if the golfers feel hurt by this remark, let them remember that a
man always praises his own game. We understand so little of the real
scheme of things that, for all we know, golf may be the end for which
man was made, as, according to Coleridge, snuff was the final term of
the human nose. But waiving this possibility--I think a remote one--I
would contend that literature has more in it on the whole. Being an
art as well as a sport, there is a question of making something, and
very occasionally of making something that will divert or enchant
others, besides the maker; whereas the sport which is nothing but
a sport has no such by-products as “Don Quixote” or “Pickwick.” Of
course the man who plays a game, such as golf or cricket, often gives
pleasure--or amusement, at all events--to many spectators; but when
the match is over and the last ball bowled nothing permanent remains.
So far as others are concerned the player of games is much in the
position of the player of plays. The actor thrills the house or rocks
it with laughter; but the curtain falls and all is over. We know that
the best judges of the eighteenth century found Garrick natural,
simple, affecting; but we know no more. We have pictures of Garrick
in his favourite situations; but I at least have no distinct image in
my mind of what it was really like to be in the front row of the pit
at Drury Lane and see and hear Garrick play.
And, this apart, I cannot help thinking that the pleasures of the
literary game are more intense and more exquisite than the pleasures
of the other games. I know this is a very difficult question; there
is no final answer to it. But I feel sure that the happiness of
Charles Dickens on writing the last words of “David Copperfield” was
greater than the happiness of the cricketer at Lord’s who carries
out his bat for a faultless innings of two hundred against the most
difficult bowling and the best fielding in England. I do not know
that this is so, but I conjecture that it is so, chiefly because
the joys of the writer of a great romance are so varied and so
complex in comparison with the joys of the man who has played a
perfect innings. In a sense, perhaps, the first-rate cricketer has
achieved the more perfect performance: he has met every difficulty
splendidly, his judgment as to running has been impeccable, he has
not given a single chance. The writer, on the other hand, is--I think
we may say--never perfect: consider those last chapters of “Don
Quixote”; consider Steerforth and that infernal ... woman, Agnes; the
Grandfather and Little Nell. Yet the man of the book has traversed
such an infinitely wider region than the man of the bat and ball:
he has perhaps rectified the work of the Creator and made himself
anew and made himself much better; and so he has worked with all
the world, fashioning a new life, discovering wonders where before
there were no wonders, shewing secrets that had been hidden from the
foundation of things, peering now and again, as Poe and Hawthorne
peered, into the places of thick darkness, and, above all, voyaging
into the unknown, perpetually climbing the steep white track that
vanishes over the hill.
_Chapter VI_
We are, I think, in the period 1890–1900; or, perhaps, to be more
accurate, let us say 1889–1899. Between these dates I made a
translation of “Le Moyen de Parvenir,” an early seventeenth-century
book by an odd follower of Rabelais. I wrote “The Great God Pan,”
“The Inmost Light,” “The Three Impostors,” “The Hill of Dreams,”
a short collection of experiments called “Ornaments in Jade,”
“Hieroglyphics,” “The White People,” the first part of “A Fragment of
Life,” and “The Red Hand.” As I have said, I had inherited a little
capital and spent it, and at ample leisure wrote these books and
tales, instead of doing honest work. In the words of some character
in “The Three Impostors,” I regarded my various legacies as an
endowment of research.
Now, as to the first title on this list, I was inspired to translate
“Le Moyen de Parvenir” by that earlier Rabelaisian enthusiasm, which
had lasted on. I found the book (in the original edition, I think),
a little dumpy volume, while I was in the employment of a firm of
second-hand booksellers who lived not far from Leicester Square. I
have been called a modest man in an after-dinner speech, and I hope
I am one; but I am sure I was modest in 1888. For, finding that I
could not get a “rise” on the £60 a year which York Street afforded
me, I tried Leicester Square and asked as much as £80; thirty
shillings a week. I think the firm were amused; but they gave it me,
and I set about cataloguing books for them.
