GREAT MEN OF THE DAY
Every artist is his own masterpiece.—BURSTALL.
In beginning this chapter, I very nearly fell into the old mistake of
saying “I suppose young people don’t read Dickens nowadays.” It is
curious how generation after generation of us seniors fall into that
trap. Miss Linthorpe said it to me once, when I was in the schoolroom,
upon which I offered to submit to a Dickens examination, and passed it
with flying colours. I said it myself to Francis one day, when he was
lying on the floor with a book, and he held up the book, which was
_Martin Chuzzlewit_. So I will make no apology this time for talking of
Mrs. Leo Hunter as if she were a character familiar to my readers. She
was a real old lady, who lived at Ipswich (I think) and had some
phenomenal number of children, and wrote verses quite as bad as the
“Dying Frog.” But indeed she was not one woman, she was every
woman—every woman who has sufficient station in the world to be able to
choose her own company. We all want to collect lions—none the less since
we ourselves began to be Managing Directresses, and Q.C.’s, and Members
of Parliament. So I am not ashamed of having hunted the lions in my day;
and I have kept them for a separate chapter—just a few of them, who will
be worth exhibiting, because everybody still remembers their names, and
yet my younger readers never saw or only saw them at a distance.
I suppose it would be generally agreed that the greatest man of the
period (I am speaking of the period round about 1960) was Lord Chief
Justice Poltwhistle. He dated from the old days of the English Bar,
before women could plead (“barbarous days, Lady Porstock”) or sit on
juries. In his young days, he said, it was still customary for lawyers
to demand their fees, even when they lost the case; and he could quote
instances in which men had risen to great fame at the Bar without ever
winning a single important case. “We took it all in a more sporting
spirit then,” he would say, in his quaint old way. “You might win a
moral victory as a pleader, although you failed to get a verdict owing
to the intrinsic badness of your cause. But of course at that time
counsel weren’t required to take any oath as to what they thought of the
rights and wrongs of the case, and it was not contrary to etiquette to
defend a man although you were morally certain he was guilty. Even the
moral theologians allowed that; and you must understand, Lady Porstock,
that a moral theologian has a conscience just one point less elastic
than a lawyer’s. I recollect when the Act was passed in ’42 an old
company-promoter called Blofeld sitting next to O’Leary, who was a
prominent K.C. in those days, and saying, ‘Well, the next time I get
into the Courts it seems as if I’d have to find either a knave or a fool
to defend me.’ ‘And you’ll have your pick of the Bar,’ says O’Leary.
Wonderful smart chap he was, O’Leary. ‘It isn’t fair on us Catholics,’
he’d say to me (there weren’t very many of us practising in those days),
‘for the Protestants all think we’re such liars, when I’ve defended a
man it’s all I can do to prevent him getting up and pleading Guilty.’ In
those days, too, you could accept any brief you liked, and accepted the
party that offered the biggest retaining fee, instead of having to wait
your turn. It nearly broke O’Leary’s heart when the Retaining Fees Bill
went through. I remember Lord Hopedale saying to him, ‘Surely you don’t
defend the old system? You wouldn’t have a man get the best counsel
because he can pay the biggest fee?’ and he just looked up with a
twinkle in his eye and said, ‘I do defend it. Aren’t those that want the
best counsel the biggest rogues? And aren’t the biggest rogues the rich
people who can afford to pay for the best counsel?’ Oh, he was a
wonderful smart chap, O’Leary.” And so the old gentleman would wander
on, charming us with anecdotes of the bad old times that, just because
they are so distant, still win our rebellious sympathies.
Another of our guests was Mrs. Justice Partridge, who was one of the
first of my sex to take the silk, and actually the first, I believe, to
attain the Bench. She used to tell the story of one of the first cases
she had to try. The offence was criminal wife-beating, and everybody was
expecting her, as a woman, to be particularly severe over it. The
accused, an Irishman, was equal to the occasion, and explained that he
was “just taychin’ her her place in the house, the same as you would
_your_ old man, yer Honour.”
