Produced by Lionel Sear
FROM A CORNISH WINDOW.
By
ARTHUR THOMAS QUILLER-COUCH.
DEDICATION.
MY DEAR WILLIAM ARCHER,
Severe and ruthlessly honest man that you are, you will find that the
levities and the gravities of this book do not accord, and will say so.
I plead only that they were written at intervals, and in part for
recreation, during years in which their author has striven to maintain a
cheerful mind while a popular philosophy which he believed to be cheap
took possession of men and translated itself into politics which he knew
to be nasty. I may summarise it, in its own jargon, as the philosophy of
the Superman, and succinctly describe it as an attempt to stretch a part
of the Darwinian hypothesis and make it cover the whole of man's life and
conduct. I need not remind you how fatally its doctrine has flattered, in
our time and in our country, the worst instincts of the half-educated:
but let us remove it from all spheres in which we are interested and
contemplate it as expounded by an American Insurance 'Lobbyist,' a few days
ago, before the Armstrong Committee:--
"The Insurance world to-day is the greatest financial proposition in
the United States; and, _as great affairs always do, it commands a
higher law._"
I have read precisely the same doctrine in a University Sermon preached by
an Archbishop; but there its point was confused by pietistic rhetoric:
the point being that in life, which is a struggle, success has in itself
something divine, by virtue of which it can be to itself a law of right
and wrong; and (inferentially) that a man is relieved of the noble
obligation to command himself so soon and in so far as he is rich enough
or strong enough to command other people.
But why (you will ask) do I drag this doctrine into a dedication?
Because, my dear Archer, I have fought against it for close upon seventeen
years; because seventeen years is no small slice of a man's life--rather,
so long a time that it has taught me to prize my bruises and prefer that,
if anybody hereafter care to know me, he shall know me as one whose spirit
took its cheer in intervals of a fight against detestable things; that--
let him rank me in talent never so low beside my contemporaries who
preached this doctrine--he shall at least have no excuse but to acquit me
of being one with them in mind or purpose; and lastly, because in these
times few things have brought me such comfort (stern comfort!) as I have
derived from your criticism, so hospitable to ideas, so inflexible in
judging right from wrong. As I have lived lonelier it has been better for
me, and a solace beyond your guessing, to have been reminded that
criticism still lives amongst us and has a Roman spirit.
A. T. QUILLER-COUCH
The Haven,
FOWEY,
April 3rd, 1906.
PREFACE.
My old friend and publisher, Mr. Arrowsmith, maintains that the time has
come for a cheap edition of this book. Should the public endorse that
opinion, he will probably go about pretending that his head is as good as
his heart.
_From a Cornish Window_ first appeared between cloth covers some six or
seven years ago. I see that its Dedication bears the date, April 3rd,
1906. But parts of it were written years before in the old _Pall Mall
Magazine_, under the editorship of Lord Frederic Hamilton (who invented
its title for me), and a few fragments date back almost to undergraduate
days. The book, in short, is desultory to the last degree, and discourses
in varying moods on a variety of topics. Yet, turning the pages again,
I find them curiously and somewhat alarmingly consistent--consistent not
only in themselves, but with their surviving author as he sits here
to-day, using the same pen-holder which he bought for twopence in 1886,
and gazing out of the same window, soon to be exchanged for another with a
view more academic: and 'alarmingly consistent' because (as Emerson has
very justly observed) a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little
minds. To persevere in one fixed outlook upon life may be evidence of
arrested capacity to grow, while on the other hand mere flightiness
is a sure sign that the mind has not even arrived at man's estate.
The best plan seems to be to care not a farthing for consistency or
inconsistency, but to keep the eye turned outwards, and to keep it fresh
by taking on new interests (however trivial), and reading new books, but
still comparing them with the old. I think we ought to be especially
careful to read new poetry as we get on in life, if only as a discipline--
as men with increasing waists practise calisthenics--because poetry is
always trying to reach beyond the phenomena of life, and because these are
all the while, if imperceptibly, narrowing us within the round of daily
habit. As the author of _Ionica_ put it (I quote from memory)--
Our feelings lose poetic flow
Soon after thirty years or so:
Professionising modern men
Thenceforth admire what pleased them then.
