Chapter 9

I cannot say I have ever been greatly helped by what I have read concerning the standards for literary criticism. Of the many wise and learned critics to whose works I have gone for light, I can remember only Aristotle, Longinus, Tolstoy, and Anatole France--probably because it is easy for the innocent to agree with dominating men. Of the moderns I enjoy reading anything "Q" has to say about books; useless pleasure again, for what does one get but "Q's" full, friendly, ironic, and humorous mind? Lately, too, the critics have been unanimously recommending to us--and that shows the genuine value to the community of mere book reviewers--the _Letters of Tchehov_, as noble a document as we have had for a very long time. But I thought they did not praise Tchehov enough as a critic, for that wise and lovable author, among his letters, made many casual asides about art that were pleasing and therefore right to me. I begin to fear that most of the good things said about literature are said in casual asides.

If I were asked to say why I preferred Christabel or Keats's odes to Tennyson's Revenge or the _Barrack-Room Ballads_, I should find it hard to explain satisfactorily to anyone who preferred to read Tennyson or Kipling. Where are the criteria? Can a Chinaman talk to an Arab? The difference, we see at once, is even deeper than that of language. It is a difference in nature; and we may set up any criterion of literature we like, but it will never carry across such a chasm. Our only consolation is that we may tell the other man he is on the wrong side of it, but he will not care, because he will not see it. The means by which we are able to separate what is precious in books from the matrix is not a process, and is nothing measurable. It is instinctive, and not only differs from age to age, but changes in the life of each of us. It is as indefinable as beauty itself. An artist may know how to create a beautiful thing, but he cannot communicate his knowledge except by that creation. That is all he can tell us of beauty, and, indeed, he may be innocent of the measure of his effort; and the next generation may ridicule the very thing which gave us so much pleasure, pleasure we proved to our own satisfaction to be legitimate and well founded by many sound generalizations about art. The canons of criticism are no more than the apology for our personal preferences, no matter how gravely we back them. Sometimes it has happened that a book or a poem has succeeded in winning the approval of many generations, and so we may call it a classic. Yet what is the virtue of a classic, or of the deliberate and stately billows going with the wind when the world has sweep and is fair, or of a child with a flower, or of the little smile on the face of the dead boy in the muck when the guns were filling us with fear and horror of mankind? I don't know; but something in us appears to save us from the punishing comet of Zeus.

XXI. The South Downs

MAY 22, 1920. The southern face of the hill fell, an abrupt promontory, to the woods of the plain. Its face was scored by the weather, and the dry drainage channels were headlong cascades of grey pebbles. Clumps of heather, sparse oak scrub with young leaves of bronze, contorted birch, and this year's croziers of the bracken (heaven knows their secret for getting lush aromatic sap out of such stony poverty), all made a tough life which held up the hill, steep as it was; though the hill was going, for the roots of some of the oaks were exposed, empty coils of rope from which the burden had slipped. In that sea of trees whose billows came to the foot of our headland, and out of sight beneath its waves, children were walking, gathering bluebells. We knew they were there, for we could hear their voices. But there was no other sign of our form of life except a neolithic flint scraper one of us had picked up on the hilltop. The marks of the man who made it were as clear as the voices below. It had been lost since yesterday, it might be--anyhow, about the day the first Pyramid was finished. It depends on how one looks at the almanac. For you could feel the sun fire was young. It had not been long kindled. Its heat in the herbage was moist. One of the youngsters with me, bruising the bracken and snuffing it, said it smelt of almond and cucumber. Another said the crushed birch leaves smelt of sour apples. We could not say what the oak leaves smelt like. Then another grabbed a handful of leafmould, damp and brown and full of fibre. What did that smell of? They were not sure that they liked it. Perhaps it was the smell of the hill. They admitted that it wasn't a bad smell. They seemed a little afraid of that odour.

But I was trying to read, and neolithic times and the bluebell gatherers had run together. They were in the same day. My book had made of that May morning in Surrey an apparition without time and place. We hear ourselves laughing now, intent, for instance, on confirming the almond and cucumber in bruised bracken, or catch the sound of our serious voices raised in a dispute over literature or politics. But these things are not really in our minds. We would not betray our secret thoughts to bluebell gatherers and boys snuffing the bracken. This book I was reading, and a fancied resemblance in that hill and its prospect, moved the shadows again--they are so readily moved--and I saw two of us in France on such a hill, gazing intently and innocently over just such a prospect, in the summer of 1915, without in the least guessing what, in that landscape before us, was latent for us both. Those downs across the way would be Beaumont Hamel and Thiepval. Bluebells! The publishers may send out what advice they choose to authors concerning the unpopularity of books about the War--always excepting, of course, the important reminiscences, the soft and heavy masses of words of the great leaders of the nations in the War, which merely reveal that they never knew what they were doing. Certainly we could spare that kind of war book, though it continues to arrive in abundance; a volume by a famous soldier explaining why affairs went strangely wrong is about the last place where we should look for anything but folly solemnly pondering unrealities. But whatever the publishers may say, we do want books about the War by men who were in it. Some of us have learned by now that France is a memory of such a nature that, though it is not often we dare stop to look directly at it, for the day's work must be done, yet it looms through the importance of each of these latter days as though the event of our lives were past, and we were at present merely watching the clock. The shadow of what once was in France is an abiding presence for us. We know nothing can happen again which will release us from it. And yet how much has been written of it? That is the measure of its vastness and its mystery--it possesses the minds of many men, but they are silent on what they know. They rarely speak of it, except to one of the fraternity. But where are their thoughts? Wandering, viewless and uneasy wraiths, over Flanders, in Artois and Picardy. Those thoughts will never come home again to stay.

It is strange to me that publishers should suppose that books, intimate about the invisible but abiding shadow which is often more potent than present May sunshine, should not be wanted. Take for example this book I was reading, _The Squadroon_, by Ardern Beaman. To induce readers to buy it it has a picture on its dust-cover which kept me from reading it for weeks. This wrapper shows a ghostly knight in armour leading a charge of British cavalry in this War. I should have thought we had had enough of that romantic nonsense during the actual events. The War was written for the benefit of readers who made a luxury of the sigh, and who were told and no doubt preferred to believe that the young soldier went into battle with the look we so admire in the picture called The Soul's Awakening. He was going to glory. There are no dead. There are only memorial crosses for heroes and the Last Post. The opinions of most civilians on the War were as agreeable as stained-glass windows. The thought of a tangle of a boy's inside festooned on rusty wire would naturally have spoiled the soul's awakening and the luxury of the sigh. I heard of a civilian official, on his way to Paris after the Armistice, who was just saved by rapid explanations from the drastic attention of a crowd of Tommies who mistook him for a War Correspondent.

But Mr. Beaman's book is not like war correspondence. It can be commended to those who were not there, but who wish to hear a true word or two. Mr. Beaman as a good-natured man remembers how squeamish we are, and being also shy and dainty indicates some matters but briefly. I wish, for one thing, that when describing the doings of his cavalry squadron after the disaster on the Fifth Army front--the author enables you to feel how slender was the line of resolute men which then saved the Army from downfall--he had ventured to record with more courage the things which it shamed him to see. Why should only such as he know of those shocks to affability? But all he says about some unpleasant matters is: "During those days we saw things of which it is not good to speak--of which afterwards we never did speak, except late at nights, in the privacy of our own mess."

Mr. Beaman's simple narrative, however, with its humanity and easy humour, often lets in light on strange affairs, as though he had forgotten what had been locked up, and had carelessly opened a forbidden door. He shuts it again at once, like a gentlemen, and we follow him round hoping that presently he will do the same again. Ambrose Bierce could have made something of what is suggested in such a passage as this:

"On the borders of this horrid desolation (the Somme) we met a Salvage Company at work. That warren of trenches and dugouts extended for untold miles.... They warned us, if we insisted on going further in, not to let any man go singly, but only in strong parties, as the Golgotha was peopled with wild men, British, French, Australian, German deserters, who lived there underground, like ghouls among the mouldering dead, and who came out at nights to plunder and kill. In the night, an officer said, mingled with the snarling of carrion dogs, they often heard inhuman cries and rifle-shots coming from that awful wilderness. Once they (the Salvage Company) had put out, as a trap, a basket containing food, tobacco, and a bottle of whisky. But the following morning they found the bait untouched, and a note in the basket, 'Nothing doing!'"

