Literature and the Middle Classes.
I am sorry to be compelled to cast a slur upon the Literary profession,
but observation shows me that it still contains within its ranks writers
born and bred in, and moving amidst--if, without offence, one may put it
bluntly--a purely middle-class environment: men and women to whom Park
Lane will never be anything than the shortest route between Notting Hill
and the Strand; to whom Debrett's Peerage--gilt-edged and bound in red, a
tasteful-looking volume--ever has been and ever will remain a drawing-
room ornament and not a social necessity. Now what is to become of these
writers--of us, if for the moment I may be allowed to speak as
representative of this rapidly-diminishing yet nevertheless still
numerous section of the world of Art and Letters? Formerly, provided we
were masters of style, possessed imagination and insight, understood
human nature, had sympathy with and knowledge of life, and could express
ourselves with humour and distinction, our pathway was, comparatively
speaking, free from obstacle. We drew from the middle-class life around
us, passed it through our own middle-class individuality, and presented
it to a public composed of middle-class readers.
But the middle-class public, for purposes of Art, has practically
disappeared. The social strata from which George Eliot and Dickens drew
their characters no longer interests the great B. P. Hetty Sorrell,
Little Em'ly, would be pronounced "provincial;" a Deronda or a Wilfer
Family ignored as "suburban."
I confess that personally the terms "provincial" and "suburban," as
epithets of reproach, have always puzzled me. I never met anyone more
severe on what she termed the "suburban note" in literature than a thin
lady who lived in a semi-detached villa in a by-street of Hammersmith. Is
Art merely a question of geography, and if so what is the exact limit? Is
it the four-mile cab radius from Charing Cross? Is the cheesemonger of
Tottenham Court Road of necessity a man of taste, and the Oxford
professor of necessity a Philistine? I want to understand this thing. I
once hazarded the direct question to a critical friend:
"You say a book is suburban," I put it to him, "and there is an end to
the matter. But what do you mean by suburban?"
"Well," he replied, "I mean it is the sort of book likely to appeal to
the class that inhabits the suburbs." He lived himself in Chancery Lane.
May a man of intelligence live, say, in Surbiton?
"But there is Jones, the editor of _The Evening Gentleman_," I argued;
"he lives at Surbiton. It is just twelve miles from Waterloo. He comes
up every morning by the eight-fifteen and returns again by the five-ten.
Would you say that a book is bound to be bad because it appeals to Jones?
Then again, take Tomlinson: he lives, as you are well aware, at Forest
Gate which is Epping way, and entertains you on Kakemonos whenever you
call upon him. You know what I mean, of course. I think 'Kakemono' is
right. They are long things; they look like coloured hieroglyphics
printed on brown paper. He gets behind them and holds them up above his
head on the end of a stick so that you can see the whole of them at once;
and he tells you the name of the Japanese artist who painted them in the
year 1500 B.C., and what it is all about. He shows them to you by the
hour and forgets to give you dinner. There isn't an easy chair in the
house. To put it vulgarly, what is wrong with Tomlinson from a high art
point of view?
"There's a man I know who lives in Birmingham: you must have heard of
him. He is the great collector of Eighteenth Century caricatures, the
Rowlandson and Gilray school of things. I don't call them artistic
myself; they make me ill to look at them; but people who understand Art
rave about them. Why can't a man be artistic who has got a cottage in
the country?"
"You don't understand me," retorted my critical friend, a little
irritably, as I thought.
"I admit it," I returned. "It is what I am trying to do."
"Of course artistic people live in the suburbs," he admitted. "But they
are not of the suburbs."
"Though they may dwell in Wimbledon or Hornsey," I suggested, "they sing
with the Scotch bard: 'My heart is in the South-West postal district. My
heart is not here.'"
"You can put it that way if you like," he growled.
"I will, if you have no objection," I agreed. "It makes life easier for
those of us with limited incomes."