But on the whole I do not regret this consistency, believing that the
years 1896-1906 laid an almost holy constraint on the few who believed
neither in Sham-Imperialism nor in the Superman, to stand together,
to be stubborn, to refuse as doggedly as possible to bow the knee to these
idols, to miss no opportunity of drawing attention to their feet of clay.
I seem to perceive that the day of the Superman is drawing to its close.
He is a recurring nuisance, like the influenza, and no doubt will afflict
mankind again in due season. But our generation has enjoyed a peculiarly
poisonous variety of him. In his Renaissance guise, whether projected
upon actual history, as in the person of Richard III, or strutting
sublimated through Marlowe's blank verse, he spared at any rate to
sentimentalise his brutality. Our forefathers summed him up in the
byword that an Italianate Englishman was a devil incarnate; but he _had_
the grace of being Italianate. It is from the Germanised avatar--the
Bismarck of the 'Ems telegram,' with his sentimentalising historians and
philosophers--that Europe would seem to be recovering to-day. Well, I
believe that the Christian virtues, the lovable and honourable code of
ancient gentlemen, may always be trusted to win in the long run, and
extrude the impostor. But while his vogue lasts, it may be of service to
keep reminding men that to falsify another man's dispatch is essentially a
stupider action than to tilt at windmills: and that is the main moral of
my book.
Arthur Quiller-Couch.
December 2nd, 1912.
JANUARY.
Should any reader be puzzled by the title of this discursive volume, the
following verses may provide him with an explanation. They were written
some time ago for a lady who had requested, required, requisitioned
(I forget the precise shade of the imperative) something for her album.
"We are in the last ages of the world," wrote Charles Lamb to Barry
Cornwall, "when St. Paul prophesied that women should be 'headstrong,
lovers of their own will, having albums.--'"
BEATUS POSSIDENS.
I can't afford a mile of sward,
Parterres and peacocks gay;
For velvet lawns and marble fauns
Mere authors cannot pay.
And so I went and pitched my tent
Above a harbour fair,
Where vessels picturesquely rigg'd
Obligingly repair.
The harbour is not mine at all:
I make it so--what odds?
And gulls unwitting on my wall
Serve me for garden-gods.
By ships that ride below kaleid-
oscopically changed,
Unto my mind each day I find
My garden rearranged.
These, madam, are my daffodils,
My pinks, my hollyhocks,
My herds upon a hundred hills,
My phloxes and my flocks.
And when some day you deign to pay
The call that's overdue,
I'll wave a landlord's easy hand
And say, "Admire _my_ view!"
Now I do not deny that a part of the content expressed in these lines may
come of resignation. In some moods, were I to indulge them, it were
pleasant to fancy myself owner of a vast estate, champaign and woodland;
able to ride from sea to sea without stepping off my own acres, with
villeins and bondmen, privileges of sak and soke, infangthef,
outfangthef, rents, tolls, dues, royalties, and a private gallows for
autograph-hunters. These things, however, did not come to me by
inheritance, and for a number of sufficient reasons I have not amassed
them. As for those other ambitions which fill the dreams of every healthy
boy, a number of them had become of faint importance even before a
breakdown of health seemed definitely to forbid their attainment.
Here at home, far from London, with restored strength, I find myself less
concerned with them than are my friends and neighbours, yet more keenly
interested than ever in life and letters, art and politics--all that men
and women are saying and doing. Only the centre of gravity has shifted,
so to speak.
I dare say, then, that resignation may have some share in this content;
but if so 'tis an unconscious and happy one. A man who has been writing
novels for a good part of his life should at least be able to sympathise
with various kinds of men; and, for an example or two, I can understand--
1. Why Alexander cried (if he ever did) because he had no second
world to conquer.
2. Why Shakespeare, as an Englishman, wanted a coat of arms and
a respectable estate in his own native country town.
