streets, however, is very inferior form. The proper smoking is a briar,
and, remember, it is not smart to have a new pipe. So soon as he buys
it, the Blade takes his pipe home, puts it on a glowing fire to burn the
rim, scrapes this away, burns it again, and so on until it looks a
sullen desperado of a pipe--a pipe with a wild past. Sometimes he cannot
smoke a pipe. In this case he may--for his stomach's sake--smoke a
cigarette. And, besides, there is something cynical about a cigarette.
For the very young Blade there are certain makes of cigarette that burn
well--they are mixed with nitre--and these may be smoked by holding them
in the left hand and idly swinging them to and fro in the air. If it
were not for the public want of charity, I would recommend a well-known
brand. A Blade may always escape a cigar by feigning a fastidious taste.
"None of your Cabanas" is rather good style.
The Blade, it must be understood--especially by the Blade's
friends--spends his time in a whirl of dissipation. That is the
symbolism of the emphatic obliquity of the costume. First, he drinks.
The Blade at Harrow, according to a reliable authority, drinks cherry
brandy and even champagne; other Blades consume whisky-and-soda; the
less costly kind of Blade does it on beer. And here the beginner is
often at a loss. Let us say he has looked up the street and down,
ascertained that there are no aunts in the air, and then plunged into
his first public-house. How shall he ask for his liquor? "I will take a
glass of ale, if you please, Miss," seems tame for a Blade. It may be
useful to know a more suitable formula. Just at present, we may assure
the Blade neophyte, it is all the rage to ask for "Two of swipes,
ducky." Go in boldly, bang down your money as loudly as possible, and
shout that out at the top of your voice. If it is a barman, though, you
had better not say "ducky." The slang will, we can assure him, prove
extremely effective.
Then the Blade gambles; but over the gambling of the Blade it is well to
draw a veil--a partially translucent and coquettish veil, through which
we can see the thing dimly, and enhanced in its enormity. You must
patronise the Turf, of course, and have money on horses, or you are no
Blade at all, but a mere stick. The Harrow Blade has his book on all the
big races in the calendar; and the great and noble game of Nap--are not
Blades its worshippers wherever the sun shines and a pack of cards is
obtainable? Baccarat, too. Many a glorious Blade has lost his whole
term's pocket-money at a single sitting at that noble game. And the
conversation of the Blade must always be brilliant in the extreme, like
the flashing of steel in the sunlight. It is usually cynical and
worldly, sometimes horrible enough to make a governess shudder, but
always epigrammatic. Epigrams and neat comparisons are much easier to
make than is vulgarly supposed. "Schoolmasters hang about the crops of
knowledge like dead crows about a field, examples and warnings to greedy
souls." "Marriage is the beginning of philosophy, and the end is, 'Do
not marry.'" "All women are constant, but some discover mistakes." "One
is generally repentant when one is found out, and remorseful when one
can't do it again." A little practice, and this kind of thing may be
ground out almost without thinking. Occasionally, in your conversation
with ladies, you may let an oath slip. (Better not let your aunt hear
you.) Apologise humbly at once, of course. But it will give them a
glimpse of the lurid splendour of your private life.
And that brings us to the central thing of the Blade's life, the eternal
Feminine! Pity them, be a little sorry for them--the poor souls cannot
be Blades. They must e'en sit and palpitate while the Blade flashes. The
accomplished Blade goes through life looking unspeakable wickedness at
everything feminine he meets, old and young, rich and poor, one with
another. He reeks with intrigue. Every Blade has his secrets and
mysteries in this matter--remorse even for crimes. You do not know all
that his handsome face may hide. Even he does not know. He may have sat
on piers and talked to shop-girls, kissed housemaids, taken barmaids to
music halls, conversed with painted wickedness in public places--nothing
is too much for him. And oh! the reckless protestations of love he has
made, the broken promises, the broken hearts! Yet men must be Blades,
though women may weep; and every Blade must take his barmaid to a music
hall at least once, even if she be taller than himself. Until then his
manhood is not assured.
