Part 4

The virtues of the villager are well known. They are such as to deserve and frequently to obtain happiness, but they do not tend to his prosperity in the Club’s sense. Nationalise the land to-morrow, and parcel it out in small holdings next week; by next year more than half of it will have run to waste. On the other half, for nine men who gain a bare subsistence off it there may be one who will do well. What is lacking? Mental alacrity. The peasant can plod with the best, rise early, work till dark; but he will do the thing to-morrow which he did yesterday. Mental sloth is temperamental: probably the Iberians had it. But there is nothing to prevent him from being happy; very many of them are so, and more than you might expect. Farm-labour, like farming, is a way of life; and so is happiness, in the sense that the kingdom of Heaven may be within you. One might go so far as to say that the prosperity of which the labourer dreams would rather diminish his store of happiness than increase it. Some of the wisest of my friends of the village feel sure of it. There are men about here who have risen in the world, as they call it, and are not conspicuously better citizens, nor more contented ones for that. Getting and spending, they lay waste their time. The wise villager sees it, and if he would rather be happy than prosperous is in the way to remain so. In that resolve the papers of the Agricultural Club cannot help him. The elementals remain. Others abide our question, but not those.

OTHERWHERENESS

The man whom I found one day in the reading-room at the Club, searching the Court Guide to find out his own name, was quite good-tempered about it. It had suddenly occurred to him to send a telegram, and he had written it out: when it came to signing it he was beat. I told him at once what I believed his name to be; he verified it in Boyle. “I might have had to get a dressing-room,” he said. “It isn’t one of those things which you can ask the hall-porter.”

The really absent-minded are not irritated by those intrusions of the supra-liminal self. The sub-liminal so pleasantly employs them, habitually, that they can afford to put up with the other’s impertinence. But occasionally he goes too far, as he certainly did with a dear and vague friend of mine when, horribly involved with a fishing line and a fly-hook in his sleeve, he hastily put his eye-glass into his mouth and his cigarette into his eye. Then indeed he broke into a flood of imprecation, so very unlike himself that one part of him “which never was heard to speak so free” really shocked the other part. “Oh, shameful, shameful!” I heard him say, and the profaner part was silenced. Here, of course, the whole assembled man was no further away than the whereabouts of the fly-hook, and not at all pleasantly occupied. Mostly, as Lamb says of his good friend, George Dyer:

“With G. D., to be absent from the body, is sometimes (not to speak it profanely) to be present with the Lord. At the very time when, personally encountering thee, he passes on with no recognition--or, being stopped, starts like a thing surprised--at that moment, reader, he is on Mount Tabor--or Parnassus--or co-sphered with Plato--or, with Harrington, framing ‘immortal commonwealths.’”

If he interrupted those happy sojournings, as he did once, to make a call in Bedford Square, and on learning that no one was at home, solemnly to sign his name in the visitors’ book, it is not at all surprising that, wandering on and on, he should presently find himself again in Bedford Square, again inquire for his friends, again ask for the visitors’ book and be brought up short, on the point of signing it again, by his own name scarcely dry--as if, says Lamb, “a man should suddenly encounter his own duplicate.” He may have been a little mortified, I daresay, but--it was worth it. A thing of the same sort happened to a very delightful lady of my friends--a lady of commanding presence, but occasional remarkable absences too. She went to call at a house in Eaton Square, no less, and found herself, when the door was opened by a footman, totally deprived of the name of the houselady. What did she? There was a moment of heart-beating and wild surmise; and then, with a smile of ineffable courtesy and sweetness, she held out her hand to the wondering man, pressed his own warmly as she said “_Good_-bye,” and sailed serenely away to resume her commerce with the infinite. Such commerce, I know, she had. She told me the story herself, and saw nothing amiss with it. Nor was there anything amiss. She was one who could do simple things simply--which is a great and rich possession; but occasionally she presumed upon it--as when she assured herself of the same virtue in her daughters and expected them to carry out her simplifications. That, of course, was a very different thing; but I don’t think she understood it. There is this also to be said, that women are much less self-conscious than men and do not go in such terror of being made ridiculous. Tell me of a man who could enter his drawing-room full of guests, and discovering himself without, say, his teeth, could laugh in the first face his eye encountered. “Forgive me--one moment--I must get my teeth”--tell me of such a man. _Mutatis mutandis_, I have been told of such a woman--and a great lady she was, too--by somebody who was there. It was not teeth, however.

