in the middle of a novel and a big case comes along----”
“That’s very refreshing,” he answers. “I come back to the novel as from
a vacation.”
And you recall the early writing, done, so to speak, between telephone
calls.
There _has_ been a change; Mr. Train freely acknowledges it. “I can’t
say exactly when it occurred. It was during the war. I felt differently
about my writing. I felt much more intent about it. It took hold of
me very strongly when I was writing about Ephraim Tutt--_Tutt and Mr.
Tutt_, you know. I think those were possibly the first stories I had
written which made me feel emotion.”
It is easy to see why, easier, perhaps, in Mr. Train’s new collection
of these tales, _Tut, Tut! Mr. Tutt_, than in the first book. For the
emphasis upon Ephraim Tutt’s attitude is more pronounced as we see
him deliberately employing the tricks of the law in the interests of
justice. Himself moved by that most permanent of human emotions, the
desire for the just, and by that most continual of human delights, the
extraction of good from evil or even good wreaked by means of evil, and
moved also by that human protest against the application of general
rules to individual dilemmas, Mr. Tutt would be strange if he did not
arouse in his creator the emotion inseparable from any act of art.
Once felt, never without. The practise of law seems less important
than once it did to Arthur Train. The number of cases that really are
interesting--are they growing fewer? There is something about private
practise ... duller than the old court work, less stimulating....
He has “an infinite capacity for taking pains.” It has been proven.
There, I think, our case rests.
Books by Arthur Train
1905 _McAllister and His Double_
1906 _The Prisoner at the Bar_
1908 _True Stories of Crime_
1909 _The Butler’s Story_
1909 _Mortmain_
1909 _Confessions of Artemas Quibble_
1910 _C. Q., or In the Wireless House_
1911 _Courts, Criminals and the Camorra_
1914 _The “Goldfish.”_ This book, published
anonymously, caused a sensation by its
satirisation of American social life
1915 _The Man Who Rocked the Earth_ (with
ROBERT WILLIAMS WOOD)
1917 _The World and Thomas Kelly_
1918 _The Earthquake_
1920 _Tutt and Mr. Tutt_
1921 _By Advice of Counsel_
1921 _The Hermit of Turkey Hollow_
1923 _His Children’s Children_
1923 _Tut, Tut! Mr. Tutt_
_6. The Lady of a Tradition, Miss Sackville-West_
i
There are two sides from which you may first profitably look at the
house. One is from the park, the north side. From here the pile shows
best the vastness of its size; it looks like a mediæval village. It
is heaped with no attempt at symmetry; it is sombre and frowning; the
grey towers rise; the battlements cut out their square regularity
against the sky; the buttresses of the old twelfth-century tithe-barn
give a rough impression of fortifications. There is a line of trees
in one of the inner courtyards, and their green heads show above the
roofs of the old breweries; but although they are actually trees of a
considerable size they are dwarfed and unnoticeable against the mass
of the buildings blocked behind them. The whole pile soars to a peak
which is the clock-tower with its pointed roof; it might be the spire
of the church on the summit of the hill crowning the mediæval village.
At sunset I have seen the silhouette of the great building stand dead
black on a red sky; on moonlight nights it stands black and silent,
with glinting windows, like an enchanted castle. On misty autumn nights
I have seen it emerging partially from the trails of vapour, and
heard the lonely roar of the red deer roaming under the walls.”
[Illustration: V. SACKVILLE-WEST]
Such is the opening page of V. Sackville-West’s volume, _Knole and the
Sackvilles_, a handsomely printed and illustrated account of the seat
of the Earls and Dukes of Dorset. Authentic record of the family goes
not beyond that Herbrand de Sackville who came to England with William
the Conqueror. Knole, bought by Archbishop Bourchier in 1456, and held
by Cardinal Morton, Cranmer, Henry VIII., Edward VI., Queen Mary and
Elizabeth, was granted, in 1586 by Elizabeth, to Thomas Sackville,
Lord Buckhurst, first Earl of Dorset. The name “West” enters with the
marriage of Lady Elizabeth Sackville, sister of the fourth Duke, to
John West, Earl de la Warr.