The modern novel takes care, however, to avoid all doubt upon the
subject. Its personages, one and all, reside within the half-mile square
lying between Bond Street and the Park--a neighbourhood that would appear
to be somewhat densely populated. True, a year or two ago there appeared
a fairly successful novel the heroine of which resided in Onslow Gardens.
An eminent critic observed of it that: "It fell short only by a little
way of being a serious contribution to English literature." Consultation
with the keeper of the cabman's shelter at Hyde Park Corner suggested to
me that the "little way" the critic had in mind measures exactly eleven
hundred yards. When the nobility and gentry of the modern novel do leave
London they do not go into the provinces: to do that would be vulgar.
They make straight for "Barchester Towers," or what the Duke calls "his
little place up north"--localities, one presumes, suspended somewhere in
mid-air.
In every social circle exist great souls with yearnings towards higher
things. Even among the labouring classes one meets with naturally
refined natures, gentlemanly persons to whom the loom and the plough will
always appear low, whose natural desire is towards the dignities and
graces of the servants' hall. So in Grub Street we can always reckon
upon the superior writer whose temperament will prompt him to make
respectful study of his betters. A reasonable supply of high-class
novels might always have been depended upon; the trouble is that the
public now demands that all stories must be of the upper ten thousand.
Auld Robin Grey must be Sir Robert Grey, South African millionaire; and
Jamie, the youngest son of the old Earl, otherwise a cultured public can
take no interest in the ballad. A modern nursery rhymester to succeed
would have to write of Little Lord Jack and Lady Jill ascending one of
the many beautiful eminences belonging to the ancestral estates of their
parents, bearing between them, on a silver rod, an exquisitely painted
Sevres vase filled with ottar of roses.
I take up my fourpenny-halfpenny magazine. The heroine is a youthful
Duchess; her husband gambles with thousand-pound notes, with the result
that they are reduced to living on the first floor of the Carlton Hotel.
The villain is a Russian Prince. The Baronet of a simpler age has been
unable, poor fellow, to keep pace with the times. What self-respecting
heroine would abandon her husband and children for sin and a paltry five
thousand a year? To the heroine of the past--to the clergyman's daughter
or the lady artist--he was dangerous. The modern heroine misbehaves
herself with nothing below Cabinet rank.
I turn to something less pretentious, a weekly periodical that my wife
tells me is the best authority she has come across on blouses. I find in
it what once upon a time would have been called a farce. It is now a
"drawing-room comedietta. All rights reserved." The _dramatis personae_
consist of the Earl of Danbury, the Marquis of Rottenborough (with a
past), and an American heiress--a character that nowadays takes with
lovers of the simple the place formerly occupied by "Rose, the miller's
daughter."
I sometimes wonder, is it such teaching as that of Carlyle and Tennyson
that is responsible for this present tendency of literature? Carlyle
impressed upon us that the only history worth consideration was the life
of great men and women, and Tennyson that we "needs must love the
highest." So literature, striving ever upward, ignores plain Romola for
the Lady Ponsonby de Tompkins; the provincialisms of a Charlotte Bronte
for what a certain critic, born before his time, would have called the
"doin's of the hupper succles."
The British Drama has advanced by even greater bounds. It takes place
now exclusively within castle walls, and--what Messrs. Lumley & Co.'s
circular would describe as--"desirable town mansions, suitable for
gentlemen of means." A living dramatist, who should know, tells us that
drama does not occur in the back parlour. Dramatists have, it has been
argued, occasionally found it there, but such may have been dramatists
with eyes capable of seeing through clothes.
I once wrote a play which I read to a distinguished Manager. He said it
was a most interesting play: they always say that. I waited, wondering
to what other manager he would recommend me to take it. To my surprise
he told me he would like it for himself--but with alterations.
"The whole thing wants lifting up," was his opinion. "Your hero is a
barrister: my public take no interest in plain barristers. Make him the
Solicitor General."
