“Then I’ll introduce myself. Miss Pussy Willow, late of the Vaudeville
Theatre!”
She was a good actress. She had always known how to get the most out of
her voice, how to lay the bait for an effect. And she got it all right.
I sat back and looked at her, looked at the puffed, swollen cheeks, the
pouches under the eyes, the unshapely mouth where the powder caked along
the wrinkles, the bulging double chin, and searched there, as one might
search in the face of a long drowned friend for some sign of accustomed
features, searched for that face, so pretty, so delicate, so appealing,
so utterly, so entrancingly soubrette, that had made so many hearts beat
quickly fifteen years ago. Not a trace of it. Not a trace of the woman
who had once been Pussy Willow, of the radiant creature who had swayed
in that great silver dress, before the chorus, singing the song that had
been for six months the rage of London: “Love is the song of a girl and
a boy.” Gone: all of it. That youth, that charm, that divine mingling of
simplicity and wantonness--buried beneath this coated unhealthy mask of
flesh and powder. I did not know what to say. She was looking at me in a
half-dazed, half-resentful manner, ready to hit back if what I might say
should hurt her. In the end I thought it better to say nothing.
“So it’s silence, is it?” she said. “Ah, well, I guessed as much. I know
what you’re thinking--the pity of it, that’s what you’re saying to
yourself. Poor Pussy Willow, you’ll say. Drunk herself down to this. And
then you’ll go back home and think what a damned fine fellow you are.
And to-morrow you’ll tell your friends up at the club: ‘Do you know whom
I saw yesterday?’ you’ll say. ‘Pussy Willow, quite drunk, she was. All
her looks gone. You wouldn’t have recognised her.’ And you’ll all raise
your hands and say: ‘The pity of it!’ and get self-righteous. And then
you’ll go back to your office and swindle some wretched underdog and
talk about leaving the world better than you found it. I know your sort.
You only come here to get warm with self-righteousness. Ah, you--But,
well, I’ll tell you this, mister: you talk about leaving the world
better than you found it, but I’ve probably done a sight more good in it
than you have.”
She paused on a high-pitched note of challenge.
But again I made no answer. I knew that I had only to wait to be told
the story. I caught the waiter’s eye, nodded, and another double was at
her elbow. She gulped it down quickly, as she had the other. She leant
forward, warmed, softened, recollective to continue on the note where
she had paused. “More good than you,--a blooming sight more good than
you. I saved a man once from becoming--well, you know what men become if
they don’t pull the reins up tight in the early thirties. Yes, me--I
saved a man. It makes me laugh now when I think of it.
“I met him here a couple of months ago, just as I met you. Tall,
fine-looking man, he was, white-haired, with a short, close-cut beard.
Well dressed: a successful family business man--that’s what he looked.
Heaven knows what he thought he was doing here. Change, I suppose; an
empty hour to be filled in somehow. Perhaps he used to come here when he
was a boy and felt sentimental suddenly. At any rate, he came in and
stood at the corner of the bar and ordered a brown sherry and looked
very self-conscious and out of place. I nudged the girl next me. ‘The
396th hymn,’ I said. ‘Two minutes and he’ll be in the pulpit.’ And we
laughed and had another, and told a couple of bluish stories. And then,
suddenly, I found myself getting uncomfortable, and I realised that I
was being stared at, stared at in a curious, creepy sort of way, as
though I was being looked through for something that was behind me. It
went on that stare, till I couldn’t stick it any longer. I walked across
to him. ‘Well, old sport,’ I said, ‘this is me. Now, what about it?’
“He stammered a little and looked embarrassed.
“‘Yes--I--I’m sorry. It was rude of me, but ... well, you remind me very
much of someone.’
“‘And who might that be?’ I asked.
“‘An actress. You probably wouldn’t know her. We thought a lot of her
once--Pussy Willow.’
“It knocked me sideways, I can tell you. I thought the world had
forgotten Pussy, or that those who did remember wouldn’t recognise her
now in what she is.
“‘You ought to be a detective then,’ I says, ‘you’ve touched the right
target.’
“It told. I hoped it would. He stammered: ‘What! you--you really are the
Pussy Willow who----’
“And suddenly, for cheek, I cocked back my hat as I used to at the jolly
old Vaudeville, and I plumped my fists down on my hips and swayed
backwards and began to sing the first verse of that old thing of
mine--you remember it, when I wore that great silver dress, ‘Love is
the song of a girl and a boy.’
