Looking back through the years and comparing the London of the early

'eighties with the London of to-day, one circumstance emerges very

clearly in my mind: that is, that the early London had an infinitely

"smarter," wealthier air than the later. I say "air" advisedly, to make

it clear that I knew nothing of the real interior life of the place, or

of the resources of its rich inhabitants. I judged of London purely by

its exterior aspects, as one may judge of a passing stranger in the

street, and decide that he goes to an expensive tailor, without knowing

anything of the condition of his banking account. So, I say that the

outward show and lineaments of the London of 1880 were much more

refulgent and splendid than those of the last few years. I was a good

deal surprised when the truth of this first dawned on me some three or

four years ago. For I believe that as a matter of fact the new London is

a much wealthier, more luxurious, more extravagant place than the old.

The rich people of to-day spend hundreds instead of tens, thousands for

the hundreds of their fathers; the "pace" of the splendid has increased

enormously in the last thirty-five years; and all the facilities for

expending very large sums of money have also increased to a huge extent.

So well was I convinced of all this when I fell to comparing the London

of my boyhood with the London of my middle age that at first I thought

that there must be a fallacy somewhere, and I was very willing to

believe that those early impressions of mine were illusions, natural

enough in a lad who had never seen any more splendid streets than those

which the Newport and Cardiff of those days had to show, than the

venerable, peaceful, ancient ways of Hereford, whose stillness was only

broken by the deep, sweet chiming of the cathedral bells. But when,

interested, I went into the facts of the question, I found that I

had not been mistaken in my first view--i.e., that London was a

smarter-looking place thirty years ago than at the present day, and

this for several reasons.

To begin with, there is the trifling matter of men's dress. I do not

know whether we have yet realised the fact that the frock coat is

rapidly becoming "costume," verging, that is, towards the status of

levee dress. Already, I believe, it is only worn on occasions of

semi-state, at functions where the King is expected, at smart weddings,

and so forth. Before long it will probably attain the singular twofold

state of "evening dress," which is worn all day long by waiters and by

what are conveniently called gentlemen after seven o'clock in the

evening. So very likely the frock coat will soon be seen on the backs of

the maitre d'hotel, the hotel manager, the shopwalker, the

major-domo--if there be any majores-domo left--as a kind of uniform or

livery, while it will also be the afternoon wear of dukes at great

social functions. And so with the silk hat; it has not gone so far on

the road of obsolescence as the frock coat, but, unless I mistake, it

has entered on that sad way.

Here, then, is the point of contrast. Between 'eighty and 'ninety--and

later still--practically every man in London went about his business and

his pleasure with a high hat on his head. Every man, I say, above the

rank of the mechanic; certainly all the clerkly class; Mr. Guppy and

his friends were still faithful to this headdress; which, be it

remembered, was once universal all over England, so that even

smock-frocked farm labourers wore it. As for the London of pleasure, the

West End, it would have been quite impossible to conceive a man of the

faintest social pretensions being seen abroad in anything else. And now,

I go up and down Piccadilly, Bond Street, the Row at the height of the

London season, and see--a few silk hats and morning coats, it is

true--but the majority of well-dressed men in "lounge" suits and grey

soft hats and black and grey bowlers.

Now let it be clearly understood that I have no passion for black coats

and shiny hats myself, nor for the dazzling white linen which has

largely given way to soft, unstarched stuffs. But it is not to be denied

that all those habits had a "smart" appearance, and that a pavement

crowded with shiny black hats, shiny white cuffs and collars, and long

black frock coats made a much more imposing show than the pavement of

to-day, on which the men's dress is very much as they please. The modern

men look extremely comfortable and well at their ease; but they do not

scintillate in the old style. A soft grey hat does not flash back the

rays of the sun.

Then, another point and a most important one: the coming of the motor. I

suppose the kind of motor-impelled vehicle which one is likely to see in

Hyde Park may very well have cost seven or eight or nine or ten times as

much as the horse-drawn carriages which I remember going round and

round so gay and so glorious. Well, I have watched the modern

procession of motor-cars, and they are about as impressive as a career

of light locomotive engines. It may indeed in course of time become

fashionable to go up and down the Row in express locomotives capable of

drawing their hundred coaches at a hundred miles an hour, but the effect

would not be smart. Now, the old equipages were undeniably the last word

of smartness; in themselves they were enough to tell the stranger that

he had come to the very centre of the earth, of its riches and its

splendours. There were the high-bred, high-spirited, high-stepping

horses, in the first place, groomed to the last extreme of shiny, satiny

perfection, tossing their heads proudly and champing their bits and

doing the most wonderful things with their legs. The bright sunlight of

those past London summers shone on their glossy coats, shone in the

patent leather of the harness, shone and glittered on the plated bolts

and buckles and ornaments. And the carriages were of graceful form, and

the servants of those days sometimes wore gorgeous liveries; and scores

of those brilliant equipages followed on one another in an unending

dazzling procession. That was the old way; now there are some "Snorting

Billies" that choke and snarl and splutter as they dodge furtively and

meanly in and out of the Park, like mechanical rabbits bolting for their

burrows.

While I contrast the London of my young days and the London of my

old--or present--days, I would like it to be remembered that I am, so

far, only contrasting the two cities from one point of view, the point

of view of smartness. I have not been saying that 1880 London was more

sensible than 1915 London; but merely that the former struck an outsider

as a more brilliant place than the modern city. The fact is that I have

the most cordial approval for all social pomps and splendours, so long

as I am not required to take part therein. I hate wearing frock coats

and silk hats and shiny shirts; but I am very well pleased to sit in the

pit, as it were, and watch those exalted persons who are cast for the

decorative parts going through their brilliant performances. And, after

all, if a man finds that plate armour is uncomfortable, that is no

reason why he should not delight in seeing other people wearing it, and

wearing it with dignity. And in speaking of the Hyde Park and Rotten Row

of the old days I mentioned that there were some gorgeous servants'

liveries still left in 1880. And while we are on that matter, I may say

that I have never sympathised at all with those persons who have found

something mean and ridiculous in a manservant in purple and gold or in

blue and crimson, unless, that is, the point be taken that only a

splendid duty should be dignified with a splendid vestment, and in that

objection I admit there is some force. Not that I agree for one moment

that there is anything contemptible in "menial" service; but I am

willing to allow that it may not be altogether seemly for a faithful

fellow, whose business is to hold on behind a carriage and wait at

dinner, to outshine a bishop in pontificals. But I suspect that the

people who sneered at poor Jeames and his plush were not actuated by

this reasonable motive, but rather by that vile "Liberal" objection to

splendour as splendour. The man who found "Blazes" ridiculous would

probably find the King in his Coronation robes equally ridiculous. And

so you may go on, up the scale and down the scale; but the only logical

alternative to splendour is Dr. Johnson's proposed suit of bull's

hide--all beyond that is superfluity and vain show, according to the

doctrine of the wretches who in times not long past sold antique civic

ornaments, such as chains and maces, on the ground that the Mayor of

Little Pedlington did not need such gauds to help him in his customary

task of sentencing "drunks."

There is one more point in connection with the Row. Twenty-five years

ago the appointed hour was five o'clock in the afternoon. Then people

sat in the chairs and walked up and down and looked at the carriages,

and I remember a friend observing to me this singularity, that though

the place was public and open to anybody, still only those persons who

were dressed in the regulation costume--frock coat and silk hat for

men--ever came near the sacred ground. The people in lounge suits and

bowler hats stood apart, and watched the show from some distance. Well,

the hour of the Row is now in the morning; but there is a greater

change. There are still "smart" people there; but there are also people

who cannot by any possibility be described as smart, not even if they be

judged by the very lax standards of these days.

In another matter the London of to-day is much less impressive in its

outward show than the London of 1880; that is in the aspect of its

principal streets. There are still excellent shops in Bond Street,

Regent Street, and Piccadilly; but there is no longer in any of them

that air of exclusiveness and expensiveness that I can remember, and

this is particularly true of Regent Street. In 1880 you felt as soon as

you turned up the Quadrant that anything you might buy therein would

certainly be dear; the very stones and stucco exuded costliness and the

essential attars of luxury. I feel convinced that the cigars of Regent

Street were of a more curious aroma than cigars bought in any other

street, that it was the very place wherein to purchase a great green

flagon of rare scent as a present for a lady, that if you happened to

want a Monte Cristo emerald this was the quarter wherein to search for

it. That was my impression, but lest it should be mere fancy, a year or

so ago I asked one of the older shopkeepers whether the street was quite

what he and I remembered it. He said very emphatically it was not at all

what it had been; and I feel sure that he was right, and that in a less

degree the other principal shopping centres have declined from their

former splendour.

And this for two reasons; first, the curious modern tendency of the best

and most luxurious shops to scatter and disperse themselves abroad about

the side streets of the West End, leaving gaps which are filled in most

cases by dealers in cheaper wares. And secondly, the coming of the

popular tea-shop has, in my opinion, done a very great deal to

"unsmarten" the streets of which I am speaking. Let it not be

understood for one moment that I would speak despitefully of cheap

tea-shops; that would indeed be vilely thankless in one who has often

made the principal meal of the day at an A.B.C.--large coffee,

threepence; milk cake, twopence; butter, a penny--and has been grateful

that for once in a way he has dined. But, it cannot be pretended that a

milk cake is a costly or a curious dish, or that a plate of cold meat

for sixpence or eightpence is an opimian banquet; and so, when I pass a

popular tea-shop or eating-house, I feel that my dream of luxury and

expense is broken; and that something of glitter and splendour has

passed away from the West End of London.

* * * * *

I spent the years from the summer of 1880 to the winter of 1886 in a

singular sort of apprenticeship to life and London and letters and to

most other things. Sometimes I was in London; then for months at a time

I was out of it, back again in my old haunts of Gwent. I had hot fits of

desire for the town when I was forced to stay in the country; and then,

settled, or apparently settled, in the heart of London, its immensities

and its solitudes overwhelmed me, the faint, hot breath of its streets

sickened me, so that my heart ached for the thought of the green wood by

the valley of the Soar, and for the thought of friendly faces.

They say that in old Japan they had a wonderful and secret art of

tempering their sword blades. Now the steel was placed in the white heat

of the fire, now it was withdrawn and plunged into the water of an icy

torrent; and then again the trial of the furnace. So heat and cold were

alternated, according to an ancient and hidden tradition, till at last

the craftsman obtained an exquisite and true and perfect blade, fit for

the adorned scabbard of a great lord of Japan. When I think of those

early years of mine I should be reminded of the process of the Japanese

sword-craftsman--if only the heart were as tractable as steel. The

Kabbalists, I believe, take the view--a gloomy one--that the innermost

essence of man's spirit goes out from the world in much the same state

as that in which it came into the world; and it is certainly true that

some men seem incorrigible; neither fire nor ice will temper them

aright.

During these early years of my London experience I lived under very

varying conditions. I lived with families, and I lived alone; I lived in

the suburbs and in the centre; I had enough to eat, and then narrowly

escaped starvation. My first habitat was in the High Street of a

southern suburb. My memory holds a picture of an ancient street of

dignified red-brick houses, a Georgian church, and a stream of quite

inky blackness. The old houses had old gardens behind them, green

enough, but with a certain grime upon them that made them strange to

eyes unused to this combination of soot and leafage. But it was quite

easy in those days to get from the suburb to the open country.

