To the people who do not write it must seem odd that men and women
should be willing to sacrifice their lives in the endeavour to
find new arrangements and combinations of words with which to
express old thoughts and older emotions, yet that is not an unfair
statement of the task of the literary artist. Words--symbols that
represent the noises that human beings make with their tongues and
lips and teeth--lie within our grasp like the fragments of a
jig-saw puzzle, and we fit them into faulty pictures until our hands
grow weary and our eyes can no longer pretend to see the truth. In
order to illustrate an infinitesimal fraction of our lives by
means of this preposterous game we are willing to sacrifice all
the rest. While ordinary efficient men and women are enjoying the
promise of the morning, the fulfilment of the afternoon, the
tranquillity of evening, we are still trying to discover a fitting
epithet for the dew of dawn. For us Spring paves the woods with
beautiful words rather than flowers, and when we look into the
eyes of our mistress we see nothing but adjectives. Love is an
occasion for songs; Death but the overburdened father of all our
saddest phrases. We are of those who are born crying into the
world because they cannot speak, and we end, like Stevenson, by
looking forward to our death because we have written a good
epitaph. Sometimes in the course of our frequent descents from
heaven to the waste-paper basket we feel that we lose too much to
accomplish so little. Does a handful of love-songs really outweigh
the smile of a pretty girl, or a hardly-written romance compensate
the author for months of lost adventure? We have only one life to
live, and we spend the greater part of it writing the history of
dead hours. Our lives lack balance because we find it hard to
discover a mean between the triolet we wrote last I night and the
big book we are going to start tomorrow, and also because living
only with our heads we tend to become top-heavy. We justify our
present discomfort with the promise of a bright future of flowers
and sunshine and gladdest life, though we know that in the garden
of art there are many chrysalides and few butterflies. Few of us
are fortunate enough to accomplish anything that was in the least
worth doing, so we fall back on the arid philosophy that it is
effort alone that counts.
Luckily--or suicide would be the rule rather than the exception
for artists--the long process of disillusionment is broken by
hours when even the most self-critical feel nobly and indubitably
great; and this is the only reward that most artists ever have for
their labours, if we set a higher price on art than money. On the
whole, I am inclined to think that the artist is fully rewarded,
for the common man can have no conception of the Joy that is to be
found in belonging, though but momentarily and illusively, to the
aristocracy of genius. To find the just word for all our emotions,
to realise that our most trivial thought is illimitably creative,
to feel that it is our lot to keep life's gladdest promises, to
see the great souls of men and women, steadfast in existence as
stars in a windless pool--these, indeed, are no ordinary
pleasures. Moreover, these hours of our illusory greatness endow
us in their passing with a melancholy that is not tainted with
bitteress. We have nothing to regret; we are in truth the richer
for our rare adventure. We have been permitted to explore the
ultimate possibilities of our nature, and if we might not keep
this newly-discovered territory, at least we did not return from
our travels with empty hands. Something of the glamour lingers,
something perhaps of the wisdom, and it is with a heightened
passion, a fiercer enthusiasm, that we set ourselves once more to
our life-long task of chalking pink salmon and pinker sunsets on
the pavements of the world.
I once met an Englishman in the forest that starts outside Brussels
and stretches for a long day's journey across the hills. We found a
little café under the trees, and sat in the sun talking about modern
English literature all the afternoon. In this way we discovered that
we had a common standpoint from which we judged works of art, though
our judgments differed pleasantly and provided us with materials
for agreeable discussion. By the time we had divided three bottles of
Gueze Lambic, the noble beer of Belgium, we had already sketched out a
scheme for the ideal literary newspaper. In other words, we had
achieved friendship.
When the afternoon grew suddenly cold, the Englishman led me off to
tea at his house, which was half-way up the hill out of Woluwe. It
was one of those modern country cottages that Belgian architects
steal openly and without shame from their English confreres. We were
met at the garden gate by his daughter, a dark-haired girl of
fifteen or sixteen, so unreasonably beautiful that she made a
disillusioned scribbler feel like a sad line out of one of the
saddest poems of Francis Thompson. In my mind I christened her
Monica, because I did not like her real name. The house, with its
old furniture, its library, where the choice of books was clearly
dictated by individual prejudices and affections, and its
unambitious parade of domestic happiness, heightened my melancholy.
