The furniture vans had unloaded their freight in the new house. We were
installed, or, at least, we were left to make the best of an unbearable
life in the dirt and the confusion. One of the Pre-Raphaelites, I forget
at the moment which, once painted a picture called “The Last Day in the
Old Home.” A touching subject. But it would need a grimmer, harder brush
to depict the horrors of “The First Day in the New Home.” I had sat down
in despair among the tumbled movables when I noticed—with what a thrill
of pleased recognition—the top of a little leather-bound book protruding
from among a mass of bulkier volumes in an uncovered case. It was
_Candide_, my treasured little first edition of 1759, with its
discreetly ridiculous title-page, “_Candide ou L’Optimisme_, Traduit de
l’Allemand de Mr. le Docteur Ralph.”
Optimism—I had need of a little at the moment, and as Mr. le Docteur
Ralph is notoriously one of the preachers most capable of inspiring it,
I took up the volume and began to read: “Il y avait en Westphalie, dans
le Château de Mr. le Baron de Thunder-ten-tronckh....” I did not put
down the volume till I had reached the final: “Il faut cultiver notre
jardin.” I felt the wiser and the more cheerful for Doctor Ralph’s
ministrations.
But the remarkable thing about re-reading _Candide_ is not that the book
amuses one, not that it delights and astonishes with its brilliance;
that is only to be expected. No, it evokes a new and, for me at least,
an unanticipated emotion. In the good old days, before the Flood, the
history of Candide’s adventures seemed to us quiet, sheltered,
middle-class people only a delightful phantasy, or at best a
high-spirited exaggeration of conditions which we knew, vaguely and
theoretically, to exist, to have existed, a long way off in space and
time. But read the book to-day; you feel yourself entirely at home in
its pages. It is like reading a record of the facts and opinions of
1922; nothing was ever more applicable, more completely to the point.
The world in which we live is recognizably the world of Candide and
Cunégonde, of Martin and the Old Woman who was a Pope’s daughter and the
betrothed of the sovereign Prince of Massa-Carrara. The only difference
is that the horrors crowd rather more thickly on the world of 1922 than
they did on Candide’s world. The manœuvrings of Bulgare and Abare, the
intestine strife in Morocco, the earthquake and _auto-da-fé_ are but
pale poor things compared with the Great War, the Russian Famine, the
Black and Tans, the Fascisti, and all the other horrors of which we can
proudly boast. “Quand Sa Hautesse envoye un vaisseau en Egypte,”
remarked the Dervish, “s’embarrasse-t-elle si les souris qui sont dans
le vaisseau sont à leur aise ou non?” No; but there are moments when Sa
Hautesse, absent-mindedly no doubt, lets fall into the hold of the
vessel a few dozen of hungry cats; the present seems to be one of them.
Cats in the hold? There is nothing in that to be surprised at. The
wisdom of Martin and the Old Woman who was once betrothed to the Prince
of Massa-Carrara has become the everyday wisdom of all the world since
1914. In the happy Victorian and Edwardian past, Western Europe, like
Candide, was surprised at everything. It was amazed by the frightful
conduct of King Bomba, amazed by the Turks, amazed by the political
chicanery and loose morals of the Second Empire—(what is all Zola but a
prolonged exclamation of astonishment at the goings-on of his
contemporaries?). After that we were amazed at the disgusting behaviour
of the Boers, while the rest of Europe was amazed at ours. There
followed the widespread astonishment that in this, the so-called
twentieth century, black men should be treated as they were being
treated on the Congo and the Amazon. Then came the war: a great outburst
of indignant astonishment, and afterwards an acquiescence as complete,
as calmly cynical as Martin’s. For we have discovered, in the course of
the somewhat excessively prolonged _histoire à la Candide_ of the last
seven years, that astonishment is a supererogatory emotion. All things
are possible, not merely for Providence, whose ways we had always known,
albeit for some time rather theoretically, to be strange, but also for
men.
Men, we thought, had grown up from the brutal and rampageous
hobbledehoyism of earlier ages and were now as polite and genteel as
Gibbon himself. We now know better. Create a hobbledehoy environment and
you will have hobbledehoy behaviour; create a Gibbonish environment and
every one will be, more or less, genteel. It seems obvious, now. And now
that we are living in a hobbledehoy world, we have learnt Martin’s
lesson so well that we can look on almost unmoved at the most appalling
natural catastrophes and at exhibitions of human stupidity and
wickedness which would have aroused us in the past to surprise and
indignation. Indeed, we have left Martin behind and are become, with
regard to many things, Pococurante.
And what is the remedy? Mr. le Docteur Ralph would have us believe that
it consists in the patient cultivation of our gardens. He is probably
right. The only trouble is that the gardens of some of us seem hardly
worth cultivating. The garden of the bank clerk and the factory hand,
the shop-girl’s garden, the garden of the civil servant and the
politician—can one cultivate them with much enthusiasm? Or, again, there
is my garden, the garden of literary journalism. In this little plot I
dig and delve, plant, prune, and finally reap—sparsely enough, goodness
knows!—from one year’s end to another. And to what purpose, to whom for
a good, as the Latin Grammar would say? Ah, there you have me.
There is a passage in one of Tchekov’s letters which all literary
journalists should inscribe in letters of gold upon their writing desks.
“I send you,” says Tchekov to his correspondent, “Mihailovsky’s article
on Tolstoy.... It’s a good article, but it’s strange: one might write a
thousand such articles and things would not be one step forwarder, and
it would still remain unintelligible why such articles are written.”
_Il faut cultiver notre jardin._ Yes, but suppose one begins to wonder
why?