Not that I desired any such excursions, for my notion of an ideal

residence was then a lodging in one of the streets or courts or passages

going down from the Strand to the Thames. This was a dream that I

realised years afterwards, when many waters (not of the Thames) had

passed over my head. It was well enough, and I used to go out and get my

breakfast at the "chocolate as in Spain" shop at the west end of the

Strand, on the north side. It was well enough, I say, but it was not

absolute paradise. And, furthermore, and in an interior parenthesis, let

me say that the chocolate at the old Strand shop was not as in Spain,

though very decent chocolate. The Spanish service of chocolate--I

encountered it when I was in Gascony--consists in this, first that the

chocolate is made extremely strong and thick, and secondly that with it

comes a goblet of ice-cold well-water, to be drunk after the chocolate,

on the principle, I suppose, of the Scots who drink water, not with

whisky, but after it.

Well, to return to the more or less--chiefly less--direct current of my

tale, after my sojourn in the southern suburb came a return to the

country, where I remained eight or nine months. It was during this

exodus or hegira, I think, that I was excommunicated by old Mr. James,

of Lansoar, because I was loafing at home instead of living on five

shillings a week in London. But my long sojourn in Gwent was in fact due

to a very dismal discovery having been made of me by certain persons

called examiners. They found me utterly incapable of the simple rules of

arithmetic; and hence I was debarred from the career which I had been

contemplating. And here I would say that I am almost proud of myself for

my quite extraordinary arithmetical incapacity. I am not merely dull

and slow, but desperate. I am so wanting in the mere faculty of counting

as to be curious, like those tribes of savages that can say "One, two,

three, four, five ... many." There are people who make a living by

exhibiting their arithmetical skill in the music-halls; someone writes

on the blackboard a multiplication sum of fifteen figures multiplied by

fifteen figures, and a second or two after the last figure is drawn the

arithmetical artist utters the result. Well, I am at the opposite end of

the scale, and I have sometimes wondered whether "Incompetent Machen"

would not be quite a good turn. It would make anybody laugh to hear me

doing a sum in simple addition. It is like "Forty-seven and nine,

forty-seven and nine, forty-seven and nine." I ponder. Then a brilliant

idea strikes me. I pretend the problem is "forty-seven and ten." I get

the result, fifty-seven, deduct one and proceed.

Well, I came to London again in the summer of '81, thinking of another

and quite a different career, which did not involve, on the face of it,

that little difficulty of arithmetic. Again I was in a suburb, and again

in an old one, but this time the quarter was in the far west. I stayed

in Turnham Green, then a place of many amenities standing amongst fields

and gardens and riparian lawns, which, long ago, have been buried

beneath piles of cheap bricks and mortar, for a year and a half, and

then again I altered my plans, or fate rather altered them for me. I

started on a new tack and kept it for a month, and then somehow slid

into a backwater, in which I was afloat and nothing more than afloat.

Summoning this period into recollection, I find my position very much

like to that of certain ancient and outworn barges, grass-grown,

flower-grown, that I have come upon suddenly in improbable back alleys

of water, in the midst of a maze of by-streets at Brentford; but,

locally and literally, I was then living in a small room, a very small

room, in Clarendon Road, Notting Hill Gate.

I have already stated that when I first came up to London I had no

thought of literature as a career. Indeed, I never have thought of it as

a career, but only as a destiny. Still, my meaning is that it in no wise

dawned upon me as I travelled up from Newport to London in the early

summer of 1880 that writing of any kind or sort was to be a great part

of my life's business. And yet, before I had lived a month in the old

red house by the inky stream, I was trying to write, in the intervals of

a very different task, in an atmosphere which was utterly remote from

literature of any kind. How was this? Partly, I suppose, because of the

very large proportion of Celtic blood in my veins. It is quite true that

the Celt--the Welsh Celt, at all events--has directly contributed very

little to great literature. This I have always maintained, and always

shall maintain; and I think all impartial judges will allow that if

Welsh literature were annihilated at this moment the loss to the world's

grand roll of masterpieces would be insignificant. I, speaking from the

point of view of my own peculiar interests, I should be very sorry to

miss my copy of the "Mabinogion," and there are certain stanzas of the

poem called "Y Beddau"--"Vain is it to seek for the grave of

Arthur"--which have a singular and enchanting and wizard music; but in

neither case is there any question of a literary masterpiece.

Yet there is in Celtdom a certain literary feeling which does not exist

in Anglo-Saxondom. It is diffused, no doubt, and appreciative rather

than creative, and lacking in the sterner, critical spirit which is so

necessary to all creative work; still it is there, and it is delighted

with the rolling sound of the noble phrase. It perceives the music of

words and the relation of that music to the world. I was taking a lesson

in Welsh pronunciation some time ago, and uttered the phrase "yn oes

oesodd"--from ages to ages. "That is right," said my Welsh friend,

"speak it so that it makes a sound like the wind about the mountains."

And, with or without the leave of the literary rationalists, I would say

that the spirit of that sentence is very near to the heart of true

literature.

So far then, as a man three-parts Celt, I was by nature inclined to the

work of words, and there was, moreover, a feeble literary strain in my

own family. There was a second cousin, or Welsh uncle, I am not certain

which, who had composed a five-act heroic blank verse drama, called

"Inez de Castro," which was almost, but not quite, represented by the

famous Mrs. Somebody at the Lane in the early 'fifties. And then, more

potent still, was the heredity of bookishness, the growing up among

books that had accrued from grandfathers and uncles and cousins, all

men who had lived all their days amongst books, and had sat over country

hearths on mountain sides, reading this leathern Colloquies of Erasmus,

this little Horace in mellow parchment, with the Sphere of Elzevir.

And then there was the old-fashioned grammar school education, of which

it must be said, by friends and foes, that it is an education in words.

One spent one's time, unconsciously, in weighing the values of words in

English and Greek and Latin, in rendering one tongue into another, in

estimating the exact sense of an English sentence before translating it

into one or another of the old tongues. So that a boy who could do

decent Latin prose must first have mastered the exact sense and

significance of his English original, and then he must also have made

himself understand to a certain extent, not only the logic but the

polite habit of each language. I remember when I was a very small boy

rendering "Put to the sword" literally into "Gladio positi." "Well,"

said my master, "there is no reason on earth why the Romans shouldn't

have said 'gladio positi,' but as a matter of fact they _did_ say 'ferro

occisi'--killed with iron." And if one thinks of it, he who has mastered

that little lesson has also mastered the larger lesson that literature

is above logic, that there are matters in it which transcend plain

common sense. And so, the long and the short of it was, that in 1880 I

began to try to write.

Now I believe that one of the most tortuous and difficult questions that

engages philosophy is the theory of cause and effect. I think, though I

am not quite sure, that in one of Mr. Balfour's philosophical books

this matter is treated, and the familiar case of a sportsman's pulling a

trigger, firing a gun, and thereby bringing down a bird, is made an

instance. What is the "cause" of the bird's death? Roughly speaking, of

course, the pulling of the trigger; but roughly speaking is not the same

thing as philosophically speaking; and if anyone be so simple as to

conclude that roughly speaking means truly speaking and that philosophy

is all nonsense, let me remind him that when he enjoys his after-dinner

cigar in his arm-chair he is not conscious of the fact that he is being

whirled through space, like a top, at the most terrific speed.

So, if I remember rightly, Mr. Balfour left the philosophical "cause" of

the bird's death an open question, if not a question altogether beyond

determination of human wit; and thus it is with the impulse that sends

off a harmless young fellow on the career of letters. One can talk of

the causes that impel a grain of corn to grow from the ground; sound

seed, good soil, good farming; dry weather, wet weather, each in its

season; but at the last the engendering of the green shoot remains a

mystery. And so it is a mystery that near midsummer in 1880 I suddenly

began to write horrible rubbish in a little manuscript book with a

scarlet cover; rubbish that had rhymes to it.

But if ultimate causes lie beyond those flaming walls of the world that

put bounds to all our inquisition, it is not so hard to trace those

causes which are proximate. The bird dies because the shot hit it in a

vital part, the corn sprouts because it is put into the ground--and I

began to write because I bought a copy of Swinburne's "Songs Before

Sunrise."

I forget how I heard of this name, which once loomed so fiery and

strange a portent, which still, in the estimation of many excellent

judges, stands for a great literary achievement. I know it was while I

was down in the country, because I can remember one of our clergy, an

Eton and Christchurch man, telling me gossip about the poet, who had in

those early days retired from the world to Putney. It is to be supposed

that I had read something concerning Swinburne in one of those wonderful

London papers that came over our hills from another world, that might

almost have fallen from the stars they were so wholly marvellous. But,

somehow or other, I was possessed by an eager curiosity concerning this

Swinburne, convinced in advance--I cannot remember how--that here I

should surely find an unexpected, unsurmised treasure. And so, one hot,

shiny afternoon, I came up from the old Georgian suburb by the black

stream, crossed Hungerford Bridge, and made my way into the Strand; into

that Strand which is as lost as Atlantis. And going eastward past many

vanished things, past the rich odours of Messrs. Rimell's soap-boiling,

I came to St. Mary-le-Strand, and the entrance of Holywell Street. At

the southern corner of this street, facing the east end of the church,

there stood Denny's bookshop, and, gold in my pocket, I went in with a

bold appearance, and said, "Have you got Swinburne's 'Songs Before

Sunrise'?" The shopman did not seem in the least astonished at my

question. He said he had got the book, and produced it, and showed it

me, and the very cover was such as I had never seen before, provocative,

therefore, in a high degree. And so I bought the book and carried it out

of Denny's into the sunlight in a great amazement.

For, be it remembered, one did not go into a provincial bookshop in that

easy way and say, "Have you got this or that?" For the chances were

about a thousand to one that they hadn't got it, and never would have

it. It is odd, but I cannot remember exactly the nature of the stock of

the average country bookseller; my impression is of Bibles, Prayer

Books, Church Services, and Pitman's Shorthand Manuals. So, if you

wanted a book in the county town, you did not say, "Have you got

so-and-so?" but "Will you get me so-and-so?" and in four or five days

you called and the book was ready. But I had a notion that in this

wonderful London the bookshop would actually have the book that you

wanted, there actually in presence, and waiting for you on its shelves.

I had a notion, I say, but again, it seemed almost incredible that there

should be such shops in the world, and so when the bookseller under St.

Mary-le-Strand said "Yes," quite simply, and handed me the "Songs Before

Sunrise" in two or three seconds, I was amazed and exultant too; the

legend of London, though marvellous, was evidently a true one.

Now I have a friend who is very fond of preaching the doctrine of what

he calls the cataclysm. He holds that we are all much bettered by an

occasional earthquake, moral, mental or spiritual. He says that

volcanoes which suddenly burst out from under our feet are the finest

tonics in the world, that violent thunderstorms, cloud-bursts, and

tornadoes clear our mental skies. The treatment is heroic, but my friend

may be right; certainly that volume of "Songs Before Sunrise" was to me

quite cataclysmic. First there was the literary manner of the book,

which to me was wholly strange and new and wonderful, and then there was

the tremendous boldness of it all, the denial of everything that I had

been brought up to believe most sure and sacred; the book was positively

strewn with the fragments of shattered altars and the torn limbs of

kings and priests.

How do the lines go? I quote from memory, but they run something like

this:--

Thou hast taken all, Galilaean, but these thou shalt not take;

The laurel, the doves and the paean, the breasts of the nymph in the

brake.

