Chapter XXV: To Hugh Pontrex, Villa Rosa, Mentone

91B HARLEY STREET, W.,
_October_ 3, 1910.

MY DEAR HUGH,

When you write and ask me to tell you what books I read during my illness I can see an ancient accusation of yours peering at me behind the question--as though you had visibly added that, except when indisposed, I never read books at all. And if it weren't that I too find other people's reading so interesting, though less informing perhaps than their pictures, I might possibly stand upon my dignity, and decline to supply you with an answer. And in any case, now that I come to reflect a little, this will be rather a difficult thing to do. For having got me at a disadvantage, you see, I could no longer pick and choose, as is my wont when the health within me is rude and exacting. I could no longer demand haughtily of a book that it must make me read it, or remain within its covers for ever unread. My defences were down, and I had perforce to roll over, hands up, for anything in the shape of book with which Accident and Mudie had happened to endow my house. And as a result I read half a dozen novels that, as the Americans say, left me cold, although I must needs give them the credit of having whiled away the time. Moreover, before dismissing them thus unkindly, I must remember that they were each the work of somebody's hand and brain, and the hard work too--at any rate so far as the hand was concerned--as anyone who has tried to put eighty thousand words of even unimaginative English upon paper would surely bear witness. Some of it too, one could see, was the rather tired work of minds that should really have been (perhaps only too willingly) lying fallow of production. And I think that I noticed this particularly in an altogether unimportant little volume called "Daisy's Aunt" by Mr. E. F. Benson, that may well stand for a sorrowful example. It's true that it was merely a two-shilling story; but even so, it was surely an unworthy one. And yet, I suppose, there _is_ a public that likes to devour these descriptions of very ordinary London drawing-rooms and very usual Thames-side bungalows--that would fain listen to even the weariest repetitions of the somewhat annoying slang of the "oh you heavenly person" type that for the moment is being affected by Mr. Benson's "quite nice people." And having thus found, or created, such a public, and designed the precise bait that it requires, I suppose that one is justified in hooking, as often as may be, one's share of their two-shilling pieces. But alas for the artist in Mr. Benson, in whose books there have been passages good enough of their kind to have made, perhaps, three or four pieces of real literature that few, I suppose, would have bought, but that some, at any rate, would have liked to keep upon their shelves. And yet again, who is to say that Mr. Benson (as representing not a few) has not after all chosen his better way? For if his popularity has been costly, it is at any rate of a clean and healthy sort, and one that may well, perhaps, be substituting itself for vogues unworthier and less wholesome.

They form an interesting study, these three brothers, not merely in heredity of talent, but because, as it seems to me, they stand very high in that small but growing band of really able writers, who possess also the knack of a popular appeal. The sons of a religious, scholarly, and discreet father, who himself had the power of attracting both attention and success, these qualities, with no suspicion of a more wayward genius, have descended upon them in very generous measure. The social sense, the faculty of choosing the right friends, and a gift for getting them on paper; the high purpose, clerically moulded; the gentle inward warring of trained intellect and instinctive orthodoxy; to each has fallen a share of his father's mantle, wherewith to make himself a garment. And the mental pabulum that they provide is just what is wanted by a large number of active, intelligent men and women to whom genius is at all times unsympathetic; and by the yet greater company--including most of us, I suppose--to whom its strongest appeal is a matter of mood and place. Every generation seems to provide itself with such writers, and as a rule rewards them well; and while, no doubt, it is genius alone that survives, with a light that can never remain hidden, the others, by their more instant and transient appeal, do yeoman work, and are gathered honourably to their fathers. For we may not always be tuned to the tang of Stevenson or the burr of Dr. John Brown. But we are seldom incapable of sitting with enjoyment at some College Window, or allowing the lesser voices to prepare us for those that are mightier than they.