3. What and how deep are the feelings beneath that _cri du
coeur_ of Mr. Wilfrid Blunt's 'Old Squire:'--
"I like the hunting of the hare
Better than that of the fox;
I like the joyous morning air,
And the crowing of the cocks.
"I covet not a wider range
Than these dear manors give;
I take my pleasures without change,
And as I lived I live.
"Nor has the world a better thing,
Though one should search it round,
Than thus to live one's own sole king
Upon one's own sole ground.
"I like the hunting of the hare;
It brings me day by day
The memory of old days as fair,
With dead men past away.
"To these as homeward still I ply,
And pass the churchyard gate,
Where all are laid as I must lie,
I stop and raise my hat.
"I like the hunting of the hare:
New sports I hold in scorn.
I like to be as my fathers were
In the days ere I was born."
4. What--to start another hare--were Goldsmith's feelings when he
wrote--
"And as a hare whom hounds and horns pursue
Pants to the place from whence at first she flew,
I still had hopes, my long vexations past,
Here to return--and die at home at last."
5. With what heart Don Quixote rode forth to tilt at sheep and
windmills, and again with what heart in that saddest of all
last chapters he bade his friends look not for this year's
birds in last year's nests.
6. Why the young man went away sadly, because he had great
possessions and could not see his way to bestowing them all
on the poor; why, on the contrary, St. Paulinus of Nola and
St. Francis of Assisi joyfully renounced their wealth; what
Prudhon meant by saying that 'property is theft'; and what a
poor Welsh clergyman of the seventeenth century by
proclaiming in verse and prose that he was heir of all the
world, and properties, hedges, boundaries, landmarks meant
nothing to him, since all was his that his soul enjoyed; yes,
and even what inspired him to pen this golden sentence--
"_You will never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself
floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens
and crowned with the stars._"
My window, then, looks out from a small library upon a small harbour
frequented by ships of all nations--British, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian,
Russian, French, German, Italian, with now and then an American or a
Greek--and upon a shore which I love because it is my native country. Of
all views I reckon that of a harbour the most fascinating and the most
easeful, for it combines perpetual change with perpetual repose. It
amuses like a panorama and soothes like an opiate, and when you have
realised this you will understand why so many thousands of men around this
island appear to spend all their time in watching tidal water. Lest you
should suspect me of taking a merely dilettante interest in the view, I
must add that I am a Harbour Commissioner.
As for the house, it is a plain one; indeed, very like the house a child
draws on a slate, and therefore pleasing even externally to me, who prefer
the classical to any Gothic style of architecture. Why so many strangers
mistake it with its modest dimensions for a hotel, I cannot tell you.
I found one in the pantry the other day searching for a brandy-and-soda;
another rang the dining-room bell and dumbfoundered the maid by asking
what we had for lunch; and a third (a lady) cried when I broke to her that
I had no sitting-room to let. We make it a rule to send out a chair
whenever some unknown invader walks into the garden and prepares to make a
water-colour sketch of the view.
There are some, too, whose behaviour cannot be reconciled with the
hallucination of a hotel, and they must take the house for a public
institution of some kind, though of what kind I cannot guess.
There was an extremely bashful youth, for instance, who roamed the garden
for a while on the day after the late Duke of Cambridge's funeral, and,
suddenly dashing in by the back door, wanted to know why our flag was not
at half-mast. There was also a lady who called on the excuse that she had
made a life-study of the Brontes, and after opining (in a guarded manner)
that they came, originally, from somewhere in Yorkshire, desired to be
informed how many servants we kept. I have sometimes thought of
rechristening our house The Hotel of the Four Seasons, and thereby
releasing its true name (The Haven) to a friend who covets it for his own.
On the whole, however, these visitors disturb the house and the view from
my window very little. The upper halves of them, as they pass up and down
the road, appear above my garden wall much as the shadows that passed in
Plato's cave. They come, enjoy their holiday, and go, leaving the window
intent upon the harbour, its own folk and its own business.
And now for the book, which is really not a book at all, but a chapter of
one.
Last autumn I returned from a holiday to find that the publishing season
had begun. This was announced by a stack of new books, review copies and
presentation copies, awaiting me on my window-seat. I regarded it sourly.