“He knew then: ‘Pussy Willow!’ he murmured. Then stood looking at me as
they all do, those that remember me, when I tell them who I am; looked
at me till I got all hot and shivery.
“‘Oh, come off it,’ I said, ‘Give me a drink, old pal.’
“He seemed to pull himself together with a start. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said,
‘I forgot. Waiter, send a bottle of champagne over to that table and
some sandwiches.’
“By the time one’s got to my age one’s learnt not to be surprised at
anything. ‘Gee, girls,’ I said, ‘but it’s a party!’ And I followed him
across and began to chatter about old times. I thought that was what he
wanted, to be made to feel young again. But I soon saw that he was not
listening to what I was saying, that he had something of his own to say,
but didn’t know how to say it, so I just chattered on till he was ready.
“It came, all of a heap, like an explosion, right across one of my best
stories.
“‘Pussy, look here--I’m ... well, I’m not rich, but I want to do
something for you. I want to--may I give you an allowance of two pounds
a week?’
“I sat back on my chair flabergasted, absolutely. It was five years
since anyone had made me that sort of offer.
“‘Well,’ I said, ‘the old lady’s a bit weatherbeaten, but what there is
of her is good.’
“He shook his hand; quite a stage gesture, quietly in front of me.
“‘Oh, no, no, no,’ he said. ‘Please don’t misunderstand me. I didn’t
mean anything like that--as a present, simply.’
“I tried him with a dead straight glance.
“‘Now, look here, my lad,’ I said, ‘cough it up. What’s it all about?
People don’t give things for nothing--not in this world, any way.’
“He nodded. ‘That’s why I want to do something for you. You’ve done me
the greatest service that anyone has ever done me. I have a very happy
home and three very happy children, and but for you I don’t think I
should have ever married.’
“That made me laugh. ‘So you heard me sing: “Love me in a cottage by the
sea,” and caught the next train to Margate?’
“‘Oh, no, no! Something--something perhaps you’d rather not be reminded
of. But, do you remember when “The Eastern Princess” was running at the
Clarion, and you flung up your part at a moment’s notice and weren’t
seen again in London for six months?’
“I nodded. One of the landmarks in my life, that show was.
“‘Well,’ he said, ‘I was twenty-seven then. I’d just passed my first
medical exam. in Ireland and had come up to London to open a practice in
Richmond. I wasn’t badly off. I had good prospects. I was a sportsman.
For eight years, ever since I had gone up to Oxford, I had been working
really hard. All my friends told me that my innings was just going to
begin. “You’ll have a wonderful time,” they said; “there’s no place like
London.”’
“‘And then I fell in love with a very young and very unsophisticated
girl, the daughter of a country parson whom I had got to know during a
cricket tour. My friends did their very best to dissuade me. “It’s
perfect madness,” they said, “you’re going to chuck your life away
before you’ve started it. You could have a wonderful time. My dear chap,
don’t be an ass!” And they took me to dancing clubs, and the heat and
colour mounted to my brain. I began to agree with them: marriage was a
fetter, a prison house. One didn’t chuck one’s life away.
“‘And then I heard a rumour about you. They were saying that you had
gone away because--well, your name was coupled with the producer’s
there. What was his name? Ah, yes, Clive Ferguson,--and they said that
you were--well--er--very ill.
“‘It’ll surprise you, but I don’t think anything’s ever shocked me quite
so much. I had heard you sing a great many times. I had made a sort of
ideal of you, as young men will of actresses. You had become the
embodiment to me of the gay, brightly coloured butterfly life of London;
and, when I heard that rumour, your ruin seemed a criticism of the whole
life you represented. That’s where it ends, I told myself. I thought of
you as I had last seen you, singing in that great silver dress of yours.
And then I thought of what life would be to you from then on. And I
don’t know, but beneath its warmth and glitter that life seemed hard and
cruel and revengeful. A month later I was married, and I’ve been very,
very happy. And--well, it’s a bit late, I’m afraid, but if I can I
should like to be able to do something for you now.’”
Pussy Willow stopped speaking, tossed back her head and smiled. “And
that’s the way I got my beer money for life.”
“And was it true?” I asked.
“True--what true?”
“About Clive Ferguson?”
She laughed a loud, harsh, triumphing laugh. “True, that! good God, no.