The best of men--the George Dyers, whom, happily, we have always with us somewhere or other--are as content as most women with their natural destiny. George Dyer dined one night with Leigh Hunt at Hampstead, dined, talked, and took his leave. Twenty minutes later the knocker announced a late-comer. It was G. D. “What is the matter?” asked Hunt. “I think sir,” said Dyer, in his simpering, apologetic way, “I think I have left one of my shoes behind me.” He had indeed shuffled it off under the table, and did not discover his loss until he had gone a long way. As I read that story, which is Ollier’s (but I get it from Mr. Lucas), G. D.’s apologetics were directed to Hunt, whose rest he had disturbed, by no means to himself. A man less sublimely lifted was one with whom I had been staying in a Scotch country house. We came away together, and half-way to the station he struck himself on the forehead, and “Good God!” he said, “I have tipped the same man three times!” It appeared too true that he had: once in his bedroom, once in the hall, and once at the carriage door. Now he, if you like, was excessively mortified, and his reason may well have been that he had not been better employed, on Helikon or elsewhere, when he might have been noticing menservants. He was as blind as a bat, poor man, and a sense of infirmity may have stung him. The otherwhere men have no sense of infirmity--on the contrary, one of great gain. An ampler æther, a diviner air is theirs in which to exercise.

But of all divinely preoccupied men the best--unless Dyer be the best--is Brancas--the Comte de Brancas of whom you may read in Saint-Simon, in the Correspondence of “Madame,” and in Tallemant des Réaux. Brancas was to the Paris of the _Grand Siècle_ what Dyer was to the London of the Regency, or Dr. Spooner to the wits of my younger days. La Bruyère, summarising him as _Ménalque_, overdid his study, and made him appear like the clown in a circus who gets horribly involved in the carpet, or kicks away the hat he stoops to pick up. It may be perfectly true that Brancas went downstairs, opened his front door, and shut it again, thinking that he had just come in--that I can perfectly understand. It is a thing I might have done myself. But to add to it that he presently discovered his nightcap on his head, his stockings down about his ankles, and his shirt outside his _chausses_, is to spoil the story. Never mind, he is out in the street finally, and walking briskly along, with his mind leagues away. By and by he is brought up short by a violent blow on the nose. “Who has attacked me?” he cries. Nobody. He has walked fiercely into the tilt of a market cart, which he had overtaken in his briskness. Or he goes to Versailles to pay his court, enters the _appartement_, and passing under the central chandelier, his perruque is caught and held there; but he forges along. The company gapes, then bursts into laughter. Brancas stops, looks inquiringly about, sees the swinging perruque and is delighted. “Whose is that?” He looks all about him to find the bare pate and exposed ears. Finally, of course, somebody claps it on his head. A good story, which may be true.

Two of them, at least, may be, as they are told by Madame in letters to her friends. Brancas went to church--to the _Salut_: he knelt down, and feeling in his pocket for his Book of Hours, pulled out a slipper which he had put there instead of it. Just outside the church, on leaving, he is accosted by a lackey who, with much deprecation, asks him if he happens to have taken Monseigneur’s shoe by mistake. “Monseigneur’s shoe!” It is the fact that he had paid a call upon a bishop that afternoon. “No, no--certainly not”--then he remembers that he has, in fact, a slipper in his pocket. His hand goes in, to make sure that it is there. It is; but so is another slipper--which is precisely--Monseigneur’s.