Clearly this was a terrible, a tremendous fellow, an earth-shaking,

heaven-storming poet. And so between my endeavours to qualify for

passing the preliminary examination of the Royal College of Surgeons, I

began to write; I should think the most horrible drivel that ever has

been written since rhymes first jingled. I can't remember, oddly enough,

whether I tried to imitate Swinburne; I know one copy of verses was

"inspired" by a picture called "Harmony," which I think was hung in the

Academy of 1880. It depicted a mediaeval maiden playing the organ, while

a mediaeval youth watched her in a dazed and love-stricken condition.

This is positively the only one of these early horrors of mine, of which

I have any recollection; my memory is purged of the rest of them, I am

glad to say. I merely mention these things because they illustrate a

very singular point in literary psychology; in universal psychology, for

the matter of that. For I believe it is a rule that almost every

literary career, certainly every literary career which is to be

concerned with the imaginative side of literature, begins with the

writing of verses. Nay, people who are to live lives quite remote from

literature will often try to write poetry in their youth; and on the

face of it, this is a great puzzle. For poetry, be it remembered, is the

most "artificial" kind of literary composition, it is immeasurably the

most difficult, it is by far the most remote from that which is commonly

called life. Why, then, does the inexperienced beginner, devoid of all

technical ability, invariably essay this most difficult technical task

on his entry into the literary career?

The problem of the boy in the back room, not far from the dark stream of

the Wandle, writing verses in the red notebook, is really one of the

enigmas of the universe; it is rather a Chinese-box puzzle; riddle is

within riddle.

For if we start at the beginning of things, or at what seems to us to be

the beginning of things, we are met by the question as to why there

should be any such thing as poetry in the universe. I need not say how

much wider this question is than it seems; how it must be asked about

all the arts, about fugues and cathedrals and romances and dances. It

is an immense question; immense when one considers that with nine people

out of ten the great criterion is, "Does it pay?" That is, will it

result in a larger supply of fine champagne, four ale, roast legs of

pork, and mousses royales to the population? Will this scheme of things

enable Sir John to keep a fifth motor-car, or will it get Bill meat

three times a day? That is, at last, the test by which we judge all

things. It is an old and approved British test; by it Macaulay condemned

the whole of Greek philosophy, because that philosophy did not lead up

to the invention of the steam engine. Now, it is quite clear that

poetry, speaking generally, pays neither the producer nor the consumer

of it; it does not lead to motor-cars, beefsteaks, vintage clarets, or

four ale. It is not even moral; not a single man has ever been induced

to drink ginger-beer instead of beer by reading Keats.

I must pause for a moment; I fear that it may be thought that I am

trying to be funny or--more injurious accusation!--trying to be clever.

I am not trying to be either; I am stating the simple facts of the case.

Hardly a month passes by without some indignant person pointing out in

the Press that Engineering and Commercial Chemistry are infinitely more

useful--i.e., lead to more beefsteaks--than Latin and Greek; and that

when Oxford and Cambridge find out that obvious truth they may become of

some service to the State. Indeed, it is only a few weeks ago since a

gentleman wrote to a paper showing that military training was better

for a boy--i.e., would make him the better soldier--than "silly old"

Greek plays. And let me acknowledge that these contentions are perfectly

true; just as it is perfectly true that fur coats are much warmer than

Alcaics. So, I say, here is the problem: the common, widely accepted

test of the right to existence of everything: does it pay, does it add

to the physical comforts of life, is quite clearly opposed to the

existence of poetry, and yet poetry exists. Therefore, either the poets

and the lovers of poetry are mad, or else the common judgment is ... let

us say, mistaken. I need scarcely say that I incline to the latter

solution of the problem, and so qua human being, I am not ashamed of

trying to write poetry by the Wandle, though I recognise, qua Arthur

Machen, that I was, very decidedly, not born a poet.

For I firmly hold the doctrine that the natural, the arch-natural

expression of man, so far as he is to be distinguished from pigs and

dogs and goats, is in the arts, and through the arts and by the arts. It

is not by reason, as reason is commonly understood, that man is

distinguished from the other animals; but by art. I can quite well

conceive the Black Ants sending the message "Hill 27 fell before the Red

Ant attack early this afternoon," but I cannot conceive either Red or

Black Ants writing odes or building miniature cathedrals. The arts,

then, are man's difference, that which makes him to be what he is; and

when he speaks through them he is using the utterance which is proper to

him, as man. For, if we once set aside the "does it pay" nonsense, which

is evidently nonsense and pestilent nonsense at that, we come clearly

and freely to the truth that man is concerned with beauty, and with the

ecstasy or rapture that proceeds from the creation of beauty and from

the contemplation of it. And youth, as I think I have pointed out

before, is the time of revelation. It is children who possess the

"kingdom of heaven," to them are vouchsafed glimpses of that paradise

which is the true home of man, and so it is that the boy with literature

in his blood naturally makes his first efforts in the region of poetry,

which is the heart and core of all literature.

The heart and core; for, as in the individual man, so in the whole

history of men literature begins always with poetry, just as speech

began with song. First, the magic incantation, sung about strange secret

fires in hidden places by wild men, then the ballad or lyric, then

Homer, then Herodotus, with the odours of the sanctuary of poetry still

about him, though he has come down into the market-place of prose. And

it is not necessary to go farther in time or space than the

Northumberland of a few years ago to hear phrases common enough, things

of everyday, set to enchanting melodies. I shall never forget how once

in the years of my wandering I came one wet autumn afternoon to a little

town called Morpeth. It struck me as a dingy place enough, "un petit

trou de province, sale, noir, boueux," and my lodging was dingy, and

musty too, in a house kept by an old invalid woman who moved about in a

wheel chair and grumbled if a window were opened. But when it came to

the question of the stroller's tea, the servant-maid, who came, I

think, from the wild places of that land, said consolingly: "You need

not trouble yourselves; you shall have your tea in half an hour." No

doubt the girl was mortal, but she spoke the tongue of the immortals;

her phrase about our tea was chanted to an exquisite melody that might

have come from the Gradual--or from fairyland.

The natural man, then, is a singer and a poet, and so we may say that

all artists are in reality survivals from an earlier time, and so it is

that even in these later days the lad, with something of the youth and

true nature of his race restored to him for a brief hour, sits in

solitary places and endeavours to exercise his birthright. Alas! he

stutters deplorably in his speech as he delays by the Wandle, inditing

verses; but it is thus that he would declare that he is a citizen of no

mean city; he would fain say through those sorry rhymes, _Civis

coelestis sum_.

_Chapter IV_

Well, I saw the first of Augustus Harris's autumn dramas at Drury Lane,

heard the newsboys calling out the death of Miss Neilson one misty

evening up and down the Strand, and went back to Gwent in the character

of a bad penny; and so fell to writing of those autumn and winter

nights, when all the house was still.

Poor wretch! For this is the misery of literature, that it has no

technique in the sense that music and painting have each its own

technique. The young painter and the young composer, having acquired a

certain mechanical skill in the elements of their arts, have studios and

schools which they can attend. They have masters who lead them in their

several ways, or who tell them, if necessary, to abandon those ways with

all convenient speed. But for the lad with letters on the brain there is

no help, no guidance; nor is there the possibility of any direction in

the literary path. Now and then people send me manuscripts, and ask for

my opinion; I give it because I am weak, but I always tell them that in

literature the other man's opinion is not worth twopence.

No; the only course is to go on stumbling and struggling and blundering

like a man lost in a dense thicket on a dark night; a thicket, I say,

of rebounding boughs that punish with the sting of a whip-lash, of

thorns that most savagely lacerate the flesh--it is the flesh of the

heart, alas! that they tear--of sharp rocks of agony and black pools of

despair. Such is the obscure wood of the literary life; such, at least,

it was to me. You struggle to find your way; but again and again you ask

yourself whether, for you, there is any way. You think you have hit upon

the lucky track at last. And lo! before your feet is the black pit. And

such is not alone the adventure of little, ineffectual, struggling men.

How old was glorious Cervantes, now serene for ever amongst the

immortals, when he found his way to that village of La Mancha? Fifty, I

think, or almost fifty. And he had been striving for years to write

plays, and poetry, and short stories of passion and sentiment; and it

was only the roar of applause that thundered up from the world when the

Knight and the Squire were seen riding over the hill that convinced

Cervantes that at last he had discovered his true path; if indeed he

ever were convinced in his heart of the magnitude and majesty of the

achievement of "Don Quixote."

And if these things are done with the great, what will be done with the

little? If the clear-voiced rulers of the everlasting choir are to

suffer so and agonise, what of miserable little Welshmen stammering and

stuttering by the Wandle, in the obscure rectory amongst the hills, in

waste places by Shepherd's Bush, in gloomy Great Russell Street, where

the ghosts of dead, disappointed authors go sighing to and fro? For the

fate of the little literary man there is no articulate speech that is

sufficient; one must fall back on aoi or oimoi, or alas, or some such

vague lament of unutterable woe.

Now one of the first agonies of the learner in letters is the discovery

of the horrid gulf that yawns between the conception and the execution.

Some years before this winter of 1880, when I was at school, I had read

the tale of Owain in the Mabinogion, of the magic sudden storm, and of

the singing of the birds after it. And going out for a walk one

half-holiday with a school-fellow, just such a sudden storm, as it

seemed to me, overtook us as we went down into a beautiful valley not

far from Hereford; and after it there was a like joyful singing of birds

in the trees. And somehow the magic atmosphere of the old tale, mingled

with the enacting, as it were, of one of its chief circumstances, left

on my mind a very strong and singular impression which, when the desire

of literature came upon me, I yearned to put into words. I did so, in

the blank verse form, and sent the "poem" to the "Gentleman's Magazine,"

and this I think was my first attempt to get into print. I need not say

that my nonsense was returned to me, with thanks; but I wish I knew why

I chose that particular magazine. It must have had some especial

attraction for me, since ten years later I sent Sylvanus Urban a prose

article, which he accepted and paid for at the appropriate

eighteenth-century rate of a guinea a sheet; that is sixteen pages. But

I must say in all fairness that Sylvanus warned me in advance of his

rate of payment.

But that gulf between the idea as it glows warm and radiant in the

author's heart, and its cold and faulty realisation in words is an

early nightmare, and a late one, too. For the beginner, if he suffer

from many terrible disappointments, has also the consolations of hope,

fallacious though these may prove to be. This scheme that looked so well

has certainly come to the saddest grief, but there may be better luck

next time; if this road have led to nothing but a blank wall of failure,

that way may rise from the valley and climb the hill and lead into a

fair land. It is later in the life of the literary man, when he has

tried all roads and made all the experiments, that his final sorrow

comes upon him. He may not be forced to say, perhaps, that he has been a

total failure; he may, indeed, be able to chronicle achievements of a

minor kind, successes in the estimation of others. But now, with riper

understanding, he perceives, as he did not perceive in the days of his

youth, the depth of the gulf between the idea and the word, between the

emotion that thrilled him to his very heart and soul, and the sorry page

of print into which that emotion stands translated. He dreamed in fire;

he has worked in clay.

I did not know (happily for myself) of these things in the ending of the

year 1880; and so, when all the rectory was abed and asleep, I sat up by

a dying fire writing a "poem" on a classic subject.

