Chapter II: Part 2

It is a debatable point, I suppose, whether life, taking it all round, by and large, as Mr. Bixby said, is a horrible business. On the one hand, most of us are excessively sorry to quit this world, so, clearly, there must be something to be said for it. But, on the other hand, how endless are the devices which we find to give a seasoning to a dish which is, perhaps, rather insipid than nauseous. I have eaten cold mutton with relish--after smothering it in about half a dozen different condiments, sauces, relishes and salads. So look at all the games we play with desperate earnestness, with a vigour and delight and, sometimes, an asceticism which we give to no office routine or serious employment of our lives. Perhaps we may try and define what “life” means a little later; but, under all ordinary and respectable conventions, I presume that the business of which I have been dimly aware on this day of writing can in no wise be classed as one of the serious employments of life; as, in any sense, a vital part of life according to accepted doctrine, religious, scientific or philosophical. The business of which, I say, I have been dimly aware; for all I have seen of it has been Grove Road, Grove End Road, and Circus Road and all the roads adjacent lined on both sides with motor cars of all sizes, splendours and miseries; the affair being the last day of the Oxford and Cambridge Cricket Match. And, looking at all this fairly, it comes to this: here are two wickets placed at a certain specified distance from one another on a stretch of turf, and here are men with bats and here are men with balls. Will the men with balls succeed in hitting the wickets, or will the men with bats succeed in hitting those balls away to remote parts of the turf? And on the whole: are the eleven young men of Oxford or the eleven young men of Cambridge the smarter and more skilled at these pursuits and in the subsidiary pursuit called “fielding,” or the art of stopping the ball which the man has hit with the bat from going to a remote part of the stretch of turf? That, in the very rough, is cricket; and I want to ask the clergy (if they have any time to spare from their self-appointed tasks of meddling in politics, “disapproving” of bookstall novels, and serving tables) what they honestly think Saint Paul would have said, if he had seen twenty-two of his most promising young converts engaged in this cricket business, applauded by a vast multitude of the saints? I desire to put this question not with a wish to “score”--to use an idiom of the game which we are discussing--but with an honest longing for information. That is: will theologians maintain that the ’Varsity Match and First Class County Cricket generally is a part of serious life, or a serious part of life? Or, will the scientific people or the philosophical people declare that this game, played as it is played at Lord’s with desperate earnestness, is a necessary part of the bodily and mental well-being of the human race? I say the game as played at Lord’s, that is the great game; for the case of the old-fashioned, village cricket on the green was somewhat different. Then you had a number of people with two or three hours of leisure before them who found a good deal of fun and relaxation and amusement in bowling balls and hitting balls and running after balls, with intervals of supping of ale, sitting on the bench under the shady tree in front of the village inn; this is a very different matter from the high cricket of our times, just as diverting yourself with a ball, a racket and a net is remote from Mdlle. Lenglen’s game at lawn tennis.

And these are the comparatively mild forms of sport. What of rowing till you are blue in the face, what of climbing frightful mountain-peaks, with half an inch of rock between you and a fall of a thousand feet? Why do people do all these things, voluntarily, gladly, enthusiastically? I can only suppose that they do these things to make life tolerable, even entertaining, just as I add tomato sauce, Worcester sauce, pickles, beetroot, cucumber and salad to the cold mutton, to make _that_ tolerable and even appetising. It would seem indeed that life must be an awful business, if you have to plaster yourself on the walls of a sheer Alp before you can endure it. This is “drowning” your cold mutton in strong sauce with a vengeance.

And all this by way of a tentative explanation of why I ever wrote anything at all, and still more why I have gone on writing, with brief remissions, ever since the autumn of 1880. This problem, as I have hinted already, is a profound mystery. For, taking first the plain view of the man in the street, and applying his plain and simple test, I have just been running through a list of my books from 1881 to 1922, and reckoning--it was an easy task--how much money I have made by them. The list contains eighteen titles. Of these, the “Heptameron,” “Fantastic Tales,” “Casanova” represent more or less laborious translations--“Casanova” runs to twelve sizeable volumes. And my total receipts for these eighteen volumes, for these forty-two years of toil, amount to the sum of six hundred and thirty-five pounds. That is, I have been paid at the rate of fifteen pounds and a few shillings per annum. It seems clear, then, that my literary activities cannot be adequately accounted for on the hypothesis of mere greed and money-grubbing.

