us somewhere or other--are as content as most women with their natural
destiny. George Dyer dined one night with Leigh Hunt at Hampstead,
dined, talked, and took his leave. Twenty minutes later the knocker
announced a late-comer. It was G. D. “What is the matter?” asked Hunt.
“I think sir,” said Dyer, in his simpering, apologetic way, “I think
I have left one of my shoes behind me.” He had indeed shuffled it off
under the table, and did not discover his loss until he had gone a
long way. As I read that story, which is Ollier’s (but I get it from
Mr. Lucas), G. D.’s apologetics were directed to Hunt, whose rest he
had disturbed, by no means to himself. A man less sublimely lifted was
one with whom I had been staying in a Scotch country house. We came
away together, and half-way to the station he struck himself on the
forehead, and “Good God!” he said, “I have tipped the same man three
times!” It appeared too true that he had: once in his bedroom, once
in the hall, and once at the carriage door. Now he, if you like, was
excessively mortified, and his reason may well have been that he had
not been better employed, on Helikon or elsewhere, when he might have
been noticing menservants. He was as blind as a bat, poor man, and a
sense of infirmity may have stung him. The otherwhere men have no sense
of infirmity--on the contrary, one of great gain. An ampler æther, a
diviner air is theirs in which to exercise.
But of all divinely preoccupied men the best--unless Dyer be the
best--is Brancas--the Comte de Brancas of whom you may read in
Saint-Simon, in the Correspondence of “Madame,” and in Tallemant des
Réaux. Brancas was to the Paris of the _Grand Siècle_ what Dyer was to
the London of the Regency, or Dr. Spooner to the wits of my younger
days. La Bruyère, summarising him as _Ménalque_, overdid his study, and
made him appear like the clown in a circus who gets horribly involved
in the carpet, or kicks away the hat he stoops to pick up. It may be
perfectly true that Brancas went downstairs, opened his front door,
and shut it again, thinking that he had just come in--that I can
perfectly understand. It is a thing I might have done myself. But to
add to it that he presently discovered his nightcap on his head, his
stockings down about his ankles, and his shirt outside his _chausses_,
is to spoil the story. Never mind, he is out in the street finally,
and walking briskly along, with his mind leagues away. By and by he
is brought up short by a violent blow on the nose. “Who has attacked
me?” he cries. Nobody. He has walked fiercely into the tilt of a
market cart, which he had overtaken in his briskness. Or he goes to
Versailles to pay his court, enters the _appartement_, and passing
under the central chandelier, his perruque is caught and held there;
but he forges along. The company gapes, then bursts into laughter.
Brancas stops, looks inquiringly about, sees the swinging perruque and
is delighted. “Whose is that?” He looks all about him to find the bare
pate and exposed ears. Finally, of course, somebody claps it on his
head. A good story, which may be true.
Two of them, at least, may be, as they are told by Madame in letters
to her friends. Brancas went to church--to the _Salut_: he knelt
down, and feeling in his pocket for his Book of Hours, pulled out a
slipper which he had put there instead of it. Just outside the church,
on leaving, he is accosted by a lackey who, with much deprecation,
asks him if he happens to have taken Monseigneur’s shoe by mistake.
“Monseigneur’s shoe!” It is the fact that he had paid a call upon a
bishop that afternoon. “No, no--certainly not”--then he remembers that
he has, in fact, a slipper in his pocket. His hand goes in, to make
sure that it is there. It is; but so is another slipper--which is
precisely--Monseigneur’s.
The next is even better. Brancas goes to mass at Versailles. He is
late, and bustles up the nave between the kneeling company. He sees, as
he thinks, a _prie-dieu_ facing the altar. Most convenient--just the
thing. He hastens, throws himself upon it. To his amazement it emits a
strangled cry, gives way before him, and he finds himself intricately
struggling on the pavement with a stout lady. His _prie-dieu_ had been
the Queen-Mother.
THE JOURNEY TO COCKAIGNE
I remember being taken ill in a small town on the Marne in 1906,
desperately ill with copper poisoning. I say that I remember, as if
there was a chance that I should ever forget it. The agony, the rigour
and all the rest of it, were accompanied by high fever and delirium,
which lasted all through a burning August night. It happened that a
_fête nationale_ had possession of the town: there were a fair, a steam
roundabout, a horrible organ accompaniment. The grinding, remorseless
tune, the uproar, the slapping of countless feet (though I tried to
count them) on the pavement wove themselves into my racing dreams.
I seemed to be a party to some Witches’ Sabbath; and now, if I ever
try to imagine Hell, it always comes out like that. A dry, crackling,
reiterated business, without rest, without mirth, without hope, without
reason. One suffered incredibly, one was desperately concerned; the
brain was involved in it; the more frivolous it was the more deeply the
mind must work. I knew it was a festivity; all the familiar features
of revel were there--and all horrible. The mind was so tired that you
seemed to hear it wailing for mercy; but it went on jigging after the
organ. The feet of the dancers were burnt by the paving stones, yet
never stayed. Some mocking devil possessed the people, rode them with
spurs. There was no zest, yet no pause; and through it all was the
blare of the organ.
Life in London, in Ascot week, struck me, coming up after six months
in the country, as very much like that night of fever. There was the
same dry crackling, the same strife of noise, the symptoms of mirth
without reality. London, of course, is much too big to be generalised
from. The best is hidden behind shut doors. It is the froth of the
ferment that you see. But there is now too much froth; one wonders what
is working in the lees.
Londoners, as you pass them in a cab, are a crowd; you don’t even
suspect individuality there. They drift along the streets like
clouds. The colours of them are so blurred down by the dust and din
that they seem a uniform drab. Here and there a yellow jumper, or
a grass-green sunshade catches the eye; but no personality behind
it, no reasonable soul in human flesh subsisting. It requires stern
attention on a fixed point if you would candidly consider your fellow
creatures as London has made them, and, no doubt, been made by them.
It happened to me that I was held up by a block in Piccadilly, at a
favourable point between Bond Street and the arcade of the Ritz. Four
o’clock on a glaring afternoon; tea-shops crammed; motor buses piled
skywards like market-carts: extraordinarily over-dressed young men, and
extraordinarily undressed girls were on the pavement, all very much
alike, and all apparently of one age.
Observe that I have not seen London in the season since the Armistice.
Well, it seemed to me that the scythe had mown down much that I used to
know. Here instead was a saturnalia of extreme youth. I saw thin girls
in single garments of silk, with long white legs and Russian opera
shoes; and young men walking with them, looking curiously at them,
or talking to them urgently at shop windows. The girls said little;
they were not there to talk, but to be talked to; they accepted what
was said as a matter of routine. Their eyes wandered from article to
article displayed. They seemed to me as purposeless as moths hovering
about flowers at dusk. Love, I suppose, was their food--it ought to
have been; but neither they nor their lovers showed any of the pride or
triumph, the joy or the longing of love. Love, for once, was not a new
thing; the wonder had left it. Fever had dried up the juices of nymph
and swain alike. It was like a dinner off husks.
Next day was the first of Ascot, and I watched for some time the
endless procession of motors in the Hammersmith Road. I had often
seen it before--I mean before the war. It had been a big thing then;
but now it was a monstrous thing, a nightmare of going to the races.
A continuous stream there was, of long, low, swift, smooth-gliding
machines, never stopping, almost noiseless. They were all covered
and glazed, all filled inside with doll-like, silent, half-clad,
vaguely-gazing girls; with stiff and starched, black-coated,
silk-hatted young men. I saw no one laughing; I thought the whole
business a dream on that account; for, though you see and mix with
crowds in dreams, there is never either talking or laughing. It was
that absence of heart in the thing, or of zest for it, which made one
so uncomfortable. Lavish outlay is rather shocking nowadays; but if you
take away the only excuse for it, which is high spirits, it is much
more than shocking; it is terrifying, it is hideous.
Where on earth, I asked myself, did the money come from? Who floated,
and how did they float the balances at the banks? Every one of those
motors must have cost a thousand pounds; every one of the chauffeurs
(you could see at a glance) must have cost five pounds a week. The
clothes, no doubt, you could have on tick; but not the champagne, and
not the chauffeurs. From where I stood in Addison Road I could see, at
the lowest, fifty thousand pounds’ worth of motors. And the stream,
mind you, at that hour reached from Ascot to Piccadilly, and was
repeating itself on the Fulham Road and the King’s Road, to say nothing
of the Uxbridge Road. Who were those people? Were they all profiteers,
or all in other peoples’ debt? It was very odd. In the county where I
live we are rather put to it how to keep going. The great houses are
mostly shut up or in the market; the smaller houses are all too big for
their owners and occupiers. There is a scale of general descent. The
marquesses let their castles, if they can, and go in to the manors; the
squires let their manors, and convert the farmhouses to their domestic
use. I leave my old Rectory and hide in a cottage. We are all a peg or
two down. Income-tax and the rates had done their fell work when there
came upon us a coal strike of three months long--a knock-out blow to
many. Did it not touch London? Or were all those pleasurers Colonel and
Mrs. Rawdon Crawleys who live at the rate of seven thousand a year, on
tick? The Lord knows.
On the whole, I thought it well that the miners’ wives, in the
scorching grey villages of Durham and the Tyne, were not standing
with me in Addison Road that first day of Ascot. Or if South Wales
and Lanark had been there! I should not have wished them let loose on
London just then. Nothing was further from London’s mind than either
of those vexed and seething provinces. It neither talked of them nor
read about them. _The Westminster Gazette’s_ front page was entirely
filled up with a cricket match; so, by the by, was the second. _The
Times_--but since _The Times_ has become sprightly I confess it is
too much for me. An elephant on hot bricks! Nowadays, if I want to
read the news I must send to Manchester for it. Thence I learn that
the coal strike is in its third month, the English and Irish still
murdering each other, and the Government still throwing overboard its
own legislation. Golf news, cricket, polo, lawn tennis I can have from
_The Westminster Gazette_.
The sea saw that and fled; Jordan was driven back. I stood it for
three days, then came home to find the mallow in flower in the hedges,
and men and women still afield getting in the last of the hay. Wilts
was being careful over many things, but Ascot and thin girls were not
of them. In London I was puzzled by the way the money was flying;
but I was shocked, not by that, but by the absence of zest for a
time-honoured pastime. If only some young couple had laughed! Or made
love as if it was the only thing in the world worth doing! But they
were all as weary as the King Ecclesiast. That seemed to me the serious
matter.
SUICIDE OF THE NOVEL
The epic faculty in us is never likely to atrophy, but will break
out again presently in some unsuspected place; for while all men are
children once, most of them remain so all their lives. Winter’s Tales
will go on, because there will always be winter evenings, and the most
interesting thing, next to playing at life, is to talk about it. “There
was a man--dwelt by a churchyard ...”, or “Andra moi ennepé, Mousa....”
So the romantic or the adventurous tale should begin, as it always did
and always will. It is when he adds love to his chronicle of events
and allows that to modify them that the tale-teller turns novelist
and, in danger of over-sophistication, begins the road to Avernus; for
love involves passion, and passion means sex, and sex invites curious
philosophy, and philosophy calls in pathology; then comes Herr Freud
with his abhorred complexes; and then you have something which may
stimulate, may divert, may do you good, but (as the old tale goes)
“is not Emily.” There is no love in the _Odyssey_, none in _Robinson
Crusoe_, none worth talking about (only gallantry) in _Gil Blas_. The
animalism in _Tom Jones_, as in Smollett’s gross tales, was but a vent
for high spirits in a century which reckoned love among the appetites,
and put women and claret roughly in the same category. Speaking only
for my own countrymen, I doubt if sex took on its romantic aspect or
became a final cause of narrative fiction until the latter half of
the last century. In Walter Scott and Jane Austen it does not exist.
It hardly exists in Dickens, hardly, except as a butt, in Thackeray.
Trollope’s charming girls are satisfied with extremely little in the
way of wooing. The Luftons and young Frank Greshams and Major Grantleys
choose by liking, wait seven months or years for their Rachels, kiss
them and go home--to write once in a while. Johnny Eames cherishes a
flame--if it may be called a flame. We are asked to believe in Mr.
Grey’s passion for Miss Vavasour--but do we believe it, or are we the
less entertained for our strong doubts? No, indeed.