The classic "poem" was finished some time in the winter of 1880-81, and

then I performed a bold action. I sent the manuscript--I can see it now,

written in a sprawly hand on both sides of ordinary letter paper--to a

Hereford stationer, and bade him print me one hundred copies thereof.

He, strangely enough, did so, and I saw myself in print for the first

time. I have been looking at my copy of this work, I should think the

only copy in existence, and wondering whether I would quote a few lines

from it. I have decided against this course. But, after all, I was only

seventeen when I wrote "Eleusinia."

But the little pamphlet had its influence on my life. My relations

decided, after reading it, that journalism was the career for me; a

decision that then seemed to me both reasonable and pleasant, which now

strikes me with amazement, nay with stupefaction. Since those days I

have found out a good many things concerning both poetry and journalism;

and looking over that old copy of "Eleusinia," I have meditated on what

career I should advise for the author of that work if he were now to

consult me. I give it up; I abandon the problem utterly. And yet,

strange as it seems, strange most of all to me, my relations were

justified after all. I did become a journalist, just thirty years

afterwards. But by 1910, those who had arranged this destiny for me were

long dead and delivered from all their troubles. I remember my father,

who knew about as much of the matter as I did, sketching out my future

career. I was to go to London to learn the business first of all,

shorthand, of course, and all that sort of thing. A chief portion of the

task, he said, half jocularly, would be to lurk in the entrance-halls of

great houses and write down the names of distinguished guests on the

nights of grand receptions. And then, eventually, some few hundreds

would come to me, and with this I was to buy an interest in a small

local paper, and so, I suppose, write leaders and live happily ever

after. The programme has not been carried out literally. The few

hundreds have been more agreeably spent long years ago, and my editor

never sent me to get the names of distinguished guests at great

houses--knowing, wise man, that I should make a sad mess of such a

business. But one of my first "assignments" in journalism was to

describe a Giant Apple. I chased after that apple from Bond Street to

Covent Garden, from Covent Garden back to Bond Street, and wrote in my

paper about its smiling face, wishing my poor father were alive to hear

the story of my long-deferred entrance into the art and mystery of the

journalist. He would have laughed consumedly; and from my dear

remembrance of him, I think he would have found a quotation from Horace

to meet the case. Once, I recollect, it turned out that the odd man at

the rectory, supposed to be a bachelor, had abandoned a wife and twelve

children--all of them small ones, for aught I know--somewhere in

Gloucestershire. A policeman came for poor Robert, and my father was

very sorry for the man, even though he were a sad dog, and a notorious

toper of ale. But the rector thought of the phrase: "Raro antecedentem

scelestum deseruit poena," and cheered up amazingly.

Well, on the strength of the verses about the Eleusinian mysteries, I am

to be a journalist, and consequently, as it was thought in those days, I

must learn shorthand, so that I may be able to write a hundred and fifty

words in a minute. And here again comes a chapter as sad as that which

I have written on my arithmetic. I never learnt shorthand effectively,

because I was too stupid to learn it. The queer thing is that when I was

quite a little boy at school this art of shorthand had a strange and

mysterious attraction for me. Why? I am sure I don't know; why did the

small boys of my generation love dark lanterns? Robert Louis Stevenson

has written an enchanting essay on the fascination of this instrument of

the mysteries; but I am not quite sure that even he has penetrated to

the heart of the enigma. For I, though a lonely child, knew the joy of

the dark lantern, and it was a great and exceeding joy. The glowing of

heat that rose from its roof--corrugated, I think?--the rank smell of

its oils were charms that somehow carried me over the borders of this

common world into an exquisite region of wonder and surmise. And now I

come to look back into days horribly distant--the shorthand question

must wait for a while--I perceive that there was a perfect ritual, or

ceremonial rather, of the Dark Lantern, the origins of which are as

obscure to me as are the origins of other primitive mysteries. Of one

thing only I am certain, and I speak with all due deference to the

author of "The Golden Bough," not forgetting Miss Jane Harrison; the

lantern service of my early boyhood had no reference whatever to the

young crops or to the sprouting of the corn. As I lit the wick I did not

say, "O Sun! shine thou also on the land and make it warm so that there

may be many cabbages, so that green peas may not be lacking to the lamb

which is equally nurtured by thy beams." Of course, I am quite willing

to allow that, as a general rule, an anxiety about the spring crops

fully explains the origin of all painting, all sculpture, all

architecture, all poetry, all drama, all music, all religion, all

romance: I admit that the Holy Gospels are really all about spring

cabbage, that martyrdom and mass are spring cabbage, that Arthur is

really arator, the ploughman; that Galahad, denoting the achievement and

end of the great quest, is Caulahad, the cabbage god. I admit all this

because it is so entirely reasonable and satisfactory, and, indeed,

self-evident; but though all Frazerdom should rise up against me, I

cannot allow that when I lit my dark lantern I was inviting the sun to

help the crops.

There was some sort of obscure connection--I seem to remember--between

Dark Lanterns and Masks. They were both properties in singular mysteries

of a formless character which were enacted in dark shrubberies on dark

nights, just before bed-time. It was well understood, I know, that these

objects must be kept in secret places, and must not by any means be seen

by the uninitiated; and the uninitiated were everybody besides myself.

And here, I believe, I was following unconsciously, but most strictly,

the rules of all primitive mysteries throughout the world. The Greeks of

the historical period had become lax; they carried about the mystic fan

of Iacchus in public procession. But amongst the Blackfellows of

Australia, where the rites are much nearer to the original purity of

their institution, the mystic fan is not seen, only heard. Therefore the

Dark Lantern and the Mask were kept hidden in an obscure cranny of the

coach-house, which was at the end of an overshadowed drive at some

distance from the rectory. They were produced under the cover of the

darkness, these sacramental instruments, clouds and stars and the dim

boughs of trees and tangled undergrowth alone saw them. There were

certain solemn words which accompanied the ostension of the objects, but

they were in a language which I have long forgotten. But some day, when

the turmoil has died down, when the clouds have cleared for the sunset

and the apparition of the evening star, as I sit by a western shore

awaiting the boat of Avalon, I shall write my last treatise, under the

title of "The Dark Lantern and the Mask," _libellus vere mysticus_. And

here I give notice to all good and lawful men that I am duly seized of

the above title, so that they may abstain from intromitting with the

same.

This digression of the dark lantern proceeded, naturally enough, from my

speaking of shorthand. This art, I said, appealed to me when I was a

boy, and its appeal was that of a kind of mystery writing, of a script

not in common use. For my acquaintance did not lie in journalistic

circles. I knew nobody who could write shorthand or understood anything

about it, and so the three books of Pitman--"Teacher," "Manual," and

"Reporter"--were three mystery books, so far as my small world was

concerned. But now, in later years, having written that famous poem on

the initiation of Eleusis, I was to be a journalist, and to be a

journalist I must learn shorthand. And then I found Phonography a

mystery indeed, and too great a mystery for me, since I could not attain

to it. I muddled about with it for three or four years; I actually made

some use of it in one of my queer employments, but I never wrote it

decently. I was too fumble-fisted; try as I would, I could not form the

characters with elegance or accuracy. My p's and b's would wobble and

bend till they looked like f's and v's, if I tried to halve a letter I

quartered it. A kindly reporter gave me a hint: "Don't bother about the

thick and thin lines," he said, "I never do." And no doubt the skilled

shorthand writer can play all manner of tricks with the system, but I

was not a skilled writer, and I took the reporter's advice and made bad

worse. My last shorthand lesson was taken in 1885, long after I had

ceased to think of journalism as a profession. Indeed, I cannot now

remember why I continued to waste my time over a craft that I could not

master; but I suppose I thought the endeavour gave an air of

respectability and solidity to my proceedings that they would have

lacked without it. From June 1881 to December 1882 I was more or less

vaguely bent on the journalist's career. I remember feeling somewhat

discouraged during this period by reading an advertisement for a

journalistic position in a London paper. The applicant could write

shorthand at the rate of one hundred and fifty words a minute, he

understood all about reporting, he was an expert at "leaderettes," and

quite willing to take a turn at the case--all for thirty shillings a

week. This did not seem promising, but I need not have disturbed myself;

my journalistic days were not yet, nor for many years to come. In the

meanwhile I read variously and became thoroughly familiar with

Boswell's Johnson (in Mr. Percy Fitzgerald's edition). And one windy,

gusty night, when the costers' flares in the back streets were burning

with a rushing sound, I came upon a secondhand bookshop on the main road

between Hammersmith and Turnham Green, and went in and found an odd

volume of William Morris's "Earthly Paradise." Now followed the old

trouble, and in a worse form. As Swinburne's "Songs Before Sunrise" had

first set me versifying, so the "Earthly Paradise" reinforced the

original virus. And now I had acquired some slight facility of a

worthless sort, and so I began to imitate William Morris, and spent the

odd hours of six good months in writing a sham-Greek tale in rhymed

couplets; which I tore up thirty years ago. And then I discovered

Herrick, and tried to imitate that inimitable writer; but this effort,

though vain in itself, was not so wholly vain. For it brought me, as it

were, into the seventeenth century, into an age which I have loved ever

since with a peculiar devotion. Ten years later I went on pilgrimage to

Dean Prior and Dean Churchtown, and in spite of the restored church,

trod the lanes under the moor with reverence, since Herrick's feet had

passed by those ways.

But now towards the end of the year 1882, after I had known London, on

and off, for nearly two and a half years, all that feeling of its

immense gaiety with which I had approached it in the first place was

dropping from me. I began to realise, very gradually and by dismal

degrees, that the gaieties of London were commodities that had to be

bought with money, and that I had none. The theatre had ceased to charm

me, and I am very sorry to say that it has never charmed me since; that

is from the point of view of the man sitting in the pit. By the end of

'82 I had quite definitely ceased to be "fond of the play."

For now London began to assume for me its terrible aspect. It was rather

a goblin's castle than a city of delights; if indeed it had not become a

place of punishment wherein I was condemned to hard labour through many

dreary and hopeless years.

_Chapter V_

In that wonderful volume which is called the Grand Saint Graal we are

told how the hermit Nasciens received a magic book from paradise. It was

divided into portions, and one of these portions was intituled "Here

Begin Terrors." I can find no words that might more fitly introduce the

tale of my solitary life in London. I was only twenty; I was poor; I was

desolate. And I frizzled all the time (or most of it) on the fire of my

own futility; I longed to make literature, and I could only write

nonsense.

I was employed for a time in a house of business in a street north of

the Strand and parallel to it, which, I suppose, must have been Chandos

Street. I know that it was still paved with cobble-stones. My employers

were publishers--the firm has for many years ceased to exist--and I was

something or other in what is called the "editorial" department. But to

the best of my belief publishing books was but a minor part of the

energies of the house, and I should think a later growth. The real

staple was wholesale stationery; there was an important "line" of

copybooks, there was a great deal done with ornamental and decorated

albums, and also with pictorial calendars. The Shakespeare calendar of

the House is still in existence, or was in existence a year or two ago,

and it bears the name of the vanished firm. Mr. (afterwards Sir) Walter

Besant had been the "editor" of Messrs. Chandos and Co., but just before

I made my first trial of business life he had resigned, and his place

was taken by a very kindly literary gentleman, whose name I have

forgotten. Afterwards he edited a series, if not several series, of

anthologies, and was, I believe, appointed Professor of English

Literature at some Indian seminary of learning. I do not know whether he

is still alive. Well, it was my business to assist this gentleman. I

think I was engaged as his "secretary," but I was known in the House as

his "clurk." I am trying to recollect what I actually did to assist him.

