respectable and even dignified, and, having begun to take root in them
much earlier in life, he felt acutely the wastage of his powers—for
he could never have office. But he was treated by the Chair as a sort
of Elder Statesman, and I shall always remember the solidity and
detail of his experience in foreign affairs. He was one of the very
few men of my time (overlapping from an older time) who knew what he
was talking about when he discussed the Continent, and who followed
the change which was taking place over all Western Europe; and he
could value the degree and the quality of it in each country, or at
least in the Germanies, in France, in Italy, and in Belgium. Spain he
discussed less, and I do not know what his measure of acquaintance was
with Spanish affairs. I always count his evidence as valuable in the
interesting discussion upon the origin of Gambetta. He knew Gambetta
well, and did not despise him. He said that he was a Jew, and that,
therefore, he was quite alien to the French temper. That, of course,
was also the thesis of many of Gambetta’s enemies (for Liberals
always seem to think that they are saying something unpleasant about
a man when they say that he is of Jewish race), but it was not the
testimony of most of his friends. Two of Gambetta’s friends I knew well
enough: one was a relative of mine, the other was that very great man,
Déroulède. I do not think Déroulède was a very accurate observer, but
at any rate he testified to the intensely national quality of Gambetta,
and swore that there was nothing Oriental about him at all. My own
relative, who was of a more cynical temper, said that he was certain of
the same thing from careful observation. Gambetta seems to have been a
man who commanded real and profound affection, but his legend will be
distorted, for it is one of the curses of the modern political chaos
that those who by accident or by their desire enter its whirlpool of
personal competition and consequent advertisement must inevitably be
betrayed by fate. Not one of them can appear as he is, and not one of
them will ever be taken by posterity to have anything of greatness
about him, however great he may be, unless he can exercise some talent
outside the wretched parliamentary business into which he has been
caught up.
There is in that life such an admixture of violence, cunning, and
bombast, quite apart from the money taint, that a man’s name becomes
a mere label for hatred and ridicule in places where the struggle is
taken seriously, as it is in France or in Ireland. It becomes a mere
label for play-acting and make-believe in a country such as ours, where
politics are not taken seriously.
No English Parliamentarian could suffer the legacy of hatred,
virulent contempt, and documented, detailed, evidenced accusation
which will prevent the name of Gambetta from taking an honourable
place in history. But, on the other hand, no English politician,
since the nineties, will cut any figure for posterity unless he can
do something outside his profession. There is nothing to prevent the
Postmaster-General, or the Leader of the Opposition, or any other of
the circus, from writing a good poem, or painting a good picture; but,
unless he does something of the sort, his name will only be one of a
hundred names, half comic and all wearisome. For the trade has lost its
dignity. It is found out.
I have delayed on this subject too long. It is public property, and
filth at that, and people are tired of it, for in their heart of hearts
they know that nothing more can be done, that public life in its
Parliamentary form is past saving.
It is possible that I exaggerate the effect of the evil; it is possible
that some novel remedy besides the obvious one of increasing the power
of the Crown may set things right. It has certainly done so in the
past; the break-up of one institution apparently necessary to society
has discovered the importance of other forces which have saved society
by bringing up new forces unsuspected. It is possible. Perhaps it is
probable. It is to be hoped. And that is all one can say.
Such thoughts are suitable for a drizzling calm, and for wet canvas
hanging useless and dead in a hopeless dawn upon a sea without life.
But with the coming of a little wind, a little northeasterly wind in
the growing light; with its blowing away of the misty rain, and its
bringing a heartening into the morning, I prefer to turn to better
things, to the realities: to the English water and to the English land.
The mist scudded off from the Folkestone waters, the light not only
brightened, but grew coloured, until at last there was a fine, flaming
dawn over the Kentish chalk and the Bastion cliffs of the Kentish
salient, and very soon she was running to it prettily, her wet canvas
holding the wind well, and, if anything, pressing her a little too
hard. My companion came on deck with the morning, woken by the new
life in the hull, and by the run of the sea along the sides. As yet
the water was smooth, for the wind was a trifle off shore, and would
so remain until we had come into the hollow bend of the flat coast,
the last of which runs almost due south, and which ends in the shingle
of Dungeness. Also we were still on the ebb and the wind followed the
stream.
