Part 6

And so you may discourse of the pistils and stamens of the lilies of the field, and divide the fowls of the air into genera and species and sub-species and count the teeth of Keats: and when all is done, you know--nothing. Nothing that is of the essence of your matter, nothing of its “quiddity,” a word that we have ceased to use, I suppose, because we have no use for it, having forgotten that there is such a thing as that essence which is present in all things, which indeed makes them to be what they are, which is nevertheless unsearchable and ineffable. And all this is true, not only of the matters which the plain man, the man in the street, is inclined to sniff at, but of all things, of man himself and of the universe of noumena and phenomena which is presented to him. If you talk to the plain, practical man about Mystic Theology, Mystic Love, Poetry, Romance, he will, very likely, brush you aside with his “In my opinion that’s all imagination”--and serve you right for talking to him on such subjects at all. The dear fellow has no notion of the fact that he has never seen a point, a line, a square, or a triangle, and that he never will see any one of these things--in this life at all events. He has seen black marks on paper which he has been told are lines and squares and triangles. Being at heart thoroughly credulous, he believes what he is told, but if he will dig up his old “Euclid” and read the definitions, he will find that no mortal eyes can ever see a square or a circle, since a line is length without breadth and a plane surface is length and breadth without thickness. There is nothing in the nature of things to prevent a man from seeing a dragon or a griffin, a gorgon or a unicorn. Nobody as a matter of fact has seen a woman whose hair consisted of snakes, nor a horse from whose forehead a horn projected; though very early man most probably did see dragons--known to science as pterodactyls--and monsters more improbable than griffins. At any rate, none of these zoological fancies violates the fundamental laws of the intellect; the monsters of heraldry and mythology do not exist, but there is no reason in the nature of things nor in the laws of the mind why they should not exist. But no man hath seen a line at any time, since the manifestation of length without breadth is a contradiction in terms. And the plain man is probably inclined to believe in the existence of vulgar fractions; he may tell you that he makes use of them daily in his calculations. But let him study the story of the race between Achilles and the Tortoise, and note to what monstrous results his belief in elementary arithmetic inevitably conducts him; results which are more intolerable than a madman’s dreams.

And then, again, there are wider, more universal conceptions than anything contained in the geometry and arithmetic books. In a little book of mine with the bad title of “War and the Christian Faith”--the publisher chose the title--I speak thus of Space and Time:

“Take two insistent and unavoidable examples (of the things which are unsearchable and indefinable), space and time. No man who strolls from his arm-chair to the mantelpiece and watches the hands of the clock move round can deny the existence of either, since he has walked from point to point in one and seen the other measured before his eyes. But as to understanding space and time, what highest philosophy can attain to such a pitch? The limitless cannot so much as be imagined in the mind, nor imagined in a nightmare: but that space which you have traversed of some eight or ten feet is limitless, and must be so.

“It is a sea without a shore. And time, that which your two-guinea clock ticks off for you, as you watch the dial: it had no beginning that you can picture; it can have no end save with God. You cannot understand; you must believe; and so on your very hearth-rug the infinites and eternities are before you and confront you, as truly as the clock face confronts you.”

And the conclusion of the whole matter is that we live and move in a world of profound and ineffable mystery; that all things from the most abstract to the most concrete are involved in this mystery, and, _therefore_, that Casanova as an exponent of love is a futile fellow. He was a Voltairean; he approached the question as he would say without prejudices, as the foolish among us would say, without any nonsense, or, as the still more foolish among us would say, in a scientific spirit. And the result is exactly what might be expected: nothing. Love is defined and expounded in the spirit of Bitzer defining a horse; and one perceives that science misapplied is just gibberish, nothing more or less. Otherwise, taking Casanova’s Memoirs from a lower standpoint, they are in many places vastly entertaining. He knew all Europe from Petersburg and Constantinople to London and Madrid; he was familiar with the palace and the gutter; he was the friend of Kings and philosophers and popes--and also of the scum of the eighteenth-century earth. One cannot understand the period as a whole without knowing Casanova.

So I translated and translated day after day; but in a few months’ time the black hole in which I worked began very violently to disagree with me. I got ill, and it was clear that some change must be made. The Brothers, as always, were courteous and considerate: why not do the work at home? I assented very willingly, worked at the task for five hours every day, and every Saturday took my parcel of copy to the shop and got my thirty shillings, the week’s wages.