My first job on the morning of my arrival I can remember. I made a copy

of Mr. Gladstone's Latin version of the well-known hymn, "Rock of Ages":

"Jesu, pro me perforatus," it began. And then I had to take down in

shorthand and afterwards write in longhand a stern letter to somebody

who had made a mistake in the name of King Alfred's grandmother. This

error had occurred in one of a series of Board School history books that

the firm was publishing; and this circumstance alone gave me a loathing

and hatred for the whole business, since I thought then, and think

still, that the name of King Alfred's grandmother is not of the faintest

consequence to any reasonable being. It is the kind of fact which would

interest a German deeply; he would spend years of his life to find out

all about it; but such is not the occupation of a gentleman.

In the afternoon of that day we became a little livelier. My chief

contributed a London letter to some Scottish paper--he came from the

northern part of this island--and again my shorthand was required. The

London letter was distinctly gay in its tone, it dealt in a cheerful

spirit with some early incidents in the career of a certain admirable

actress whose talents then engaged and delighted us. As I took it down

it struck me as over worldly for the readers of the "Haddaneuk Herald,"

and sure enough my man reconsidered the matter and struck out the

gaieties from the copy. And how did that famous shorthand of mine serve

me? Not so vilely, considering all things. I had a quick memory then,

and remembered many of the phrases that had been dictated, and I could

read quite a lot of the characters that I had formed, and others gave me

a vague sort of intimation of the sense; just as the neumes helped the

church-singers of the earlier ages; they were quite useful if you knew

the tune.

I search my memory for further details of my occupation with Chandos and

Co. I think that the Shakespeare Calendar occupied me during odd hours

for a week or more. This was January, and I was set to the preparation

of the calendar for the next year. It was not a difficult task, and I

was furnished with a sort of album, containing the Shakespeare calendars

for the past six or seven years, and my only business was to make a new

almanack out of these old elements. Thus January 1, 1884, gave the

Shakespearean quotation that had been assigned to December 27, 1877; for

January 2 I chose a motto that had pertained to February 6, 1882, and

so forth. It was easy, but dull. And I was dull, too, or I would have

invented Shakespearean lines that Shakespeare never wrote, and trusted

to the all but universal ignorance of Shakespeare. I did something like

that, when I was an older and a merrier man. I persuaded a friend of

mine, a young fellow of literary tastes, that one of the most famous

phrases ascribed to Shakespeare was in reality a gag, invented by Mr. F.

R. Benson's stage manager. "Do you mean to say," said my friend, "that

this Mr. Randle Ayrton invented 'a poor thing, but mine own'?"

"Certainly," I replied. "Then," said he, "Ayrton must be a most

wonderful man." And I wonder how many of my readers know exactly how the

matter stands--without referring to the play?

And then what else did I do for my pound a week in Chandos Street?

Chiefly, I think I took down and transcribed a daily report to the head

office of the firm, which was in Belfast or Dundee or some such town. I

don't remember in the least what it was about, whether it dealt with

King Alfred's grandmother's name or with other matters. But I had to

write about two quarto pages daily of this report, and put D 1 in the

margin. I think D 1 meant Literary Department; but the whole thing was

the terror of my life. For it had to be neatly written, with a fair and

level margin on each side; and this I could by no means achieve. Again

and again my D 1 was condemned as a ragged and untidy performance, and I

had to copy it out all over again, as if I had been a careless

schoolboy--as, indeed, I was from the firm's point of view.

And I sit in my corner, trying to write a round, clear, clerkly hand,

trying to remember that of the two forms of the small "t" one was much

to be preferred, trying to observe the rule that "today" must be written

as one word, not two, and that for commercial purposes "draft" must be

spelt with "f," not with "ugh"; and thinking of the nightingale in the

thorn bush by the Soar, in the still valley.

Here I was, then, in Chandos Street, a peg of no particular shape at all

in a perfectly round hole, feeling very miserable indeed. We were, I

believe, somewhat cramped for room, and I had a desk in the album

department. Here three very cheerful and kindly young fellows of about

my own age did something with handsome albums. I don't know in the least

what they did; so far as I could see they took albums out of tissue

paper and put them back into tissue paper all day long. One of them, the

senior of the room--he must have been three or four years older than any

of us--was just about to make a real start in life. He used to tell me

all about it when we were alone together for a minute or two, as

sometimes happened. There was a young lady whom he was to marry in a few

months' time, and he had made arrangements for setting up as a stationer

in Harlesden, and he meant to push Chandos's stuff--albums and

everything--and to do well and be happy. "Poor man, and then he died,"

to quote one of Dr. Johnson's muttered undertones. I do not know how far

his short life at Harlesden was successful or felicitous. But as for me,

I hated it all. It was not that the work was hard, but that I took no

interest in it, and saw no reason why it should be done at all, or why

anybody alive should do it. So I looked about me, and through the favour

of a friend I got a little teaching of small children at twenty-five

shillings a week. Then I gave notice to Messrs. Chandos. They were very

kind; they offered me twenty-five shillings a week to stay, but I

thanked them and said no. It was the business atmosphere of the place

that I detested; I have always agreed with the small boy in "Nicholas

Nickleby" who uttered the great maxim, "Never Perform Business." The

teaching which followed was certainly not exciting, but I did not mind

it. Indeed, having to teach Euclid, I found to my amazement that it was

about something, and actually was a coherent and reasoned scheme of

things, not a mere madhouse puzzle, as I had always imagined. But then

my own geometrical instruction had been limited. It consisted simply in

this: Fourteen Euclids were served out to fourteen small boys. The

mathematical master then said: "Learn the Definitions, Axioms, and

Postulates." That was my first and my last lesson in geometry; though I

duly went through the accustomed books of Euclid, trying to learn by

heart what was to me mere unmeaning gibberish.

At this time and for the next year and a half I was living in Clarendon

Road, Notting Hill Gate--or Holland Park, to give the politer

subdirection. I am sorry to say that I had not a garret, since the

houses of that quarter, being comparatively modern, do not possess the

sloping roofs which have seen the miseries of so many lettered men.

Still, my room had its merits. It was, of course, at the top of the

house, and it was much smaller than any monastic "cell" that I have ever

seen. From recollection I should estimate its dimensions as ten feet by

five. It held a bed, a washstand, a small table, and one chair; and so

it was very fortunate that I had few visitors. Outside, on the landing,

I kept my big wooden box with all my possessions--and these not many--in

it. And there was a very notable circumstance about this landing. On the

wall was suspended, lengthwise, a step-ladder by which one could climb

through a trap door to the roof in case of fire, and so between the

rungs or steps of this ladder I disposed my library. For anything I

know, the books tasted as well thus housed as they did at a later period

when I kept them in an eighteenth-century bookcase of noble dark

mahogany, behind glass doors. There was no fireplace in my room, and I

was often very cold. I would sit in my shabby old great-coat, reading or

writing, and if I were writing I would every now and then stand up and

warm my hands over the gas-jet, to prevent my fingers getting numb. I

remember envying a man very much indeed on a certain night in late

winter or early spring. It was a very cold night; there was a bitter

north-easter blowing, and the wind seemed to pierce right through my old

coat and to set my very bones shivering and aching. I had gone abroad,

because I was weary of my den, because I was sick with reading and in no

humour for writing, because I felt I must have some change, however

slight. But it was an evil and a bitter blast, so I turned back after a

little while, coming down one of the steep streets that lead from

Notting Hill Gate Station to Clarendon Road. And half-way home I came

upon a man encamped on the road by the pavement. He was watching over

some barrows and tools and other instruments of street repair, and he

sat in a sort of canvas wigwam, well sheltered from the wind that was

chilling me to the heart. His coat, too, looked thick and heavy, and he

had a warm comforter round his neck, and before him was a glowing,

ardent brazier of red-hot coals. He held his hands and his nose over the

radiant heat, and smoked a black clay pipe; and I think he had a can of

beer beside him. I envied that man with all my heart; I don't think I

have ever envied any man so much.

Occasionally I had applications for the loan of a book from my

step-ladder library. These came from the lodgers on the ground floor, an

Armenian and his wife, who annoyed the landlady by sleeping in cushions

piled about the carpet and hanging their blankets in front of the doors

and windows. It was the Armenian lady who had literary tastes, and her

desire was always for "a story-book." I never saw her or her husband,

but I often heard him calling Mary, the servant. He would stand at the

top of the kitchen stairs and shout "Marry! Marry!" and then,

reflectively, and after a short interval, "Damn that girl." He gave a

fine, Oriental force to the common English "damn." Other lodgers that I

remember were a young Greek and a chorus girl, mates for a single

summer. They occupied the first floor and were succeeded by a family

from Ireland. I have a confused notion that there was something a

little queer about the head of this household. He was, I think, a major,

and I know he was Evangelical. As I went down the stairs I heard him

more than once uttering in loud, earnest tones the words, "Let us pray."

This was startling; and one of his daughters would always shut the door

of their room with a bang on these occasions, and that was startling,

too.

The little table in my little room turned out to be a very useful piece

of furniture. I not only read at it and wrote on it, but I used it as a

larder. In the corner nearest the angle of the wall by the window I kept

my provisions, that is to say, a loaf of bread and a canister of green

tea. Morning and evening the landlady or "Marry" would bring me up a

tray on which were a plate, a knife, a teapot, a cup and saucer, and a

jug of hot water. With the aid of a kettle and a spirit lamp, which

came, I think, from under that serviceable table--one may fairly say

from the cellar--I made the hot water to boil and brewed a great pot of

strong green tea.

In the first months of this life of mine an early dinner was added to

the fees of my teaching; later, my pupils changed, and the dinner

disappeared. I then used to spend the hour in the middle of the day in

wanderings about Turnham Green and the waste places round Gunnersbury,

making my meal on a large Captain's biscuit and a glass of beer. I

varied this repast by taking it in various public-houses. In those days

there were still pleasing and ancient taverns scattered along those

western roads. One I remember in particular, a very old, tumbledown

house, set at the edge of the market gardens, which then approached

almost to Turnham Green. There was not a straight line about this old,

old house, its roof-tree dipped and wavered, and the roof was of

mellowed tiles, and one end of the place was quite overwhelmed by a huge

billow of ivy. I used to think that highwaymen must have lurked in the

little room where I took my biscuit and glass of ale; and the food and

drink tasted much better on that account. The old tavern, and its

leaning sheds and ragged outbuildings, its red roof and its green ivy;

all are gone long ago. There is a row of raw houses where it stood, and

I hate them. Sometimes I did not have any beer, either because I did not

want any, or because it struck me as too great a luxury. Then I would

buy a small bag of currant biscuits and take them to the region of the

market gardens and devour them, sitting on a gate or sheltering behind a

hedge. I don't know how it is, but these feasts are always connected in

my mind with a grey and gloomy sky and a very cold wind, so that I

shiver when I think of flat, square biscuits in which currants are

embedded. But I have a reverence for them, too. There were, I confess,

days of gross debauch. Once a week, or once a fortnight at the least, I

went to a goodly and spacious and ancient tavern on the high road, and

had a grilled chop, potatoes, bread, and beer; which came to one and a

penny or one and twopence. _Les Cotelettes de Mouton_, _Sauce Benie_ the

dish is called by the experts of the _haute cuisine_. I can recommend

it. And in the evenings I sometimes exceeded, though not so violently. I

would, nine evenings out of ten, buy my provision of bread at a shop at

the bottom of the long main road, opposite or nearly opposite to

Uxbridge Road Station. The shop kept a very choice kind of gingerbread,

and I would buy a couple of bricks of this gingerbread, and munch them

with a high relish as a supplement to the common bread.

