WHAT is beauty to one man is ugliness to another. There is a proverb “about one man’s meat”; but there is a chariness about applying it to literature. Writers like to believe that a criterion of criticism exists; that their work is definitely good, bad, or indifferent.
Well; we are creatures of infinite limitations. A certain range of sentiment comes within the province of our comprehension; vast tracts of life must be for all time to us an unknown country. J. C. Squire announces thatJurgenis a poor book, but he does not persuade us that our admiration has been misplaced. We regard his article as the statement of a personal dislike. For criticism in the end comes always back to this: “I like it, or I do not like it.” Criticism is autobiography, as these pages are autobiography, the expression of personal preferences and distastes. And, on the whole, I think critics are ill advised to write of books that they do not like. Their inability to appreciate the book is as likely to be their fault as the author’s. And I find myself singularly out of sympathy with the type of critic who tries to explain his enthusiasms and disapprovals by metaphysics. He discusses for three pages what he considers to be thefunction of literature. “Literature,” he concludes, “is the sublimation of phenomena.” And, for the remainder of his article, proceeds to show which poets do, and which do not, satisfy the requirements of his formula. And, of course, he leaves us unimpressed. The ability to conduct an argument is not a proof of literary taste. And if the substance of the article is to be “I like, or do not like, this book,” then the critic is beholden to persuade us that he is a person whose opinion is deserving of attention. He can prove it to us in two ways, preferably in both. He can show that he has read and appreciated a quantity of good literature. “A man,” we say, “who has really appreciated Turgenev, should have a standard implicit in his emotional response to other books. If he says this book is good, there must be something in it.” Or the critic may prove by writing well and interestingly that he has a sense of literature. For there is nothing more damning to a book than a favourable, but ill-written, notice. “If the ass who wrote this,” the reader thinks, “liked that book, then I’m pretty certain that I shouldn’t.” Criticism would carry much more weight if it would forget its sense of responsibility, and would remember that its purpose is, as that of all literature, the entertainment of the reader.
And so back to that original, that disconcerting fact that Florence Barclay was to me ten years ago an equivalent for Turgenev. She meant as much; she revealed as much. She touched the heart as surely and as deeply. And again comes that uncomfortable knowledge that a book is after all only a focus forourselves, a spade to unearth the absolute. And does it matter what sort of a spade you use as long as the work gets finished? The object of any emotion is of less matter than the intensity of the emotion that object has evoked. Is a love any the less real, less tender, less passionate, less unselfish because it has been inspired by a shallow, trivial, worthless woman? Does it very much matter whence we derive that state of heightened consciousness that we undoubtedly reach through literature, as long as we do reach it? We come the richer fromKing Lear, fromAnna Karenin, fromLycidas, because these books have revealed to us what is eternal in ourselves. In their company we have forgotten momentarily the anxieties, the ambitions, the frivolities that dazzle and distract us, that move in glittering, bewildering profusion on the surface of our lives, that belong to time and space. In such moments of heightened consciousness we are in harmony with ourselves, we see ourselves as a part of that pattern that Pater spoke of, the pattern whose threads pass out on either side of us.
And it is towards such moments that we are always striving, for the most part indirectly, striving in our work, our love affairs, our amusements and distractions. We are dissatisfied with what we are and with what we have. That which is immortal in us struggles towards what is remote, in the hope, in the belief that it may prove immortal. It may be that books add something to our emotional, our intellectual stature, that they are the rich soil in which we dig for treasure; but I prefer to think that we are the rich soil, that we contain an immortal spirit, and that our ultimate success or failure must be judged by our ability to keep that spirit nourished and alive. If this be so, and it is a philosophy that commended itself to Wordsworth, are we not right in saying that Florence Barclay and Turgenev are fulfilling a similar function in different spheres?
There is no difference in the quality nor the intensity of the emotion. I am, I believe, tone deaf, and I have a perfectly deplorable taste in music. But by some music I am very profoundly moved. Sometimes it is by music with which I have personal associations—marches and dance tunes, and that, of course, strictly speaking, should not count. The emotion is inspired not by the music, but the scene evoked through it. But quite often it is by some catchy affair heard for the first time in a restaurant or across a street. I listen to it with enraptured pleasure, thrilled by the tricks and twiddles and syncopations, and I am quite prepared to accept my companion’s assurance that it is a cheap, vulgar, sentimental thing. “I do not care,” I say, “these things are relative. It moves me, therefore to me it is a masterpiece.”
