Chapter III: Part 3

Living very pleasantly; that is, apart from my chosen sport of making books. I have already discussed the strange paradox of writing, of writing, that is, when it is entirely divorced from all commercial considerations. I wrote purely to please myself; and what a queer pleasure it was! To write, or to try to write, means involving oneself in endless difficulties, contrarieties, torments, despairs, and yet I wrote on, and I suppose for the reason which I have given, the necessity laid upon most of us to create another and a fantastic life in order that the life of actuality may be endurable. Look at the golfer: observe how he toils and frets in that fantastic world that he has made for himself, a world wherein he who can say, “I did the fourth hole in two” is happy; while the wretch who had to hit the little white ball six or seven times before it finally popped into that fourth hole goes out wretchedly into the night. It is fantastic nonsense; but for all that the golfers are in the right.

Still, there may be a little more in the sport of literature; and if the golfers feel hurt by this remark, let them remember that a man always praises his own game. We understand so little of the real scheme of things that, for all we know, golf may be the end for which man was made, as, according to Coleridge, snuff was the final term of the human nose. But waiving this possibility--I think a remote one--I would contend that literature has more in it on the whole. Being an art as well as a sport, there is a question of making something, and very occasionally of making something that will divert or enchant others, besides the maker; whereas the sport which is nothing but a sport has no such by-products as “Don Quixote” or “Pickwick.” Of course the man who plays a game, such as golf or cricket, often gives pleasure--or amusement, at all events--to many spectators; but when the match is over and the last ball bowled nothing permanent remains. So far as others are concerned the player of games is much in the position of the player of plays. The actor thrills the house or rocks it with laughter; but the curtain falls and all is over. We know that the best judges of the eighteenth century found Garrick natural, simple, affecting; but we know no more. We have pictures of Garrick in his favourite situations; but I at least have no distinct image in my mind of what it was really like to be in the front row of the pit at Drury Lane and see and hear Garrick play.

And, this apart, I cannot help thinking that the pleasures of the literary game are more intense and more exquisite than the pleasures of the other games. I know this is a very difficult question; there is no final answer to it. But I feel sure that the happiness of Charles Dickens on writing the last words of “David Copperfield” was greater than the happiness of the cricketer at Lord’s who carries out his bat for a faultless innings of two hundred against the most difficult bowling and the best fielding in England. I do not know that this is so, but I conjecture that it is so, chiefly because the joys of the writer of a great romance are so varied and so complex in comparison with the joys of the man who has played a perfect innings. In a sense, perhaps, the first-rate cricketer has achieved the more perfect performance: he has met every difficulty splendidly, his judgment as to running has been impeccable, he has not given a single chance. The writer, on the other hand, is--I think we may say--never perfect: consider those last chapters of “Don Quixote”; consider Steerforth and that infernal ... woman, Agnes; the Grandfather and Little Nell. Yet the man of the book has traversed such an infinitely wider region than the man of the bat and ball: he has perhaps rectified the work of the Creator and made himself anew and made himself much better; and so he has worked with all the world, fashioning a new life, discovering wonders where before there were no wonders, shewing secrets that had been hidden from the foundation of things, peering now and again, as Poe and Hawthorne peered, into the places of thick darkness, and, above all, voyaging into the unknown, perpetually climbing the steep white track that vanishes over the hill.

_Chapter VI_

We are, I think, in the period 1890–1900; or, perhaps, to be more accurate, let us say 1889–1899. Between these dates I made a translation of “Le Moyen de Parvenir,” an early seventeenth-century book by an odd follower of Rabelais. I wrote “The Great God Pan,” “The Inmost Light,” “The Three Impostors,” “The Hill of Dreams,” a short collection of experiments called “Ornaments in Jade,” “Hieroglyphics,” “The White People,” the first part of “A Fragment of Life,” and “The Red Hand.” As I have said, I had inherited a little capital and spent it, and at ample leisure wrote these books and tales, instead of doing honest work. In the words of some character in “The Three Impostors,” I regarded my various legacies as an endowment of research.

Now, as to the first title on this list, I was inspired to translate “Le Moyen de Parvenir” by that earlier Rabelaisian enthusiasm, which had lasted on. I found the book (in the original edition, I think), a little dumpy volume, while I was in the employment of a firm of second-hand booksellers who lived not far from Leicester Square. I have been called a modest man in an after-dinner speech, and I hope I am one; but I am sure I was modest in 1888. For, finding that I could not get a “rise” on the £60 a year which York Street afforded me, I tried Leicester Square and asked as much as £80; thirty shillings a week. I think the firm were amused; but they gave it me, and I set about cataloguing books for them.

I did this under odd conditions. When I made my application, the Brothers--let us say--took me down to the place in the basement where my work would have to be done. Once, I suppose, it had been the underground back-kitchen of the house. The kitchen was occupied by two other employees of the firm. One of them kept the accounts; the other treated “foxed” plates and pages in baths and made them fresh again, and “grangerised” and packed up books that had been bought. And the kitchen had the illumination from the solid glass over which people walked as they passed the shop, and some sort of air from the outer world. But my workshop had neither one nor the other. Save for gas, it was in total darkness. Its air was dead. And the House asked me very fairly whether I thought I could stand it. I said I could, and so I went to work.

