Part 9

“Now what do you think it will have been that moved him? I wonder if it was the bay. No, he was standing on the top of the hill and he looked down and saw the village lying there in the sunlight! You take my word for it, we shall find him on the hill!”

But they did not find him on the hill, nor was he painting the bay nor the orange grove, and they sought him in vain on the skirts of their little orchard. At last they began to feel a little nervous and began to ask one another fretfully whether any harm could have come to him. They made inquiries of the natives, but learnt nothing, and it was not till almost dinnertime that a fisherman told them where he was.

“The young artist? Yes, sir. I saw him early this morning go into that little broken hut on the edge of the shingle, and though I have been working here all day I haven’t seen him come out. He’s probably there still.”

Mr and Mrs Abbot looked at each other askance. What could Eric want in that small dilapidated house that was slowly falling to pieces over the head of an old shrivelled woman and her daughter? At the thought of the daughter Mrs Abbot began to blush. What if the south wind and the sudden beauty had moved Eric to express himself in terms more personal than those of paint? Artists were notoriously immoral, and the islanders, she had always heard, unfortunately weak.

She hurried on, her heart beating quickly, excited and perturbed.

In a few moments, however, all her fears for the innocence of the gentle islander were banished. For there, at the back of the small hut, an old woman, black and shrivelled, was cooking her dinner over an iron stove. Her neck and arms were bare, and the red glow of the fire shone dimly on the damp flesh, the dying sunlight stealing in one long, broad band through a chink in the woodwork fell across her throat, cutting the curves of her hanging breasts into hard, sharp angles, and a few yards away Eric Walker was working at his canvas in a fine frenzy of inspiration.

VIII

What is beauty to one man is ugliness to another. There is a proverb “about one man’s meat”; but there is a chariness about applying it to literature. Writers like to believe that a criterion of criticism exists; that their work is definitely good, bad, or indifferent.

Well; we are creatures of infinite limitations. A certain range of sentiment comes within the province of our comprehension; vast tracts of life must be for all time to us an unknown country. J. C. Squire announces that _Jurgen_ is a poor book, but he does not persuade us that our admiration has been misplaced. We regard his article as the statement of a personal dislike. For criticism in the end comes always back to this: “I like it, or I do not like it.” Criticism is autobiography, as these pages are autobiography, the expression of personal preferences and distastes. And, on the whole, I think critics are ill advised to write of books that they do not like. Their inability to appreciate the book is as likely to be their fault as the author’s. And I find myself singularly out of sympathy with the type of critic who tries to explain his enthusiasms and disapprovals by metaphysics. He discusses for three pages what he considers to be the function of literature. “Literature,” he concludes, “is the sublimation of phenomena.” And, for the remainder of his article, proceeds to show which poets do, and which do not, satisfy the requirements of his formula. And, of course, he leaves us unimpressed. The ability to conduct an argument is not a proof of literary taste. And if the substance of the article is to be “I like, or do not like, this book,” then the critic is beholden to persuade us that he is a person whose opinion is deserving of attention. He can prove it to us in two ways, preferably in both. He can show that he has read and appreciated a quantity of good literature. “A man,” we say, “who has really appreciated Turgenev, should have a standard implicit in his emotional response to other books. If he says this book is good, there must be something in it.” Or the critic may prove by writing well and interestingly that he has a sense of literature. For there is nothing more damning to a book than a favourable, but ill-written, notice. “If the ass who wrote this,” the reader thinks, “liked that book, then I’m pretty certain that I shouldn’t.” Criticism would carry much more weight if it would forget its sense of responsibility, and would remember that its purpose is, as that of all literature, the entertainment of the reader.

