(Roger Mifflin _loquitur_)
[Illustration]
I had a pleasant adventure to-day. A free verse poet came in to see me,
wanted me to buy some copies of "The Pagan Anthology." I looked over the
book, to which he himself had contributed some pieces. I advised him to
read Tennyson. I wish you could have seen his face.
If you want to see a really good anthology (I said) have a look at
Pearsall Smith's "Treasury of English Prose," just out. The only thing
that surprises me is that Mr. Smith didn't include some free verse in
it. The best thing about free verse is that it is often awfully good
prose.
It's a superb clear night: a milky pallor washed in the blue: a white
moon overhead: stars rare but brilliant, one in the south twinkles and
flutters like a tiny flower stirred by faint air. The wind is "a cordial
of incredible virtue" (Emerson)--sharp and chill, but with a milder
tincture. To-day, though brisk and snell on the streets, the sunshine
had a lively vigour, a generous quality, a promissory note of the
equinox. I felt it from first rising this morning--the old demiurge at
work! As I sat in the bathtub (when a man is fifty he may be pardoned
for taking a warm bath on winter mornings) my mind fell upon the desire
of wandering: it occurred to me that a spread of legs in the vital air
would be richly repaid. The windows called me: as soon as shirt and
trousers were on, I was at the sill peering out over Gissing Street.
Later, even through closed panes, the chink of milk bottles on the
pavement below seemed to rise with a clearer, merrier note. Setting out
for some tobacco about 8:30, I stopped to study the ice-man's great
blocks of silvery translucence, lying along the curb by a big apartment
house. "Artificial" ice, I suppose: it was interesting to see, in the
meridian of each cake, a kind of silvery fracture or membrane, with the
grain of air-bubbles tending outward therefrom--showing, no doubt, if
one knew the mechanics of refrigeration, just how the freezing
proceeded. Even in so humble a thing as a block of ice are these
harmonic and lovely patterns, the seal of Nature's craft, inscrutable,
inimitable. I might have made a point of this in talking to that free
verse poet. I'm glad I didn't, however: he would have had some tedious
reply, convincing to himself. That's the trouble with replies: they are
always convincing to the replier. As a friend of mine used to say, one
good taciturn deserves another.
I was thinking, as I took a parcel of laundry up to the Chinaman on
McFee Street just now, it would be interesting to write a book dealing
solely, candidly, exactly, and fully with the events, emotions, and
thoughts of just one day in a man's life. If one could do that, in a way
to carry conviction, assent, and reality, to convey to the reader's
senses a recognition of genuine actual human _being_, one might claim to
be a true artist.
I have found an admirable book for reading in bed--this little anthology
of prose, collected by Pearsall Smith. He knows what good prose is,
having written some of the daintiest bits of our time in his "Trivia," a
book with which I occasionally delight a truly discerning customer. What
a fascination there is in good prose--"the cool element of prose" as
Milton calls it--a sort of fluid happiness of the mind, unshaken by the
violent pangs of great poetry. I am not subtle enough to describe it,
but in the steadily cumulating satisfaction of first-class prose there
seems to be something that speaks direct to the brain, unmarred by the
claims of the senses, the emotions. I meditate much, ignorantly and
fumblingly, on the modes and purposes of writing. It is so
simple--"Fool!" said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart and write!"--all
that is needful is to tell what happens; and yet how hard it is to
summon up that necessary candor. Every time I read great work I see the
confirmation of what I grope for. How vivid, straight, and cleanly it
seems when done: merely the outward utterance of "what the mind at home,
in the spacious circuits of her musing, hath liberty to propose to
herself." Let a man's mind depart from his audience; let him have no
concern whether to shock or to please. Let him carry no consideration
save to utter, with unsparing fidelity, what passes in his own spirit.
One can trust the brain to do its part. All that is needed is honourable
frankness: not to be ashamed to open our hearts, to speak our privy
weakness, our inward exulting. Then the pain and perplexity, or the
childish satisfactions, of our daily life are the true material of the
writer's art, and that which is sown in weakness may be raised in power.
Curious indeed that in this life, brief and precariously enjoyed, men
should so set their hearts on building a permanence in words: something
to stand, in the lovely stability of ink and leaden types, as our speech
out of silence to those who follow on. Indefensible absurdity, and yet
the secret and impassioned dream of those who write!
I was about to say that, for the writing of anything truly durable, the
first requisite is plenty of silence. Then I recall Dr. Johnson's
preface to his Dictionary--"written not in the soft obscurities of
retirement, or under the shelter of academic bowers, but amid
inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow."