And some endure;
One robes itself in snow, and one
In raiment of the rising sun
Bordered with gold; in all I find
God's signature.
As on my grassy couch I lie,
From hedge and tree
Musicians pipe; or if the heat
Subdue the birds, one crooneth sweet
Whose labour is a lullaby--
The slumbrous bee.
The sun my work doth overlook
With searching light;
The serious moon, the flickering star,
My midnight lamp and candle are;
A soul unhardened is the book
Wherein I write.
There labouring, my heart is eased
Of every care;
Yet often wonderstruck I stand,
With earnest gaze but idle hand,
Abashed--for God Himself is pleased
To labour there.
Ashamed my faultful task to spell,
I watch how grows
The Master's perfect colour-scheme
Of sunset, or His simpler dream
Of moonlight, or that miracle
We name a rose.
Dear Earth, one thought alone doth grieve--
The tender dread
Of parting from thee; as a child,
Who painted while his father smiled,
Then watched him paint, is loth to leave
And go to bed.
A Reminiscence of
"The Transgressor"
By Francis Forster
[Illustration: A Reminiscence of The Transgressor]
A Letter to the Editor
From Max Beerbohm
Dear Sir,--When The Yellow Book appeared I was in Oxford. So literary
a little town is Oxford that its undergraduates see a newspaper nearly
as seldom as the Venetians see a horse, and until yesterday, when
coming to London, I found in the album of a friend certain newspaper
cuttings, I had not known how great was the wrath of the pressmen.
What in the whole volume seems to have provoked the most ungovernable
fury is, I am sorry to say, an essay about Cosmetics that I myself
wrote. Of this it was impossible for anyone to speak calmly. The mob
lost its head, and, so far as anyone in literature can be lynched, I
was. In speaking of me, one paper dropped the usual prefix of "Mr." as
though I were a well-known criminal, and referred to me shortly as
"Beerbohm"; a second allowed me the "Mr." but urged that "a short Act
of Parliament should be passed to make this kind of thing illegal"; a
third suggested, rather tamely, that I should read one of Mr. William
Watson's sonnets. More than one comic paper had a very serious poem
about me, and a known adherent to the humour which, forest-like, is
called new, declared my essay to be "the rankest and most nauseous
thing in all literature." It was a bomb thrown by a cowardly decadent,
another outrage by one of that desperate and dangerous band of madmen
who must be mercilessly stamped out by a comity of editors. May I,
Sir, in justice to myself and to you, who were gravely censured for
harbouring me, step forward, and assure the affrighted mob that it is
the victim of a hoax? May I also assure it that I had no notion that
it would be taken in? Indeed, it seems incredible to me that any one
on the face of the earth could fail to see that my essay, so grotesque
in subject, in opinion so flippant, in style so wildly affected, was
meant for a burlesque upon the "precious" school of writers. If I had
only signed myself D. Cadent or Parrar Docks, or appended a note to
say that the MS. had been picked up not a hundred miles from Tite
Street, all the pressmen would have said that I had given them a very
delicate bit of satire. But I did not. And _hinc_, as they themselves
love to say, _illæ lacrimæ_.
After all, I think it is a sound rule that a writer should not kick
his critics. I simply wish to make them a friendly philosophical
suggestion. It seems to be thought that criticism holds in the
artistic world much the same place as, in the moral world, is held by
punishment--"the vengeance taken by the majority upon such as exceed
the limits of conduct imposed by that majority." As in the case of
punishment, then, we must consider the effect produced by criticism
upon its object, how far is it reformatory? Personally, I cannot
conceive how any artist can be hurt by remarks dropped from a garret
into a gutter. Yet it is incontestable that many an illustrious artist
has so been hurt. And these very remarks, so far from making him
change or temper his method, have rather made that method intenser,
have driven him to retire further within his own soul, by showing him
how little he may hope for from the world but insult and ingratitude.
In fact, the police-constable mode of criticism is a failure. True
that, here and there, much beautiful work of the kind has been done.