Just one hint in conclusion. A Blade who collects stamps, or keeps tame
rabbits, or eats sweets, oranges, or apples in the streets, or calls
names publicly after his friends, is no Blade at all, but a boy still.
So, with our blessing, he swaggers on his way and is gone. A Don Juan as
fresh as spring, a rosebud desperado. May he never come upon just cause
for repentance!
OF CLEVERNESS
ÀPROPOS OF ONE CRICHTON
Crichton is an extremely clever person--abnormally, indeed almost
unnaturally, so. He is not merely clever at this or that, but clever all
round; he gives you no consolations. He goes about being needlessly
brilliant. He caps your jests and corrects your mistakes, and does your
special things over again in newer and smarter ways. Any really
well-bred man who presumed so far would at least be plain or physically
feeble, or unhappily married by way of apology, but the idea of so much
civility seems never to have entered Crichton's head. He will come into
a room where we are jesting perhaps, and immediately begin to flourish
about less funny perhaps but decidedly more brilliant jests, until at
last we retire one by one from the conversation and watch him with
savage, weary eyes over our pipes. He invariably beats me at chess,
invariably. People talk about him and ask my opinion of him, and if I
venture to criticise him they begin to look as though they thought I was
jealous. Grossly favourable notices of his books and his pictures crop
up in the most unlikely places; indeed I have almost given up newspapers
on account of him. Yet, after all----
This cleverness is not everything. It never pleases me, and I doubt
sometimes if it pleases anyone. Suppose you let off some clever little
thing, a subtlety of expression, a paradox, an allusive suggestive
picture; how does it affect ordinary people? Those who are less clever
than yourself, the unspecialised, unsophisticated average people, are
simply annoyed by the puzzle you set them; those who are cleverer find
your cleverness mere obvious stupidity; and your equals, your
competitors in cleverness, are naturally your deadly rivals. The fact is
this cleverness, after all, is merely egotism in its worst and unwisest
phase. It is an incontinence of brilliance, graceless and aggressive, a
glaring swagger. The drunken helot of cleverness is the creature who
goes about making puns. A mere step above comes the epigram, the
isolated epigram framed and glazed. Then such impressionist art as
Crichton's pictures, mere puns in paint. What they mean is nothing, they
arrest a quiet decent-minded man like myself with the same spasmodic
disgust as a pun in literature--the subject is a transparent excuse;
they are mere indecent and unedifying exhibitions of himself. He thinks
it is something superlative to do everything in a startling way. He
cannot even sign his name without being offensive. He lacks altogether
the fundamental quality of a gentleman, the magnanimity to be
commonplace. I----
On the score of personal dignity, why should a young man of respectable
antecedents and some natural capacity stoop to this kind of thing? To be
clever is the last desperate resort of the feeble, it is the merit of
the ambitious slave. You cannot conquer _vi et armis_, you cannot
stomach a decent inferiority, so you resort to lively, eccentric, and
brain-wearying brilliance to ingratiate yourself. The cleverest animal
by far is the monkey, and compare that creature's undignified activity
with the mountainous majesty of the elephant!
And I cannot help thinking, too, that cleverness must be the greatest
obstacle a man can possibly have in his way upward in the world. One
never sees really clever people in positions of trust, never widely
influential or deeply rooted. Look, for instance, at the Royal Academy,
at the Judges, at----But there! The very idea of cleverness is an
all-round readiness and looseness that is the very negation of
stability.
Whenever Crichton has been particularly exasperating, getting himself
appreciated in a new quarter, or rising above his former successes, I
find some consolation in thinking of my Uncle Augustus. He was the
glory of our family. Even Aunt Charlotte's voice drooped a little in the
mention of his name. He was conspicuous for an imposing and even
colossal stupidity: he rose to eminence through it, and, what is more,
to wealth and influence. He was as reliable, as unlikely to alter his
precise position, or do anything unexpected, as the Pyramids of Egypt. I
do not know any topic upon which he was not absolutely uninformed, and
his contributions to conversation, delivered in that ringing baritone of
his, were appallingly dull. Often I have seen him utterly flatten some
cheerful clever person of the Crichton type with one of his simple
garden-roller remarks--plain, solid, and heavy, which there was no
possibility either of meeting or avoiding. He was very successful in
argument, and yet he never fenced. He simply came down. It was, so to
speak, a case of small sword _versus_ the avalanche. His moral inertia
was tremendous. He was never excited, never anxious, never jaded; he was
simply massive. Cleverness broke upon him like shipping on an ironbound
coast. His monument is like him--a plain large obelisk of coarse
granite, unpretending in its simple ugliness and prominent a mile off.
