XI

MUSING thus over the past, while I waited for Alroy Kear, I chuckled

when I considered this shabby incident of Edward Driffield’s obscurity

in the light of the immense respectability of his later years. I

wondered whether it was because, in my boyhood, he was as a writer held

in such small esteem by the people about me that I had never been able

to see in him the astonishing merit that the best critical opinion

eventually ascribed to him. He was for long thought to write very bad

English, and indeed he gave you the impression of writing with the stub

of a blunt pencil; his style was laboured, an uneasy mixture of the

classical and the slangy, and his dialogue was such as could never have

issued from the mouth of a human being. Toward the end of his career,

when he dictated his books, his style, acquiring a conversational ease,

became flowing and limpid; and then the critics, going back to the

novels of his maturity, found that their English had a nervous, racy

vigour that eminently suited the matter. His prime belonged to a period

when the purple patch was in vogue and there are descriptive passages in

his works that have found their way into all the anthologies of English

prose. His pieces on the sea, and spring in the Kentish woods, and

sunset on the lower reaches of the Thames are famous. It should be a

mortification to me that I cannot read them without discomfort.

When I was a young man, though his books sold but little and one or two

were banned by the libraries, it was very much a mark of culture to

admire them. He was thought boldly realistic. He was a very good stick

to beat the Philistines with. Somebody’s lucky inspiration discovered

that his sailors and peasants were Shakespearean, and when the advanced

got together they uttered shrill cries of ecstasy over the dry and spicy

humour of his yokels. This was a commodity that Edward Driffield had no

difficulty in supplying. My own heart sank when he led me into the

forecastle of a sailing ship or the taproom of a public house and I knew

I was in for half a dozen pages in dialect of facetious comment on life,

ethics, and immortality. But, I admit, I have always thought the

Shakespearean clowns tedious and their innumerable progeny

insupportable.

Driffield’s strength lay evidently in his depiction of the class he knew

best, farmers and farm labourers, shopkeepers and bartenders, skippers

of sailing ships, mates, cooks, and able seamen. When he introduces

characters belonging to a higher station in life even his warmest

admirers, one would have thought, must experience a certain malaise; his

fine gentlemen are so incredibly fine, his high-born ladies are so good,

so pure, so noble that you are not surprised that they can only express

themselves with polysyllabic dignity. His women difficultly come to

life. But here again I must add that this is only my own opinion; the

world at large and the most eminent critics have agreed that they are

very winsome types of English womanhood, spirited, gallant, high-souled,

and they have been often compared with the heroines of Shakespeare. We

know of course that women are habitually constipated, but to represent

them in fiction as being altogether devoid of a back passage seems to me

really an excess of chivalry. I am surprised that they care to see

themselves thus limned.

The critics can force the world to pay attention to a very indifferent

writer, and the world may lose its head over one who has no merit at

all, but the result in neither case is lasting; and I cannot help

thinking that no writer can hold the public for as long as Edward

Driffield without considerable gifts. The elect sneer at popularity;

they are inclined even to assert that it is a proof of mediocrity; but

they forget that posterity makes its choice not from among the unknown

writers of a period, but from among the known. It may be that some great

masterpiece which deserves immortality has fallen still-born from the

press, but posterity will never hear of it; it may be that posterity

will scrap all the best sellers of our day, but it is among them that it

must choose. At all events Edward Driffield is in the running. His

novels happen to bore me; I find them long; the melodramatic incidents

with which he sought to stir the sluggish reader’s interest leave me

cold; but he certainly had sincerity. There is in his best books the

stir of life, and in none of them can you fail to be aware of the

author’s enigmatic personality. In his earlier days he was praised or

blamed for his realism; according to the idiosyncrasy of his critics he

was extolled for his truth or censured for his coarseness. But realism

has ceased to excite remark, and the library reader will take in his

stride obstacles at which a generation back he would have violently

shied. The cultured reader of these pages will remember the leading

article in the Literary Supplement of the _Times_ which appeared at the

moment of Driffield’s death. Taking the novels of Edward Driffield as

his text, the author wrote what was very well described as a hymn to

beauty. No one who read it could fail to be impressed by those swelling

periods, which reminded one of the noble prose of Jeremy Taylor, by that

reverence and piety, by all those high sentiments, in short, expressed

in a style that was ornate without excess and dulcet without effeminacy.

