how is it that much money--one may say the wealth of the whole
world--cannot buy anything like this in London? Money will get you a
set of rooms thirty feet or so in height from floor to ceiling, it
will buy you the use of suites of furniture that make you wonder when
you wake up in the morning whether by any chance you can have turned
into Louis XV in your sleep; it will buy you bathrooms all marble and
tessellated pavement, dining-rooms as marblous and Louisquinzious as
your private suites; but delights such as are afforded by the Faisan
at Tours it will by no means buy. It is a pity; at least I think so.
But then I can never fancy that I am Louis XV even for a moment, and
that, I suppose, is the reason why I don’t like living in the style
of that monarch, why I don’t even like lunching or dining in palatial
halls built and furnished in his favourite manner. And I doubt
whether the grandest of all grand hotels in our London could furnish
you with a bottle of Vouvray Nature of a named _clos_, for any money
that your millionaire’s purse could proffer.
And the mention of that admirable amber wine of Vouvray, the wine
wherein an argent bead rises at intervals through the mellow gold,
reminds me of my first night at the Faisan. All down the tables were
portly decanters of wine, red and white. I chose red, and found it
a new sensation in wine vastly to my taste. It was, of course, an
ordinary wine, and a little wine, I think of the kind called Joué
Noble, from the place of its growth, a parish by the Cher river. It
was scented like flowers in June; it was in its entirely unpretending
way quite exquisite. I drank it with relish, and towards the end of
dinner I had accounted for about three-parts of the decanter. Swiftly
came the head waiter and bore it away and as swiftly put another and
a full decanter in its place. It was almost too much; “temperance”
enthusiasts would say a great deal too much. I thought solemnly to
myself as I smoked a grateful pipe after dinner in the courtyard:
“This night I have had as much good red wine as ever I could drink.”
And this was one of the great moments of my visit to Touraine.
And then there was Chinon. The train passes through the deep darkness
of Chinon Forest, and you leave the station and come out into the
sunlight. Here is a narrow river valley: the clear Vienne in the
middle of it; to the left a gently rising land, rich with vines;
to the right a long, golden, precipitous cliff, golden in such a
sunlight as we never see in England. As in the backgrounds of the old
Italian masters, the trees stand out clearly, vividly, distinctly
against the sky; so was it at Chinon. That long, mouldering and
golden cliff was surmounted by the walls of the old castle, golden
and mouldering also, irradiated; and from the river to the cliff the
town climbed up; narrow ways, winding ways, steep ways, and every
here and there the grey-blue _tourelles_ of the fifteenth-century
houses piercing upwards; and the dark mass of the forest stretching
far and far away beyond. And then the thought that the man who had
received one of the great visions of reality once walked these ways,
and looked on a scene that had not much changed since his time; that
the golden and rich sunlight had shone on him also, in the hour when
the amazing, terrible, tremendous figures and symbols of the vision
of Pantagruel, Panurge, Friar John, the three who are yet one came to
him, we must conjecture, in clouds and darkness and uncertainties,
as he listened to the new song of the vineyards, and the vine and
the outpoured wine: all this was made a great moment also. I sat
on a sort of bridge--if I remember--joining the two parts of the
ruined castle, sat on golden stones, and looked down on the Chinon
of the grey-blue _tourelles_, on the shining Vienne, and the gentle
vine-covered slope, and I thought of the cloudy young man stumbling
over that hard French of Rabelais far into the night, in obscure
Clarendon Road, long ago. It was not long ago; this was of ’90 and
that was of ’85, but hard pains make long years. I went down the hill
again, past the fountain, and drank the red wine of Chinon solemnly,
reverently in a dark tavern in one of the dark, narrow streets. It
was called “Le Caveau de Rabelais.”
* * * * *
I came back to London in the autumn and took rooms in Guilford Street
till that cottage on the Chilterns should be ready for occupation.
