I said that Florence Barclay was an equivalent for Turgenev. But I could
wish that, eleven years ago, I had elected to read some popular writer
in whom I could trace a closer parallel, a similarity of plot as well as
atmosphere. For it would not be difficult to find in the _Family Herald_
stories that would in synopsis seem to resemble very closely those of
Turgenev. The plot of _On the Eve_ or _A House of Gentlefolk_ might well
have appealed to the writer of slushy sentimental romances. In the type
of story that Turgenev wrote, the story of memory and regret, the
boundary between excellence and rubbish is very narrow, and only a lax
sentimentalist or a man of genius would attempt to tell it. Talent would
be frightened by the simple triangle of _Spring Floods_ and of _Smoke_.
It would seem ordinary, as would that of _Rudin_ and _The House of
Gentlefolk_. A man’s wife is unfaithful. He leaves her, and in time,
believing her to be dead, falls in love with a young girl and proposes
marriage. But the wife returns and his happiness is shattered. “What!”
says the professional novelist, “that old theme; the person who returns
from the grave at the eleventh hour and upsets everything. But that has
been done a hundred times. It is impossibly _vieux jeu_. In farce, in
light opera, perhaps, but in serious drama....” The writer of talent
must take unusual and difficult situations. He must find originality in
the employment of new material. The broad field has been ploughed too
many times, has yielded too many harvests. It must lie fallow for a
while.
I remember talking once with W. L. George of the eternal appeal of a
good story, and of how the first business of the novelist was to tell a
story. “Possibly,” he said, “but I will tell you a true story, a
universal story, and you will not dare to write it. It is the story of
Edwin and Angelina. Edwin is a clerk in the office of Angelina’s father.
He is sent up to the house with messages for his employer, and passes
Angelina in the hall. Their eyes meet and he knows that he is in love. A
few days later there is a football match between the office team and
that of a neighbouring factory. Edwin wins the match with a brilliant
last-minute goal, but in doing so he breaks his arm. Angelina is
watching the match. Edwin becomes her hero. Soon afterwards they again
meet in the hall. She asks him about his arm. They talk together, and
discover in a short while that they are in love. Of course, Angelina’s
father refuses to countenance the match. He has his own plans for his
daughter. The lovers are forbidden to meet. Angelina falls sick. They
send her to the South of France; but she grows worse. She is listless
and despondent. The doctor says that unless she is given an interest in
life she will die. All that money can provide is showered on her. But
she becomes thinner and paler every day. At last the mother intervenes,
‘She must see Edwin.’ The father tardily assents. There is a reunion of
the lovers, and the miracle happens. The book ends with marriage bells.
It is a true story,” he concluded, “but you wouldn’t dare to write it.”
I agreed. “Only two people could write it,” I said. “Turgenev, or a
merchant of popular fiction.”
Turgenev is always obvious. He employs none of the devices of surprise
and of suspended interest on which the writer of talent depends for his
effects. The waters of Turgenev’s narrative are so smooth, so clear, and
bring the river bed so close to us that we hardly realise how deep they
are. It is not till we see the blunders that others make with the
Turgenev technique that we realise to what an extent he is supreme. And
it is such a simple technique. The passage of youth; the waning power of
love; the recompenses of middle age; memory and regret, and a serene
twilight that harmonises and consoles. It is of these things that
Turgenev speaks--simple things, and he speaks of them simply, through a
technique that is miraculously adequate and sure. A man in the middle
years finds under two layers of cotton a little garnet cross; three men
sitting round a table talk of love; a young man, betrothed and happy,
returns at night to his hotel to recapture, in a room filled with the
overpowering scent of heliotrope, the buried anguish of an earlier love.
A man sits in a garden, and remembers. It looks so easy; and yet, in
mediocre work, how the machinery creaks. How artificial become the
excuses for recollection. A violin playing in a certain restaurant,
after many years, a tune to which the hero danced when young. A
narrative that closes where it began, in the same place, on the same
note, with the same sentence. What is pattern in Turgenev becomes in
lesser writers a series of devices.
And yet it is thus that life is always getting its effects; sometimes
with our co-operation. We return after certain months to the ball-room
where we first encountered love, to the restaurant where we first spoke
of love, to the woods that were the shelter and the screen of our first
love-making. But at such moments the scene has been set too carefully;
the climax is manufactured. We have known beforehand the nature of the
emotion we are to experience; we force it to the required pitch of
intensity. And that is bad technique. Only if we stand aside and let
life tell our story for us, shall we happen on the inevitable, the
unpremeditated moment.
In the early spring of 1921 I wrote a sketch of an ex-officer; it was an
attempt to interpret the spirit of post-war disillusionment, and I
selected as its subject a clerk in a large advertising agency and
christened him Evan Miller.
He occupied in Johnson’s renowned establishment an obscure position. He
sat in a small room with two male typists at the top of three flights of
stairs. He sorted out press cuttings, despatched the right copy to the
right papers, entered up the proofs in a large folio, checked the
returned slips, supplied a head clerk with lists giving the space rates
and percentages allowed to agents. It was routine work that required an
orderly mind; that quality Miller possessed, and his employers
estimated its value at three pounds five shillings a week. An unexciting
job for a man who three years earlier had been in command of a company
of Fusiliers.
But it was the best he had been able to find, and his friends had
assured him that he had been remarkably lucky to get it. As soon as the
Armistice was signed he had commenced a series of desperate assaults on
the War Office; he had claimed in turn to be a pivotal man, an
educational authority, a university student. He had even considered an
appeal on sympathetic grounds. Finally, he was allowed to transfer his
commission from the regular army to the reserve of officers, and in
April he was able to walk a free man down Savile Row and carefully
finger the tailor’s samples of tweed and serge. Great days, undoubtedly.
He had a good balance at Cox’s; a large gratuity was due to him. For two
months he enjoyed himself. Then he began to look for a job. He had hoped
vaguely for some sort of Government post with a good salary and not a
great deal of work. But he soon discovered that Whitehall was more than
full, and that civil service jobs abroad were going to the men from the
Universities. He felt lost in a world that moved so fast and with such
complete detachment from his interests.
At last, through the influence of a fellow-officer, he had got this
advertising job. “And very lucky too,” he had been told.
Miller did not appreciate his fortune. At first he had managed to work
himself into a mood of self-complacence; every evening, as he walked
home from the office, he had reminded himself that a year ago he had
been standing in a narrow trench waiting for the stand to, with the
prospect of a cold night, to be spent either in patrols or in working
parties; whereas now he was going back to a good dinner, a warm fire,
and, afterwards, a soft bed--a very different proposition. And, as he
sat reading the paper, he remembered pleasantly the cold wind that swept
over the lonely hills. He always thought of France as he walked home. “A
year ago,” he would say to himself, and try to reconstruct the scene;
where had he been, what had he been doing, what had he thought; only
twelve months ago he had belonged to a different life.
And then, when November had passed, it was “two years ago” that he found
himself saying, for, after the Armistice, there had not seemed anything
particular to remember. “Two years ago”--and he saw himself once again
in the mud and cold of Bullecourt during those dark weeks over which had
hung the menace of the great advance; strangely quiet days. There had
been rain in January, cruel driving rain; the main trench had been three
feet deep in mud and men had stuck in it for hours. But February had
been fine and warm with a suggestion of spring. They had been out of the
line just then, and he had gone for long rides to Peronne and Baupaume
in the faint mild sunshine. He had been very happy, and the memory of
that happiness caused him an insidious disquiet. As he walked back from
the office he found himself thinking less of the mud and cold, the
fatigue and danger, than of the warm comfort of the mess; the
friendliness of those long evenings, when they sat round the stove and
had opened bottle after bottle of port. In particular, he remembered
that last night at Ervillers, when they had collected a huge beam from a
neighbouring ruin and had piled up an enormous fire; he remembered how
they had undressed before it, and how the light had flickered on past
midnight, and that when he had woken at three o’clock, it had still
glowed dimly. They had had good times, and he could not help contrasting
them with this present uneventful routine of home and office. Nothing
unexpected ever happened. An evening of desultory conversation. Bed.
Next morning the hurried breakfast; the scramble for shoes and hat and
coat; the uncomfortable journey in the tube, with the same faces
opposite him, the same heavy, taciturn, discontented faces; and the
squash in the lift; the bad-tempered, ill-mannered crowd; and,
afterwards, from 9.30 till 5.30 in that small room at the top of the
third flight of stairs with two male typists, with neither of whom he
had anything in common and who were both secretly a little glad to see
an ex-officer reduced to the same position as themselves, he sat
arranging proofs, checking the copy, filing lists.
Occasionally he had to answer an inquiry on the telephone, and this was
the one excitement of his day. The telephone had always possessed a
fascination for him, and whenever he heard the bell ring in the next
room he would put down his pen and wait, listening for the sound of a
chair pushed back, an opened door, and the short, “Mr Miller, you’re
wanted on the ’phone.” It was always the same thing--an inquiry about
space rate, or the date of a special issue, but he never failed to
experience a tremor of excitement as he ran into the next room and took
up the receiver.
Nothing unexpected ever happened; there was nothing to look forward to;
each day was exactly like the one that had gone before; he did not,
indeed, see how anything could ever happen now. He would remain in that
office for the rest of his life. In the end he might become manager of a
department. At the age of forty he might have a large enough salary to
be able to think of marriage. Forty! How often had they agreed in the
mess that love was the privilege of the young. As far as he could see,
everyone else was in the same boat. He used to go round occasionally to
the long bar at the Troc: a melancholy sight. In 1917 it had been full
of young officers, eager, light-hearted, home on leave with pay in their
pockets and in their hearts a reckless determination to make the most of
what little time was left them. The same fellows were there now, young
men in mufti, leaning across the bar sipping their cocktails, raising
their glasses to the light, exchanging their “cheeriohs.” But the
lightheartedness had left them; their faces were set in lines of sullen
discontent; they would stand and talk together of France and their
experiences there. The unpleasant memories had been effaced. Already
they had forgotten. They were unhappy in the present; they remembered
they had been happy in the past.