And here I must make a boast, which is not wholly a boast: the second part of this sentence I shall explain no farther. I finished the translation of the Memoirs, but the book was not immediately issued. On the completion of my job the Brothers needed me no more. I imagine that they wanted a real, expert, technical cataloguer, not a literary man of sorts; and my having worked for them for some months at my own home and not in the shop made it easy for them to get rid of me quietly; rather, to let me fade away, without the least suspicion of firmness, much less of harshness. And they were always very glad to see me when I chose to look them up, either on business or merely as a friendly caller. I remember, for example, that when I had finished the translation of “Le Moyen de Parvenir” and was “subscribing” the book with “the trade,” I called at the shop and was received with a genial and kindly courtesy that I have not forgotten, though it is a long time since 1890; but then I do not forget. And lest it should be suspected by some persons that under a veil of benignity I am “getting at” the Brothers all the time, I hasten to say that this is not so; to say this in the strongest manner possible. True, thirty shillings a week was not good pay for decent French-English translating, even in 1889; but it was the wages that I had asked myself, having been thoroughly convinced by my experiences of the six preceding years that I was such a dismal and incapable ass that if I just managed to escape the Governorship of the Island of Farre Joyaunce--otherwise the ditch or the workhouse--it was as much as I could expect. So I asked my thirty shillings a week and hoped in my heart that it was not too much; and I am not blaming the Brothers in the least because they did not press more upon me. And, however that may be, they were always courteous and kindly in all communications that passed between us; and for that they shall be in my grateful memory so long as I live. I have said already, I think, how once during the last year of my employment on the “Evening News,” finding myself in old haunts of long ago, Wellington Street, Bow Street, York Street, anguish possessed me as I remembered how I had once starved and had known something like happiness while I toiled over the ancient occult books in the Catherine Street garret; anguish possessed me as I recollected the happy time in misery. And, as I said to a friend soon afterwards: “In those days I was getting considerably less money in a whole year than I am now getting in a month; and yet....”

Again, I say, if our clergy would but mind their business. If instead of enquiring into the exact cut of bodices, instead of passing anxious hours as to the pernicious corruptions of the Fox-Trot and the Bunny Hug, instead of working with all their hearts and souls to make sure that no one can possibly get a glass of bitter beer after ten o’clock, instead of unmasking the inferno of the race-course, the utter levity of much of our railway literature; if, instead of all this accursed drivel, cant and imbecility, they would but say Mass and preach the Gospel, and otherwise quite abide in peace! Let them go to the Book, and there they will find that the most horrible sin denounced in it is neither gambling, drinking nor wantoning, but the sin of shaming a man, of bitterly insulting him, of making him mean in his own eyes, of making him despise his own self as something unutterably fouled and scorned and bewrayed. What is the text? Something like: but he that sayeth to his brother, “Thou fool,” shall be in danger of hell fire.

I am drawing a contrast between 1889 and 1921, and hence I say that the Brothers always treated me with the common decency due from one human being to another, though they were rich and I was poor, though they were men of business and I an idiot in all matters of business, though they were masters and I was man.

And now as to the famous boast. As I said, I ceased to be in the employment of these good men. I went into the country, up on the Children Hills. We neither saw nor heard anything of each other. But all the while those legacies of which I have spoken came dropping slow, and in 1893, when I had made up my mind to return to London, I think I must have had in bank something between three and four thousand pounds. I was assailed by an unworthy pang of prudence, by one of the foolish notions that the world’s people take for wisdom. It struck me that this living on capital, taking the pieces of eight by fistfuls out of the chest, would never do; that the money ought to be invested, preferably in some business in which I could contribute work as well as money. I looked about me, I advertised, I saw some people in the City and found nothing promising from my point of view, though I found here and there such curiosities as London, I believe, only affords. For example, in a very dim sort of cock-loft in an old house in the heart of the City, I hit upon a firm of general agents who had answered my advertisement. There were two of them: one, a young, rosy, out-in-the-open sort of man, the other elderly, frock-coated, with a kind of dissenting beard on his chin. He talked of the version of Horace’s odes that he was shortly bringing out at his own expense, and discussed with me the true pronunciation of the Latin language with much intelligence. The junior partner’s talk was of trawling, and indeed he said that the firm was a sort of trawling concern--in City waters.

