PEOPLE I WOULD LIKE TO MEET
I suppose that even the most outrageously sincere of men are to some
extent _poseurs_, if not to themselves, then to other people. The
artistic temperament must either attitudinise or die. Posturing is the
most delicate, the most dangerous, of all the arts. To pose before
others is risky, but to pose before oneself is most hazardous, for no
one in the world is so easy to deceive, and so ready to be deceived,
as oneself, and to be deluded by a fancy picture that one has drawn
and painted in hectic moments is to appear to the world as a fantastic
clown.
Deluded thus, it appears to me, is W. B. Yeats. He is, of course, a
fine though not a great poet: no reasonable man can question that. And
there are lines and verses of his that have become woven into the very
texture of my mind. Moreover, I recognise that it is futile to quarrel
with a man because he is not other than he is. Yet I do quarrel with
him. I remember a photograph of Yeats, a photograph I have not seen
for ten or twelve years, wherein he appears conscious of nothing in
the world but himself, conscious of nothing but his hair, his eyes,
his hands—especially his hands. His fingers are so long that one is
surprised that, his palm resting on his knee, they do not reach to
the floor. It is, I concede, a human weakness for a man whom Nature
has gifted (or do I mean cursed?) with the appearance of a poet, to
play up to Nature and help her by delicate titivations. But to do this
successfully, one must have an overwhelming personality—a personality
like that of Shelley, of Byron, of Swinburne. It is a simple matter to
look like a poet, but to impose that look on mankind is given to few.
It is not given to W. B. Yeats.
How is it, I wonder, that one rather admires Æ for believing in the
objective existence of strange gods and spirits, and yet despises Yeats
for sharing this belief? It is, I think, because one feels that Æ has a
solid, even massive, intellect controlling his fantasy, whereas Yeats’
intellect is not distinguished either by subtlety or massiveness. Yeats
believes what he wishes to believe; Æ believes only what he must. Yeats
has an incurable aching for the picturesque, and whilst he believes
that he is “helped” by the supernatural, I think that this help is
derived from his own imaginings, if indeed the question of “help” comes
in at all.
Why, then, should I wish to meet this man whom, it is clear, I regard
as self-deluded and for whom my respect is mingled with a feeling
that is not very far removed from dislike? Really, I do not know. His
attitude of mind is not uncommon, and I have met many men and women his
equal in intellectual force. I think that perhaps I wish to study at
first hand a mind that is so exquisite in its refinement, so sensitive
in its moods, so invariably right in its choice of words. From all the
tens of thousands of words that exist, how difficult it is to select
the one word that is inevitable! And how slender and fragile a man’s
work becomes when his mind must perforce invariably pounce upon the
one only word! The great writers were not so fastidious. Scott, Byron,
Shelley, Keats, Balzac and a hundred others: take, if you wish, any
half-dozen words from almost any page of their writings and substitute
six others, and what will be lost thereby? Scott and Byron and Balzac,
and even Shelley and Keats, have, I think, not more than a hundred or
so pages that could not with safety be tampered with in this manner.
There is something lily-fingered and, to me, something disagreeable
and effeminate in a writer who, at all times and seasons, searches
and burrows for the _mot juste_. I am curious about such writers,
curious though I know instinctively that they love letters more than
they love life. To me such men are incomprehensible, and in them,
somewhere, something is wrong. Men who do not feel lust for life have
thin necks, or shallow pates, or neurasthenia.... Perhaps, after all, I
am something of a student of nerve trouble, and wish to meet Yeats in
order to satisfy myself what precisely is lacking in him.
* * * * *
It is a popular fallacy that versatility is invariably accompanied by
shallowness, whereas, of course, almost all men of great genius have
been peculiarly and even marvellously versatile. For me, versatility
has most powerful attraction. The man with only one talent is as
uninteresting as the man with no talent at all. Perhaps Hilaire Belloc
has retained his hold on me because he is continually surprising me.
He has done so many different and opposed things so admirably, that it
seems impossible he should strike out in yet another line; but I know
very well that before twelve months have gone he will have turned his
amazing powers in still another direction, and will accomplish his task
better than any other living man can do it.
Nearly twenty years have gone since early one spring I walked alone
across Devon from Ilfracombe to Exeter and from Exeter to Land’s End.
Now, I went alone simply because Belloc had walked alone across much of
France and Italy, and the spirit of imitation was then, as it is now,
very strong within me. I had just read his glorious _Path to Rome_,
and I carried a copy of the first edition in my haversack, reading
it by the wayside and forgetting my loneliness (for I was many times
pathetically lonely) in Belloc’s most excellent company. I pondered
over the nature of this man for many hours, envying him, and thinking
that a man with such great and diverse gifts must be reckoned among the
happiest people alive. I remember that during the weeks I walked in
Devon and Cornwall I copied him as far as I could in the most minute
particular, and at Clovelly, one golden evening as I stood talking with
some tall, Spanish-looking fishermen, I suddenly made up my mind that
I would write to him. I do not know what I wrote, but a couple of days
later a reply came from him telling me that my letter had given him
more pleasure than any of the enthusiastic reviews in the papers. This
letter I pasted in my copy of _The Path to Rome_, and in 1915 a friend
begged me to allow him to take it with him to France. He had a copy of
his own, but he wished to take mine. That friend (our worship of Belloc
was one of the many things we had in common) now lies dead, and I like
to think that his comrades buried my precious book with him.
