Part 8

_The Rosary_ was his favourite novel, as it was mine. At each fresh reading we were moved to the edge, if not over the edge, of tears. It is, in the author’s words, the story of a beautiful woman in a plain shell. No man has ever seen below that surface. But one day she sings “The Rosary” at a concert: the veil is torn aside, and Garth Dalmain, the famous painter, perceives her spiritual worth. But because she fears that he will tire of her, she will not marry him, and in a scene of sustained pathos, during which the name of the Deity is never long absent from her lips, she tells him that their paths must separate. But “love never faileth.” Garth is providentially blinded in a shooting accident, and his lover returns to him as a nurse. Then the drama opens. She writes him letters, which in the position of nurse and secretary she reads to him, and as his nurse she makes him gradually appreciate the intensity of his need for the woman who has refused him. And, when the last barrier has gone, the nurse reveals herself as the lover by striking triumphantly the solemn chords of “The hours I spent with thee, dear heart.”

Prose narrative could, we felt, attain to no higher level of emotion, and at the end of the day, between lock up and hall, among mauve cushions we would sit and talk of the secret springs, the hidden splendours of life, of how we, too, within a plain shell were beautiful. It passed, of course, that worship that was almost idolatry. It passed in the September of 1913, when a copy of _Carnival_ was bought at a railway bookstall at the close of a summer holiday. That autumn we laid our mantle of sentiment before the tripping feet of Jenny, and when in early summer a copy of _Poems and Ballads_ found its way into the school-house studies, it was the departed glory of Proserpine that we declaimed. We passed from one allegiance to another, as we passed from one size in collars to another. We were growing up.

But it is no part of my intention here, in this chapter, to attempt to trace the growth, the development, or the decay, as you may please to call it, of a literary taste. I am concerned solely with this fact: that ten years ago I held Florence Barclay to be the greatest living novelist, that in her work I found those characteristics, those qualities that to-day I find in the stories of Turgenev; that, as Turgenev moves me in 1923, so Mrs Barclay moved me in the summer of 1912. And this fact I find to be in the highest degree disquieting. There are attached to it a very large number of uncomfortable corollaries.

It depends, of course, on whether one does or does not take a relative view of things. To those who hold that there is a definite standard of literary judgment the tastes of immature, and of uneducated persons, can be of little matter. You tell your form master that you consider Swinburne a greater poet than Matthew Arnold, and he will smile indulgently: “One does think like that at your age,” he will say, “but you’ll find in time that Matthew Arnold is more satisfying stuff.” And I suppose one does. At any rate, the majority of middle-aged persons of my acquaintance seem to find him so. But I can never see that this fact is a proof of Arnold’s superiority, any more than the fact that at forty one plays golf with greater comfort than Rugby football is a proof of the superiority of golf. In an estimate of Victorian poetry a critic considers himself to have proved his case when he has written: “Swinburne is the supreme poet of youth, but as the years pass his tempestuous flow of sound means less to us, and we increasingly appreciate the chastened, harmonious cadences of Matthew Arnold.” Actually, of course, he has done no more than state that Swinburne’s is the poetry of youth and Arnold’s of middle age. That each poet has certain qualities and certain limitations, and in his acceptance of Arnold’s superiority he has assumed that the tastes of a man of fifty are more significant, less impermanent, more surely built than those of a man of twenty-five.

It is an assumption before whose authority most young writers, especially writers of fiction, have been in their time arraigned. “These stories,” the reviewer says, “are well enough written, the characters competently drawn, the situations skilfully prepared. But the book is concerned entirely with the problems of adolescence, problems, that is to say, that will in a few years’ time have ceased to concern the author. Its quality, therefore, is strictly temporal.” The author has been condemned, not on grounds of literary craftsmanship, not because he has failed to do well the thing he set out to do, but because he has employed unprofitable material, because the perplexities and enthusiasms of adolescence that formed the theme of his book are transient and must yield in time to the perplexities and enthusiasms of manhood. It is doubtless inevitable that literary criticism should accept the quality of permanence as its deciding standard, should consider the period of duration rather than the intensity of the fleeting mood; but on its own grounds even would not criticism do well to seek that quality in the skill and sincerity of the treatment, rather than in the matter of the material treated?