And, then, taking another side of the question: consider the debit of toil and endeavour and mortification and disappointment that these forty-two years of book-writing have cost me. I believe that business men, engaged in manufacture, always “write off” a considerable sum for legitimate wear and tear and depreciation of plant. What about the wear and tear of mind and heart and that T,e,a,r, which is pronounced in another manner; what about the depreciation of the plant--a highly important one--of self-confidence that my writing has inflicted on me? I have described some of the pains I endured when I set out to write the thing which afterwards became the “Chronicle of Clemendy,” and that was only the beginning of months of hard and agonizing labour. And then I remember another occasion. The “idea” which turned into “The Great God Pan” came to me; again that delicious glow of delight. Now at last I had got hold of a real notion; I had a curious tale, a rare fantasy set in a rarer atmosphere to work upon: I thrilled at my heart as the explorer must thrill as he comes suddenly to the verge of the dark forest, or to the summit of the high mountain and sees before him a new and wonderful and undiscovered land. Well I remember how all this exquisite bliss was bestowed on me, one dark and foggy afternoon of 1890–91, in rooms in Guilford Street, not far from “The Foundling.” The foul air shone bright, the dingy street, the dingy room were irradiated: here was happiness almost too keen to be endured. With no delay I got notebook and pencil and proceeded to “lay out” the story; that is, to set down the various scenes and incidents by which the plot was to be developed. Afterwards; the writing, and on the whole I was not altogether so ill-contented--though I daresay that I ought to have been disgusted--till it came to the last chapter. And that simply would not be written. I tried again and again; it was impossible. I could hit on no incident that would convey the required emotion; and at last I put away the uncompleted MS. in despair; I was within an ace of tearing it to bits. But think of the suffering, the misery, the bitter disappointment of those evenings. True it was all a silly thing, a toy; but an authority quoted in “The Water Babies” says that one of the saddest sights in the world is a child crying over a broken toy. My scheme was all silly, I allow; but I had set my heart on it, I had glowed with pride over it: and here it was all broken to pieces in my hands, a sorry, spoilt, piteous thing. True, I found some sort of an ending six months later; but that was not the same. There was no fun in that. You remember the party in the cabrioily that called on Mrs. Bardell? There was a dispute about the precise situation of Mrs. Bardell’s house, and finally the driver, who had dismounted, led the horse by the bridle to the house with the red door.

Here was a mean and low way of arriving at a friend’s
house! No dashing up with all the fire and fury of the
animal; no jumping down of the driver; no loud knocking at
the door; no opening of the apron with a crash at the very
last moment.... The whole edge of the thing had been taken
off; it was flatter than walking.

So with me and my story: I got to the house with the red door eventually; but the whole edge of the thing had been taken off. And so it has been with most of my books; I get, somehow or other, to the house with the red door, or to a house which I try to persuade myself is just as good; but on the way in the cabrioily I have suffered so many disappointments that I am in no condition to enjoy the pleasure of Mrs. Bardell’s society. I remember that, in writing “The Hill of Dreams,” I sat down every night for three weeks with blank paper before me, trying to get the second chapter. On some nights I wrote half a dozen lines, on other nights a couple of pages--before the evening’s work went, hopeless, into the drawer. A few months later, having fallen on the wrong path, I had the pleasure of casting aside about 30,000 words that I had written; and by the time the book was at last ended there were two neat piles of MS. in my drawer; the one a little higher than the other. The bigger pile consisted of the folios that I had written and had been forced to reject. And think of what that means: a heartbreak to every other page and the comment of the author on himself and to himself: “You fool! Why do you pass your life in rending your heart, in trying to do the thing that you can’t do? Why weren’t you brought up to sit by a brazier in the streets, to see that nobody steals the planks and railings and the wood pavement: to do something that with an effort you might be able to do?” Or, to return to our former metaphor: “Don’t you see that you haven’t the knack of the toy maker? Then why will you persist in trying to make toys which always break in your hands, while you fill the air with lamentable boohoos?”

And yet, as I have said, such has been my employment, with intermissions, from 1880 to 1922. It was like that in 1885–86. Night after night, when my father had knocked out his last pipe at eleven o’clock, did I draw out my papers from the table-drawer and set them under the lamp. Winds came from the mountain of the west and shook the trees about the house and sighed and wailed; snows came from the mountains of the north and whitened the terraced lawn, black clouds drifted over Wentwood, the winter rains scourged the land; and still I wrote on in the silent house; struggling against the bitter conviction of my incapacity, as a man struggles and claws at the crumbling earth when his foot has slipped and he is over the edge of the cliff. Yet, stubborn, I wrote on late into the night, far into the morning, and as the year advanced I often drew the heavy crimson curtain and looked out after I had put away my papers in the drawer, and saw a red or golden dawn streaming above the forest in the east. And as to the work itself? Let us not enquire too curiously; though I have always been proud of my parody of the terms of an ancient writ. _Diem clausit extremum_, he has ended his last day, was the title of the writ, which is moved now and then even in these days: my writ was called _Cyathum hausit extremum_: he has drained his last cup. And then there is the _merum et mixtum cervisium_, and the Charter of _Terra Sabulosa_ or Sandy Soil, and the offices of Tankard Marshal and _Clericus Spigotti_, or Clerk of the Spigot; all choice jests--to adopt the manner of the work in question. But, as I say, let us not enquire too curiously into the merits of “The Chronicle of Clemendy.” I am content to abide by the verdict of M. Octave Uzanne, who is held, I believe, to be a good judge of letters. He said that it was “le renouveau de la Renaissance,” and that I was sure of my place beside Rabelais and Boccaccio, on the serene, immortal seats. I am surrendering my judgment wholly to that of M. Octave Uzanne.

