But neither Apollo nor Buddha could help or save me. One in his exquisite
balance of body, a skylark-like song of eternal beauty, stood lightly
advancing; the other sat sombrously contemplating, calm as a beautiful
evening. I looked for sorrow in the eyes of the pastel--the beautiful
pastel that seemed to fill with a real presence the rich autumnal leaves
where the jays darted and screamed. The twisted columns of the bed rose,
burdened with great weight of fringes and curtains, the python devoured a
guinea pig, the last I gave him; the great white cat came to me. I said all
this must go, must henceforth be to me an abandoned dream, a something, not
more real than a summer meditation. So be it, and, as was characteristic of
me, I broke with Paris suddenly, without warning anyone. I knew in my heart
of hearts that I should never return, but no word was spoken, and I
continued a pleasant delusion with myself; I told my _concierge_ that
I would return in a month, and I left all to be sold, brutally sold by
auction, as the letter I read in the last chapter charmingly and touchingly
describes.
Not even to Marshall did I confide my foreboding that Paris would pass out
of my life, that it would henceforth be with me a beautiful memory, but
never more a practical delight. He and I were no longer living together; we
had parted a second time, but this time without bitterness of any kind; he
had learnt to feel that I wanted to live alone, and had moved away into the
Latin quarter, whither I made occasional expeditions. I accompanied him
once to the old haunts, but various terms of penal servitude had scattered
our friends, and I could not interest myself in the new. Nor did Marshall
himself interest me as he had once done. To my eager taste, he had grown
just a little trite. My affection for him was as deep and sincere as ever;
were I to meet him now I would grasp his hand and hail him with firm, loyal
friendship; but I had made friends in the Nouvelle Athènes who interested
me passionately, and my thoughts were absorbed by and set on new ideals,
which Marshall had failed to find sympathy for, or even to understand. I
had introduced him to Degas and Manet, but he had spoken of Jules Lefèvre
and Bouguereau, and generally shown himself incapable of any higher
education; he could not enter where I had entered, and this was alienation.
We could no longer even talk of the same people; when I spoke of a certain
_marquise_, he answered with an indifferent "Do you really think so?"
and proceeded to drag me away from my glitter of satin to the dinginess of
print dresses. It was more than alienation, it was almost separation; but
he was still my friend, he was the man, and he always will be, to whom my
youth, with all its aspirations, was most closely united. So I turned to
say good-bye to him and to my past life. Rap--rap--rap!
"Who's there?"
"I--Dayne."
"I've got a model."
"Never mind your model. Open the door. How are you? what are you painting?"
"This; what do you think of it?"
"It is prettily composed. I think it will come out all right. I am going to
England; come to say good-bye."
"Going to England! What will you do in England?"
"I have to go about money matters; very tiresome. I had really begun to
forget there was such a place."
"But you are not going to stay there?"
"Oh, no!"
"You will be just in time to see the Academy."
The conversation turned on art, and we æstheticised for an hour. At last
Marshall said, "I am really sorry, old chap, but I must send you away;
there's that model."
The girl sat waiting, her pale hair hanging down her back, a very picture
of discontent.
"Send her away."
"I asked her to come out to dinner."
"D----n her ... Well, never mind, I must spend this last evening with you;
you shall both dine with me. _Je quitte Paris demain matin, peut-être
pour longtemps; je voudrais passer ma dernière soirée avec mon ami; alors
si vous voulez bien me permettre, mademoiselle, je vous invite tous les
deux à diner; nous passerons la soirée ensemble si cela vous est
agréable?_"
"_Je veux bien, monsieur._"
Poor Marie! Marshall and I were absorbed in each other and art. It was
always so. We dined in a gargotte, and afterwards we went to a students'
hall; and it seems like yesterday. I can see the moon sailing through a
clear sky, and on the pavement's edge Marshall's beautiful, slim, manly
figure, and Marie's exquisite gracefulness. She was Lefèvre's Chloe; so
every one sees her now. Her end was a tragic one. She invited her friends
to dinner, and with the few pence that remained she bought some boxes of
matches, boiled them, and drank the water. No one knew why; some said it
was love.