I was never any good at cataloguing, real, technical cataloguing. I was explaining the other day to a friend of mine, a most accomplished and learned cataloguer, how I despised his work. “This business,” I said, “of putting little slanty lines between the words of a title-page. A pitiable job,” I proceeded, “it must be so since I could never make anything of it.” But, the truth is, I never had any heart for the work. I don’t care twopence whether a book is in the first edition or in the tenth; nay, if the tenth is the best edition, I would rather have it. To me it appears mere childishness to consider whether Lowndes--I think that is one of the authorities--has seen three copies of some particular book or three hundred; the only question being: is the book worth reading or not? Then, when it comes to measuring an Elzevir, say, with a graduated rule, and pronouncing a little book three inches and a half high to be a “tall copy,” my common sense revolts. In other words, I am sure that Bibliography is a capital game, but it is not my game. I disliked my work of cataloguing; but I loathed another branch of my work, that was indexing. Everybody knows about “grangerising.” You take a book, say, Smith’s “Life of Nollekens.” In it many eighteenth-century personages are mentioned, and many London streets and public places. The indexer has to read through the book, noting every person, every place, and compile an index. And on this index the grangeriser, the bookseller, goes to work hunting his stock of plates, hunting certain well-known sources for pictures with which he can stuff the original work. He will destroy a dozen or a hundred or a thousand other books of less value to produce a kind of monster: “The Life of Nollekens,” by Joseph Smith, 1 vol., 8vo., 17--. Enlarged to 3 vols. quarto, and furnished with 250 extra illustrations, comprising portraits, views, plans, maps, and original and facsimile letters from Blank, Dash, Chose, and other famous persons of the period. Purple Levant Morocco Jansenist; in watered purple silk case, gilt. Price: A great deal.

There. I am afraid I have forgotten the trick of the business and my friend the expert cataloguer will say that it is a good thing indeed that I have changed my trade; but it is something like that. Well, indexing is a horrible job; a weariness, a nuisance; a matter of covering the table with innumerable little slips of paper that flow over on to the floor; and one must be careful and accurate, and I have always hated being careful, and accurate--unless I happen to be interested in what I am doing. Besides, I hold that “grangerising” is both barbarous and silly. So I didn’t like my work, but I liked the Brothers. They were always most courteous. Near our establishment was a shop where a very old gentleman sold precious things. His shop windows were made of small squares of glass. Above them was an inscription to the effect that the firm were “Goldsmiths and Silversmiths to Their Majesties the King and Queen and to Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent.” And the old gentleman who kept this shop wore what we call evening-dress all day long, and advanced to meet his customers with an inclined head, his hands clasped together. The Brothers were a good deal younger, but they were of the same school. They had a way of putting things. For example, Brother Charles was trying to teach me how to catalogue their very beautiful collection of French eighteenth-century illustrated books, the sort of books that have illustrations by Fragonard.

“And if, Mr. Machen,” said Brother Charles, “if it strikes you that any of these plates are brilliant impressions--well, we have no objection to your saying so.”

It may be mentioned that the firm dealt occasionally in works which would not be suitable for the “center table” of a New England parlour. For themselves, for their own private taste, they read George Eliot and thought her by far the greatest novelist that the English Nation had ever produced. I am sure that they would have held “Peregrine Pickle”--save in the rare first impression--to be a low book, and Dickens, I conjecture, would have struck them as funny and vulgar. But, still, selling books was their business, and it was not their affair as booksellers to censor the morals of the works they sold. They dealt in rare books.

Well, one morning as I walked down from Great Russell Street to the shop, I was reading of the trial and conviction of a minor bookseller of Charing Cross Road. This Mr. Jackson, or whatever his name was, had been found guilty of selling obscene books, and had been sent to gaol, for nine months, if I remember. I mentioned the matter to Brother Ned as I entered.

“You’ve seen about Jackson?” I said.

“Yes, Mr. Machen,” said Brother Ned, with a certain moral austerity of demeanour that was new to me. “We _have_ seen about Mr. Jackson, and we wish to state at once that we have no sympathy with Mr. Jackson; none whatever. There is a _right_ way, Mr. Machen, of doing these things and a _wrong_ way.”

Mr. Jackson, I may say, did not deal in rare books. His prices were low, he appealed to the general public. I hasten to add that on the whole I sympathise with the Brothers on this matter. And I add also: that after more recent experiences of mine I am very loath to find fault with any persons who treat those in their employment as human beings, with the decent civilities, courtesies and considerations that are befitting between man and man. In those days I had no knowledge of the anthropoids; still, I appreciated the pleasant treatment I received.