Everyone has, I suppose, at one time or another paused to examine the windows of the type of bookshop that abounds in certain streets in the west end of London. They are curiously alike, these places. One side of the window is stocked with articles the nature of which it is unnecessary to particularise, and the other side with such literature as the management appears to consider most likely toencourage the purchase of them. The selection of that literature does not greatly alter with the passage of time. There are no spring and autumn seasons in these bookshops. Occasionally some new novel finds a home there; occasionally a callous or unenterprising publisher allows some fading favourite to pass from circulation. But there is, on the whole, a commendable fidelity to old friends. Were you to be transplanted miraculously to the Piccadilly of 1926 you would find of the volumes that to-day adorn so proudly the front tables of Mr Hatchards’ bookshop scarcely half a dozen, but the appearance of the questionable shop window will be probably no more altered by 1930 than it has been since 1910. Victoria Cross will be there, and Elinor Glyn, and the confessions of the retiring aristocrat who is content to sign himself “A Peer.” There will be the same French classics,Droll Stories,Madame Bovary,A Woman’s Life. The alliterative titles of Gertie de S. Wentworth James will show against a circle of entwining arms. BetweenBel-amiandAnna Lombardwill be spread enticinglyA Bed of Roses. The public, whatever it be, that patronises such establishments knows its mind.
They are good hat-racks, these bookshops, for ridicule, for denunciation, for satire. They can make a sermon for the priest, a middle for the journalist, a simile for the politician. For the student of life they are a subject of speculative curiosity.
What is, we ask ourselves, this public with so catholic a taste? We rarely see anyone enter one of these bookshops. There are always two or three peoplegazing enviously at the window, but self-consciousness restrains them. They dare not publicly declare their interest by purchasing a volume. Indeed, there are times when we wonder how these shops carry on their business at all. Are they, we wonder, a spectacle and nothing else? Do the same books remain there from one season to another for the simple reason that no one buys them? A pleasant fancy, but apparently they do carry on a very excellent, a very thriving, trade. I once asked a proprietor if the trade slump had at all affected him. “Very little,” he said. “Just before the armistice I ordered two thousand copies ofFive Nights, and I sold the last one yesterday.”
Two thousand copies of one book in one shop in three years. That man must have sold on an average two copies ofFive Nightsevery day. Can Mr Bumpus say as much for Shakespeare? Two thousand copies in three years! It is easy, of course, to shrug one’s shoulders, to say: “But for such stuff there will always be a public.” And yet so vague a gesture provides no explanation of this incredible popularity. The appeal ofFive Nightsis not, I believe, due to what bishops describe as the baser instincts of human nature. Victoria Cross wrote it in the innocence of her heart, firmly believing it to be a good book. It is a sincere book asThe Rosaryis sincere, andThe Way of an Eagleis sincere. It is written with feeling; she enjoyed writing it. Its sentimental sensuality is warm and cloying and pleasant, like a hot bath after too good a dinner. There even comes a moment when the heat of the bath mingling with the heat of Pommard makesus ask ourselves whether it is such appalling drivel after all. A couple of pages more we decide it is; but there was that moment of doubt.
Thus it happens, I conjecture.
The shop assistant as he hurries homewards at the close of his day’s work is moved with a sense of envy for the eager life of pleasure that wakes in the city only at the moment that he leaves it. His own life is tedious, with small excitements. He feels the need of vicarious sensation. The cover and title of Miss Cross’s masterpiece allures him. And as he journeys home he is pleasantly excited by the description of the painter’s intrigue with the Chinese. He feels otherwise, however, when he meets the heroine, and is confronted with what appears to him as a picture of nobility and self-sacrifice. He is deeply moved. That it is bad literature does not matter. It is enough that it should arouse in him the same thoughts and emotions thatAnna Kareninstirs in a man of letters. He feels himself in touch with a great passion, a passion that can override the convention of an hour and a place, that destroys life but makes of it first a thing worth having. In the world of popular fictionFive Nightsbears toThe Rosarythe same relation that in the world of literatureManon Lescautbears toOn the Eve.
I read while I was a prisoner in Germany Elinor Glyn’s novel,Three Weeks, and I remember thinking that it was of its kind the very worst novel that I had ever read. The grand passion is as rare as genius, and it is as difficult to make the grand passion convincing ina novel as to make a genius convincing. The novels in which a grand passion has been “got over” could be counted on the fingers of one hand. But never, I felt, had any novel of passion failed more lamentably, more inexcusably, thanThree Weeks.
But, as I said, these things are relative. To a couple of my fellow-captivesThree Weekswas a window opening on the immortal meadows. For days they discussed it exhaustively from every point of view. It was, they were agreed, marvellously done. But they were doubtful of its morals; such ardour, they felt, was only permissible after a marriage ceremony, or, they were prepared to concede, as a prelude to one. But it was the less real part of them that doubted. Their instincts told them that the grand passion makes its own laws. And finally they yielded to their deeper nature.
“After all,” they said, “those two were different from the rest of us. They were wonderful characters. You can’t judge them as you judge ordinary people.”
It is with such words that we acquit Paolo and Francesca, Antony and Cleopatra, Lancelot and Guinevere.Three Weekssaid to my fellow-captives whatAntony and Cleopatrasays to a cultured public. It was a focus for their belief in the grand passion.