Clive Ferguson! I wouldn’t look at him. Dirty great oily Jew. I wouldn’t
have looked twice at him, not that way. I expect he started that story
one evening when he was drunk--sheer swank to save his vanity. Oh no, he
wasn’t the cause of that little jaunt of mine. No, I was away for six
months, old sport, with the only man I think I’ve ever really cared for.
A young boxer, he was, engaged to some soppy fool in the chorus. She
brought him round to see us one evening. I had one look at him and made
my mind up. He wasn’t going to waste himself on the likes of her. God!
but I was mad about that boy. That’s really what started things against
me. I rushed him straight away; didn’t give him time to think; and Clive
Ferguson never forgave me. The understudy was an utter dud; clean
smashed the piece, it did, in its second month. He never forgave me.
Wouldn’t take me back again. And the money I spent on that boy; all my
jewellery went and the things I’d put away. And of course I couldn’t
keep him. One never can keep them. They use one as a stepping-stone. I
never really got over it. I shan’t ever forget. But, oh, well! two
pound a week for life I’ve got out of it.
“And if it’s a woman’s job in life to make a man happy, to give him a
good home and children, well, I suppose I’ve done it. I could laugh
sometimes when I think how I have done it. But it doesn’t matter, does
it, as long as the thing gets done.”
What are you going to argue against that? and in literature as in life.
As far as effect is concerned, social and moral effect that is to say,
bad books, bad deeds, are just as valuable as good. Our contempt for the
best seller, is it anything but a form of intellectual snobbery, or
jealousy, which is the same thing, from another side.
Best sellers!
Whenever I see, on railway bookstalls and the shelves of Mudie’s
library, a novel by Florence Barclay I am reminded of one of my first,
certainly my strangest, school friends. He was not the conventional
public-school type. He disliked games. He refused to join the corps. He
had no house or school spirit. He was a fine swimmer, but never trained
for the competitions. Games were compulsory. But I do not recollect to
have ever seen him on the cricket field, and he played football scarcely
once a fortnight. He arranged for every afternoon of the week a music
lesson or a music practice. Authority let him go his own way. He was, in
fact, the sort of person whom one would expect to be bullied, and
thoroughly wretched generally. And yet he was not, I think, unhappy.
Certainly he was never bullied. Even the swashbuckling element, in what
was admittedly a fairly boisterous community, treated him with respect.
This in itself would make him a well-placed candidate for immortality.
But it is his study that I particularly remember. It was the sort of
study that challenged enterprise, and an old boy on seeing it was
reported to have exclaimed: “Good God! what must the house be coming to!
Why hasn’t this place been shipped?”
It was like no study that had ever been. They were small dark rooms, our
studies, monastic quarters that lay under the shadow, on one side, of
the abbey, and on the other, of the lindens and big school. We tried to
make them brighter with light festooned wallpapers, allegorical
pictures, and brackets on which we placed china shepherdesses; to the
height of four feet the walls were panelled, and fashion decreed that
the woodwork should be covered with long strips of brightly coloured
cloth. It was a fashion that had been handed down, like the pictures,
from one generation to another. Thus in my father’s day did they
disfigure honest handiwork, and thus will they disfigure it when I am
fifty. My friend had, however, little use for fashions. He decided that
he would have his woodwork painted in mauve and black. And to match it
he had the walls covered with a deep mauve paper. From the ceiling he
hung before the window a mauve curtain, edged with black. On the window
seat and on the chairs he heaped high a profusion of mauve cushions; the
walls, for he was a great admirer of Napoleon, he devoted exclusively to
a picture gallery for the dictator. It was, in fact, a study that would,
in Chelsea, occasion a mild surprise; at school it made you reel in
outraged dismay across the passage. Yet no one shipped it, no one turned
the portraits of Napoleon to the wall, nor bedecked the ceiling with red
ink; nor did anyone tear from their bracket beneath the gas the
calf-bound set of Mrs Barclay’s novels.
_The Rosary_ was his favourite novel, as it was mine. At each fresh
reading we were moved to the edge, if not over the edge, of tears. It
is, in the author’s words, the story of a beautiful woman in a plain
shell. No man has ever seen below that surface. But one day she sings
“The Rosary” at a concert: the veil is torn aside, and Garth Dalmain,
the famous painter, perceives her spiritual worth. But because she fears
that he will tire of her, she will not marry him, and in a scene of
sustained pathos, during which the name of the Deity is never long
absent from her lips, she tells him that their paths must separate. But
“love never faileth.” Garth is providentially blinded in a shooting
accident, and his lover returns to him as a nurse. Then the drama opens.