Among the innumerable little white sorrows of the cemetery it looks
exactly as he used to look among clever people.
Depend upon it cleverness is the antithesis of greatness. The British
Empire, like the Roman, was built up by dull men. It may be we shall be
ruined by clever ones. Imagine a regiment of lively and eccentric
privates! There never was a statesman yet who had not some ballast of
stupidity, and it seems to me that part at least of the essentials of a
genius is a certain divine dulness. The people we used to call the
masters--Shakespeare, Raphael, Milton, and so forth--had a certain
simplicity Crichton lacks. They do not scintillate nearly so much as he
does, and they do not give that same uncomfortable feeling of internal
strain. Even Homer nods. There are restful places in their work, broad
meadows of breezy flatness, calms. But Crichton has no Pacific Ocean to
mitigate his everlasting weary passage of Cape Horn: it is all point
and prominence, point and prominence.
No doubt this Crichton is having a certain vogue now, but it cannot
last. I wish him no evil, of course, but I cannot help thinking he will
presently have had his day. This epoch of cleverness must be very near
its last flare. The last and the abiding thought of humanity is peace. A
dull man will presently be sought like the shadow of a great rock in a
thirsty land. Dulness will be the New Genius. "Give us dull books,"
people will cry, "great dull restful pictures. We are weary, very
weary." This hectic, restless, incessant phase in which we
travail--_fin-de-siècle_, "decadent," and all the rest of it--will pass
away. A chubby, sleepy literature, large in aim, colossal in execution,
rotund and tranquil will lift its head. And this Crichton will become a
classic, Messrs. Mudie will sell surplus copies of his works at a
reduction, and I shall cease to be worried by his disgusting success.
THE POSE NOVEL
I watched the little spurts of flame jet out from between the writhing
pages of my manuscript, watched the sheets coil up in their fiery
anguish and start one from another. I helped the fire to the very vitals
of the mass by poking the brittle heap, and at last the sacrifice was
over, the flames turned from pink to blue and died out, the red glow
gave place to black, little luminous red streaks coiled across the
charred sheets and vanished at the margins, and only the ashes of my
inspiration remained. The ink was a lustrous black on the dull blackness
of the burnt paper. I could still read this much of my indiscretion
remaining, "He smiled at them all and said nothing."
"Fool!" I said, and stirred the crackling mass into a featureless heap
of black scraps. Then with my chin on my fists and elbows on knees I
stared at the end of my labours.
I suppose, after all, there has been some profit out of the thing. Satan
finds some mischief still for idle hands to do, and one may well thank
Heaven it was only a novel. Still, it means many days out of my life,
and I would be glad to find some positive benefit accruing. Clearly, in
the first place, I have eased my mind of some execrable English. I am
cleaner now by some dozen faulty phrases that I committed and saw
afterwards in all the nakedness of typewriting. (Thank Heaven for
typewriting! Were it not for that, this thing had gone to the scoffing
of some publisher's reader, and another had known my shame.) And I shall
not write another pose novel.
I am inclined to think these pose novels the wild oats of authorship. We
sit down in the heyday of our youth to write the masterpiece.
Obviously, it must be a novel about a man and a woman, and something as
splendid as we can conceive of in that way. We look about us. We do not
go far for perfection. One of the brace holds the pen and the other is
inside his or her head; and so Off! to the willing pen. Only a few years
ago we went slashing among the poppies with a walking-stick, and were,
we said boldly and openly, Harolds and Hectors slaying our thousands.