As the spring of 1883 advanced, and the weather improved and the

evenings lengthened, I began the habit of rambling abroad in the hope of

finding something that could be called country. I would sometimes pursue

Clarendon Road northward and get into all sorts of regions of which I

never had any clear notion. They are obscure to me now, and a sort of

nightmare. I see myself getting terribly entangled with a canal which

seemed to cross my path in a manner contrary to the laws of reason. I

turn a corner and am confronted with an awful cemetery, a terrible city

of white gravestones and shattered marble pillars and granite urns, and

every sort of horrid heathenry. This, I suppose, must have been Kensal

Green: it added new terror to death. I think I came upon Kensal Green

again and again; it was like the Malay, an enemy for months. I would

break off by way of Portobello Road and entangle myself in Notting Hill,

and presently I would come upon the goblin city; I might wander into the

Harrow Road, but at last the ghost-stones would appal me. Maida Vale was

treacherous, Paddington false--inevitably, it seemed, my path led me to

the detested habitation of the dead.

Be it remembered that my horror at the sight of Kensal Green Cemetery

was due to this, that, odd as it may seem to townsfolk, I had never seen

a cemetery before. Well I knew the old graveyards of Gwent, solemn

amongst the swelling hills, peaceful in the shadow of very ancient yews.

I knew well these garths. There was Henllis, high up on the mountain

side, in the place of roaring winds, under the faery dome of Twyn

Barlwm. I had lingered there of autumn evenings while the sun set red

over the mountains, and a drift of rain came with the gathering

darkness, as the yew boughs beat upon the east window of the church.

There were graves there with flourished inscriptions, deeply cut, and

queer Welsh rhymes--_dyma gareg deg_:--

Here's a rare stone--of death.

Beneath it lies

A rarer dust, that shall arise

By heavenly breath alone; and climb the skies--

We trust.

* * * * *

I knew the churchyard of Llanddewi, looking down the steep hillside into

the chanting valley of the Soar, and Kemeys, between the Forest and the

Usk, and Partrishw, in the heart of the wild mountains beyond

Abergavenny. These places of the dead were solemn with old religion, and

the tones of _Dirige_ and _De Profundis_ and _Requiem AEternam_ sang

still about them on their hills; but this white ghostly city of

corruption--there was nothing but horror in it! Still, I see myself on

these wanderings, beating to and fro in the stony wilderness, entangled,

as I say, in the endless mazes of unknown streets. Now I would succeed

in breaking away. I would pass that sad zone of destruction and disgrace

that always lies just beyond the furthest points of the suburb. These

are the places where the hedges are half ruined, half remaining, where

the little winding brook is defiled, but not yet a drain, where one tree

lies felled and withered, while its fellow is still all green. Here

curbstones impinge on the fields, and show where new, rabid streets are

to rush up the sweet hillside and capture it; here the well under the

thorn is choked with a cartload of cheap bricks lately deposited. I

would pass over these dismal regions and come, as I thought, into the

fair open country, and then suddenly at the turn of the lane I would be

confronted by red ranks of brand-new villas: this might be Harlesden or

the outposts of Willesden.

I think that on the especial occasion that I have in mind the red row of

houses must have been some portion or fragment of Harlesden. I remember

that, like the cemetery, this impressed me as a wholly new and

unforeseen horror, something as strange and terrible as the apparition

of a rattlesnake or a boa-constrictor might be to an English child,

wandering a little away into the orchard or the wood near the house. I

had never lived in a world that might have prepared me for such things;

in Gwent--in my day, at all events--there was no such phenomenon as this

sudden and violent irruption of red brick in the midst of a green field;

and thus when I came round the corner of a peaceful lane and saw in the

midst of elms and meadows this staring spectacle, I was as aghast as

Robinson Crusoe when he saw the track of the foot on the sand of his

desert island.

... And here I would make a parenthesis, and say that so long as my

writing habits had any concern with the imagination I never departed

from the one formula. This not consciously; in fact, I have a secret

doctrine to the effect that in literature no imaginative effects are

achieved by logical predetermination. I have told, I think, how I was

confronted suddenly and for the first time with the awe and solemnity

and mystery of the valley of the Usk, and of the house called Bartholly

hanging solitary between the deep forest and the winding esses of the

river. This spectacle remained in my heart for years, and at last I

transliterated it, clumsily enough, in the story of "The Great God Pan,"

which, as a friendly critic once said, "does at least make one believe

in the devil, if it does nothing else." Here, of course, was my real

failure; I translated awe, at worst awfulness, into evil; again, I say,

one dreams in fire and works in clay. But, at all events, my method

never altered. More legitimately than in the instance of "The Great God

Pan" I made the horrid apparition of the crude new houses in the midst

of green pastures the seed of my tale, "The Inmost Light," which was

originally bound up with "The Great God Pan." And so the man in my

story, resting in green fields, looked up and saw a face that chilled

his blood gazing at him from the back of one of those red houses that

once had frightened me, when I was a sorry lad of twenty, wandering

about the verges of London. The doctor of my tale lived in Harlesden.

And if I may pursue this subject farther I would suggest that the whole

matter of imaginative literature depends upon this faculty of seeing the

universe, from the aeonian pebble of the wayside to the raw suburban

street as something new, unheard of, marvellous, finally, miraculous.

The good people--amongst whom I naturally class myself--feel that

everything is miraculous; they are continually amazed at the strangeness

of the proportion of all things. The bad people, or scientists as they

are sometimes called, maintain that nothing is properly an object of awe

or wonder since everything can be explained. They are duly punished.

If we go more deeply into this text of Horror and Harlesden, it will

become apparent, I think, that what is called genius is not only of many

varying degrees of intensity, but also very distinctly of two parts or

functions. There is the passive side of genius, that faculty which is

amazed by the strange, mysterious, admirable spectacle of the world,

which is enchanted and rapt out of our common airs by hints and omens of

an adorable beauty everywhere latent beneath the veil of appearance. Now

I think that every man or almost every man is born with the potentiality

at all events of this function of genius. _Os homini sublime dedit,

coelumque tueri_: man, as distinct from the other animals, carries his

head on high so that he may look upon the heavens; and I think that we

may say that this sentence has an interior as well as an exterior

meaning. The beasts look downward, to the earth, not only in the letter

but in the spirit; they are creatures of material sensation, living by

far the greatest part of their lives in a world of hot and cold, hunger

and thirst and satisfaction. Man, on the other hand, is by his nature

designed to look upward, to gaze into the heavens that are all about

him, to discern the eternal in things temporal. Or, as the Priestess of

the Holy Bottle defines and distinguishes: the beasts are made to drink

water, but men to drink wine. This, the receptive or passive part of

genius, is, I say, given to every human being, at least potentially. We

receive, each one of us, the magic bean, and if we will plant it it will

undoubtedly grow and become our ladder to the stars and the cloud

castles. Unfortunately the modern process, so oddly named civilisation,

is as killing to this kind of gardening as the canker to the rose; and

thus it is that if I want a really nice chair, I must either buy a chair

that is from a hundred to a hundred and fifty years old, or else a

careful copy or replica of such a chair. It may appear strange to

Tottenham Court Road and the modern furniture trade; but it is none the

less true that you cannot design so much as a nice arm-chair unless you

have gone a little way at all events up the magic beanstalk.

Still, many of us have our portion of the passive or perceptive faculty

of genius; we are moved by the wonder of the world; we know ourselves as

citizens of an incredible city, we catch stray glimpses of faery

Atlantis, drowned beneath the ocean of sense. But it is one thing to

dream dreams; and quite another to interpret them, and in this active

faculty of interpretation, or translation of the heavenly tongues into

earthly speech, there are infinite degrees of excellence. And the

masters in this craft of interpretation are few indeed. And the final

conclusion--a sad one for me--is that if I could have "translated" the

Horror of Harlesden competently I should have been a man of genius.

* * * * *

Still, I see myself all through that year 1883 tramping, loafing,

strolling along interminable streets and roads lying to the north-west

and the west of London, a shabby, sorry figure; and always alone. I

remember walking to Hendon and back--this must have been on a whole

holiday--and to this day I can't think how I found my way there, through

what clues I struck from the north parts of Clarendon Road into the

Harrow Road, and how I knew when to leave the Edgware Road and bend to

the right. Anyhow, I got there and back, tired enough and glad of the

half-loaf of bread that awaited me.

Then I became learned in Wormwood Scrubs and its possibilities. It was

and is a very barren and bleak place itself, but in those days there was

an attractive corner on the Acton side of the waste, that I was fond of

contemplating. This was a sort of huddle of old cottages and barns and

outhouses with a fringe of elms about them. It did my eyes good then as

now to look on something that was old and worn with use and mellow; my

eyes that were bleared and aching with the rawness and newness of

multitudinous London. To me an old cottage, with its little latticed

porch and its tangled garden patch, was veritable balm; I would gaze on

such a place with refreshment and delight, as desert travellers must

gaze on the cold pools and green leafage of an unexpected oasis. I used

to light on these little, humble, pleasant retreats in my walks--there

were many more of such cottages in the outskirts of London then than

now--and make impossible plans for migrating from the urbanity of

Clarendon Road into one of these hidden places, where there would be a

garden for me to walk in, and perhaps a summer-house overgrown with

white roses, and a little low room with oldish furniture. But I found no

such place, and still went prowling in a kind of torment of the spirit

by the highways and by-ways of the west. Acton used to do me good; it

was then more like a country town than a modern suburb. On the right

hand, as you came up from the Uxbridge Road under the railway bridge,

there were then some grave and dignified houses of the early Georgian

period, with broad lawns before them and big gardens behind them. On the

left was the Priory, with spacious and park-like grounds and many greeny

elms. Legends about the first Lord Lytton hung about the Priory, and it

was whispered that the old lady who kept the lodge-gate had in her day

written daring poetry, of the erotic kind. There are laundries and rows

and rows of little houses now where the Priory stood; the Georgian

houses on the other side of the road have all been pulled down. But I

have a notion that the last time I went that way I saw a second-hand

bookshop on the London side of the railway bridge, where in '83 I bought

an old, odd volume of Cowley's poems.