It was itself a thing of beauty. If some suggested that Edward Driffield

was by way of being a humourist and that a jest would here and there

have lightened this eulogious article it must be replied that after all

it was a funeral oration. And it is well known that Beauty does not look

with a good grace on the timid advances of Humour. Roy Kear, when he was

talking to me of Driffield, claimed that, whatever his faults, they were

redeemed by the beauty that suffused his pages. Now I come to look back

on our conversation, I think it was this remark that had most

exasperated me.

Thirty years ago in literary circles God was all the fashion. It was

good form to believe and journalists used him to adorn a phrase or

balance a sentence; then God went out (oddly enough with cricket and

beer) and Pan came in. In a hundred novels his cloven hoof left its

imprint on the sward; poets saw him lurking in the twilight on London

commons, and literary ladies in Surrey and New England, nymphs of an

industrial age, mysteriously surrendered their virginity to his rough

embrace. Spiritually they were never the same again. But Pan went out

and now beauty has taken his place. People find it in a phrase, or a

turbot, a dog, a day, a picture, an action, a dress. Young women in

cohorts, each of whom has written so promising and competent a novel,

prattle of it in every manner from allusive to arch, from intense to

charming; and the young men, more or less recently down from Oxford, but

still trailing its clouds of glory, who tell us in the weekly papers

what we should think of art, life, and the universe, fling the word with

a pretty negligence about their close-packed pages. It is sadly frayed.

Gosh, they have worked it hard! The ideal has many names and beauty is

but one of them. I wonder if this clamour is anything more than the cry

of distress of those who cannot make themselves at home in our heroic

world of machines, and I wonder if their passion for beauty, the Little

Nell of this shamefaced day, is anything more than sentimentality. It

may be that another generation, accommodating itself more adequately to

the stress of life, will look for inspiration not in a flight from

reality, but in an eager acceptance of it.

I do not know if others are like myself, but I am conscious that I

cannot contemplate beauty long. For me no poet made a falser statement

than Keats when he wrote the first line of _Endymion_. When the thing of

beauty has given me the magic of its sensation my mind quickly wanders;

I listen with incredulity to the persons who tell me that they can look

with rapture for hours at a view or a picture. Beauty is an ecstasy; it

is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It

is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all: that is

why the criticism of art, except in so far as it is unconcerned with

beauty and therefore with art, is tiresome. All the critic can tell you

with regard to Titian’s Entombment of Christ, perhaps of all the

pictures in the world that which has most pure beauty, is to go and look

at it. What else he has to say is history, or biography, or what not.

But people add other qualities to beauty—sublimity, human interest,

tenderness, love—because beauty does not long content them. Beauty is

perfect, and perfection (such is human nature) holds our attention but

for a little while. The mathematician who after seeing Phèdre asked:

“_Qu’est-ce que ça prouve?_” was not such a fool as he has been

generally made out. No one has ever been able to explain why the Doric

temple of Pæstum is more beautiful than a glass of cold beer except by

bringing in considerations that have nothing to do with beauty. Beauty

is a blind alley. It is a mountain peak which once reached leads

nowhere. That is why in the end we find more to entrance us in El Greco

than in Titian, in the incomplete achievement of Shakespeare than in the

consummate success of Racine. Too much has been written about beauty.

That is why I have written a little more. Beauty is that which satisfies

the æsthetic instinct. But who wants to be satisfied? It is only to the

dullard that enough is as good as a feast. Let us face it: beauty is a

bit of a bore.

But of course what the critics wrote about Edward Driffield was

eye-wash. His outstanding merit was not the realism that gave vigour to

his work, nor the beauty that informed it, nor his graphic portraits of

seafaring men, nor his poetic descriptions of salty marshes, of storm

and calm and of nestling hamlets; it was his longevity. Reverence for

old age is one of the most admirable traits of the human race and I

think it may safely be stated that in no other country than ours is this

trait more marked. The awe and love with which other nations regard old

age is often platonic; but ours is practical. Who but the English would

fill Covent Garden to listen to an aged prima donna without a voice? Who

but the English would pay to see a dancer so decrepit that he can hardly

put one foot before the other and say to one another admiringly in the

intervals: “By George, sir, d’you know he’s a long way past sixty?” But

compared with politicians and writers these are but striplings, and I

often think that a _jeune premier_ must be of a singularly amiable

disposition if it does not make him bitter to consider that when at the

age of seventy he must end his career the public man and the author are

only at their prime. A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman

at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to

be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe

to govern a country. This is not so strange when you reflect that from

the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are

wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this

was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture;