After the sun had risen the breeze grew stronger, and even violent;
but as I greatly desired to round the Ness before the tide should
catch me and raise a sea, I would not take in a reef. So I held on,
though with the more southerly course we were setting, and with the
wind still rising, it was not over safe; for that wind was now coming
almost due aft, her boom was right out, and I feared a gybe. To take
every advantage of any slight northing of the wind that might come, I
ran closer into the coast at a still greater risk of gybe, of course,
if the wind should hold where it did when we came to the sharp turn of
the Ness. We were now running for it very hard indeed, and the Nona,
splendidly as she lifts when properly trimmed, was burying a little
owing to too great press of mainsail, and with head sails doing no work
to support her bows. A slight sea had risen, although the tide was
still with us and with the wind, and once or twice she took it green as
she plunged forward.
Then it was, as I held the Nona with difficulty thus, right in front of
a wind that was now much too strong for her canvas, that I understood
what had long puzzled me, and that is, why the ancients, down to
the end of the Dark Ages in the Mediterranean, and to, perhaps, the
fourteenth century in the North, continued to step the masts of their
square rig so far aft. It was to prevent burying; to give the bow its
chance of lifting to the sea. For this rig sailed at its best with the
wind aft, and when their boats were running so with the great square
sail driving them into the seas, had their mast been stepped forward,
they would have buried dangerously.
And why do you think men were so long in adapting the fore-and-aft to
larger boats?
But I cannot delay to consider such things of the past, for I am at the
edge of Dungeness, and with my heart in my mouth lest at any moment
she should gybe over.
I handed the helm to my companion, who had a better eye than I had, and
a firmer hold, and he, with great skill, did just save the gybe. We had
not the luck to hold the tide; we caught the turn of it and the early
flood nearly two miles from Dungeness Point, and, as you may imagine,
it raised a short and buffeting sea, which made our task the more
perilous. My companion handled her beautifully, until I told him he
could go as near as he liked to the end of the Ness, because the land
shelves down here so steeply as to give one deep water right up against
the shore. We were, perhaps, five minutes in the worst of the ordeal
just opposite the lighthouse before we could put the helm a trifle over
and get the wind fairly on our quarter and breathe again. It seemed
about half an hour, for the strength of the tide, even against that
wind, made us forge very slowly past the land, and it was astonishing
to see the white foam racing by while the shingle, a stone’s throw
away, barely crept past us; but save the gybe he did, as I said, and
there came that placid moment when she would take a turn a little west
of south, and then fairly west of south, and the roar of the wind was
at her quarter and I had no excuse for an excessive nervousness. But
she was pressing too hard altogether, so now we threw her round (as
I ought to have done long before), took in two reefs, and then were
able to set an easy and comfortable line for the doubtful harbour of
Rye, which neither of us had yet made. We feared we might touch at the
entry, but we had at least the comfort of a wind off the land, yet far
round enough to take us in without beating, and we were on a rising
tide.
I have often thought that a boat running snug and properly reefed to
suit the wind is a model of the virtue which the theologians called
temperance, and which has nothing to do with the historical dread of
wine bred in those who have themselves suffered from, or have seen in
their families, the disease called dipsomania. For temperance does not
mean doing things half-heartedly, still less does it mean doing or
not doing things extremely. It means suiting your implements to your
motive power, and not carrying on at a risk. It is not unconnected with
dignity, and there is something profound about it; I will call it the
contralto among the virtues, and leave it at that.
We sped on (the stream against us, very slight now that we were inside
the Ness); we saw before us the broomstick, or whatever you like to
call it, which marks (or does not mark) the entry into Rye Haven, and
the last bare remnant of what was once the crowded fairway, a market
for the nations—the harbour of Rye.
The little town stood up inland, neat and beautiful, red and grey,
a pyramid thrown up towards its squat steeple; for under that keen
northeasterly air all was clear and well cut. The pilot book gave us
no comfort; it only told us that the deep changes with every gale,
and, as for the lead, there was no use for it, the shore would come
too steep; what we had to do was to look out for the outer buoy, and
round it, hoping that as we turned we should neither touch nor get into
irons, but still have the wind easterly enough to round to take us in.