The next is even better. Brancas goes to mass at Versailles. He is late, and bustles up the nave between the kneeling company. He sees, as he thinks, a _prie-dieu_ facing the altar. Most convenient--just the thing. He hastens, throws himself upon it. To his amazement it emits a strangled cry, gives way before him, and he finds himself intricately struggling on the pavement with a stout lady. His _prie-dieu_ had been the Queen-Mother.

THE JOURNEY TO COCKAIGNE

I remember being taken ill in a small town on the Marne in 1906, desperately ill with copper poisoning. I say that I remember, as if there was a chance that I should ever forget it. The agony, the rigour and all the rest of it, were accompanied by high fever and delirium, which lasted all through a burning August night. It happened that a _fête nationale_ had possession of the town: there were a fair, a steam roundabout, a horrible organ accompaniment. The grinding, remorseless tune, the uproar, the slapping of countless feet (though I tried to count them) on the pavement wove themselves into my racing dreams. I seemed to be a party to some Witches’ Sabbath; and now, if I ever try to imagine Hell, it always comes out like that. A dry, crackling, reiterated business, without rest, without mirth, without hope, without reason. One suffered incredibly, one was desperately concerned; the brain was involved in it; the more frivolous it was the more deeply the mind must work. I knew it was a festivity; all the familiar features of revel were there--and all horrible. The mind was so tired that you seemed to hear it wailing for mercy; but it went on jigging after the organ. The feet of the dancers were burnt by the paving stones, yet never stayed. Some mocking devil possessed the people, rode them with spurs. There was no zest, yet no pause; and through it all was the blare of the organ.

Life in London, in Ascot week, struck me, coming up after six months in the country, as very much like that night of fever. There was the same dry crackling, the same strife of noise, the symptoms of mirth without reality. London, of course, is much too big to be generalised from. The best is hidden behind shut doors. It is the froth of the ferment that you see. But there is now too much froth; one wonders what is working in the lees.

Londoners, as you pass them in a cab, are a crowd; you don’t even suspect individuality there. They drift along the streets like clouds. The colours of them are so blurred down by the dust and din that they seem a uniform drab. Here and there a yellow jumper, or a grass-green sunshade catches the eye; but no personality behind it, no reasonable soul in human flesh subsisting. It requires stern attention on a fixed point if you would candidly consider your fellow creatures as London has made them, and, no doubt, been made by them. It happened to me that I was held up by a block in Piccadilly, at a favourable point between Bond Street and the arcade of the Ritz. Four o’clock on a glaring afternoon; tea-shops crammed; motor buses piled skywards like market-carts: extraordinarily over-dressed young men, and extraordinarily undressed girls were on the pavement, all very much alike, and all apparently of one age.

Observe that I have not seen London in the season since the Armistice. Well, it seemed to me that the scythe had mown down much that I used to know. Here instead was a saturnalia of extreme youth. I saw thin girls in single garments of silk, with long white legs and Russian opera shoes; and young men walking with them, looking curiously at them, or talking to them urgently at shop windows. The girls said little; they were not there to talk, but to be talked to; they accepted what was said as a matter of routine. Their eyes wandered from article to article displayed. They seemed to me as purposeless as moths hovering about flowers at dusk. Love, I suppose, was their food--it ought to have been; but neither they nor their lovers showed any of the pride or triumph, the joy or the longing of love. Love, for once, was not a new thing; the wonder had left it. Fever had dried up the juices of nymph and swain alike. It was like a dinner off husks.

Next day was the first of Ascot, and I watched for some time the endless procession of motors in the Hammersmith Road. I had often seen it before--I mean before the war. It had been a big thing then; but now it was a monstrous thing, a nightmare of going to the races. A continuous stream there was, of long, low, swift, smooth-gliding machines, never stopping, almost noiseless. They were all covered and glazed, all filled inside with doll-like, silent, half-clad, vaguely-gazing girls; with stiff and starched, black-coated, silk-hatted young men. I saw no one laughing; I thought the whole business a dream on that account; for, though you see and mix with crowds in dreams, there is never either talking or laughing. It was that absence of heart in the thing, or of zest for it, which made one so uncomfortable. Lavish outlay is rather shocking nowadays; but if you take away the only excuse for it, which is high spirits, it is much more than shocking; it is terrifying, it is hideous.