Then from 1891 I lived in the country, and found it nothing, and
came back to London in the autumn of 1893, to an “upper part” in
Great Russell Street, a little westward of the British Museum. It was
then that I began to explore London, and to realise its vastness,
its immensities. Things are relative; I began now to appreciate
the fact that if you set out, without a map, from your house at 36
Great Russell Street and walk for an hour eastward or northward
you are in fact in an unknown region, a new world. Continually you
stand on a peak in Darien, and look out on undiscovered territories,
inhabited by peoples of whom you know nothing. I would go along
Great Russell Street, and turn up into Russell Square, and then go
by Guilford Street, crossing Gray’s Inn Road, and so find myself,
like the knight in the song, “ten leagues beyond the wide world’s
end.” I would go northward, up the Gray’s Inn Road, and then turn
to the right, descend into a valley and climb a height and so come
to a region which was to me as the ultimate parts of Libya, and the
lands of the Mountains of the Moon. I shall never forget the awe with
which I first came upon the other Baker Street, the Baker Street
which would enter no taxi-driver’s mind; those houses climbing up the
hill into Lloyd Square, stucco houses with classic pediments, but
all tottering, askew, and falling into decay; the jerry building of
1820–30. And, I remember, seeing on one of the leaning and doubtful
doors here the brass plate of someone who said that he was a “Buhl
Maker.” I wonder. Did someone really labour in this forsaken,
climbing street in that rich eighteenth-century art of brass and
tortoiseshell, fashioning curious cabinets and escritoires! How
unlikely it seemed; more unlikely than another announcement on a
modest door in the recesses of Camden Town, to the effect that here
were made Shell Boxes.
Often I went up Baker Street and stood in Lloyd’s Square and looked
down on London, on Gilbert Scott’s horrible, villainous sham-Gothic
St. Pancras Station and on all the vague, smoky, weary streets
about it. Here, one evening, the sun flamed suddenly and struck the
windows of a school below and lit fires in them: hence the lines--in
“A Fragment of Life”--entitled: “Lines written on looking down from a
Height in London on a Board School suddenly lit up by the sun.”
And here I would say that the matter of Wonder--that is the matter of
the arts--is everywhere offered to us. It is, I am sure, true, as the
feeble though pious Keble wrote, that:
The daily round, the common task
Will furnish all we need to ask.
And it is utterly true that he who cannot find wonder, mystery, awe,
the sense of a new world and an undiscovered realm in the places by
the Gray’s Inn Road will never find those secrets elsewhere, not in
the heart of Africa, not in the fabled hidden cities of Tibet. “The
matter of our work is everywhere present,” wrote the old alchemists,
and that is the truth. All the wonders lie within a stone’s-throw of
King’s Cross Station.
I remember that when, later on, I wrote a book on the principles
of literary criticism called “Hieroglyphics,” a good many of the
reviewers found grave fault with my dictum that all fine literature
is the work of ecstasy and the inspirer of ecstasy. “In other
words,” said these clever fellows, “a good book is a book that you
happen to like. But other people may have very different tastes
and likings; no doubt many people experience ecstasy in reading a
newspaper feuilleton. Is the feuilleton therefore fine literature?”
The objection, I hasten to say, is perfectly legitimate. Tens of
thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people, I have no doubt, read
the newspaper feuilleton in an ecstasy of delight. I once found
myself, to my dumb, almost awestruck horror, in a drawing-room where
a number of tolerably well-educated people were engaged in taking
the works of ... well, Miss Thingumbob, seriously. Doubtless, then,
there are many people who find rarities and wonders in matter that
you and I pronounce to be contemptible or detestable or just nothing
at all: my reviewers were perfectly right. But if you accept their
ruling you put an end to criticism of all sorts. I could form a large
company of coalheavers, financiers, sporting noblemen, gardeners,
journalists, ladies of quality, actors, scavengers--I was going to
add bishops, but they rarely speak the honest truth--and myself who
had very much rather not see the famous Primavera and the famous
Monna Lisa Gioconda than see them, who had rather--again I include
myself--listen to George Robey’s songs and gags and wheezes than to
“Hamlet.” But what does that prove? Simply, I suppose, that so far
as the pictures and the play are concerned my friends and myself
cannot rise to these particular heights. As an old friend of mine
once observed very well, “We all of us have some windows that are
darkened.” My friend is a musician, and remembering his maxim, I
was much diverted one day by hearing him speak with easy contempt
of the composer of “Acis and Galatea.” But it is true that each one
of us has some darkened windows: Oscar Wilde confessed to me once,
with shame be it said, that he thought absinthe a detestable drink.