While tea was being prepared Monica showed me the garden. Only
a few daffodils and crocuses were in bloom, but she led me to the
rose garden, and told me that in the summer she could pick a great
basket of roses every day. I pictured Monica to myself, gathering
her roses on a breathless summer afternoon, and returned to the
house feeling like a battened version of the Reverend Laurence
Sterne. I knew that I had gathered all my roses, and I thought
regretfully of the chill loneliness of the world that lay beyond the
limits of this paradise.
This mood lingered with me during tea, and it was not till that
meal was over that the miracle happened. I do not know whether it
was the Englishman or his wife that wrought the magic: or perhaps
it was Monica, nibbling "speculations" with her sharp white teeth;
but at all events I was led with delicate diplomacy to talk about
myself, and I presently realised that I was performing the
grateful labour really well. My words were warmed into life by an
eloquence that is not ordinarily mine, my adjectives were neither
commonplace nor far-fetched, my adverbs fell into their sockets
with a sob of joy. I spoke of myself with a noble sympathy, a
compassion so intense that it seemed divinely altruistic. And
gradually, as the spirit of creation woke in my blood, I revealed,
trembling between a natural sensitiveness and a generous
abandonment of restraint, the inner life of a man of genius.
I passed lightly by his misunderstood childhood to concentrate my
sympathies on the literary struggles of his youth. I spoke of the
ignoble environment, the material hardships, the masterpieces written
at night to be condemned in the morning, the songs of his heart that
were too great for his immature voice to sing; and all the while I
bade them watch the fire of his faith burning with a constant and
quenchless flame. I traced the development of his powers, and
instanced some of his poems, my poems, which I recited so well that
they sounded to me, and I swear to them also, like staves from an
angelic hymn-book. I asked their compassion for the man who, having
such things in his heart, was compelled to waste his hours in sordid
journalistic labours.
So by degrees I brought them to the present time, when, fatigued by
a world that would not acknowledge the truth of his message,
the man of genius was preparing to retire from life, in order to
devote himself to the composition of five or six masterpieces. I
described these masterpieces to them in outline, with a suggestive
detail dashed in here and there to show how they would be finished.
Nothing is easier than to describe unwritten literary masterpieces
in outline; but by that time I had thoroughly convinced my audience
and myself, and we looked upon these things as completed books. The
atmosphere was charged with the spirit of high endeavour, of
wonderful accomplishment. I heard the Englishman breathing deeply,
and through the dusk I was aware of the eyes of Monica, the wide,
vague eyes of a young girl in which youth can find exactly what it
pleases.
It is a good thing to be great once or twice in our lives, and that
night I was wise enough to depart before the inevitable anti-climax.
At the gate the Englishman pressed me warmly by the hand and begged
me to honour his house with my presence again. His wife echoed the
wish, and Monica looked at me with those vacant eyes, that but a few
years ago I would have charged with the wine of my song. As I stood
in the tram on my way back to Brussels I felt like a man recovering
from a terrible debauch, and I knew that the brief hour of my pride
was over, to return, perhaps, no more. Work was impossible to a man
who had expressed considerably more than he had to express, so I went
into a café where there was a string band to play sentimental music
over the corpse of my genius. Chance took me to a table presided over
by a waiter I singularly detested, and the last embers of my
greatness enabled me to order my drink in a voice so passionate that
he looked at me aghast and fled. By the time he returned with my hock
the tale was finished, and I tried to buy his toleration with an
enormous _pourboire_.
No; I will return to that house on the hill above Woluwe no more, not
even to see Monica standing on tiptoe to pick her roses. For I have
left a giant's robe hanging on a peg in the hall, and I would not
have those amiable people see how utterly incapable I am of filling
it under normal conditions. I feel, besides, a kind of sentimental
tenderness for this illusion fated to have so short a life. I am no
Herod to slaughter babies, and it pleases me to think that it lingers
yet in that delightful house with the books and the old furniture and
Monica, even though I myself shall probably never see it again, even
though the Englishman watches the publishers' announcements for the
masterpieces that will never appear.