She writes him letters, which in the position of nurse and secretary she
reads to him, and as his nurse she makes him gradually appreciate the
intensity of his need for the woman who has refused him. And, when the
last barrier has gone, the nurse reveals herself as the lover by
striking triumphantly the solemn chords of “The hours I spent with thee,
dear heart.”
Prose narrative could, we felt, attain to no higher level of emotion,
and at the end of the day, between lock up and hall, among mauve
cushions we would sit and talk of the secret springs, the hidden
splendours of life, of how we, too, within a plain shell were beautiful.
It passed, of course, that worship that was almost idolatry. It passed
in the September of 1913, when a copy of _Carnival_ was bought at a
railway bookstall at the close of a summer holiday. That autumn we laid
our mantle of sentiment before the tripping feet of Jenny, and when in
early summer a copy of _Poems and Ballads_ found its way into the
school-house studies, it was the departed glory of Proserpine that we
declaimed. We passed from one allegiance to another, as we passed from
one size in collars to another. We were growing up.
But it is no part of my intention here, in this chapter, to attempt to
trace the growth, the development, or the decay, as you may please to
call it, of a literary taste. I am concerned solely with this fact: that
ten years ago I held Florence Barclay to be the greatest living
novelist, that in her work I found those characteristics, those
qualities that to-day I find in the stories of Turgenev; that, as
Turgenev moves me in 1923, so Mrs Barclay moved me in the summer of
1912. And this fact I find to be in the highest degree disquieting.
There are attached to it a very large number of uncomfortable
corollaries.
It depends, of course, on whether one does or does not take a relative
view of things. To those who hold that there is a definite standard of
literary judgment the tastes of immature, and of uneducated persons, can
be of little matter. You tell your form master that you consider
Swinburne a greater poet than Matthew Arnold, and he will smile
indulgently: “One does think like that at your age,” he will say, “but
you’ll find in time that Matthew Arnold is more satisfying stuff.” And I
suppose one does. At any rate, the majority of middle-aged persons of my
acquaintance seem to find him so. But I can never see that this fact is
a proof of Arnold’s superiority, any more than the fact that at forty
one plays golf with greater comfort than Rugby football is a proof of
the superiority of golf. In an estimate of Victorian poetry a critic
considers himself to have proved his case when he has written:
“Swinburne is the supreme poet of youth, but as the years pass his
tempestuous flow of sound means less to us, and we increasingly
appreciate the chastened, harmonious cadences of Matthew Arnold.”
Actually, of course, he has done no more than state that Swinburne’s is
the poetry of youth and Arnold’s of middle age. That each poet has
certain qualities and certain limitations, and in his acceptance of
Arnold’s superiority he has assumed that the tastes of a man of fifty
are more significant, less impermanent, more surely built than those of
a man of twenty-five.
It is an assumption before whose authority most young writers,
especially writers of fiction, have been in their time arraigned. “These
stories,” the reviewer says, “are well enough written, the characters
competently drawn, the situations skilfully prepared. But the book is
concerned entirely with the problems of adolescence, problems, that is
to say, that will in a few years’ time have ceased to concern the
author. Its quality, therefore, is strictly temporal.” The author has
been condemned, not on grounds of literary craftsmanship, not because
he has failed to do well the thing he set out to do, but because he has
employed unprofitable material, because the perplexities and enthusiasms
of adolescence that formed the theme of his book are transient and must
yield in time to the perplexities and enthusiasms of manhood. It is
doubtless inevitable that literary criticism should accept the quality
of permanence as its deciding standard, should consider the period of
duration rather than the intensity of the fleeting mood; but on its own
grounds even would not criticism do well to seek that quality in the
skill and sincerity of the treatment, rather than in the matter of the
material treated?