Where on earth, I asked myself, did the money come from? Who floated, and how did they float the balances at the banks? Every one of those motors must have cost a thousand pounds; every one of the chauffeurs (you could see at a glance) must have cost five pounds a week. The clothes, no doubt, you could have on tick; but not the champagne, and not the chauffeurs. From where I stood in Addison Road I could see, at the lowest, fifty thousand pounds’ worth of motors. And the stream, mind you, at that hour reached from Ascot to Piccadilly, and was repeating itself on the Fulham Road and the King’s Road, to say nothing of the Uxbridge Road. Who were those people? Were they all profiteers, or all in other peoples’ debt? It was very odd. In the county where I live we are rather put to it how to keep going. The great houses are mostly shut up or in the market; the smaller houses are all too big for their owners and occupiers. There is a scale of general descent. The marquesses let their castles, if they can, and go in to the manors; the squires let their manors, and convert the farmhouses to their domestic use. I leave my old Rectory and hide in a cottage. We are all a peg or two down. Income-tax and the rates had done their fell work when there came upon us a coal strike of three months long--a knock-out blow to many. Did it not touch London? Or were all those pleasurers Colonel and Mrs. Rawdon Crawleys who live at the rate of seven thousand a year, on tick? The Lord knows.

On the whole, I thought it well that the miners’ wives, in the scorching grey villages of Durham and the Tyne, were not standing with me in Addison Road that first day of Ascot. Or if South Wales and Lanark had been there! I should not have wished them let loose on London just then. Nothing was further from London’s mind than either of those vexed and seething provinces. It neither talked of them nor read about them. _The Westminster Gazette’s_ front page was entirely filled up with a cricket match; so, by the by, was the second. _The Times_--but since _The Times_ has become sprightly I confess it is too much for me. An elephant on hot bricks! Nowadays, if I want to read the news I must send to Manchester for it. Thence I learn that the coal strike is in its third month, the English and Irish still murdering each other, and the Government still throwing overboard its own legislation. Golf news, cricket, polo, lawn tennis I can have from _The Westminster Gazette_.

The sea saw that and fled; Jordan was driven back. I stood it for three days, then came home to find the mallow in flower in the hedges, and men and women still afield getting in the last of the hay. Wilts was being careful over many things, but Ascot and thin girls were not of them. In London I was puzzled by the way the money was flying; but I was shocked, not by that, but by the absence of zest for a time-honoured pastime. If only some young couple had laughed! Or made love as if it was the only thing in the world worth doing! But they were all as weary as the King Ecclesiast. That seemed to me the serious matter.

SUICIDE OF THE NOVEL

The epic faculty in us is never likely to atrophy, but will break out again presently in some unsuspected place; for while all men are children once, most of them remain so all their lives. Winter’s Tales will go on, because there will always be winter evenings, and the most interesting thing, next to playing at life, is to talk about it. “There was a man--dwelt by a churchyard ...”, or “Andra moi ennepé, Mousa....” So the romantic or the adventurous tale should begin, as it always did and always will. It is when he adds love to his chronicle of events and allows that to modify them that the tale-teller turns novelist and, in danger of over-sophistication, begins the road to Avernus; for love involves passion, and passion means sex, and sex invites curious philosophy, and philosophy calls in pathology; then comes Herr Freud with his abhorred complexes; and then you have something which may stimulate, may divert, may do you good, but (as the old tale goes) “is not Emily.” There is no love in the _Odyssey_, none in _Robinson Crusoe_, none worth talking about (only gallantry) in _Gil Blas_. The animalism in _Tom Jones_, as in Smollett’s gross tales, was but a vent for high spirits in a century which reckoned love among the appetites, and put women and claret roughly in the same category. Speaking only for my own countrymen, I doubt if sex took on its romantic aspect or became a final cause of narrative fiction until the latter half of the last century. In Walter Scott and Jane Austen it does not exist. It hardly exists in Dickens, hardly, except as a butt, in Thackeray. Trollope’s charming girls are satisfied with extremely little in the way of wooing. The Luftons and young Frank Greshams and Major Grantleys choose by liking, wait seven months or years for their Rachels, kiss them and go home--to write once in a while. Johnny Eames cherishes a flame--if it may be called a flame. We are asked to believe in Mr. Grey’s passion for Miss Vavasour--but do we believe it, or are we the less entertained for our strong doubts? No, indeed.