The second-hand bookshop, which includes the bookstall, is one of the

many things that I have dabbled in; but I have never been sworn to the

hunt over the old shelves as to a devouring passion. I lack the great

incentive: the love of rare books on account of their rarity. I have a

great respect for the collector of such things, and I often envy him his

sudden joys of discovery; it must be like finding a golden treasure in a

rubbish heap; but I could never follow his example. Still, I often used

to amuse myself by grubbing about the dusty shelves for an odd hour or

two, turning over vast masses of insignificance--of insignificance for

me, at all events--conning titles, diving into prefaces, glancing

doubtfully over strange pages, wondering whether this or that or the

other would bring me the best entertainment for the few shillings that I

had to spend. In these new days the young man with a thirst for

literature has his labours simplified; the classics of the world are

ready for him, nicely printed, in a handy form, and at a low price. He

has simply to go into a shop, put down his shilling, and get his book,

and it is all over. This would never have done for me. When I bought a

book I required and obtained a long drawn-out, deliberated pleasure; I

considered that the possession of three-and-sixpence or five shillings

entitled me to a whole afternoon's rich enjoyment. Just as ladies of the

suburbs make arrangements--as I understand--to come up to town and do a

little shopping, and have a delicate cress-sandwich or two in Regent

Street, and then go to a matinee at the theatre, and have creamy cakes

for tea before they start back for the red villas: so did I use to

travel from Notting Hill Gate to Charing Cross, and stroll up Villiers

Street, and walk along the Strand, relishing its savours, which never

grew stale to me. For I do believe that the old Strand, before they

destroyed it with their porphyries and their marbles and Babylonian

fooleries and facades of all sorts, was the very finest street in all

the world. I know quite well its manifest and manifold weaknesses and

faults, if it were to be regarded from the point of view of a classical

town-architect. There was no plan, no design about it, no uniformity;

its houses were of all shapes, sizes, periods, and heights; it had no

more been designed than a wild hedgerow has been designed. And there,

exactly, was its infinite and subtle and curious charm. Nothing could be

more urban or urbane than the Strand; and yet it had grown, as the green

brake grows, as the cathedrals and the country houses of England grew

from age to age, gathering beauty as they increased. The Strand was an

altogether English street, and it was the very heart of London. In it,

or beside it, were the theatres and the bookshops and the cookshops; to

north and south odd passages and stairs and archways admitted the

curious into the oddest places and quarters. You were weary of the

traffic and the pattering feet? Then you could turn into New Inn or

Clement's Inn and enjoy deep silence. You wanted to see the old

hugger-mugger of the London back streets, dark taverns of the eighteenth

century, where men had lain hidden from the hangman? Here was Clare

Market for you. You had heard that "Elzevirs" were very rare and curious

books, and would like to see an Elzevir? You would lose your opinion of

their rarity, for you would see as many Elzevirs as any man could desire

in Holywell Street, where I believe they were to be bought by the sack,

as if they had been coals. And Elzevirs apart; the naughty prints and

books of Holywell Street were as good as a play. For I believe that the

Row had turned naughty somewhere in the early 'fifties; it had then got

in its stocks--and had kept them. Here were the works of G. M. W.

Reynolds in large volumes; "Mysteries of the Court of St. James," and

such weariness. Here was the faded coloured engraving of a young female

of extreme gaiety--with ringlets, and the appearance of the chambermaid

in the once-famous print, "Sherry, sir." And with all the curiosity, and

variety, and oddity and richness of the Strand, it had the while a

manner of snug homeliness and cosiness and comfort about it which was

quite inimitable. To be in the Strand was like drinking punch and

reading Dickens. One felt it was such a warmhearted, hospitable street,

if one only had a little money. Unfortunately, I was never on dining

terms, as it were, with the Strand; but I always felt that if it only

knew me it would have called me "old boy" and given me its choicest

saddles of mutton and its oldest port, and I felt grateful. Somehow I

always warmed my hands when I got into the Strand ... and they were

often chilly enough.

Such, then, was my preparation for a book-foray in the heart of London,

this relished, leisurely, savoury walk along the Strand; and then I

might dive into Clare Market by Clement's Inn and look for mystery books

in a certain shop that I knew there. I bought one of the most curious--I

do not say the best--books in the world, Vaughan's "Lumen de Lumine" in

a shop in Clare Market, and still I should be much obliged if someone

would tell me what "Lumen de Lumine" is about. Or I might try Denny's,

at the western end of Booksellers' Row, or like enough go grovelling

round the shelves of Reeves and Turner, who were then in the southern

bend of the Strand, opposite to St. Clement Dane's Church.

One dull afternoon, I remember, I ran to earth in this shop on a lower

shelf a dim, brown elderly-looking book in cloth covers called

"Ferrier's Institutes of Metaphysic." It repaid me many times over for

the couple of shillings that I gave for it. I took Ferrier home in

delight to the little room in Clarendon Road, and made a great deal of

green tea, and found the dry bread of quite admirable flavour, and

smoked pipes and read the new book far into the night. Before I

went to bed Ferrier had quite convinced me of the truth of the

proposition--which looked odd at first--that we can only be ignorant of

that which we can know. This means, of course, that no man can be

ignorant of the existence of four-sided triangles; which is evident

enough. But as I fell asleep, I felt I had had a tremendous day.

* * * * *

I look back upon myself in that little room in Clarendon Road with some

amazement. I come in from one of my long, prowling walks--I may have

been to Hounslow to look for the Heath, or I may have been to Hampton

Court--and make my meal of bread and tea, and then settle down to

tobacco and literature. I find that my landlady turns off the gas at the

meter at midnight, so I provide myself with carriage candles, which I

fix up somehow on the table. I read on night after night. It may be

Homer's "Odyssey," or it may be "Don Quixote"--to which I have been

faithful ever since I found the book in the drawing-room of Llanfrechfa

Rectory--it may be that singular magazine of oddities, Disraeli's

"Curiosities of Literature," it may be Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy";

a great refuge, this last, a world of literature in itself. Or I am

reading Pepys for the first time, with ravishment, or Pomponius Mela "De

Situ Orbis" in a noble Stephanus quarto, or Harris's "Hermes," or

Hargrave Jennings on the Rosicrucians; this last one of the craziest and

most entertaining of books, which had a little later an odd influence on

my fortunes. It was a sad blow to me to find out afterwards, chiefly

through the medium of A. E. Waite's "Real History of the Rosicrucians,"

that, as a cold matter of fact, there were no Rosicrucians. A Lutheran

pastor who had read Paracelsus, wrote, early in the seventeenth

century, a pamphlet describing a secret order which had no existence

outside of his brain. Naturally enough, societies arose which imitated,

so far as they could, the imaginary organisation described by the

fantastic Johannes Valentinus Andrea; I should not be surprised, indeed,

to be told that such societies are now in being in modern London; but

these orders are late "fakes"; the 'seventies and 'eighties of the last

century saw their beginnings. There are no Rosicrucians--and there never

were any.

Or I am reading Carlyle--"Sartor Resartus" or the Johnson and Burns and

Walter Scott Essays--and I must say that I think a good many young men

of this age would be all the better for a Carlyle course. For though

Carlyle was not the prophet of full inspiration that the time just

before my own imagined, though he exalted brute force into a place that

belongs to the Divine Wisdom, though his original Calvinism hung like a

dark and obscuring cloud over all his life, yet I know not any man of

these days that is worthy to dust Carlyle's hat or to clean his pipe for

him.

There is a passage in the Johnson essay telling how the poor, agonised,

heroic doctor made for himself a boat of the transient driftwood and

enduring iron, and sailed down Fleet Ditch, "the roaring mother of dead

dogs," to the City that hath foundations; the phrases ring still in my

heart, noble music; worthier stuff than the prophecies of to-day--or

should I say of yesterday? These, so far as I can make out, bid us

abstain from meat and beer and tobacco, and the State shall give us a

pound a day and save our souls alive. This message does not ring in my

heart a noble music; I think Carlyle would have called it "a damned

potato gospel." I read Carlyle, then, in my little room, and find a

strange encouragement and strength in him. His picture of life is of a

bitter struggle, and so indeed I find it--at twenty. Man, in Carlyle, is

a poor wretch in thin and ragged clothes, out on a blasted heath, with

all the heavens and all the clouds crashing and pouring upon him;

blackness over him, hailstorms and fire showers his portion in the

world. Get into whatever kennel or doghole you can find, says Carlyle,

and shelter yourself from the blast so long as you can keep it, and be

thankful. I liked the doctrine then, and it still seems to me a very

good philosophy.

So I read and meditated night after night, and I am amazed at the utter

loneliness of it all, when I contrast this life of mine with the

beginnings of other men of letters. These others have often gathered

friends of all sorts, both useful and pleasant, at the University; they

have come of well-known stocks, every step they take is eased for them,

their way is pointed out, there are hands to help them over the rough

and difficult places. Or, even if they have not been at Oxford or

Cambridge, if they have not come of "kent folk," they know, somehow or

other, young fellows of their own age, with whom they can engage in

endless talk about letters over eternal pipes and ever-welling tankards.

One informs another, one, consciously or unconsciously, charts the

other's way for him. I am often made quite envious when I see and hear

how a young man, fresh on the town, drops so easily, so pleasantly, so

delightfully into a quite distinguished place in literature before he is

twenty-five. He enters the world of letters as a perfectly well-bred man

enters a room full of a great and distinguished company, knowing exactly

what to say, and how to say it; everyone is charmed to see him; he is at

home at once; and almost a classic in a year or two.

And I, all alone in my little room, friendless, desolate; conscious to

my very heart of my stuttering awkwardness whenever I thought of

attempting the great speech of literature; wandering, bewildered, in the

world of imagination, not knowing whither I went, feeling my way like a

blind man, stumbling like a blind man, like a blind man striking my head

against the wall, for me no help, no friends, no counsel, no comfort.

Somehow or other, out of a welter of reading of the most miscellaneous

and shapeless sort, out of long walks and long meditations, out of

moonings and loafings by Brentford and the parts thereto adjacent, there

rose up in the spring of 1883 the beginnings of something that had a

vague resemblance to a book. I had finished that miserable "poem" which

attempted the manner of William Morris, and from that time my attacks of

verse-writing became brief and trifling, causing no uneasiness. And,

this trouble happily over, I became immersed in the study of scholastic

logic, and gave many days and nights to Whately's "Elements." I got

Thomson also, and dallied with the quantification of the predicate, but

I found such devices too new-fangled; what I wanted was the logic of

the mediaeval schools, and in this I took a singular and intense delight.

And here is a paradox, which may be worthy the consideration of the

curious: that age which was above all the age of logic, was also the age

of the most luxuriant and splendid imagination. The scholars and

thinkers of the Middle Ages have been reproached with idolising the

logical process to a point of utter extravagance, with treating the

syllogism as a sort of divining rod by which all the treasures of the

spiritual, intellectual, and physical worlds could be discovered and

drawn up from the dark womb and chaos of things into the light of the

sun. These reproaches, I think, have chiefly proceeded from people to

whom exact thinking has proved unpleasant and unprofitable; but it is

certainly true that the logical art was deeply and profoundly and

constantly studied in the thirteenth century--which was the age of the

marvellous imagery, the great magistry of the Gothic cathedrals, of the

Arthurian romances, of Dante. Nay, it is interesting to note that

Coleridge and De Quincey, two main agents of the "renascence of wonder"

at the beginning of the nineteenth century, were both practised

logicians. It would seem, therefore, that the dream and the syllogism

have between them a certain secret alliance and bond, and so, naturally

enough, two of the most extravagant dreams, "Alice in Wonderland," and

"Alice Through the Looking-Glass," were the visions of a master of

logic. As for the Snark, I can inform the inquisitive as to his true

abode. He dwells in the place that is called Bocardo.