In the latter half of the last century, Rossetti wrote sensuous poetry
of a kind which was new to English literature, very different, say,
from that of Keats. Swinburne wrote sexual poetry, as I apprehend, of
a highly theoretical kind. I don’t know exactly when Mr. George Moore
began to write novels, but cannot recall any striking example of the
French novel in English before his time, and should be inclined to
commence our series of the grubby and illicit with him. George Meredith
and Mr. Hardy were both well-established before that; but though there
is passion in Meredith, and lyric passion too, and sex in Mr. Hardy,
with much intensive imagining about it, _non ragioniam di lor_. They
were alike in the old tradition. Neither Aphrodite or Priapus sat on
the Muse’s throne. At the utmost they did but “donner la chemise!”
Meredith and Mr. Hardy wrote stories, not sex-fantasias. Mr. Moore will
do very well as an illustration of the change which came over our
novels when Trollope ceased to write, the change which, as I say, made
them French novels written in English. Before that change, love, sex,
passion, as manifestations of life, had been part of the entertainment
which the novel as a redaction of life had to offer. After it they
_were_ the entertainment, and thereupon and thereby the novel ceased to
be a redaction of life. For, _pace_ Herr Freud, all life is not sex.
One resultant of the changed objective will account for that. There was
no room for life in a sex-novel. If you set out to write a dithyramb of
lust, or sex, your novel will be short. The subject is absorbing, once
it takes hold of you, and the celebration of it will exhaust itself
as the reality does. Such tales have always been short: _Daphnis and
Chloe_, for instance, _Manon Lescaut_. One could not have filled the
old three-decker with that kind of thing. Nobody except Richardson ever
tried it. With the change of theme, then, conspired the change of form,
and the bookseller and the novelist in a concatenation accordingly.
Other things followed of necessity. The novel ceased to be an
interpretation of life and became a kind of poem. The preoccupied
novelist wrote _à priori_. Observation ceased to procure novels to
be written; the novelist, rather, stung by his gadfly into action,
observed for his own purposes and those of his theme. His novel clothed
his thought in appropriate draperies, to call them so, with which life
had little or nothing to do. He did not in fact set up an image of
life at all, but instead, a Hermes, on which he could hang garlands
corresponding to his passion or indicative of his complaint. Novels
of this sort, to call them so, are still being produced: I read three
of them the other day, all written by women. One of them, which was
“crowned” with a cheque for a hundred pounds, was a real pæan of sex:
in the other two sophistication had set in. They did not so much hymn
the function as “peep and botanise” upon its grave. The three were
episodic, “all for love, and the world well lost.” The world indeed,
for all that appeared, was standing still while half a dozen persons to
a book were enacting their secret rites. If the end of all this be not
despondency and madness it will be something quite as unpleasant.
That which led me into these speculations was Mrs. Stirling’s excellent
memoir of her sister and brother-in-law, Evelyn and William De Morgan,
that happily-mated pair. She tells in its place the manner in which De
Morgan fell into the writing of novels, how without effort they came
to him. They were certainly the last of our novels which have offered
us a comprehensive reading of life. It seems absurd to say of them
that they are able, because ability, in the common use of the word,
implies the conscious exercise of it. De Morgan’s novels, however, seem
effortless; they read as the most spontaneous things in the world, and
Mrs. Stirling now says that they really were so. There is no apparent
design, no contrivance. They are as formless as life itself.
“‘Be good enough to note,’ he says in one of them, ‘that none of
the characters in this story are picturesque or heroic--only
chance samples of folk you may see pass your window now, at this
moment, if you will only lay your book down and look out. They are
passing--passing--all day long, each with a story. And some little
thing you see, a meeting, a parting, may make the next hour the
turning point of existence.... This is a tale made up of trifles.’”
What he made of those stored and treasured-up trifles, with what
humour, with what tenderness, what wisdom he combined and related
them, what in fact was the harvest of his quiet eye, cannot be entered
upon here. De Morgan had been harvesting for sixty-five years when he
began! To me his books seem to be the wisest of our time. I know of
none which, as Matthew Arnold said of Homer, produce the sense in the
reader “of having, within short limits of time, a large portion of
human life presented to him.” They contain--like the _Iliad_ in that,
like _Tom Jones_, like _David Copperfield_ and _Vanity Fair_, and _War
and Peace_--sufficient of the world to create in us a strong illusion
of the whole labouring, blundering, groaning, laughing, praying affair.