In the old, old Quarterlies is many a slashing review, that, however
absurd it be as criticism, we can hardly wish unwritten. In the
_National Observer_, before its reformation, were countless fine
examples of the cavilling method. The paper was rowdy, venomous and
insincere. There was libel in every line of it. It roared with the
lambs and bleated with the lions. It was a disgrace to journalism and
a glory to literature. I think of it often with tears and desiderium.
But the men who wrote these things stand upon a very different plane
to the men employed as critics by the press of Great Britain. These
must be judged, not by their workmanship, which is naught, but by the
spirit that animates them and the consequence of their efforts. If
only they could learn that it is for the critic to seek after beauty
and to try to interpret it to others, if only they would give over
their eternal fault-finding and not presume to interfere with the
artist at his work, then with an equally small amount of ability our
pressmen might do nearly as much good as they have hitherto done harm.
Why should they regard writers with such enmity? The average pressman,
reviewing a book of stories or of poems by an unknown writer, seems
not to think "where are the beauties of this work that I may praise
them, and by my praise quicken the sense of beauty in others?" He
steadily applies himself to the ignoble task of plucking out and
gloating over its defects. It is a pity that critics should show so
little sympathy with writers, and curious when we consider that most
of them tried to be writers themselves, once. Every new school that
has come into the world, every new writer who has brought with him a
new mode, they have rudely persecuted. The dulness of Ibsen, the
obscurity of Meredith, the horrors of Zola--all these are household
words. It is not until the pack has yelled itself hoarse that the
level voice of justice is heard in praise. To pretend that no
generation is capable of gauging the greatness of its own artists is
the merest bauble-tit. Were it not for the accursed abuse of their
function by the great body of critics, no poet need "live uncrown'd,
apart." Many and irreparable are the wrongs that our critics have
done. At length let them repent with ashes upon their heads. Where
they see not beauty, let them be silent, reverently feeling that it
may yet be there, and train their dull senses in quest of it.
Now is a good time for such penance. There are signs that our English
literature has reached that point, when, like the literatures of all
the nations that have been, it must fall at length into the hands of
the decadents. The qualities that I tried in my essay to
travesty--paradox and marivaudage, lassitude, a love of horror and all
unusual things, a love of argot and archaism and the mysteries of
style--are not all these displayed, some by one, some by another of
les jeunes écrivains? Who knows but that Artifice is in truth at our
gates and that soon she may pass through our streets? Already the
windows of Grub Street are crowded with watchful, evil faces. They are
ready, the men of Grub Street, to pelt her, as they have pelted all
that came before her. Let them come down while there is still time,
and hang their houses with colours, and strew the road with flowers.
Will they not, for once, do homage to a new queen? By the time this
letter appears, it _may_ be too late!
Meanwhile, Sir, I am, your obedient servant,
MAX BEERBOHM.
Oxford, May '94.
A Study
By Bernhard Sickert
[Illustration: A Study]
_EPIGRAM_
_TO A LADY RECOVERED FROM A DANGEROUS
SICKNESS_
_Life plucks thee back as by the golden hair--_
_Life, who had feigned to let thee go but now._
_Wealthy is Death already, and can spare_
_Ev'n such a prey as thou._
_WILLIAM WATSON_
The Coxon Fund
By Henry James
I
"They've got him for life!" I said to myself that evening on my way
back to the station; but later, alone in the compartment (from
Wimbledon to Waterloo, before the glory of the District Railway), I
amended this declaration in the light of the sense that my friends
would probably after all not enjoy a monopoly of Mr. Saltram. I won't
pretend to have taken his vast measure on that first occasion; but I
think I had achieved a glimpse of what the privilege of his
acquaintance might mean for many persons in the way of charges
accepted. He had been a great experience, and it was this perhaps that
had put me into a frame for divining that we should all have the
honour, sooner or later, of dealing with him as a whole. Whatever
impression I then received of the amount of this total, I had a full
enough vision of the patience of the Mulvilles. He was staying with
them for the winter; Adelaide dropped it in a tone which drew the
sting from the temporary. These excellent people might indeed have
been content to give the circle of hospitality a diameter of six
months; but if they didn't say that he was staying for the summer as
well it was only because this was more than they ventured to hope. I
remember that at dinner that evening he wore slippers, new and
predominantly purple, of some queer carpet-stuff; but the Mulvilles
were still in the stage of supposing that he might be snatched from
them by higher bidders. At a later time they grew, poor dears, to fear
no snatching; but theirs was a fidelity which needed no help from
competition to make them proud. Wonderful indeed as, when all was
said, you inevitably pronounced Frank Saltram, it was not to be
overlooked that the Kent Mulvilles were in their way still more
extraordinary; as striking an instance as could easily be encountered
of the familiar truth that remarkable men find remarkable
conveniences.
