Of Human Bondage
but we must observe the limits of common propriety. You may talk of
Bouguereau if you will: there is a cheerful disgustingness in the sound
which excites laughter; but let us not sully our chaste lips with the
names of J. Ruskin, G. F. Watts, or E. B. Jones.”
“Who was Ruskin anyway?” asked Flanagan.
“He was one of the Great Victorians. He was a master of English style.”
“Ruskin’s style—a thing of shreds and purple patches,” said Lawson.
“Besides, damn the Great Victorians. Whenever I open a paper and see
Death of a Great Victorian, I thank Heaven there’s one more of them
gone. Their only talent was longevity, and no artist should be allowed
to live after he’s forty; by then a man has done his best work, all he
does after that is repetition. Don’t you think it was the greatest luck
in the world for them that Keats, Shelley, Bonnington, and Byron died
early? What a genius we should think Swinburne if he had perished on
the day the first series of Poems and Ballads was published!”
The suggestion pleased, for no one at the table was more than
twenty-four, and they threw themselves upon it with gusto. They were
unanimous for once. They elaborated. Someone proposed a vast bonfire
made out of the works of the Forty Academicians into which the Great
Victorians might be hurled on their fortieth birthday. The idea was
received with acclamation. Carlyle and Ruskin, Tennyson, Browning, G.
F. Watts, E. B. Jones, Dickens, Thackeray, they were hurried into the
flames; Mr. Gladstone, John Bright, and Cobden; there was a moment’s
discussion about George Meredith, but Matthew Arnold and Emerson were
given up cheerfully. At last came Walter Pater.
“Not Walter Pater,” murmured Philip.
Lawson stared at him for a moment with his green eyes and then nodded.
“You’re quite right, Walter Pater is the only justification for Mona
Lisa. D’you know Cronshaw? He used to know Pater.”
“Who’s Cronshaw?” asked Philip.
“Cronshaw’s a poet. He lives here. Let’s go to the Lilas.”
La Closerie des Lilas was a cafe to which they often went in the
evening after dinner, and here Cronshaw was invariably to be found
between the hours of nine at night and two in the morning. But Flanagan
had had enough of intellectual conversation for one evening, and when
Lawson made his suggestion, turned to Philip.
“Oh gee, let’s go where there are girls,” he said. “Come to the Gaite
Montparnasse, and we’ll get ginny.”
“I’d rather go and see Cronshaw and keep sober,” laughed Philip.
XLII
There was a general disturbance. Flanagan and two or three more went on
to the music-hall, while Philip walked slowly with Clutton and Lawson
to the Closerie des Lilas.
“You must go to the Gaite Montparnasse,” said Lawson to him. “It’s one
of the loveliest things in Paris. I’m going to paint it one of these
days.”
Philip, influenced by Hayward, looked upon music-halls with scornful
eyes, but he had reached Paris at a time when their artistic
possibilities were just discovered. The peculiarities of lighting, the
masses of dingy red and tarnished gold, the heaviness of the shadows
and the decorative lines, offered a new theme; and half the studios in
the Quarter contained sketches made in one or other of the local
theatres. Men of letters, following in the painters’ wake, conspired
suddenly to find artistic value in the turns; and red-nosed comedians
were lauded to the skies for their sense of character; fat female
singers, who had bawled obscurely for twenty years, were discovered to
possess inimitable drollery; there were those who found an aesthetic
delight in performing dogs; while others exhausted their vocabulary to
extol the distinction of conjurers and trick-cyclists. The crowd too,
under another influence, was become an object of sympathetic interest.
With Hayward, Philip had disdained humanity in the mass; he adopted the
attitude of one who wraps himself in solitariness and watches with
disgust the antics of the vulgar; but Clutton and Lawson talked of the
multitude with enthusiasm. They described the seething throng that
filled the various fairs of Paris, the sea of faces, half seen in the
glare of acetylene, half hidden in the darkness, and the blare of
trumpets, the hooting of whistles, the hum of voices. What they said
was new and strange to Philip. They told him about Cronshaw.
“Have you ever read any of his work?”
“No,” said Philip.
“It came out in The Yellow Book.”
They looked upon him, as painters often do writers, with contempt
because he was a layman, with tolerance because he practised an art,
and with awe because he used a medium in which themselves felt
ill-at-ease.
“He’s an extraordinary fellow. You’ll find him a bit disappointing at
first, he only comes out at his best when he’s drunk.”
“And the nuisance is,” added Clutton, “that it takes him a devil of a
time to get drunk.”
When they arrived at the cafe Lawson told Philip that they would have
to go in. There was hardly a bite in the autumn air, but Cronshaw had a
morbid fear of draughts and even in the warmest weather sat inside.
“He knows everyone worth knowing,” Lawson explained. “He knew Pater and
Oscar Wilde, and he knows Mallarme and all those fellows.”
The object of their search sat in the most sheltered corner of the
cafe, with his coat on and the collar turned up. He wore his hat
pressed well down on his forehead so that he should avoid cold air. He
was a big man, stout but not obese, with a round face, a small
moustache, and little, rather stupid eyes. His head did not seem quite
big enough for his body. It looked like a pea uneasily poised on an
egg. He was playing dominoes with a Frenchman, and greeted the
new-comers with a quiet smile; he did not speak, but as if to make room
for them pushed away the little pile of saucers on the table which
indicated the number of drinks he had already consumed. He nodded to
Philip when he was introduced to him, and went on with the game.