In the latter half of the last century, Rossetti wrote sensuous poetry of a kind which was new to English literature, very different, say, from that of Keats. Swinburne wrote sexual poetry, as I apprehend, of a highly theoretical kind. I don’t know exactly when Mr. George Moore began to write novels, but cannot recall any striking example of the French novel in English before his time, and should be inclined to commence our series of the grubby and illicit with him. George Meredith and Mr. Hardy were both well-established before that; but though there is passion in Meredith, and lyric passion too, and sex in Mr. Hardy, with much intensive imagining about it, _non ragioniam di lor_. They were alike in the old tradition. Neither Aphrodite or Priapus sat on the Muse’s throne. At the utmost they did but “donner la chemise!” Meredith and Mr. Hardy wrote stories, not sex-fantasias. Mr. Moore will do very well as an illustration of the change which came over our novels when Trollope ceased to write, the change which, as I say, made them French novels written in English. Before that change, love, sex, passion, as manifestations of life, had been part of the entertainment which the novel as a redaction of life had to offer. After it they _were_ the entertainment, and thereupon and thereby the novel ceased to be a redaction of life. For, _pace_ Herr Freud, all life is not sex. One resultant of the changed objective will account for that. There was no room for life in a sex-novel. If you set out to write a dithyramb of lust, or sex, your novel will be short. The subject is absorbing, once it takes hold of you, and the celebration of it will exhaust itself as the reality does. Such tales have always been short: _Daphnis and Chloe_, for instance, _Manon Lescaut_. One could not have filled the old three-decker with that kind of thing. Nobody except Richardson ever tried it. With the change of theme, then, conspired the change of form, and the bookseller and the novelist in a concatenation accordingly.

Other things followed of necessity. The novel ceased to be an interpretation of life and became a kind of poem. The preoccupied novelist wrote _à priori_. Observation ceased to procure novels to be written; the novelist, rather, stung by his gadfly into action, observed for his own purposes and those of his theme. His novel clothed his thought in appropriate draperies, to call them so, with which life had little or nothing to do. He did not in fact set up an image of life at all, but instead, a Hermes, on which he could hang garlands corresponding to his passion or indicative of his complaint. Novels of this sort, to call them so, are still being produced: I read three of them the other day, all written by women. One of them, which was “crowned” with a cheque for a hundred pounds, was a real pæan of sex: in the other two sophistication had set in. They did not so much hymn the function as “peep and botanise” upon its grave. The three were episodic, “all for love, and the world well lost.” The world indeed, for all that appeared, was standing still while half a dozen persons to a book were enacting their secret rites. If the end of all this be not despondency and madness it will be something quite as unpleasant.

That which led me into these speculations was Mrs. Stirling’s excellent memoir of her sister and brother-in-law, Evelyn and William De Morgan, that happily-mated pair. She tells in its place the manner in which De Morgan fell into the writing of novels, how without effort they came to him. They were certainly the last of our novels which have offered us a comprehensive reading of life. It seems absurd to say of them that they are able, because ability, in the common use of the word, implies the conscious exercise of it. De Morgan’s novels, however, seem effortless; they read as the most spontaneous things in the world, and Mrs. Stirling now says that they really were so. There is no apparent design, no contrivance. They are as formless as life itself.