They had sent for me from Wimbledon to come out and dine, and there
had been an implication in Adelaide's note (judged by her notes alone
she might have been thought silly), that it was a case in which
something momentous was to be determined or done. I had never known
them not to be in a state about somebody, and I daresay I tried to be
droll on this point in accepting their invitation. On finding myself
in the presence of their latest revelation I had not at first felt
irreverence droop--and, thank heaven, I have never been absolutely
deprived of that alternative in Mr. Saltram's company. I saw, however
(I hasten to declare it), that compared to this specimen their other
phoenixes had been birds of inconsiderable feather, and I afterwards
took credit to myself for not having even in primal bewilderments made
a mistake about the essence of the man. He had an incomparable gift; I
never was blind to it--it dazzles me at present. It dazzles me perhaps
even more in remembrance than in fact, for I'm not unaware that for a
subject so magnificent the imagination goes to some expense, inserting
a jewel here and there or giving a twist to a plume. How the art of
portraiture would rejoice in this figure if the art of portraiture had
only the canvas! Nature, however, had really rounded it, and if
memory, hovering about it, sometimes holds her breath, this is because
the voice that comes back was really golden.
Though the great man was an inmate and didn't dress he kept dinner on
this occasion waiting long, and the first words he uttered on coming
into the room were a triumphant announcement to Mulville that he had
found out something. Not catching the allusion and gaping doubtless a
little at his face, I privately asked Adelaide what he had found out.
I shall never forget the look she gave me as she replied:
"Everything!" She really believed it. At that moment, at any rate, he
had found out that the mercy of the Mulvilles was infinite. He had
previously of course discovered, as I had myself for that matter, that
their dinners were soignés. Let me not indeed, in saying this, neglect
to declare that I shall falsify my counterfeit if I seem to hint that
there was in his nature any ounce of calculation. He took whatever
came, but he never plotted for it, and no man who was so much of an
absorbent can ever have been so little of a parasite. He had a system
of the universe, but he had no system of sponging--that was quite hand
to mouth. He had fine, gross, easy senses, but it was not his
good-natured appetite that wrought confusion. If he had loved us for
our dinners we could have paid with our dinners, and it would have
been a great economy of finer matter. I make free in these connections
with the plural possessive because, if I was never able to do what the
Mulvilles did, and people with still bigger houses and simpler
charities, I met, first and last, every demand of reflection, of
emotion--particularly perhaps those of gratitude and of resentment. No
one, I think, paid the tribute of giving him up so often, and if it's
rendering honour to borrow wisdom I have a right to talk of my
sacrifices. He yielded lessons as the sea yields fish--I lived for a
while on this diet. Sometimes it almost appeared to me that his
massive, monstrous failure--if failure after all it was--had been
intended for my private recreation. He fairly pampered my curiosity;
but the history of that experience would take me too far. This is not
the large canvas I just now spoke of, and I would not have approached
him with my present hand had it been a question of all the features.
Frank Saltram's features, for artistic purposes, are verily the
anecdotes that are to be gathered. Their name is legion, and this is
only one, of which the interest is that it concerns even more closely
several other persons. Such episodes, as one looks back, are the
little dramas that made up the innumerable facets of the big
drama--which is yet to be reported.
II
It is furthermore remarkable that though the two stories are
distinct--my own, as it were, and this other, they equally began, in a
manner, the first night of my acquaintance with Frank Saltram, the
night I came back from Wimbledon so agitated with a new sense of life
that, in London, for the very thrill of it, I could only walk home.