I did this under odd conditions. When I made my application, the
Brothers--let us say--took me down to the place in the basement where
my work would have to be done. Once, I suppose, it had been the
underground back-kitchen of the house. The kitchen was occupied by
two other employees of the firm. One of them kept the accounts; the
other treated “foxed” plates and pages in baths and made them fresh
again, and “grangerised” and packed up books that had been bought.
And the kitchen had the illumination from the solid glass over which
people walked as they passed the shop, and some sort of air from the
outer world. But my workshop had neither one nor the other. Save for
gas, it was in total darkness. Its air was dead. And the House asked
me very fairly whether I thought I could stand it. I said I could,
and so I went to work.
I was never any good at cataloguing, real, technical cataloguing. I
was explaining the other day to a friend of mine, a most accomplished
and learned cataloguer, how I despised his work. “This business,”
I said, “of putting little slanty lines between the words of a
title-page. A pitiable job,” I proceeded, “it must be so since I
could never make anything of it.” But, the truth is, I never had any
heart for the work. I don’t care twopence whether a book is in the
first edition or in the tenth; nay, if the tenth is the best edition,
I would rather have it. To me it appears mere childishness to
consider whether Lowndes--I think that is one of the authorities--has
seen three copies of some particular book or three hundred; the
only question being: is the book worth reading or not? Then, when
it comes to measuring an Elzevir, say, with a graduated rule, and
pronouncing a little book three inches and a half high to be a “tall
copy,” my common sense revolts. In other words, I am sure that
Bibliography is a capital game, but it is not my game. I disliked
my work of cataloguing; but I loathed another branch of my work,
that was indexing. Everybody knows about “grangerising.” You take a
book, say, Smith’s “Life of Nollekens.” In it many eighteenth-century
personages are mentioned, and many London streets and public places.
The indexer has to read through the book, noting every person, every
place, and compile an index. And on this index the grangeriser, the
bookseller, goes to work hunting his stock of plates, hunting certain
well-known sources for pictures with which he can stuff the original
work. He will destroy a dozen or a hundred or a thousand other books
of less value to produce a kind of monster: “The Life of Nollekens,”
by Joseph Smith, 1 vol., 8vo., 17--. Enlarged to 3 vols. quarto, and
furnished with 250 extra illustrations, comprising portraits, views,
plans, maps, and original and facsimile letters from Blank, Dash,
Chose, and other famous persons of the period. Purple Levant Morocco
Jansenist; in watered purple silk case, gilt. Price: A great deal.
There. I am afraid I have forgotten the trick of the business and my
friend the expert cataloguer will say that it is a good thing indeed
that I have changed my trade; but it is something like that. Well,
indexing is a horrible job; a weariness, a nuisance; a matter of
covering the table with innumerable little slips of paper that flow
over on to the floor; and one must be careful and accurate, and I
have always hated being careful, and accurate--unless I happen to be
interested in what I am doing. Besides, I hold that “grangerising”
is both barbarous and silly. So I didn’t like my work, but I liked
the Brothers. They were always most courteous. Near our establishment
was a shop where a very old gentleman sold precious things. His
shop windows were made of small squares of glass. Above them was
an inscription to the effect that the firm were “Goldsmiths and
Silversmiths to Their Majesties the King and Queen and to Her Royal
Highness the Duchess of Kent.” And the old gentleman who kept this
shop wore what we call evening-dress all day long, and advanced to
meet his customers with an inclined head, his hands clasped together.
The Brothers were a good deal younger, but they were of the same
school. They had a way of putting things. For example, Brother
Charles was trying to teach me how to catalogue their very beautiful
collection of French eighteenth-century illustrated books, the sort
of books that have illustrations by Fragonard.
“And if, Mr. Machen,” said Brother Charles, “if it strikes you that
any of these plates are brilliant impressions--well, we have no
objection to your saying so.”
It may be mentioned that the firm dealt occasionally in works which
would not be suitable for the “center table” of a New England
parlour. For themselves, for their own private taste, they read
George Eliot and thought her by far the greatest novelist that the
English Nation had ever produced. I am sure that they would have held
“Peregrine Pickle”--save in the rare first impression--to be a low
book, and Dickens, I conjecture, would have struck them as funny and
vulgar. But, still, selling books was their business, and it was not
their affair as booksellers to censor the morals of the works they
sold. They dealt in rare books.