For are the tastes of a man of fifty any more permanent than those of a man of twenty-five? Can we not still say to him: “You will feel differently when you are older. You will look back to the person that you now are as to a stranger: to a man with different affections, different ambitions, and a different way of living. These present enthusiasms of yours will in their turn pass, we can assure you. They will pass into the tepid preferences of old age, and you will sit in the smoking-room of your club, the chief pleasure of your life an immunity from gout, the chief problem of it the avoidance of a draught.” Can we, with any greater justice, condemn the problems of twenty before the tribunal of forty-five than we can those of fifty before those of eighty? The brain is not useless now because it will one day soften; teeth not inefficacious because they will eventually decay. The young man will hardly listen to the impotent antiquity who assures him that the charm of woman is a snare and an illusion. “When you have reached my age it will no longer move you.” In a world of fugitive sensation there is no fixed point at which anyone can say, “thus far and no farther.” We have a right to our own age; to the problems, the turmoil, the compensating enthusiasms of our age, and we have an equal right to the literature best suited for their nourishment and inspiration.

In the same way a particular period has a right to the literature best suited to its needs. Books follow a wave of recurrent popularity and depreciation. The masterpiece of 1820 is the Aunt Sally of 1850, but by 1880 it has been restored to favour. “The masterpiece is the mood, and all moods pass save Shakespeare and the Bible.” This from George Moore. But of Shakespeare, as of others. He had little, or nothing, to say to the eighteenth century: to that unrivalled period of elegance and polish. They re-wrote “King Lear”: they made it end happily with Cordelia in Edgar’s arms. Shakespeare’s tragedy was described by Mr Tate in the dedicatory epistle to his own version “as a heap of jewels, unstrung and unpolished, yet so dazzling in their disorder that I soon perceived that I had seized a treasure.” We are inclined to smile at such ridiculous folly. “So that is all they knew,” we say. But I think Mr Tate did wisely to rewrite “King Lear” in the idiom of his own time. The eighteenth century which produced Swift, and Addison, and Pope, was not less cultured than the century that produced Shakespeare, and Donne, and Milton, and compares very favourably with ours that has produced--but I will not be personal. It is enough to say that the eighteenth century had a perfect right to say: “This is what we like.” It could justify by its creations its exclusiveness. And, at the time, it was so very certain it was right--as certain as we are to-day that Clifford Bax is abundantly justified in the slaughter of Mr Gay’s dialogue and verses that he has made in his new version of “Polly.”

With what emotions, I wonder, must the wraith of John Gay have witnessed at the Kingsway Theatre the triumph of his opera. He can have hardly failed to find, after an interval of two hundred years, the enraptured reception of his work intensely gratifying. But he can equally have hardly failed to wonder what in that interval can have happened to his play. “This,” we can imagine him to have said, “is all of it, of course, perfectly delightful.” But it was for a very different thing that London was divided into two camps, and the Duchess of Queensberry was forbidden the Court. I wrote a political and social satire. I transported to the West Indies the most notable of my creations in “The Beggar’s Opera.” Mrs Trapes I placed in charge of an establishment which courtesy permitted me to describe as an “academy for young gentlewomen in song and dance.” Of Macheath I made a pirate chief, disguised with a blackened face, and wedded, to his no great comfort, to Jenny Diver. In the scandalous person of Mr Ducat, the colonel of the militia, I satirised British colonial administration. Polly Peachum, who had come to the island in search of her rascal husband, alone, I permitted to be an agreeable and virtuous creature. And by making her marry, after the well-merited execution of Macheath, the Indian Prince Cawwawkee, I established the superiority of the “noble savage” over the weak, cowardly, and self-indulgent white man. That was my opera. But of all this I find remarkably little in the version that Mr Clifford Bax has so elegantly adapted and Mr Nigel Playfair so successfully produced.