Talking of Irishmen reminds me of another distinguished visitor of ours,
Daniel Geraghty, the Prime Minister of Ireland at that time. I remember
asking him why it was that Ireland, since her liberation in the
twenties, had never done much that was memorable in the way of
literature, having produced so much till then. “It’s a simple thing,” he
said, “it’s just that we Irishmen have no imagination. We’re hard,
business folk by nature. When you English had it all your own way, you
always liked to believe, and always wanted us to believe, that we were
just dreamy sort of fellows, only fit to dream in a pig-sty or a garret,
the way we’d starve contented. It’s always the way with you conquering
races, you admire your subjects for the qualities that won’t be
dangerous to you. _Excudent alii_—it’s the same all the world over.” I
have never made up my mind whether he was right, but it certainly looks
as if he was justified.
At another time, we entertained Fothergill—the younger Fothergill, of
course, not the one who wrote _Fifteen Years in a Fijian Larder_. He
came to us when he had just had the distinction of discovering the last
race that was left to be discovered—the Ibquo’s in South America. He
said they were a fascinating people, very simple in their character and
very primitive in their habits. They knew nothing of flying, of
electricity, or even of steam, and they used petrol only as an
intoxicant. When they had to travel a long distance, or to pull heavy
weights, they would take one of their tame mustangs and fasten it to a
wheeled cart, and then drive it along with a whip, pulling the cart
behind it. Their cooking was done over a fire, usually of coal; and
their sacrificial meals were always cooked in vessels of iron, not
aluminium, because it would be “bad magic.” They believed in a good
Spirit which ruled the world, and in a bad Spirit which only had power
to hurt them if they did wrong. They had great respect for old age, and
generally chose some of the older men of the tribe to be their
counsellors; if a child disobeyed its parents, it was punished. They
also regarded their women with great veneration, and you would often see
a man getting up from his place by the fire to make room for a woman who
had none. When there was a marriage, the bride was solemnly escorted by
her friends to the house of her future husband, where she was
henceforward to live. The men worked in the fields; the women stayed at
home and cooked for them, and also looked after the children, of whom
there were often as many as eight or nine in one family. I seldom
remember spending such an interesting evening.
It was not at my own house but at Lady Leek’s that I used to meet the
literary men of the period. I did not care for having them at Greylands,
or even at Chiswick, because they were liable to wear such odd clothes,
and to talk so very loud, and to bring the strangest people in with
them, quite uninvited. But they were very interesting people to meet,
there is no doubt. The trouble about their writings was that they spent
almost all their time writing about one another; sometimes in
appreciation, sometimes in criticism. Occasionally one of them would
break away from the tradition by writing about the men of a previous
generation—there was Bernard Sykes, for example, who wrote a book that
was very much talked about at the time, in which he tried to show that
Lord Kitchener was a bad general, and that Herbert Wells was not really
religious. But mostly they stuck to their own generation and criticized
each other’s works about each other. The novelists could not do this
exactly, but even in the novels the heroes were always novelists and the
heroines female novelists, and they all settled down in Chelsea and
lived unhappily ever after. Novels were very long in those days, running
to three, or four, or even five volumes. Archie Lock used to say that he
always took Debrett with him when he went on a journey, because it was
the only book you could still get in one volume. “And very creditable to
them,” he added, “considering the pressure on their space.” Of course
the old “adventure stories” had not quite died out, but they were dying
out rapidly—the Tarzan Syndicate, for example, decided to confine itself
to films about this time. Publishing was already so expensive that all
books except technical ones had to be produced by subscription. So the
only novels one had were very long and very literary. It was only
Jenkins’ invention in the seventies that made them cheap again.
