Chapter 5

You seem a little cross with publishers and editors. They have not proved the distinguished, brilliant, and sympathetic beings you imagined them in your boyish dreams. No doubt, publishers and editors enter hardly into the kingdom of heaven. But then, you see, they don't care so much about that; they are much more interested in the next election at certain fashionable clubs. It is really a little hard on them that they should suffer from the ignorant misconception of the literary amateur. It is only those who have had no dealings with them who would be unfair enough to expect publishers or editors to be literary men. They are business men--business men _par excellence_--and a good thing, too, for their papers and their authors. You lament their mercenary view of life; but, judging by your letter, even you are not disposed to regard money as the root of all evil.

You cannot understand why you have failed where others have succeeded. You have far more Greek than Keats, more history than Scott, and you know nineteen languages--ten of them to speak. With so many accomplishments, it must indeed be hard to fail--though you do not seem to have found it difficult. You have travelled too--have been twice round the world, and have a thorough knowledge of the worst hotels. Certainly, it is singular. Nevertheless, I must confess that the dullest men I have ever met have been professors of history; the worst poets have not only known Greek, but French as well; and, generally speaking the most tiresome of my acquaintances have more degrees than I have Latin to name them in. Alas! it is not experience, or travel, or language, but the use we make of them, that makes literary success, which, one may add, is particularly dependent--perhaps not unnaturally--on the use we make of language. A book may be a book, although there is neither Latin nor Greek, nor travel, nor experience--in fact 'nothing' in it; and though, like myself, you may pay an Oxford professor a thousand a year to correct your proofs, you may still miss immortality.

To these intellectual and general equipments you add goodness of heart, sincerity of conviction, and martyrdom for your opinions; you are, it would seem, like many others of us, the best fellow and greatest man of your acquaintance. Permit me to remind you that we are not talking of goodness of heart, of strength or beauty of character, but of success, which is a thing apart, a fine art in itself.

You confess that you are somewhat unpractical: you expect others--hard-worked journalists who never met you--to tell you what to read, how to form your style, and how 'to get into the magazines.' You are, you say, with something of pride, but a poor business man. That is a pity, for nearly every successful literary man of the day, and particularly the novelists, are excellent business men. Indeed, the history of literature all round has proved that the men who have been masters of words have also been masters of things--masters of the facts of life for which those words stand. Many writers have mismanaged their affairs from idleness and indifference, but few from incapacity. Leigh Hunt boasted that he could never master the multiplication-table. Perhaps that accounts for his comparative failure as a writer. Incompetence in one art is far from being a guarantee of competency in another, and a man is all the more likely to make a name if he is able to make a living--though, judging from Coleridge, it seems a good plan to let another hard-worked man support one's wife and children. On the other hand, though business faculty is a great deal, it is not everything: for a man may be as punctual and methodical as Southey, and yet miss the prize of his high calling, or as generally 'impossible' as Blake, and yet win his place among the immortals.

In fact, after all, success in literature has something to do with writing. In temporary success, industry and business faculty, and an unworked field--be it Scotland, Ireland, or the Isle of Man (any place but plain England!)--are the chief factors. For that more lasting success which we call fame other qualities are needed, such qualities as imagination, fancy, and magic and force in the use of words. Can you honestly say, O beloved, though tiresome, correspondent, that these great gifts are yours? Judging from your letter--but Heaven forbid that I should be unkind! For, need I say I love you with a fellow-feeling? Do you think that you are the only unappreciated genius on the planet--not to speak of all the other unappreciated geniuses on all the other planets? Thank goodness, the postal arrangements with the latter are as yet defective! Others there are with hearts as warm, minds as profound, and style at least as attractive, who languish in unmerited neglect--Miltons inglorious indeed, though far from mute.

Believe me, you are not alone. In fact, there are so many like you that it would be quite easy for you to find society without worrying me. And, for all of us, there is the consolation that, though we fail as writers, we may still succeed as citizens, as husbands and fathers and friends. As Whitman would say--because you are not Editor of _The Times_, do you give in that you are less than a man? There are poets that have never entered into the Bodley Head, and great prose-writers who have never sat in an editorial chair. Be satisfied with your heavenly crowns, O you whining unsuccessful, and leave to your inferiors the earthly five-shilling pieces.

A POET IN THE CITY

'In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray.'

I (and when I say I, I must be understood to be speaking dramatically) only venture into the City once a year, for the very pleasant purpose of drawing that twelve-pound-ten by which the English nation, ever so generously sensitive to the necessities, not to say luxuries, of the artist, endeavours to express its pride and delight in me. It would be a very graceful exercise of gratitude for me here to stop and parenthesise the reader on the subject of all that twelve-pound-ten has been to me, how it has quite changed the course of my life, given me that long-desired opportunity of doing my best work in peace, for which so often I vainly sighed in Fleet Street, and even allowed me an indulgence in minor luxuries which I could not have dreamed of enjoying before the days of that twelve-pound-ten. Now not only peace and plenty, but leisure and luxury are mine. There is nothing goes so far as--Government money.

