It must be borne in mind that not even the opening chapter of this
huge book, "The Mind of the Race," was ever completely written. The
discussion in the Garden by the Sea existed merely so far as the
fragment of dialogue I have quoted took it. I do not know what Mr.
Gosse contributed except that it was something bright, and that
presently he again lost his temper and washed his hands of the whole
affair and went off with Mr. Yeats to do a little Academy thing of
their own round a corner, and I do not know what became of the
emissaries of Lord Northcliffe and Mr. Hearst. One conversation drops
out of mind and another begins; it is like the battle of the Aisne
passing slowly into the battle of the Yser. The idea develops into the
holding of a definite congress upon the Mind of the Race at some
central place. I don't think Boon was ever very clear whether that
place was Chautauqua, or Grindelwald, or Stratford, or Oxford during
the Long Vacation, or the Exhibition grounds at San Francisco. It was,
at any rate, some such place, and it was a place that was speedily
placarded with all sorts of bills and notices and counsels, such as,
"To the Central Hall," or "Section B: Criticism and Reviewing," or
"Section M: Prose Style," or "Authors' Society (British) Solicitors'
Department," or "Exhibit of the Reading Room of the British Museum."
Manifestly the model of a meeting of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science dominated his mind more and more, until at last
he began to concoct a presidential address. And he invented a man
called J. B. Pondlebury, very active and illiterate, but an excellent
organizer, trained by Selfridge, that Marshal Field of London, who is
very directive throughout. J. B. Pondlebury orders the special trains,
contrives impossible excursions, organizes garden fetes and water
parties, keeps people together who would prefer to be separated, and
breaks up people who have been getting together. Through all these
things drifts Hallery, whose writings started the idea, and sometimes
he is almost, as it were, leader and sometimes he is like a drowned
body in the torrent below Niagara--Pondlebury being Niagara.
On the whole the atmosphere of the great conference was American, and
yet I distinctly remember that it was the Special Train to Bale of
which he gave us an account one afternoon; it was a night journey of
considerable eventfulness, with two adjacent carriages de luxe
labelled respectively "Specially Reserved for Miss Marie Corelli," and
"Specially Reserved for Mr. and Mrs. George Bernard Shaw," with
conspicuous reiterations. The other compartments were less exclusive,
and contained curious minglings of greatness, activity, and
reputation. Sir J. M. Barrie had an upper berth in a _wagon-lit_,
where he remained sympathetically silent above a crowd of younger
reputations, a crowd too numerous to permit the making of the lower
berth and overflowing into the corridor. I remember Boon kept jamming
new people into that congestion. The whole train, indeed, was to be
fearfully overcrowded. That was part of the joke. James Joyce I recall
as a novelist strange to me that Boon insisted was a "first-rater." He
represented him as being of immense size but extreme bashfulness. And
he talked about D. H. Lawrence, St. John Ervine, Reginald Wright
Kauffman, Leonard Merrick, Viola Meynell, Rose Macaulay, Katherine
Mansfield, Mary Austin, Clutton Brock, Robert Lynd, James Stephens,
Philip Guedalla, H. M. Tomlinson, Denis Garstin, Dixon Scott, Rupert
Brooke, Geoffrey Young, F. S. Flint, Marmaduke Pickthall, Randolph S.
Bourne, James Milne----
"Through all the jam, I think we must have Ford Madox Hueffer,
wandering to and fro up and down the corridor, with distraught blue
eyes, laying his hands on heads and shoulders, the Only Uncle of the
Gifted Young, talking in a languid, plangent tenor, now boasting about
trivialities, and now making familiar criticisms (which are invariably
ill-received), and occasionally quite absent-mindedly producing
splendid poetry...."
Like most authors who have made their way to prominence and profit,
Boon was keenly sympathetic with any new writer who promised to do
interesting work, and very ready with his praise and recognition. That
disposition in these writing, prolific times would alone have choked
the corridor. And he liked young people even when their promises were
not exactly convincing. He hated to see a good book neglected, and was
for ever ramming "The Crystal Age" and "Said the Fisherman" and "Tony
Drum" and "George's Mother" and "A Hind Let Loose" and "Growing Pains"
down the throats of his visitors. But there were very human and
definite limits to his appreciations. Conspicuous success, and
particularly conspicuous respectable success, chilled his generosity.
Conrad he could not endure. I do him no wrong in mentioning that; it
is the way with most of us; and a score of flourishing contemporaries
who might have liked tickets for the Conference special would have
found great difficulty in getting them.
There is a fascination in passing judgements and drawing up class
lists. For a time the high intention of the Mind of the Race was
forgotten while we talked the narrow "shop" of London literary
journalism, and discovered and weighed and log-rolled and--in the case
of the more established--blamed and condemned. That Bale train became
less and less like a train and more and more like a descriptive
catalogue.
For the best part of an afternoon we talked of the young and the new,
and then we fell into a discussion about such reputations as
Pickthall's and W. H. Hudson's and the late Stephen Crane's,
reputations ridiculously less than they ought to be, so that these
writers, who are certainly as securely classic as Beckford or Herrick,
are still unknown to half the educated English reading public. Was it
due to the haste of criticism or the illiteracy of publishers? That
question led us so far away from the special Bale train that we never
returned to it. But I know that we decided that the real and
significant writers were to be only a small portion of the crowd that
congested the train; there were also to be endless impostors,
imitators, editors, raiders of the world of print.... At every
important station there was to be a frightful row about all these
people's tickets, and violent attempts to remove doubtful cases....
Then Mr. Clement K. Shorter was to come in to advise and help the
conductor.... Ultimately this led to trouble about Mr. Shorter's own
credentials....
Some of Boon's jokes about this train were, to say the best of them,
obvious. Mr. Compton Mackenzie was in trouble about his excess
luggage, for example. Mr. Upton Sinclair, having carried out his ideal
of an innocent frankness to a logical completeness in his travelling
equipment, was forcibly wrapped in blankets by the train officials.
Mr. Thomas Hardy had a first-class ticket but travelled by choice or
mistake in a second-class compartment, his deserted place being
subsequently occupied by that promising young novelist Mr. Hugh
Walpole, provided with a beautiful fur rug, a fitted dressing-bag, a
writing slope, a gold-nibbed fountain pen, innumerable introductions,
and everything that a promising young novelist can need. The brothers
Chesterton, Mr. Maurice Baring, and Mr. Belloc sat up all night in the
_wagon-restaurant_ consuming beer enormously and conversing upon
immortality and whether it extends to Semitic and Oriental persons. At
the end of the train, I remember, there was to have been a horse-van
containing Mr. Maurice Hewlett's charger--Mr. Hewlett himself, I
believe, was left behind by accident at the Gare de Lyons--Mr.
Cunninghame Graham's Arab steed, and a large, quiet sheep, the
inseparable pet of Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson....
There was also, I remember, a description of the whole party running
for early coffee, which gave Boon ample and regrettable opportunities
for speculations upon the _deshabille_ of his contemporaries. Much of
the detail of that invention I prefer to forget, but I remember Mr.
Shaw was fully prepared for the emerging with hand-painted pyjamas,
over which he was wearing a saffron dressing-gown decorated in green
and purple scrolls by one of the bolder artists associated with Mr.
Roger Fry, and as these special train allusions are all that I can
ever remember Boon saying about Shaw, and as the drawing does in
itself amount to a criticism, I give it here....
[Illustration: _How Mr. Shaw knocked them all on Bale platform, and
got right into the middle of the picture. Remark his earnest face.
This surely is no mountebank._]