I once met Henricourt and heard from him the story of his early
struggles. He was a Civil Servant on £600 a year when he wrote his first
masterpiece, _The Kleptomaniac_. It was one of the most realistic books
of the century, and critics said that Chapter LXVII of the first volume,
which begins with the hero falling into a deep, dreamless sleep, and
ends just before he wakes up, was one of the most powerful things ever
written. He took it to a publisher, who said there was a printers’
strike on, and they were not producing anything but school books at the
moment; why didn’t he film it? He said he had thought of that, but the
manager had said it would want a reel about as long as the Equator, and
asked him to cut it: he said that would be false to his Art. The
publisher said he’d better store the manuscript somewhere and write
another book that would catch on with the public—his reminiscences, for
example—and then have the Klep. in reserve. He said it was the one thing
they weren’t allowed to do in the Civil Service, write Reminiscences, it
was so apt to create a false impression. Couldn’t the publisher see his
way to producing the first volume, anyhow, dividing the risks? The
publisher said it couldn’t be done unless he could guarantee a sale of
4,000. In despair, he went to a Touting Agency, and asked them if they
could find him 4,000 subscribers for what was really rather a remarkable
novel. They asked if any important public characters came into the book
under pseudonyms. He said no, that was against the principles of his
Art. Finally the agent said he thought he could get the signatures if
Henricourt wouldn’t mind his pretending that the book was a translation
from the Lithuanian, written by a blind Lithuanian patriot. Henricourt
agreed to this, and so the subscribers were procured and the great work
was produced after all.
Poetry in those days had hardly felt the influence of the neo-classical
school, and our poets still went in for using the language of common
life, the commoner the better. To show the sort of thing that was
popular, I don’t think I can do better than give you a page from the
Index of First Lines in a volume of collected Edwardian Poetry, which
Lady Travers-Grant[14] gave me on my fiftieth birthday:
EDWARDIAN POETRY 1960‒1965—INDEX
Damn all these lousy pamphleteers 87
Damn and blast, blast and damn 36
Damnation! has that flat-faced woman gone? 103
Damn Billy Smith, he’s pinched my girl 45
Damned if I care what these nincompoops say of me 156
Damned if that stud hasn’t come loose once more 43
Damned if we’ll sweat, you greasy sycophant 52
Damned in these mucky estuaries of hell 113
Damn her! Where did she get those saffron eyes 11
Damn him! 73
Damn him! What the 128
Damn it all, I’ve swabbed these beetle-squashers 59
Damn kindness! damn faith! damn humanity! 97
Damn my eyes, if yonder paling moonlight 77
Damn Nero for a mawkish hypocrite 80
Damnonian maidens, in your sluttish smocks 34
Damn silly? Yet if this damned silliness 62
Damn the Church and damn the State 39
Damn those little ears of yours, my darling 101
Damn you, Charles, you’ve spoilt it all 1
Damp as the Morgue on autumn afternoons 100
I suppose the mechanical school of poets are hardly to be found at all
in modern bookshelves, and yet there was a time when Edgar Pirbright was
enthusiastically reviewed, and you would see his book, “By Helico to
Helicon,” lying on the tables of all his personal friends. He was
obsessed with the idea that mechanical triumphs, being part of Man’s
self-assertion on the planet, are infinitely better subjects to be
celebrated by the poet’s typewriter than Nature, “that irrelevant mass
of geological strata and atmospheric effects,” as he called it. He even
went so far as to bring out an anthology from the older poets, in which
he included a great deal of Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold and other
writers who had shown themselves hostile to the march of civilization;
but he had, as he said, adapted them—which meant that he had altered
them freely so as to suit his own doctrines. Some of it was ingenious,
and even contained a good deal of original work: for instance, when you
read the stanza:
Our fathers watered with their tears
The sea of time whereon we sail;
They watered it for years and years,
But found its tides of no avail;
Still the same ocean round us raves,
But we have utilized its waves!—
when you read a stanza like that, you did not realize all at once that
it was the Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse which Pirbright was
“utilizing” to celebrate the glories of the tide-trap. And there was a
certain forcefulness about lines like:
But still my heart with rapture fills,
And dances with the cotton-mills:
but you felt the thing was going too far when you came across a poem
called “Sky-writing,” which opened:
My heart leaps up when I behold
An advert in the sky.
I used to have the book, but I have lost it; it was full of things like
that.
And then, of course, there was the Futurist school, which ran into all
sorts of extremes; but none more curious, I think, than the
“Page-decorating” group of writers, who said that neither sense nor
grammar nor even sound counted for anything in poetry; an immediate,
telling effect ought to be produced by the mere look of the letters on
the page. I can give an example of it from an old album of mine: it is
no use trying to make head or tail of it, but if you look at it with
your eyes half-shut, so to speak, you can just see that the first verse
contains pretty and the second contains ugly letters, or groups of
letters:
St. Just-in-Roseland! St. Just-in-Roseland!
