I have written thus far, partly to resolve my own doubts (which,
however, are not resolved) but chiefly to excuse myself to those who
may buy this book. I beg of them to believe that I have not reprinted
these fugitive pieces without deliberation on their value. My friends
tell me that any impressions of men of quality and genius have value,
and undoubtedly Boswell's biography of Dr. Johnson confirms many
mediocrities in their intention to accept a man's hospitality for the
purpose of earning money by describing his personal habits in a public
journal. We would be very grateful for an account of Shakespeare no
better than any one of the chapters in this book. If an Elizabethan
had had a mind like Boswell's and had noted down all that he ever
heard Shakespeare say, had pressed him with questions on his work,
had noted his personal appearance, his habits of dress, his ways of
eating, his effect on women, his likes and dislikes, the thousand and
one small things which, when summed up, make a man out of a myth,
how happy we should all be, how many thousand commentators and
emendators and wrathful Baconians and cypher maniacs would be put out
of employment! One could cry with vexation at the thought that there
was no one with sufficient intelligence to keep a diary during those
last few mysterious years in Stratford-on-Avon when Shakespeare, though
still a young man as ages go, ceased to work at his trade and went in
silence to his grave. Such are the considerations which have affected
me in my decision to reprint these chapters, though they may add very
little to any one's knowledge of the men who are described in them.
It is, perhaps, an additional factor in the decision that they record
impressions made on the mind of a young man by his elders and betters
and expressed at a time when he was ceasing to be young. The generation
to which I belong was much impressed by the men whose work and beliefs
are sketched in this book. All young men, whatever their class or
culture, have heroes. The world, indeed, will end when young men cease
to have heroes. Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells, Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc,
Mr. Yeats and Mr. Moore, Mr. Bennett and Mr. Galsworthy and, rather
more remotely, "A. E." were heroes worthy of emulation by me and the
likes of me. George Meredith and Mr. Hardy were too far up the slopes
of Olympus for us to hope ever to touch the hem of their garments, but
we were alive in the same world with them and sometimes spoke with
people who knew them. Once, even, on a hot Sunday morning I walked for
miles in Surrey, stiff with determination to see Meredith and to speak
with him, even if I should have to skulk about his house the entire day
and run the risk of being arrested for suspicious loitering; but my
heart failed me when, tired and thirsty, I came into his neighbourhood.
Who was I, I demanded of myself, that I should thrust my unimportant
person on the notice of a genius? And when I had made that demand of
myself, I realised that I could do no other than go away and leave the
old man in peace. And so I went, though now I regret that I did, for a
little while after I made my expedition to Box Hill, Meredith died and
I had lost for ever my hope of seeing him. Time has been kinder to me
over Mr. Hardy whose friendship I have the happiness to enjoy.
I have described these men as our heroes, but of course the degree of
respect we gave to them varied. The feeling we had for Mr. Galsworthy,
for example, was diminished by the fact that we were afraid he would
turn aside and shed a few unaccountable tears. His work, particularly
"The Man of Property," "The Country House" and "The Silver Box," had
the great appeal which all passionately sincere work has, but it
left some of us in a state of chilled speculation. We were afraid of
the effect Mr. Galsworthy had on our emotions and we resisted him
more, perhaps, than we ought to have done because we suspected him of
sentimentality and were afraid he might let our minds down by pressing
too hardly on our hearts. His work excited a remote pity in us, but it
did not rouse us to wrath or warm our affections. His characters were
the creatures of an aloof, impassive and immovable Destiny; and it is
difficult to feel much interest in automatons. If a man is wronged by
another man, I may be stirred to his defence, but if he is thwarted
or crushed by some passionless Force which cannot be controlled or
persuaded or defeated, I am unlikely to do more than murmur "Poor
fellow!" and pass on my way. Spineless men, impotently submitting to
Circumstances, do not stir the blood, and Mr. Galsworthy's characters,
though they might excite our pity, killed our hope. Mr. Galsworthy
seemed to us to say, "Vain youths, it is idle to make any effort!
Things happen and they cannot be helped. You are doomed from the moment
of your birth to die frustrated!..." He is easily made indignant by
suffering, but we could not imagine him sounding a call to fight.
We could think of him only in the act of surrender. We asked for a
challenge; he counselled submission. He was a Tolstoyan, not of his
Free Will, for he had no Free Will, but because he could not help
himself. He turned the other cheek because he would not clench his
fist. Mr. Hardy did not fill our mouths with dust as Mr. Galsworthy
did, for his people, though they, too, were creatures of Destiny, were
gallant creatures and went to their end with a noble gesture. He left
us with the sensation that although we were obliged to submit to a doom
determined for us by a Power that understood neither Itself nor us, yet
we could put ribbons in our hats. We could die like men and not like
rats. When Mr. Hardy celebrated his eighty-first birthday, his younger
comrades in the craft of letters presented an address to him from which
I quote the following passages:
"In your novels and poems you have given us a tragic vision of
life which is informed by your knowledge of character and relieved
by the charity of your humour and sweetened by your sympathy with
human suffering and endurance. We have learned from you that the
proud heart can subdue the hardest fate, even in submitting to it.
When Mr. Justice Shallow sought to instruct Sir John Falstaff in
the choice of soldiers, the knight said: 'Care I for the limbs,
the thewes, the stature, bulk and big assemblance of a man? Give
me the spirit, Master Shallow.' So would you have answered him,
for in all that you have written you have shown the spirit of
man, nourished by tradition and sustained by pride, persisting
through defeat. You have inspired us both by your work and by the
manner in which it was done. The craftsman in you calls for our
admiration as surely as the artist, and few writers have observed
so closely as you have the Host's instruction in the Canterbury
Tales:
Your termes, your colours and your figures,
Keep them in store, till so be ye indite
High style, as when that men to kinges write.
From your first book to your last, you have written in the 'high
style, as when that men to kinges write,' and you have crowned a
great prose with a noble poetry."
Those extracts express, I think, some of the quiet quality of courage
discoverable in the determinism of Mr. Hardy, but absent from the
determinism of Mr. Galsworthy.