Walking and swinging my stick, I overtook, at Buckingham Gate, George
Gravener, and George Gravener's story may be said to have begun with
my making him, as our paths lay together, come home with me for a
talk. I duly remember, let me parenthesise, that it was still more
that or another person, and also that several years were to elapse
before it was to extend to a second chapter. I had much to say to him,
none the less, about my visit to the Mulvilles, whom he more
indifferently knew, and I was at any rate so amusing that for long
afterwards he never encountered me without asking for news of the old
man of the sea. I hadn't said Mr. Saltram was old, and it was to be
seen that he was of an age to outweather George Gravener. I had at
that time a lodging in Ebury Street, and Gravener was staying at his
brother's empty house in Eaton Square. At Cambridge, five years
before, even in our devastating set, his intellectual power had seemed
to me almost awful. Some one had once asked me privately, with
blanched cheeks, what it was then that after all such a mind as that
left standing. "It leaves itself!" I could recollect devoutly
replying. I could smile at present at this reminiscence, for even
before we got to Ebury Street I was struck with the fact that, save in
the sense of being well set up on his legs, George Gravener had
actually ceased to tower. The universe he laid low had somehow bloomed
again--the usual eminences were visible. I wondered whether he had
lost his humour, or only, dreadful thought, had never had any--not
even when I had fancied him most Aristophanesque. What was the need of
appealing to laughter, however, I could enviously inquire, where you
might appeal so confidently to measurement? Mr. Saltram's queer
figure, his thick nose and hanging lip were fresh to me: in the light
of my old friend's fine cold symmetry they presented mere success in
amusing as the refuge of conscious ugliness. Already, at hungry
twenty-six, Gravener looked as blank and parliamentary as if he were
fifty and popular. In my scrap of a residence (he had a wordling's eye
for its futile conveniences, but never a comrade's joke), I sounded
Frank Saltram in his ears; a circumstance I mention in order to note
that even then I was surprised at his impatience of my enlivenment. As
he had never before heard of the personage, it took indeed the form of
impatience of the preposterous Mulvilles, his relation to whom, like
mine, had had its origin in an early, a childish intimacy with the
young Adelaide, the fruit of multiplied ties in the previous
generation. When she married Kent Mulville, who was older than
Gravener and I, and much more amiable, I gained a friend, but Gravener
practically lost one. We were affected in different ways by the form
taken by what he called their deplorable social action--the form (the
term was also his) of nasty second-rate gush. I may have held in my
_for intérieur_ that the good people at Wimbledon were beautiful
fools, but when he sniffed at them I couldn't help taking the opposite
line, for I already felt that even should we happen to agree it would
always be for reasons that differed. It came home to me that he was
admirably British as, without so much as a sociable sneer at my
bookbinder, he turned away from the serried rows of my little French
library.
"Of course I've never seen the fellow, but it's clear enough he's a
humbug."
"Clear _enough_ is just what it isn't," I replied: "if it only were!"
That ejaculation on my part must have been the beginning of what was
to be later a long ache for final frivolous rest. Gravener was
profound enough to remark after a moment that in the first place he
couldn't be anything but a Dissenter, and when I answered that the
very note of his fascination was his extraordinary speculative breadth
he retorted that there was no cad like your cultivated cad and that I
might depend upon discovering (since I had had the levity not already
to have inquired), that my shining light proceeded, a generation back,
from a Methodist cheesemonger. I confess I was struck with his
insistence, and I said, after reflection: "It may be--I admit it may
be; but why on earth are you so sure?"--asking the question mainly to
lay him the trap of saying that it was because the poor man didn't
dress for dinner. He took an instant to dodge my trap and come blandly
out the other side.
"Because the Kent Mulvilles have invented him. They've an infallible
hand for frauds. All their geese are swans. They were born to be
duped, they like it, they cry for it, they don't know anything from
anything, and they disgust one (luckily perhaps!) with Christian
charity." His intensity was doubtless an accident, but it might have
been a strange foreknowledge. I forget what protest I dropped; it was
at any rate something which led him to go on after a moment: "I only
ask one thing--it's perfectly simple. Is a man, in a given case, a
real gentleman?"
"A real gentleman, my dear fellow--that's so soon said!"