The house, of seven courts to correspond with the days of the week,
fifty-two staircases matching the weeks of the year and 365 rooms
answering to the days of the year[1] “is gentle and venerable. It has
the deep inward gaiety of some very old woman who has always been
beautiful, who has had many lovers and seen many generations come
and go, smiled wisely over their sorrows and their joys, and learnt
an imperishable secret of tolerance and humour. It is, above all, an
English house.” The garden side is the gay, the princely side. When,
in summer, the great oak doors of the second gatehouse were left open,
“it has sometimes happened that I have found a stag in the banqueting
hall, puzzled but still dignified, strayed in from the park since no
barrier checked him.”
[1] “I cannot truthfully say,” writes Miss Sackville-West in _Knole and
the Sackvilles_, “that I have ever verified these counts, and it may be
that their accuracy is accepted solely on the strength of the legend;
but, if this is so, then it has been a very persistent legend, and I
prefer to sympathise with the amusement of the ultimate architect on
making the discovery that by a judicious juggling with his additions he
could bring courts, stairs and rooms up to that satisfactory total.”
ii
In 1825 the duchess Arabella Diana died and her estate devolved upon
her two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth. Elizabeth, as has been told,
became the wife of Lord de la Warr. Dying in 1870 she left Buckhurst
to her elder sons and Knole to her younger sons, one of whom was Miss
Sackville-West’s grandfather. He was eighty and she perhaps eight,
and as he shared “the family failing of unsociability” it fell to the
child’s lot to show the house to visitors. In this, as in more natural
ways, she became highly familiar with Knole and from her earliest years
must have loved the place. On receipt of a telegram that people were
coming, Grandpapa would take the next train for London, “returning
in the evening when the coast was clear.” The Cartoon Gallery, the
Leicester Gallery, the Brown Gallery; Lady Betty Germaine’s bedchamber;
the three principal bedrooms, the Spangled Room, the Venetian
Ambassador’s and the King’s chamber, “the only vulgar room in the
house” with furniture made entirely in silver and articles of silver,
“even to a little eye-bath”--the procession of the days and years was
not more certain than the procession of the curious, the inquisitive
and the wonder-struck through these. You will fashion your own picture
of the daughter of the Sackvilles standing before the portrait of
Lady Margaret Sackville (over the fireplace in Lady Betty Germaine’s
sitting room) and endeavouring, quite vainly, to do her own hair in the
elaborate manner of young Lady Margaret’s. Or, it may be, she had been
naughty that day, and had hid herself inside the pulpit of the Chapel
of the Archbishops, where, in spite of private steps leading out of her
bedroom straight into the Family Pew, “they never found me.” Grandpapa
was “a queer and silent old man,” as Miss Sackville-West remembers him.
“He knew nothing whatever about the works of art in the house; he spent
hours gazing at the flowers, followed about the garden by two grave
demoiselle cranes.... He and I, who so often shared the house alone
between us, were companions in a shy and undemonstrative way. Although
he had nothing to say to his unfortunate guests, he could understand
a child.... When we were at Knole alone together I used to go down to
his sitting-room in the evening to play draughts with him--and never
knew whether I played to please him, or he played to please me--and
sometimes, very rarely, he told me stories of when he was a small boy,
and played with the rocking-horse, and of the journeys by coach with
his father and mother from Buckhurst to Knole or from Knole to London;
of their taking the silver with them under the seat; of their having
outriders with pistols; and of his father and mother never addressing
each other, in their children’s presence, as anything but ‘my Lord’ and
‘my Lady.’ I clasped my knees and stared at him when he told me these
stories of an age which already seemed so remote, and his pale blue
eyes gazed away into the past, and suddenly his shyness would return to
him and the clock in the corner would begin to wheeze in preparation to
striking the hour, and he would say that it was time for me to go to
bed....”