Yet, with all their pleasant manners, I am afraid that the Brothers did not find in me the ideal cataloguer. Anyhow, one day Brother Ned came down to my darksome place with a queer little quarto in his hand, a quarto in a dull paper wrapper. He had it open, marked with a slip of paper, at a certain page, and so far as I remember, without any particular preface or explanation, he asked me to begin making a translation of the work from that point. I said: “Certainly, Mr. Edward,” and began to translate without more ado.

And here I may say that my career as a French translator has always struck me as highly humorous. At the good old grammar school where I was educated and educated very well, I think that the headmaster thoroughly agreed with the boys that Foreign Languages were a silly game that, for various reasons, one had to play. Education was Latin and Greek, but a notion had arisen in these late days that one ought to learn French, and so there was a French master. But he wore neither cap nor gown, and so he was not a real master, and so, again, his language was not a real language. Therefore: poor M. Ménard! And I am afraid that he was a very bad master. If his authority had been supported, and if we had tried our best, I do not think we should have learned much; as it was, the French lessons, three times a week, were a farce. I knew no French when I left Hereford Cathedral School in 1880, that is, I could not have conjugated the verb _Aimer_ to save my life. I had read no French to speak of. Then, in my desolation in Clarendon Road, I had somehow come across “Gil Blas” and had managed, being interested, to get through it. Then, the York Street publisher had sent me down the sixteenth-century “Heptameron” and had ordered me to translate it, and I did so, somehow. And now, Brother Ned ordered me to translate from the dumpy quarto which he handed me; and forthwith I set about translating, not troubling what it was, what it was about, not caring two straws that I had not the thread of the narrative, nor worrying over the fact that I knew nothing whatever about the enigmatic “M.M.” or the mysterious “C.C.” into whose singular adventures I now plunged gaily. Thus I began the translation of the famous “Memoirs of Casanova,” and I think the money balance between the Brothers and myself was readjusted. For if I had been dear as a cataloguer, at thirty shillings a week, I was decidedly cheap as a translator. Casanova is a work that runs into twelve sizeable volumes, and the task of turning it into English took me a year, and I think the cost to the firm will be held to have been strictly moderate.

And what about these strange Memoirs of the charlatan adventurer? Well, not long ago I was called upon to write an introduction to a reissue of the version I had made in the ’eighties. I found this an extremely difficult task. The obvious solution of the difficulty, the writing a sort of _précis_ of the book and calling it an Introduction, did not appeal to me. It was some time before the “moral” of the Memoirs disengaged itself. The Introduction when written proved to be an essay on the futility of trying to tell the whole truth about the relations between men and women. This is what Casanova, who was highly qualified, in a certain sense, for the undertaking, tried to do; and the more “frank,” the more “outspoken” his page the more the secret escapes from it; the more openly he reveals, the more deeply he conceals the mysteries. For the fact is that all the real secrets are ineffable; the secrets of love, and the secrets of the wood; the secrets of the flower and the secrets of the flame; and the secrets of the Faith. As I point out in my Introduction, you can enumerate the scientific facts--such of them as are known--relating to any subject. You can define a horse, for example, as Bitzer defined it in “Hard Times.”

“Quadruped. Gramjnivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.”

And so you may discourse of the pistils and stamens of the lilies of the field, and divide the fowls of the air into genera and species and sub-species and count the teeth of Keats: and when all is done, you know--nothing. Nothing that is of the essence of your matter, nothing of its “quiddity,” a word that we have ceased to use, I suppose, because we have no use for it, having forgotten that there is such a thing as that essence which is present in all things, which indeed makes them to be what they are, which is nevertheless unsearchable and ineffable. And all this is true, not only of the matters which the plain man, the man in the street, is inclined to sniff at, but of all things, of man himself and of the universe of noumena and phenomena which is presented to him. If you talk to the plain, practical man about Mystic Theology, Mystic Love, Poetry, Romance, he will, very likely, brush you aside with his “In my opinion that’s all imagination”--and serve you right for talking to him on such subjects at all. The dear fellow has no notion of the fact that he has never seen a point, a line, a square, or a triangle, and that he never will see any one of these things--in this life at all events. He has seen black marks on paper which he has been told are lines and squares and triangles. Being at heart thoroughly credulous, he believes what he is told, but if he will dig up his old “Euclid” and read the definitions, he will find that no mortal eyes can ever see a square or a circle, since a line is length without breadth and a plane surface is length and breadth without thickness. There is nothing in the nature of things to prevent a man from seeing a dragon or a griffin, a gorgon or a unicorn. Nobody as a matter of fact has seen a woman whose hair consisted of snakes, nor a horse from whose forehead a horn projected; though very early man most probably did see dragons--known to science as pterodactyls--and monsters more improbable than griffins. At any rate, none of these zoological fancies violates the fundamental laws of the intellect; the monsters of heraldry and mythology do not exist, but there is no reason in the nature of things nor in the laws of the mind why they should not exist. But no man hath seen a line at any time, since the manifestation of length without breadth is a contradiction in terms. And the plain man is probably inclined to believe in the existence of vulgar fractions; he may tell you that he makes use of them daily in his calculations. But let him study the story of the race between Achilles and the Tortoise, and note to what monstrous results his belief in elementary arithmetic inevitably conducts him; results which are more intolerable than a madman’s dreams.