By the way; I do not know how it was, but the only copy sent out for review was addressed to “Le Livre,” which was then edited by M. Uzanne. Somehow, no review copies found their way to the English papers. But the MS. had been shown to a pushing young literary gentleman, and he said that if it were properly “cut” it might make a good Christmas book for boys.

And then, again, the question returns: why did I compel myself to undergo all the toil and misery and disappointment that the writing of this “Chronicle of Clemendy” involved? It was my own choice, nobody stood over me with a stick to force me to do it. Why? Why do men row themselves into blueness and incipient heart disease at Henley and Putney? Why do men expose themselves to horrors, miseries and the instant risk of death on all the most desperate mountains of the world? The answer is the same in all these cases: that cold mutton (or life) is in itself intolerable; that _Le Gigot de Mouton froid, sauce Cyanide de Potasse_ is better than the same dish _nature_.

* * * * *

And, going further, the reason of this odd state of things is plain enough. The fact is, that what we commonly call life is not life at all. All the things that are considered serious, important and vital: the faithful earning of a living, the going to the City every morning to copy letters, keep accounts or float companies; the toils of the Chancery barrister, of the factory hand, of the doctor, of the shop-keeper, of the mining engineer, the affairs of all the serious and necessary employments of life; these things are not life at all. They are the curse of life, or, as it is sometimes called, the curse of Adam; as the theologians might have told us if they had not been too busy over the “curse of alcohol,” over the dubious moral influence of “the pictures,” over the decidedly frivolous character of the lighter fiction of the day, and the demoralising effects of putting a bob on the winner--this dreadful offence, I believe, is held to “harden the heart” more quickly and thoroughly than any other method. But this curse of getting a livelihood remains profoundly unnatural to man, in spite of his long experience of it: hence his frantic efforts to escape from what he erroneously calls life by running himself red in the face at Lord’s, by rowing himself blue in the face at Henley, by drinking methylated spirit, by “putting on” those criminal bobs, by playing mind-torturing games like chess, by knocking small balls into small holes, by climbing Alps--and even by writing books. He will do anything to get away from what are called the serious facts of life and follow any track however desperate, trivial, perilous, or painful, if only those serious facts can be evaded and forgotten, though it be but for a few hours. And so I wrote on, night after night, till the August of 1886 saw my task ended; and I immediately began to think of what I could write next.

_Chapter IV_

I have just been trying to reckon up the various quarters which I have occupied in my forty-two years on-and-off life in London. When I first came up to town in 1880--the year when the play was the thing--I stayed at Wandsworth in an old Georgian house near the ugly Georgian church. I looked for it a few years ago, but I could not find it; I suspect that shops now flourish on its site and on the site of its grave old garden. Then, in 1881–82 I was domiciled in a house fronting Turnham Green; here, too, were ample lawns and gardens which, for all I know, may remain still. Clarendon Road, as I have mentioned once or twice, entertained me in ’83, ’84, and again in ’85, and when I returned to London at the beginning of ’87 I lodged for a time in Upper Bedford Place, Russell Square. This place I left for an amusing reason. I had been out rather late. The festivity was not furious; simply a little and most informal dance given by Mrs. Augusta Webster, in those days an admired poetess; and I suppose that it was half-past one when I got home from Hammersmith. I was moving softly up the stairs, and was a good deal puzzled to hear the clanking noise of metal on metal, as I passed the door of the first-floor bedroom. However, I supposed that somebody was ill and that the fire was being kept up. But the next morning, the landlady addressed me gravely. She said that Mr. and Mrs. Sogden had been very much alarmed by hearing footsteps in the middle of the night, and had made preparations for receiving burglars; and on the whole the landlady thought that I should be much more comfortable at her sister’s in Great Russell Street, where no ladies were taken and things “were more Bohemian.” And, indeed, she was quite right. The garret--a real garret, with a sloping roof and a dormer window--looked out on Dyott Street, the last remnant of the old rookery of St. Giles; the house was late seventeenth century or quite early eighteenth, and the room, with tea and bread and butter breakfast included, only cost ten-and-six a week. Later in the year, I moved across the street and lived for a while over a stained-glass business; then I crossed again and lived over a tailor’s shop. January, 1890, found me in two rooms in Soho Street--undoubted seventeenth century, panelled, with beautifully deep wooden cornices. And here took place the battle of the fleas.

I had moved in, as I say, early in the year, in cold weather. The rooms seemed quite all right, and the black tom cat of the premises was a remarkable and consistent character whom it was a privilege to know. His daily plan of dining with every one in the house, from his own family in the basement to the people in the attics, finally welcoming the cat’s-meat man with loud shrieks, shewed, I thought, Mind. And, as I say, the cornice; well, I wish that I had been draughtsman enough to draw a section of it. Well, everything was as pleasant as it could be; and there, at the door, was all Soho to explore and investigate, and I suppose I need not say that Soho offered then, and still offers, I am glad to note, a large and curious field wherein the contemplative mind loves to expatiate.

