Fair were the dreamful days of old,
When in the summer's sleepy shade,
Beneath the beeches on the wold,
The shepherds lay and gently played
Music to maidens, who, afraid,
Drew all together rapturously,
Their white soft hands like white leaves laid,
In the old dear days of Arcady.
Men were not then as they are now
Haunted and terrified by creeds,
They sought not then, nor cared to know
The end that as a magnet leads,
Nor told with austere fingers beads,
Nor reasoned with their grief and glee,
But rioted in pleasant meads
In the old dear days of Arcady.
The future may be wrong or right,
The present is a hopeless wrong,
For life and love have lost delight,
And bitter even is our song;
And year by year grey doubt grows strong,
And death is all that seems to dree.
Wherefore with weary hearts we long
For the old dear days of Arcady.
Envoi.
Glories and triumphs ne'er shall cease,
But men may sound the heavens and sea,
One thing is lost for aye--the peace
Of the old dear days of Arcady.
And so it was that I came to settle down in a Strand lodging-house,
determined to devote myself to literature, and to accept the hardships
of a literary life. I had been playing long enough, and was now anxious
for proof, peremptory proof, of my capacity or incapacity. A book! No.
An immediate answer was required, and journalism alone could give that.
So did I reason in the Strand lodging-house. And what led me to that
house? Chance, or a friend's recommendation? I forget. It was
uncomfortable, ugly, and not very clean; but curious, as all things are
curious when examined closely. Let me tell you about my rooms. The
sitting-room was a good deal longer than it was wide; it was panelled
with deal, and the deal was painted a light brown; behind it there was a
large bedroom: the floor was covered with a ragged carpet, and a big bed
stood in the middle of the floor. But next to the sitting-room was a
small bedroom which was let for ten shillings a week; and the partition
wall was so thin that I could hear every movement the occupant made.
This proximity was intolerable, and eventually I decided on adding ten
shillings to my rent, and I became the possessor of the entire flat. In
the room above me lived a pretty young woman, an actress at the Savoy
Theatre. She had a piano, and she used to play and sing in the mornings,
and in the afternoon, friends--girls from the theatre--used to come and
see her; and Emma, the maid-of-all-work, used to take them up their tea;
and, oh! the chattering and the laughter. Poor Miss L----; she had only
two pounds a week to live on, but she was always in high spirits except
when she could not pay the hire of her piano; and I am sure that she now
looks back with pleasure and thinks of those days as very happy ones.
She was a tall girl, a thin figure, and she had large brown eyes; she
liked young men, and she hoped that Mr Gilbert would give her a line or
two in his next opera. Often have I come out on the landing to meet her;
we used to sit on those stairs talking, long after midnight, of
what?--of our landlady, of the theatre, of the most suitable ways of
enjoying ourselves in life. One night she told me she was married; it
was a solemn moment. I asked in a sympathetic voice why she was not
living with her husband. She told me, but the reason of the separation I
have forgotten in the many similar reasons for separations and partings
which have since been confided to me. The landlady resented our
intimacy, and I believe Miss L---- was charged indirectly for her
conversations with me in the bill. On the first floor there was a large
sitting-room and bedroom, solitary rooms that were nearly always unlet.
The landlady's parlour was on the ground floor, her bedroom was next to
it, and further on was the entrance to the kitchen stairs, whence
ascended Mrs S----'s brood of children, and Emma, the awful servant,
with tea things, many various smells, that of ham and eggs
predominating.
Emma, I remember you--you are not to be forgotten--up at five o'clock
every morning, scouring, washing, cooking, dressing those infamous
children; seventeen hours at least out of the twenty-four at the beck
and call of landlady, lodgers, and quarrelling children; seventeen hours
at least out of the twenty-four drudging in that horrible kitchen,
running up stairs with coals and breakfasts and cans of hot water; down
on your knees before a grate, pulling out the cinders with those
hands--can I call them hands? The lodgers sometimes threw you a kind
word, but never one that recognised that you were akin to us, only the
pity that might be extended to a dog. And I used to ask you all sorts
of cruel questions, I was curious to know the depth of animalism you had
sunk to, or rather out of which you had never been raised. And generally
you answered innocently and naïvely enough. But sometimes my words were
too crude, and they struck through the thick hide into the quick, into
the human, and you winced a little; but this was rarely, for you were
very nearly, oh, very nearly an animal, your temperament and
intelligence were just those of a dog that has picked up a master, not a
real master, but a makeshift master who may turn it out at any moment.