For are the tastes of a man of fifty any more permanent than those of a
man of twenty-five? Can we not still say to him: “You will feel
differently when you are older. You will look back to the person that
you now are as to a stranger: to a man with different affections,
different ambitions, and a different way of living. These present
enthusiasms of yours will in their turn pass, we can assure you. They
will pass into the tepid preferences of old age, and you will sit in the
smoking-room of your club, the chief pleasure of your life an immunity
from gout, the chief problem of it the avoidance of a draught.” Can we,
with any greater justice, condemn the problems of twenty before the
tribunal of forty-five than we can those of fifty before those of
eighty? The brain is not useless now because it will one day soften;
teeth not inefficacious because they will eventually decay. The young
man will hardly listen to the impotent antiquity who assures him that
the charm of woman is a snare and an illusion. “When you have reached my
age it will no longer move you.” In a world of fugitive sensation there
is no fixed point at which anyone can say, “thus far and no farther.” We
have a right to our own age; to the problems, the turmoil, the
compensating enthusiasms of our age, and we have an equal right to the
literature best suited for their nourishment and inspiration.
In the same way a particular period has a right to the literature best
suited to its needs. Books follow a wave of recurrent popularity and
depreciation. The masterpiece of 1820 is the Aunt Sally of 1850, but by
1880 it has been restored to favour. “The masterpiece is the mood, and
all moods pass save Shakespeare and the Bible.” This from George Moore.
But of Shakespeare, as of others. He had little, or nothing, to say to
the eighteenth century: to that unrivalled period of elegance and
polish. They re-wrote “King Lear”: they made it end happily with
Cordelia in Edgar’s arms. Shakespeare’s tragedy was described by Mr Tate
in the dedicatory epistle to his own version “as a heap of jewels,
unstrung and unpolished, yet so dazzling in their disorder that I soon
perceived that I had seized a treasure.” We are inclined to smile at
such ridiculous folly. “So that is all they knew,” we say. But I think
Mr Tate did wisely to rewrite “King Lear” in the idiom of his own time.
The eighteenth century which produced Swift, and Addison, and Pope, was
not less cultured than the century that produced Shakespeare, and Donne,
and Milton, and compares very favourably with ours that has
produced--but I will not be personal. It is enough to say that the
eighteenth century had a perfect right to say: “This is what we like.”
It could justify by its creations its exclusiveness. And, at the time,
it was so very certain it was right--as certain as we are to-day that
Clifford Bax is abundantly justified in the slaughter of Mr Gay’s
dialogue and verses that he has made in his new version of “Polly.”
With what emotions, I wonder, must the wraith of John Gay have witnessed
at the Kingsway Theatre the triumph of his opera. He can have hardly
failed to find, after an interval of two hundred years, the enraptured
reception of his work intensely gratifying. But he can equally have
hardly failed to wonder what in that interval can have happened to his
play. “This,” we can imagine him to have said, “is all of it, of course,
perfectly delightful.” But it was for a very different thing that London
was divided into two camps, and the Duchess of Queensberry was forbidden
the Court. I wrote a political and social satire. I transported to the
West Indies the most notable of my creations in “The Beggar’s Opera.”
Mrs Trapes I placed in charge of an establishment which courtesy
permitted me to describe as an “academy for young gentlewomen in song
and dance.” Of Macheath I made a pirate chief, disguised with a
blackened face, and wedded, to his no great comfort, to Jenny Diver. In
the scandalous person of Mr Ducat, the colonel of the militia, I
satirised British colonial administration. Polly Peachum, who had come
to the island in search of her rascal husband, alone, I permitted to be
an agreeable and virtuous creature. And by making her marry, after the
well-merited execution of Macheath, the Indian Prince Cawwawkee, I
established the superiority of the “noble savage” over the weak,
cowardly, and self-indulgent white man. That was my opera. But of all
this I find remarkably little in the version that Mr Clifford Bax has so
elegantly adapted and Mr Nigel Playfair so successfully produced.
“The social and political satire has been removed, No comparison is
drawn between the virtues of the black man and the white. Macheath is
never even threatened with the fate that I had prepared for him, but is
restored in health and charm and vigour to the eager embraces of his
faithful Polly. A good two-thirds of the play is not mine at all, and
though I am highly sensitive to the charms of its many bewitching
lyrics, I can claim but a small share in their authorship. It is all, as
I have previously remarked, perfectly delightful; but what has happened
to my play?”
We like to think that Mr Gay must have, by now, realised how extremely
bad his own edition was. We venture, whatever biographers may state, to
discern in his work the presence of a genial unpretentious personality.
By now, we say, he should have acquired a sufficient sense of detachment
from the jealousies and rivalries and feuds of the early eighteenth
century to realise that he himself had made a sad mess of it, that
Clifford Bax is perfectly right, and that it would have been impossible
for Macheath to die, or the divine Polly to be wedded to a black.