Very well; but the weather got warmer: and the fleas appeared. At first as single spies; and then in battalions. They swarmed everywhere. They made life hideous and intolerable. I did not see what was to be done. My furniture, such as it was, occupied the rooms; it would be highly inconvenient for me to move. The advertised specifics were useless. I isolated a flea--they were fair, large fleas--with a little of the powder, under a wine glass and watched his behaviour. He seemed happy, though perhaps a little torpid; he reminded me of a stout, red-faced old gentleman who has had two or three glasses of “hot Scotch,” and is inclined to fall asleep by the tavern fire. Clearly, such mild measures were useless against the busy multitudes which swarmed all over my rooms. Then, I had a notion, a much more brilliant notion than anything that I have known in the region of literature. I have an odd and random vein of practicality within me, and it came out in the Soho Street emergency. I took a large sheet of newspaper and brushed it over with treacle and laid it on the bedroom floor and waited for an hour or two. At the end of that time, a dozen or so of fleas were sticking fast to the treacle. I experienced the happy glow of the inventor; and now there was no dismal reaction. By the evening, there were at least six dozen fleas captured and out of action. I thought I might say, Eureka.

But then there came a difficulty. I discovered a certain property in treacle, which, so far as I know, is not recorded in scientific text-books. The matter of the work--to use the term of alchemy--was, I found, susceptible to weather. In certain states of the atmosphere, in place of being sticky, it became crystalline and as hard as glass. I do not know whether this interesting property of treacle can be utilised for forecasting purposes. But this hardness rendered it useless for my immediate end. The large, fair fleas hopped on to the trap and hopped away. I surveyed the problem anew. Again the flash akin to genius. I thought of fly-papers and bought half a dozen. The battle was over in a few weeks. I kept a careful daily account, and in a month, or perhaps five weeks, I had captured over three thousand fleas. And I had purged the first floor of 12 Soho Street utterly of all the race. I recollect well one night’s bag. I had been to see “A Pair of Spectacles” at the Garrick, and when I came home I found I had got 120 fine fleas.

And then, having won this notable victory, a very odd distaste for London came upon me. I am not joking; the sentiment had nothing to do with the insects whom I had defeated; but, somehow, London sickened me. Its faint, hot summer airs were an oppression, its swarming streets a tribulation; I thought of cold wells in the hills and running brooks and the breath of the wood and the mountain in the early morning--and I resolved to be a countryman again. So I took a cottage high up on the Chiltern Hills, and while certain alterations were being made, I left for Tours, Touraine, France.

The Rabelaisian enthusiasm was still upon me. I had just issued a translation (called “Fantastic Tales”) of that extraordinary and enigmatic book, “Le Moyen de Parvenir,” by Beroalde de Verville, who was a canon of Tours Cathedral. So to Touraine I went; to see the land of Rabelais, of Beroalde, of Balzac. And the odd thing is, that my first Sunday afternoon in Tours--I got there on a Saturday--was a severe disappointment. The fact was that I had taken Doré’s wonderful illustrations to the “Contes Drolatiques” for granted. I supposed that the enchanted heights, the profound and sombre valleys, the airy abysses of these amazing plates represented, with a little exaggeration, perhaps, the veritable scenery of Touraine. You remember the picture showing how that sinful little page climbed the heights of Marmoutiers to confess his sin to the Abbot? Well, that Sunday afternoon, early in September, 1890, I set out from the Faisan, in the Rue Royale, to see the tremendous ascent of Marmoutiers. I crossed the bridge over the Loire, most of it sand with a swift stream here and there, and arrived at Portillon, where the conductor of the steam tram was calling out “Marmoutiers, Rochecorbon, Vouvray” in a melodious chant. But I walked along the road to Marmoutiers. Alas! there were no terrific heights, as in the picture. Imagine something like the high ground near the river at Henley; nothing higher, nothing as high. Instead of the dark green woods of Henley, golden rocks and golden earth shining in a very happy sun; little villas, larger villas, everywhere with gardens that were gardens indeed. Green walled closes, with rich green lawns; fountains in the midst of them, flowering shrubs and flowery creepers blossoming and trailing everywhere; kitchen gardens where the peaches glowed and burned dark against the hot white walls, where the pears on the dwarf trees were as shapes of golden honey: at last the old _clôture_ of the Abbey of Marmoutiers with pepper-pot turrets at intervals, close to the road, and inside the enclosure, the modern buildings of a convent school: and the mellow, river cliff behind all. It was delightful; but it was not a bit like Doré. I confess, my heart sank. And then going on by the river road, I got to Rochecorbon. Still the warm cliff overhung the road, underneath it a small hamlet with a tavern, “A la Lanterne de Rochecorbon,” and perched on the edge of the cliff the Lantern, an odd structure which looked something like an ancient factory chimney, and was, I suppose, the sole relic of the ancient castle celebrated by Balzac. It took me some time before I could get Dora’s Touraine out of my mind and enjoy the Touraine of actuality on its own merits. And these are many. There were great moments on this first visit to the garden of France.