“The social and political satire has been removed, No comparison is drawn between the virtues of the black man and the white. Macheath is never even threatened with the fate that I had prepared for him, but is restored in health and charm and vigour to the eager embraces of his faithful Polly. A good two-thirds of the play is not mine at all, and though I am highly sensitive to the charms of its many bewitching lyrics, I can claim but a small share in their authorship. It is all, as I have previously remarked, perfectly delightful; but what has happened to my play?”

We like to think that Mr Gay must have, by now, realised how extremely bad his own edition was. We venture, whatever biographers may state, to discern in his work the presence of a genial unpretentious personality. By now, we say, he should have acquired a sufficient sense of detachment from the jealousies and rivalries and feuds of the early eighteenth century to realise that he himself had made a sad mess of it, that Clifford Bax is perfectly right, and that it would have been impossible for Macheath to die, or the divine Polly to be wedded to a black.

Doubtless they said much the same of Mr Tate two hundred years ago. To the dandy of 1720 it seemed as impossible that Lear should die as is to-day the execution of Macheath. And, as Clifford Bax has found in Polly’s misfortunes the single string on which might be threaded the characters and incidents that would have been otherwise irrelevant, so Mr Tate discovered in the love of Edgar for Cordelia the missing unity of Lear. Mr Gay’s Polly was as impossible to-day as Mr Shakespeare’s Lear was in 1720. In 2020 who knows but Mr Tate’s version will be upon the boards of the Lyric, Hammersmith, and His Majesty’s will be staging an unexpurgated Gay. Each age takes the food it needs. Like wine in bottles, some books deteriorate and others mature.

And, indeed, what is this posterity that we should so appeal to it? Are we not ourselves fallible and imperfect mortals, posterity to the Victorians? I can see Browning walking with Tennyson in the Elysian Fields. They discuss the literary journalism of their day. “It was bad,” Browning mumbles into his beard,--“very bad indeed. There was a silly fellow called John Stuart Mill--what was it he said about that first book of mine? ‘Most self-conscious thing he’d ever read.’ But I didn’t worry. I looked ahead. I was content to let posterity decide; and I have my reward. I read last week such a charming thing about me by, let me see now, a very vigorous young person I thought--ah, yes, Miss Rebecca West....”

The other day I listened for upwards of a quarter of an hour to the complaint of a young poet whose works had been mishandled grievously in the _London Mercury_. Highly did he heap abuse on the heads of Mr J. C. Squire and Mr Edward Shanks; nor was he less generous to critics unconnected with that periodical: to Middleton Murry, and T. S. Eliot, and Robert Lynd; one by one they were presented to the lash of ridicule. Finally the injured poet turned a loving, a valedictory eye towards the great men of the past--Matthew Arnold, Ruskin, Emerson, Carlyle. “There,” he said, “were critics for you.” And, after a pause: “Ah, well, in fifty years’ time....” And he shrugged his shoulders as one who can afford to ignore such triflings in the face of time.

I said nothing. I am a placid person; I dislike quarrels. This, though, is what, if I were fashioned differently, I might have said: “My good, my very good friend,” I would have said, “you despise your own generation. You are content to appeal to posterity. You place your faith in the traditions that have been handed down to you by great writers in the past. Very good, but let me remind you of this--that Matthew Arnold too despised his generation and made his appeal to posterity. It was his hope that in 1923 he would receive the commendation of Robert Lynd, of J. C. Squire, and of Edward Shanks. What was good enough for Matthew Arnold should be good enough for you. The judgments of posterity are likely to be no more profound than those of 1923. For one day this posterity that you so worship will be to-day, and in this club and in that armchair will be sitting a disgruntled poet telling an indifferent friend how much better things were done in 1923. We are no better and no worse than other generations. We are a little different, that is all. And, because we are a little different, what you, my friend, are writing now may be more readily understood in 1950 than it is to-day. But, for that reason, your work will be of no higher quality than that of Walter de la Mare, whose verses give us such pleasure now. If you are popular in 1950 you will be little read in 1980. For that is the way things happen, and your talk about Matthew Arnold is a mixture of vanity and of snobbishness; let me hear no more of it.”