Philip’s knowledge of the language was small, but he knew enough to
tell that Cronshaw, although he had lived in Paris for several years,
spoke French execrably.
At last he leaned back with a smile of triumph.
“Je vous ai battu,” he said, with an abominable accent. “Garcong!”
He called the waiter and turned to Philip.
“Just out from England? See any cricket?”
Philip was a little confused at the unexpected question.
“Cronshaw knows the averages of every first-class cricketer for the
last twenty years,” said Lawson, smiling.
The Frenchman left them for friends at another table, and Cronshaw,
with the lazy enunciation which was one of his peculiarities, began to
discourse on the relative merits of Kent and Lancashire. He told them
of the last test match he had seen and described the course of the game
wicket by wicket.
“That’s the only thing I miss in Paris,” he said, as he finished the
bock which the waiter had brought. “You don’t get any cricket.”
Philip was disappointed, and Lawson, pardonably anxious to show off one
of the celebrities of the Quarter, grew impatient. Cronshaw was taking
his time to wake up that evening, though the saucers at his side
indicated that he had at least made an honest attempt to get drunk.
Clutton watched the scene with amusement. He fancied there was
something of affectation in Cronshaw’s minute knowledge of cricket; he
liked to tantalise people by talking to them of things that obviously
bored them; Clutton threw in a question.
“Have you seen Mallarme lately?”
Cronshaw looked at him slowly, as if he were turning the inquiry over
in his mind, and before he answered rapped on the marble table with one
of the saucers.
“Bring my bottle of whiskey,” he called out. He turned again to Philip.
“I keep my own bottle of whiskey. I can’t afford to pay fifty centimes
for every thimbleful.”
The waiter brought the bottle, and Cronshaw held it up to the light.
“They’ve been drinking it. Waiter, who’s been helping himself to my
whiskey?”
“Mais personne, Monsieur Cronshaw.”
“I made a mark on it last night, and look at it.”
“Monsieur made a mark, but he kept on drinking after that. At that rate
Monsieur wastes his time in making marks.”
The waiter was a jovial fellow and knew Cronshaw intimately. Cronshaw
gazed at him.
“If you give me your word of honour as a nobleman and a gentleman that
nobody but I has been drinking my whiskey, I’ll accept your statement.”
This remark, translated literally into the crudest French, sounded very
funny, and the lady at the comptoir could not help laughing.
“Il est impayable,” she murmured.
Cronshaw, hearing her, turned a sheepish eye upon her; she was stout,
matronly, and middle-aged; and solemnly kissed his hand to her. She
shrugged her shoulders.
“Fear not, madam,” he said heavily. “I have passed the age when I am
tempted by forty-five and gratitude.”
He poured himself out some whiskey and water, and slowly drank it. He
wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“He talked very well.”
Lawson and Clutton knew that Cronshaw’s remark was an answer to the
question about Mallarme. Cronshaw often went to the gatherings on
Tuesday evenings when the poet received men of letters and painters,
and discoursed with subtle oratory on any subject that was suggested to
him. Cronshaw had evidently been there lately.
“He talked very well, but he talked nonsense. He talked about art as
though it were the most important thing in the world.”
“If it isn’t, what are we here for?” asked Philip.
“What you’re here for I don’t know. It is no business of mine. But art
is a luxury. Men attach importance only to self-preservation and the
propagation of their species. It is only when these instincts are
satisfied that they consent to occupy themselves with the entertainment
which is provided for them by writers, painters, and poets.”
Cronshaw stopped for a moment to drink. He had pondered for twenty
years the problem whether he loved liquor because it made him talk or
whether he loved conversation because it made him thirsty.
Then he said: “I wrote a poem yesterday.”
Without being asked he began to recite it, very slowly, marking the
rhythm with an extended forefinger. It was possibly a very fine poem,
but at that moment a young woman came in. She had scarlet lips, and it
was plain that the vivid colour of her cheeks was not due to the
vulgarity of nature; she had blackened her eyelashes and eyebrows, and
painted both eyelids a bold blue, which was continued to a triangle at
the corner of the eyes. It was fantastic and amusing. Her dark hair was
done over her ears in the fashion made popular by Mlle. Cleo de Merode.
Philip’s eyes wandered to her, and Cronshaw, having finished the
recitation of his verses, smiled upon him indulgently.
“You were not listening,” he said.
“Oh yes, I was.”
“I do not blame you, for you have given an apt illustration of the
statement I just made. What is art beside love? I respect and applaud
your indifference to fine poetry when you can contemplate the
meretricious charms of this young person.”
She passed by the table at which they were sitting, and he took her
arm.
“Come and sit by my side, dear child, and let us play the divine comedy
of love.”
“Fichez-moi la paix,” she said, and pushing him on one side continued
her perambulation.
“Art,” he continued, with a wave of the hand, “is merely the refuge
which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food
and women, to escape the tediousness of life.”
Cronshaw filled his glass again, and began to talk at length. He spoke
with rotund delivery. He chose his words carefully. He mingled wisdom
and nonsense in the most astounding manner, gravely making fun of his
hearers at one moment, and at the next playfully giving them sound