And so back to that original, that disconcerting fact that Florence Barclay was to me ten years ago an equivalent for Turgenev. She meant as much; she revealed as much. She touched the heart as surely and as deeply. And again comes that uncomfortable knowledge that a book is after all only a focus for ourselves, a spade to unearth the absolute. And does it matter what sort of a spade you use as long as the work gets finished? The object of any emotion is of less matter than the intensity of the emotion that object has evoked. Is a love any the less real, less tender, less passionate, less unselfish because it has been inspired by a shallow, trivial, worthless woman? Does it very much matter whence we derive that state of heightened consciousness that we undoubtedly reach through literature, as long as we do reach it? We come the richer from _King Lear_, from _Anna Karenin_, from _Lycidas_, because these books have revealed to us what is eternal in ourselves. In their company we have forgotten momentarily the anxieties, the ambitions, the frivolities that dazzle and distract us, that move in glittering, bewildering profusion on the surface of our lives, that belong to time and space. In such moments of heightened consciousness we are in harmony with ourselves, we see ourselves as a part of that pattern that Pater spoke of, the pattern whose threads pass out on either side of us.

And it is towards such moments that we are always striving, for the most part indirectly, striving in our work, our love affairs, our amusements and distractions. We are dissatisfied with what we are and with what we have. That which is immortal in us struggles towards what is remote, in the hope, in the belief that it may prove immortal. It may be that books add something to our emotional, our intellectual stature, that they are the rich soil in which we dig for treasure; but I prefer to think that we are the rich soil, that we contain an immortal spirit, and that our ultimate success or failure must be judged by our ability to keep that spirit nourished and alive. If this be so, and it is a philosophy that commended itself to Wordsworth, are we not right in saying that Florence Barclay and Turgenev are fulfilling a similar function in different spheres?

There is no difference in the quality nor the intensity of the emotion. I am, I believe, tone deaf, and I have a perfectly deplorable taste in music. But by some music I am very profoundly moved. Sometimes it is by music with which I have personal associations--marches and dance tunes, and that, of course, strictly speaking, should not count. The emotion is inspired not by the music, but the scene evoked through it. But quite often it is by some catchy affair heard for the first time in a restaurant or across a street. I listen to it with enraptured pleasure, thrilled by the tricks and twiddles and syncopations, and I am quite prepared to accept my companion’s assurance that it is a cheap, vulgar, sentimental thing. “I do not care,” I say, “these things are relative. It moves me, therefore to me it is a masterpiece.”

Everyone has, I suppose, at one time or another paused to examine the windows of the type of bookshop that abounds in certain streets in the west end of London. They are curiously alike, these places. One side of the window is stocked with articles the nature of which it is unnecessary to particularise, and the other side with such literature as the management appears to consider most likely to encourage the purchase of them. The selection of that literature does not greatly alter with the passage of time. There are no spring and autumn seasons in these bookshops. Occasionally some new novel finds a home there; occasionally a callous or unenterprising publisher allows some fading favourite to pass from circulation. But there is, on the whole, a commendable fidelity to old friends. Were you to be transplanted miraculously to the Piccadilly of 1926 you would find of the volumes that to-day adorn so proudly the front tables of Mr Hatchards’ bookshop scarcely half a dozen, but the appearance of the questionable shop window will be probably no more altered by 1930 than it has been since 1910. Victoria Cross will be there, and Elinor Glyn, and the confessions of the retiring aristocrat who is content to sign himself “A Peer.” There will be the same French classics, _Droll Stories_, _Madame Bovary_, _A Woman’s Life_. The alliterative titles of Gertie de S. Wentworth James will show against a circle of entwining arms. Between _Bel-ami_ and _Anna Lombard_ will be spread enticingly _A Bed of Roses_. The public, whatever it be, that patronises such establishments knows its mind.

They are good hat-racks, these bookshops, for ridicule, for denunciation, for satire. They can make a sermon for the priest, a middle for the journalist, a simile for the politician. For the student of life they are a subject of speculative curiosity.