All vervein, desirable vervein, and melilot.
Here veined agrimony swoons, with fumes calamitous, daintily;
Arable fallows assoil sly fingers;
Purple woofs incarnate of swishy meadows,
Dilapidated obloquies amorously urgent, all anyhow, wayward fingers,
Transience unimaginably rapid,
Languorous ditties, that opiates inhibit,
Rosy anodynes, albeit rigorously voluble,
Alcantara!
Kircudbright!
Gutted offsets, bombastic in groping hot-houses, endways:
Fungoid sprockets, puddle-bedripped, ungainly,
Rectitudes, angularly awkward, perspectives,
Elucubrate dross, grinning potsherds, warps,
Stinking of frogs, knock-kneed scorpion gargoyles,
Wreathed mouthings of something quarrelsome, brutish,
Newts hag-ridden, huddled responsibilities,
Spawn umbellated, coughing, slobbering,
Heckmondwike!
Perhaps it was time the neo-classical school came along to give us a new
lead! But of course it was far more of a revolution in Art than it was
in letters. I am afraid I am a very poor first-hand witness about the
artistic movements of my time, for the old painters used to expect such
a lot of you! They exhibited, of course, at the Academy and other
accessible places every now and then, but even so it was rather trying
to have the artists standing on guard, as they always did, and
explaining to the sight-seer, not what their pictures were about, but
what sort of emotions they ought to evoke! Some of them went further,
and said you must not look at their pictures unless you were fasting, or
unless you had recently taken opium. (Opium-smoking was not as common
then as it is now, but already you were sometimes offered it in
Chelsea.) I was too busy in one way and another to devote my life to
picture-inspecting; and indeed, it was only a small group of people who
took any interest in painting at all.
But I did once come in close touch with it, when I sat for my own
portrait to Sanderson, the great Præteritist. In those days, when
chromography gave very little help to the artist, you would often have
to “sit” twice or three times before the painter caught what he
considered a likeness. It was during the enforced idleness of one of
these “sittings” that I had a long conversation with him which
interested me so much that I wrote down notes of it afterwards.
We talked of Futurism; he said it was all very well, but the trouble
about it was it had no future. He told me (what I did not know) that the
term “futurism,” when it was first invented, in the early part of the
century (“before you were born, my dear”—waving his brush at me), meant
simply a dissatisfaction with present standards in art and a
determination to find new methods: it was only with Lennox and Burstall
that it took on its new meaning. The old Futurists refused, indeed, to
draw the thing as they saw it, but they had not reached the idea of
portraying things _as one day they would be_. It was Lennox’s _Ruins of
Westminster Cathedral_ that first heralded this much-criticized
departure; and it was Burstall who developed the notion in
portrait-painting. He was something of a missionary: unhappily married
himself, he maintained that it was one of the functions of Art to show
the evanescence of beauty, and when _débutantes_ came to sit to him he
represented them as those wrinkled old women whom we still see and
admire (he was speaking, of course, in 1960) in his portraits. He was a
missionary, and something of a martyr; in consequence of his decision,
he had to struggle for a long time with neglect and poverty; and it was
only his portrait of Prince Albert, then three years old, as six foot
high and a Colonel of Hussars, that drew attention to him once more. He
got all the babies after that.
I said I supposed the Futuribilists were a necessary, or at least a
logical, sequel to the Futurists. He said no, except in so far as they
continued the tradition of drawing anything rather than what you saw in
front of you; “and that, after all,” he added, “we Præteritists maintain
as strongly as anybody.” The idea of painting what might have been was a
quite different inspiration from the idea of painting what probably
would be. (The names, he said, were all wrong; the Futurists ought to
have been called Futuribilists, and the Futuribilists Potentialists, or
something of that sort.) Besides, Futuribilism started in Belgium, and
came out of the Electricist school, which we in England had barely heard
of; had I ever seen an Electric picture, such as Bavet’s _Windmill_? I
said no. “Well,” he said, “it represents simply a mass of electrons
butting in and out. It was a craze that caught on for a bit, but there
was a sameness about it. Then there were the Vitalists, but they never
mattered much; and then Mosheim and his crowd began the Potentialist
movement. It was still life, chiefly, game and so on; and the idea was
to represent it not as what it was, but as what it might have become ...
well, they weren’t very pleasant pictures, and our modern taste has
decided, perhaps rightly, against them. It hardly started in England
till Murchison’s _Decay of a Leaf_ was exhibited: and even then it
didn’t catch on until they began to treat human subjects, like Moffatt
with his _Influenza Patient_, and Rosenstein with his _Triumph of the
Red Corpuscles_.”