And, with a vague nostalgia, Miller appreciated that in France, in spite
of the danger and discomfort, there had been always something to look
forward to. There had been the mail, a relief, the taking over of a new
bit of line, a continual change, and there had been leave--how wonderful
that had been, to count the days to one’s leave, to say to one’s self:
“in twenty-three days’ time I shall be in London”; there was nothing
like that now. And peace: how often he had talked of it, of all the
things he would do, _après la guerre_; the future had seemed to him
boundless then with opportunities. He had looked forward with a happy
confidence to the days of routine and quiet work. He had asked nothing
more than that--the resumption of the ordered ways.
He remembered, too, in what spirit he had read three years earlier a
novel by Zola called _The Soil_. He had seen a copy at the railway
bookstall at Boulogne with “Suppressed English Edition” printed in thick
black lettering across the yellow cover. He was on his way back from
leave and he had hoped that the book would help him to pass agreeably
the long journey to Baupaume. But he had found it heavy even in its
obscenity, and he had discarded it for the light suggestion of
_Fantasia_ and _Le Rire_. Later, however, during the nights of
wakefulness in a lonely post, he had returned, for want of anything else
to read, to Zola, and he had soon found to his surprise that, instead of
turning the pages quickly with prurient fingers in search of the
flavoured passage, he was reading the book carefully, word by word,
letting it pass slowly before his eyes--a savage spectacle of human life
held captive to the soil, of men and women whose actions and desires
were controlled by their allegiance to it, and of that fierce ferment of
deceit, greed, falsehood, wantonness that the soil turned in its own way
to its own use.
It had seemed strange to him, though, that Jean, an old soldier, should
be prepared, even after so much adversity, to rejoin the army. It was
easy to forget; memory, concerned with the general proportions of a
picture, selected what it chose; Miller knew that, but could anyone, he
had asked himself, forget the fatigue of a long march, the chill of
nightfall in the open, the heartache of separation, the fields of blood
and pain. And, putting the book down on the table, he had walked to the
head of his dug-out steps and looked out over the long stretch of
mangled country. Himself, he never could forget.
But that had been three years earlier, under the flicker of a Verey
light, within the range of guns. And now, sitting at a desk with a pile
of press-cuttings before him, and the clatter of typewriters beating on
his ear, he felt prepared to welcome any change, however violent. If
only something would happen. That evening as he walked down Kingsway to
Holborn station the newsboys were shouting tidings of another war;
across the placards a huge note of interrogation followed the word
Berlin. Was it then to begin again--the noise, the cruelty, the carnage?
For a moment there passed before his eyes a picture of Passendael as he
had last seen it in the October rains, the dead tilted across the lips
of shell holes. Then his thoughts returned to the present and its more
urgent trouble, the monotony of routine; the type-writers; the proofs;
the copy. “Allies to march to Berlin! Paper! Ultimatum to Germany!
Paper!” The words were flung out into the mild spring air and the sound
floated heedlessly down Kingsway over the heads of the workers, old and
young, who were hurrying towards their homes, with faces set in hard
lines of dull, sullen resentment. “Start of a New War! Paper!” If only
something new would happen. “Ultimatum to Germany! Paper!
Allies--Berlin--Paper!” And Evan Miller, in his heart of hearts, hoped
that it was true.
That is the story as I wrote it. But life from its vast repertoire can
produce always when it chooses, a climax far more complete than any of
our contrivance. Sometimes, impatient with our fumbling, it takes the
pen from us and writes.
Three weeks later a trade dispute brought England nearer to revolution
than it had been for a hundred years. The regular reserve was recalled
to the colours and Evan Miller found himself at Shorncliffe reporting at
orderly room his existence and unimportance; curiously easy, he would
discover, the re-adoption, after an absence of two years, of the
formalities of military life; curious, too, how stabilising became,
after the casual nature of town engagements, the fixed routine of the
parade-ground and the mess. But that would be personal and incidental.
The significance, the universally applicable significance of that six
weeks’ return to uniform would lie in the chance discovery in the pocket
of an old tunic of a piece of paper, placed there hurriedly and
forgotten, two years before. There would be nothing romantic about that
piece of paper. A memo, from battalion dated the 17th of February 1919.
“Please note,” it said, “that you were passed fit for active service by
the Medical Board at Dover, the 3rd of December 1918.” Formal enough: to
anyone but himself, meaningless enough. The sort of thing with which a
dug-out would have become quickly littered had he not possessed a
servant. But its discovery would be, for him, that inevitable, that
unpremeditated moment, at which every story-teller is aiming and so
rarely reaching. He would stand in the centre of the room, the piece of
paper in his hand, and before his eyes, and before his brain, the
details of the circumstances under which he had last seen it.
In the early spring of 1919 a couple of months’ leave had been granted
to all regular officers, and a very great number of them had taken
advantage of that leave to file their application for transference to
the reserve of officers. It was on the last morning before his leave
that he had found waiting for him in the ante-room that memo. from
battalion correcting a mistake he had made in his application for leave.
He had laughed gaily, confidently. They could send their memos. if they
liked, he had told himself. To-morrow he would be in London, and if,
during two months, he could achieve no compromise with the Whitehall
mandarins he had no right to call himself a soldier. And he pushed the
note away into his pocket.