A holiday is the most unsettling thing in the world. At the end of it I
regain the well-worn chair with a sigh of pleasure and reach for the
familiar tobacco-jar, wondering how I could have been fool enough to leave
them; yet somehow this lively sense of repurchased habit does not go far
enough and compel me to work. Being at home is a game, and so good a game
that I play at it merely, rearranging my shelves and, under pretence of
dealing with arrears of correspondence, skimming the literary papers and
book-catalogues found amid the pile of letters.
It happened that the first postal-wrapper to be broken enclosed a copy of
_The Academy_, and _The Academy_ opened with this sentence: "Since our
last issue we have received one hundred and nineteen new books and
reprints." I looked across to the pile on my window-seat and felt it to
be insignificant, though it interfered with my view of the English
Channel. One hundred and nineteen books in a single week! Yet who was I
to exclaim at their number?--I, who (it appeared) had contributed one of
them? With that I remembered something which had happened just before my
holiday, and began to reflect on it, for the first time seriously.
A publisher had asked me for a complete list of my published works, to
print it on the fly-leaf of another of them. I sat down with the best
intention and compiled it for him, and, in honest oblivion, omitted a
couple--of books, mind you--not of pamphlets, reviews, stray articles,
short stories, or any such trifles, but of books solemnly written for this
and future ages, solemnly printed, bound, and put into circulation at the
shops and libraries. (Here, for the due impressiveness of the tale, it
becomes necessary to tell you that their author is an indolent and painful
writer, slow at the best of times.)
Well, the discovery that I had forgotten two of my own books at first
amused and then set me thinking. "Here you are," said I to myself,
"a writer of sorts; and it's no use to pretend that you don't wish to be
remembered for a while after you are dead and done with."
"Quite right," the other part of me assented cheerfully.
"Well, then," urged the inquisitor, "this is a bad look-out. If you had
been born a Dumas--I am speaking of fecundity, if you please, and of
nothing else--if you had been born a Dumas, and could rattle off a romance
in a fortnight, you might be excused for not keeping tally of your
productions. Pitiful, dilatory worker that you are, if _you_ cannot
remember them, how can you expect the world (good Heavens!) to take the
trouble?"
"I suppose it won't," responded the other part of me, somewhat dashed;
then, picking up its spirits again, "But, anyhow, I shall know where to
lay the blame."
"On yourself?"
"Most assuredly not."
"Where, then?"
"Why, on the publishers."
"Ah, of course!" (This with fine irony.)
"Yes, on the publishers. Most authors do this during life, and now I
begin to see that all authors do it sooner or later. For my part, I shall
defer it to the future state."
"Why?"
"Obviously because there will be no publishers thereabouts to contradict
me."
"And of what will you accuse them?"
"That they never issued my work in the form it deserved."
"I see. Poor fellow! You have the 'Edinburgh' Stevenson or something of
that sort on your mind, and are filled with nasty envy."
Upon this the other part of me fairly lost its temper.
"The 'Edinburgh' Stevenson! The 'Edinburgh' Ste--, and you have known me
all these years! The 'Edinburgh' Stevenson is a mighty handsome edition
of a mighty fine writer, but I have no more desire to promenade the ages
in that costume than to jump the moon. No, I am not going to break any
more of the furniture. I am handing you this chair that you may seat
yourself and listen . . . Now! The book which I shall accuse my
publishers of not having produced will be in one volume--"
"Come, come. Modesty is all very well, but don't overdo it."
"--folio."
"Oh!"
"--Of three thousand odd pages, printed (blunt type) in double columns,
and here and there in triple."
"O--oh!"
"--with marginalia by other hands, and footnotes running sometimes to
twenty thousand words, and, including above six thousand quotations from
the best poets--every one, in short, which has given me pleasure of a
certain quality, whether gentle or acute, at one time or another in my
life."
"!!!"
"--The whole profusely, not to say extravagantly, adorned with woodcuts in
the text, not to mention fifty or sixty full-page illustrations in
copper."