Dickens would sentimentalise or laugh over you; I do neither. I merely
recognise you as one of the facts of civilisation. You looked--well, to
be candid,--you looked neither young nor old; hard work had obliterated
the delicate markings of the years, and left you in round numbers
something over thirty. Your hair was reddish brown, and your face wore
that plain honest look that is so essentially English. The rest of you
was a mass of stuffy clothes, and when you rushed up stairs I saw
something that did not look like legs; a horrible rush that was of
yours, a sort of cart-horselike bound. I have spoken angrily to you; I
have heard others speak angrily to you, but never did that sweet face of
yours, for it was a sweet face--that sweet, natural goodness that is so
sublime--lose its expression of perfect and unfailing kindness. Words
convey little sense of the real horrors of the reality. Life in your
case meant this: to be born in a slum, and to leave it to work seventeen
hours a day in a lodging-house; to be a Londoner, but to know only the
slum in which you were born and the few shops in the Strand at which the
landlady dealt. To know nothing of London meant in your case not to know
that it was not England; England and London! you could not distinguish
between them. Was England an island or a mountain? you had no notion. I
remember when you heard that Miss L---- was going to America, you asked
me, and the question was sublime: "Is she going to travel all night?"
You had heard people speak of travelling all night, and that was all you
knew of travel or any place that was not the Strand. I asked you if you
went to church, and you said, "No, it makes my eyes bad." I said, "But
you don't read; you can't read." "No, but I have to look at the book." I
asked you if you had heard of God--you hadn't, but when I pressed you
on the point you suspected I was laughing at you, and you would not
answer, and when I tried you again on the subject I could see that the
landlady had been telling you what to say. But you had not understood,
and your conscious ignorance, grown conscious within the last couple of
days, was even more pitiful than your unconscious ignorance when you
answered that you couldn't go to church because it made your eyes bad.
It is a strange thing to know nothing; for instance, to live in London
and to have no notion of the House of Commons, nor indeed of the Queen,
except perhaps that she is a rich lady; the police--yes, you knew what a
policeman was because you used to be sent to fetch one to make an
organ-man or a Christy minstrel move on. To know of nothing but a dark
kitchen, grates, eggs and bacon, dirty children; to work seventeen hours
a day and to get cheated out of your wages; to answer, when asked, why
you did not get your wages or leave if you weren't paid, that you
"didn't know how Mrs S---- would get on without me."
This woman owed you forty pounds, I think, so I calculated it from what
you told me; and yet you did not like to leave her because you did not
know how she would get on without you. Sublime stupidity! At this point
your intelligence stopped. I remember you once spoke of a half-holiday;
I questioned you, and I found your idea of a half-holiday was to take
the children for a walk and buy them some sweets. I told my brother of
this and he said--Emma out for a half-holiday! why, you might as well
give a mule a holiday. The phrase was brutal, but it was admirably
descriptive of you. Yes, you are a mule, there is no sense in you; you
are a beast of burden, a drudge too horrible for anything but work; and
I suppose, all things considered, that the fat landlady with a dozen
children did well to work you seventeen hours a day, and cheat you out
of your miserable wages. You had no friends; you could not have a friend
unless it were some forlorn cat or dog; but you once spoke to me of your
brother, who worked in a potato store, and I was astonished, and I
wondered if he were as awful as you. Poor Emma! I shall never forget
your kind heart and your unfailing good humour; you were born
beautifully good as a rose is born with perfect perfume; you were as
unconscious of your goodness as the rose of its perfume. And you were
taken by this fat landlady as 'Arry takes a rose and sticks it in his
tobacco-reeking coat; and you will be thrown away, shut out of doors
when health fails you, or when, overcome by base usage, you take to
drink. There is no hope for you; even if you were treated better and
paid your wages there would be no hope. Those forty pounds even, if they
were given to you, would bring you no good fortune. They would bring the
idle loafer, who scorns you now as something too low for even his
kisses, hanging about your heels and whispering in your ears. And his
whispering would drive you mad, for your kind heart longs for kind
words; and then when he had spent your money and cast you off in
despair, the gin shop and the river would do the rest. Providence is
very wise after all, and your best destiny is your present one. We
cannot add a pain, nor can we take away a pain; we may alter, but we
cannot subtract nor even alleviate. But what truisms are these; who
believes in philanthropy nowadays?