Doubtless they said much the same of Mr Tate two hundred years ago. To
the dandy of 1720 it seemed as impossible that Lear should die as is
to-day the execution of Macheath. And, as Clifford Bax has found in
Polly’s misfortunes the single string on which might be threaded the
characters and incidents that would have been otherwise irrelevant, so
Mr Tate discovered in the love of Edgar for Cordelia the missing unity
of Lear. Mr Gay’s Polly was as impossible to-day as Mr Shakespeare’s
Lear was in 1720. In 2020 who knows but Mr Tate’s version will be upon
the boards of the Lyric, Hammersmith, and His Majesty’s will be staging
an unexpurgated Gay. Each age takes the food it needs. Like wine in
bottles, some books deteriorate and others mature.
And, indeed, what is this posterity that we should so appeal to it? Are
we not ourselves fallible and imperfect mortals, posterity to the
Victorians? I can see Browning walking with Tennyson in the Elysian
Fields. They discuss the literary journalism of their day. “It was bad,”
Browning mumbles into his beard,--“very bad indeed. There was a silly
fellow called John Stuart Mill--what was it he said about that first
book of mine? ‘Most self-conscious thing he’d ever read.’ But I didn’t
worry. I looked ahead. I was content to let posterity decide; and I have
my reward. I read last week such a charming thing about me by, let me
see now, a very vigorous young person I thought--ah, yes, Miss Rebecca
West....”
The other day I listened for upwards of a quarter of an hour to the
complaint of a young poet whose works had been mishandled grievously in
the _London Mercury_. Highly did he heap abuse on the heads of Mr J. C.
Squire and Mr Edward Shanks; nor was he less generous to critics
unconnected with that periodical: to Middleton Murry, and T. S. Eliot,
and Robert Lynd; one by one they were presented to the lash of ridicule.
Finally the injured poet turned a loving, a valedictory eye towards the
great men of the past--Matthew Arnold, Ruskin, Emerson, Carlyle.
“There,” he said, “were critics for you.” And, after a pause: “Ah, well,
in fifty years’ time....” And he shrugged his shoulders as one who can
afford to ignore such triflings in the face of time.
I said nothing. I am a placid person; I dislike quarrels. This, though,
is what, if I were fashioned differently, I might have said: “My good,
my very good friend,” I would have said, “you despise your own
generation. You are content to appeal to posterity. You place your faith
in the traditions that have been handed down to you by great writers in
the past. Very good, but let me remind you of this--that Matthew Arnold
too despised his generation and made his appeal to posterity. It was his
hope that in 1923 he would receive the commendation of Robert Lynd, of
J. C. Squire, and of Edward Shanks. What was good enough for Matthew
Arnold should be good enough for you. The judgments of posterity are
likely to be no more profound than those of 1923. For one day this
posterity that you so worship will be to-day, and in this club and in
that armchair will be sitting a disgruntled poet telling an indifferent
friend how much better things were done in 1923. We are no better and
no worse than other generations. We are a little different, that is all.
And, because we are a little different, what you, my friend, are writing
now may be more readily understood in 1950 than it is to-day. But, for
that reason, your work will be of no higher quality than that of Walter
de la Mare, whose verses give us such pleasure now. If you are popular
in 1950 you will be little read in 1980. For that is the way things
happen, and your talk about Matthew Arnold is a mixture of vanity and of
snobbishness; let me hear no more of it.”
I should like to believe that there is to be found somewhere a standard
of literary criticism, but the power to appreciate beauty is a quality
relative to ourselves: and there are times when it seems to me to be as
vain to search for a standard of beauty in literature as it would be to
search for one in woman. We respond to a certain type of beauty. And we
say of other types: “I am sure, my dear fellow, that she is perfectly
delightful. I am not in the least surprised that you are desperately
enraptured. But, for myself, as I said, she leaves me cold.” We make no
attempt to explain or adjudge a beauty in woman that we cannot
understand. Why, then, should we speak so dogmatically of a beauty in
literature that does not touch us; why should we deny the existence of a
beauty to which we are insensible?