And then, again, there are wider, more universal conceptions than anything contained in the geometry and arithmetic books. In a little book of mine with the bad title of “War and the Christian Faith”--the publisher chose the title--I speak thus of Space and Time:

“Take two insistent and unavoidable examples (of the things
which are unsearchable and indefinable), space and time.
No man who strolls from his arm-chair to the mantelpiece
and watches the hands of the clock move round can deny
the existence of either, since he has walked from point
to point in one and seen the other measured before his
eyes. But as to understanding space and time, what highest
philosophy can attain to such a pitch? The limitless cannot
so much as be imagined in the mind, nor imagined in a
nightmare: but that space which you have traversed of some
eight or ten feet is limitless, and must be so.

“It is a sea without a shore. And time, that which your
two-guinea clock ticks off for you, as you watch the dial:
it had no beginning that you can picture; it can have no
end save with God. You cannot understand; you must believe;
and so on your very hearth-rug the infinites and eternities
are before you and confront you, as truly as the clock face
confronts you.”

And the conclusion of the whole matter is that we live and move in a world of profound and ineffable mystery; that all things from the most abstract to the most concrete are involved in this mystery, and, _therefore_, that Casanova as an exponent of love is a futile fellow. He was a Voltairean; he approached the question as he would say without prejudices, as the foolish among us would say, without any nonsense, or, as the still more foolish among us would say, in a scientific spirit. And the result is exactly what might be expected: nothing. Love is defined and expounded in the spirit of Bitzer defining a horse; and one perceives that science misapplied is just gibberish, nothing more or less. Otherwise, taking Casanova’s Memoirs from a lower standpoint, they are in many places vastly entertaining. He knew all Europe from Petersburg and Constantinople to London and Madrid; he was familiar with the palace and the gutter; he was the friend of Kings and philosophers and popes--and also of the scum of the eighteenth-century earth. One cannot understand the period as a whole without knowing Casanova.

So I translated and translated day after day; but in a few months’ time the black hole in which I worked began very violently to disagree with me. I got ill, and it was clear that some change must be made. The Brothers, as always, were courteous and considerate: why not do the work at home? I assented very willingly, worked at the task for five hours every day, and every Saturday took my parcel of copy to the shop and got my thirty shillings, the week’s wages.

And here I must make a boast, which is not wholly a boast: the second part of this sentence I shall explain no farther. I finished the translation of the Memoirs, but the book was not immediately issued. On the completion of my job the Brothers needed me no more. I imagine that they wanted a real, expert, technical cataloguer, not a literary man of sorts; and my having worked for them for some months at my own home and not in the shop made it easy for them to get rid of me quietly; rather, to let me fade away, without the least suspicion of firmness, much less of harshness. And they were always very glad to see me when I chose to look them up, either on business or merely as a friendly caller. I remember, for example, that when I had finished the translation of “Le Moyen de Parvenir” and was “subscribing” the book with “the trade,” I called at the shop and was received with a genial and kindly courtesy that I have not forgotten, though it is a long time since 1890; but then I do not forget. And lest it should be suspected by some persons that under a veil of benignity I am “getting at” the Brothers all the time, I hasten to say that this is not so; to say this in the strongest manner possible. True, thirty shillings a week was not good pay for decent French-English translating, even in 1889; but it was the wages that I had asked myself, having been thoroughly convinced by my experiences of the six preceding years that I was such a dismal and incapable ass that if I just managed to escape the Governorship of the Island of Farre Joyaunce--otherwise the ditch or the workhouse--it was as much as I could expect. So I asked my thirty shillings a week and hoped in my heart that it was not too much; and I am not blaming the Brothers in the least because they did not press more upon me. And, however that may be, they were always courteous and kindly in all communications that passed between us; and for that they shall be in my grateful memory so long as I live. I have said already, I think, how once during the last year of my employment on the “Evening News,” finding myself in old haunts of long ago, Wellington Street, Bow Street, York Street, anguish possessed me as I remembered how I had once starved and had known something like happiness while I toiled over the ancient occult books in the Catherine Street garret; anguish possessed me as I recollected the happy time in misery. And, as I said to a friend soon afterwards: “In those days I was getting considerably less money in a whole year than I am now getting in a month; and yet....”

Again, I say, if our clergy would but mind their business. If instead of enquiring into the exact cut of bodices, instead of passing anxious hours as to the pernicious corruptions of the Fox-Trot and the Bunny Hug, instead of working with all their hearts and souls to make sure that no one can possibly get a glass of bitter beer after ten o’clock, instead of unmasking the inferno of the race-course, the utter levity of much of our railway literature; if, instead of all this accursed drivel, cant and imbecility, they would but say Mass and preach the Gospel, and otherwise quite abide in peace! Let them go to the Book, and there they will find that the most horrible sin denounced in it is neither gambling, drinking nor wantoning, but the sin of shaming a man, of bitterly insulting him, of making him mean in his own eyes, of making him despise his own self as something unutterably fouled and scorned and bewrayed. What is the text? Something like: but he that sayeth to his brother, “Thou fool,” shall be in danger of hell fire.