On the plan I had by me the fairway was marked dangerously near the
point from which the wind was coming, but I trusted to luck, and still
kept her to her course.
Any man making Rye Haven must first resign himself to the will of
God, and consider, especially if the boat is running and a little
over-canvassed, that death is but a mighty transition; that it is
all sand hereabouts, with no cruel rocks to tear the tender body with
their horrid fangs; that nothing is worth calculating in life, because
things happen by fate anyhow, or by chance, but certainly not by our
direction; and that if, or when, she strikes, it will not be his
fault. There is no man living that can ever tell you the deep into Rye
Harbour, for it shifts with every wind, and at the best it is of the
narrowest. As for me, I have made it four times in my life, each time I
have touched and never have I struck, and how the thing was done no one
knows. Nevertheless, they still build ships in Rye, and the tradition
of the sea is all about it, though what used to be the old haven is now
a field.
I remember sitting up to a very late and clear sunset of a Whit-Monday,
gazing, under the sharp northeast breeze (the Nona moored at last
to the wooden quay), at the pyramid of red roofs, and the highly
successful walls and battlements of Rye, and considering within my mind
many things.
First I considered within my own dear mind how marvellously this place
had been preserved, seeing what modern England is, and what modern
travel is. It is, of course, a stage-scenery town, such as I have heard
that Rothenburg is in Germany, and, therefore, there is an interest
in preserving it; but I never heard that any such pains were taken to
prevent its destruction by increase or rebuilding, or by any of those
courses which bring death to beauty, such as a good train service,
clubs, large and torturing hotels. Rye manages to live on. I suppose
there is a spell. At any moment it may be broken, and the flood will
pour in.
Being what it is, you cannot begin thinking about Rye without finding
yourself dragged on to consider preciosity, and from that to the
business of letters is but half a step.
Here at Rye did I meet and speak with Henry James, who was in the
very heart of letters. Here also did I meet his brother, William
James, whose business in life it was to write about philosophy,
but whose conversation when I met him turned principally upon the
subtle diplomatic genius of the King of England then reigning;
upon the stability of English institutions; the excellence of the
English police, and the singular faculty shown by our institutions of
permitting differences without conflict. Also the piercing wit of the
paper ‘Punch,’ and the profound wisdom of ‘The Times.’ I had just come
back with a companion from foreign parts; I had been sleeping rough,
and I was in no condition to take part in polite conversation, so I did
all the listening, and, as I listened, I still considered how literary
was Rye. And so now, years after, looking at Rye from my boat, was I
led on to consider the trade or business of letters.
When a writing man approaches that subject, he feels—at least I
feel—like a man before a jumbled heap of material of all kinds—one of
those refuse-heaps in which you may pick up stray bits of machinery,
or salve a little fuel, or find what you will. Or again, it is like
being in one of those shops—there are few of them left, alas!—where
an old half-wit has collected all manner of things, so that one knows
not whether to begin by the furniture, or the glass, or the pictures,
or the second-hand telescopes, or the books. For there is an indefinite
number of ways of considering letters.
To those who have had to pursue letters as a trade (and to this I have
been condemned all my life since my twenty-fifth year) it certainly is
the hardest and the most capricious, and, indeed, the most abominable
of trades, for the simple reason that it was never meant to be a trade.
A man is no more meant to live by writing than he is meant to live
by conversation, or by dressing, or by walking about and seeing the
world. For there is no relation between the function of letters and the
economic effect of letters; there is no relation between the goodness
and the badness of the work, or the usefulness of the work, or the
magnitude of the work, and the sums paid for the work. It would not be
natural that there should be such a relation, and, in fact, there is
none.
This truth is missed by people who say that good writing has no market.
That is not the point. Good writing sometimes has a market, and very
bad writing sometimes has a market. Useful writing sometimes has a
market, and writing of no use whatsoever, even as recreation, sometimes
has a market. Writing important truths sometimes has a market.