XXX. Kipling

JUNE 5, 1920. One day, when I did not know Kipling's name, I found in a cabin of a ship from Rangoon two paper-covered books, with a Calcutta imprint, smelling of something, whatever it was, that did not exist in England. The books were _Plain Tales from the Hills_ and _Soldiers Three_. It was high summer, and in that cabin of a ship in the Albert Dock, with its mixed odour of tea, teak, and cheroots, I read through all. The force in those stories went nearer to capturing me completely than anything I have read since. I can believe now that I just escaped taking a path which would have given me a world totally different from the one I know, and the narrowness of the escape makes me feel tolerant towards the young people who give up typewriting and book-keeping, and go out into an unfriendly world determined to be Mary Pickfords and Charlie Chaplins. A boy boards a ship merely to get a parrot, and his friend, who brought it from Burma, has gone to Leadenhall Street; there is a long interval, with those books lying in a bunk. Such a trivial incident--something like it happening every week to everybody--and to-day that boy, but for the Grace of God, might be reading the leaders of the _Morning Post_ as the sole relief to a congested mind, going every week to the cartoon of _Punch_ as to barley water for chronic prickly heat, and talking of dealing with the heterodox as the Holy Office used to deal with unbaptized Indian babies for the good of their little souls.

I have recovered from those astonishing adventures with Kipling. I may read him to-day with enjoyment, but safe from excitation. This is due, perhaps, to a stringy constitution, subject to bilious doubts, which loves to see lusty Youth cock its hat when most nervous, swagger with merry insolence to hide the uncertainty which comes of self-conscious inexperience, assume a cynical shrewdness to protect its credulity, and imitate the abandon of the hard fellow who has been to Hong Kong, Tal Tal, and Delagoa Bay. We enjoy seeing Youth act thus; but one learns in time that a visit to Rhodesia, worse luck, makes one no more intelligent than a week-end at Brighton. Well, it doesn't matter. What ingrates we should be now to turn on Kipling because we disagree with the politics he prefers, those loud opinions of his which, when we get too much of them, remain in the ears for a while like the echoes of a brass tray which a hearty child banged for a drum. Though we hold the British Constitution as sacred as the family vault we do not think the less of Dickens because the awful spectacle of our assembled legislators made him laugh, nor do we leave the room when Beethoven is played because his careless regard for a monarch's divine right is painful to us. If Kipling had not given us _My Sunday at Home_ and _The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney_, how should we have got them?

I have just read Kipling's book, _Letters of Travel_. Its attractive title drew me to it, and is to blame. Kipling has an uncanny gift of sight. It prompts no divination in him, but its curiosity misses nothing that is superficial. If he had watched the Crucifixion, and had been its sole recorder, we should have had a perfect representation of the soldiers, the crowds, the weather, the smells, the colours, and the three uplifted figures; so lively a record that it would be immortal for the fidelity and commonness of its physical experience. But we should never have known more about the central figure than that He was a cool and courageous rebel. Kipling can make a picture of an indifferent huddle of fishing boats in a stagnant harbour which is more enjoyable than being there. Letters from such a traveller would attract one directly across the bookshop. But these letters of his were addressed to his friends the Imperialists before the War, and one may guess the rest. Such an exposure moves one to sorrow over a writer whose omniscience used to make the timorous believe that arrogance, if lively enough, had some advantage over reason.

Yet there is in a few of the letters enough to show what we missed because they were not addressed to himself, or to anybody but a Composite Portrait of The Breed. There are passages in the chapter called "Half a Dozen Pictures" which clear all irritation from the mind (for many of the author's insults are studied and gratuitous) and leave nothing but respect for the artist. These come when the artist sees only a riot of Oriental deck passengers, bears, and macaws, in the tropics; or a steamer coming round, exposed by a clarity like crystal in the trough of immense seas somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Auckland Islands at dayfall. We get such impressions when Kipling has, for the moment, forgotten the need to make a genuflection towards the Absolute and Everlasting Chutney, and is a man and brother delighting in his craft.

The rest of the book has, one must admit, a value, but it is an undesigned value; indeed, its value is that it was designed to prove, at the time it was written, something quite different. From this book, with its recurring contempt for England, you may see what value we need have attached to much that the assured and the violent ever had to tell us about our Empire. If this publication is, indeed, an act of contrition for words unwisely written, then it should be read as a warning by all who write. Materialists naturally attach to transient circumstances a value which the less patriotic of us might think not really material. "We discussed, first of all, under the lee of a wet deck-house in mid-Atlantic; man after man cutting in and out of the talk as he sucked at his damp tobacco." There is no doubt Kipling supposes that the wet deck-house adds a value to the words spoken under its lee-side. Yet the words he reports are what one may hear, with grief, any day in any tavern in the hurry and excitement of ten minutes before closing time. But Kipling always thought an opinion gained in value if expressed elsewhere than in England. His ideal government would be a polo-player from Simla leading the crew of the _Bolivar_.