What is, we ask ourselves, this public with so catholic a taste? We rarely see anyone enter one of these bookshops. There are always two or three people gazing enviously at the window, but self-consciousness restrains them. They dare not publicly declare their interest by purchasing a volume. Indeed, there are times when we wonder how these shops carry on their business at all. Are they, we wonder, a spectacle and nothing else? Do the same books remain there from one season to another for the simple reason that no one buys them? A pleasant fancy, but apparently they do carry on a very excellent, a very thriving, trade. I once asked a proprietor if the trade slump had at all affected him. “Very little,” he said. “Just before the armistice I ordered two thousand copies of _Five Nights_, and I sold the last one yesterday.”

Two thousand copies of one book in one shop in three years. That man must have sold on an average two copies of _Five Nights_ every day. Can Mr Bumpus say as much for Shakespeare? Two thousand copies in three years! It is easy, of course, to shrug one’s shoulders, to say: “But for such stuff there will always be a public.” And yet so vague a gesture provides no explanation of this incredible popularity. The appeal of _Five Nights_ is not, I believe, due to what bishops describe as the baser instincts of human nature. Victoria Cross wrote it in the innocence of her heart, firmly believing it to be a good book. It is a sincere book as _The Rosary_ is sincere, and _The Way of an Eagle_ is sincere. It is written with feeling; she enjoyed writing it. Its sentimental sensuality is warm and cloying and pleasant, like a hot bath after too good a dinner. There even comes a moment when the heat of the bath mingling with the heat of Pommard makes us ask ourselves whether it is such appalling drivel after all. A couple of pages more we decide it is; but there was that moment of doubt.

Thus it happens, I conjecture.

The shop assistant as he hurries homewards at the close of his day’s work is moved with a sense of envy for the eager life of pleasure that wakes in the city only at the moment that he leaves it. His own life is tedious, with small excitements. He feels the need of vicarious sensation. The cover and title of Miss Cross’s masterpiece allures him. And as he journeys home he is pleasantly excited by the description of the painter’s intrigue with the Chinese. He feels otherwise, however, when he meets the heroine, and is confronted with what appears to him as a picture of nobility and self-sacrifice. He is deeply moved. That it is bad literature does not matter. It is enough that it should arouse in him the same thoughts and emotions that _Anna Karenin_ stirs in a man of letters. He feels himself in touch with a great passion, a passion that can override the convention of an hour and a place, that destroys life but makes of it first a thing worth having. In the world of popular fiction _Five Nights_ bears to _The Rosary_ the same relation that in the world of literature _Manon Lescaut_ bears to _On the Eve_.

I read while I was a prisoner in Germany Elinor Glyn’s novel, _Three Weeks_, and I remember thinking that it was of its kind the very worst novel that I had ever read. The grand passion is as rare as genius, and it is as difficult to make the grand passion convincing in a novel as to make a genius convincing. The novels in which a grand passion has been “got over” could be counted on the fingers of one hand. But never, I felt, had any novel of passion failed more lamentably, more inexcusably, than _Three Weeks_.

But, as I said, these things are relative. To a couple of my fellow-captives _Three Weeks_ was a window opening on the immortal meadows. For days they discussed it exhaustively from every point of view. It was, they were agreed, marvellously done. But they were doubtful of its morals; such ardour, they felt, was only permissible after a marriage ceremony, or, they were prepared to concede, as a prelude to one. But it was the less real part of them that doubted. Their instincts told them that the grand passion makes its own laws. And finally they yielded to their deeper nature.

“After all,” they said, “those two were different from the rest of us. They were wonderful characters. You can’t judge them as you judge ordinary people.”

It is with such words that we acquit Paolo and Francesca, Antony and Cleopatra, Lancelot and Guinevere. _Three Weeks_ said to my fellow-captives what _Antony and Cleopatra_ says to a cultured public. It was a focus for their belief in the grand passion.