Writing the most ridiculous errors and false judgments sometimes has
a market. The point is that the market has nothing to do with the
qualities attached to writing. It never had and it never will. There
is no injustice about it, any more than there is an injustice in the
survival of beauty or ugliness in human beings, or the early death
of the beautiful or the ugly. There is no more injustice about it
than there is in a dry year hurting a root crop, and a wet harvest
hurting a corn crop. The relationship between the excellence or the
usefulness of a piece of literature, and the number of those who will
buy it in a particular form, is not a causal relationship, it is a
purely capricious one; and I, for my part, have never complained of the
absence of a market, nor flattered myself upon the presence of one when
a market turned up, though I have certainly been astonished at the way
the market would behave.
For some few months thousands upon thousands—at one moment sixty
thousand a week—of the articles I wrote upon the war were demanded by
the public. Some months later the same articles, of the same value, or
lack of value, were no longer demanded. There was no particular reason,
the articles were clear, and based upon such insufficient knowledge as
I shared with all my fellow citizens. I had no private information save
upon the point of numbers, and that was the very point upon which the
public grew most easily fatigued, and were at last most sceptical.
Mr. Hutchinson, for whose work I personally have (though I am afraid my
judgment is not worth much in these things) a great liking, wrote among
other books a book called ‘Once Aboard the Lugger.’ It was exceedingly
amusing, fresh, and, as I should have said, well worth anybody’s
buying. I do not know how many copies he sold of it, but I should
imagine nothing very astonishing. A little while after he wrote a book
called ‘If Winter Comes,’ and it sold by the stack, and by the ton. One
could see it piled up man-high upon the counters of shops in America,
and it sold, and it sold, and it sold.
Mr. Wells wrote a book which is most remarkable, and will probably
make a mark in English literature. It was called ‘The Time Machine.’
When Henley (I think it was) was bringing it out by instalments, the
appearance of each was, for me at least, and for very many others,
the chief event of the month. I do not know how many copies he sold,
but there again I will swear nothing comparable to the numbers
he has sold of later books which certainly will not stand out in
English literature. That one which I hear has sold most largely has
always seemed to me to be a mere repetition of what his audience
already thought they knew, and of a philosophy which they already
held: I mean his ‘Outline of History.’ It was mainly a repetition of
the popular mythology of to-day, of antiquated scientific jargon,
full of the popular errors, but it was clear, well-proportioned and
vivacious, showing a rare economy in the use and placing of words.
It was also (and that is high minor praise for any book purporting
to deal with history) astonishingly accurate in details. The names
were properly spelt; south was never written for north, nor east for
west; the dates were all right. Any one who has attempted the writing
of history will not belittle such a feat: I, least of all, because I
am constitutionally inaccurate in such things, and I will write left
for right and north for south as a matter of course, and the word
‘Tyre’ for the word ‘Acre,’ and so on. At any rate, the book, with
all its good and bad qualities, is obviously not of the first class,
and equally obviously is not destined to endure, while ‘The Time
Machine’ is quite certainly of the first class, and is quite likely to
endure. But I believe that the huge ephemeral demand for the ‘Outline
of History’ created no special, certainly no very great, demand for
the more permanent ‘The Time Machine.’ In general, I am assured by
publishers, that when there is a sudden boom in a writer’s work, they
hardly ever manage to float on that boom a resale of earlier works;
while if these earlier works are unknown, it is almost impossible to
give them a popular fame on the strength of the later works. Witness
the late Mr. Hudson’s ‘Crystal Age.’ I came across it as a young man
in a bookshop in the Euston Road on a winter evening. I took it up and
began reading it, and I read it so long that the bookseller told me I
must buy it, which I did. Now, towards the end of Mr. Hudson’s life,
he became deservedly famous as a writer upon the things of the natural
world, and especially upon animals. But what made him famous was not
his subject, though he was both accurate and learned; it was his manner
of writing. One would have expected, therefore, that the ‘Crystal Age’
would, upon his fame tardily arising, have a quiet and equal fame. It
did not. I say that there are no laws governing these movements. They
are capricious and incalculable.
