Part 5

And I have always been glad that I made this business-like arrangement. By it I was enabled to live for eleven or twelve years under pleasant and humane conditions. Not in luxury, be it understood, for luxury has always been utterly detestable to me. Detestable to me, I say with emphasis; I do not say that luxury is detestable in itself. If men like to have it so, by all means let them dwell in marble halls, with vassals and serfs and wine-stewards at their side. Let them be as Louisquinzious as ever they please in their homes and at their hotels; for all I care, they may take their ease in snuggeries, all gold and mirrors and marbles, fifty feet high, a hundred feet high, if they like it so. But to me, a poor clerk, all this has ever been nauseous. When I plied my sorry trade of journalist, I disliked most things involved in that vile business, but I hated my occasional missions to the Hôtel Splendide and the Hôtel Glorieux. I would be sent to these places to find out, say, the exact method employed by the new chef, M. Mirobolant, in cooking red herrings for the famous Joy Teas in the Venetian Hall--everybody has heard of the Joy Teas at the Splendide, and of the Joy Band of twenty kettle-drums, fifty tea-trays, ten trombones and thirty bassoons. Well, I would be sent to the Splendide on this errand; or, perhaps, to the Glorieux to find out whether it were true that the principals of the Russian Ballet sucked their morning tea through raspberry jam and declared that this was necessary to their art. I would visit one or other of these establishments and sit down on Louis Quinze or Louis Seize chairs and wait there in my dingy old cloak, while “Reception” and “Enquiries” smiled to see such an incongruous figure before them, while the guests of the hotel smiled also as they went in and out, till at last the manager arrived, fretful enough, usually, at being dragged from his business or his leisure to answer idiotic questions. I used to wonder on these Splendide or Glorieux days what I had done to deserve such humiliations. The only thing that somewhat consoled me was the thought that, whatever pains the Doctor may have suffered, while he waited in Lord Chesterfield’s outward rooms or was repulsed from that nobleman’s door, my case was more humiliating still, since an English nobleman of race is a much greater personage than the shiniest of hotel managers. And perhaps, also, I fancied that I was beginning to follow a little in the faithful steps of Venerable Raymondus Anglus, who was slowly sliced into little pieces in Cathay.

Rather, I am afraid, in the steps of a relative of my own, some distant Cousin Machen, whom business, I suppose, took to Cathay in the ’fifties and ’sixties of the last century. It so fell out that while this gentleman was in China we declared one of our infamous Opium Wars against the Dragon Throne and the Vermilion Pencil. Promptly the local mandarin seized Cousin Machen and put him in a cage. They then travelled him round the Chinese “Smalls.” When the cortège got to a village or town, my cousin’s custodians touched him up smartly with their spears. Cousin Machen would then dance with anguish, and, I am sure, most ungracefully, and the happy villagers, howling with mirth, and voting Cousin Machen good goods, would pelt the poor man with undesirable matters. He got away from them, but I have heard my relations say that in extreme old age the mere word “China” was enough to bring a sweat of horror pouring down his face. And I am in a position to sympathise fully with Cousin Machen----

Well, I was saying, I think, that I never cared for luxury, and so did not waste my bit of money on it. But if luxury tempts me not at all, I care a great deal for homely comfort, and I lived in considerable comfort in the days of which I am speaking. I think that my annual budget was between four and five hundred a year, and let me tell an amazed generation that for five hundred a year or rather less two people could live very sufficiently in the ’eighties and ’nineties. Your saddle of mutton and your sirloin of beef were of the best, lamb at Easter--is there anything better than spring lamb with its skin roasted to a golden-brown?--was easily attainable; fowls and ducks, grouse and partridges and pheasants, with now and then that most delicious bird the woodcock, were no rarities. And asparagus might well appear quite early in the spring, and green peas in advance of the main crop. And sometimes one felt that it would be amusing to go out to dinner for a change: well, the bill of the Soho restaurant never gave an indigestion afterwards. Sometimes the Soho dinners were quite good, they were always amusing; and in those days there was such a thing as decent Chianti. It came to the cheerful table in flasks of very thin glass, and between the cork and the wine was a stratum of olive oil. This the waiter flicked off on to the linoleum with a swift gesture. The last Chianti of this order that I tasted was in 1902. I saw great gallon flasks of it standing in the window of a small shop opposite the stage door of the Palace, and bought one of these flasks--it cost six shillings, if I remember--and bore it tenderly to my dressing-room at the St. James’s Theatre. It was the last night of “Paolo and Francesca,” and we drank the Chianti merrily in trunk hose and armour when the play was done. And Herbert Dansey, who was really a noble Florentine, “degli Tassinari,” vowed you could get no better Chianti in all Tuscany.

Or again, one didn’t fancy roast beef, and yet one didn’t want to go out dining. There was the middle course; Salame or Mortadella, half a round of ripe Brie and a bottle of a sufficient red or white wine. And a half-bottle of Benedictine only cost four-and-six. And the whole of the small banquet ran into very little: they were cheap days, and the Income Tax was inconsiderable then. But I was forgetting. I had no income, so I saved the expense of the tax. And under these conditions, living very pleasantly, with a month in France every year, I cultivated literature between 1890–1900. I refrained, utterly, I am glad to say, from the impious folly of wondering what would happen when the money should have come to an end. When that day came, why, that day could see to it.

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

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

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

_Chapter VI_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’ve seen about Jackson?” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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