I should like to believe that there is to be found somewhere a standard of literary criticism, but the power to appreciate beauty is a quality relative to ourselves: and there are times when it seems to me to be as vain to search for a standard of beauty in literature as it would be to search for one in woman. We respond to a certain type of beauty. And we say of other types: “I am sure, my dear fellow, that she is perfectly delightful. I am not in the least surprised that you are desperately enraptured. But, for myself, as I said, she leaves me cold.” We make no attempt to explain or adjudge a beauty in woman that we cannot understand. Why, then, should we speak so dogmatically of a beauty in literature that does not touch us; why should we deny the existence of a beauty to which we are insensible?

There was a painter once whose personality it would be discreet to hide under the pseudonym of Eric Walker. He had never seen the country. He did not know that trees existed outside the carefully tended borders of Burnden Park. The only other stretch of grass he had ever seen was from the terraces of a football ground. For him the sky had been always dim with smoke, cut by the outline of huge chimney stacks. The only beauty he could understand was the clean, hard efficiency of a machine. With eager eyes he had seen stones lifted into the air by iron arms; he had watched the glow of furnaces flickering on polished steel. For hours on end he had stood beneath the great factory at North Town, while the sunlight cut the wreathing smoke into hard, sharp angles. The noise and glare of machinery enchanted him, and when a discerning teacher had discovered that he could draw, it was only natural that he should try to interpret in terms of line and colour those particular sights and sounds that alone had for him an æsthetic value.

Success came to him easily and quickly. He was taken up by the right people, his pictures were discussed in the right circles, and when his exhibition came on the right critics said the right things in the right papers. Eric Walker suddenly found himself rich; he came up to London, was made much of, sold his pictures easily. For six months he was the adored child of Mayfair.

After a while, however, his welcome grew less warm. At the time of his reception Gerald Garstin wrote: “Here is a young man who has successfully interpreted the hard, calculating commercialism of the North. In a fury of indignation he has revealed the soullessness of modern conditions. All his life he has been surrounded by squalor and ugliness. What may he not do when he has seen more of life and has learnt to appreciate beauty in its fullest sense?” And Mayfair had endorsed this opinion. “Such a wonderful young man,” they would say to one another. “And to think that he spent all those years in that terrible place, nothing but smoke and chimneys. What a revelation it must be to him to come to London, and how beautifully he will be able to express it.” And the patrons of modern art waited for Eric’s delight to break forth in a riot of form and colour.

No such thing, however, happened. At the yearly exhibition of the Chelsea Group he was represented by a large picture of a train entering a tube station as it would be seen through the eyes of the driver. At the Florence Galleries he exhibited a picture called “Charing Cross Road,” in which a small boy stood watching the glowing furnaces of Messrs. Crosse and Blackwell, and to the New Movement Society he contributed “Liftman at Piccadilly Circus.” The announcement that he was at work on “Surrey and Middlesex at the Oval” gave promise of better things, but his followers were again disappointed. In a far corner of the canvas was a patch of green and one white figure, the remainder was occupied by the telegraph and the gasometers. It was generally agreed that Eric Walker had not fulfilled his promise.

“Interesting though this work may be,” wrote Gerald Garstin, “it cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called beautiful, and without beauty where is art?” Once again Mayfair echoed the pronouncement of its trusted critic. “It’s not beautiful all that harping on machinery and ugliness. I am sure he can’t have a nice mind. Why doesn’t he look on the pleasant side of things?”

To Eric Walker this change of front came abruptly and incomprehensibly. “Beauty,” he said. “Beauty, what do they mean? Aren’t my pictures beautiful?” To him there was nothing in the world lovelier than the angles that sunshine cut in smoke, than the glow of a furnace on damp flesh, than the smooth, hard rhythm of a piston. “Beauty,” he said, “that’s the one thing I have really striven for, to get the full value of these things I have enjoyed, to interpret the magic of these sounds and colours, to make others realise the perfect form, poise, balance of a machine. What do they mean?”