Sometimes one hears that a great demand for a book, or for a set of
newspaper articles, is due to something touching a common feeling in
a particular fashion, something which great bodies of men necessarily
feel together. There is a sense, of course, in which that is a mere
truism, for it is clear that obscure stuff, or stuff dealing with
matters that could not interest great numbers, will never sell. Why
should it? But if the statement is intended to mean (as it usually is)
that whatever sells in great numbers does so through this quality of
a common appeal, that anything having this quality will always sell
in great numbers, and that this quality is in some way a rare thing
discoverable only in ‘best-sellers,’ then the statement is manifestly
false. A great deal of matter which possesses this appeal—enormously
the greater part of such matter—remains unknown, and that which is
best known is often rather weak in such an appeal. There are a great
many factors entering into the result of a great popular demand which
people forget because they are irrational: fashion is one, routine
is another, inertia is a third. I know one man whose name, for the
honour I bear it (he is now dead), I would not publish, since what I
am about to say of his work is not flattering. He wrote a great number
of stories, all of them with exactly the same plot and exactly the
same characters. There was a beautiful chocolate-box girl, there was
a villain, there was a hero who became rich after being poor, there
were parents who objected to the match, and there was a racehorse.
Had he departed from the formula, he would not have sold. As it was,
he sold by the million. He was not only as modest a man as you could
find, but exceedingly generous. He put on no airs; he made no error as
to the nature of his success; he is already forgotten. Nothing shall
persuade me that any one of many thousand men could not have written
exactly the same; but a certain vast public got used to that particular
insipid food, and wanted it unchanged, just as you and I get used to a
particular kind of breakfast, and eat it every day of our lives.
Of course, there is a different set of factors operating in different
phases of society. The popular best-seller of to-day depends upon the
existence of our great towns with their machine-made citizens, all
working blindly in little grooves, lacking any common direction—a dust
of individuals. He depends also on that new-fangled, mechanical, and,
let us hope, ephemeral, institution called ‘popular education.’ If you
tell millions of boys and girls (nearly all the citizens of the state),
at the age when they receive unquestioning any dogmatic teaching, that
their ancestors were repulsive savages, first actually bestial, later
exceedingly vile, and that these ancestors passed through certain
stages, and were ‘Cavemen,’ and men of the ‘Stone Age,’ and of the
‘Bronze Age,’ and so forth; then, obviously, writers using such terms,
and taking for granted such a mythology, will fit in with the popular
market. The demand for books, or for writing in any form, is created
by minds already moulded, and any kind of writing which tends to break
the mould is resented and left on one side. In older phases of society,
judgment upon writing was passed by a few well-trained and leisured
people, who handed down their judgments to a larger class, but still a
small class compared with the whole state; and it is clear that in such
a condition of society—which was that of England from the last third
of the eighteenth century to the last third of the nineteenth—there
would be no best-sellers in our modern sense, and that there would be
a nearer approach between the demand for a book and its excellence.
But there also the mould had to be considered. Macaulay’s false
rhetoric sold well, because it agreed with the religion of his day. No
historical work telling the truth about James II would have sold in his
day, nor for that matter would any such matter sell in ours.
For religion is here, as elsewhere, at the root of effect. Robert Louis
Stevenson was an excellent writer, but his popularity reposed not upon
his excellence alone, but also upon the consonance of his religion
with that of his readers. A man who was perpetually telling you that
it was your duty to be cheerful, that you must take pleasure in God’s
creation, that you had a ‘task of happiness’ would cut no ice with the
Irish, or with the Italians, or, in general, with the Catholic culture
of Europe, but he rings true in the ears of the Protestant culture.
Conversely, what the French powerfully call the ‘bitter taste of
reality’ has very little chance with the crowd of the North. It is a
spur and a relish to the crowd of the South. You could not sell Barrie
in Arles nor Baudelaire in Pudsey.
The truth remains that the relation, or the lack of relation, between
the economic result of a literary effort and its success as a piece of
craft is of very much less importance than the consideration of the
canon, the attempt to achieve a standard. To get a canon is the first
requirement of letters. For though it is said that time will test
literature for us in any case, this is not universally true; and, even
in so far as it is true, it is better to have the good things to our
hand than to wait for time to establish them. Such a canon requires
not only intelligent analysis, but a common philosophy into which our
rules must fit. It is, therefore, with great difficulty arrived at, or
perhaps not to be arrived at at all, in a period of confusion like
ours. But the attempt to arrive at it never loses interest—no, not
even to-day.
One of the things which always seem to me best worth saying in
connection with letters is that prose should be distinguished, not only
from verse, but also from rhetoric; and that prose in itself, mere
lucid, economic, unornamented prose, is the foundation of good letters.