iii
At the age of thirteen Miss Sackville-West wrote “an enormous novel”
about the figure of Edward Sackville, fourth Earl of Dorset, who seemed
to her the embodiment of Cavalier romance. And perhaps he was. “He had
the advantage of starting with the Vandyck portrait in the hall, the
flame-coloured doublet, the blue Garter, the characteristic swaggering
attitude, the sword, the love-locks, the key of office painted dangling
from his hip and the actual key dangling on a ribbon from the frame of
the picture.” The dashing career of this follower of King Charles, who
fought a duel with Lord Bruce and whose younger son was murdered by the
Roundheads, became “a source of rich romance to a youthful imagination
nourished on _Cyrano_ and _The Three Musketeers_.” The half-grown
girl re-examined certain old nail-studded trunks in the attics, mute
witnesses to Cromwellian violence, some of them curved to fit the roof
of a barouche. “The battered trunks were stacked near the entrance to
the hiding-place, which, without the smallest justification save an
old candlestick and a rope-ladder found therein, I peopled with the
fugitive figures of priests and Royalists. I peeped into the trunks:
they contained only a dusty jumble of broken ironwork, some old books,
some bits of hairy plaster fallen from the ceiling, some numbers of
Punch for 1850. Nevertheless, there were the gaping holes where the
locks had been prised off the trunks, and the lid forced back upon
the hinges by an impatient hand. Down in the Poets’ Parlour, where I
lunched with my grandfather, taciturn unless he happened to crack one
of his little stock-in-trade of jokes, Cromwell’s soldiers had held
their Court of Sequestration. The Guard Room was empty of arms or
armour, save for a few pikes and halberds, because Cromwell’s soldiers
had taken all the armour away. The past mingled with the present in
constant reminder; and out in the summer-house, after luncheon, with
the bees blundering among the flowers of the Sunk Garden and the
dragon-flies flashing over the pond, I returned to the immense ledger
in which I was writing my novel, while Grandpapa retired to his little
sitting-room and whittled paper-knives from the lids of cigar-boxes,
and thought about--Heaven knows what _he_ thought about.”
iv
Miss Sackville-West is writing of Knole, of course, in her long story
called _The Heir_. The manor of Blackboys with its peacocks is not
Knole; I suppose no one makes the mistake of literal identification
of people and places in fiction; at least, none should do so. What is
truly identifiable is never anything tangible at all; it is merely
an emotion. When we read _The Heir_, subtitled “A Love Story,” and
acquaint ourselves in a leisurely sufficience with the fellow Chase we
should be stupid indeed if we grasped at the substance and neglected
the shadow. It is shadow and its correspondent sunlight for which,
after all, mankind lives a life wherein the things of substance are the
final unreality....
But her first book, which was brought to the attention of the American
publisher by Hugh Walpole, was a novel called _Heritage_, an unusual
story of young lovers. The breath of distinction upon the tale more
than redeemed its faults of construction, of which, perhaps, after all,
the most serious was merely the device of a letter immensely longer
than any epistle probable to be written. Then, in point of publication,
at least, came _The Dragon in Shallow Waters_, also a novel. Some two
years elapsed before the appearance of her third novel, _Challenge_, a
piece of work of such a character as to demand our earnest scrutiny.
_Challenge_ is being followed by _Grey Wethers_ and _The Heir_.
I have been speaking of American publication; in England Miss
Sackville-West first came to notice as a poet. Her _Poems of West and
East_ was followed by another collection called _Orchard and Vineyard_.
Her work in verse exhibited austerity of expression joined to an
emotional and descriptive power difficult to appraise. Although it may
be, as has been said, that the chief use of poetry, written when one is
young, is to produce a finer prose when one is older.
Of _The Heir_ it is best to say little since a few betraying words
can so easily spoil its secret for the reader. In the same volume
appear _The Christmas Party_, _Patience_, _Her Son_ and _The Parrot_,
a vignette dedicated to “H. G. N.” All the qualities present in _The
Heir_ may be found in the other tales, so varyingly shorter--delicacy,
precision, dramatic power and a perception of beauty translated almost
without the use of a single emotional word. In _The Christmas Party_ we
have the deferred revenge of a woman, a theatrical costumer, upon her
strait-minded family; _Patience_ is an elderly man’s recollection, in
perfectly domesticated surroundings, of his youthful affair; _Her Son_
is the inevitable cruelty inflicted upon a mother by the passage of the
years; the story of _The Parrot_ points to the only escape from the ...
cage.
The “H. G. N.” of its dedication is the Honourable Harold G. Nicolson.