"By eminent artists?"
"Some of them by eminent artists, for the reason only that I number such
among my friends; the rest by amateurs and members of my household who
would help, out of mere affection, in raising this monument."
"They would do it execrably."
"I dare say; but that would not matter in the least. The book should be
bound in leather and provided with serviceable clasps, as well as with a
couple of inner pockets for maps and charts. The maps should contain
plenty of sea, with monsters rising from it--leviathans and sea-serpents--
as they do in Speed's map of Cornwall which hangs in the hall."
"Your book will need a window-seat to hold it."
"Ah, now you talk intelligently! It was designed for a window-seat, and
its fortunate possessor will take care to provide one. Have you any
further objections?"
"Only this: that a book of such a size written by one man (I make the
objection as little personal as I can) must perforce contain many dull
pages."
"Hundreds of them; whole reams of dull pages."
"They will be skipped."
"They will be inserted with that object."
"Oh!"
"It is one of the conditions of becoming a classic."
"Who will read you?"
"Look here. Do you remember the story of that old fellow--a Dutchman, I
think--who took a fancy to be buried in the church porch of his native
town, that he might hear the feet of the townsfolk, generation after
generation, passing over his head to divine service?"
"Well?"
"Well. I shall stand on my shelf, bound in good leather, between (say)
_Bayle's Dictionary_ and _Sibrandus Schnafnaburgensis, his Delectable
Treatise_; and if some day, when the master of the house has been coaxed
by his womenfolk to take a holiday, and they descend upon the books, which
he (the humbug) never reads, belabour and bang the dust out of them and
flap them with dusters, and all with that vindictiveness which is the good
housewife's right attitude towards literature--"
"Had you not better draw breath?"
"Thank you. I will: for the end of the protasis lies yet some way off.
If, I say, some child of the family, having chosen me out of the heap as a
capital fellow for a booby-trap, shall open me by hazard and, attracted by
the pictures, lug me off to the window-seat, why then God bless the child!
I shall come to my own. He will not understand much at the time, but he
will remember me with affection, and in due course he will give me to his
daughter among her wedding presents (much to her annoyance, but the
bridegroom will soothe her). This will happen through several generations
until I find myself an heirloom. . . ."
"You begin to assume that by this time you will be valuable.
Also permit me to remark that you have slipped into the present
indicative."
"As for the present indicative, I think you began it."
"No."
"Yes. But it doesn't matter. I begin precisely at the right moment to
assume a value which will be attached to me, not for my own sake, but on
account of dear grandpapa's book-plate and autograph on the fly-leaf. (He
was the humbug who never read me--a literary person; he acquired me as a
'review copy,' and only forbore to dispose of me because at the current
railway rates I should not have fetched the cost of carriage.)"
"Why talk of hindrances to publishing such a book, when you know full well
it will never be written?"
"I thought you would be driven to some such stupid knock-down argument.
Whether or not the book will ever be finished is a question that lies on
the knees of the gods. I am writing at it every day. And just such a
book was written once and even published; as I discovered the other day in
an essay by Mr. Austin Dobson. The author, I grant you, was a Dutchman
(Mr. Dobson calls him 'Vader Cats,') and the book contains everything from
a long didactic poem on Marriage (I also have written a long didactic poem
on Marriage) to a page on Children's Games. (My book shall have a chapter
on Children's Games, with their proper tunes.) As for poetry--poetry,
says Mr. Dobson, with our Dutch poet is not by any means a trickling rill
from Helicon: 'it is an inundation _a la mode du pays_, a flood in a flat
land, covering everything far and near with its sluggish waters.'
As for the illustrations, listen to this for the kind of thing I demand:--
"Perhaps the most interesting of these is to be found in the
large head-piece to the above-mentioned Children's Games, the
background of which exhibits the great square of Middleburgh,
with its old Gothic houses and central clump of trees.
This is, moreover, as delightful a picture as any in the
gallery. Down the middle of the foreground, which is filled by
a crowd of figures, advances a regiment of little Dutchmen,
marching to drum and fife, and led by a fire-eating captain of
fifteen. Around this central group are dispersed knots of
children playing leap-frog, flying kites, blowing bubbles,
whipping tops, walking on stilts, skipping, and the like.