But no inference can be drawn from this undoubted fact. It always
stirs in me a certain feeling of impatience when I see the solemn
correspondence, the more solemn leading articles under the dread
heading, “What is Wrong with the Church?” It is alleged, I am sure
with complete truth, that a great many people do not go to church;
and the conclusion is drawn that the Church must be very gravely
at fault. Now this may be true also--I think it is--but it is a
conclusion not to be deduced from the minor premiss, the sole premiss
stated. Scholastic logic, the only logic that is worth twopence, the
“new logic” being, as an Oxford graduate once very sensibly observed
to me, merely “nonsense about things,” is now unfashionable, so,
I suppose I shall be thought somewhat boorish for exhibiting the
newspaper syllogism at full length, supplying the suppressed major.
But here it is:
That which is unpopular is worthless.
The Church is unpopular.
Therefore, the Church is worthless. In other words, as one of the
ladies in the cabrioily--to which I have already alluded--observed:
“Most Votes carries the day.” Very well; but how does the attendance
on the pictures in the National Gallery compare with the attendance
at “the pictures”? And shall we try the experiment of “knocking”
the music-halls, the revue houses and the musical comedy houses by
running Bach’s Organ and Clavier Fugues at popular prices? Perhaps
the purse of Rockefeller might survive the experiment; certainly
no other purse would hold anything after a year of it. Mr. Walkley
of “The Times” proposes to solve the difficulty of criticism by
making the critic address himself to ὁ χαρίεις, the well-graced and
accomplished man. But who is he? Each one of us is a good judge--in
his own judgment. And technical instruction is nothing. No one in his
senses would seek anything vital as to Greek or Latin poetry from a
classical don at Oxford or Cambridge. Keats, poor, shabby John, who
had only been to a commercial academy, knew more about Greek poetry
than a wilderness of classical tutors.
But, I was going to say, all these considerations apply to the known
and recognised arts, to literature, music, painting, architecture.
In all these I am willing to admit I may be hopelessly wrong--I
have said that I had much rather hear Robey than “Hamlet”--but I
will listen to no objections or criticisms as to the Ars Magna of
London, of which I claim to be the inventor, the professor and the
whole school. Here I am artist and judge at once, and possess the
whole matter of the art within myself. For, let it be quite clearly
understood, the Great Art of London has nothing to do with any map
or guide-book or antiquarian knowledge, admirable as these are; and
indeed Peter Cunningham’s “London” is to me one of the choicest of
books. But the Great Art is a matter of quite another sphere; and
as to maps, for example, if known they must be forgotten. How would
the Odyssey have read, do you imagine, if Ulysses had been furnished
with Admiralty Charts, giving the soundings in fathoms, even to the
exact depth of water in the harbourage of Calypso’s isle? And all
historical associations; they too must be laid aside. Mr. Pickwick
at Bury St. Edmunds has nothing to do with the history of the famous
abbey. Of all this the follower of the London Art must purge himself
when he sets out on his adventures. For the essence of this art is
that it must be an adventure into the unknown, and perhaps it may be
found that this, at last, is the matter of all the arts.
And it was this art of London that I followed, while I lived in
Great Russell Street between ’93 and ’95, and still more earnestly
afterwards when I was living at Verulam Buildings, Gray’s Inn.
Sometimes I took a friend with me on my journeys, but not often.
The secret of it all was hidden from them, and they were apt to
become violent. On one grey day that I remember I had personally
conducted a man on a most interesting exploration of the obscurer
by-ways of Islington. He grew silent as the streets grew greyer
and the squares dimmer and the remoteness of the whole region from
any conceivable London that he knew filtered through his soul. His
London was Piccadilly, the Haymarket, St. James’s, and the many
polite neighbourhoods where there are flats and calls are paid and
tea is taken and literary and theatrical and artistic circles meet
and gather. But this London that was a grey wilderness, these streets
that went to the beyond and beyond, these squares which nobody that
my friend could ever have known could ever inhabit: it was all too
much for him. His face darkened with terror and hate, and with a
poisonous glance at me he struck his golden-headed cane violently on
the pavement, and stopping dead, exclaimed: “I wish to God I could
see a hansom!”