Except as an author, the lady of Knole is no longer Victoria
Sackville-West but the Honourable Mrs. Harold G. Nicolson.
v
_Challenge_, a novel that may instructively be compared with Joseph
Conrad’s _Nostromo_, had the curious fortune to be published first in
America and--what is more remarkable--only in America. It might seem
altogether extraordinary that one of the most noteworthy novels by
an Englishwoman in years should not only not be published first in
England but should not be published there at all. It might seem very
extraordinary; and it is. The circumstances were perhaps without a
precedent and, it may be hoped, will be without a duplication. In
1920 an English publisher had accepted _Challenge_ and prepared it for
issuance. That is to say, type had been set, plates had been cast,
the sheets of the novel had been printed, folded and sewed. Nothing
remained but to encase them in cloth--a matter of a week, usually--when
the book would be ready to go on sale. It was the eleventh hour; 11.59
to be precise. Then fate intervened.
It transpired (or was allowed to transpire) that Miss Sackville-West
had written her novel about an actual family, portraying that family in
general and possibly in particular. The family was part of her own, or
shall we say, connected with her own; and it was not without influence.
This influence was immediately exerted to secure the suppression of
_Challenge_. How far the influence succeeded, by virtue of its own
force and considerations, and how far it was aided by the peculiarity
of the English libel law, which recognises technical libel, I am
unable to say; but succeed it did. _Challenge_ remained unbound and
the English house either put it down as a loss or, with a sanguineness
born of much publishing experience, carried it in its inventory. There
were all those folded and sewed sheets constituting a very fair-sized
edition, as English editions go, packed away in some sufficiently dry
place. At Knole and in Cornwall and it may be in other places Miss
Sackville-West continued writing.
Probably the only challenge to the suppressors of the novel in England
lay in the single figurative word of the title. Miss Sackville-West
could be said to be writing of the actual family only in the same
sense that we can say, in alluding to the manor of Blackboys in _The
Heir_, that she writes of Knole. Some South American republic, indeed,
any South American republic, would be equally justified in beginning
suit for libel against Conrad for the picture of Costaguana in
_Nostromo_--could a court be discovered in which such a suit would be
justiciable? It is charitable to suppose that the suppressors beheld
themselves mirrored in the pages of _Challenge_ because they were
victims of a narcism complex. However, the interesting disabilities
of these people were of no serious importance on this side of the
Atlantic; Miss Sackville-West had done no work of such importance
as the unborn _Challenge_; and after all those unbound sheets had
lain untouched for two years or longer the day came when an American
publisher took the whole lot, together with the plates to enable him to
print more, and _Challenge_ saw the light in the United States early in
1923.
It is still unpublishable in England and seems destined indefinitely to
remain so. Not indignation nor ridicule is likely to alter this state
of affairs, since the prototypes of Miss Sackville-West’s Davenants
must be conceived of as resembling Galsworthy’s Forsytes in one
respect: They are almost certainly impervious to the wrath or derision
of any except their own kind, and this will hardly be forthcoming.
_Challenge_, admirable in its technique, begins with an epilogue,
giving us through the eyes of disinterested bystanders a glimpse of
Julian Davenant many years afterward. We see him with his wife at a
great affair in London. He has power, wealth, distinction; and his wife
is perfectly equipped for her rôle. Many people expect that Davenant
will be the next Viceroy; he has already been in the Cabinet. A cynical
man, who believes in nothing--and a philanthropist, really. His face,
or his eyes, give one the impression that he has “learnt all the sorrow
of the world”; they are inexpressibly weary. And the two onlookers, a
man and a woman, recall that there was some “crazy adventure” in Julian
Davenant’s youth. “Very romantic, but we all start by being romantic
until we have outgrown it.”
The three parts which follow narrate in a strictly chronological
order the details of that “crazy adventure.” Julian Davenant was
the young son of a house of English Levantines, that is to say, an
English family established for several generations in the Levant and
possessing, at the time of the story, besides much land, the site of
valuable vineyards, prestige and influence and political power. It will
be recalled that the Goulds of Costaguana in _Nostromo_ constituted
a similar clan. Such English exoterics (not to say exotics) are only
moderately rare. It is not proper to speak of them as hybrids, since in
their marriages they are careful to avoid a non-English admixture and
their sons are invariably sent to England for their education. Without
in any essential degree sacrificing a single one of those peculiarly
tenacious English traits of character and without any alteration of the
English habit of thought, they are in most other matters assimilated to
the country of their holdings. They come to understand it, its ways,
its habit of thought and policy of conduct and instinct of behaviour
with a completeness that amounts to perfection and reposes, as a rule
and deep down, on a sincere distaste. They are really marvellous,
whether Goulds in South America or Davenants in Greece. And their young
men....