I am drawing a contrast between 1889 and 1921, and hence I say that the Brothers always treated me with the common decency due from one human being to another, though they were rich and I was poor, though they were men of business and I an idiot in all matters of business, though they were masters and I was man.

And now as to the famous boast. As I said, I ceased to be in the employment of these good men. I went into the country, up on the Children Hills. We neither saw nor heard anything of each other. But all the while those legacies of which I have spoken came dropping slow, and in 1893, when I had made up my mind to return to London, I think I must have had in bank something between three and four thousand pounds. I was assailed by an unworthy pang of prudence, by one of the foolish notions that the world’s people take for wisdom. It struck me that this living on capital, taking the pieces of eight by fistfuls out of the chest, would never do; that the money ought to be invested, preferably in some business in which I could contribute work as well as money. I looked about me, I advertised, I saw some people in the City and found nothing promising from my point of view, though I found here and there such curiosities as London, I believe, only affords. For example, in a very dim sort of cock-loft in an old house in the heart of the City, I hit upon a firm of general agents who had answered my advertisement. There were two of them: one, a young, rosy, out-in-the-open sort of man, the other elderly, frock-coated, with a kind of dissenting beard on his chin. He talked of the version of Horace’s odes that he was shortly bringing out at his own expense, and discussed with me the true pronunciation of the Latin language with much intelligence. The junior partner’s talk was of trawling, and indeed he said that the firm was a sort of trawling concern--in City waters.

But nothing came of it, and at last I bethought me of the Brothers. Brother Charles was as genial as ever. He saw my point. He said: “We are going to issue Casanova at last; why not put a thousand pounds into that for a start?” I agreed, and the matter was settled. And then, very nervously, with a good deal of hesitation, with a certain difficulty in the choice of words, Brother Charles said:

“Of course, Mr. Machen, we quite recognise the ... er ... circumstances in which you made your most admirable translation of the book. It was ... er ... in a manner ... er ... task-work; yes, _task-work_. Well ... the case is now, to a certain degree ... altered; you have an interest in the prosperity of the venture, and, in short, we rather wondered whether you would like to ... to ... _revise_ your manuscript.”

“Mr. Charles,” I replied, “I did the job as well as I could; and I don’t think I can make it any better.”

_Chapter VII_

Beroalde de Verville proved to be what the elder members of the theatrical profession used to call “a pill.” Only the other day I was reading a French account of this author. The critic said in the course of his remarks that many people who had gone to the “Moyen de Parvenir” in search of unpleasantness had turned back from the quest, deterred by the difficulty of the language. And I don’t know that it is more difficult for a modern Frenchman than for an Englishman. It is written in a sort of Babylonish dialect which is not exactly French though it looks like it; as Meredith looks like English to the casual glance. And then, it is not only difficult, but obscure; not only are the sentences queerly constructed, but the subject-matter is of a highly dubious and cloudy character: when you have found out what Beroalde is saying, you begin to wonder what he is saying it about. And, then, there are bits of old dialect peppered about this excessively odd volume. I remember coming upon two words: “iquent hesne.” I sat down in front of them, and looked at them from every angle. I don’t know how I found out at last that “iquent hesne” was a sort of seventeenth-century French “Zummerzet” for “cette chêne”--“thicky oāk.” Again the “Moyen” is thick with puns, of the kind that used to be called in the golden days of Burlesque “outrageous”: and the time I wasted in trying to turn these silly French tricks into sillier English contortions! On the whole, I would say that “Le Moyen de Parvenir” in literature is as a cathedral constructed entirely of gargoyles would be in architecture. Rabelais is full of gargoyles, “apes and owls and antics,” as he calls them, on the outside of the jar. But within, as he rightly claims, there are precious medicines, aromatic balms of singular power and virtue. And so far as I can judge, Beroalde is all oddity and nothing else. He cost me a year’s hard labour; the version was issued and is now valued by collectors; and that is all that need be said.

And now--in 1890--I began to try a little journalism of the more or less literary kind. I began, I think, by writing “Turnovers” for the “Globe,” and miscellaneous articles for the “St. James’s Gazette,” and at length stories for the latter paper, which was then edited by Mr.--now Sir--Sydney Lowe. The “Globe” is extinct, the “St. James’s Gazette” is merged and submerged in the “Evening Standard”; there are no papers of such metal now in existence. The difference between them and the evening papers of the day is a very simple one: the former were meant to please the educated, the latter are designed to entertain the uneducated, and the uneducated may be equated, very largely indeed, with women. It is an odd paradox: there is no doubt, I suppose, that the instruction--or, if you like, education--of women has made immense strides in the last thirty years; and yet it is true that when a newspaper editor says to himself: “We have an immense number of women readers and we must see that they get what they like,” the result is drivel. This sort of thing:

Madame has just discovered a new craze. Jewelled clay
pipes and shag tobacco delicately sprinkled with gold-dust
are now quite _démodés_ when once we cross the borders of
Balham; but my lady prides herself on her collection of
hookahs, the water-pipes of the gorgeous East.