Well, one morning as I walked down from Great Russell Street to the
shop, I was reading of the trial and conviction of a minor bookseller
of Charing Cross Road. This Mr. Jackson, or whatever his name was,
had been found guilty of selling obscene books, and had been sent
to gaol, for nine months, if I remember. I mentioned the matter to
Brother Ned as I entered.
“You’ve seen about Jackson?” I said.
“Yes, Mr. Machen,” said Brother Ned, with a certain moral austerity
of demeanour that was new to me. “We _have_ seen about Mr. Jackson,
and we wish to state at once that we have no sympathy with Mr.
Jackson; none whatever. There is a _right_ way, Mr. Machen, of doing
these things and a _wrong_ way.”
Mr. Jackson, I may say, did not deal in rare books. His prices were
low, he appealed to the general public. I hasten to add that on the
whole I sympathise with the Brothers on this matter. And I add also:
that after more recent experiences of mine I am very loath to find
fault with any persons who treat those in their employment as human
beings, with the decent civilities, courtesies and considerations
that are befitting between man and man. In those days I had no
knowledge of the anthropoids; still, I appreciated the pleasant
treatment I received.
Yet, with all their pleasant manners, I am afraid that the Brothers
did not find in me the ideal cataloguer. Anyhow, one day Brother Ned
came down to my darksome place with a queer little quarto in his
hand, a quarto in a dull paper wrapper. He had it open, marked with a
slip of paper, at a certain page, and so far as I remember, without
any particular preface or explanation, he asked me to begin making
a translation of the work from that point. I said: “Certainly, Mr.
Edward,” and began to translate without more ado.
And here I may say that my career as a French translator has always
struck me as highly humorous. At the good old grammar school where
I was educated and educated very well, I think that the headmaster
thoroughly agreed with the boys that Foreign Languages were a
silly game that, for various reasons, one had to play. Education
was Latin and Greek, but a notion had arisen in these late days
that one ought to learn French, and so there was a French master.
But he wore neither cap nor gown, and so he was not a real master,
and so, again, his language was not a real language. Therefore:
poor M. Ménard! And I am afraid that he was a very bad master. If
his authority had been supported, and if we had tried our best, I
do not think we should have learned much; as it was, the French
lessons, three times a week, were a farce. I knew no French when I
left Hereford Cathedral School in 1880, that is, I could not have
conjugated the verb _Aimer_ to save my life. I had read no French to
speak of. Then, in my desolation in Clarendon Road, I had somehow
come across “Gil Blas” and had managed, being interested, to get
through it. Then, the York Street publisher had sent me down the
sixteenth-century “Heptameron” and had ordered me to translate it,
and I did so, somehow. And now, Brother Ned ordered me to translate
from the dumpy quarto which he handed me; and forthwith I set about
translating, not troubling what it was, what it was about, not caring
two straws that I had not the thread of the narrative, nor worrying
over the fact that I knew nothing whatever about the enigmatic
“M.M.” or the mysterious “C.C.” into whose singular adventures I now
plunged gaily. Thus I began the translation of the famous “Memoirs
of Casanova,” and I think the money balance between the Brothers
and myself was readjusted. For if I had been dear as a cataloguer,
at thirty shillings a week, I was decidedly cheap as a translator.
Casanova is a work that runs into twelve sizeable volumes, and the
task of turning it into English took me a year, and I think the cost
to the firm will be held to have been strictly moderate.
And what about these strange Memoirs of the charlatan adventurer?
Well, not long ago I was called upon to write an introduction to a
reissue of the version I had made in the ’eighties. I found this an
extremely difficult task. The obvious solution of the difficulty,
the writing a sort of _précis_ of the book and calling it an
Introduction, did not appeal to me. It was some time before the
“moral” of the Memoirs disengaged itself. The Introduction when
written proved to be an essay on the futility of trying to tell the
whole truth about the relations between men and women. This is what
Casanova, who was highly qualified, in a certain sense, for the
undertaking, tried to do; and the more “frank,” the more “outspoken”
his page the more the secret escapes from it; the more openly he
reveals, the more deeply he conceals the mysteries. For the fact is
that all the real secrets are ineffable; the secrets of love, and
the secrets of the wood; the secrets of the flower and the secrets
of the flame; and the secrets of the Faith. As I point out in my
Introduction, you can enumerate the scientific facts--such of them
as are known--relating to any subject. You can define a horse, for
example, as Bitzer defined it in “Hard Times.”