So, of course, I never took him to Barnsbury. As for Brentford,
that is the Great Magisterium, the Hidden Secret. There is a Secret
Society of those initiated in Brentford, and so darkly is the mystery
kept that there have been cases in which members have known each
other intimately for twenty years before the passwords have been
exchanged.
_Chapter V_
I have been talking of rooms in Gray’s Inn, of trips to Touraine; and
I suppose it will have become evident that the days of the Clarendon
Road cell, of dry bread and green tea meals were over. This was, in
fact, the case. Between ’87 and ’92 I “came into money,” that is,
into what I called money. My mother died in 1885, my father in 1887;
distant and ancient relatives in Scotland who had lived to fabulous
ages died at last, and thus moneys that should have come to my
mother came to me. And I was no longer the lonely man of the earlier
chapters.
Reckoning up the various sums which I inherited, I calculate that
if they had been invested I should have had enough whereon to live
narrowly and meanly for the next thirty years. Somewhere about 1921
a long lease would have fallen in, and two-thirds of my income would
have disappeared. I should then have been left with sixty pounds
a year at the outside, and even with the “aconomy” recommended by
Captain Costigan, there is very little to be done in these days with
£60 per annum. But I did not invest my fortune in sound securities.
Perhaps I might have done so if it had fallen in a lump on my lap;
but this was not the way of it. It came in bits and parcels: £700
one year, £500 eighteen months afterwards. So I adopted the simple,
manly course of putting my money as I got it into a box, as it were,
and dipping my hand into the box when I needed a few gold pieces. I
wish it were possible to do this literally: it must be magnificent
to live on a chestful of gold; but I compromised by getting a
cheque-book.
And I have always been glad that I made this business-like
arrangement. By it I was enabled to live for eleven or twelve
years under pleasant and humane conditions. Not in luxury, be it
understood, for luxury has always been utterly detestable to me.
Detestable to me, I say with emphasis; I do not say that luxury is
detestable in itself. If men like to have it so, by all means let
them dwell in marble halls, with vassals and serfs and wine-stewards
at their side. Let them be as Louisquinzious as ever they please in
their homes and at their hotels; for all I care, they may take their
ease in snuggeries, all gold and mirrors and marbles, fifty feet
high, a hundred feet high, if they like it so. But to me, a poor
clerk, all this has ever been nauseous. When I plied my sorry trade
of journalist, I disliked most things involved in that vile business,
but I hated my occasional missions to the Hôtel Splendide and the
Hôtel Glorieux. I would be sent to these places to find out, say, the
exact method employed by the new chef, M. Mirobolant, in cooking red
herrings for the famous Joy Teas in the Venetian Hall--everybody has
heard of the Joy Teas at the Splendide, and of the Joy Band of twenty
kettle-drums, fifty tea-trays, ten trombones and thirty bassoons.
Well, I would be sent to the Splendide on this errand; or, perhaps,
to the Glorieux to find out whether it were true that the principals
of the Russian Ballet sucked their morning tea through raspberry jam
and declared that this was necessary to their art. I would visit
one or other of these establishments and sit down on Louis Quinze
or Louis Seize chairs and wait there in my dingy old cloak, while
“Reception” and “Enquiries” smiled to see such an incongruous figure
before them, while the guests of the hotel smiled also as they
went in and out, till at last the manager arrived, fretful enough,
usually, at being dragged from his business or his leisure to answer
idiotic questions. I used to wonder on these Splendide or Glorieux
days what I had done to deserve such humiliations. The only thing
that somewhat consoled me was the thought that, whatever pains the
Doctor may have suffered, while he waited in Lord Chesterfield’s
outward rooms or was repulsed from that nobleman’s door, my case was
more humiliating still, since an English nobleman of race is a much
greater personage than the shiniest of hotel managers. And perhaps,
also, I fancied that I was beginning to follow a little in the
faithful steps of Venerable Raymondus Anglus, who was slowly sliced
into little pieces in Cathay.