It is quite the thing, I hear, amongst really smart women
to give “Hookah Teas.” Everybody wears Oriental costume,
and sits on cushions piled on the floor, and delicately
draws in the aroma of the rarest Turkish Tobacco, scented
by its passage through rosewater or lavender-water. At Lady
Clarinda Belsize’s Hookah Tea last Wednesday, two native
musicians played the tom-tom and the _guzla_ behind a
curtain, or _purdah_, as I am told it is called. Of course
_yashmaks_ were worn by all the guests.

There; it is not worth parodying. And there is another sort of terrible tosh which deals with the doings of “The Summer Girl” and “The Winter Girl” and “The Marathon Girl”: all of it a very feeble imitation of the cheapest American journalism. In the ’nineties this kind of thing existed, but it was confined to the columns of one or two ladies’ papers. In those days, I would not say that the editors of evening papers brought out their journals exclusively for the benefit of the members of the best clubs of St. James’s and Pall Mall; but I certainly should say that they had the clubs in their mind’s eye; that they presumed a certain standard of education and culture in their readers. All that ended when the evening “Westminster Gazette” came to an end.

But indeed there would be little harm done if a column or two columns or three columns were reserved for the “Hookah Tea” stuff and the “Caravan Girl” stuff and all similar stuff. You could skip these columns if you didn’t like them, just as I skip the racing columns, in which I am not interested. But “the women” rule the whole paper. Not only must the editor put in matter which he knows they will like, he must keep out matter which he knows they won’t like. And the result is ... the result as we know it. As the “literary editor” of a big London paper acutely observed to me not long ago, the case of the newspaper article is exactly as the case of chops and steaks, beefsteak puddings and saddles of mutton that were of old. “The women” have spoilt all. What do they know or care about man’s food? To them there is nothing to choose between a chop fried white and hard and greasy in the frying-pan and a chop which has been purged of all excess by the ardent heat, beneath the gridiron, which beneath a coat half black, half golden-brown, preserves its delicious juices, which sizzles on the plate as William or Charles serves it, which, opened by the eager knife, shews within a hue like that of a blush-rose in June. These are not matters to enchant the wayward heart of a young girl, and when once she sets foot inside the tavern coffee-room, farewell to all such solid merits. There was once a noble tavern called Herbert’s, famous for two generations. Men who had spent half a lifetime in Africa or India or in the islands of the South Seas were sustained by the thought of the beefsteak pudding at Herbert’s. The times changed and the old tavern with them. Going there in these later days, I used to wonder why all the meats seemed to taste alike, why there was no distinctive and peculiar relish about any of the dishes. I found out the reason why one day. I had business, oddly enough, in Herbert’s kitchen. One of the cooks shewed me the joints roasting on the jack; and I perceived that three different meats were cooking at the one fire, while beneath, in a common pan, their juices mingled, ready for the basting ladle. It is not much wonder, I think, that veal and lamb and beef taste all much alike in this unhappy place, once so high, now fallen so low. One night I was dining there, and a member of the party asked the waiter to bring him some Stilton. “I beg your pardon, sir,” said the man, “we only have _English_ cheeses.” It sounds impossible; but I heard this with my ears. In the old days Herbert’s was exclusively masculine in its custom; I do not know what would have happened to that waiter then. I hardly think that his death would have been an easy one.

But to “the women” all this is of no account. They know nothing about man’s food, as I say, and they care less. I do not blame them; I do not blame myself for being ignorant of the difference between Hopsac and Gaberdine: but how would _they_ like it if I poked my nose into their Oxford Street shops and insisted on these shops being carried on to suit my taste?

So through this monstrous incursion of women, with the war and the nursery hours of to-day, the old tavern life has gone; utterly and for ever, I am afraid. A good thing has gone. The old mahogany boxes with bright brass work and green curtains, the light twinkling in the dark polished surfaces that were all about the room, the flaming fire with the plates warming by it, the plain food, the best of its kind, cooked in the best possible manner, the mighty tankards of mighty ale, the port that _was_ port afterwards, in itself a great gift and a curious grace, and later--say about eleven o’clock--Charles appearing with a large china bowl and a bottle under his arm, following up these things with lump sugar, lemons, and the hot water: it is all over. And it is not only the good material things that have been taken away: the good meats and the good drinks, the glowing mahogany and the cheerful blaze and crackle of the fire: with them has gone, I suspect, a certain genial habit of the mind and soul which was congruous with all the circumstances of the old-fashioned tavern, which was congruous also with good men and good books and choice poetry, with all the rich zest and relish and unction which made the Victorian age of letters a great age; and, in its measure, a worthy successor to three other illustrious tavern ages: the Shakespearian, the Caroline, and the Johnsonian. Think of Falstaff and his tavern bill and his warning against thin potations, think of Herrick and his address to Ben, his fond remembrance of the taverns “where we such clusters had as made us nobly wild not mad,” think of Johnson squeezing the orange into the bowl with antick gestures, saying “Who’s for _poonsh_?” think of Tennyson and that blest pint of port at the vanished Cock Tavern, think of Dickens, that great lover of tavern feasts and immortaliser of them: think of all this, my poor young man, and beat your breast. There are no jolly taverns for you, and your favourite authors do not write like men--“my son Cartwright writes all like a man,” said Ben Jonson--but like psycho-analytical chemists.