Usually on these literally State occasions, I drive up in state, that is in a hansom. There is only one other day in the year on which I am so splendid, but that is another beautiful story. It, too, is a day and an hour too joyous to be approached otherwise than on winged wheels, too stately to be approached in merely pedestrian fashion. To go on foot to draw one's pension seems a sort of slight on the great nation that does one honour, as though a Lord Mayor should make his appearance in the procession in his office coat.

So I say it is my custom to go gaily, and withal stately, to meet my twelve-pound-ten in a hansom. For many reasons the occasion always seems something of an adventure, and I confess I always feel a little excited about it--indeed, to tell the truth, a little nervous. As I glide along in my state barge (which seems a much more proper and impressive image for a hansom than 'gondola,' with its reminiscences of Earl's Court) I feel like some fragile country flower torn from its roots, and bewilderingly hurried along upon the turbid, swollen stream of London life.

The stream glides sweetly with a pleasant trotting tinkle of bells by the green parkside of Piccadilly, and sweet is it to hear the sirens singing, and to see them combing their gilded locks, on the yellow sands of Piccadilly Circus--so called, no doubt, from the number of horses and the skill of their drivers. Here are the whirling pools of pleasure, merry wheels of laughing waters, where your hansom glides along with a golden ease--it is only when you enter the First Cataract of the Strand that you become aware of the far-distant terrible roar of the Falls! They are yet nearly two miles away, but already, like Niagara, thou hearest the sound thereof--the fateful sound of that human Niagara, where all the great rivers of London converge: the dark, strong floods surging out from the gloomy fastnesses of the East End, the quick-running streams from the palaces of the West, the East with its wagons, the West with its hansoms, the four winds with their omnibuses, the horses and carriages under the earth jetting up their companies of grimy passengers, the very air busy with a million errands.

You are in the rapids--metaphorically speaking--as you crawl down Cheapside; and here where the Bank of England and the Mansion House rise sheer and awful from, shall we say, this boiling caldron, this 'hell' of angry meeting waters--Threadneedle Street and Cornhill, Queen Victoria Street and Cheapside, each 'running,' again metaphorically, 'like a mill-race'--here in this wild maelstrom of human life and human conveyances, here is the true 'Niagara in London,' here are the most wonderful falls in the world--the London Falls.

'Yes!' I said softly to myself, and I could see the sly sad smile on the face of the dead poet, at the thought of whose serene wisdom a silence like snow seemed momentarily to cover up the turmoil--'Yes!' I said softly, 'there is still the same old crush at the corner of Fenchurch Street!'

By this time I had disbursed one of my two annual cab-fares, and was standing a little forlorn at that very corner. It was a March afternoon, bitter and gloomy; lamps were already popping alight in a desolate way, and the east wind whistled mournfully through the ribs of the passers-by. A very unflowerlike man was dejectedly calling out 'daffadowndillies' close by. The sound of the pretty old word, thus quaintly spoken, brightened the air better than the electric lights which suddenly shot rows of wintry moonlight along the streets. I bought a bunch of the poor pinched flowers, and asked the man how he came to call them 'daffadowndillies.'

'D'vunshur,' he said, in anything but a Devonshire accent, and then the east wind took him and he was gone--doubtless to a neighbouring tavern; and no wonder, poor soul! Flowers certainly fall into strange hands here in London.

Well, it was nearing four, and if I wanted a grateful country's twelve-pound-ten, I must make haste; so presently I found myself in a great hall, of which I have no clearer impression than that there were soft little lights all about me, and a soft chime of falling gold, like the rippling of Pactolus. I have a sort of idea, too, of a great number of young men with most beautiful moustaches, playing with golden shovels; and as I thus stood among the soft lights and listened to the most beautiful sound in the world, I thought that thus must Danæ have felt as she stood amid the falling shower. But I took care to see that my twelve sovereigns and a half were right number and weight for all that.

Once more in the street, I lingered a while to take a last look at the Falls. What a masterful alien life it all seemed to me! No single personality could hope to stand alone amid all that stress of ponderous, bullying forces. Only public companies, and such great impersonalities, could hope to hold their own, to swim in such a whirlpool--and even they, I had heard it whispered, far away in my quiet starlit garret, sometimes went down. 'How,' I cried, 'would--

'... my tiny spark of being wholly vanish in your deeps and heights ... Rush of suns, and roll of systems, and your fiery clash of meteorites,'

again quoting poetry. I always quote poetry in the City, as a protest--moreover, it clears the air.