and besides, no one can have moved in the society of politicians without

discovering that (if one may judge by results) it requires little mental

ability to rule a nation. But why writers should be more esteemed the

older they grow, has long perplexed me. At one time I thought that the

praise accorded to authors when they had ceased for twenty years to

write anything of interest was largely due to the fact that the younger

men, having no longer to fear their competition, felt it safe to extol

their merit; and it is well known that to praise someone whose rivalry

you do not dread is often a very good way of putting a spoke in the

wheel of someone whose rivalry you do. But this is to take a low view of

human nature and I would not for the world lay myself open to a charge

of cheap cynicism. After mature consideration I have come to the

conclusion that the real reason for the universal applause that comforts

the declining years of the author who exceeds the common span of man is

that intelligent people after the age of thirty read nothing at all. As

they grow older the books they read in their youth are lit with its

glamour and with every year that passes they ascribe greater merit to

the author that wrote them. Of course he must go on; he must keep in the

public eye. It is no good his thinking that it is enough to write one or

two masterpieces; he must provide a pedestal for them of forty or fifty

works of no particular consequence. This needs time. His production must

be such that if he cannot captivate a reader by his charm he can stun

him by his weight.

If, as I think, longevity is genius, few in our time have enjoyed it in

a more conspicuous degree than Edward Driffield. When he was a young

fellow in the sixties (the cultured having had their way with him and

passed him by) his position in the world of letters was only

respectable; the best judges praised him, but with moderation; the

younger men were inclined to be frivolous at his expense. It was agreed

that he had talent, but it never occurred to anyone that he was one of

the glories of English literature. He celebrated his seventieth

birthday; an uneasiness passed over the world of letters, like a

ruffling of the waters when on an Eastern sea a typhoon lurks in the

distance, and it grew evident that there had lived among us all these

years a great novelist and none of us had suspected it. There was a rush

for Driffield’s book in the various libraries and a hundred busy pens,

in Bloomsbury, in Chelsea, and in other places where men of letters

congregate, wrote appreciations, studies, essays, and works, short and

chatty or long and intense, on his novels. These were reprinted, in

complete editions, in select editions, at a shilling and three and six

and five shillings and a guinea. His style was analyzed, his philosophy

was examined, his technique was dissected. At seventy-five everyone

agreed that Edward Driffield had genius. At eighty he was the Grand Old

Man of English Letters. This position he held till his death.

Now we look about and think sadly that there is no one to take his

place. A few septuagenarians are sitting up and taking notice, and they

evidently feel that they could comfortably fill the vacant niche. But it

is obvious that they lack something.

Though these recollections have taken so long to narrate they took but a

little while to pass through my head. They came to me higgledy-piggledy,

an incident and then a scrap of conversation that belonged to a previous

time, and I have set them down in order for the convenience of the

reader and because I have a neat mind. One thing that surprised me was

that even at that far distance I could remember distinctly what people

looked like and even the gist of what they said, but only with vagueness

what they wore. I knew of course that the dress, especially of women,

was quite different forty years ago from what it was now, but if I

recalled it at all it was not from life but from pictures and

photographs that I had seen much later.

I was still occupied with my idle fancies when I heard a taxi stop at

the door, the bell ring, and in a moment Alroy Kear’s booming voice

telling the butler that he had an appointment with me. He came in, big,

bluff, and hearty; his vitality shattered with a single gesture the

frail construction I had been building out of the vanished past. He

brought in with him, like a blustering wind in March, the aggressive and

inescapable present.

“I was just asking myself,” I said, “who could possibly succeed Edward

Driffield as the Grand Old Man of English Letters and you arrive to

answer my question.”

He broke into a jovial laugh, but into his eyes came a quick look of

suspicion.

“I don’t think there’s anybody,” he said.