And so I steeped myself in these rare and entrancing studies, for such

they seemed, and still seem to me. And thus I would sit on a bench on

that bald, arid, detestable Shepherd's Bush Green, and be in reality,

though not in actuality--let us for the moment adapt our discourse to

the matter, and make the distinction--in cool, grey cloisters of the

Middle Ages, walking in the silvery light with the Master of the

Sentences, with the Angelic Doctor, listening to the high, interminable

argument of the Schools. High, indeed, as dealing with immortal

essences, not with monkeys' guts; interminable also in the manner of the

cathedral rushing upwards to the stars which it cannot attain, of the

old modes in which there are no true closes, but rather hints of undying

melodies far beyond their endings; interminable, according to the dictum

of one of these dark-robed Masters; _omnia exeunt in mysterium_. For

there is a quest to which there is no term, nor bound, nor limit:

_pelagus vastissimum_. Meditating these things, the jangling of the old

horse trams might disturb me, and I would carry my quiddities to green

fields by Hanger Hill, or to solitary places in Osterley Park, beyond

Brentford, and so muse till the shadows came and sent me homeward under

the twinkling, wavering lamps of those far-off days. Then for much

tobacco, the disjunctive hypothetical syllogism and the strict rigour of

the game. I am afraid very little of the old science has remained with

me, but now and then I come with some amusement on distinguished

personages engaged in what they suppose is argument. I see no arguments;

but undistributed middle terms are thick as October leaves in Wentwood.

From such a soil, then, the thing that had certain resemblances to a

book rose up and gradually took shape, so far as it ever had any shape.

It came up out of my logic books and out of Burton's "Anatomy of

Melancholy," and so it was called "The Anatomy of Tankards." For, having

enough sense, even though I was only twenty, to know that I could not

write a serious treatise concerning the high doctrines that entranced

me, I wrote a grave burlesque of what I loved. I examined into the

essence of the tankard, I sought deeply into its quiddity, I divided its

properties from its accidents, and distinguished again between the

separable and inseparable accidents. I showed philosophically and

conclusively that if there were no tankards there would be no men, that

is, no rational or civilised men. For the ancient Greeks truly taught

that man was raised from the brutish to the spiritual state by Bacchus,

the giver of the vine. By wine is man made divine; and a diviner, says

Bacbuc: and since wine must be contained before it can be drunk, it is

clear that without tankards man cannot become divine; that is, cannot be

man at all, in the proper sense of the term. And so on, and so on, with

an infinite deal of easy dictionary learning, with much twisting of my

logic formulae; it was all too elaborate, elephantine, prolonged; a

little thing that might have been well enough in its way drawn out into

a big thing, and so spoiled. Still, I was only twenty, and twenty is apt

to worry its bone long after all the meat has disappeared.

But if I could only have written the real book--that is, the dreamed,

intended book--and not the actual book! Then, I promise you, you should

have had high fantasies; not only arguments that began with a pebble by

the way and rose upward to the evening star, that deduced all the

shining worlds in an ineffable sorites from one mere letter of the

alphabet. You should not only have been in at the death when Achilles

caught at last the tortoise and passed him by, spurning his body into

that utter void where parallel straight lines meet; you should have had

an English Rabelais.

I remember taking my thoughts of the book up to Ealing Common one autumn

evening. The work was drawing to a close, and I stood meditating the

matter, looking from the height down towards Brentford. There was a wild

sunset, scarlet and green and gold, and as it were, gardens of Persian

roses, far in the evening sky. I stood by an old twisted oak, and

thought of my book as I would have made it, and sighed, and so went home

and made it as I could.

_Chapter VI_

The kind of life that I have been trying to indicate lasted for about

eighteen months, and then my pupils mysteriously disappeared.

Mysteriously, I say, for I have completely forgotten what became of

them, and by what ways they left me. At all events, they vanished, and

I, being destitute, returned to Gwent and my old home. There they were

almost as poor as poverty, but they were glad to see me. And I, waking

in the morning to the brave breath from the mountain, wandering in the

sunshine--it was summer-time--about the gardens and the orchards,

revisiting the green, delicious heart of the twisted brake, listening

once more to the water bubbling from the rock; I thought I had been

translated from hell to paradise.

For, be it remembered, I have dealt gently with the days of Clarendon

Road. I have spoken for the most part of the happier hours, of eager

reading, of finding an enchanting book on dusty shelves, on the delights

of the mind, on the capacity of changing dreary, common Shepherd's Bush

into the cloistered walks of the Schools, on the joy of obtaining some

kind of literary utterance. I have said little of the black days and the

waste nights, of the desolation that would sometimes engulf me as it

were with a deep flood. For many weeks at a time I never spoke to any

human being; save to my pupils on Euclid and Caesar, and this was a

speech that was no speech. And being born, I believe, with at least the

usual instincts of human fellowship and a great love of all genial

interchanges of thought and opinion, this silence seared my spirit; to

the interior sense I must have shown as something burnt and blasted with

ice-winds and fires. Indeed, when I was released from this life in the

manner that I have described, I came out, as it were, a prisoner from

the black pit of his dungeon, all confused, trembling, and afraid,

scarce able to bear the light of genial affection. For a long while I

spoke but little, and then with difficulty; I was fast losing the habit

of speech. Indeed, the eighteen months in Clarendon Road had been a very

grave experience; but I think that what affected my relations most in my

demeanour was this: for a long time I would cut myself a piece of dry

bread at tea, and munch it mechanically, having forgotten all about the

use of butter. This struck them as dreadful; one might be poor, but to

eat dry bread was more than poverty; it was beggary. When my aunt first

noticed this trick of mine, she pushed the butter dish towards me,

saying in a disturbed voice that there was no need for _that_ any more.

And for many days I was in a sort of swoon of delight. I had no desire

for activities of any kind; I had all the happy languor of the

convalescent about me. It was bliss to stroll gently in that delicious

air, to watch the mists vanishing from the mountain-side in the morning,

to see again the old white farms beneath Twyn Barlwm and Mynydd Maen

gleaming in the sunlight, to lie in deep green shade and to feel that I

was at home again; that my troubles were over. I did not fret myself by

inquiring as to whether they would not begin again. Indeed, in this

first passion of relief, I loved to imagine myself as dwelling for the

rest of my days amidst friendly faces in a friendly land, and devoting,

say, fifty years to healing the wounds of eighteen months. It is a sorry

thing to be but twenty-one and to feel so.

But it is thus, I suppose, that the man of the imaginative cast of mind

pays, and pays heavily, for whatever qualities he may possess, and it

will always be a question whether the price exacted be not too dear and

beyond all proportion to the value received. But the case, I apprehend,

is this: Mr. Masefield has said, very finely, that literature is the art

of presenting the world as it were _in excess_. To the lovers in Mr.

Stephen Phillips's drama of "Paolo and Francesca" the earth appears a

greener green, the heavens a bluer blue; all beautiful things are raised

to a higher power by the fire of their passion; the whole world is

alchemised. And this state, which is a result of love, is the condition

of imaginative work in literature, and so the man who is to make

romances sees everything and feels everything acutely, or, as Mr.

Masefield says, excessively. Now there would be nothing amiss in this

state of things if these exalted and intensified perceptions could be

utilised when there was a question of making a book and then abrogated

and laid aside with pen and ink and paper. Unluckily, however, this

cannot be so managed; and too often the dealer in dreams finds that his

magic magnifying glass is tight fixed to his eyes and cannot be moved.

And thus a mere common bore or nuisance appears to him as dreadful as

Nero or Heliogabalus, the possibility of missing a train is as tragical

as "Hamlet," and the pettiest griefs swell into the hugest sorrows.

I, in truth, had suffered; I had been through a dreary and a dismal

experience enough; but my pains had racked me to excess; the pinpricks,

unpleasant in plain earnest, had become stabs of a poisoned dagger. And

so I came back to Gwent as to Avalon; there to heal me of my grievous

wounds. So, as I say, it was mercifully given to me to saunter under the

apple trees in July and August weather, to watch the sun and the wind on

the quivering woods, to wander alone, and yet how deeply consoled and

medicined, by the winding Soar Valley. Now and again I recollected, as I

hope we shall recollect earthly torments in Paradise, as things over and

paid for, the interminable, cruel labyrinths of London. I saw myself

again, a half-starved, unhappy, desolate wretch astray in those

intolerable, friendless, stony mazes of Notting Hill and Paddington and

Harrow Road; I came again by obscene, obscure paths to Kensal Green, the

place of the whited sepulchres. Or the hideous raw row of suburban

houses would suddenly confront me, surging up, a foul growth, from the

green meadow, or the sick reek of the brickfields by Acton Vale blew in

my nostrils. And the grim little room and solitude for the end of every

journey!

I recollected these things, but though only days or weeks had been

interposed between my happy state and my endurance of them they were as

torments suffered in some remote aeon. I said to myself, "I am as they

that rest at last," and almost heard the words _In Convertendo_: with

whatso in that psalm is after written.

* * * * *

Among the books that I kept in my step-ladder library in Clarendon Road

I mentioned that queer piece of sham learning and entertaining

extravagance "The Rosicrucians: Their Rites and Mysteries," by Hargrave

(or Hargreave?) Jennings. I said that this odd volume had eventually a

curious influence on my life; and this was as follows: I was reading

Herodotus and that portion of Herodotus which treats of Egypt--I have

long ago forgotten the Muse which names the book--and Herodotus, it will

be remembered, was very deeply interested in the Mysteries of the

Egyptian religion. In treating of these occult things of Osiris the

historian mentions certain singular matters which were highly pertinent

to Mr. Jennings's thesis--if Mr. Jennings could be said to have had

anything so definite as a thesis. But "The Rosicrucians" contained no

mention of that which Herodotus had seen when night was on the Nile, so

I ventured to write to the ingenious author, pointing out the particular

passage which, I thought, would interest him. Mr. Jennings did not

answer my letter; he was odd to extremity in most things, but in this

particular he conformed perfectly to all the literary men whom I

encountered in my early days. I came into contact with four or five men

of a certain reputation; or perhaps I should say I came within sight of

them; and they could very easily have flung me a word or two of

encouragement, which would have been very precious to me then. But I

never had that word, and so was forced to go on and do my best without

it; the better way, no doubt, but a hard way. But though the author of

"The Rosicrucians" did not reply to my letter, he passed my name and

address to another man, a young fellow who had just set up as a

publisher, and was going to issue one of the astounding Jennings books.

So Davenport, the publisher, sent me his catalogue of new and

second-hand books, and I, on reading it, sent him the manuscript of my

"Anatomy of Tankards."

Here a parenthesis, if not several parentheses. We are now in 1884, and

I had finished the "Anatomy" in the autumn of 1883. Soon after it was

ended I sent the MS. to a gentleman who was then but in a small way. He

is now a very eminent publisher indeed, and loved so much by his

authors--by some of them at all events--as to be known as "Uncle." Well,

"Uncle" (though, alas! it was not fated that he should ever be

uncle-in-letters of mine) sent back the MS. in due season with a letter

that almost made up for any disappointment my first "boomerang" may have

occasioned.

His letter delighted me, not because it was specially complimentary, nor

because it gave evidence of a careful and critical reading of the

rejected manuscript, but because it was almost a replica of the

publisher's letter which introduces Mr. Tobias Smollett's admirable

epistolary romance, "Humphry Clinker." My actual publisher so resembled

Smollett's feigned bookseller in the manner of his letter that I should

suppose the one had deliberately made the other his model, did I not

know "Uncle" to be far too good a man to read such a book as "Humphry

Clinker." I have not got my Smollett by me, I am sorry to say, so I

cannot quote, but I may mention that both publishers made a very liberal

use of the dash, or mark of parenthesis, and were curious in avoiding

the word "I."