And never, perhaps, has a generation possessed so many of these. Never certainly has their level of eloquence been so high. Hichens and Locke and Anthony Hope, Phillpotts, Marriott, Munro, and Wells, with Hewlett and de Morgan a little nearer, perhaps, to the stars, and a score of others close upon their heels--how sound and various is their artistry, and how consistent, as a whole, is the quality of their output. For this, one thinks, must be the besetting danger of all these skilled professionals--to avoid, on the one hand, the Scylla of over-repetition (to which most of the monthly magazines were long ago safely anchored) and on the other, the more dangerous Charybdis of a too venturesome novelty. Upon the first (and still confining oneself to the more considerable writers) Mr. Benson, the essayist, for example, would seem, more nearly than many, to be in danger of foundering. While upon the second I can think of Conan Doyle as having bumped as badly as most writers of an equal eminence. For while there is no man who can spin a better yarn for a dull journey (even if he has never given us a Brushwood Boy), his particular talent is about as at home among the delicate domesticities of his "Duet with an Occasional Chorus" as would be some genial pugilist with the "Pot-pourri of a Surrey Garden." And yet, while one could pile up examples of sad wreckage upon both these rocks, the wonder, after all, is that there is really so little of it.

Mr. Benson, no doubt, will put up his helm in time; and Sir Arthur has been wise enough, as far as I know, to avoid any further emulation of Mrs. Gaskell and Miss Mitford. But it is, perhaps, to Mrs. Humphry Ward that one naturally seems to turn for a demonstration of the completely median course--so rigidly median indeed, in its lofty mediocrity, that I am sometimes at a loss to account for her very great popularity even among (as the critics have called it) the circulating-library public. For though she has a gift, and a very considerable one, for bringing together the materials--a little machine-made, perhaps--of dramatic incident, one may search her books in vain for a single thrill that they have produced; while of humour they contain not a semblance. Indeed they form, as it seems to me, a long series of admirably well-laid fires, for which only the matches are wanting. As Dr. Brown would have said, she is the Maker, not the Mother, of her books. And I think hers must be the twentieth-century triumph of the college-bred lady inspector.

It's strange how increasingly one misses, when it is absent, this underlying sense of humour; so much so indeed that one perceives it more and more to be a _sine qua non_ of all towering and durable achievement. Given Meredith's humour, how Hardy, with his first-hand observation, his extraordinary detachment, and the beautiful lucidity of his English, would have loomed above the creator of Sir Willoughby. With humour for its lightning, how Tess would have stricken us to the heart. And how poor a substitute for it is irony, howsoever its subjects may deserve it. To withstand the years it must, no doubt, surround itself with the stronger qualities--depth and simplicity and desire--or Barrie, least of the Immortals, would be among their giants; and Jacobs would be knocking at their door. But that Olympus demands it let all testify who have tried to love Sordello, or watched Jude fade ever deeper into his obscurity, or read again, a generation later, the rhapsodies of Inglesant and Elsmere. There are a few exceptions of course, chiefly, I think, in the sphere of the short story, the mere _conte_, and among the poets, of whom perhaps Wordsworth is the one that springs most readily to the mind. By the way, I saw a discussion (a rather unkindly one) in one of the magazines, a year or two ago, as to the worst line in reputable poetry, and I am rather afraid that last Sunday I discovered it, and that Wordsworth must be regarded as its sponsor. Here it is, and one grain of humour would surely have made it impossible.

Spade! with which Wilkinson has tilled his land.

And yet he has written a sonnet or two, and at least one ode, that are as immortal, I suppose, as anything in letters.

But I don't seem to have told you very much about my bedside books. And the truth of it is that "Daisy's Aunt" is the only title that I can remember, though it may conveniently be stretched, perhaps, to embrace them all. For it concluded, if I remember rightly, with the matrimony of four persons; and the others also are now a blur to me of ultimate marriages--marriages between pathological pianists and high-born, introspective damsels; and marriages between athletic young gentlemen, good at puncture-mending, and the distressed maidens whose tyres had become deflated.

