And Even Now
nothing anywhere scamped in the workmanship of it. It looked as though
it had been built for all time. But this was not so. For it was built on
sand, and of sand; and the tide was coming in.
Here and there in its vicinity stood other buildings. None of these
possessed any points of interest. They were just old-fashioned
‘castles,’ of the bald and hasty kind which I myself used to make
in childhood and could make even now--conic affairs, with or without
untidily-dug moats, the nullities of convention and of unskilled labour.
When I was a child the charm of a castle was not in the building of
it, but in jumping over it when it was built. Nor was this an enduring
charm. After a few jumps one abandoned one’s castle and asked one’s
nurse for a bun, or picked a quarrel with some child even smaller than
oneself, or went paddling. As it was, so it is. My survey of the sands
this morning showed me that forty years had made no difference. Here was
plenty of animation, plenty of scurrying and gambolling, of laughter and
tears. But the actual spadework was a mere empty form. For all but the
builder of that cottage. For him, manifestly, a passion, a rite.
He stood, spade in hand, contemplating, from one angle and another, what
he had done. He was perhaps nine years old; if so, small for his age.
He had very thin legs in very short grey knickerbockers, a pale freckled
face, and hair that matched the sand. He was not remarkable. But with
a little good-will one can always find something impressive in anybody.
When Mr. Mallaby-Deeley won a wide and very sudden fame in connexion
with Covent Garden, an awe-stricken reporter wrote of him for The Daily
Mail, ‘he has the eyes of a dreamer.’ I believe that Mr. Cecil Rhodes
really had. So, it seemed to me, had this little boy. They were pale
grey eyes, rather prominent, with an unwavering light in them. I guessed
that they were regarding the cottage rather as what it should be than as
what it had become. To me it appeared quite perfect. But I surmised
that to him, artist that he was, it seemed a poor thing beside his first
flushed conception.
He knelt down and, partly with the flat of his spade, partly with the
palm of one hand, redressed some (to me obscure) fault in one of the
gables. He rose, stood back, his eyes slowly endorsed the amendment.
A few moments later, very suddenly, he scudded away to the adjacent
breakwater and gave himself to the task of scraping off it some of the
short green sea-weed wherewith he had made the cottage’s two gardens so
pleasantly realistic, oases so refreshing in the sandy desert. Were the
lawns somehow imperfect? Anon, when he darted back, I saw what it was
that his taste had required: lichen, moss, for the roof. Sundry morsels
and patches of green he deftly disposed in the angles of roof and
gables. His stock exhausted, off to the breakwater he darted, and back
again, to and fro with the lightning directness of a hermit-bee making
its nest of pollen. The low walls that enclosed the two gardens were
in need of creepers. Little by little, this grace was added to them. I
stood silently watching.
I kept silent for fear of discommoding him. All artists--by which
I mean, of course, all good artists--are shy. They are trustees of
something not entrusted to us others; they bear fragile treasure, not
safe in a jostling crowd; they must ever be wary. And especially shy
are those artists whose work is apart from words. A man of letters can
mitigate his embarrassment among us by a certain glibness. Not so can
the man who works through the medium of visual form and colour. Not
so, I was sure, could the young architect and landscape-gardener here
creating. I would have moved away had I thought my mere presence was a
bother to him; but I decided that it was not: being a grown-up person, I
did not matter; he had no fear that I should offer violence to his work.
It was his coevals that made him uneasy. Groups of these would pause in
their wild career to stand over him and watch him in a fidgety manner
that hinted mischief. Suppose one of them suddenly jumped--on to the
cottage!
Fragile treasure, this, in a quite literal sense; and how awfully
exposed! It was spared, however. There was even legible on the faces of
the stolid little boys who viewed it a sort of reluctant approval.
Some of the little girls seemed to be forming with their lips the word
‘pretty,’ but then they exchanged glances with one another, signifying
‘silly.’ No one of either sex uttered any word of praise. And so,
because artists, be they never so agoraphobious, do want praise, I did
at length break my silence to this one. ‘I think it splendid,’ I said to
him.
He looked up at me, and down at the cottage. ‘Do you?’ he asked, looking
up again. I assured him that I did; and to test my opinion of him I
asked whether he didn’t think so too. He stood the test well. ‘I wanted
it rather diff’rent,’ he answered.
‘In what way different?’
He searched his vocabulary. More comf’table,’ he found.
I knew now that he was not merely the architect and builder of the
cottage, but also, by courtesy of imagination, its tenant; but I was
tactful enough not to let him see that I had guessed this deep and
delicate secret. I did but ask him, in a quite general way, how the
cottage could be better. He said that it ought to have a porch--‘but
porches tumble in.’ He was too young an artist to accept quite meekly
the limits imposed by his material. He pointed along the lower edge
of the roof: ‘It ought to stick out,’ he said, meaning that it wanted
eaves. I told him not to worry about that: it was the sand’s fault, not
his. ‘What really is a pity,’ I said, ‘is that your house can’t last
for ever.’ He was tracing now on the roof, with the edge of his spade, a
criss-cross pattern, to represent tiles, and he seemed to have forgotten
my presence and my kindness. ‘Aren’t you sorry,’ I asked, raising my
voice rather sharply, ‘that the sea is coming in?’