"Not so soon when he isn't! If they've got hold of one this time he
must be a great rascal!"
"I might feel injured," I answered, "if I didn't reflect that they
don't rave about _me_."
"Don't be too sure! I'll grant that he's a gentleman," Gravener
presently added, "if you'll admit that he's a scamp."
"I don't know which to admire most, your logic or your benevolence."
My friend coloured at this, but he didn't change the subject. "Where
did they pick him up?"
"I think they were struck with something he had published."
"I can fancy the dreary thing!"
"I believe they found out he had all sorts of worries and
difficulties."
"That, of course, was not to be endured, and they jumped at the
privilege of paying his debts!" I replied that I knew nothing about
his debts, and I reminded my visitor that though the dear Mulvilles
were angels they were neither idiots nor millionaires. What they
mainly aimed at was re-uniting Mr. Saltram to his wife. "I was
expecting to hear that he has basely abandoned her," Gravener went on,
at this, "and I'm too glad you don't disappoint me."
I tried to recall exactly what Mrs. Mulville had told me. "He didn't
leave her--no. It's she who has left him."
"Left him to _us_?" Gravener asked. "The monster--many thanks! I
decline to take him."
"You'll hear more about him in spite of yourself. I can't, no, I
really can't, resist the impression that he's a big man." I was
already learning--to my shame perhaps be it said--just the tone that
my old friend least liked.
"It's doubtless only a trifle," he returned, "but you haven't happened
to mention what his reputation's to rest on."
"Why, on what I began by boring you with--his extraordinary mind."
"As exhibited in his writings?"
"Possibly in his writings, but certainly in his talk, which is far and
away the richest I ever listened to."
"And what is it all about?"
"My dear fellow, don't ask me! About everything!" I pursued, reminding
myself of poor Adelaide. "About his idea of things," I then more
charitably added. "You must have heard him to know what I mean--it's
unlike anything that ever _was_ heard." I coloured, I admit, I
overcharged a little, for such a picture was an anticipation of
Saltram's later development and still more of my fuller acquaintance
with him. However, I really expressed, a little lyrically perhaps, my
actual imagination of him when I proceeded to declare that, in a cloud
of tradition, of legend, he might very well go down to posterity as
the greatest of all great talkers. Before we parted George Gravener
demanded why such a row should be made about a chatterbox the more and
why he should be pampered and pensioned. The greater the windbag the
greater the calamity. Out of proportion to all other movements on
earth had come to be this wagging of the tongue. We were drenched with
talk--our wretched age was dying of it. I differed from him here
sincerely, only going so far as to concede, and gladly, that we were
drenched with sound. It was not, however, the mere speakers who were
killing us--it was the mere stammerers. Fine talk was as rare as it
was refreshing--the gift of the gods themselves, the one starry
spangle on the ragged cloak of humanity. How many men were there who
rose to this privilege, of how many masters of conversation could he
boast the acquaintance? Dying of talk?--why, we were dying of the lack
of it! Bad writing wasn't talk, as many people seemed to think, and
even good wasn't always to be compared to it. From the best talk,
indeed, the best writing had something to learn. I fancifully added
that we too should peradventure be gilded by the legend, should be
pointed at for having listened, for having actually heard. Gravener,
who had looked at his watch and discovered it was midnight, found to
all this a response beautifully characteristic of him.
"There is one little sovereign circumstance," he remarked, "which is
common to the best talk and the worst." He looked at this moment as if
he meant so much that I thought he could only mean once more that
neither of them mattered if a man wasn't a real gentleman. Perhaps it
was what he did mean; he deprived me, however, of the exultation of
being right by putting the truth in a slightly different way. "The
only thing that really counts for one's estimate of a person is his
conduct." He had his watch still in his hand, and I reproached him
with unfair play in having ascertained beforehand that it was now the
hour at which I always gave in. My pleasantry so far failed to mollify
him as that he presently added that to the rule he had just enunciated
there was absolutely no exception.
"None whatever?"
"None whatever."
"Trust me then to try to be good at any price!" I laughed as I went
with him to the door. "I declare I will be, if I have to be horrible!"
III