The recovered memory of that gesture of careless confidence would be a
mirror in which he could see reflected the significance of the last two
years. He would see himself two years earlier, eager and exuberant,
tired of army life, anxious for a return to freedom, proudly assured of
his capacity to subdue the future. He would remember how his one idea in
those days had been to rush away from camp. For the sake of eleven hours
in town he had caught a five o’clock train from Grantham on Sunday
morning and had not got back to bed till three o’clock. The journey had
cost him twenty-seven shillings. His first question on joining a new
unit had been, “What chance of leave?” No matter how far from town, how
long, how expensive, how uncomfortable the journey--he had been prepared
to make it: anything to get back to civil life. And he would see himself
now in this aftermath of turmoil, indifferent, passive, dumbly
satisfied. He had hardly considered the question of leave. It would cost
him over a pound to get to town; it wasn’t worth it. There would be very
little for him to do when he got there. A theatre, a dance, a dinner. It
was pleasanter on the whole to sit and read _Blackwood’s_ in the mess
and play bridge and walk across the cliffs to Folkestone. He had nothing
in particular that he wanted to do. He was well enough where he was. The
old zest for life had gone, pilfered from him by two years of
frustration and disappointment and foiled endeavour. And the realisation
of it would be brought to him by the discovery of a crumpled memo., a
thing intrinsically worthless, but the focus, the rallying-point of much
hard circumstance.
And thus, indeed, it was that, to one at least of many thousands, was
brought fully and bitterly the significance of that post-war period, of
those treacherous, deceiving years that had glittered so bravely on the
horizon, that had looked so warm and hospitable, that had promised so
much and had brought so little.
1919 was the year of disillusion, not merely of a political disillusion,
of disgust at broken faith and forgotten promises and personal
treacheries, but of a profounder, subtler disenchantment, of an awakened
sense of life’s deception.
We came back from the trenches, the prison camp, the parade ground,
radiantly, unspeakably confident. We had looked forward for so long to
peace. There had been times when we hardly thought that it would come,
certainly not to us. It was like the city of Heaven--a dazzling, remote
prospect. We had come to look on it as a tavern where we should rest
after our journey; a huge fire would be blazing in the grate, barons of
beef would be set before us, mine host would bring from his cellar his
richest chambertin. But we had hardly defined the circumstance of our
dream. We saw it with the heightened vision of strained and tired nerves
as a land of limitless enchantment. And, when peace came, we settled
down and waited for the good things to be set before us. And, of course,
they were not set before us. And we had not the vitality to fetch them
for ourselves; we were tired, not with the exhaustion that follows a
day’s hard work, from which after sleep we awake the fitter, but with
the exhaustion of dissipation, of a sleepless night. For too long we
had been geared too high. The pressure had been maintained by the
intoxication of war conditions. We were like tops that are models of
poise and balance only as long as they retain their intensity of speed.
The stimulation, the incentive had been removed suddenly. We were weak
as a drug fiend who has been deprived of morphia; we became listless,
lifeless, indifferent.
We have been described as a generation that has flung up the sponge; and
the old men grumble about us in their clubs. “No social sense,” they
say. “A generation that thinks of nothing except tennis and dancing.
Poor stuff!” Perhaps: it may be we are the seed that has been flung on
stony ground, that has sprung up quickly, without root in itself or
sustenance. It may be that the hot sun has scorched and withered
us. It may be. But the Victorians indulged in such an orgy of
self-righteousness. They proclaimed so loudly that they were leaving the
world better than they found it: and we know what manner of inheritance
they handed down to us. It may be pardoned in us, I think, our
indifference to politics, and the rights and wrongs of little nations.
And yet we all of us, four years ago, came back to life with some sort
of an ideal of citizenship; we were conscious of our responsibility to
the future. “We would make it,” we said, “impossible for there to be
ever war again.” We were frightfully anxious to do something, but there
did not seem anything in particular for us to do. Those of us who wrote,
would not have found it difficult perhaps to sell our pens in the arena
of party politics. There were plenty of people ready enough to exploit
us. But that was not what we wanted.
During the war many of us had come to look on the Labour party as a sort
of fairy godmother. Labour was the only party that had included in its
programme a ruthless avoidance of war. And, as the man who is hungry can
think only of food, so in 1917 it had seemed to us that the avoidance of
war was the one thing that mattered. We expected great things of the
_Daily Herald_. But long before the end of 1919 we had realised that no
more bellicose production had been ever presented in large quantities to
the public. It had substituted one form of war for another. Nations were
not to fight each other, but classes were. The proletariat of the world,
with the possible exception of the French, was to ride triumphantly over
the mangled remains of the idle and blood-sucking rich. It was to be war
to the death. Prizes were offered for the best slogan. The people who
had clamoured in 1916 for arbitration and compromise between the demands
of Germany and those of the Allies, would not listen to arbitration and
compromise when the Tynesider demanded another shilling a day from his
employer. The _Herald_ became the champion of every trade dispute, and
some of us began to wonder. Was this international peace, we asked
ourselves, worth the purchase at such a price? If it came to a fight,
would we rather fight beside English navvies and English ploughmen
against the navvies and ploughmen of Germany and Russia; or would we
rather fight beside English, Russian, French, Belgian, German, and
Swedish ploughmen against Russian, English, French, German and Swedish
aristocrats, or _vice versa_? Of two wars, which was the less
pernicious? And we began to think that class is a habit that can be
changed in half a generation; a man who is a newsboy at seventeen may be
a baronet at fifty and a viscount at seventy; but race is a tree planted
deeply in firm soil. We can change our class as easily as we can change
our clothes; but English blood is English blood in the pit, in Mayfair,
in the shires; and we should have no sympathy with that party that
strove to divide a people against itself.