One may well wonder, though, in what spirit the man who is deeply stirred by Victoria Cross and Elinor Glyn reads such masterpieces of prose narrative as _Une Vie_ and _Madame Bovary_ and _Mademoiselle de Maupin_. They are bound in the same lurid cover, printed on the same absorbent paper, and yet it is hard to believe that a man can be moved equally by what is good and by what is bad. Is it not more likely that he will be shocked and a little disgusted by Maupassant’s detachment and cold restraint? “Pretty hot stuff,” he will say to himself of _Une Vie_, but will add, “most awful filth.” And he will be ashamed of the book, and secrete it at the bottom of his chest of drawers. A melancholy reflection. It is, after all, of little matter that two thousand people should in the course of three years purchase at one shop a rather silly, sensual, sentimental book. But it is a little sad that only thus, in this form, and in this type of shop, should be procurable in the English language a complete translation of one of the world’s greatest novels, a little sad that even then it should be only read by such a person, and in such a spirit.

Sad though for the man of letters, not for the advocate of social progress. I am convinced that these books are as completely harmless as any book that may possibly encourage people to think for themselves can be harmless.

There appeared a few months ago an article, I believe, by St John Ervine, maintaining that the effect on the mind of the public of books such as _The Way of an Eagle_, with their scenes of brutality and masculine domination, was pernicious. And certainly they make melancholy enough reading. But what are they, after all, but an expression for our eternal human impulse to be swept off our feet, to be subjugated by a force outside of and stronger than ourselves. And cannot we find in literature equivalents enough for the cracked whip and the submissive cheek of an Ethel Dell romance? Equivalents, but not parallels; for the best seller is written for women, usually by women. And it is by a masculine intelligence that the masterpieces of prose literature have been produced. A man would, in search of such an equivalent, choose an experience of which he was the object, not the subject. He would not write of the dominant male, but of the siren. “Is it to be a kiss or a blow?” asks the hero of popular fiction. In Turgenev, that woman who “when she comes towards one, seems as though she is bringing all the happiness of one’s life to meet one,” leans forward across a table and taps the nails of one hand against the nails of the other. “Tell me, tell me,” she says, “is it true, they say you are going to be married?”

It is from such reflections that we are forced to ask ourselves how much purpose is served by our attempts to educate the public up to Shakespeare. We are only giving them an equivalent for what they already have. And the energy that we devote so prodigally to the organisation of lectures and bazaars and repertory theatres might be spent so very much more profitably on ourselves. I doubt if the Ethel Dell public would find life any fuller, any more enraptured, by an exchange of _The Knave of Diamonds_ for _Jude the Obscure_.

I suspect, indeed, that these educational movements are inspired subconsciously for the most part, by the novelist’s desire to increase his own public. “If only,” he says, “a sixth part of the 60,000 who buy each novel by Ethel Dell would divert their attention towards my admittedly superior work, how salutary it would be for them and how charming it would be for me!” It sounds pleasant enough, but they are dangerous things, these revolutions, and they have a way of turning on their organisers. On the whole, I prefer to leave things as they are. It would be perfectly delightful if that 60,000 public were to transfer its affection to my humble efforts. If the public could be educated to a wide appreciation of the tendenz novel, very well, very admirably well. But this talk of Shakespeare and Fielding and the giants of the eighteenth century, frankly, I distrust it. I have no wish to see the public educated to that degree. Were it so to be, I can see that myself and many other deserving and inoffensive persons would have to seek some other means of livelihood--a procedure that would be most distasteful. For were the public able to appreciate Fielding and Balzac, and Smollett and Thomas Hardy, I cannot believe that it would take much interest in the stories that I should have to tell it. I distrust these Literature Promotion Leagues. I am disturbed when a new edition of Trollope is put upon the market. But a deep content consumes me when I open my Sunday newspaper and see that the publishers of Miss Dell’s new novel have “called” already for a seventh printing. I smile. Things are as they have been. The old standards remain. And I feel that there are still left a few people whom my publishers may be able to persuade to take some interest in my writings.