“How about yourself?”

“Oh, my dear boy, I’m not fifty yet. Give me another twenty-five years.”

He laughed, but his eyes held mine keenly. “I never know when you’re

pulling my leg.” He looked down suddenly. “Of course one can’t help

thinking about the future sometimes. All the people who are at the top

of the tree now are anything from fifteen to twenty years older than me.

They can’t last for ever, and when they’re gone who is there? Of course

there’s Aldous; he’s a good deal younger than me, but he’s not very

strong and I don’t believe he takes great care of himself. Barring

accidents, by which I mean barring some genius who suddenly springs up

and sweeps the board, I don’t quite see how in another twenty or

twenty-five years I can help having the field pretty well to myself.

It’s just a question of pegging away and living on longer than the

others.”

Roy sank his virile bulk into one of my landlady’s armchairs and I

offered him a whisky and soda.

“No, I never drink spirits before six o’clock,” he said. He looked about

him. “Jolly, these digs are.”

“I know. What have you come to see me about?”

“I thought I’d better have a little chat with you about Mrs. Driffield’s

invitation. It was rather difficult to explain over the telephone. The

truth of the matter is that I’ve arranged to write Driffield’s life.”

“Oh! Why didn’t you tell me the other day?”

I felt friendly disposed toward Roy. I was happy to think that I had not

misjudged him when I suspected that it was not merely for the pleasure

of my company that he had asked me to luncheon.

“I hadn’t entirely made up my mind. Mrs. Driffield is very keen on my

doing it. She’s going to help me in every way she can. She’s giving me

all the material she has. She’s been collecting it for a good many

years. It’s not an easy thing to do and of course I can’t afford not to

do it well. But if I can make a pretty good job of it, it can’t fail to

do me a lot of good. People have so much more respect for a novelist if

he writes something serious now and then. Those critical works of mine

were an awful sweat, and they sold nothing, but I don’t regret them for

a moment. They’ve given me a position I could never have got without

them.”

“I think it’s a very good plan. You’ve known Driffield more intimately

than most people for the last twenty years.”

“I think I have. But of course he was over sixty when I first made his

acquaintance. I wrote and told him how much I admired his books and he

asked me to go and see him. But I know nothing about the early part of

his life. Mrs. Driffield used to try to get him to talk about those days

and she made very copious notes of all he said, and then there are

diaries that he kept now and then, and of course a lot of the stuff in

the novels is obviously autobiographical. But there are immense lacunæ.

I’ll tell you the sort of book I want to write, a sort of intimate life,

with a lot of those little details that make people feel warm inside,

you know, and then woven in with this a really exhaustive criticism of

his literary work, not ponderous, of course, but although sympathetic,

searching and . . . subtle. Naturally it wants doing, but Mrs. Driffield

seems to think I can do it.”

“I’m sure you can,” I put in.

“I don’t see why not,” said Roy. “I am a critic, and I’m a novelist.

It’s obvious that I have certain literary qualifications. But I can’t do

anything unless everyone who can is willing to help me.”

I began to see where I came in. I tried to make my face look quite

blank. Roy leaned forward.

“I asked you the other day if you were going to write anything about

Driffield yourself and you said you weren’t. Can I take that as

definite?”

“Certainly.”

“Then have you got any objection to giving me your material?”

“My dear boy, I haven’t got any.”

“Oh, that’s nonsense,” said Roy good-humouredly, with the tone of a

doctor who is trying to persuade a child to have its throat examined.

“When he was living at Blackstable you must have seen a lot of him.”

“I was only a boy then.”

“But you must have been conscious of the unusual experience. After all,

no one could be for half an hour in Edward Driffield’s society without

being impressed by his extraordinary personality. It must have been

obvious even to a boy of sixteen, and you were probably more observant

and sensitive than the average boy of that age.”

“I wonder if his personality would have seemed extraordinary without the

reputation to back it up. Do you imagine that if you went down to a spa

in the west of England as Mr. Atkins, a chartered accountant taking the

waters for his liver, you would impress the people you met there as a

man of immense character?”

“I imagine they’d soon realize that I was not quite the common or garden

chartered accountant,” said Roy, with a smile that took from his remark

any appearance of self-esteem.