In any comparison of _Nostromo_ and _Challenge_ it will be found that
the most obvious likenesses are purely superficial. In _Nostromo_
we have the son, Charles Gould, determined to avenge, by a patient
commercialism and a silent political sagacity, the fate of his Uncle
Harry and the killing worry of his father; the instrumentality to his
hand is the silver of the mine. In _Challenge_ young Julian Davenant is
the victim of the romantic impulse which causes him to respond, at any
cost, to the patriotic appeal of the Islands lying off the coast and
unwillingly a part of the tiny republic of Herakleion. The girl, Eve,
and the woman, Kato, a native of the Islands and a famous singer, are
the personal contending forces in the struggle over Julian Davenant.
Eve is Julian’s cousin. In the developing story of her love for Julian,
in its culminating struggle and final disaster a precise comparison
with _Nostromo_--even in respect of the tragedy that befell Linda
Viola--is a waste of our attention.
vi
What may profitably be compared in Mr. Conrad’s acknowledged
masterpiece and Miss Sackville-West’s dramatic novel is the identity
of method and art. I say “identity” without any hesitation, for in
both cases I think the artist has achieved a proportionately impressive
and living and beautiful result. As to method, the reader will observe
for himself that either novel might have been written by either
author. In each case the actual knowledge of a totally foreign country
is perhaps the same, and in neither case is it very great or very
important. Again, in each case, the imaginative creation is on a plane
so much above the level attained in other (and very excellent) novels
that the book must definitely be set in a class apart. One accounts
for the intense imaginative insight of _The Old Wives’ Tale_ and _My
Antonia_ (to choose two especially fine examples) by saying that,
after all, both Arnold Bennett and Willa Cather had the immeasurable
aid of childhood’s unblunted perceptiveness; and in so partially
accounting for the sheer fact, one does quite rightly. But neither
memory nor the deepest well of sympathy serves to explain _Nostromo_
and _Challenge_; in these two novels the imagination had to create
something _de novo_ and actively body it forth; memories, hearsay,
would be an actual interference and the existence of an outer world a
positive interruption. They are both novels of a perfectly valid idea
recreated in terms of the subconscious personality. If that is too
cloudy an explanation I will ask you to think of the subconscious mind
as a happily benevolent oyster, of the germ-idea as an infinitesimal
particle of irritant sand, and of the accomplished story as the
resulting pearl. It is as near as I can come to conveying what I mean
... and know to be at least subjectively true.
Abandoning this difficult region and ascending to the surface on which
most art and literary method lies, the comparison becomes so easy that
one feels superfluous in making it. Have we not the same complexity of
persons presented in an intimate relation to each other and composing
a little world, complete socially, politically and in their attitudes;
so that we can perfectly conceive them in any set of circumstances?
Have we not also an atmosphere resulting from a multitude of impalpable
small touches? Is not the effect in each case more exact than any
impression to be derived from personal familiarity with either South
America or Greece? Is not the same impersonal viewpoint present?
the same astringent humour in evidence in its application to the
incongruities of the life presented? In both cases the avoidance of
any expression of emotion, the final austerity of the highest art,
exercises an effect out of all predictable proportion on the emotions
of the reader. He is led to feel amusement, ridicule, sympathy,
indignation, dismay, horror and grief; because never is it intimated to
him that it is his duty to feel any of these things.
vii
The new novel, _Grey Wethers_, taking its name from those ancient
sacrificial stones of the Druids which are the symbols of the story,
traces back in substance to Miss Sackville-West’s _Heritage_, but
is free from the faults of construction which made her first novel
so unsatisfactory. The fineness of her hand upon this more familiar
material is the delicate reward for her incessant painstaking. She is
not a person to rest satisfied, but an artist. An artist....