In the end he took his troubles to Mrs Abbot, a kindly, sentimental woman, who had always rather mothered the young artist. To her he poured out all his troubles, telling her how they misinterpreted his work, calling it ugly.

“But, my dear boy, it is ugly!”

“Ugly! Oh, but, Mrs Abbot. Why, come here. Look out there. Do you see the great chimney-stack of the Gas Works? Do you see how the red glare shines out against the black roofs; what could be lovelier?”

And he leapt up, seizing her hand, dragging her to the window. Gradually Mrs Abbot pacified him.

“My dear boy,” she said, “I dare say you may like that sort of thing, but you’ll find that it’s not what we think nice, and it’s what other people think nice that matters. Those chimneys of yours are all very well, and I know you’re fond of them, but the things we call beautiful are not a bit like that.”

“No?”

“No, of course not,” she went on, “the things we like--well, trees, fields, love--oh, you know, the joy, the beauty of life. Those are the things you ought to be painting.”

Eric Walker gazed out fondly at the red glare of the factory as it shone glimmering on the surrounding roofs, then he turned sadly to the water-colours that hung on the walls, soft and delicate, roses and arbours, with a suggestion of Love, fleeting and perilously dear. For him there was no beauty there--only cowardice, weakness and evasion.

That evening Mrs Abbot had a long and serious talk with her husband about her young protégé.

“Something must be done, Harry,” she said. “He’s such a dear boy, and he’s absolutely spoiling his chances. Now I tell you what we must do. We must take him right away from all this to some primitive, natural spot. When once he gets free from sordid influences he’ll respond to beauty like a child.”

Mr Abbot had been married twenty years, and had learnt that his personal comfort was only to be purchased by a complete indulgence of his wife’s fancies.

“All right, my dear,” he said, “we’ll see what can be done.”

And so arrangements were made. An invalid friend owned a small house on an island in the Pacific, which he was willing to let for a summer holiday. Mrs Abbot leapt at the opportunity, and with Eric Walker submitting as to an intractable decree of Fate, within five weeks he and Mr and Mrs Abbot were leaning over the taffrail of the ship watching the churned foam stretch out in a white line behind them.

The island was certainly very charming. The air was soft and scented, the deep blue of the sky merged almost imperceptibly into the deeper blue of the sea. The garden was full of rich flowers and luxuriant growth; the sunshine was full and heavy; it was the kind of island which one never expects to see, but of which one dreams fondly, hopelessly.

“Now,” said Mrs Abbot, “you’ll be able to paint wonderful pictures, won’t you, Eric?”

“I hope so,” he said, gazing round with puzzled eyes at this world that, for all its riot of colour, lacked so strangely the sights and sounds to which he was accustomed.

For four days he wandered round with his sketchbook and water-colours. First of all he tried to draw the little house that was overgrown with fruit and flowers, but the lines blurred into one another, and he could not find the clear-cut form that he understood. Then he tried to paint the sunlight as it flickered on the waves, but its movement was irregular and spasmodic, unsuited to his method, and he failed equally when he tried to interpret the sway of the branches and the lazy droop of the oranges. He was puzzled, unhappy, unable to understand why things so vague and indefinite should be called beautiful. Mrs Abbot’s large, kindly voice quite failed to comfort him.

“Wait for your inspiration to come,” she would say. “Just walk about and absorb all that’s round you, and you’ll be painting before you know where you are.”

And next day it seemed as though her prophecy had been fulfilled. Eric had gone out directly after breakfast with his easel, paints, and canvas. They had seen nothing of him the whole morning; he had not come back to lunch, and by tea-time there were still no signs of him.

“I knew it,” said Mrs Abbot, “I knew it. We only had to take him away and put him in fresh surroundings; he was bound to respond to beauty, he only needed the sunshine.”

As soon as she had finished her tea she set out to look for him, garrulous with excitement.