I was staying at the Faisan in the Rue Royale--that street which Balzac, who was born in it, praises as being “always royal, always imperial,” which in these later days has taken to calling itself the Rue Nationale--a delicious inn indeed. I got the recommendation from Thackeray. Philip stayed there once. He calls it the “Faisan d’Or.” It had three courtyards, or rather a courtyard and two gardens, both closed in by the hotel walls. You entered the courtyard under the archway in the Rue Royale; to the left was the dining-room hung with tapestries depicting in an ancient mode the famous castles of Touraine; on the right was the kitchen, all bright with glowing copper pots, and the big round cook standing at the open door or bending over his furnace, occasionally shaking one of his pots knowingly and beaming on you as you sat at your little table in the courtyard as much as to say: “You will find it good.” Around this great man were four or five boys, all in white like their chief, who seemed to be busy all day long in washing vegetables, in chopping meat and herbs fine for _farses_, in manifold culinary employments, running out now and again and shaking showers from bags full of wet lettuce or endive leaves. At the back were the stables, and on market days the yard of the Faisan was full, like an English inn yard, of all manner of queer traps and shandridans from the country. And beyond this courtyard, at the back of the house, were the two gardens, secret, retired and delicious. Such green turf was there in these chosen places, so pleasant a music in one of them of a singing fountain, so glowing the flowers about it with the water drops glittering on them, so sweet the shade of overhanging boughs--there are here and there gardens that address the heart and spirit and not the florist, as Poe knew well.

And thinking of the Faisan at Tours and of its curious delights, how is it that much money--one may say the wealth of the whole world--cannot buy anything like this in London? Money will get you a set of rooms thirty feet or so in height from floor to ceiling, it will buy you the use of suites of furniture that make you wonder when you wake up in the morning whether by any chance you can have turned into Louis XV in your sleep; it will buy you bathrooms all marble and tessellated pavement, dining-rooms as marblous and Louisquinzious as your private suites; but delights such as are afforded by the Faisan at Tours it will by no means buy. It is a pity; at least I think so. But then I can never fancy that I am Louis XV even for a moment, and that, I suppose, is the reason why I don’t like living in the style of that monarch, why I don’t even like lunching or dining in palatial halls built and furnished in his favourite manner. And I doubt whether the grandest of all grand hotels in our London could furnish you with a bottle of Vouvray Nature of a named _clos_, for any money that your millionaire’s purse could proffer.

And the mention of that admirable amber wine of Vouvray, the wine wherein an argent bead rises at intervals through the mellow gold, reminds me of my first night at the Faisan. All down the tables were portly decanters of wine, red and white. I chose red, and found it a new sensation in wine vastly to my taste. It was, of course, an ordinary wine, and a little wine, I think of the kind called Joué Noble, from the place of its growth, a parish by the Cher river. It was scented like flowers in June; it was in its entirely unpretending way quite exquisite. I drank it with relish, and towards the end of dinner I had accounted for about three-parts of the decanter. Swiftly came the head waiter and bore it away and as swiftly put another and a full decanter in its place. It was almost too much; “temperance” enthusiasts would say a great deal too much. I thought solemnly to myself as I smoked a grateful pipe after dinner in the courtyard: “This night I have had as much good red wine as ever I could drink.” And this was one of the great moments of my visit to Touraine.

And then there was Chinon. The train passes through the deep darkness of Chinon Forest, and you leave the station and come out into the sunlight. Here is a narrow river valley: the clear Vienne in the middle of it; to the left a gently rising land, rich with vines; to the right a long, golden, precipitous cliff, golden in such a sunlight as we never see in England. As in the backgrounds of the old Italian masters, the trees stand out clearly, vividly, distinctly against the sky; so was it at Chinon. That long, mouldering and golden cliff was surmounted by the walls of the old castle, golden and mouldering also, irradiated; and from the river to the cliff the town climbed up; narrow ways, winding ways, steep ways, and every here and there the grey-blue _tourelles_ of the fifteenth-century houses piercing upwards; and the dark mass of the forest stretching far and far away beyond. And then the thought that the man who had received one of the great visions of reality once walked these ways, and looked on a scene that had not much changed since his time; that the golden and rich sunlight had shone on him also, in the hour when the amazing, terrible, tremendous figures and symbols of the vision of Pantagruel, Panurge, Friar John, the three who are yet one came to him, we must conjecture, in clouds and darkness and uncertainties, as he listened to the new song of the vineyards, and the vine and the outpoured wine: all this was made a great moment also. I sat on a sort of bridge--if I remember--joining the two parts of the ruined castle, sat on golden stones, and looked down on the Chinon of the grey-blue _tourelles_, on the shining Vienne, and the gentle vine-covered slope, and I thought of the cloudy young man stumbling over that hard French of Rabelais far into the night, in obscure Clarendon Road, long ago. It was not long ago; this was of ’90 and that was of ’85, but hard pains make long years. I went down the hill again, past the fountain, and drank the red wine of Chinon solemnly, reverently in a dark tavern in one of the dark, narrow streets. It was called “Le Caveau de Rabelais.”