There was a painter once whose personality it would be discreet to hide
under the pseudonym of Eric Walker. He had never seen the country. He
did not know that trees existed outside the carefully tended borders of
Burnden Park. The only other stretch of grass he had ever seen was from
the terraces of a football ground. For him the sky had been always dim
with smoke, cut by the outline of huge chimney stacks. The only beauty
he could understand was the clean, hard efficiency of a machine. With
eager eyes he had seen stones lifted into the air by iron arms; he had
watched the glow of furnaces flickering on polished steel. For hours on
end he had stood beneath the great factory at North Town, while the
sunlight cut the wreathing smoke into hard, sharp angles. The noise and
glare of machinery enchanted him, and when a discerning teacher had
discovered that he could draw, it was only natural that he should try to
interpret in terms of line and colour those particular sights and sounds
that alone had for him an æsthetic value.
Success came to him easily and quickly. He was taken up by the right
people, his pictures were discussed in the right circles, and when his
exhibition came on the right critics said the right things in the right
papers. Eric Walker suddenly found himself rich; he came up to London,
was made much of, sold his pictures easily. For six months he was the
adored child of Mayfair.
After a while, however, his welcome grew less warm. At the time of his
reception Gerald Garstin wrote: “Here is a young man who has
successfully interpreted the hard, calculating commercialism of the
North. In a fury of indignation he has revealed the soullessness of
modern conditions. All his life he has been surrounded by squalor and
ugliness. What may he not do when he has seen more of life and has
learnt to appreciate beauty in its fullest sense?” And Mayfair had
endorsed this opinion. “Such a wonderful young man,” they would say to
one another. “And to think that he spent all those years in that
terrible place, nothing but smoke and chimneys. What a revelation it
must be to him to come to London, and how beautifully he will be able to
express it.” And the patrons of modern art waited for Eric’s delight to
break forth in a riot of form and colour.
No such thing, however, happened. At the yearly exhibition of the
Chelsea Group he was represented by a large picture of a train entering
a tube station as it would be seen through the eyes of the driver. At
the Florence Galleries he exhibited a picture called “Charing Cross
Road,” in which a small boy stood watching the glowing furnaces of
Messrs. Crosse and Blackwell, and to the New Movement Society he
contributed “Liftman at Piccadilly Circus.” The announcement that he was
at work on “Surrey and Middlesex at the Oval” gave promise of better
things, but his followers were again disappointed. In a far corner of
the canvas was a patch of green and one white figure, the remainder was
occupied by the telegraph and the gasometers. It was generally agreed
that Eric Walker had not fulfilled his promise.
“Interesting though this work may be,” wrote Gerald Garstin, “it cannot
by any stretch of the imagination be called beautiful, and without
beauty where is art?” Once again Mayfair echoed the pronouncement of its
trusted critic. “It’s not beautiful all that harping on machinery and
ugliness. I am sure he can’t have a nice mind. Why doesn’t he look on
the pleasant side of things?”
To Eric Walker this change of front came abruptly and incomprehensibly.
“Beauty,” he said. “Beauty, what do they mean? Aren’t my pictures
beautiful?” To him there was nothing in the world lovelier than the
angles that sunshine cut in smoke, than the glow of a furnace on damp
flesh, than the smooth, hard rhythm of a piston. “Beauty,” he said,
“that’s the one thing I have really striven for, to get the full value
of these things I have enjoyed, to interpret the magic of these sounds
and colours, to make others realise the perfect form, poise, balance of
a machine. What do they mean?”
In the end he took his troubles to Mrs Abbot, a kindly, sentimental
woman, who had always rather mothered the young artist. To her he poured
out all his troubles, telling her how they misinterpreted his work,
calling it ugly.
“But, my dear boy, it is ugly!”
“Ugly! Oh, but, Mrs Abbot. Why, come here. Look out there. Do you see
the great chimney-stack of the Gas Works? Do you see how the red glare
shines out against the black roofs; what could be lovelier?”
And he leapt up, seizing her hand, dragging her to the window. Gradually
Mrs Abbot pacified him.
“My dear boy,” she said, “I dare say you may like that sort of thing,
but you’ll find that it’s not what we think nice, and it’s what other
people think nice that matters. Those chimneys of yours are all very
well, and I know you’re fond of them, but the things we call beautiful
are not a bit like that.”
“No?”
“No, of course not,” she went on, “the things we like--well, trees,
fields, love--oh, you know, the joy, the beauty of life. Those are the
things you ought to be painting.”
Eric Walker gazed out fondly at the red glare of the factory as it shone
glimmering on the surrounding roofs, then he turned sadly to the
water-colours that hung on the walls, soft and delicate, roses and
arbours, with a suggestion of Love, fleeting and perilously dear. For
him there was no beauty there--only cowardice, weakness and evasion.