Rather, I am afraid, in the steps of a relative of my own, some
distant Cousin Machen, whom business, I suppose, took to Cathay in
the ’fifties and ’sixties of the last century. It so fell out that
while this gentleman was in China we declared one of our infamous
Opium Wars against the Dragon Throne and the Vermilion Pencil.
Promptly the local mandarin seized Cousin Machen and put him in a
cage. They then travelled him round the Chinese “Smalls.” When the
cortège got to a village or town, my cousin’s custodians touched him
up smartly with their spears. Cousin Machen would then dance with
anguish, and, I am sure, most ungracefully, and the happy villagers,
howling with mirth, and voting Cousin Machen good goods, would pelt
the poor man with undesirable matters. He got away from them, but I
have heard my relations say that in extreme old age the mere word
“China” was enough to bring a sweat of horror pouring down his face.
And I am in a position to sympathise fully with Cousin Machen----
Well, I was saying, I think, that I never cared for luxury, and
so did not waste my bit of money on it. But if luxury tempts me
not at all, I care a great deal for homely comfort, and I lived in
considerable comfort in the days of which I am speaking. I think that
my annual budget was between four and five hundred a year, and let
me tell an amazed generation that for five hundred a year or rather
less two people could live very sufficiently in the ’eighties and
’nineties. Your saddle of mutton and your sirloin of beef were of
the best, lamb at Easter--is there anything better than spring lamb
with its skin roasted to a golden-brown?--was easily attainable;
fowls and ducks, grouse and partridges and pheasants, with now and
then that most delicious bird the woodcock, were no rarities. And
asparagus might well appear quite early in the spring, and green peas
in advance of the main crop. And sometimes one felt that it would be
amusing to go out to dinner for a change: well, the bill of the Soho
restaurant never gave an indigestion afterwards. Sometimes the Soho
dinners were quite good, they were always amusing; and in those days
there was such a thing as decent Chianti. It came to the cheerful
table in flasks of very thin glass, and between the cork and the wine
was a stratum of olive oil. This the waiter flicked off on to the
linoleum with a swift gesture. The last Chianti of this order that I
tasted was in 1902. I saw great gallon flasks of it standing in the
window of a small shop opposite the stage door of the Palace, and
bought one of these flasks--it cost six shillings, if I remember--and
bore it tenderly to my dressing-room at the St. James’s Theatre. It
was the last night of “Paolo and Francesca,” and we drank the Chianti
merrily in trunk hose and armour when the play was done. And Herbert
Dansey, who was really a noble Florentine, “degli Tassinari,” vowed
you could get no better Chianti in all Tuscany.
Or again, one didn’t fancy roast beef, and yet one didn’t want to
go out dining. There was the middle course; Salame or Mortadella,
half a round of ripe Brie and a bottle of a sufficient red or white
wine. And a half-bottle of Benedictine only cost four-and-six. And
the whole of the small banquet ran into very little: they were
cheap days, and the Income Tax was inconsiderable then. But I was
forgetting. I had no income, so I saved the expense of the tax.
And under these conditions, living very pleasantly, with a month
in France every year, I cultivated literature between 1890–1900.
I refrained, utterly, I am glad to say, from the impious folly of
wondering what would happen when the money should have come to an
end. When that day came, why, that day could see to it.
Living very pleasantly; that is, apart from my chosen sport of making
books. I have already discussed the strange paradox of writing, of
writing, that is, when it is entirely divorced from all commercial
considerations. I wrote purely to please myself; and what a queer
pleasure it was! To write, or to try to write, means involving
oneself in endless difficulties, contrarieties, torments, despairs,
and yet I wrote on, and I suppose for the reason which I have given,
the necessity laid upon most of us to create another and a fantastic
life in order that the life of actuality may be endurable. Look at
the golfer: observe how he toils and frets in that fantastic world
that he has made for himself, a world wherein he who can say, “I did
the fourth hole in two” is happy; while the wretch who had to hit the
little white ball six or seven times before it finally popped into
that fourth hole goes out wretchedly into the night. It is fantastic
nonsense; but for all that the golfers are in the right.