IX

I said that Florence Barclay was an equivalent for Turgenev. But I could wish that, eleven years ago, I had elected to read some popular writer in whom I could trace a closer parallel, a similarity of plot as well as atmosphere. For it would not be difficult to find in the _Family Herald_ stories that would in synopsis seem to resemble very closely those of Turgenev. The plot of _On the Eve_ or _A House of Gentlefolk_ might well have appealed to the writer of slushy sentimental romances. In the type of story that Turgenev wrote, the story of memory and regret, the boundary between excellence and rubbish is very narrow, and only a lax sentimentalist or a man of genius would attempt to tell it. Talent would be frightened by the simple triangle of _Spring Floods_ and of _Smoke_. It would seem ordinary, as would that of _Rudin_ and _The House of Gentlefolk_. A man’s wife is unfaithful. He leaves her, and in time, believing her to be dead, falls in love with a young girl and proposes marriage. But the wife returns and his happiness is shattered. “What!” says the professional novelist, “that old theme; the person who returns from the grave at the eleventh hour and upsets everything. But that has been done a hundred times. It is impossibly _vieux jeu_. In farce, in light opera, perhaps, but in serious drama....” The writer of talent must take unusual and difficult situations. He must find originality in the employment of new material. The broad field has been ploughed too many times, has yielded too many harvests. It must lie fallow for a while.

I remember talking once with W. L. George of the eternal appeal of a good story, and of how the first business of the novelist was to tell a story. “Possibly,” he said, “but I will tell you a true story, a universal story, and you will not dare to write it. It is the story of Edwin and Angelina. Edwin is a clerk in the office of Angelina’s father. He is sent up to the house with messages for his employer, and passes Angelina in the hall. Their eyes meet and he knows that he is in love. A few days later there is a football match between the office team and that of a neighbouring factory. Edwin wins the match with a brilliant last-minute goal, but in doing so he breaks his arm. Angelina is watching the match. Edwin becomes her hero. Soon afterwards they again meet in the hall. She asks him about his arm. They talk together, and discover in a short while that they are in love. Of course, Angelina’s father refuses to countenance the match. He has his own plans for his daughter. The lovers are forbidden to meet. Angelina falls sick. They send her to the South of France; but she grows worse. She is listless and despondent. The doctor says that unless she is given an interest in life she will die. All that money can provide is showered on her. But she becomes thinner and paler every day. At last the mother intervenes, ‘She must see Edwin.’ The father tardily assents. There is a reunion of the lovers, and the miracle happens. The book ends with marriage bells. It is a true story,” he concluded, “but you wouldn’t dare to write it.”

I agreed. “Only two people could write it,” I said. “Turgenev, or a merchant of popular fiction.”

Turgenev is always obvious. He employs none of the devices of surprise and of suspended interest on which the writer of talent depends for his effects. The waters of Turgenev’s narrative are so smooth, so clear, and bring the river bed so close to us that we hardly realise how deep they are. It is not till we see the blunders that others make with the Turgenev technique that we realise to what an extent he is supreme. And it is such a simple technique. The passage of youth; the waning power of love; the recompenses of middle age; memory and regret, and a serene twilight that harmonises and consoles. It is of these things that Turgenev speaks--simple things, and he speaks of them simply, through a technique that is miraculously adequate and sure. A man in the middle years finds under two layers of cotton a little garnet cross; three men sitting round a table talk of love; a young man, betrothed and happy, returns at night to his hotel to recapture, in a room filled with the overpowering scent of heliotrope, the buried anguish of an earlier love. A man sits in a garden, and remembers. It looks so easy; and yet, in mediocre work, how the machinery creaks. How artificial become the excuses for recollection. A violin playing in a certain restaurant, after many years, a tune to which the hero danced when young. A narrative that closes where it began, in the same place, on the same note, with the same sentence. What is pattern in Turgenev becomes in lesser writers a series of devices.