And Even Now
what I must at all costs achieve. Not too much of mere aesthetics,
either, nor of mere sentiment for the past. No more than a brief eulogy
of ‘those admirably proportioned streets so familiar to all students
of eighteenth century architecture,’ and perhaps a passing reference to
‘the shades of Dr. Johnson, Garrick, Hannah More, Sir Joshua Reynolds.
Topham Beauclerk, and how many others!’ The sooner my protest were put
in terms of commerce, the better for my cause. The more clearly I were
to point out that such antiquities as the Adelphi are as a magnet to the
moneyed tourists of America and Europe, the likelier would my readers
be to shudder at ‘a proposal which, if carried into effect, will bring
discredit on all concerned and will in some measure justify Napoleon’s
hitherto-unjustified taunt that we are a nation of shopkeepers.--I am,
Sir, your obedient servant’--good! I sat down to a table and wrote out
that conclusion, and then I worked backwards, keeping well in view
the idea of ‘restraint.’ But that quality which is little sister
to restraint, and is yet far more repulsive to the public mind than
vehemence, emerged to misguide my pen. Irony, in fact, played the deuce.
I found myself writing that a nation which, in its ardour for beauty
and its reverence for great historic associations, has lately disbursed
after only a few months’ hesitation £250,000 to save the Crystal Palace,
where the bank holidays of millions of toilers have been spoilt by the
utter gloom and nullity of the place--a nullity and gloom that will,
however and of course, be dispelled so soon as the place is devoted
to permanent exhibitions of New Zealand pippins, Rhodesian tobacco,
Australian mutton, Canadian snow-shoes, and other glories of
Empire--might surely not be asked in vain to’--but I deleted
that sentence, and tried another in another vein. My desire to be
straightforward did but topple me into excess of statement. My sorrow
for the Adelphi came out as sentimentality, my anger against the
authorities as vulgar abuse. Only the urgency of my cause upheld me. I
would get my letter done somehow and post it. But there flitted through
my mind that horrid doubt which has flitted through the minds of so many
choleric old gentlemen in the course of the past hundred years and more:
‘Will The Times put my letter in?’
If The Times wouldn’t, what then? At least my conscience would be clear:
I should have done what I could to save my beloved quarter. But the
process of doing it was hard and tedious, and I was glad of the little
respite presented by the thought that I must, before stating my case
thoroughly, revisit Adam Street itself, to gauge precisely the extent
of the mischief threatened there. On my way to the Strand I met an old
friend, one of my links with whom is his love of the Adams’ work. He
had not read the news, and I am sorry to say that I, in my selfish
agitation, did not break it to him gently. Rallying, he accompanied me
on my sombre quest.
I had forgotten there was a hosier’s shop next to the Tivoli, at the
corner of the right-hand side of Adam Street. We turned past it, and
were both of us rather surprised that there were other shops down that
side. They ought never to have been allowed there; but there they were;
and of course, I felt, it was the old facades above them that really
counted. We gazed meanwhile at the facades on the left-hand side,
feasting our eyes on the proportions of the pilasters, the windows;
the old seemly elegance of it all; the greatness of the manner with the
sweet smallness of the scale it wrought on.
‘Well,’ I said, turning abruptly away, ‘to business! Thirty feet--how
much, about, is that? My friend moved to the exact corner of the Strand,
and then, steadily, methodically, with his eyes to the pavement, walked
thirty toe-to-heal paces down Adam Street.
‘This,’ he said, ‘is where the corner of the Tivoli would come’--not
‘will come,’ observe; I thanked him for that. He passed on, measuring
out the thirty additional feet. There was in his demeanour something so
finely official that I felt I should at least have the Government on my
side.
Thus it was with no sense of taking a farewell look, but rather to
survey a thing half-saved already, that I crossed over to the other
side of the road, and then, lifting my eyes, and looking to and fro,
beheld--what?
I blankly indicated the thing to my friend. How long had it been there,
that horrible, long, high frontage of grey stone? It must surely have
been there before either of us was born. It seemed to be a very perfect
specimen of 1860--1870 architecture--perfect in its pretentious and
hateful smugness.
And neither of us had ever known it was there.
Neither of us, therefore, could afford to laugh at the other; nor did
either of us laugh at himself; we just went blankly away, and parted. I
daresay my friend found presently, as I did, balm in the knowledge that
the Tivoli’s frontage wouldn’t, because it couldn’t, be so bad as that
which we had just, for the first time, seen.
For me there was another, a yet stronger, balm. And I went as though I
trod on air, my heart singing within me. For I had not, after all, to
resume my task of writing that letter to The Times.
BOOKS WITHIN BOOKS 1914.
They must, I suppose, be classed among biblia abiblia [Greek]. Ignored
in the catalogue of any library, not one of them lurking in any
uttermost cavern under the reading-room of the British Museum, none of
them ever printed even for private circulation, these books written by
this and that character in fiction are books only by courtesy and good
will.
