s Quarterly was already in the press, Professor George Herbert Clarke suffered a heart attack and was obliged to resign from the editorship which he had held since 1943.  The Editorial Board regret to announce, in the first number to be issued since his resignation, that Professor Clarke died in Friday 27 March.

Primarily a poet and scholar, he brought a varied experience to the Queen’s Quarterly; a journalist, at different times he had been war correspondent, and editor of the Sewanee Review, and had also edited Bacon, Shelley, Browning, and Sidney Lanier, as well as two volumes of war poems.  His range of interests embraced social and political matters as well as literary; but it was in his reading of literature that the sensitiveness of his critical judgement was most clearly to be seen.  He had a profound respect for persons; this showed itself equally in his generous and open-minded encouragement of other people’s work and in the shy charm of his manner in greeting strangers – for all strangers, it seems, were interesting to him.  Regular readers will be familiar with his acute, sympathetic, but undogmatic criticism of scholarly works on Shakespeare and the Nineteenth Century; they will also have noticed with what accurate insight he could estimate those kinds of contemporary poetry which he himself did not write.

In all things incorrigibly single-minded, he considered that an editor’s task did not end with distributing books for review and with collecting material for publication.  He restrained his contributors equally from exploiting the rarefied atmosphere of minute scholarship and from descending to the level of popular journalism.  Concentrating his energies upon the literary functions of an editor, he sought to unify each number to the distinctive character he had in mind for the Quarterly.  The numbers he edited offer a vivid record of his capacity for appreciation, and of the literary purpose he had long ago tested and whetted by experience and in conversation with such men as Masefield, Hardy, and Ford Madox Ford.  His love of the English language made him an exacting purist in matters of style; near enough was not good enough for him.  Contributors will recall with what gracious but firm tact he enjoined a discipline of clear unpretentious writing.  Those who knew him personally will also remember his deliberate style of speaking, circuitous, full of surprises, courtly but with a certain reticent edge to it, gravely amusing but never bitter, full of wide-eyed and sorrowful feeling for life.  He was a reserved man but he had a great gift of sympathy and friendship.