Of the books, on the other hand, that have made me read them--rare and beloved visitors--there have been fewer this year than usual, though it is I, and not the books, that must bear the chief blame for this. The two latest of these, separated by an interval of months, and both, I believe, already elderly as the lives of modern novels go, are "The Cliff End" and "Captain Margaret." The first of these delighted me from cover to cover, in spite of some exaggerations of character-drawing and dialogue; and I reverently bow my head to its author as having made himself at a bound the laureate, not only of the bath-tub, but of that peculiarly distressing variety of it that is very wide and shallow, with a dimple in it that cracks when you stand upon it, and a capacity for water that no housemaid has ever satisfied. It is perhaps too late for the nature of this vessel to change. But never more, with that rosy vision of sponging maidenhood before my eyes, shall I regard it as anything but blessed.

So it's a book for which I should like to prophesy life, though with less certainty, perhaps, than "Captain Margaret," upon the deck of his _Broken Heart_, carries the very germ of it in his delicate hands. For to his eldorado of dreams we have all of us, at one time or another, turned our eyes. And in his schooner might have sailed any Quixote of history, lucky indeed to find a Cammock for his navigator.

And yet who am I to be thus prophesying so boldly? For the third of my books has been a collection of Oscar Wilde's contributions to the "Pall Mall Gazette," full of such forecasts, and written, too, by a practised hand. Has one half of them been verified? I think not. And yet I suspect that few critics could more equably confront a reprinting of their twenty-year-old opinions. Looking through this book, I read, for example, whole pages devoted to the novel of Miss So-and-so whom one would have supposed, in the eighties, to have been an emerging George Eliot. And how desperately must the praise have fired her to further efforts. Yet what, in 1910, has become of poor Miss So-and-so; and where are those great works that were so certainly to be? There is the writer himself too, so young then, with his brilliant flippancies--his impeachment of the British Cook, for instance, with her passion for combining pepper and gravy and calling it soup, and her inveterate habit of sending up bread poultices with pheasant--and all his promises of grace.

So, upon the whole, it's a sad book; and here, for a brisker comment upon all that I have been writing, comes a volume of American essays that has just been lent to Esther, wherein I am positively assured that the volumes of Mrs. Humphry Ward are quite dangerously immoral! While there, upon a chair, lies a novel, "Mr. Meeson's Will," that Rupert Morris has just recommended to me as being his beau-ideal of a really outstanding story. So let me lie low. I have spoken out my literary heart to you, as any man, on occasion, should have the courage to do. But now let me lie low. For by what standards am I judging, after all, who have only spent an hour in Chicago, and never a moment east of Suez?

You will remember Morris, whom you met here during his last visit to England. And as you remember him so he is, with perhaps an added grey hair or two in his moustache, and a few more upon his temples. For the rest, he is just as lean and brown and boyish as he has always been, and with a touch of deference in his first greetings to Esther and me that has survived from the school-days, when he was a comparative nipper, and that he will carry, I suppose, since he is English of the English, until common earth shall level us all. He was looking, when he first came in, rather hesitating and ill at ease, with his title, as it were, tucked awkwardly under his arm. Much like this I have seen him at school, on some Old Boys' Day, coming back to the pavilion after making his century, with an uncomfortable shove at his cap, and something about the bowlers having been "dead off their luck."

Finding us alone however, and not disposed to worry him, he cheered up amazingly, and was soon chattering to us briskly about his various adventures. His personal part in these would seem as a rule to have been conspicuous by its dullness; but the adventures themselves were well worth hearing about. And it was only quite accidentally, as he was leaving for Stoke, that we discovered him to be seconded for some special duties in the colonies--"imperial defence, don't you know, and all that sort of thing; rather an interesting job."

And did I tell you, by the way, that the Poles have bequeathed us their baby during their visit to Italy? Esther has just brought her in, and she is staring at me now with the solemnest eyes in creation--little pools of Siloam, but with the angels just going to be busy. I must go to them, and be healed.

Ever yrs.,
P. H.