* * * * *
"Come in."
"Oh, it is you, Emma!"
"Are you going to dine at home to-day, sir?"
"What can I have?"
"Well, yer can 'ave a chop or a steak."
"Anything else?"
"Yes, yer can 'ave a steak, or a chop, or--"
"Oh, yes, I know; well then, I'll have a chop. And now tell me, Emma,
how is your young man? I hear you have got one, you went out with him
the other night."
"Who told yer that?"
"Ah, never mind; I hear everything."
"I know, from Miss L----"
"Well, tell me, how did you meet him, who introduced him?"
"I met 'im as I was a-coming from the public 'ouse with the beer for
missus' dinner."
"And what did he say?"
"He asked me if I was engaged; I said no. And he come round down the
lane that evening."
"And he took you out?"
"Yes."
"And where did you go?"
"We went for a walk on the Embankment."
"And when is he coming for you again?"
"He said he was coming last evening, but he didn't."
"Why didn't he?"
"I dunno; I suppose because I haven't time to go out with him. So it
was Miss L---- that told you; well, you do 'ave chats on the stairs. I
suppose you likes talking to 'er."
"I like talking to everybody, Emma; I like talking to you."
"Yes, but not as you talks to 'er; I 'ears you jes do 'ave fine times.
She said this morning that she had not seen you for this last two
nights--that you had forgotten 'er, and I was to tell yer."
"Very well, I'll come out to-night and speak to her."
"And missus is so wild about it, and she daren't say nothing 'cause she
thinks yer might go."
* * * * *
A young man in a house full of women must be almost supernaturally
unpleasant if he does not occupy a great deal of their attention.
Certain at least it is that I was the point of interest in that house;
and I found there that the practice of virtue is not so disagreeable as
many young men think it. The fat landlady hovered round my doors, and I
obtained perfectly fresh eggs by merely keeping her at her distance; the
pretty actress, with whom I used to sympathise with on the stairs at
midnight, loved me better, and our intimacy was more strange and subtle,
because it was pure, and it was not quite unpleasant to know that the
awful servant dreamed of me as she might of a star, or something equally
unattainable; but the landlady's daughter, a nasty girl of fifteen,
annoyed me with her ogling, which was a little revolting, but the rest
was, and I speak quite candidly, not wholly unpleasant. It was not
aristocratic, it is true, but, I repeat, it was not unpleasant, nor do I
believe that any young man, however refined, would have found it
unpleasant.
But if I was offered a choice between a chop and steak in the evening,
in the morning I had to decide between eggs and bacon and bacon and
eggs. A knocking at the door, "Nine o'clock, sir; 'ot water, sir; what
will you have for breakfast?" "What can I have?" "Anything you like,
sir. You can have bacon and eggs, or--" "Anything else?"--Pause,--"Well,
sir, you can have eggs and bacon, or--" "Well, I'll have eggs and
bacon."
The streets seemed to me like rat holes, dark and wandering as chance
directed, with just an occasional rift of sky, seen as if through an
occasional crevice, so different from the boulevards widening out into
bright space with fountains and clouds of green foliage. The modes of
life were so essentially opposed. I am thinking now of intellectual
rather than physical comforts. I could put up with even lodging-house
food, but I found it difficult to forego the glitter and artistic
enthusiasm of the _café_. The tavern, I had heard of the tavern.