Indeed, we were sick of party politics: we were in search of some league
of international co-operation of the young people of Europe, which
should have the right to direct our destinies. “It had been our war,” we
said, “it was going to be our peace.” It sounds foolish now, no doubt,
at this distant date, but we believed in it then; we were sincere in our
desire for it. They offered us “The League of Youth.”
It was a magnificent affair that inaugural banquet at the Connaught
Rooms. Viscount Bryce and Sir Oliver Lodge were the chief speakers, as
far as I remember. And a number of other very venerable persons
described themselves, like the old gentleman in the story, as being no
older than they felt. I don’t think that there were at the high table
three people under thirty. And the aims and objects of the League were
outlined subsequently in the daily press in an article headed with
commendable accuracy, but with a singular absence of self-criticism,
“The Age of Youth.” But still we had hopes of it. I found myself
vice-president of the Education Committee. One Committee meeting I
attended. It was my last.
We assembled to discuss the reformation of the Public Schools. There
were eight of us. Four of these were girls, of the Girton-Newnham-1917
Club variety. The other half was composed of a secondary schoolmaster, a
journalist, an imponderable young Scot, and myself. The schoolmaster was
the president. He knew a good deal about the practical side of the
business, and he was, therefore, somewhat sceptical. He opened
proceedings with a bland, highly noncommittal speech about “harnessing
the activities of youth,” which was very jolly but got us little
“forra’der.” The journalist, who was, in a sense, secretary of the
affair, then read some letters from people who had been sufficiently
far-seeing to decline the honour to co-operate. Then the Scotsman began
his innings: it was a good, breezy innings, of the Walter Brearley-Tom
Wass variety; vigorous, but with the bat infrequently connected with the
ball. His idea was to draft manifestoes, circularise headmasters, and
open a press campaign on such as declined co-operation. I suggested that
headmasters were busy men, that they had secretaries and waste-paper
baskets, and that a press campaign on what would be consequently the
entire educational world would be a gallant, but unprofitable,
undertaking. This perturbed the Scot.
“What, then,” he asked me, “are we going to do?”
“That,” I said, “is what I have come here this afternoon to learn.”
He emitted a snort of disgust. “But we must do something.” And for the
first time one of the four flappers spoke: “We’ve got,” she said, “to
justify our existence.”
That is rather what we were in 1919: a number of persons walking about
with a pocket full of stones, wondering which window to smash. In the
end we found the stones weighed rather heavily and hurt our thighs and
spoilt our clothes, and we dropped them on the pavement. It is easy
enough to evolve plans of international brotherhood when the Government
feeds and boards and clothes you and gives you some twenty-five pounds
pocket-money a month. It is less easy when you have to earn your own
living. Questions of international policy seemed less important when the
morning post brought a yellow form with scarlet letters across the top:
“Third and final application.” During the war our liabilities had been
those of many million others. In 1919 we entered the glass case of our
private lives. We reassumed the habit of our own troubles and our own
problems; we became again what Gilbert Frankau describes as the
“possessive and predatory male.”
X
But I doubt even if there had been some employment for it, whether that
particular enthusiasm would have survived very long the return to peace
conditions. We were only sympathetic to the Communists because their
views on the war tallied with our own. We should have soon realised how
wide is the divergence between their interests and ours. For Communism
is, or so it would seem to me, a sort of insurance policy taken out by
the routine worker against the creative worker. The routine worker, the
man who knocks nails into the soles of boots, who adds up columns of
figures in a ledger, who pushes a trolley up a slope, who does tolerably
well a thing that some fifty thousand other people could do equally well
if they so chose, is protecting himself against the ingenuity that
contrives a machine that will take the place of twenty such as he. He
plays for safety. He enters a business as office boy; licks the backs of
stamps; he passes into the counting-house and sits on a high stool. He
makes no blots in his ledgers, and puts the right invoices in the right
envelopes. He is allotted a room to himself and becomes a junior
manager. At the age of forty-five he is drawing a salary of £450 a year.
At the age of sixty-six he is given a pension in return for faithful
service. He knows his limitations. He accepts and fulfils orders. Of
himself he produces nothing. He knows that anyone else could do his job
as well as he can. He retains his position through industry and
punctuality. He appeals to the humanity of his directors. He hopes in
time to fill, in his firm, much the same position as a butler in a
baronial establishment. He has weathered many storms. He has become an
institution. But because he knows his limitations he is frightened,
frightened of the ravages of creative business, the amalgamations of one
firm with another firm, the hard, purposeful nature of young blood, of
the introduction of new ideas. He knows that, after a certain age, he
has no value in the open market. And so he would limit the scope of
private enterprise. He would prevent big men from launching schemes
whose failure will involve thousands in disaster. The State must
supervise and guarantee big business. It must control the avenues of
precarious livelihood. It is not envy of the rich that drives the
routine worker to Communism. As long as he is paid an adequate and
steady wage he does not mind what money his employer makes or loses. But
he knows as long as there is big business, as long as tigers hunt and
are hunted in the high jungle of finance, so long will markets rise and
fall, and so long will there be slumps and crashes and a cutting of
staffs and wages; so long will the law of demand and supply be
operative. Communism is the armour of the feeble against the
adventurous; of safety against daring.