And as I was saying, as with the taverns, so with the papers. When I wrote a little for them, in 1890 or thereabouts, it was allowable to assume a certain amount of literacy, a certain knowledge in the reader. Now that is over. I know the case of a man who, I am certain, pretends ignorance that he may continue to be employed. As it happens, he is an expert in food and drink; but I have known him number Beaujolais with the wines of Bordeaux in a newspaper article, and speak of curry powder and pickles as ordinary ingredients in veal and ham pie. I believe he knows much better; but he has probably found out that a misstatement or two gives an easy careless air that is much admired. Nobody can call a writer of this kind a pedant. A highly accomplished journalist said to me a few years ago: “Always remember that we appeal, not to the cabman, but to the cabman’s wife.” And another instance, though I am afraid it is somewhat tinged with self-praise. I had written a brief article for the “Evening News” on a topic that had been given to me; I was to explain _why_ it is that a “mean street” of to-day is, generally, hideous and appalling, while a row of sixteenth-century cottages is, generally, a delight to see. I did as I always do when I can, I took the particular instance and placed it under a general principle. I said the chief horror of the modern street was not to be sought in the poverty of the design, though that was, doubtless, bad enough, but in the fact that in the street of to-day each house is a replica of the other, so that the effect to the eye is, if the street be long enough, the prolongation of one house to infinity, in an endless series of repetitions. And I pointed out that even if you admired some particular picture or statue immensely, it would be rather awful to traverse a long gallery in which the picture or the statue were repeated again and again as far as the eye could see. And then, on the other hand, I shewed how the sixteenth-century cottages were each of them individuals, each with some slight difference from the cottage next door, each with its variety in door or window or pent-house. And hence, I urged, a continual slight surprise to the beholder, and taking the supposed row as a whole, that strangeness in the proportion which Bacon declared, most profoundly, to be necessary to the highest beauty. Well, I got this with difficulty into the prescribed 500 words--“nobody will read anything over 500 words”--and said to myself: “Now that Patmore is dead, nobody else could have written that article. But ... there will be a row.” There was. Lord Northcliffe gave the little essay the honour of a special mention in one of his famous _communiqués_--as I believe they were called. He spoke of it with venom as “a wiseacre article.” I am sure he was perfectly right from his point of view. The fault was mine. “When I am in Rome, I fast on Saturdays,” said one of the Fathers.

Things have changed indeed. I was mentioning Coventry Patmore. In the Introduction to the “Religio Poetæ,” a collection of short essays of the profoundest wisdom, he acknowledges his obligations to Greenwood, once editor of the “St. James’s Gazette.” Some of these essays had appeared in that journal: the fact is quite stupefying considered in the light of the journalism of to-day. Education increases; ignorance grows deeper.

* * * * *

Let me not be understood as claiming that my newspaper work of thirty-two years ago was characterised by the profoundest wisdom. Very far from it; my articles were harmless and agreeable enough, I think, in a small way; and writing them, I first began to get a hint of my true subject; the country of my childhood and my youth. And I thus began to move away from the exotic Rabelaisian influence, both as to manner and to matter: to perceive that not the splendid Loire but the humble Soar brook, winding and shining in deep valleys and obscured by dark alder thickets, was my native stream. I began to see that I was a citizen of Caerleon-on-Usk, and not of Tours or of Chinon, and that the old grey manor-houses and the white farms of Gwent had their beauty and significance, though they were not castles in Touraine. There was something of all this, of course, in “The Chronicle of Clemendy,” the Great Romance which was neither great nor a romance; but in this everything was viewed and everything expressed in an exotic medium: now I saw that a blossoming thorn bush in the valley of the Soar and the nightingale singing in it and the river level about Caerleon and the red fires of sunset over the mountain in the west were all in themselves and by themselves fit matter for the work; that they needed not to be disguised in a French literary habit of four hundred years ago.

It was in this summer of 1890 that I wrote the first chapter of “The Great God Pan.” I have told the whole story in the Introduction to the latest edition of that fantasy, which is published by Messrs. Simpkin, Marshall, and whether I should weary my readers I know not, but I do know that I should weary myself if I told it all over again. The tale was written in bits, in the intervals between severe literary cramps, as I have mentioned in this present volume, and it was published by Mr. John Lane, of the Bodley Head, at the end of 1894, when yellow bookery was at its yellowest. And it aroused a certain amount of attention. There was a storm--in a doll’s teacup.