That evening Mrs Abbot had a long and serious talk with her husband
about her young protégé.
“Something must be done, Harry,” she said. “He’s such a dear boy, and
he’s absolutely spoiling his chances. Now I tell you what we must do. We
must take him right away from all this to some primitive, natural spot.
When once he gets free from sordid influences he’ll respond to beauty
like a child.”
Mr Abbot had been married twenty years, and had learnt that his personal
comfort was only to be purchased by a complete indulgence of his wife’s
fancies.
“All right, my dear,” he said, “we’ll see what can be done.”
And so arrangements were made. An invalid friend owned a small house on
an island in the Pacific, which he was willing to let for a summer
holiday. Mrs Abbot leapt at the opportunity, and with Eric Walker
submitting as to an intractable decree of Fate, within five weeks he and
Mr and Mrs Abbot were leaning over the taffrail of the ship watching the
churned foam stretch out in a white line behind them.
The island was certainly very charming. The air was soft and scented,
the deep blue of the sky merged almost imperceptibly into the deeper
blue of the sea. The garden was full of rich flowers and luxuriant
growth; the sunshine was full and heavy; it was the kind of island which
one never expects to see, but of which one dreams fondly, hopelessly.
“Now,” said Mrs Abbot, “you’ll be able to paint wonderful pictures,
won’t you, Eric?”
“I hope so,” he said, gazing round with puzzled eyes at this world that,
for all its riot of colour, lacked so strangely the sights and sounds to
which he was accustomed.
For four days he wandered round with his sketchbook and water-colours.
First of all he tried to draw the little house that was overgrown with
fruit and flowers, but the lines blurred into one another, and he could
not find the clear-cut form that he understood. Then he tried to paint
the sunlight as it flickered on the waves, but its movement was
irregular and spasmodic, unsuited to his method, and he failed equally
when he tried to interpret the sway of the branches and the lazy droop
of the oranges. He was puzzled, unhappy, unable to understand why things
so vague and indefinite should be called beautiful. Mrs Abbot’s large,
kindly voice quite failed to comfort him.
“Wait for your inspiration to come,” she would say. “Just walk about and
absorb all that’s round you, and you’ll be painting before you know
where you are.”
And next day it seemed as though her prophecy had been fulfilled. Eric
had gone out directly after breakfast with his easel, paints, and
canvas. They had seen nothing of him the whole morning; he had not come
back to lunch, and by tea-time there were still no signs of him.
“I knew it,” said Mrs Abbot, “I knew it. We only had to take him away
and put him in fresh surroundings; he was bound to respond to beauty, he
only needed the sunshine.”
As soon as she had finished her tea she set out to look for him,
garrulous with excitement.
“Now what do you think it will have been that moved him? I wonder if it
was the bay. No, he was standing on the top of the hill and he looked
down and saw the village lying there in the sunlight! You take my word
for it, we shall find him on the hill!”
But they did not find him on the hill, nor was he painting the bay nor
the orange grove, and they sought him in vain on the skirts of their
little orchard. At last they began to feel a little nervous and began to
ask one another fretfully whether any harm could have come to him. They
made inquiries of the natives, but learnt nothing, and it was not till
almost dinnertime that a fisherman told them where he was.
“The young artist? Yes, sir. I saw him early this morning go into that
little broken hut on the edge of the shingle, and though I have been
working here all day I haven’t seen him come out. He’s probably there
still.”
Mr and Mrs Abbot looked at each other askance. What could Eric want in
that small dilapidated house that was slowly falling to pieces over the
head of an old shrivelled woman and her daughter? At the thought of the
daughter Mrs Abbot began to blush. What if the south wind and the sudden
beauty had moved Eric to express himself in terms more personal than
those of paint? Artists were notoriously immoral, and the islanders, she
had always heard, unfortunately weak.
She hurried on, her heart beating quickly, excited and perturbed.
In a few moments, however, all her fears for the innocence of the gentle
islander were banished. For there, at the back of the small hut, an old
woman, black and shrivelled, was cooking her dinner over an iron stove.
Her neck and arms were bare, and the red glow of the fire shone dimly on
the damp flesh, the dying sunlight stealing in one long, broad band
through a chink in the woodwork fell across her throat, cutting the
curves of her hanging breasts into hard, sharp angles, and a few yards
away Eric Walker was working at his canvas in a fine frenzy of
inspiration.