Some seventy years ago the Club superseded the Tavern, and since then
all literary intercourse has ceased in London. Literary clubs have been
founded, and their leather arm-chairs have begotten Mr Gosse; but the
tavern gave the world Villon and Marlowe. Nor is this to be wondered at.
What is wanted is enthusiasm and devil-may-careism; and the very aspect
of a tavern is a snort of defiance at the hearth, the leather arm-chairs
are so many salaams to it. I ask, Did anyone ever see a gay club room?
Can any one imagine such a thing? You can't have a club-room without
mahogany tables, you can't have mahogany tables without
magazines--_Longman's_, with a serial by Rider Haggard, the _Nineteenth
Century_, with an article, "The Rehabilitation of the Pimp in Modern
Society," by W. E. Gladstone--a dulness that's a purge to good spirits,
an aperient to enthusiasm; in a word, a dulness that's worth a thousand
a year. You can't have a club without a waiter in red plush and silver
salver in his hand; then you can't bring a lady to a club, and you have
to get into a corner to talk about them. Therefore I say a club is dull.
As the hearth and home grew all-powerful it became impossible for the
husband to tell his wife that he was going to the tavern; everyone can
go to the tavern, and no place in England where everyone can go is
considered respectable. This is the genesis of the Club--out of the
Housewife by Respectability. Nowadays everyone is respectable--jockeys,
betting-men, actors, and even actresses. Mrs Kendal takes her children
to visit a duchess, and has naughty chorus girls to tea, and tells them
of the joy of respectability. There is only one class left that is not
respectable, and that will succumb before long; how the transformation
will be effected I can't say, but I know an editor or two who would be
glad of an article on the subject.
Respectability!--a suburban villa, a piano in the drawing-room, and
going home to dinner. Such things are no doubt very excellent, but they
do not promote intensity of feeling, fervour of mind; and as art is in
itself an outcry against the animality of human existence, it would be
well that the life of the artist should be a practical protest against
the so-called decencies of life; and he can best protest by frequenting
a tavern and cutting his club. In the past the artist has always been an
outcast; it is only latterly he has become domesticated, and judging by
results, it is clear that if Bohemianism is not a necessity it is at
least an adjuvant. For if long locks and general dissoluteness were not
an aid and a way to pure thought, why have they been so long his
characteristics? If lovers were not necessary for the development of
poet, novelist, and actress, why have they always had lovers--Sappho,
George Eliot, George Sand, Rachel, Sara? Mrs Kendal nurses children all
day and strives to play Rosalind at night. What infatuation, what
ridiculous endeavour! To realise the beautiful woodland passion and the
idea of the transformation, a woman must have sinned, for only through
sin may we learn the charm of innocence. To play Rosalind a woman must
have had more than one lover, and if she has been made to wait in the
rain and has been beaten she will have done a great deal to qualify
herself for the part. The ecstatic Sara makes no pretence to virtue,
she introduces her son to an English duchess, and throws over a nation
for the love of Richepin, she can, therefore, say as none other--
"Ce n'est plus qu'une ardeur dans mes veines cachée,
C'est Venus tout entière à sa proie attachée."
Swinburne, when he dodged about London, a lively young dog, wrote "Poems
and Ballads," and "Chastelard," since he has gone to live at Putney, he
has contributed to the _Nineteenth Century_, and published an
interesting little volume entitled, "A Century of Rondels," in which he
continues his plaint about his mother the sea.