Every horror in the world, the author of these letters tells us, has its fitting ritual. How easily, too, one realizes it, when feeling again the fanatic heat and force of this maker of old magic with the tom-tom; the vicious mockery, certain of popular applause, of ideas that are not marketable; the abrupt rancour whenever the common folk must be mentioned; the spite felt for England--"in England ... you see where the rot starts"; the sly suspicion of other countries, and the consequent jealousy and fear; here it all is, convulsive, uncertain, inflammable. The prophet of Empire! But the prophecy was wrong. England, "where the rot starts," bore most of the heat and burden of the day, and saved the Empire for the money-mongers. And what of the British youngsters who did that, who were not materialists in the least, but many of them the idealists for whom no abuse once could be too vicious? The corruption of the Somme! That faceless and nameless horror was the apotheosis of the Imperialist.

XXXI. A Devon Estuary

SEPTEMBER 11, 1920. "This dreary expanse," the guide-book explains, "will not attract the tourist." The guide was right. I was alone to that degree beyond mere solitude when you feel you are not alone, but that the place itself is observing you. Yet only five miles away long lines of motor-cars were waiting to take tourists, at ruinous prices, to the authentic and admitted beauty spots. There was not, as the polite convention would put it, a soul about. It was certainly a dreary expanse, but the sunlight there seemed strangely brilliant, I thought, and, what was more curious, appeared to be alive. It was quivering. The transient glittering of some seagulls remote in the blue was as if you could glimpse, now and then, fleeting hints of what is immaculate in heaven. Nothing of our business was in sight anywhere except the white stalk of a lighthouse, and that, I knew, was miles away across the estuary whose waters were then invisible, for it was not only low tide, but I was descending to the saltings, having left the turf of the upper salt marshes.

You felt that here in the saltings you were beyond human associations. The very vegetation was unfamiliar. The thrift, sea lavender, rocket, sea campion, and maritime spurge did not descend so low as this. They came no nearer than where the highest tidal marks left lines of driftwood and bleached shells, just below the break of the upper marshes. Here it was another kingdom, neither sea nor land, but each alternately during the spring tides. At first the sandy mud was reticulated with sun-cracks, not being daily touched by the sea, and the crevasses gave a refuge for algae. There was a smell, neither pleasant nor unpleasant, which reminded you of something so deep in the memory that you could not give it a name. But it was sound and good. Beyond that dry flat the smooth mud glistened as if earth were growing a new skin, which yet was very tender. It was spongy, but it did not break when I trod on it, though the earth complained as I went. It was thinly sprinkled with a plant like little fingers of green glass, the maritime samphire, and in the distance this samphire gave the marsh a sheen of continuous and vivid emerald.

The saltings looked level and unbroken. But on walking seaward I was continually surprised by drainage channels. These channels serpentined everywhere, and were deep and wide. Sometimes they contained nothing but silt, and sometimes they were salt-water rivers. I came upon each canyon unexpectedly. The first warning was a sudden eruption from it, a flock of dunlin, a flock which then passed seawards in a regimented flight that was an alternate flash of light and a swift shadow. Dunlin, curlew, oyster-catchers, or gulls, left a gully just before I knew I was headed off again. In one of these creeks, however, the birds left me more than their delicate footprints to examine. They left there a small craft whose mast I had long taken to be a stump projecting from the mud. A young man in a brown beard, a brown shirt, and a pair of khaki trousers was sitting on its skylight. He hailed, and showed me how I could get to him without sinking up to more than the knees in this dreary spot.

"Stay here if you like," he said, when I was with him. "When the tide is full I'll pull you round to the village." It was a little cutter of about fifteen tons, moored to the last huge links of a cable, the rest of which had long been covered up. I thought he was making holiday in a novel way. "No," he replied, "I'm living here."

It seems (I am but paraphrasing his apology) that he returned from Cambrai, bringing back from France, as a young officer, some wounds and other decorations, but also his youthful credulity and a remembrance of society's noble promises to its young saviours. But not long after his return to us the sight of us made him feel disappointed. He "stuck it," he said, as long as he could. But the more he observed us the worse he felt. That was why he gave up a good position a second time on our account. "What was the good of the money? The profiteers took most of it. I worked hard, and had to give up what I earned to every kind of parasite. London was more disagreeable than ever was Flanders. Yet I think I would not object to sweep the roads for a community of good people. Yes, I thought nothing could be worse than the dead in the mud. But I found something worse. The minds of the living who did not know what I knew in France were worse to me. I couldn't remember the friends I'd lost and remain where I was with those people about me. It was more awful than that German--did you ever meet him?--who lay just the other side of the parapet for weeks and weeks."