"But he's got to be amusing," I argued. "A Solicitor General is never
amusing."
My Manager pondered for a moment. "Let him be Solicitor General for
Ireland," he suggested.
I made a note of it.
"Your heroine," he continued, "is the daughter of a seaside lodging-house
keeper. My public do not recognize seaside lodgings. Why not the
daughter of an hotel proprietor? Even that will be risky, but we might
venture it." An inspiration came to him. "Or better still, let the old
man be the Managing Director of an hotel Trust: that would account for
her clothes."
Unfortunately I put the thing aside for a few months, and when I was
ready again the public taste had still further advanced. The doors of
the British Drama were closed for the time being on all but members of
the aristocracy, and I did not see my comic old man as a Marquis, which
was the lowest title that just then one dared to offer to a low comedian.
Now how are we middle-class novelists and dramatists to continue to live?
I am aware of the obvious retort, but to us it absolutely is necessary.
We know only parlours: we call them drawing-rooms. At the bottom of our
middle-class hearts we regard them fondly: the folding-doors thrown back,
they make rather a fine apartment. The only drama that we know takes
place in such rooms: the hero sitting in the gentleman's easy chair, of
green repp: the heroine in the lady's ditto, without arms--the chair, I
mean. The scornful glances, the bitter words of our middle-class world
are hurled across these three-legged loo-tables, the wedding-cake
ornament under its glass case playing the part of white ghost.
In these days, when "Imperial cement" is at a premium, who would dare
suggest that the emotions of a parlour can by any possibility be the same
as those exhibited in a salon furnished in the style of Louis Quatorze;
that the tears of Bayswater can possibly be compared for saltness with
the lachrymal fluid distilled from South Audley Street glands; that the
laughter of Clapham can be as catching as the cultured cackle of Curzon
Street? But we, whose best clothes are exhibited only in parlours, what
are we to do? How can we lay bare the souls of Duchesses, explain the
heart-throbs of peers of the realm? Some of my friends who, being
Conservative, attend Primrose "tourneys" (or is it "Courts of love"? I
speak as an outsider. Something mediaeval, I know it is) do, it is true,
occasionally converse with titled ladies. But the period for
conversation is always limited owing to the impatience of the man behind;
and I doubt if the interview is ever of much practical use to them, as
conveying knowledge of the workings of the aristocratic mind. Those of
us who are not Primrose Knights miss even this poor glimpse into the
world above us. We know nothing, simply nothing, concerning the deeper
feelings of the upper ten. Personally, I once received a letter from an
Earl, but that was in connection with a dairy company of which his
lordship was chairman, and spoke only of his lordship's views concerning
milk and the advantages of the cash system. Of what I really wished to
know--his lordship's passions, yearnings and general attitude to life--the
circular said nothing.
Year by year I find myself more and more in a minority. One by one my
literary friends enter into this charmed aristocratic circle; after which
one hears no more from them regarding the middle-classes. At once they
set to work to describe the mental sufferings of Grooms of the
Bed-chamber, the hidden emotions of Ladies in their own right, the
religious doubts of Marquises. I want to know how they do it--"how the
devil they get there." They refuse to tell me.
Meanwhile, I see nothing before me but the workhouse. Year by year the
public grows more impatient of literature dealing merely with the middle-
classes. I know nothing about any other class. What am I to do?
Commonplace people--friends of mine without conscience, counsel me in
flippant phrase to "have a shot at it."
"I expect, old fellow, you know just as much about it as these other
Johnnies do." (I am not defending their conversation either as regards
style or matter: I am merely quoting.) "And even if you don't, what does
it matter? The average reader knows less. How is he to find you out?"
But, as I explain to them, it is the law of literature never to write
except about what you really know. I want to mix with the aristocracy,
study them, understand them; so that I may earn my living in the only way
a literary man nowadays can earn his living, namely, by writing about the
upper circles.
I want to know how to get there.