I went to London in an exuberant necktie, a tiny hat; I wore large trousers
and a Capoul beard; and I looked, I believe, as unlike an Englishman as a
drawing by Grévin. In the smoking-room of Morley's Hotel I met my agent, an
immense nose, and a wisp of hair drawn over a bald skull. He explained,
after some hesitation, that I owed him a few thousands, and that the
accounts were in his portmanteau. I suggested taking them to a solicitor to
have them examined. The solicitor advised me strongly to contest them. I
did not take the advice, but raised some money instead, and so the matter
ended so far as the immediate future was concerned. The years the most
impressionable, from twenty to thirty, when the senses and the mind are the
widest awake, I, the most impressionable of human beings, had spent in
France, not among English residents, but among that which is the
quintessence of the nation; I, not an indifferent spectator, but an
enthusiast, striving heart and soul to identify himself with his
environment, to shake himself free from race and language and to recreate
himself as it were in the womb of a new nationality, assuming its ideals,
its morals, and its modes of thought, and I had succeeded strangely well,
and when I returned home England was a new country to me; I had, as it
were, forgotten everything. Every aspect of street and suburban garden was
new to me; of the manner of life of Londoners I knew nothing. This sounds
incredible, but it is so; I saw, but I could realise nothing. I went into a
drawing-room, but everything seemed far away--a dream, a presentment,
nothing more; I was in touch with nothing; of the thoughts and feelings of
those I met I could understand nothing, nor could I sympathise with them:
an Englishman was at that time as much out of my mental reach as an
Esquimaux would be now. Women were nearer to me than men, and I will take
this opportunity to note my observation, for I am not aware that any one
else has observed that the difference between the two races is found in the
men, not in the women. French and English women are psychologically very
similar; the standpoint from which they, see life is the same, the same
thoughts interest and amuse them; but the attitude of a Frenchman's mind is
absolutely opposed to that of an Englishman; they stand on either side of a
vast abyss, two animals different in colour, form, and temperament;--two
ideas destined to remain irrevocably separate and distinct. I have heard of
writing and speaking two languages equally well: this was impossible to me,
and I am convinced that if I had remained two more years in France I should
never have been able to identify my thoughts with the language I am now
writing in, and I should have written it as an alien. As it was I only just
escaped this detestable fate. And it was in the last two years, when I
began to write French verse and occasional _chroniques_ in the papers,
that the great damage was done. I remember very well indeed one day, while
arranging an act of a play I was writing with a friend, finding suddenly to
my surprise that I could think more easily and rapidly in French than in
English; but with all this I did not learn French. I chattered, and I felt
intensely at home in it; yes, I could write a sonnet or a ballade almost
without a slip, but my prose required a good deal of alteration, for a
greater command of language is required to write in prose than in verse. I
found this in French and also in English. For when I returned from Paris,
my English terribly corrupt with French ideas and forms of thought, I could
write acceptable English verse, but even ordinary newspaper prose was
beyond my reach, and an attempt I made to write a novel drifted into a
miserable failure; but the following poems opened to me the doors of a
first-class London newspaper, and I was at once entrusted with some
important critical work:
THE SWEETNESS OF THE PAST
As sailors watch from their prison
For the faint grey line of the coasts,
I look to the past re-arisen,
And joys come over in hosts
Like the white sea birds from their roosts.
I love not the indelicate present,
The future's unknown to our quest,
To-day is the life of the peasant,
But the past is a haven of rest--
The things of the past are the best.
The rose of the past is better
Than the rose we ravish to-day,
'Tis holier, purer, and fitter
To place on the shrine where we pray
For the secret thoughts we obey.
There are there no deceptions or changes,
And there all is lovely and still;
No grief nor fate that estranges,
Nor hope that no life can fulfil,
But ethereal shelter from ill.
The coarser delights of the hour
Tempt, and debauch, and deprave,
And we joy in a poisonous flower,
Knowing that nothing can save
Our flesh from the fate of the grave.
But sooner or later returning
In grief to the well-loved nest,
Our souls filled with infinite yearning,
We cry, in the past there is rest,
There is peace, its joys are the best.
NOSTALGIA
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 distinctly 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 now I was resolved to
see what I could do in the world of work. I was anxious for proof,
peremptory proof, of my capacity or incapacity. A book! No. I required an
immediate answer, and journalism alone could give me that. So I reasoned in
the Strand lodging-house. And what led me to that house? Chance, or a
friend's recommendation? I forget. It was uncomfortable, hideous, 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 bitterly 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 you generally 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 was just that 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-horse
like 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. That 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 any one 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--_Longmans_,
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 every one 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 Richepein, 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 Jeddo. 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 deeply 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 as
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, 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 archaeology 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;
and 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 realize 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 assafoetida 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 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 slut 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 cracks 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."
And then the astonishing change of key:--
"I will be Paris, and for love of thee,
Instead of Troy shall Wurtemberg be sacked," etc.
The hall is at least a protest against the wearisome stories concerning
wills, misers in old castles, lost heirs, and the woeful solutions of such
things--she who has been kept in the castle cellar for twenty years
restored to the delights of hair-pins and a mauve dress, the _ingénue_
to the protecting arm, etc. The music-hall is a protest against Mrs.
Kendal's marital tendernesses and the abortive platitudes of Messrs. Pettit
and Sims; the music-hall is a protest against Sardou and the immense
drawing-room sets, rich hangings, velvet sofas, etc., so different from the
movement of the English comedy with its constant change of scene. The
music-hall is a protest against the villa, the circulating library, the
club, and for this the "'all" is inexpressibly dear to me.
But in the interests of those illiterate institutions called theatres it is
not permissible for several characters to narrate events in which there is
a sequel, by means of dialogue, in a music-hall. If this vexatious
restriction were removed it is possible, if it is not certain, that while
some halls remained faithful to comic songs and jugglers others would
gradually learn to cater for more intellectual and subtle audiences, and
that out of obscurity and disorder new dramatic forms, coloured and
permeated by the thought and feeling of to-day, might be definitely
evolved. It is our only chance of again possessing a dramatic literature.