One may well wonder, though, in what spirit the man who is deeply stirred by Victoria Cross and Elinor Glyn reads such masterpieces of prose narrative asUne VieandMadame BovaryandMademoiselle de Maupin. They are bound in the same lurid cover, printed onthe same absorbent paper, and yet it is hard to believe that a man can be moved equally by what is good and by what is bad. Is it not more likely that he will be shocked and a little disgusted by Maupassant’s detachment and cold restraint? “Pretty hot stuff,” he will say to himself ofUne Vie, but will add, “most awful filth.” And he will be ashamed of the book, and secrete it at the bottom of his chest of drawers. A melancholy reflection. It is, after all, of little matter that two thousand people should in the course of three years purchase at one shop a rather silly, sensual, sentimental book. But it is a little sad that only thus, in this form, and in this type of shop, should be procurable in the English language a complete translation of one of the world’s greatest novels, a little sad that even then it should be only read by such a person, and in such a spirit.
Sad though for the man of letters, not for the advocate of social progress. I am convinced that these books are as completely harmless as any book that may possibly encourage people to think for themselves can be harmless.
There appeared a few months ago an article, I believe, by St John Ervine, maintaining that the effect on the mind of the public of books such asThe Way of an Eagle, with their scenes of brutality and masculine domination, was pernicious. And certainly they make melancholy enough reading. But what are they, after all, but an expression for our eternal human impulse to be swept off our feet, to be subjugated by a force outside of and stronger than ourselves. And cannot we findin literature equivalents enough for the cracked whip and the submissive cheek of an Ethel Dell romance? Equivalents, but not parallels; for the best seller is written for women, usually by women. And it is by a masculine intelligence that the masterpieces of prose literature have been produced. A man would, in search of such an equivalent, choose an experience of which he was the object, not the subject. He would not write of the dominant male, but of the siren. “Is it to be a kiss or a blow?” asks the hero of popular fiction. In Turgenev, that woman who “when she comes towards one, seems as though she is bringing all the happiness of one’s life to meet one,” leans forward across a table and taps the nails of one hand against the nails of the other. “Tell me, tell me,” she says, “is it true, they say you are going to be married?”
It is from such reflections that we are forced to ask ourselves how much purpose is served by our attempts to educate the public up to Shakespeare. We are only giving them an equivalent for what they already have. And the energy that we devote so prodigally to the organisation of lectures and bazaars and repertory theatres might be spent so very much more profitably on ourselves. I doubt if the Ethel Dell public would find life any fuller, any more enraptured, by an exchange ofThe Knave of DiamondsforJude the Obscure.
I suspect, indeed, that these educational movements are inspired subconsciously for the most part, by the novelist’s desire to increase his own public. “If only,” he says, “a sixth part of the 60,000 who buy each novel by Ethel Dell would divert their attention towardsmy admittedly superior work, how salutary it would be for them and how charming it would be for me!” It sounds pleasant enough, but they are dangerous things, these revolutions, and they have a way of turning on their organisers. On the whole, I prefer to leave things as they are. It would be perfectly delightful if that 60,000 public were to transfer its affection to my humble efforts. If the public could be educated to a wide appreciation of the tendenz novel, very well, very admirably well. But this talk of Shakespeare and Fielding and the giants of the eighteenth century, frankly, I distrust it. I have no wish to see the public educated to that degree. Were it so to be, I can see that myself and many other deserving and inoffensive persons would have to seek some other means of livelihood—a procedure that would be most distasteful. For were the public able to appreciate Fielding and Balzac, and Smollett and Thomas Hardy, I cannot believe that it would take much interest in the stories that I should have to tell it. I distrust these Literature Promotion Leagues. I am disturbed when a new edition of Trollope is put upon the market. But a deep content consumes me when I open my Sunday newspaper and see that the publishers of Miss Dell’s new novel have “called” already for a seventh printing. I smile. Things are as they have been. The old standards remain. And I feel that there are still left a few people whom my publishers may be able to persuade to take some interest in my writings.
ISAID 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 theFamily Heraldstories that would in synopsis seem to resemble very closely those of Turgenev. The plot ofOn the EveorA House of Gentlefolkmight 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 ofSpring Floodsand ofSmoke. It would seem ordinary, as would that ofRudinandThe 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 impossiblyvieux 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 lastthe 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 manyyears, 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 orderlymind; 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 fromthe 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 friendlinessof 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 calledThe 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 ofFantasiaandLe 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 whoseactions 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 oldtunic 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 carelessconfidence 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 readBlackwood’sin 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 sleeplessnight. 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 inthe 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 theDaily 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. TheHeraldbecame 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 fightbeside English, Russian, French, Belgian, German, and Swedish ploughmen against Russian, English, French, German and Swedish aristocrats, orvice 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 asingular 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.”
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 isgiven 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 toflout 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 Londonstreets 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 offortune, 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 mustknow 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 acabinet particulieror 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. Eitherthat, 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 RebeccaWest—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 inThe Strandin 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 HughWalpole 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 betterbowler 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, thosesimpering, 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.