But nothing came of it, and at last I bethought me of the Brothers. Brother Charles was as genial as ever. He saw my point. He said: “We are going to issue Casanova at last; why not put a thousand pounds into that for a start?” I agreed, and the matter was settled. And then, very nervously, with a good deal of hesitation, with a certain difficulty in the choice of words, Brother Charles said:

“Of course, Mr. Machen, we quite recognise the ... er ... circumstances in which you made your most admirable translation of the book. It was ... er ... in a manner ... er ... task-work; yes, _task-work_. Well ... the case is now, to a certain degree ... altered; you have an interest in the prosperity of the venture, and, in short, we rather wondered whether you would like to ... to ... _revise_ your manuscript.”

“Mr. Charles,” I replied, “I did the job as well as I could; and I don’t think I can make it any better.”

_Chapter VII_

Beroalde de Verville proved to be what the elder members of the theatrical profession used to call “a pill.” Only the other day I was reading a French account of this author. The critic said in the course of his remarks that many people who had gone to the “Moyen de Parvenir” in search of unpleasantness had turned back from the quest, deterred by the difficulty of the language. And I don’t know that it is more difficult for a modern Frenchman than for an Englishman. It is written in a sort of Babylonish dialect which is not exactly French though it looks like it; as Meredith looks like English to the casual glance. And then, it is not only difficult, but obscure; not only are the sentences queerly constructed, but the subject-matter is of a highly dubious and cloudy character: when you have found out what Beroalde is saying, you begin to wonder what he is saying it about. And, then, there are bits of old dialect peppered about this excessively odd volume. I remember coming upon two words: “iquent hesne.” I sat down in front of them, and looked at them from every angle. I don’t know how I found out at last that “iquent hesne” was a sort of seventeenth-century French “Zummerzet” for “cette chêne”--“thicky oāk.” Again the “Moyen” is thick with puns, of the kind that used to be called in the golden days of Burlesque “outrageous”: and the time I wasted in trying to turn these silly French tricks into sillier English contortions! On the whole, I would say that “Le Moyen de Parvenir” in literature is as a cathedral constructed entirely of gargoyles would be in architecture. Rabelais is full of gargoyles, “apes and owls and antics,” as he calls them, on the outside of the jar. But within, as he rightly claims, there are precious medicines, aromatic balms of singular power and virtue. And so far as I can judge, Beroalde is all oddity and nothing else. He cost me a year’s hard labour; the version was issued and is now valued by collectors; and that is all that need be said.

And now--in 1890--I began to try a little journalism of the more or less literary kind. I began, I think, by writing “Turnovers” for the “Globe,” and miscellaneous articles for the “St. James’s Gazette,” and at length stories for the latter paper, which was then edited by Mr.--now Sir--Sydney Lowe. The “Globe” is extinct, the “St. James’s Gazette” is merged and submerged in the “Evening Standard”; there are no papers of such metal now in existence. The difference between them and the evening papers of the day is a very simple one: the former were meant to please the educated, the latter are designed to entertain the uneducated, and the uneducated may be equated, very largely indeed, with women. It is an odd paradox: there is no doubt, I suppose, that the instruction--or, if you like, education--of women has made immense strides in the last thirty years; and yet it is true that when a newspaper editor says to himself: “We have an immense number of women readers and we must see that they get what they like,” the result is drivel. This sort of thing:

Madame has just discovered a new craze. Jewelled clay pipes and shag tobacco delicately sprinkled with gold-dust are now quite _démodés_ when once we cross the borders of Balham; but my lady prides herself on her collection of hookahs, the water-pipes of the gorgeous East.

It is quite the thing, I hear, amongst really smart women to give “Hookah Teas.” Everybody wears Oriental costume, and sits on cushions piled on the floor, and delicately draws in the aroma of the rarest Turkish Tobacco, scented by its passage through rosewater or lavender-water. At Lady Clarinda Belsize’s Hookah Tea last Wednesday, two native musicians played the tom-tom and the _guzla_ behind a curtain, or _purdah_, as I am told it is called. Of course _yashmaks_ were worn by all the guests.

There; it is not worth parodying. And there is another sort of terrible tosh which deals with the doings of “The Summer Girl” and “The Winter Girl” and “The Marathon Girl”: all of it a very feeble imitation of the cheapest American journalism. In the ’nineties this kind of thing existed, but it was confined to the columns of one or two ladies’ papers. In those days, I would not say that the editors of evening papers brought out their journals exclusively for the benefit of the members of the best clubs of St. James’s and Pall Mall; but I certainly should say that they had the clubs in their mind’s eye; that they presumed a certain standard of education and culture in their readers. All that ended when the evening “Westminster Gazette” came to an end.