Respectability is sweeping the picturesque out of life; national
costumes are disappearing. The kilt is going or gone in the highlands,
and the smock in the southlands, even the Japanese are becoming
christian and respectable; in another quarter of a century silk hats and
pianos will be found in every house in Yeddo. Too true that universal
uniformity is the future of the world; and when Mr Morris speaks of the
democratic art to be when the world is socialistic, I ask, whence will
the unfortunates draw their inspiration? To-day our plight is pitiable
enough--the duke, the jockey-boy, and the artist are exactly alike;
they are dressed by the same tailor, they dine at the same clubs, they
swear the same oaths, they speak equally bad English, they love the same
women. Such a state of things is dreary enough, but what unimaginable
dreariness there will be when there are neither rich nor poor, when all
have been educated, when self-education has ceased. A terrible world to
dream of, worse, far worse, in darkness and hopelessness than Dante's
lowest circle of hell. The spectre of famine, of the plague, of war,
etc., are mild and gracious symbols compared with that menacing figure,
Universal Education, with which we are threatened, which has already
eunuched the genius of the last five-and-twenty years of the nineteenth
century, and produced a limitless abortion in that of future time.
Education, I tremble before thy dreaded name. The cruelties of Nero, of
Caligula, what were they?--a few crunched limbs in the amphitheatre; but
thine, O Education, are the yearning of souls sick of life, of maddening
discontent, of all the fearsome and fathomless sufferings of the mind.
When Goethe said "More light," he said the wickedest and most infamous
words that human lips ever spoke. In old days, when a people became too
highly civilised the barbarians came down from the north and
regenerated that nation with darkness; but now there are no more
barbarians, and sooner or later I am convinced that we shall have to end
the evil by summary edicts--the obstruction no doubt will be severe, the
equivalents of Gladstone and Morley will stop at nothing to defeat the
Bill; but it will nevertheless be carried by patriotic Conservative and
Unionist majorities, and it will be written in the Statute Book that not
more than one child in a hundred shall be taught to read, and no more
than one in ten thousand shall learn the piano.
Such will be the end of Respectability, but the end is still far
distant. We are now in a period of decadence growing steadily more and
more acute. The old gods are falling about us, there is little left to
raise our hearts and minds to, and amid the wreck and ruin of things
only a snobbery is left to us, thank heaven, deeply graven in the
English heart; the snob is now the ark that floats triumphant over the
democratic wave; the faith of the old world reposes in his breast, and
he shall proclaim it when the waters have subsided.
In the meanwhile Respectability, having destroyed the Tavern, and
created the Club, continues to exercise a meretricious and enervating
influence on literature. All audacity of thought and expression has been
stamped out, and the conventionalities are rigorously respected. It has
been said a thousand times that an art is only a reflection of a certain
age; quite so, only certain ages are more interesting than others, and
consequently produce better art, just as certain seasons produce better
crops. We heard in the Nouvelle Athènes how the Democratic movement, in
other words, Respectability, in other words, Education, has extinguished
the handicrafts; it was admitted that in the more individual
arts--painting and poetry--men would be always found to sacrifice their
lives for a picture or a poem: but no man is, after all, so immeasurably
superior to the age he lives in as to be able to resist it wholly; he
must draw sustenance from some quarter, and the contemplation of the
past will not suffice. Then the pressure on him from without is as water
upon the diver; and sooner or later he grows fatigued and comes to the
surface to breathe; he is as a flying-fish pursued by sharks below and
cruel birds above; and he neither dives as deep nor flies as high as his
freer and stronger ancestry. A daring spirit in the nineteenth century
would have been but a timid nursery soul indeed in the sixteenth. We
want tumult and war to give us forgetfulness, sublime moments of peace
to enjoy a kiss in; but we are expected to be home to dinner at seven,
and to say and do nothing that might shock the neighbours.
Respectability has wound itself about society, a sort of octopus, and
nowhere are you quite free from one of its horrible suckers. The power
of the villa residence is supreme: art, science, politics, religion, it
has transformed to suit its requirements. The villa goes to the Academy,
the villa goes to the theatre, and therefore the art of to-day is mildly
realistic; not the great realism of idea, but the puny reality of
materialism; not the deep poetry of a Peter de Hogue, but the meanness
of a Frith--not the winged realism of Balzac, but the degrading
naturalism of a coloured photograph.