And the artist, more perhaps than anyone, is the soldier of fortune.
He has no armour but his talents and his confidence. He makes his own
terms with life. He stands in the open market. And he will stand there
whatever party may be in power, whatever changes may alter the surface
and the circumstance of life. He belongs to that community which was
designated once “as rogues and vagabonds.” He is of the bastardy of
Feste and Touchstone.
We are entertainers: we who paint pictures, or tell stories, or enact
history. And, if we amuse you, you pay us well; and if we fail, you seek
elsewhere diversion. Six hundred years ago minstrels and strolling
players came by night to the great banqueting hall, and before the
leaping fire told their stories and played their play and sang their
song. And, if they gave pleasure, there was good food and wine and a
roof above them and gold in their purses for the morrow’s journey. And
if they failed to please there were blows and curses and a night of
rain. To-day a novel is printed upon paper, bound in cloth, and
scattered over three continents. There are double-column advertisements
in the Sunday papers; there are paragraphs and reviews and luncheon
parties. There are agents and royalties and contracts. The writing of a
story is a trade that provides many thousands of people with employment.
But it is only the surface of life that alters, the principle is the
same. A man is telling a story: men and women respond to its humour, or
its pathos, or its beauty. They pay richly for their entertainment. But
the moment that the story-teller ceases to amuse he is deserted. There
are some writers who are pleased to think of themselves as prophets and
reformers, who object to the social stigma of their profession. But
because they are merchants of hard words they are entertainers none the
less. People like to be abused now and then. It is agreeable to sit
after a good dinner before a leaping fire, with a decanter of whisky at
one’s elbow, and read of the approaching overthrow of Israel. The sense
of danger titivates the jaded palate. People do not wish always to be
wrapped in cotton wool; they like to be frightened, to be “Grand
Guignoled” now and then. To be told that their sins are of such
blackness gives them a pleasing sense of their own importance. It is a
sensation worth the buying.
It would be hardly, I think, too fanciful to draw a parallel between the
artist and the courtesan. The real courtesan, I mean; not the poor drabs
who trudge by night down Shaftesbury Avenue. One thinks of “Skittles”
driving down Hyde Park in the sixties, to hold a levee by the Achilles
statue; “Skittles” who broke hearts and homes and fortunes; Skittles who
outlived her friends, her beauty, and her generation to die three years
ago unremembered. There is more than a slight resemblance between the
life of such a one and of the artist. Like her, he has no social status;
like her, he is bought and used and flung away. He pleases as she
pleases, for a while, through freshness and vitality and novelty; and
those that have had their entertainment, feel no after sense of
obligation. As long as he so pleases he is granted a wide licence to
flout the conventions with which society has thought it wise to protect
itself. Society knows that he is not of her, and she can afford to wait.
Everything is forgiven to an “artistic temperament” as long as that
temperament is the property of a skilful entertainer. The artist can
make what hash he likes of his private life. He can refuse to be
accepted without his mistress: and, on the whole, the public prefers its
entertainer not to be domesticated like itself. A popular novelist, who
had contributed a serial to a Sunday newspaper, was asked to provide the
editor with a photograph. He sent a pleasant snap of himself, in his
garden, with his wife and children. The snap was returned. “Our
readers,” the editor said, “would prefer not to think of you as a
married man.”
Much the same licence is accorded to the courtesan, as long as she is
beautiful. She can, if she chooses, be rude to men who ask her for a
dance. She can make fun of them in public. She rampages through life in
the pride of her youth; she can pick and choose. Her charm and her
beauty are her capital. She makes a bargain with the world of routine
and wealth, the world that sells cotton and builds empires, the
industrious, unflagging world that asks in its spare time to be amused.
To such a one the world says: “Here are two pictures. Make your choice.
You may stay all your life a suburban girl. You will go to subscription
dances and get kissed furtively in the passage by smarmy, over-dressed
young men, who will boast to their companions of your surrender. One of
them you will select to take you to a cinema, and, as a payment, you
will allow him to hold your hand. And to one of these young men you will
eventually become engaged. You may be very much in love with him, or you
may be seeking an escape from the uncongenial surroundings of your home.
But in either case the result at the end of three years’ time will be
the same. The blue bird will have flown away. You will be a mother and a
housewife. You will have settled down to the humdrum of suburban
matrimony. Your husband will no longer be satisfied with your company in
the evening. He will bring in with him those tedious friends of his who
were once your dance partners, those tedious friends grown smarmier and
softer with the years. And you will sit sewing in a corner while they
discuss the political situation and the latest murder case. There will
be not a great deal of money. You will be clothed, not dressed. Your
prettiness will soon pass, because you will be unable to give it the
right setting of georgette and crêpe-de-chine. And you will gaze
enviously at the gay windows of Oxford Circus. Before you are thirty,
before one of your hairs is grey, your personal life will be at an end.