The other day a friend of mine said genially to me:

“I have just been reading that ‘Great God Pan’ of yours
over again, and I really don’t see that there’s much in it
to make a sensation of.”

I am sure he was quite right. But a sensation there was, of a minor kind. It had some mysterious property in it, this little book, which caused good men to froth at the mouth, greatly to my delight. I have quoted a good many of the reviews in the Introduction to the Simpkin, Marshall edition: things like this:

“We are afraid he only succeeds in being ridiculous. The
book is, on the whole, the most acutely and intentionally
disagreeable we have yet seen in English. We could say
more, but refrain from doing so for fear of giving such a
work advertisement.”--“Manchester Guardian.”

“This book is gruesome, ghastly, and dull ... the majority
of readers will turn from it in utter disgust.”--“Lady’s
Pictorial.”

“These tricks have also their ludicrous side.”--“Guardian.”

And so forth. It is very well, but I cannot help saying, as an old craftsman and an old reviewer, that it might have been better. I have no fault to find with the technique of the “Guardian”; but the “Lady’s Pictorial” should have left out the “gruesome” and the “ghastly” and also, I am inclined to think, the “disgust.” There are readers who like the gruesome and the ghastly; there are readers whose curiosity is stimulated by the term “disgust.” I am afraid, for example, that if the account of legal proceedings, civil or criminal, is headed “Disgusting Details,” there are minds so prurient as to be rather attracted than repelled, and I am sure that the gentle scribe of the “Lady’s Pictorial” did not wish to paint my little book in attractive colours. And so with the “Manchester Guardian.” “Ridiculous” is admirable; but “acutely and intentionally disagreeable” is something of a signal set to attract those prurient readers whose existence I have regretted; and the last sentence says too much. Mr. Harry Quilter, something of a figure in those days, did better. He pointed out in an article in the “Contemporary Review”--also something of a figure in those days--that the only explanation he could give of such favourable notices as the book had received was that the author must have a great many friends engaged in journalism. I wrote a temperate letter to Mr. Quilter in which I said I was very sorry, but I didn’t know any journalists at all--which happened to be the truth. He wrote back to remind me, as he said, that there was “an Inmost Light to which you may yet be true”--“The Inmost Light” is the title of a tale which was included in the first edition of “The Great God Pan.”

--One of the saddest books in the world is Mrs. Gaskell’s wonderful “Life of Charlotte Brontë.” But there is one tragi-comical touch. Poor valiant, simple, stricken Charlotte was being entertained in town by Mr. and Mrs. Smith. There was a dinner-party, given, I suppose, in her honour, and she writes to an old friend:

“There were only seven gentlemen at dinner besides Mr. Smith, but of these five were critics--men more dreaded in the world of letters than you can conceive. I did not know how much their presence and conversation had excited me till they were gone, and the reaction commenced. When I had retired for the night, I wished to sleep--the effort to do so was vain. I could not close my eyes. Night passed; morning came, and I rose without having known a moment’s slumber.”

Who were these terrible five? We do not know, and it is possible enough that if we heard their names we should not have heard of their names, though, likely enough, George Henry Lewes was one of them. It is odd and pathetic too to think that a great woman such as Charlotte Brontë should have allowed the brilliant repartees and tremendous reputation of George Henry Lewes to break her rest. And just before this passage there is another, as strange and as pathetic. A severe review of “Shirley” appeared in “The Times.” Mr. and Mrs. Smith kindly “mislaid” the paper. But Charlotte insisted on pressing the thorn to her bosom. She would see “The Times.”

“Mrs. Smith took her work, and tried not to observe the
countenance, which the other tried to hide between the huge
sheets; but she could not help becoming aware of tears
stealing down the face and dropping on the lap.”

And all over a review, an unfavourable review! It is very strange, or, at least, it seems so to me, since, like Jim the nigger, I don’t never cry ska’sely over reviews, and I have always contrived to get my usual sleep.

But I have left out one curious specimen of the “Great God Pan” reviews, a specimen which leads up to a curious passage. The “Westminster Review” said:

“It is an incoherent nightmare of sex and the supposed
horrible mysteries behind it, such as might conceivably
possess a man who was given to a morbid brooding over
these matters, but which would soon lead to insanity if
unrestrained ... innocuous from its absurdity.”

I was talking over old literary doings and the affairs of the ’nineties with a friend one day in the spring of 1921. My friend was asking me about my early books and their reception. I gave him a lurid account of the castigations which I had received on account of “The Great God Pan.”

“Why,” said I, “the ‘Westminster’ practically told me that if I didn’t take care I should end up in a lunatic asylum.”

“Well,” replied the man, meaning to be funny, “haven’t you? I understood you were at Carmelite House?”

“No,” I returned, also meaning to be funny, “I haven’t. All the lunatic asylums that I’ve heard of have been managed by a _doctor_.”

* * * * *