To my mind there is no sadder spectacle of artistic debauchery than a
London theatre; the overfed inhabitants of the villa in the stalls
hoping for gross excitement to assist them through their hesitating
digestions; an ignorant mob in the pit and gallery forgetting the
miseries of life in imbecile stories reeking of the sentimentality of
the back stairs. Were other ages as coarse and common as ours? It is
difficult to imagine Elizabethan audiences as not more intelligent than
those that applaud Mr Pettit's plays. Impossible that an audience that
could sit out Edward II. could find any pleasure in such sinks of
literary infamies as _In the Ranks_ and _Harbour Lights_. Artistic
atrophy is benumbing us, we are losing our finer feeling for beauty, the
rose is going back to the briar. I will not speak of the fine old
crusted stories, ever the same, on which every drama is based, nor yet
of the musty characters with which they are peopled--the miser in the
old castle counting his gold by night, the dishevelled woman whom he
keeps for ambiguous reasons confined in a cellar. Let all this be
waived. We must not quarrel with the ingredients. The miser and the old
castle are as true, and not one jot more true, than the million events
which go to make up the phenomena of human existence. Not at these
things considered separately do I take umbrage, but at the miserable use
that is made of them, the vulgarity of the complications evolved from
them, and the poverty of beauty in the dialogue.
Not the thing itself, but the idea of the thing evokes the idea.
Schopenhauer was right; we do not want the thing, but the idea of the
thing. The thing itself is worthless; and the moral writers who
embellish it with pious ornamentation are just as reprehensible as Zola,
who embellishes it with erotic arabesques. You want the idea drawn out
of obscuring matter, and this can best be done by the symbol. The
symbol, or the thing itself, that is the great artistic question. In
earlier ages it was the symbol; a name, a plume, sufficed to evoke the
idea; now we evoke nothing, for we give everything, the imagination of
the spectator is no longer called into play. In Shakespeare's days to
create wealth in a theatre it was only necessary to write upon a board,
"A magnificent apartment in a palace." This was no doubt primitive and
not a little barbarous, but it was better by far than by dint of anxious
archæology to construct the Doge's palace upon the stage. By one rich
pillar, by some projecting balustrade taken in conjunction with a moored
gondola, we should strive to evoke the soul of the city of Veronese: by
the magical and unequalled selection of a subtle and unexpected feature
of a thought or aspect of a landscape, and not by the up-piling of
extraneous detail, are all great poetic effects achieved.
"By the tideless dolorous inland sea,
In a land of sand, of ruin, and gold."
And, better example still,
"Dieu que le son du cor est triste au fond des bois,"
that impeccable, that only line of real poetry Alfred de Vigny ever
wrote. Being a great poet Shakespeare consciously or unconsciously
observed more faithfully than any other poet these principles of art;
and, as is characteristic of the present day, nowhere do we find these
principles so grossly violated as in the representation of his plays. I
had painful proof of this some few nights after my arrival in London. I
had never seen Shakespeare acted, and I went to the Lyceum and there I
saw that exquisite love-song--for _Romeo and Juliet_ is no more than a
love song in dialogue--tricked out in silks and carpets and illuminated
building, a vulgar bawd suited to the gross passion of an ignorant
public. I hated all that with the hatred of a passionate heart, and I
longed for a simple stage, a few simple indications, and the simple
recitation of that story of the sacrifice of the two white souls for the
reconciliation of two great families. My hatred did not reach to the age
of the man who played the boy-lover, but to the offensiveness with
which he thrust his individuality upon me, longing to realise the poet's
divine imagination: and the woman, too, I wished with my whole soul
away, subtle and strange though she was, and I yearned for her part to
be played by a youth as in old time: a youth cunningly disguised, would
be a symbol; and my mind would be free to imagine the divine Juliet of
the poet, whereas I could but dream of the bright eyes and delicate mien
and motion of the woman who had thrust herself between me and it.