“Well, all I can tell you is that what chiefly bothered me about

Driffield in those days was that the knickerbocker suit he wore was

dreadfully loud. We used to bicycle a lot together and it always made me

feel a trifle uncomfortable to be seen with him.”

“It sounds comic now. What did he talk about?”

“I don’t know; nothing very much. He was rather keen on architecture,

and he talked about farming, and if a pub looked nice he generally

suggested stopping for five minutes and having a glass of bitter, and

then he would talk to the landlord about the crops and the price of coal

and things like that.”

I rambled on, though I could see by the look of Roy’s face that he was

disappointed with me; he listened, but he was a trifle bored, and it

struck me that when he was bored he looked peevish. But though I

couldn’t remember that Driffield had ever said anything significant

during those long rides of ours, I had a very acute recollection of the

_feel_ of them. Blackstable was peculiar in this, that though it was on

the sea, with a long shingly beach and marshland at the back, you had

only to go about half a mile inland to come into the most rural country

in Kent. Winding roads that ran between the great fat green fields and

clumps of huge elms, substantial and with a homely stateliness like good

old Kentish farmers’ wives, high-coloured and robust, who had grown

portly on good butter and home-made bread and cream and fresh eggs. And

sometimes the road was only a lane, with thick hawthorn hedges, and the

green elms overhung it on either side so that when you looked up there

was only a strip of blue sky between. And as you rode along in the warm,

keen air you had a sensation that the world was standing still and life

would last for ever. Although you were pedalling with such energy you

had a delicious feeling of laziness. You were quite happy when no one

spoke, and if one of the party from sheer high spirits suddenly put on

speed and shot ahead it was a joke that everyone laughed at and for a

few minutes you pedalled as hard as you could. And we chaffed one

another innocently and giggled at our own humour. Now and then one would

pass cottages with little gardens in front of them and in the gardens

were hollyhocks and tiger lilies; and a little way from the road were

farmhouses, with their spacious barns and oasthouses; and one would pass

through hopfields with the ripening hops hanging in garlands. The public

houses were friendly and informal, hardly more important than cottages,

and on the porches often honeysuckle would be growing. The names they

bore were usual and familiar: the Jolly Sailor, the Merry Ploughman, the

Crown and Anchor, the Red Lion.

But of course all that could matter nothing to Roy, and he interrupted

me.

“Did he never talk of literature?” he asked.

“I don’t think so. He wasn’t that sort of writer. I suppose he thought

about his writing, but he never mentioned it. He used to lend the curate

books. In the winter, one Christmas holidays, I used to have tea at his

house nearly every day and sometimes the curate and he would talk about

books, but we used to shut them up.”

“Don’t you remember anything he said?”

“Only one thing. I remember it because I hadn’t ever read the things he

was talking about and what he said made me do so. He said that when

Shakespeare retired to Stratford-on-Avon and became respectable, if he

ever thought of his plays at all, probably the two that he remembered

with most interest were _Measure for Measure_ and _Troilus and

Cressida_.”

“I don’t think that’s very illuminating. Didn’t he say anything about

anyone more modern than Shakespeare?”

“Well, not then, that I can remember; but when I was lunching with the

Driffields a few years ago I overheard him saying that Henry James had

turned his back on one of the great events of the world’s history, the

rise of the United States, in order to report tittle-tattle at tea

parties in English country houses. Driffield called it _il gran

rifiuto_. I was surprised at hearing the old man use an Italian phrase

and amused because a great big bouncing duchess who was there was the

only person who knew what the devil he was talking about. He said: ‘Poor

Henry, he’s spending eternity wandering round and round a stately park

and the fence is just too high for him to peep over and they’re having

tea just too far for him to hear what the countess is saying.’”

Roy listened to my little anecdote with attention. He shook his head

reflectively.

“I don’t think I could use that. I’d have the Henry James gang down on

me like a thousand of bricks. . . . But what used you to do during those

evenings?”

“Well, we played whist while Driffield read books for review, and he

used to sing.”

“That’s interesting,” said Roy, leaning forward eagerly. “Do you

remember what he sang?”

“Perfectly. ‘All Through Stickin’ to a Soljer’ and ‘Come Where the Booze

Is Cheaper’ were his favourites.”

“Oh!”