“Quadruped. Gramjnivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders,
four eye-teeth and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in
marshy countries sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be
shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.”
And so you may discourse of the pistils and stamens of the lilies of
the field, and divide the fowls of the air into genera and species
and sub-species and count the teeth of Keats: and when all is done,
you know--nothing. Nothing that is of the essence of your matter,
nothing of its “quiddity,” a word that we have ceased to use, I
suppose, because we have no use for it, having forgotten that there
is such a thing as that essence which is present in all things,
which indeed makes them to be what they are, which is nevertheless
unsearchable and ineffable. And all this is true, not only of the
matters which the plain man, the man in the street, is inclined to
sniff at, but of all things, of man himself and of the universe of
noumena and phenomena which is presented to him. If you talk to the
plain, practical man about Mystic Theology, Mystic Love, Poetry,
Romance, he will, very likely, brush you aside with his “In my
opinion that’s all imagination”--and serve you right for talking to
him on such subjects at all. The dear fellow has no notion of the
fact that he has never seen a point, a line, a square, or a triangle,
and that he never will see any one of these things--in this life
at all events. He has seen black marks on paper which he has been
told are lines and squares and triangles. Being at heart thoroughly
credulous, he believes what he is told, but if he will dig up his old
“Euclid” and read the definitions, he will find that no mortal eyes
can ever see a square or a circle, since a line is length without
breadth and a plane surface is length and breadth without thickness.
There is nothing in the nature of things to prevent a man from seeing
a dragon or a griffin, a gorgon or a unicorn. Nobody as a matter of
fact has seen a woman whose hair consisted of snakes, nor a horse
from whose forehead a horn projected; though very early man most
probably did see dragons--known to science as pterodactyls--and
monsters more improbable than griffins. At any rate, none of these
zoological fancies violates the fundamental laws of the intellect;
the monsters of heraldry and mythology do not exist, but there is no
reason in the nature of things nor in the laws of the mind why they
should not exist. But no man hath seen a line at any time, since the
manifestation of length without breadth is a contradiction in terms.
And the plain man is probably inclined to believe in the existence
of vulgar fractions; he may tell you that he makes use of them daily
in his calculations. But let him study the story of the race between
Achilles and the Tortoise, and note to what monstrous results his
belief in elementary arithmetic inevitably conducts him; results
which are more intolerable than a madman’s dreams.
And then, again, there are wider, more universal conceptions than
anything contained in the geometry and arithmetic books. In a little
book of mine with the bad title of “War and the Christian Faith”--the
publisher chose the title--I speak thus of Space and Time:
“Take two insistent and unavoidable examples (of the things
which are unsearchable and indefinable), space and time.
No man who strolls from his arm-chair to the mantelpiece
and watches the hands of the clock move round can deny
the existence of either, since he has walked from point
to point in one and seen the other measured before his
eyes. But as to understanding space and time, what highest
philosophy can attain to such a pitch? The limitless cannot
so much as be imagined in the mind, nor imagined in a
nightmare: but that space which you have traversed of some
eight or ten feet is limitless, and must be so.
“It is a sea without a shore. And time, that which your
two-guinea clock ticks off for you, as you watch the dial:
it had no beginning that you can picture; it can have no
end save with God. You cannot understand; you must believe;
and so on your very hearth-rug the infinites and eternities
are before you and confront you, as truly as the clock face
confronts you.”