Now of course we are grown up to self-respect, and must needs be a
little disingenuous about it. But as the story unfolds there is no
mistaking the likeness, in spite of the transfiguration. This bold,
decided man who performs such deeds of derring-do in the noisome slum,
knocks down the burly wife-beater, rescues an unmistakable Miss Clapton
from the knife of a Lascar, and is all the while cultivating a virtuous
consumption that stretches him on an edifying, pathetic, and altogether
beautiful deathbed in the last chapter----My dear Authorling, cry my
friends, we hear the squeak of that little voice of yours in every word
he utters. Is _that_ what you aspire to be, that twopence-coloured
edition of yourself? Heaven defend you from your desires!
Yet there was a singular fascination in writing the book; to be in
anticipation my own sympathetic historian, to joy with my joys yet to
come, and sorrow with my sorrows, to bear disaster like a man, and at
last to close my own dear eyes, and with a swelling heart write my own
epitaph. The pleasure remained with me until I reached the end. How
admirably I strutted in front of myself! And I and the better self of me
that was flourishing about in the book--we pretended not to know each
other for what we were. He was myself with a wig and a sham visiting
card, and I owed it to myself to respect my disguise. I made him with
very red hair--my hair is fairly dark--and shifted his university from
London to Cambridge. Clearly it could not be the same person, I argued.
But I endowed him with all the treasures of myself; I made him say all
the good things I might have said had I thought of them opportunely, and
all the noble thoughts that occurred to me afterwards occurred to him
at the time. He was myself--myself at a premium, myself without any
drawbacks, the quintessence and culmination of me. And yet somehow when
he came back from the typewriter he seemed a bit of an ass.
Probably every tadpole author writes a pose novel--at least I hope so
for the sake of my self-respect. Most, after my fashion, burn the thing,
or benevolent publishers lose it. It is an ill thing if by some accident
the tadpole tale survives the tadpole stage. The authoress does the
feminine equivalent, but I should judge either that she did it more
abundantly or else that she burned less. Has she never swept past you
with a scornful look, disdained you in all the pride of her beauty,
rippled laughter at you, or amazed you with her artless girlishness? And
even after the early stages some of the trick may survive, unless I read
books with malice instead of charity. I must confess, though, that I
have a weakness for finding mine author among his puppets. I conceive
him always taking the best parts, like an actor-manager or a little boy
playing with his sisters. I do not read many novels with sincere belief,
and I like to get such entertainment from them as I can. So that these
artless little self-revelations are very sweet and precious to me among
all the lay figures, tragedy and comedy. Since the deception is
transparent I make the most of the transparency, and love to see the
clumsy fingers on the strings of the marionettes. And this will be none
the less pleasant now that I have so narrowly escaped giving this
entertainment to others.
I suppose this stage is a necessary one. We begin with ignorance and the
imagination, the material of the pose novel. Later come self-knowledge,
disappointments and self-consciousness, and the prodigals of fiction
stay themselves upon the husks of epigram and cynicism, and in the place
of artless aspiration are indeed in plain black and white very desperate
characters. It is after all only another pose--the pose of not posing.
We, the common clay of the world of letters, must needs write in this
way, because we cannot forget our foolish little selves in our work.
But some few there are who sit as gods above their private universes,
and write without passion or vanity. At least, so I have been told.
These be the true artists of letters, the white windows upon the truth
of things. We by comparison are but stained glass in our own honour, and
do but obstruct the view with our halos and attitudes. Yet even
Shakespeare, the critics tell us--and they say they know--posed in the
character of Hamlet.
After all, the pose novel method has at times attained to the level of
literature. Charlotte Brontë might possibly have found no other topic
had she disdained the plain little woman with a shrewish tongue; and
where had Charles Kingsley been if the vision of a curate rampant had
not rejoiced his heart? Still, I am not sorry that this novel is burned.
Even now it was ridiculous, and the time might have come when this book,
full of high, if foolish aims, and the vain vast promise of well-meaning
youth, had been too keen a reproach to be endured. Three volumes of good
intentions! It is too much. There was more than a novel burning just
now. After this I shall be in a position to take a humorist's view of
life.