But indeed there would be little harm done if a column or two columns or three columns were reserved for the “Hookah Tea” stuff and the “Caravan Girl” stuff and all similar stuff. You could skip these columns if you didn’t like them, just as I skip the racing columns, in which I am not interested. But “the women” rule the whole paper. Not only must the editor put in matter which he knows they will like, he must keep out matter which he knows they won’t like. And the result is ... the result as we know it. As the “literary editor” of a big London paper acutely observed to me not long ago, the case of the newspaper article is exactly as the case of chops and steaks, beefsteak puddings and saddles of mutton that were of old. “The women” have spoilt all. What do they know or care about man’s food? To them there is nothing to choose between a chop fried white and hard and greasy in the frying-pan and a chop which has been purged of all excess by the ardent heat, beneath the gridiron, which beneath a coat half black, half golden-brown, preserves its delicious juices, which sizzles on the plate as William or Charles serves it, which, opened by the eager knife, shews within a hue like that of a blush-rose in June. These are not matters to enchant the wayward heart of a young girl, and when once she sets foot inside the tavern coffee-room, farewell to all such solid merits. There was once a noble tavern called Herbert’s, famous for two generations. Men who had spent half a lifetime in Africa or India or in the islands of the South Seas were sustained by the thought of the beefsteak pudding at Herbert’s. The times changed and the old tavern with them. Going there in these later days, I used to wonder why all the meats seemed to taste alike, why there was no distinctive and peculiar relish about any of the dishes. I found out the reason why one day. I had business, oddly enough, in Herbert’s kitchen. One of the cooks shewed me the joints roasting on the jack; and I perceived that three different meats were cooking at the one fire, while beneath, in a common pan, their juices mingled, ready for the basting ladle. It is not much wonder, I think, that veal and lamb and beef taste all much alike in this unhappy place, once so high, now fallen so low. One night I was dining there, and a member of the party asked the waiter to bring him some Stilton. “I beg your pardon, sir,” said the man, “we only have _English_ cheeses.” It sounds impossible; but I heard this with my ears. In the old days Herbert’s was exclusively masculine in its custom; I do not know what would have happened to that waiter then. I hardly think that his death would have been an easy one.

But to “the women” all this is of no account. They know nothing about man’s food, as I say, and they care less. I do not blame them; I do not blame myself for being ignorant of the difference between Hopsac and Gaberdine: but how would _they_ like it if I poked my nose into their Oxford Street shops and insisted on these shops being carried on to suit my taste?

So through this monstrous incursion of women, with the war and the nursery hours of to-day, the old tavern life has gone; utterly and for ever, I am afraid. A good thing has gone. The old mahogany boxes with bright brass work and green curtains, the light twinkling in the dark polished surfaces that were all about the room, the flaming fire with the plates warming by it, the plain food, the best of its kind, cooked in the best possible manner, the mighty tankards of mighty ale, the port that _was_ port afterwards, in itself a great gift and a curious grace, and later--say about eleven o’clock--Charles appearing with a large china bowl and a bottle under his arm, following up these things with lump sugar, lemons, and the hot water: it is all over. And it is not only the good material things that have been taken away: the good meats and the good drinks, the glowing mahogany and the cheerful blaze and crackle of the fire: with them has gone, I suspect, a certain genial habit of the mind and soul which was congruous with all the circumstances of the old-fashioned tavern, which was congruous also with good men and good books and choice poetry, with all the rich zest and relish and unction which made the Victorian age of letters a great age; and, in its measure, a worthy successor to three other illustrious tavern ages: the Shakespearian, the Caroline, and the Johnsonian. Think of Falstaff and his tavern bill and his warning against thin potations, think of Herrick and his address to Ben, his fond remembrance of the taverns “where we such clusters had as made us nobly wild not mad,” think of Johnson squeezing the orange into the bowl with antick gestures, saying “Who’s for _poonsh_?” think of Tennyson and that blest pint of port at the vanished Cock Tavern, think of Dickens, that great lover of tavern feasts and immortaliser of them: think of all this, my poor young man, and beat your breast. There are no jolly taverns for you, and your favourite authors do not write like men--“my son Cartwright writes all like a man,” said Ben Jonson--but like psycho-analytical chemists.