But how few, after all, the books that are books! Charles Lamb let his
kind heart master him when he made that too brief list of books that
aren’t. Book is an honourable title, not to be conferred lightly. A
volume is not necessarily, as Lamb would have had us think, a book
because it can be read without difficulty. The test is, whether it was
worth reading. Had the author something to set forth? And had he the
specific gift for setting it forth in written words? And did he use this
rather rare gift conscientiously and to the full? And were his words
well and appropriately printed and bound? If you can say Yes to these
questions, then only, I submit, is the title of ‘book’ deserved. If Lamb
were alive now, he certainly would draw the line closer than he did.
Published volumes were few in his day (though not, of course, few
enough). Even he, in all the plenitude of his indulgence, would now have
to demur that at least 90 per cent. of the volumes that the publishers
thrust on us, so hectically, every spring and autumn, are abiblia
[Greek].
What would he have to say of the novels, for example? These commodities
are all very well in their way, no doubt. But let us have no illusions
as to what their way is. The poulterer who sells strings of sausages
does not pretend that every individual sausage is in itself remarkable.
He does not assure us that ‘this is a sausage that gives furiously to
think,’ or ‘this is a singularly beautiful and human sausage,’ or ‘this
is undoubtedly the sausage of the year.’ Why are such distinctions drawn
by the publisher? When he publishes, as he sometimes does, a novel that
is a book (or at any rate would be a book if it were decently printed
and bound) then by all means let him proclaim its difference--even at
the risk of scaring away the majority of readers.
I admit that I myself might be found in that majority. I am shy of
masterpieces; nor is this merely because of the many times I have been
disappointed at not finding anything at all like what the publishers
expected me to find. As a matter of fact, those disappointments are dim
in my memory: it is long since I ceased to take publishers’ opinions as
my guide. I trust now, for what I ought to read, to the advice of a few
highly literary friends. But so soon as I am told that I ‘must’ read
this or that, and have replied that I instantly will, I become strangely
loth to do anything of the sort. And what I like about books within
books is that they never can prick my conscience. It is extraordinarily
comfortable that they don’t exist.
And yet--for, even as Must implants distaste, so does Can’t stir sweet
longings--how eagerly would I devour these books within books! What
fun, what a queer emotion, to fish out from a fourpenny-box, in a windy
by-street, WALTER LORRAINE, by ARTHUR PENDENNIS, or PASSION FLOWERS, by
ROSA BUNION! I suppose poor Rosa’s muse, so fair and so fervid in Rosa’s
day, would seem a trifle fatigued now; but what allowances one would
make! Lord Steyne said of WALTER LORRAINE that it was ‘very clever and
wicked.’ I fancy we should apply neither epithet now. Indeed, I have
always suspected that Pen’s maiden effort may have been on a plane with
‘The Great Hoggarty Diamond.’ Yet I vow would I not skip a line of it.
WHO PUT BACK THE CLOCK? is another work which I especially covet. Poor
Gideon Forsyth! He was abominably treated, as Stevenson relates, in
the matter of that grand but grisly piano; and I have always hoped that
perhaps, in the end, as a sort of recompense, Fate ordained that the
novel he had anonymously written should be rescued from oblivion and
found by discerning critics to be not at all bad.
“He had never acknowledged it, or only to some intimate friends while
it was still in proof; after its appearance and alarming failure, the
modesty of the author had become more pressing, and the secret was now
likely to be better kept than that of the authorship of ‘Waverley.’”
Such an humiliation as Gideon’s is the more poignant to me because it
is so rare in English fiction. In nine cases out of ten, a book within a
book is an immediate, an immense success.
On the whole, our novelists have always tended to optimism--especially
they who have written mainly to please their public. It pleases the
public to read about any sort of success. The greater, the more sudden
and violent the success, the more valuable is it as ingredient in a
novel. And since the average novelist lives always in a dream that one
of his works will somehow ‘catch on’ as no other work ever has caught on
yet, it is very natural that he should fondly try meanwhile to get this
dream realised for him, vicariously, by this or that creature of his
fancy. True, he is usually too self-conscious to let this creature
achieve his sudden fame and endless fortune through a novel. Usually
it is a play that does the trick. In the Victorian time it was almost
always a book of poems. Oh for the spacious days of Tennyson and
Swinburne! In how many a three-volume novel is mentioned some ‘slim
octavo’ which seems, from the account given, to have been as arresting
as ‘Poems and Ballads’ without being less acceptable than ‘Idylls of the
King’! These verses were always the anonymous work of some very young,
very poor man, who supposed they had fallen still-born from the press
until, one day, a week or so after publication, as he walked ‘moodily’
and ‘in a brown study’ along the Strand, having given up all hope now
that he would ever be in a position to ask Hilda to be his wife, a
friend accosted him--‘Seen “The Thunderer” this morning? By George,
there’s a column review of a new book of poems,’ etc. In some
three-volume novel that I once read at a seaside place, having borrowed
it from the little circulating library, there was a young poet whose
sudden leap into the front rank has always laid a special hold on
my imagination. The name of the novel itself I cannot recall; but I
remember the name of the young poet--Aylmer Deane; and the forever
unforgettable title of his book of verse was POMENTS: BEING POEMS OF
THE MOOD AND THE MOMENT. What would I not give to possess a copy of that
work?