And you will never have lived. You will be safe, that is all. There will
be food to eat, a fire to sit before, a roof above you when you have
come to the weakening hours of age.
“And this is what we bring you in exchange. We bring you the opportunity
of living to their full the best years of your life, eighteen to
thirty-three. You will dance night after night at the Savoy. Poiret will
design your dresses; you will drive through the London streets in the
deep comfort of a Daimler; you will meet men of the world, brilliant,
interesting men: barristers, financiers, doctors, artists. You will live
romance. You will love deeply, you will suffer deeply. You will pass
from the extreme of happiness to the extreme of pain. You will love no
longer than love pleases. You will be the swinging pendulum. You will
never rest. You will fulfil yourself.”
“And afterwards?”
The world shrugs its shoulders.
“That,” it says, “is your concern. You have had those years. It depends
on whether you are clever and far-seeing. You may save much money; you
may marry; you may become a respectable dowager. Or, with your
connection, you may open, very profitably to yourself, a manicure
establishment. But that is your affair. If you are wasteful and
improvident, life may be very hard to you. That is, we repeat, not part
of our bargain. We offer you those fifteen years.”
And is that offer so very different from the offer that the world makes
the artist? “You have talent,” the world says. “We found that first book
of yours to a high degree diverting. We are content that you should
amuse us for a while if you so choose.” And are the alternatives so very
different? The future presents no less dark a menace to the novelist. He
knows that, sooner or later, he will out-write himself, that the public
will get tired of his tricks, that he will cease to be original and they
will clamour for something new. If he has saved money during his days
of fortune, or if he has managed to establish himself in some sound
commercial concern, in an Editor’s chair, or on the board of a
publishing house, well and good. But if not, if he has saved no money
and is at the end of his resources, he is driven to the equivalent of
the courtesan’s dreary tramp down Jermyn Street and Piccadilly to hack
ill-paid journalism in the columns of the provincial press. And the
artist is in exchange offered the same wages. He is offered the
opportunity of living to its full the best years of his life. He has
money, he is well known. He is not fettered, as his contemporaries are,
with office hours. He is free to do what he likes, go where he likes,
make love where he likes.
Much has been written of the amours of poets, and novelists, and actors.
They have earned a publicity far beyond the range, possibly also beyond
the desire, of the financier’s. And the artist has been always inclined
to attribute the dimensions of his success to his personal magnetism, to
his powers of finesse and intuition. But it would be more modest,
certainly more generous, in him to return gratitude for the unparalleled
opportunities for gallantry with which the circumstances of his life
provide him. Far let it be from me to disparage in any way the triumphal
progress of certain distinguished and notorious persons. I would merely
point out the disadvantages under which their less gifted rivals are
conducting operations.
Consider the position of the city man. His daily routine is a matter of
general knowledge. In order to carry on his business a great number of
people must know where he is at any given moment to be found. His
secretary should even know where he is lunching. If the telephone may
be, and it doubtless is, of considerable assistance in the happy
ordering of an intrigue, it is of no less service in the detection of
it. If a wife rings up her husband in the afternoon and finds him away
she begins to wonder. She knows, too, at what hour he leaves his office
in the evening. If he is not home half an hour later her wonderment
increases. He has either to resort to a lunch in a _cabinet particulier_
or he has to manœuvre with endless deception a week-end, or a business
trip to Leeds. Every assignation has to be skilfully arranged. There is
small scope for the sudden, the unpremeditated moment. It is as
machine-made as the hosiery he handles.
But if it is hard to conduct an intrigue, it must be infinitely harder
to start one. Even nowadays the majority of women are under some sort of
masculine protection; there is either a husband or a father, or a fiancé
or “an uncle.” And at the only hours when he himself is free that
masculine protection is in operation, a fact that the realistic novelist
is in the habit of overlooking. One wonders sometimes how they get
started, these affairs of which we read every other day in the evening
papers. At haphazard, possibly. Adjacent bedrooms at the end of the
passage in a country house. A husband detained in town: a sudden
opportunity seized at eagerly--the sort of thing, though, that happens
more frequently in literature than in life. Certainly not an accident in
the hope of which a conscientious Casanova would be prepared to delay
action. Either that, though, or else a purely business proposition. A
lunch at the Carlton grill, and over the liqueur the offer of a flat and
five hundred pounds a year. Paul Bourget is reported to have remarked
that the only folk worth writing about were those with large incomes;
because it was only people without employment who were able to develop
themselves naturally, which sounds foolish enough; but as adultery is
the invariable background for Latin fiction, it was possibly some such
predicament that Bourget had in mind.
Often enough, indeed, a man’s love-life is a spectacle to the novelist
for melancholy contemplation. In the years that should overbrim with
kisses, he has neither the money nor the leisure for much love-making.
He is economically and temporally dependent. He indulges in occasional
flirtations that he dare not pursue, believing it unfair to make love to
a decent girl if he is not in a position to propose marriage to her.