My imitation of, and devotion to, Belloc led me into several amusing
scrapes, and I recollect arriving ruefully at Helston one wet afternoon
and seeking shelter at an inn called, I think, The Angel. Having
arranged to proceed to Penzance by train early in the evening, I went
to bed whilst they dried my clothes. Whilst in bed, I recalled that
Belloc had often praised Beaune and that I had never tasted it. So I
ordered a bottle, drank it at about 4 P.M.—and promptly went to sleep
for twelve hours!
Even now, on the borderland of middle age, I cannot pick up a new
book of Belloc’s without a little thrill: he is so clean, so bravely
prejudiced, so courageous. He is a lover of wine and beer, of
literature, of the Sussex downs, of the great small things of life: a
mystic, a man of affairs, a poet. What, indeed, is he not that is fine
and noble and free?
* * * * *
In the musical world one is accustomed to infant prodigies; very
rarely do they develop their powers. But in the literary world infant
prodigies are rare, and at the moment I can recall among writers of
the past the boy Chatterton and that not quite so remarkable but,
nevertheless, very distinguished youth, Oliver Madox Brown. In our own
days we have had two or three men of letters whose first work, written
in their late teens or early twenties, promised more, I think, than
their later books have fulfilled. I am thinking more particularly of
Edwin Pugh and William Romaine Paterson, the latter of whom usually
writes under the pseudonym of “Benjamin Swift.”
Many of us must remember Benjamin Swift’s _Nancy Noon_, a strange novel
that jerked the literary world into excitement two decades ago. The
writer of it was but a boy, and though a few critics declared that he
“derived” from Meredith, it was almost universally acknowledged that,
for sheer originality both in style and in its general outlook upon
the world, the novel was head and shoulders above any contemporary
literature. So we all kept a close watch upon Benjamin Swift, reading
each fresh work (and there were many fresh works, for the new-comer
was very productive) with an eager anticipation which, alas! was
foiled again and again. I remember six or eight of his books, each lit
with genius, but all a little crude and violent and not one of them
indicating that the writer’s mind was becoming more mature. It was a
vigorous, eruptive mind with which one was in contact, but it was also
a mind in such incessant turmoil that one searched in vain in each of
its products for that “point of rest” which Coventry Patmore maintains
is a _sine qua non_ of all fine works of art.
In some way that I forget Benjamin Swift and I got into correspondence,
and I still possess a bundle of his letters, mostly about his work.
I remember that in one of my letters I ventured to indicate what I
thought were some of his faults: I called in question his knowledge of
music, I expressed disapproval of his violence, and I told him I feared
that he was in danger of settling down to being a mere “eccentric”
writer. My letter, as might have been expected, produced no effect,
and though I have not read his latest works (in dug-outs and trenches
one reads everything that comes to hand, but Benjamin Swift has to be
sought), I am given to understand that they are in many ways like his
first efforts—_outré_, violent, eruptive, yet distinguished and glowing
here and there with a genius that is always hectic.
Years ago, Swift invited me to call on him whenever I should happen
to be in town, and though I should very much like to meet him, I have
never accepted his invitation. One is like that. One shrinks from
satisfying one’s curiosity. I picture Benjamin Swift as bearing a
resemblance to Strindberg, but in my mind’s eye his lips are thinner
and straighter than Strindberg’s, and his eyes are more vehement.
What is it, I wonder, that prevents this writer from ranking among the
great? His intellect is wide and deep enough, his literary talent is
very considerable, and his experience of life has been exceptionally
varied. There is a twist in his genius, a maggot in his brain. He sees
life grotesquely; some of the people he creates are like the men and
women one meets in nightmares.
* * * * *
Sometimes I amuse myself by inventing conversations between people
opposed in temperament—_e.g._ Sir Owen Seaman and Mr Hall Caine,
Mr John Galsworthy and “Marmaduke,” Little Tich and Lord Morley, and
I often wish a brain much brighter than my own (Mr Max Beerbohm’s,
for example) would occupy its idle hours in writing a book of such
conversations. I commend the idea to Mr E. V. Lucas, also, and to
Messrs A. A. Milne and Bernard Shaw (only Shaw’s fun is apt to be so
distressingly emphatic and double-fisted).
Among the dead, I make Sir Richard Burton meet and talk with Herbert
Spencer, and I always call this conversation _The Man and the Mummy_.