In one corner the children are busy with blind man's buff;
in the other the girls, with their stiff head-dresses and
vandyked aprons, are occupied with their dolls. Under the pump
some seventeenth-century equivalent for chuck-farthing seems to
be going on vigorously; and, not to be behind-hand in the fun,
two little fellows in the distance are standing upon their
heads. The whole composition is full of life and movement,
and--so conservative is childhood--might, but for the costume
and scene, represent a playground of to-day."
"Such are the pictures which shall emerge, like islands, among my dull
pages. And there shall be other pages, to be found for the looking. . . .
I must make another call upon your memory, my friend, and refer it to a
story of Hans Andersen's which fascinated the pair of us in childhood,
when we were not really a pair but inseparables, and before you had grown
wise; the story of the Student and the Goblin who lodged at the
Butterman's. The Student, at the expense of his dinner, had rescued a
book from the butter-tub and taken it off to his garret, and that night
the Goblin, overcome by curiosity, peeped through the keyhole, and lo! the
garret was full of light. Forth and up from the book shot a beam of
light, which grew into the trunk of a mighty tree, and threw out branches
over the bowed head of the student; and every leaf was fresh, and every
flower a face, and every fruit a star, and music sang in the branches.
Well, there shall be even such pages in my book."
"Excuse me," said I, "but, knowing your indolence, I begin to tire of the
future indicative, which (allow me to repeat) you first employed in this
discussion."
"I did not," said the other part of me stoutly. "And if I did, 'tis a
trick of the trade. You of all people ought to know that I write
romances."
I do not at all demur to having the value of my books enhanced by
the contributions of others--by dear grandpapa's autograph on the
fly-leaf, for example. But it annoys me to be blamed for other folks'
opinions.
The other day a visitor called and discoursed with me during the greater
part of a wet afternoon. He had come for an interview--'dreadful trade,'
as Edgar said of samphire-gathering--and I wondered, as he took his
departure, what on earth he would find to write about: for I love to smoke
and listen to other men's opinions, and can boast with Montaigne that
during these invasive times my door has stood open to all comers. He was
a good fellow, too; having brains and using them: and I made him an
admirable listener.
It amused me, some while after, to read the interview and learn that _I_
had done the talking and uttered a number of trenchant sayings upon female
novelists. But the amusement changed to dismay when the ladies began to
retort. For No. 1 started with an airy restatement of what I had never
said, and No. 2 (who had missed to read the interview) misinterpreted No.
1.'s paraphrase; and by these and other processes within a week my
digestive silence had passed through a dozen removes, and was incurring
the just execration of a whole sex. I began to see that my old college
motto--_Quod taciturn velis nemini dixeris_--which had always seemed to me
to err, if at all, on the side of excess, fell short of adequacy to these
strenuous times.
I have not kept the letters; but a friend of mine, Mr. Algernon Dexter,
has summarised a very similar experience and cast it into chapters, which
he allows me to print here. He heads them--
HUNTING THE DRAG.
CHAPTER I.
_Scene: The chastely-furnished writing-room of Mr. Algernon Dexter, a
well-known male novelist. Bust of Pallas over practicable door L.U.E.
Books adorn the walls, interspersed with portraits of female relatives.
Mr. Dexter discovered with Interviewer. Mr. D., poker in hand, is bending
over the fire, above which runs the legend, carved in Roman letters across
the mantelpiece, 'Ne fodias ignem gladio._'
INTERVIEWER (_pulling out his watch_): "Dear me! Only five minutes to
catch my train! And I had several other questions to ask.
I suppose, now, it's too late to discuss the Higher Education of Women?"
Mr. D. (_smiling_): "Well, I think there's hardly time. It will take you
a good four minutes to get to the station."
INTERVIEWER: "And I must get my typewriter out of the cloakroom.
Good-day, then, Mr. Dexter!" (_They shake hands and part with mutual
esteem._)