He glanced at the sea. ‘Yes.’ He said this with a lack of emphasis that
seemed to me noble though insincere.
The strain of talking in words of not more than three syllables had
begun to tell on me. I bade the artist good-bye, wandered away up the
half-dozen steps to the Parade, sat down on a bench, and opened the
morning paper that I had brought out unread. During the War one felt it
a duty to know the worst before breakfast; now that the English polity
is threatened merely from within, one is apt to dally.... Merely from
within? Is that a right phrase when the nerves of unrestful Labour
in any one land are interplicated with its nerves in any other, so
vibrantly? News of the dismissal of an erring workman in Timbuctoo is
enough nowadays to make us apprehensive of vast and dreadful effects on
our own immediate future. How pleasant if we had lived our lives in
the nineteenth century and no other, with the ground all firm under our
feet! True, the people who flourished then had recurring alarms. But
their alarms were quite needless; whereas ours--! Ours, as I glanced
at this morning’ s news from Timbuctoo and elsewhere, seemed odiously
needful. Withal, our Old Nobility in its pleasaunces was treading
once more the old graceful measure which the War arrested; Bohemia
had resumed its motley; even the middle class was capering, very
noticeably... To gad about smiling as though he were quite well, thank
you, or to sit down, pull a long face, and make his soul,--which, I
wondered, is the better procedure for a man knowing that very soon
he will have to undergo a vital operation at the hands of a wholly
unqualified surgeon who dislikes him personally? I inclined to think the
gloomier way the less ghastly. But then, I asked myself, was my analogy
a sound one? We are at the mercy of Labour, certainly; and Labour does
not love us; and Labour is not deeply versed in statecraft. But would
an unskilled surgeon, however ill-wishing, care to perform a drastic
operation on a patient by whose death he himself would forthwith perish?
Labour is wise enough--surely?--not to will us destruction. Russia has
been an awful example. Surely! And yet, Labour does not seem to think
the example so awful as I do. Queer, this; queer and disquieting. I rose
from my bench, strolled to the railing, and gazed forth.
The unrestful, the well-organised and minatory sea had been advancing
quickly. It was not very far now from the cottage. I thought of all the
civilisations that had been, that were not, that were as though they had
never been. Must it always be thus?--always the same old tale of growth
and greatness and overthrow, nothingness? I gazed at the cottage, all
so solid and seemly, so full of endearing character, so like to the
‘comf’table’ polity of England as we have known it. I gazed away from
it to a large-ish castle that the sea was just reaching. A little, then
quickly much, the waters swirled into the moat. Many children stood by,
all a-dance with excitement. The castle was shedding its sides, lapsing,
dwindling, landslipping--gone. O Nineveh! And now another--O Memphis?
Rome?--yielded to the cataclysm. I listened to the jubilant screams of
the children. What rapture, what wantoning! Motionless beside his work
stood the builder of the cottage, gazing seaward, a pathetic little
figure. I hoped the other children would have the decency not to
exult over the unmaking of what he had made so well. This hope was not
fulfilled. I had not supposed it would be. What did surprise me, when
anon the sea rolled close up to the cottage, was the comportment of the
young artist himself. His sobriety gave place to an intense animation.
He leapt, he waved his spade, he invited the waves with wild gestures
and gleeful cries. His face had flushed bright, and now, as the garden
walls crumbled, and the paths and lawns were mingled by the waters’
influence and confluence, and the walls of the cottage itself began to
totter, and the gables sank, and all, all was swallowed, his leaps
were so high in air that they recalled to my memory those of a strange
religious sect which once visited London; and the glare of his eyes was
less indicative of a dreamer than of a triumphant fiend.
I myself was conscious of a certain wild enthusiasm within me. But this
was less surprising for that I had not built the cottage, and my fancy
had not enabled me to dwell in it. It was the boy’s own enthusiasm that
made me feel, as never before, how deep-rooted in the human breast the
love of destruction, of mere destruction, is. And I began to ask myself:
‘Even if England as we know it, the English polity of which that cottage
was a symbol to me, were the work of (say) Mr. Robert Smillie’s own
unaided hands’--but I waived the question coming from that hypothesis,
and other questions that would have followed; for I wished to be happy
while I might.
‘A CLERGYMAN’ 1918.
Fragmentary, pale, momentary; almost nothing; glimpsed and gone; as it
were, a faint human hand thrust up, never to reappear, from beneath the
rolling waters of Time, he forever haunts my memory and solicits my weak
imagination. Nothing is told of him but that once, abruptly, he asked a
question, and received an answer.
This was on the afternoon of April 7th, 1778, at Streatham, in the
well-appointed house of Mr. Thrale. Johnson, on the morning of that day,
had entertained Boswell at breakfast in Bolt Court, and invited him to
dine at Thrale Hall. The two took coach and arrived early. It seems that
Sir John Pringle had asked Boswell to ask Johnson ‘what were the best
English sermons for style.’ In the interval before dinner, accordingly,
Boswell reeled off the names of several divines whose prose might or
might not win commendation. ‘Atterbury?’ he suggested. ‘JOHNSON: Yes,
Sir, one of the best. BOSWELL: Tillotson? JOHNSON: Why, not now. I