But De Morgan is too good for the end of an essay--he who has
inspired so many. And he will write no more of his friendly, wise and
comprehending books. And he is not the point. The point is that the
novelist has bled his art down and out by urging it to make a poem
of itself instead of a digest. I say nothing now of the pamphlet and
the tract. Those things also the novelist has done without leaving
the other undone. He, or his novel, is now dying of exhaustion,
self-induced. Worst sign of all--he is beginning to note his own
symptoms.
IMMORTAL WORKS
An editor--one, that is, of a race suspect to my species; for, as the
herbivores fear the carnivores, so is it with the likes of me and of
him--an editor, I say, has lately spread his nets before me, inviting
me to “a symposium of well-known poets and critics.” A banquet, I
fear, like that last one of Polonius, “not where he eats but where he
is eaten.” The subject of our symposium, the staple of our feast, was
to be “What poets since Wordsworth, _especially what living poets_,
and which one or two of their poems ... should be given a place in the
Golden Treasury of English poetry.” Excellent, i’ faith! Will you walk
into my parlour? said the spider to the fly. I am by this time a fly
getting on in years. I dine out as little as may be, and have developed
something of an intuitive sense which tells me whether I am to dine or
to be dined upon. So I decline the invitation in the following terms:
“Dear Sir,--I deprecate such proposals as yours, because I cannot think
them intended seriously, or (even if they are) likely to be taken so.
It seems to me that you are inviting me less to a symposium than to an
exhibition, in which I am to be an exhibit. You are asking me, among
others, to grant immortality, or deny it, to certain living persons,
many of whom are my friends or acquaintances. Entry into a Golden
Treasury is the hall-mark of no less a thing, the end and aim of every
poet in the world. Once there, a poet is a peer, a knight of a round
table. And you expect me to make of myself a Fountain of Honour, to dub
knights, deal round coronets? No, indeed, my dear sir. I am many bad
things, but I hope not so arrogant, nor such an ass. No man living can
predict immortality for his friend, though he may dearly wish that he
could.
“It is not possible to be sure of current literature for the plain
reason that local and temporary interests must inevitably bias the
judgment. I don’t mean by that one’s interest in one’s friend. At this
hour the war of 1914-18 is the most portentous thing we know or can
think of. I would not mind staking a round sum upon the probability
of nine out of ten of your banquetters selecting recent war poems by
recent young warriors. And yet how many war poems are there in the
existing Golden Treasury? _The Burial of Sir John Moore_, of course;
but what others? And yet again, is it not only too possible that,
before your new Golden Treasury were in the printer’s hands, another
war would be burning out the memory of its forerunner, and wringing
from us new war poems whose appositeness would make immortality more
obviously theirs than of any which you had in type? You see? That is
one of the difficulties in which you would land me, supposing that you
were serious.”
So much for the editor of ----. We do not know, indeed, though
we sometimes think and always hope that we do, what makes for
immortality. Shakespeare, you say? Who (except Shakespeare himself)
thought Shakespeare immortal on the day when he was alive and dead?
Who thought Johnson’s Dictionary immortal? Gibbon’s _Decline and
Fall_? Yes, I fancy that any serious reader of that book, when it was
published, knew in his heart that it would live. But take smaller
things. Why, out of all Landor’s verse, was _Rose Aylmer_ taken, and
why were others left, many of them technically as perfect? You don’t
know. Nor do I. Well, then, which out of the beautiful numbers of _A
Shropshire Lad_ will live for six hundred years--as long as Chaucer?
Which out of the quatrains of Fitzgerald’s _Omar_? We may think that we
know. But do we? Really, all that we do know is that among the copious
poets (and Landor was very copious) some produced more perdurable
lyrics than others. We know that Burns did, that Heine did: we don’t
know how or why. Universality we say goes to immortality. It certainly
does: the thing must go home to everybody. So does heart, whatever
that is; the “lyric cry,” the sense of tears. Look at _Auld Robin
Gray_: that is immortal. Look at _The Wife of Usher’s Well_. Those
things might last as long as Homer or the Bible. The exact proportion,
the exquisite admixture of those qualities I have mentioned, with
others--felicity, limpidity, grace, and so on--do make certain poems as
immortal as you please; and the want of them cuts others out. That is
all there is to say.