Here he had to get up and readjust the convex lenses, so our
conversation was interrupted. When he was back at the easel I asked him
why he said Futurism had no future. He said because it lived by
innovation; it did not develop gradually, like the mind or the tastes of
a man as he grows up, but found its successive inspirations in continual
revolt from the latest fashion: “it’s a series of kicks,” he said, “like
the old petrol tanks.” That meant that the public simply didn’t care
about pictures, because they—the laymen—hadn’t leisure to follow all the
latest movements in art criticism. In the old days you took years to
learn how to paint a picture, and only a fortnight to learn how to
criticize one; now it was the other way about. Only artists looked at
pictures, and they chiefly to see how they could invent a new method,
and turn the old ones on to the scrap-heap. “They didn’t always
succeed,” he explained. “You’d be too young to remember the commotion
there was in the early thirties, when nobody would talk about anything
but relativity, and Manning Barker suddenly laid it down that there
could be no such thing as Truth, even in Art, without velocity. His
school would only paint for the screen, and you had to sit for a quarter
of an hour to see the portrait of a Cabinet minister. I remember Lady
Marrett, who was a beauty in those days, being released in nearly a
quarter of a mile of film, and you never saw more than a square inch of
her at any given moment. It was hard for the sculptors, you see: they
wanted Billing to do an avenue of statues up the old Hammersmith
Broadway, but the police wouldn’t allow it on account of the cars having
to go forty miles an hour to get the values properly. Some of the
movements fail, and some stick, but it can’t go on like this.”
“But what about you?” I asked. “Aren’t you one of the revolts?” I am
afraid my question was a tactless one, because he painted for a time in
complete silence, and then said, yes, he was only one of the reactions;
he was only a fashion: one day people would see no more in him than they
saw in Whistler or Pennell. (“Not that I should be surprised if some of
those fellows came into vogue again,” he put in. “I was at a smart house
the other day where my hostess, who is rather a crank, was thinking of
having her house decorated with pictures, as they used to in our young
days.”) But he painted in his way because he believed in it. “Every line
on your face,” he said, “and every play of movement on your face, was
predetermined for it by your smiles and frowns and pouts and fidgetings
when you were a baby in arms. I must track Truth to its source, so I see
you as a baby still—you must excuse me saying that, but it’s my creed.
It will last my time; but you’re young, and you may live to see a
reaction. These neo-classical people are attracting a lot of attention:
I’m an old fogey, and I can’t see anything in these new ideas, but I
daresay your daughters will.” It was a bold prophecy for a man to make
in the early sixties; but he was quite right. What would he have said to
our neo-romantics!
Talking of Futurism, I noticed in the paper the other day that Dame
Beatrice Goodge was criticizing the old Futurists on the ground that
they never produced any architecture: she would not be old enough to
remember it, but I have actually seen a row of Cubist houses! It was
when I was house-hunting, with Juliet Savage, in ’41, and we were trying
our luck at the “Garden City” at Welwyn. The architect’s idea was a very
simple one, which was to build a series of octagonal passages, just like
a honeycomb: after all, bees built like that, and bees ought to know.
Juliet said if I were shaped like a bee and spent all my time in the
City making honey, one of these would just suit me. Only a very few
tenants were ever secured, and these did not last long: profane
neighbours, I believe, used to call them the Hivites. What a mad world
it is, and how few men and women you will find who have not a blind spot
somewhere.