The more people buffeted against me the more I felt the crushing sense of almost cosmic forces. Everybody was so plainly an atom in a public company, a drop of water in a tyrannous stream of human energy--companies that cared nothing for their individual atoms, streams that cared nothing for their component drops; such atoms and drops, for the most part, to be had for thirty shillings a week. These people about me seemed no more like individual men and women than individual puffs in a mighty rushing wind, or the notes in a great scheme of music, are men and women--to the banker so many pens with ears whereon to perch them, to the capitalist so many 'hands,' and to the City man generally so many 'helpless pieces of the game he plays' up there in spidery nooks and corners of the City.

As I listened to the throbbing of the great human engines in the buildings about me, a rising and a falling there seemed as of those great steel-limbed monsters, weird contortionists of metal, that jet up and down, and writhe and wrestle this way and that, behind the long glass windows of great water-towers, or toil like Vulcan in the bowels of mighty ships. An expression of frenzy seems to come up even from the dumb tossing steel; sometimes it seems to be shaking great knuckled fists at one and brandishing threatening arms, as it strains and sweats beneath the lash of the compulsive steam. As one watches it, there seems something of human agony about its panic-stricken labours, and something like a sense of pity surprises one--a sense of pity that anything in the world should have to work like that, even steel, even, as we say, senseless steel. What, then, of these great human engine-houses! Will the engines always consent to rise and fall, night and day, like that? or will there some day be a mighty convulsion, and this blind Samson of labour pull down the whole engine-house upon his oppressors? Who knows? These are questions for great politicians and thinkers to decide, not for a poet, who is too much terrified by such forces to be able calmly to estimate and prophesy concerning them.

Yes! if you want to realise Tennyson's picture of 'one poor poet's scroll' ruling the world, take your poet's scroll down to Fenchurch Street and try it there. Ah, what a powerless little 'private interest' seems poetry there, poetry 'whose action is no stronger than a flower.' In days of peace it ventures even into the morning papers; but, let only a rumour of war be heard, and it vanishes like a dream on doomsday morning. A County Council election passeth over it and it is gone.

Yet it was near this very spot that Keats dug up the buried beauty of Greece, lying hidden beneath Finsbury Pavement! and in the deserted City churches great dramatists lie about us. Maybe I have wronged the City--and at this thought I remembered a little bookshop but a few yards away, blossoming like a rose right in the heart of the wilderness.

Here, after all, in spite of all my whirlpools and engine-houses, was for me the greatest danger in the City. Need I say, therefore, that I promptly sought it, hovered about it a moment--and entered? How much of that grateful governmental twelve-pound-ten came out alive, I dare not tell my dearest friend.

At all events I came out somehow reassured, more rich in faith. There was a might of poesy after all. There were words in the little yellow-leaved garland, nestling like a bird in my hand, that would outlast the bank yonder, and outlive us all. I held it up. How tiny it seemed, how frail amid all this stone and iron! A mere flower--a flower from the seventeenth century--long-lived for a flower! Yes, an _immortelle_.

BROWN ROSES

'Well, I never thought to see this day, sir,' said Gibbs, with something like tears in his voice, as he reluctantly plied his scissors upon Hyacinth Rondel's distinguished curls.

'Nor I, Gibbs--nor I!' said Rondel sadly, relapsing into silence again, with his head meekly bent over the white sheet spread to catch his shorn beauty.

'To think of the times, sir, that I have dressed your head,' continued Gibbs, whose grief bore so marked an emphasis, 'and to think that after to-day ...'

'But you forget, my dear Gibbs, that I shall now be a more constant customer than ever!'

'Ah, sir, but that will be different. It will be mere machine-cutting, lawn-mowing, steam-reaping, if you understand me; there'll be no pleasure in it, no artistic pleasure, I mean.'

'Yes, Gibbs, and you are an artist--I have often told you that.'

'Ah, sir, but I am coming to the conclusion that it is better not to be an artist, better to be born just like every one else. In these days one suffers too much. Why, sir, I haven't in the whole of my business six heads like yours, and I go on cutting all the rest week in and week out, just for the pleasure of dressing those six--and now there'll only be five.'

* * * * *

'It looks like a winding-sheet,' mused Rondel presently, after a long silence, broken only by the soft crunch and click of the fatal scissors, as they feasted on the beautiful brown silk.

'It do indeed, sir,' said Gibbs, with a shudder, as another little globe of golden brown rolled down into Rondel's lap.

'Poor brown roses!' sighed the poet, after another silence; 'they are just like brown roses, aren't they, Gibbs?'

'They are indeed, sir!'

'Brown roses scattered over the winding-sheet of one's youth--eh, Gibbs?'

'They are indeed, sir.'

'That's rather a pretty image, don't you think, Gibbs?'

'Indeed I do, sir!'