* * * * *

I came back to London in the autumn and took rooms in Guilford Street till that cottage on the Chilterns should be ready for occupation. Then from 1891 I lived in the country, and found it nothing, and came back to London in the autumn of 1893, to an “upper part” in Great Russell Street, a little westward of the British Museum. It was then that I began to explore London, and to realise its vastness, its immensities. Things are relative; I began now to appreciate the fact that if you set out, without a map, from your house at 36 Great Russell Street and walk for an hour eastward or northward you are in fact in an unknown region, a new world. Continually you stand on a peak in Darien, and look out on undiscovered territories, inhabited by peoples of whom you know nothing. I would go along Great Russell Street, and turn up into Russell Square, and then go by Guilford Street, crossing Gray’s Inn Road, and so find myself, like the knight in the song, “ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end.” I would go northward, up the Gray’s Inn Road, and then turn to the right, descend into a valley and climb a height and so come to a region which was to me as the ultimate parts of Libya, and the lands of the Mountains of the Moon. I shall never forget the awe with which I first came upon the other Baker Street, the Baker Street which would enter no taxi-driver’s mind; those houses climbing up the hill into Lloyd Square, stucco houses with classic pediments, but all tottering, askew, and falling into decay; the jerry building of 1820–30. And, I remember, seeing on one of the leaning and doubtful doors here the brass plate of someone who said that he was a “Buhl Maker.” I wonder. Did someone really labour in this forsaken, climbing street in that rich eighteenth-century art of brass and tortoiseshell, fashioning curious cabinets and escritoires! How unlikely it seemed; more unlikely than another announcement on a modest door in the recesses of Camden Town, to the effect that here were made Shell Boxes.

Often I went up Baker Street and stood in Lloyd’s Square and looked down on London, on Gilbert Scott’s horrible, villainous sham-Gothic St. Pancras Station and on all the vague, smoky, weary streets about it. Here, one evening, the sun flamed suddenly and struck the windows of a school below and lit fires in them: hence the lines--in “A Fragment of Life”--entitled: “Lines written on looking down from a Height in London on a Board School suddenly lit up by the sun.”

And here I would say that the matter of Wonder--that is the matter of the arts--is everywhere offered to us. It is, I am sure, true, as the feeble though pious Keble wrote, that:

The daily round, the common task
Will furnish all we need to ask.

And it is utterly true that he who cannot find wonder, mystery, awe, the sense of a new world and an undiscovered realm in the places by the Gray’s Inn Road will never find those secrets elsewhere, not in the heart of Africa, not in the fabled hidden cities of Tibet. “The matter of our work is everywhere present,” wrote the old alchemists, and that is the truth. All the wonders lie within a stone’s-throw of King’s Cross Station.

I remember that when, later on, I wrote a book on the principles of literary criticism called “Hieroglyphics,” a good many of the reviewers found grave fault with my dictum that all fine literature is the work of ecstasy and the inspirer of ecstasy. “In other words,” said these clever fellows, “a good book is a book that you happen to like. But other people may have very different tastes and likings; no doubt many people experience ecstasy in reading a newspaper feuilleton. Is the feuilleton therefore fine literature?” The objection, I hasten to say, is perfectly legitimate. Tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people, I have no doubt, read the newspaper feuilleton in an ecstasy of delight. I once found myself, to my dumb, almost awestruck horror, in a drawing-room where a number of tolerably well-educated people were engaged in taking the works of ... well, Miss Thingumbob, seriously. Doubtless, then, there are many people who find rarities and wonders in matter that you and I pronounce to be contemptible or detestable or just nothing at all: my reviewers were perfectly right. But if you accept their ruling you put an end to criticism of all sorts. I could form a large company of coalheavers, financiers, sporting noblemen, gardeners, journalists, ladies of quality, actors, scavengers--I was going to add bishops, but they rarely speak the honest truth--and myself who had very much rather not see the famous Primavera and the famous Monna Lisa Gioconda than see them, who had rather--again I include myself--listen to George Robey’s songs and gags and wheezes than to “Hamlet.” But what does that prove? Simply, I suppose, that so far as the pictures and the play are concerned my friends and myself cannot rise to these particular heights. As an old friend of mine once observed very well, “We all of us have some windows that are darkened.” My friend is a musician, and remembering his maxim, I was much diverted one day by hearing him speak with easy contempt of the composer of “Acis and Galatea.” But it is true that each one of us has some darkened windows: Oscar Wilde confessed to me once, with shame be it said, that he thought absinthe a detestable drink. But no inference can be drawn from this undoubted fact. It always stirs in me a certain feeling of impatience when I see the solemn correspondence, the more solemn leading articles under the dread heading, “What is Wrong with the Church?” It is alleged, I am sure with complete truth, that a great many people do not go to church; and the conclusion is drawn that the Church must be very gravely at fault. Now this may be true also--I think it is--but it is a conclusion not to be deduced from the minor premiss, the sole premiss stated. Scholastic logic, the only logic that is worth twopence, the “new logic” being, as an Oxford graduate once very sensibly observed to me, merely “nonsense about things,” is now unfashionable, so, I suppose I shall be thought somewhat boorish for exhibiting the newspaper syllogism at full length, supplying the suppressed major. But here it is:

That which is unpopular is worthless.