“Men and women”—we still write the words in that order, though the
Feminists, at the period of which I am typing, did their best to get it
inverted. I cannot say that I sympathized at all with this agitation; I
have always been old-fashioned, and felt that the proper sphere of woman
is the flat. But I used to see a good deal in those days of Esther
Margate, who was one of our most fanatical Feminists; and I think she
ought to have her mention in this chapter, because there was a sort of
mad consistency about her, which I believe to be a necessary element in
all greatness of the reforming kind. She would always say, for example,
“I do not suppose there is a woman, man or child in this country ...
etc.,” because she maintained that woman was intellectually and morally
man’s superior, and ought therefore to have the place of honour. I can
still remember her asking Lord Billericay at dinner whether he didn’t
think the women and men of London were better dressed now than they used
to be: he said he was a bad judge, because he only came up to London
once a year, for the Harrow and Eton match (he meant the cricket match,
of course), and as a rule only stayed there till the Cambridge and
Oxford match. Nobody ever quite knew whether Esther Margate realized
what he was getting at. She used to dilate, too, on the unfairness of
talking about “Man,” when you meant the human race in general: Archie
Lock asked her if we ought to say “The proper study of mankind is
Woman”; she answered quite sharply, no, “womankind,” of course. I
believe some of her disciples went so far as to change their names; and
you certainly do meet people called Goodwoman and Newwoman now, which
you never used to. But her attempt to confine the suffrage to women was
foredoomed to failure, even if Juliet Savage had not organized her
campaign against it. It was conclusively shown that at least 27 per
cent. of the men who had votes regularly exercised their right.
This seems to be a very rambling sort of chapter, but who has a right to
ramble if it be not an old lady who has seen more than seventy summers?
I must not finish this chapter without giving a place in it to George
Hammond the historian. I never knew, I think, a more delightful
conversationalist. He was often at Greylands, and I was always trying to
draw him out, having that worst habit of hostesses, the habit of making
a man talk on his own subject. Once, for example, I asked him what he
thought was the really salient characteristic of the early twentieth
century (his special period) which distinguished the people of that time
from ourselves. “I have often wondered,” he said, “but I think you get
nearest to the truth by saying that they had no sense of humour—that is,
they had not got what we mean by the sense of humour. I’ve been at the
British Museum a good deal lately (that it, at the Cippenham annexe),
looking through the old newspapers of that period, the cheap newspapers
especially, and I think it’s quite impossible to suppose that the people
who liked to have that kind of thing served up with their breakfasts had
any sense of humour at all. If you took one of our grandfathers and put
him down opposite a series of drawings like, say, McGillivray’s, I don’t
think he’d see anything in them. Or take that joke in _Punch_ last
week—did you see last week’s _Punch_? Well, there are two men travelling
by railway, and one looks out of the window and says, ‘Cholsey and
Moulsford, change for Wallingford.’ And the other man says, ‘I should
jolly well think you did.’ Clever, isn’t it? But, you know, I don’t
believe they’d have seen anything funny in it in the twenties.”
There, I had forgotten the humorists! Lancelot Briggs-Wilde, what a
creator of merriment! And then there was the old Bishop of Birkenhead,
who had the reputation of being quite unrivalled as a _raconteur_. It
was he, I remember, who described to us how once at a missionary
festival he had a very shy curate staying with him; and at breakfast, it
seems, the eggs were not all that they should have been. The curate had
one that was really very far gone, and the Bishop, by way of apology,
said, “I’m afraid, Mr. So-and-so, your egg’s not very good.” “Oh, not at
all,” was the mild reply, “_it’s excellent in parts_.” We all told the
Bishop that he ought to send that up to _Punch_, but I don’t know if he
ever did.
We did not, I am afraid, see a great deal of the Anglican episcopate,
but of course Cardinal Smith was our near neighbour at Hare Street. He
was a great walker: and when he came over to luncheon he would nearly
always come on foot, although the distance was nearly three miles, and
he had an excellent helico. “I don’t like going the pace in this part of
Hertfordshire, Lady Porstock,” he once told me. “You see, I was brought
up in these parts—twelve years of my life—and somehow I’ve got the
leisurely spirit of them into my bones. When I die, I want them to bury
me under the station platform at St. Margaret’s, so that I can wait for
the Day of Judgment there; it’s easier waiting when you’re accustomed to
it.”