But not with symbol and subtle suggestion has the villa to do, but with
such stolid, intellectual fare as corresponds to its material wants. The
villa has not time to think, the villa is the working bee. The tavern is
the drone. It has no boys to put to school, no neighbours to study, and
is therefore a little more refined, or, should I say? depraved, in its
taste. The villa in one form or other has always existed, and always
will exist so long as our present social system holds together. It is
the basis of life, and more important than the tavern. Agreed: but that
does not say that the tavern was not an excellent corrective influence
to the villa, and that its disappearance has not had a vulgarising
effect on artistic work of all kinds, and the club has been proved
impotent to replace it, the club being no more than the correlative of
the villa. Let the reader trace villa through each modern feature. I
will pass on at once to the circulating library, at once the symbol and
glory of villaism.
The subject is not unfamiliar to me; I come to it like the son to his
father, like the bird to its nest. (Singularly inappropriate comparison,
but I am in such excellent humour to-day; humour is everything. It is
said that the tiger will sometimes play with the lamb! Let us play.) We
have the villa well in our mind. The father who goes to the city in the
morning, the grown-up girls waiting to be married, the big drawing-room
where they play waltz music, and talk of dancing parties. But waltzes
will not entirely suffice, nor even tennis; the girls must read. Mother
cannot keep a censor (it is as much as she can do to keep a cook,
housemaid and page-boy), besides the expense would be enormous, even if
nothing but shilling and two-shilling novels were purchased. Out of such
circumstances the circulating library was hatched.
The villa made known its want, and art fell on its knees. Pressure was
put on the publishers, and books were published at 31s. 6d.; the dirty
outside public was got rid of, and the villa paid its yearly
subscription, and had nice large handsome books that none but the
_élite_ could obtain, and with them a sense of being put on a footing of
equality with my Lady This and Lady That, and certainty that nothing
would come into the hands of dear Kate and Mary and Maggie that they
might not read, and all for two guineas a year. English fiction became
pure, and the garlic and assafœtida with which Byron, Fielding and Ben
Jonson so liberally seasoned their works, and in spite of which, as
critics say, they were geniuses, have disappeared from our literature.
English fiction became pure, dirty stories were to be heard no more,
were no longer procurable. But at this point human nature intervened;
poor human nature! when you pinch it in one place it bulges out in
another, after the fashion of a lady's figure. Human nature has from the
earliest time shown a liking for dirty stories; dirty stories have
formed a substantial part of every literature (I employ the words "dirty
stories" in the circulating library sense); therefore a taste for dirty
stories may be said to be inherent in the human animal. Call it a
disease if you will--an incurable disease--which, if it is driven
inwards, will break out in an unexpected quarter in a new form and with
redoubled virulence. This is exactly what has happened. Actuated by the
most laudable motives, Mudie cut off our rations of dirty stories, and
for forty years we were apparently the most moral people on the face of
the earth. It was confidently asserted that an English woman of sixty
would not read what would bring the blush of shame to the cheeks of a
maiden of any other nation. But humiliation and sorrow were awaiting
Mudie. True it is that we still continued to subscribe to his library,
true it is that we still continued to go to church, true it is that we
turned our faces away when _Mdlle. de Maupin_ or the _Assommoir_ was
spoken of; to all appearance we were as good and chaste as even Mudie
might wish us; and no doubt he looked back upon his forty years of
effort with pride; no doubt he beat his manly breast and said, "I have
scorched the evil one out of the villa; the head of the serpent is
crushed for evermore;" but lo, suddenly, with all the horror of an
earthquake, the slumbrous law courts awoke, and the burning cinders of
fornication and the blinding and suffocating smoke of adultery were
poured upon and hung over the land. Through the mighty columns of our
newspapers the terrible lava rolled unceasing, and in the black stream
the villa, with all its beautiful illusions, tumbled and disappeared.
An awful and terrifying proof of the futility of human effort, that
there is neither bad work nor good work to do, nothing but to await the
coming of the Nirvana.