It is strange, but we have not, so far as I am aware, any record of
Burton’s rich and provocative conversation, though I have been assured
by men who knew him well that his talk was the best they had heard.
Sir Richard Burton is one of the men whom I most wish to meet, and
perhaps when my happy sojourn on this planet comes to a close, I shall
be allowed to serve him in some humble capacity. To me he has always
seemed to belong to Elizabethan times, and I think that he must often
have cursed at Fate for placing him in the middle of a century that
could not fully understand or appreciate him.
In our own days we have many young men of a spirit akin to that of
Burton, though not one of them may possess a tithe of his genius
or of his colossal intellect. I refer, of course, to our numerous
soldier-poets—gallant young men of thought and action, of quick and
generous sympathy, of noble aspiration. Most of you who read what I
am now writing must know at least one man belonging to this type,
for there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them—men who, but for
the war, would probably never have written a line of poetry, but
whose souls have been stirred and whose hearts have been fired by the
grandest emotion that can urge mankind to self-sacrifice: I mean the
never-dying emotion of patriotism—that emotion at which the sexless
sneer, which the “cosmopolitan” regards with amusement, and for which
men of imagination and grit gladly die.
One soldier of this type I knew intimately, and I would gladly know
many of those others who have thrilled us with their poems. Let me
describe my friend to you. He is no longer young: his precise age is
thirty-five: but he was among those who, early in August, 1914, after
first putting his small affairs in order, enlisted in Lord Kitchener’s
Army. He made no fuss about it, and told none but his most intimate
friends what he had done. I met him a few months after he had joined
up; he was then a Corporal, and seemed to me the happiest man I had
met for many a day. He told me that he had begun to write “seriously,”
for hitherto his scribbling had been of a cursory and trivial nature.
But he showed me none of his work, and it was not until he had been
in France some little time that his verses began to appear in one or
two reviews. Having been granted a commission, he quickly rose to the
rank of Captain. He was mentioned in dispatches twice and, having led
a particularly successful bombing raid on the enemy’s trenches, was
awarded the Military Cross.
There is, I know, nothing very unusual in this bare record as I have
set it down; the unusual, indeed extraordinary, nature of this case is
that before the war my friend had been a reserved, unadventurous but
very capable bank clerk, quite undistinguished and apparently without
ambition. But hidden fires must from his youth have been smouldering
in his heart, and it required the war’s disturbance and excitement to
blow these ashes into flame, and the war’s opportunity was needed to
disclose of what fine material he was made. I flatter myself that I
had always known his nature was fine and distinguished, for though he
was a bank clerk one would never have guessed it from his conversation
and demeanour. I also know that, generations ago, his forbears played
a by-no-means ignoble part in our country’s history, and for that
reason alone I felt that, though concealed, there were imagination and
aspiration abiding in his soul.
* * * * *
One of my friends, Anna Wickham, knows D. H. Lawrence very well, and
one day I asked her if she would arrange for me to meet him at her
house. But she brushed aside the suggestion with the few words that she
was not particularly interested in Lawrence and that my time might be
wasted if spent with him. Such a suggestion amazed, and still amazes
me, and I cannot but think that Anna Wickham had never troubled to read
any of D. H. Lawrence’s writings, for it often happens among literary
people that close friends do not look at each other’s work.
To me D. H. Lawrence is perhaps the most peculiarly original English
writer living. In his poems he is so egoistic as almost to seem like
an egomaniac, and in two or three of his novels he is obsessed and
overwhelmed by the passion of sex. Yet in _Sons and Lovers_, and in
that wonderful first book of his called, I think, _The Red Peacock_, he
gets clean away from himself, and is as objective as all great creative
artists are and should be. Every writer must, of course, portray life
in terms of himself, but only small men continually thrust themselves
and themselves only on to an embarrassed public. But Lawrence has an
insatiable curiosity about himself, and it seems at times as though he
is not anxious to discover or uncover life, but to penetrate to the
deeps of his own nature and shout out at the top of his voice what he
has found there. In such egoism, there is, of course, strength as well
as weakness, and the very fault, so grave and so calamitous, that bars
him from achieving great work is, nevertheless, an attraction to those
who are much intrigued by psychology.
There are, are there not? two kinds of imaginative literature: the
kind we read without more than a passing thought for the man or woman
who has written it; and the kind we read primarily because we are
enormously interested in the personality and temperament of the man
or woman from whom that literature comes. In removing himself to
Italy instead of throwing himself heart and soul into the ugly but
extraordinary life that these years are giving us, D. H. Lawrence is,
I believe, evading his destiny and is thereby weakening the gifts and
tampering with the intellect of a man whose name should stand near the
head of all contemporary writers.
If Mr Lawrence should by chance read these pages, he will acquit me
of impertinence if he remembers that he has taken the public into his
confidence, and that he must expect the public to make some comment
upon what he, uninvited, has told us.