The Church is unpopular.

Therefore, the Church is worthless. In other words, as one of the ladies in the cabrioily--to which I have already alluded--observed: “Most Votes carries the day.” Very well; but how does the attendance on the pictures in the National Gallery compare with the attendance at “the pictures”? And shall we try the experiment of “knocking” the music-halls, the revue houses and the musical comedy houses by running Bach’s Organ and Clavier Fugues at popular prices? Perhaps the purse of Rockefeller might survive the experiment; certainly no other purse would hold anything after a year of it. Mr. Walkley of “The Times” proposes to solve the difficulty of criticism by making the critic address himself to ὁ χαρίεις, the well-graced and accomplished man. But who is he? Each one of us is a good judge--in his own judgment. And technical instruction is nothing. No one in his senses would seek anything vital as to Greek or Latin poetry from a classical don at Oxford or Cambridge. Keats, poor, shabby John, who had only been to a commercial academy, knew more about Greek poetry than a wilderness of classical tutors.

But, I was going to say, all these considerations apply to the known and recognised arts, to literature, music, painting, architecture. In all these I am willing to admit I may be hopelessly wrong--I have said that I had much rather hear Robey than “Hamlet”--but I will listen to no objections or criticisms as to the Ars Magna of London, of which I claim to be the inventor, the professor and the whole school. Here I am artist and judge at once, and possess the whole matter of the art within myself. For, let it be quite clearly understood, the Great Art of London has nothing to do with any map or guide-book or antiquarian knowledge, admirable as these are; and indeed Peter Cunningham’s “London” is to me one of the choicest of books. But the Great Art is a matter of quite another sphere; and as to maps, for example, if known they must be forgotten. How would the Odyssey have read, do you imagine, if Ulysses had been furnished with Admiralty Charts, giving the soundings in fathoms, even to the exact depth of water in the harbourage of Calypso’s isle? And all historical associations; they too must be laid aside. Mr. Pickwick at Bury St. Edmunds has nothing to do with the history of the famous abbey. Of all this the follower of the London Art must purge himself when he sets out on his adventures. For the essence of this art is that it must be an adventure into the unknown, and perhaps it may be found that this, at last, is the matter of all the arts.

And it was this art of London that I followed, while I lived in Great Russell Street between ’93 and ’95, and still more earnestly afterwards when I was living at Verulam Buildings, Gray’s Inn. Sometimes I took a friend with me on my journeys, but not often. The secret of it all was hidden from them, and they were apt to become violent. On one grey day that I remember I had personally conducted a man on a most interesting exploration of the obscurer by-ways of Islington. He grew silent as the streets grew greyer and the squares dimmer and the remoteness of the whole region from any conceivable London that he knew filtered through his soul. His London was Piccadilly, the Haymarket, St. James’s, and the many polite neighbourhoods where there are flats and calls are paid and tea is taken and literary and theatrical and artistic circles meet and gather. But this London that was a grey wilderness, these streets that went to the beyond and beyond, these squares which nobody that my friend could ever have known could ever inhabit: it was all too much for him. His face darkened with terror and hate, and with a poisonous glance at me he struck his golden-headed cane violently on the pavement, and stopping dead, exclaimed: “I wish to God I could see a hansom!”

So, of course, I never took him to Barnsbury. As for Brentford, that is the Great Magisterium, the Hidden Secret. There is a Secret Society of those initiated in Brentford, and so darkly is the mystery kept that there have been cases in which members have known each other intimately for twenty years before the passwords have been exchanged.

_Chapter V_

I have been talking of rooms in Gray’s Inn, of trips to Touraine; and I suppose it will have become evident that the days of the Clarendon Road cell, of dry bread and green tea meals were over. This was, in fact, the case. Between ’87 and ’92 I “came into money,” that is, into what I called money. My mother died in 1885, my father in 1887; distant and ancient relatives in Scotland who had lived to fabulous ages died at last, and thus moneys that should have come to my mother came to me. And I was no longer the lonely man of the earlier chapters.

Reckoning up the various sums which I inherited, I calculate that if they had been invested I should have had enough whereon to live narrowly and meanly for the next thirty years. Somewhere about 1921 a long lease would have fallen in, and two-thirds of my income would have disappeared. I should then have been left with sixty pounds a year at the outside, and even with the “aconomy” recommended by Captain Costigan, there is very little to be done in these days with £60 per annum. But I did not invest my fortune in sound securities. Perhaps I might have done so if it had fallen in a lump on my lap; but this was not the way of it. It came in bits and parcels: £700 one year, £500 eighteen months afterwards. So I adopted the simple, manly course of putting my money as I got it into a box, as it were, and dipping my hand into the box when I needed a few gold pieces. I wish it were possible to do this literally: it must be magnificent to live on a chestful of gold; but I compromised by getting a cheque-book.