Occasionally he buys pleasure in some fourth-floor flat in Piccadilly
and feels rather “a dog” about it. He marries when he is thirty-four,
and the next three years are the most vital, the most personal he will
ever know. Rapture passes; and having once drunken, he would drink
again. He begins to sow his wild oats; wild oats must be sown at some
time in a man’s life, and the casual bartering of sensation is of no
significance. But by the time a man is thirty-seven he knows too much
and has seen too much to become the light-hearted philanderer he might
have been in the earlier twenties. A woman writer--I think it was
Rebecca West--wrote somewhere something to the effect that it was not
the bad man, not the philanderer against whom a young girl should be
warned. The Jurgens and Casanovas and Macheaths have received so much
happiness from women that they repay happiness with happiness. They are
the sun that shines and leaves, after its setting, a sense of gratitude.
It is against the spiteful man, against the man who has been
unsuccessful with women that a young girl should be protected. That is
the man who will be unkind to her. And I think it is a bad thing when a
man on the verge of middle-age sets out deliberately to sow wild oats.
He will be taking revenge somewhere for his starved boyhood. The chance
to make the most of the years best worth having is the greatest offer
that the world makes to the young artist whom it would turn into an
entertainer.
But, even so, I doubt whether this bribe would overcome the instinct of
preservation that cautions us to play for safety, were there not that
other, that more powerful inducement, the love of one’s work for its own
sake.
About a year ago there was a symposium in _The Strand_ in which a number
of novelists were invited to name that book of theirs of which they had
most enjoyed the writing. Several writers said that they had not enjoyed
writing any of them; that they had enjoyed the planning, the revision,
but that the actual writing was hard and unpleasant work. I wonder. I
suppose they were sincere. But I was glad to see the other day in an
American paper an article by Hugh Walpole saying that he continued
writing simply because he “loved it--it, telling stories.”
Money and leisure and gratified ambition are prettily coloured toys; but
they are flavour, they are decoration; there does not come from them the
deep, the sustaining satisfaction of a hard task tackled and carried
through. It does not matter whether one writes well or badly: there is
the same joy of creation, the same pleasure in watching the blank page
fill before one’s eyes, in counting up the number of words that are the
outcome of a morning’s work. There is the physical sense of effort; the
physical weariness to be fought against, when one’s brain is eager with
ideas, but one’s wrist is stiff and tired--when one longs to drop the
pen and sink into an armchair. But one doesn’t drop the pen; one goes
on, and it is worth it.
It is bowling up hill, against the wind, to keep the runs down while the
man at the other end gets wickets. You have bowled ten overs; your legs
and arms and back are tired. For sixty balls you have kept that length
outside the off stump, just too short to drive, just too far up to cut.
You have altered your pace a little; you have bowled first from the far
end of the crease; then from close up against the wicket. Little tricks
to keep him playing, to break his patience, so that he may make the
fatal mistake at the other end against the man with wind and slope to
help him. And you are tired. It is heart-breaking, the Fabius Cunctator
game. You long to chuck the ball over to the captain, to say, “I’m
tired, I can’t go on.” But you know that he cannot trust his other and
better bowler to keep on at that length ball: you know that the wickets
must come from the top end. You stick to it. You bowl another over and
you get your second wind.
There is no such thing as work without physical exhaustion, and writing
is physically the most exhausting thing I know, far more exhausting than
the hardest game of rugger, or the longest day in the field. It is such
an emptying of oneself. I tried dictating once, but I did not like it. I
got through a terrific lot of work in a very little while. But I did not
like it. I missed the sight of the white page slowly turning black, of
the rising pile of paper at my side, and the long struggle of the brain
against the growing weariness of wrist and fingers.
For, whatever happens, the love of writing stays even with the sorriest
of hacks, the man who can afford to write only occasionally the thing he
wants to write, who has to produce magazine fiction, and reviews and
paragraphs, so that he may buy the leisure in which to write his verses
or his unmarketable stories. We stint ourselves in one way so that we
may squander ourselves in another. And, here again, we can find an
analogy in the courtesan, in the woman who sells part of herself to one
man that she may give herself more fully to another. In a love freely
given she recovers her self-respect. “What does it matter,” she thinks,
“what I do as long as I can make that one man happy. And because I allow
a few favours to that rich old Jew, I can give to that other what he
could have never got from those pink and white, those simpering,
bread-and-butter misses.” It is in the same spirit that the purveyor of
cheap fiction finances the publication of his verses.
We are of the same race and the same blood, speaking the same language,
having no part in the world’s business, in what is serviceable to the
commercial machinery of life. Even if what we produce is a marketable
commodity, even if we bring money into the pockets of publishers and
promoters and actor managers, we are still the merchants of
entertainment. For a while we have ceased to be rogues and vagabonds. We
do not dine, as strolling players did, in the servant’s kitchen. We are,
for the moment, almost respectable. We belong to clubs. We wear no
distinctive dress. It is indeed the fashion for the artist of the day to
look perfectly ordinary, to be, in fact, like everyone else, with short
hair and servant problems. To-day Congreve would be content to style
himself a dramatist and be a member of the Garrick Club. It is a phase.
It is only the surface of life that alters. Another turn of the wheel
and the artist will return to his own people. And he will stroll from
one town to another, with minstrels and actors and courtesans, a merry,
careless company, vagabonds of fortune, useless and ornamental. And once
more, perhaps, there will be real play-acting and English singing and
a-telling of simple tales.