'Well, well, they have bloomed their last; and when Juliet's white hands come seeking with their silver fingers, white maidens lost in the brown enchanted forest, there will not be a rose left for her to gather.'

'Believe me, sir, I would more gladly have cut off your head than your hair--that is, figuratively speaking,' sobbed the artist-in-hair-oils.

'Yes, my head would hardly be missed--you are quite right, Gibbs; but my hair! What will they do without it at first nights and private views? It was worth five shillings a week to many a poor paragraph-writer. Well, I must try and make up for it by my beard!'

'Your beard, sir?' exclaimed Gibbs in horror.

'Yes, Gibbs; for some years I have been a Nazarene--that is, a Nazarite, with the top half of my head; now I am going to change about and be a Nazarite with the lower. The razor has kissed my cheeks and my chin and the fluted column of my throat for the last time.'

'You cannot mean it, sir!' said Gibbs, suspending his murderous task a moment.

'It's quite true, Gibbs.'

'Does she wish that too, sir?'

'Yes, that too.'

'Well, sir, I have heard of men making sacrifices for their wives, but of all the cruel....'

'Please don't, Gibbs. It does no good. And Mrs. Rondel's motive is a good one.'

'Of course, sir, I cannot presume--and yet, if it wouldn't be presuming, I should like to know why you are making this great, I may say this noble, sacrifice?'

'Well, Gibbs, we're old friends, and I'll tell you some day, but I hardly feel up to it to-day.'

'Of course not, sir, of course not--it's only natural,' said Gibbs tenderly, while the scissors once more took up the conversation.

THE DONKEY THAT LOVED A STAR

'That is how the donkey tells his love!' I said one day, with intent to be funny, as the prolonged love-whoop of a distant donkey was heard in the land.

'Don't be too ready to laugh at donkeys,' said my friend. 'For,' he continued, 'even donkeys have their dreams. Perhaps, indeed, the most beautiful dreams are dreamed by donkeys.'

'Indeed,' I said, 'and now that I think of it, I remember to have said that most dreamers are donkeys, though I never expected so scientific a corroboration of a fleeting jest.'

Now, my friend is an eminent scientist and poet in one, a serious combination; and he took my remarks with seriousness at once scientific and poetic.

'Yes,' he went on, 'that is where you clever people make a mistake. You think that because a donkey has only two vowel-sounds wherewith to express his emotions, he has no emotions to express. But let me tell you, sir ...'

But here we both burst out laughing--

'You Golden Ass!' I said,'take a munch of these roses; perhaps they will restore you.'

'No,' he resumed, 'I am quite serious. I have for many years past made a study of donkeys--high-stepping critics call it the study of Human Nature--however, it's the same thing--and I must say that the more I study them the more I love them. There is nothing so well worth studying as the misunderstood, for the very reason that everybody thinks he understands it. Now, to take another instance, most people think they have said the last word on a goose when they have called it "a goose"!--but let me tell you, sir ...'

But here again we burst out laughing--

'Dear goose of the golden eggs,' I said, 'pray leave to discourse on geese to-night--though lovely and pleasant would the discourse be;--to-night I am all agog for donkeys.'

'So be it,' said my friend,' and if that be so, I cannot do better than tell you the story of the donkey that loved a star--keeping for another day the no less fascinating story of the goose that loved an angel.'

By this time I was, appropriately, all ears.

'Well,' he once more began, 'there was once a donkey, quite an intimate friend of mine--and I have no friend of whom I am prouder--who was unpractically fond of looking up at the stars. He could go a whole day without thistles, if night would only bring him stars. Of course he suffered no little from his fellow-donkeys for this curious passion of his. They said well that it did not become him, for indeed it was no little laughable to see him gazing so sentimentally at the remote and pitiless heavens. Donkeys who belonged to Shakespeare Societies recalled the fate of Bottom, the donkey who had loved a fairy; but our donkey paid little heed. There is perhaps only one advantage in being a donkey--namely, a hide impervious to criticism. In our donkey's case it was rather a dream that made him forget his hide--a dream that drew up all the sensitiveness from every part, from hoof, and hide, and ears, so that all the feeling in his whole body was centred in his eyes and brain, and those, as we have said, were centred on a star. He took it for granted that his fellows should sneer and kick-out at him--it was ever so with genius among the donkeys, and he had very soon grown used to these attentions of his brethren, which were powerless to withdraw his gaze from the star he loved. For though he loved all the stars, as every individual man loves all women, there was one star he loved more than any other; and standing one midnight among his thistles, he prayed a prayer, a prayer that some day it might be granted him to carry that star upon his back--which, he recalled, had been sanctified by the holy sign--were it but for ever so short a journey. Just to carry it a little way, and then to die. This to him was a dream beyond the dreams of donkeys.