And I have always been glad that I made this business-like arrangement. By it I was enabled to live for eleven or twelve years under pleasant and humane conditions. Not in luxury, be it understood, for luxury has always been utterly detestable to me. Detestable to me, I say with emphasis; I do not say that luxury is detestable in itself. If men like to have it so, by all means let them dwell in marble halls, with vassals and serfs and wine-stewards at their side. Let them be as Louisquinzious as ever they please in their homes and at their hotels; for all I care, they may take their ease in snuggeries, all gold and mirrors and marbles, fifty feet high, a hundred feet high, if they like it so. But to me, a poor clerk, all this has ever been nauseous. When I plied my sorry trade of journalist, I disliked most things involved in that vile business, but I hated my occasional missions to the Hôtel Splendide and the Hôtel Glorieux. I would be sent to these places to find out, say, the exact method employed by the new chef, M. Mirobolant, in cooking red herrings for the famous Joy Teas in the Venetian Hall--everybody has heard of the Joy Teas at the Splendide, and of the Joy Band of twenty kettle-drums, fifty tea-trays, ten trombones and thirty bassoons. Well, I would be sent to the Splendide on this errand; or, perhaps, to the Glorieux to find out whether it were true that the principals of the Russian Ballet sucked their morning tea through raspberry jam and declared that this was necessary to their art. I would visit one or other of these establishments and sit down on Louis Quinze or Louis Seize chairs and wait there in my dingy old cloak, while “Reception” and “Enquiries” smiled to see such an incongruous figure before them, while the guests of the hotel smiled also as they went in and out, till at last the manager arrived, fretful enough, usually, at being dragged from his business or his leisure to answer idiotic questions. I used to wonder on these Splendide or Glorieux days what I had done to deserve such humiliations. The only thing that somewhat consoled me was the thought that, whatever pains the Doctor may have suffered, while he waited in Lord Chesterfield’s outward rooms or was repulsed from that nobleman’s door, my case was more humiliating still, since an English nobleman of race is a much greater personage than the shiniest of hotel managers. And perhaps, also, I fancied that I was beginning to follow a little in the faithful steps of Venerable Raymondus Anglus, who was slowly sliced into little pieces in Cathay.

Rather, I am afraid, in the steps of a relative of my own, some distant Cousin Machen, whom business, I suppose, took to Cathay in the ’fifties and ’sixties of the last century. It so fell out that while this gentleman was in China we declared one of our infamous Opium Wars against the Dragon Throne and the Vermilion Pencil. Promptly the local mandarin seized Cousin Machen and put him in a cage. They then travelled him round the Chinese “Smalls.” When the cortège got to a village or town, my cousin’s custodians touched him up smartly with their spears. Cousin Machen would then dance with anguish, and, I am sure, most ungracefully, and the happy villagers, howling with mirth, and voting Cousin Machen good goods, would pelt the poor man with undesirable matters. He got away from them, but I have heard my relations say that in extreme old age the mere word “China” was enough to bring a sweat of horror pouring down his face. And I am in a position to sympathise fully with Cousin Machen----

Well, I was saying, I think, that I never cared for luxury, and so did not waste my bit of money on it. But if luxury tempts me not at all, I care a great deal for homely comfort, and I lived in considerable comfort in the days of which I am speaking. I think that my annual budget was between four and five hundred a year, and let me tell an amazed generation that for five hundred a year or rather less two people could live very sufficiently in the ’eighties and ’nineties. Your saddle of mutton and your sirloin of beef were of the best, lamb at Easter--is there anything better than spring lamb with its skin roasted to a golden-brown?--was easily attainable; fowls and ducks, grouse and partridges and pheasants, with now and then that most delicious bird the woodcock, were no rarities. And asparagus might well appear quite early in the spring, and green peas in advance of the main crop. And sometimes one felt that it would be amusing to go out to dinner for a change: well, the bill of the Soho restaurant never gave an indigestion afterwards. Sometimes the Soho dinners were quite good, they were always amusing; and in those days there was such a thing as decent Chianti. It came to the cheerful table in flasks of very thin glass, and between the cork and the wine was a stratum of olive oil. This the waiter flicked off on to the linoleum with a swift gesture. The last Chianti of this order that I tasted was in 1902. I saw great gallon flasks of it standing in the window of a small shop opposite the stage door of the Palace, and bought one of these flasks--it cost six shillings, if I remember--and bore it tenderly to my dressing-room at the St. James’s Theatre. It was the last night of “Paolo and Francesca,” and we drank the Chianti merrily in trunk hose and armour when the play was done. And Herbert Dansey, who was really a noble Florentine, “degli Tassinari,” vowed you could get no better Chianti in all Tuscany.

Or again, one didn’t fancy roast beef, and yet one didn’t want to go out dining. There was the middle course; Salame or Mortadella, half a round of ripe Brie and a bottle of a sufficient red or white wine. And a half-bottle of Benedictine only cost four-and-six. And the whole of the small banquet ran into very little: they were cheap days, and the Income Tax was inconsiderable then. But I was forgetting. I had no income, so I saved the expense of the tax. And under these conditions, living very pleasantly, with a month in France every year, I cultivated literature between 1890–1900. I refrained, utterly, I am glad to say, from the impious folly of wondering what would happen when the money should have come to an end. When that day came, why, that day could see to it.