THE VETERAN CRICKETER
My old cricketer was seized, he says, some score of years ago now, by
sciatica, clutched indeed about the loins thereby, and forcibly
withdrawn from the practice of the art; since when a certain
predisposition to a corpulent habit has lacked its natural check of
exercise, and a broadness almost Dutch has won upon him. Were it not for
this, which renders his contours and his receding aspect unseemly, he
would be indeed a venerable-looking person, having a profile worthy of a
patriarch, tinged though it may be with an unpatriarchal jollity, and a
close curly beard like that of King David. He lives by himself in a
small cottage outside the village--hating women with an unaccountable
detestation--and apparently earns a precarious livelihood, and certainly
the sincere aversion of the country side, by umpiring in matches, and
playing whist and "Nap" with such as will not be so discreet and
economical as to bow before his superior merit.
His neighbours do not like him, because he will not take their cricket
or their whist seriously, because he will persist in offering counsel
and the stimulus of his gift of satire. All whist than his he avers is
"Bumble-puppy." His umpiring is pedagogic in tone; he fails to see the
contest in the game. To him, who has heard his thousands roar as the
bails of the best of All England went spinning, these village matches
are mere puerile exercises to be corrected. His corrections, too, are
Olympian, done, as it were, in red ink, vivid, and without respect of
persons. Particularly he gibes. He never uses vulgar bad language
himself, but has a singular power of engendering it in others. He has a
word "gaby," which he will sometimes enlarge to "stuppid gaby," the
which, flung neatly into a man who has just missed a catch, will fill
the same with a whirl of furious curses difficult to restrain. And if
perchance one should escape, my ancient cricketer will be as startled as
Cadmus at the crop he has sown. And not only startled but pained at
human wickedness and the follies of a new generation. "Why can't you
play without swearing, Muster Gibbs?" he will say, catching the
whispered hope twenty yards away, and proclaiming it to a censorious
world. And so Gibbs, our grocer and draper, and one made much of by the
vicar, is shamed before the whole parish, and damned even as he desired.
To our vicar, a well-meaning, earnest, and extremely nervous man, he
displays a methodical antagonism. Our vicar is the worst of all possible
rural vicars--unripe, a glaring modern, no classical scholar, no lover
of nature, offensively young and yet not youthful, an indecent
politician. He was meant to labour amid Urban Myriads, to deal with
Social Evils, Home Rule, the Woman Question, and the Reunion of
Christendom, attend Conferences and go with the _Weltgeist_--damn
him!--wherever the _Weltgeist_ is going. He presents you jerkily--a tall
lean man of ascetic visage and ample garments, a soul clothed not so
much in a fleshy body as in black flaps that ever trail behind its
energy. Where they made him Heaven knows. No university owns him. It may
be he is a renegade Dissenting minister, neither good Church nor
wholesome Nonconformity. Him my cricketer regards with malignant
respect. Respect he shows by a punctilious touching of his hat brim,
directed to the sacred office; all the rest is malignity, and aimed at
the man that fills it. They come into contact on the cricket-field, and
on the committee of our reading-room. For our vicar, in spite of a
tendency to myopia, conceives it his duty to encourage cricket by his
participation. _Duty_--to encourage cricket! So figure the scene to
yourself. The sunlit green, and a match in progress,--the ball has just
snipped a stump askew,--my ancient, leaning on a stout cabbage stick,
and with the light overcoat that is sacred to umpires upon his arm.
"_Out_, Billy Durgan," says he, and adds, _ex cathedrâ_, "and one you
ought to ha' hit for four."
Then appears our vicar in semi-canonicals, worn "to keep up his
position," or some such folly, nervous about the adjustment of his hat
and his eyeglasses. He approaches the pitch, smiling the while to show
his purely genial import and to anticipate and explain any amateurish
touches. He reaches the wicket and poses himself, as the convenient book
he has studied directs. "You'll be caught, Muster Shackleforth, if you
keep your shoulder up like that," says the umpire. "Ya-a-ps! that's
worse!"--forgetting himself in his zeal for attitude. And then a voice
cries "Play!"