I have written much against the circulating library, and I have read a
feeble defence or two; but I have not seen the argument that might be
legitimately put forward in its favour. It seems to me this: the
circulating library is conservatism, art is always conservative; the
circulating library lifts the writer out of the precariousness and noise
of the wild street of popular fancy into a quiet place where passion is
more restrained and there is more reflection. The young and unknown
writer is placed at once in a place of comparative security, and he is
not forced to employ vile and degrading methods of attracting attention;
the known writer, having a certain market for his work, is enabled to
think more of it and less of the immediate acclamation of the crowd;
but all these possible advantages are destroyed and rendered _nil_ by
the veracious censorship exercised by the librarian.
* * * * *
There is one thing in England that is free, that is spontaneous, that
reminds me of the blitheness and nationalness of the Continent;--but
there is nothing French about it, it is wholly and essentially English,
and in its communal enjoyment and its spontaneity it is a survival of
Elizabethan England--I mean the music-hall; the French music-hall seems
to me silly, effete, sophisticated, and lacking, not in the popularity,
but in the vulgarity of an English hall--I will not say the Pavilion,
which is too cosmopolitan, dreary French comics are heard there--for
preference let us say the Royal. I shall not easily forget my first
evening there, when I saw for the time a living house--the dissolute
paragraphists, the elegant mashers (mark the imaginativeness of the
slang), the stolid, good-humoured costers, the cheerful lights o' love,
the extraordinary comics. What delightful unison of enjoyment, what
unanimity of soul, what communality of wit; all knew each other, all
enjoyed each other's presence; in a word, there was life. Then there
were no cascades of real water, nor London docks, nor offensively rich
furniture, with hotel lifts down which some one will certainly be
thrown, but one scene representing a street; a man comes on--not, mind
you, in a real smock-frock, but in something that suggests one--and
sings of how he came up to London, and was "cleaned out" by thieves.
Simple, you will say; yes, but better than a _fricassée_ of _Faust_,
garnished with hags, imps, and blue flame; better, far better than a
drawing-room set at the St James's, with an exhibition of passion by Mrs
and Mr Kendal; better, a million times better than the cheap popularity
of Wilson Barrett--an elderly man posturing in a low-necked dress to
some poor trull in the gallery; nor is there in the hall any affectation
of language, nor that worn-out rhetoric which reminds you of a
broken-winded barrel-organ playing _a che la morte_, bad enough in
prose, but when set up in blank verse awful and shocking in its more
than natural deformity--but bright quips and cranks fresh from the
back-yard of the slum where the linen is drying, or the "pub" where the
unfortunate wife has just received a black eye that will last her a
week. That inimitable artist, Bessie Bellwood, whose native wit is so
curiously accentuated that it is sublimated, that it is no longer
repellent vulgarity but art, choice and rare--see, here she comes with
"What cheer, Rea! Rea's on the job." The sketch is slight, but is
welcome and refreshing after the eternal drawing-room and Mrs Kendal's
cumbrous domesticity; it is curious, quaint, perverted, and are not
these the _aions_ and the attributes of art? Now see that perfect
comedian, Arthur Roberts, superior to Irving because he is working with
living material; how trim and saucy he is! and how he evokes the soul,
the brandy-and-soda soul, of the young men, delightful and elegant in
black and white, who are so vociferously cheering him, "Will you stand
me a cab-fare, ducky, I am feeling so awfully queer?" The soul, the
spirit, the entity of Piccadilly Circus is in the words, and the scene
the comedian's eyes--each look is full of suggestion; it is irritating,
it is magnetic, it is symbolic, it is art.
Not art, but a sign, a presentiment of an art, that may grow from the
present seeds, that may rise into some stately and unpremeditated
efflorescence, as the rhapsodist rose to Sophocles, as the miracle play
rose through Peele and Nash to Marlowe, hence to the wondrous summer of
Shakespeare, to die later on in the mist and yellow and brown of the
autumn of Crowes and Davenants. I have seen music-hall sketches, comic
interludes that in their unexpectedness and naïve naturalness remind me
of the comic passages in Marlowe's _Faustus_, I waited (I admit in vain)
for some beautiful phantom to appear, and to hear an enthusiastic
worshipper cry out in his agony:--
"Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips suck forth my soul; see where it flies!
Come, Helen, come; give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena."