"Dear Sir,
"Referring to your favour of the 17th ult., enclosing MS. of
work, 'Anatomy of Tankards'--have read MS. with interest--fear
it would hardly command large sale--have had little
encouragement to speculate lately--would recommend topic of
more general public interest--hoping to have pleasure of
hearing from you on some future occasion.
"Etc. etc."
I was delighted, only a few years ago, to find that "Uncle's" hand has
not lost its epistolary cunning. A distinguished friend of mine had been
good enough of his own motion--not with my knowledge--to write to this
publisher suggesting that a book by me would ornament his catalogue. The
publisher approached me by letter. I wrote to him briefly, saying that
I was just finishing a romance. He wrote back: "Sorry you speak of a
romance--fear there is very little sale for those old things--however,"
etc. etc.
I did not trouble to go into whatever might lie beyond the portals of
"however." But note the phrase, "those old things." It seems to me more
precious than gold that has passed the furnace.
But to return from this backwater of narrative; I found Mr. Davenport
established in an old street in the quarter of Covent Garden. I got to
know this street well afterwards, and to like it, too, for all its
associations and circumstances. Over the way, opposite to Davenport's
offices, was the house where they said De Quincey had written his great
book; there were theatrical shops all tinsel and wigs and grease paints
close at hand, and on market days the street was all apack with carts
and waggons and clamorous with marketmen who are still a rough and
primitive and jovial race. Indeed, the market overflowed into York
Street and submerged it, and I have had to leap over an undergrowth of
green, springing ferns established on the office steps. Mr. Davenport
had written me a very agreeable letter, and we had a very agreeable
interview. The book on his publication-list which had attracted my
attention was called "Tavern Talk and Maltworms' Gossip," and an
admirable little anthology it was, compiled (as I found out afterwards)
by Davenport himself. I thought there was a certain congruity between
this book and my "Anatomy of Tankards," hence the despatch of the
manuscript to York Street. The publisher liked my book very much. He
wanted to publish it badly; but there were certain preliminaries to be
adjusted before this could be done, and I did not see how the obstacle
could be surmounted. This conference took place at that singular hour of
my career when my pupils seemed to melt away from me, as though they had
been morning dew. I was just bound for the country, and the publisher
agreed to hold the little matter of which I have spoken in suspense.
So I went westward, and there in Gwent there were kind people who had
known my father all his days, and my grandfather before him, and so, for
the sake of "the family," they helped me to arrange those
"preliminaries." And, after all, perhaps it is fair enough that a man
should pay his footing when he enters the craft.
* * * * *
So here was another element or elixir in the potion of my bliss, that I
was drinking among those dearly-beloved hills and woods of Gwent. The
bad old days were all over, and my torments were past; Clarendon Road
and all its sad concatenations were like a black wrack of cloud seen far
down on the horizon, as the sun rises splendid on a bright and happy
day. I was come to the territory of Caerleon-on-Usk which was Avalon;
and every herb of the fields and all the leaves of the wood, and the
waters of all wells and streams were appointed for my healing. And my
book was going to be published; I was to see myself in print, between
covers--vegetable vellum they turned out to be--and I should be
reviewed in London newspapers; and, not a doubt of it, be happy ever
after.
Mr. Pecksniff, it will be remembered, spoke of the melancholy sweetness
of youthful hopes. "I remember thinking once myself, in the days of my
childhood, that pickled onions grew on trees, and that every elephant
was born with an impregnable castle on his back. I have not found the
fact to be so; far from it." Nor have I found "the fact" to be so.
Still, these visions of fair print and title-pages and reviews are very
pleasant in the green of youth, and they helped to make that summer of
1884 delightful for me. I "worked in" the thought of the coming
proof-sheets--even the anticipation of a proof-sheet is almost too much
joy at twenty-one--into my escape from hard bondage, into the summer
sunlight, into the odours of the solemn woods at night, into the cool
breath of the brook, into the twilight fires of the sky above Twyn
Barlwm. They were brave days while they lasted.
And now and again I had gallant tramps over the country with my old
friend Bill Rowlands. I saw Bill a couple of years ago, after an
interval of a quarter of a century, and Bill wore a long black coat and
a solemn collar, having been a clerk in holy orders for many years. But
when I began to speak of the little tavern at Castell-y-Bwch there was a
twinkle in Bill's eye, and at the mention of the chimes of Usk, we both
laughed till we cried--and perhaps we did cry internally. But I said to
Bill, "Now I am going to take you to the Cafe Royal; it's the best I can
do for you. But I wish it were the Three Salmons at Usk!"--where, if I
remember rightly, we had bread and cheese and a great deal of beer and
hot brandy and water to follow.
But that was a great day. We had gone over hill and dale, through the
depths of woods and over waste lands, finding footpaths in the most
unsuspected places that we had never dreamed of. And I remember that
these footpaths gave me a singular impression of travelling in
time--backwards, not forwards, as in Mr. Wells's enchantment. For the
track of feet was but barely marked, and seemed on the point to fade
away altogether, and the stiles that we climbed were of old, old oak,
whitened and riven with age, and the outlets of these paths were into
deep, forgotten lanes where no one came. And if one passed a house, it
was roofless and ruinous; its gable-wall standing grey, with
fifteenth-century corbel stones. The garden wall was fallen into a heap
of stones, and the fruit trees were dead or straggled into wildness. So
it seemed to me that we had fallen on old ways that were not of our day
at all, and no one, perhaps, had been there for fifty or a hundred
years, and if we saw anyone it would not be a man of our time. Bill, I
am convinced, thought nothing of all this; his talk was of B.N.C. and
mad tricks and all the mirth in the world, and I warmed the chilled
hands of my spirit at his gaiety, as I had longed to warm my bodily
hands at the watchman's brazier, glowing red in the cold London street.
So Bill and I came at last into Caerleon, having succeeded by much
extraordinary wandering in making five miles into ten, and at Caerleon
we drank old ale at the Hanbury Arms, which is a mediaeval hostelry,
close to the Roman tower by the river. And then nothing would satisfy us
but to go to Usk by the old road; again, ten miles instead of five, but
with our "short cut" imposed upon it, a good fifteen miles.
The way goes over the river; on the right are King Arthur's Round Table
and the relics of the Roman city wall of Isca Silurum, as the Second
Augustan Legion, garrisoned at Caerleon, called the place. Then through
the village, still known in my days as Caerleon-ultra-pontem, and so
into that most wonderful, enchanted, delicious road that winds under the
hillside, under deep Wentwood, above the solemn curves and esses of the
river. We passed Bulmore, which does not mean a moor of bulls, but pwll
mawr, the great pool, of the Usk river. It is a farmhouse now, but once
a retired officer of the 2nd Augustan had his villa here, and his
graveyard also: and here, I think, in the orchard, as they were planting
some young trees, they found the stone inscribed: _Ave, Julia, carissima
conjux; in aeternum vale_. Hail, Julia, dearest wife; farewell for ever.
And here, to the best of my belief, Bill was telling me how an
undergraduate friend of his at B.N.C., a schoolfellow of mine, found
himself under the painful necessity of screwing up the Dean in his
rooms; the screws employed being coffin-screws, headless, that is, and
not to be extracted without enormous pains.
We went on our way by the river, and passed under Kemeys, a noble grey
old house, with mullioned windows and Elizabethan chimneys. There is
such a peace about this place, such a sweetness from the wood, such a
refreshment from the water, so grave a repose upon it, that I translated
to Kemeys one of my heroes, a clerk in Shepherd's Bush. This clerk had
found out that all the bustle and activity of modern life are delusions
and wild errors, and his reward was to be that he should end his days at
Kemeys, sheltered from all turmoil and vanity, garnered from the evil
world.
The peace of Kemeys was the peace of all the valley of the Usk, and what
balms it exhibited to my spirit only those can know who have been bred
in such places, and have experienced the jar and dust and racket of some
great town, and then have returned to the old groves.
My friend Bill and I went swinging along the winding lane beside the
winding river, and as we went the sound of pouring waters sang to us.
For now the over-runnings of the wells of Wentwood came from the hill as
rivulets, and about each stream its twisted thicket grew, accompanying
it all down the steep, to the river below. We passed little Kemeys
church, watching above the pools of the Usk, and then on the hillside,
almost in the shadow of the forest, was Bartholly, that solitary house
which awed me for years, so that I made my awe into a tale. And here was
Newbridge, crossing a river that had now ceased to be tidal and yellow,
and had become glassy clear, and so on northward, and it seemed into
silences and solitudes that grew ever deeper and more solemn, more
evidently declaring the great art-magic of God that has made all the
world. The day drew on, the sun sank below wild unknown hills--neither
of us had ever been this way before--and the green world was dim for a
while, and then was lighted up with the red flames of the afterglow. The
evening redness appeared, and in those fires the ash tree became of
immortal growth, the round hills rose above no earthly land, the winding
river was a faery stream. Then, veil upon veil rising from the level,
rising from the fountains in the wood, mists closing in upon us.
My friend Bill said we should never get to Usk at this rate; he felt
sure that there must be a short cut across the fields. So we took the
first stile that appeared and set out over country that was utterly
unknown to us; and the marvel was that we ever got to Usk at all--or to
anywhere for the matter of that. I have a confused recollection of
walking for hours in a gathering darkness, through jungles and brakes of
dark wood, climbing hills that rose fantastic as out of dreamland, going
down into dusky valleys where white mist rose icy from the courses of
the brooks, threading an uncertain way through quaking marshland, and
the regions of the distance as vague as shapes of smoke.
The bells were ringing nine when we came out of this dim world into Usk,
and to the lights and cheerfulness of the Three Salmons, to ale and to
laughter. There was a wonderful old fellow, a Water Bailiff, making the
mirth of that cheerful, ancient parlour; and he told us of the tricks he
had played on poachers and fishermen till we roared again. He was a
fellow of strange disguises; if one of his stories were to be believed
he had caught the most famous salmon poacher of the Usk by assuming the
gait and utterance of a calf seeking for its mother at midnight. The
tale may have been true; it was certainly an excellent entertainment.
Such was one of our days; and again we would go wandering over the
mountains to west and to northward; climbing up into great high wild
places of yellow gorse and grey limestone rocks, stretching and mounting
onward and still beyond, so that one said in one's heart "for ever and
ever. Amen." High up there; the sunlight on that golden gorse, on the
yellow lichens that encrusted the rocks ringed in old Druid circles, the
great sweet wind that blew there, the heart of youth that rejoiced
there, all the dear shining land of Gwent far below us, glorious; it is
all an old song.
And there was a day on which we mounted over Mynydd Maen and came down
into a valley in the very heart of the mountains, and walked there all
the day, and in the evening returned again over the mountain at the
southern end, winding under Twyn Barlwm as the twilight fell. It is only
music, I think, that could image the wonder of the red sky over the
faery dome, and the gathering dusk of the night as it fell on the rocks
of that high land, on the streams rushing vehemently down into the
darkness of the valley, on the lower woods, on the white farms, gleaming
and then vanishing away. Only by music, if at all, can such things be
expressed, since they are ineffable; not to be uttered in any literal
or logical speech of men. And if one looks a little more closely into
the nature of things it will become pretty plain, I think, that all that
really matters and really exists is ineffable; that both the world
without us--the tree and the brook and the hill--and the world within us
do perpetually and necessarily transcend all our powers of utterance,
whether to ourselves or to others. Night and day, sunrise and moonrise,
and the noble assemblage of the stars, are continually exhibited to us,
and we are forced to confess that not for one moment can we proclaim
these appearances adequately. We stammer confusedly about them, much as
a savage who had been taken through the National Gallery might stammer a
few broken sentences, the applicability of which would be more or less
dubious. "Woman--very bright round head," might be the Blackfellow's
"description" of a famous Madonna; and a Turner would be summed up as
"plenty clouds--one big tree." And in like manner we, confronted, not
only with things remote and majestic, but with things familiar and near
at hand, stutter a few lame sentences, endeavouring to describe what we
have seen. And thus all literature can be but an approximation to the
truth; not the "truth" of science, for that is a figment of the brain, a
non-existent monster, like dragons, griffins, and basilisks; but to that
truth which Keats perceived to be identical with beauty. And it is
further evident that even this approximation to the truth of things is a
matter of the utmost difficulty and not very far from a miracle,
inasmuch as in a generation of men there are only two or three who
achieve it, who in consequence are hailed as men of the highest genius.
Of course, there are persons for whom "truth" implies "even gilt-edged
securities slumped heavily," or some such statement. To them, I tender
my sincere apologies.
* * * * *
The proof-sheets of my book began to appear early in that autumn of '84;
they made me rapturous reading. And while I was correcting them, with a
vast sense of the importance and dignity of the task, Davenport, the
publisher, was writing to me, asking if I had any ideas for new books,
and throwing out suggestions of his own.
Now this was very pleasant, for it all tended to persuade me, in spite
of any doubts and fears of mine, that I was really a literary man. I
would read Davenport's letters again and again, and deliberate gravely
with myself over the answering of them; I enjoyed this very much indeed.
But the correspondence led to no practical result; because I could not
then--or ever--perform the Indian mango trick. The expert conjurers of
the East, as is well known--in magazine fiction--will put a seed into a
flower pot, cover up for a second or two, and lo! there is a little
plant. Again the concealment; the plant has grown, and so forth, till
within the space of five minutes you can gather ripe mangoes from the
tree that you saw sown. This is the mango trick of fiction; that of
fact, as I have seen it, is about the dreariest and most ineffective
piece of conjuring imaginable. But, as I say, I could never imitate
those fabled Orientals. If Mr. Murray and Mr. Longman were to jostle one
another on my doorstep, clamouring for a masterpiece, and offering
Arabian terms, it would make no difference; if I had no book within me,
I should not be able to produce one on demand. In practice, I have found
that I take about ten years to grow these things; though I have one in
my mind now that was first thought of in 1898-99 and is not yet begun.
So Mr. Davenport's letters produced no literature, interesting though
they were; and I must say that a less sluggish mind would have found
them stimulating in a high degree. But the literary publisher struck on
cold iron; he suggested, I remember, a volume of scathing
criticism--"like Mozley's Essays"--as likely to receive his most
favourable attention. But, really, I could not think of anybody that I
particularly wanted to scathe--now, perhaps, I could oblige a publisher
in search of anathemas and Ernulphus curses--and I had not read Mozley,
nor have I read him to this day. Then I, on my side, suggested a book to
be called "A Quiet Life," this being, in fact, a description of the life
that I was then gratefully and gladly leading. I sent a specimen
chapter, and so far as I remember Davenport counselled me to defer the
writing of _that_ sort of book till I was eighty or thereabouts. I
daresay he was right. Then my half-dozen copies of "The Anatomy of
Tankards" reached me; and I believe that as soon as I saw the book
printed and complete in its (vegetable) vellum boards I began to be
ashamed of it. I think that this was hard lines, but the trick has been
played on me again and again; and I do believe that a moderate, not
excessive, dose of the good conceit of oneself is one of the chiefest
boons that parents should beg from fairy godmothers for their offspring.
For life is necessarily full of such buffetings and duckings, such kicks
and blows and pummellings, that balms and elixirs and medicaments of
healing are most urgently indicated, and there is nothing equal to this
same rectified spirit of conceit. It may tend to make a man an ass, but
it is better--or more agreeable, anyhow--to be an ass than to be
miserable.
Then came the reviews, and they did me some good, for, as far as I
remember them, they were kindly and indulgent. I think the critic of the
"St. James's Gazette," then in its glory under the editorship of
Greenwood, spoke of "this witty and humorous book," while he said, with
absolute justice, that I had ruined the popularity of my parodies by
their prolixity. Then the publisher, despairing, I suppose, of getting
any ideas out of me, produced a notion of his own. He sent me three or
four French texts of the "Heptameron," and bade me render it into the
best English that I had within me; and so I did forthwith, for the sum
of twenty pounds sterling. I wrote every night when the house was still,
and every day I carried the roll of copy down the lane to meet the
postman on his way to Caerleon-on-Usk.
And so my story has come round full circle. In the first of these
chapters I told how the kindly speaker at the Persian Club, praising my
version of the French classic, transported me in an instant from that
shining banqueting hall in the heart of London, over the bridge of
thirty years, into the shadows of the deep lane. Again it was the autumn
evening, and the November twilight was passing into the gloom of night.
There was a white ghost of the day in the sky far down in the west; but
the bare woods were darkening under the leaden clouds; the familiar
country grew into a wild land.
And I, with time to spare, walk slowly, meditatively down the hill,
holding my manuscript, hoping that the day's portion has been well done.
As I come to the stile there sounds faint through the rising of the
melancholy night wind the note of the postman's horn. He has climbed the
steep road that leads from Llandegveth village and is now two or three
fields away.
It grows very dark; the waiting figure by the stile vanishes into the
gloom. I can see it no more.