And the conclusion of the whole matter is that we live and move in
a world of profound and ineffable mystery; that all things from the
most abstract to the most concrete are involved in this mystery,
and, _therefore_, that Casanova as an exponent of love is a futile
fellow. He was a Voltairean; he approached the question as he would
say without prejudices, as the foolish among us would say, without
any nonsense, or, as the still more foolish among us would say,
in a scientific spirit. And the result is exactly what might be
expected: nothing. Love is defined and expounded in the spirit of
Bitzer defining a horse; and one perceives that science misapplied is
just gibberish, nothing more or less. Otherwise, taking Casanova’s
Memoirs from a lower standpoint, they are in many places vastly
entertaining. He knew all Europe from Petersburg and Constantinople
to London and Madrid; he was familiar with the palace and the gutter;
he was the friend of Kings and philosophers and popes--and also of
the scum of the eighteenth-century earth. One cannot understand the
period as a whole without knowing Casanova.
So I translated and translated day after day; but in a few months’
time the black hole in which I worked began very violently to
disagree with me. I got ill, and it was clear that some change must
be made. The Brothers, as always, were courteous and considerate: why
not do the work at home? I assented very willingly, worked at the
task for five hours every day, and every Saturday took my parcel of
copy to the shop and got my thirty shillings, the week’s wages.
And here I must make a boast, which is not wholly a boast: the second
part of this sentence I shall explain no farther. I finished the
translation of the Memoirs, but the book was not immediately issued.
On the completion of my job the Brothers needed me no more. I imagine
that they wanted a real, expert, technical cataloguer, not a literary
man of sorts; and my having worked for them for some months at my
own home and not in the shop made it easy for them to get rid of me
quietly; rather, to let me fade away, without the least suspicion of
firmness, much less of harshness. And they were always very glad to
see me when I chose to look them up, either on business or merely as
a friendly caller. I remember, for example, that when I had finished
the translation of “Le Moyen de Parvenir” and was “subscribing” the
book with “the trade,” I called at the shop and was received with
a genial and kindly courtesy that I have not forgotten, though it
is a long time since 1890; but then I do not forget. And lest it
should be suspected by some persons that under a veil of benignity
I am “getting at” the Brothers all the time, I hasten to say that
this is not so; to say this in the strongest manner possible. True,
thirty shillings a week was not good pay for decent French-English
translating, even in 1889; but it was the wages that I had asked
myself, having been thoroughly convinced by my experiences of the
six preceding years that I was such a dismal and incapable ass that
if I just managed to escape the Governorship of the Island of Farre
Joyaunce--otherwise the ditch or the workhouse--it was as much as I
could expect. So I asked my thirty shillings a week and hoped in my
heart that it was not too much; and I am not blaming the Brothers in
the least because they did not press more upon me. And, however that
may be, they were always courteous and kindly in all communications
that passed between us; and for that they shall be in my grateful
memory so long as I live. I have said already, I think, how once
during the last year of my employment on the “Evening News,” finding
myself in old haunts of long ago, Wellington Street, Bow Street,
York Street, anguish possessed me as I remembered how I had once
starved and had known something like happiness while I toiled over
the ancient occult books in the Catherine Street garret; anguish
possessed me as I recollected the happy time in misery. And, as
I said to a friend soon afterwards: “In those days I was getting
considerably less money in a whole year than I am now getting in a
month; and yet....”
Again, I say, if our clergy would but mind their business. If instead
of enquiring into the exact cut of bodices, instead of passing
anxious hours as to the pernicious corruptions of the Fox-Trot and
the Bunny Hug, instead of working with all their hearts and souls to
make sure that no one can possibly get a glass of bitter beer after
ten o’clock, instead of unmasking the inferno of the race-course, the
utter levity of much of our railway literature; if, instead of all
this accursed drivel, cant and imbecility, they would but say Mass
and preach the Gospel, and otherwise quite abide in peace! Let them
go to the Book, and there they will find that the most horrible sin
denounced in it is neither gambling, drinking nor wantoning, but the
sin of shaming a man, of bitterly insulting him, of making him mean
in his own eyes, of making him despise his own self as something
unutterably fouled and scorned and bewrayed. What is the text?
Something like: but he that sayeth to his brother, “Thou fool,” shall
be in danger of hell fire.
I am drawing a contrast between 1889 and 1921, and hence I say that
the Brothers always treated me with the common decency due from one
human being to another, though they were rich and I was poor, though
they were men of business and I an idiot in all matters of business,
though they were masters and I was man.