The Common Reader
the first volume, Walter Pater best achieves this arduous task, because
before setting out to write his essay (“Notes on Leonardo da Vinci”) he
has somehow contrived to get his material fused. He is a learned man,
but it is not knowledge of Leonardo that remains with us, but a vision,
such as we get in a good novel where everything contributes to bring the
writer’s conception as a whole before us. Only here, in the essay, where
the bounds are so strict and facts have to be used in their nakedness,
the true writer like Walter Pater makes these limitations yield their
own quality. Truth will give it authority; from its narrow limits he
will get shape and intensity; and then there is no more fitting place
for some of those ornaments which the old writers loved and we, by
calling them ornaments, presumably despise. Nowadays nobody would have
the courage to embark on the once famous description of Leonardo’s lady
who has
learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas and
keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with
Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and,
as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary . . .
The passage is too thumb-marked to slip naturally into the context. But
when we come unexpectedly upon “the smiling of women and the motion of
great waters”, or upon “full of the refinement of the dead, in sad,
earth-coloured raiment, set with pale stones”, we suddenly remember that
we have ears and we have eyes, and that the English language fills a
long array of stout volumes with innumerable words, many of which are of
more than one syllable. The only living Englishman who ever looks into
these volumes is, of course, a gentleman of Polish extraction. But
doubtless our abstention saves us much gush, much rhetoric, much
high-stepping and cloud-prancing, and for the sake of the prevailing
sobriety and hard-headedness we should be willing to barter the
splendour of Sir Thomas Browne and the vigour of Swift.
Yet, if the essay admits more properly than biography or fiction of
sudden boldness and metaphor, and can be polished till every atom of its
surface shines, there are dangers in that too. We are soon in sight of
ornament. Soon the current, which is the life-blood of literature, runs
slow; and instead of sparkling and flashing or moving with a quieter
impulse which has a deeper excitement, words coagulate together in
frozen sprays which, like the grapes on a Christmas-tree, glitter for a
single night, but are dusty and garish the day after. The temptation to
decorate is great where the theme may be of the slightest. What is there
to interest another in the fact that one has enjoyed a walking tour, or
has amused oneself by rambling down Cheapside and looking at the turtles
in Mr. Sweeting’s shop window? Stevenson and Samuel Butler chose very
different methods of exciting our interest in these domestic themes.
Stevenson, of course, trimmed and polished and set out his matter in the
traditional eighteenth-century form. It is admirably done, but we cannot
help feeling anxious, as the essay proceeds, lest the material may give
out under the craftsman’s fingers. The ingot is so small, the
manipulation so incessant. And perhaps that is why the peroration—
To sit still and contemplate—to remember the faces of women without
desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be
everything and everywhere in sympathy and yet content to remain where
and what you are—
has the sort of insubstantiality which suggests that by the time he got
to the end he had left himself nothing solid to work with. Butler
adopted the very opposite method. Think your own thoughts, he seems to
say, and speak them as plainly as you can. These turtles in the shop
window which appear to leak out of their shells through heads and feet
suggest a fatal faithfulness to a fixed idea. And so, striding
unconcernedly from one idea to the next, we traverse a large stretch of
ground; observe that a wound in the solicitor is a very serious thing;
that Mary Queen of Scots wears surgical boots and is subject to fits
near the Horse Shoe in Tottenham Court Road; take it for granted that no
one really cares about Æschylus; and so, with many amusing anecdotes
and some profound reflections, reach the peroration, which is that, as
he had been told not to see more in Cheapside than he could get into
twelve pages of the _Universal Review_, he had better stop. And yet
obviously Butler is at least as careful of our pleasure as Stevenson;
and to write like oneself and call it not writing is a much harder
exercise in style than to write like Addison and call it writing well.
But, however much they differ individually, the Victorian essayists yet
had something in common. They wrote at greater length than is now usual,
and they wrote for a public which had not only time to sit down to its
magazine seriously, but a high, if peculiarly Victorian, standard of
culture by which to judge it. It was worth while to speak out upon
serious matters in an essay; and there was nothing absurd in writing as
well as one possibly could when, in a month or two, the same public
which had welcomed the essay in a magazine would carefully read it once
more in a book. But a change came from a small audience of cultivated
people to a larger audience of people who were not quite so cultivated.
The change was not altogether for the worse. In volume III. we find Mr.
Birrell and Mr. Beerbohm. It might even be said that there was a
reversion to the classic type, and that the essay by losing its size and
something of its sonority was approaching more nearly the essay of
Addison and Lamb. At any rate, there is a great gulf between Mr. Birrell
on Carlyle and the essay which one may suppose that Carlyle would have
written upon Mr. Birrell. There is little similarity between _A Cloud of
Pinafores_, by Max Beerbohm, and _A Cynic’s Apology_, by Leslie Stephen.
But the essay is alive; there is no reason to despair. As the conditions
change so the essayist, most sensitive of all plants to public opinion,
adapts himself, and if he is good makes the best of the change, and if
he is bad the worst. Mr. Birrell is certainly good; and so we find that,
though he has dropped a considerable amount of weight, his attack is
much more direct and his movement more supple. But what did Mr. Beerbohm
give to the essay and what did he take from it? That is a much more
complicated question, for here we have an essayist who has concentrated
on the work and is without doubt the prince of his profession.
What Mr. Beerbohm gave was, of course, himself. This presence, which has
haunted the essay fitfully from the time of Montaigne, had been in exile
since the death of Charles Lamb. Matthew Arnold was never to his readers
Matt, nor Walter Pater affectionately abbreviated in a thousand homes to
Wat. They gave us much, but that they did not give. Thus, some time in
the nineties, it must have surprised readers accustomed to exhortation,
information, and denunciation to find themselves familiarly addressed by
a voice which seemed to belong to a man no larger than themselves. He
was affected by private joys and sorrows, and had no gospel to preach
and no learning to impart. He was himself, simply and directly, and
himself he has remained. Once again we have an essayist capable of using
the essayist’s most proper but most dangerous and delicate tool. He has
brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely, but
so consciously and purely that we do not know whether there is any
relation between Max the essayist and Mr. Beerbohm the man. We only know
that the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes. The
triumph is the triumph of style. For it is only by knowing how to write
that you can make use in literature of your self; that self which, while
it is essential to literature, is also its most dangerous antagonist.
Never to be yourself and yet always—that is the problem. Some of the
essayists in Mr. Rhys’ collection, to be frank, have not altogether
succeeded in solving it. We are nauseated by the sight of trivial
personalities decomposing in the eternity of print. As talk, no doubt,
it was charming, and certainly the writer is a good fellow to meet over
a bottle of beer. But literature is stern; it is no use being charming,
virtuous, or even learned and brilliant into the bargain, unless, she
seems to reiterate, you fulfil her first condition—to know how to
write.
This art is possessed to perfection by Mr. Beerbohm. But he has not
searched the dictionary for polysyllables. He has not moulded firm
periods or seduced our ears with intricate cadences and strange
melodies. Some of his companions—Henley and Stevenson, for example—are
momentarily more impressive. But _A Cloud of Pinafores_ had in it that
indescribable inequality, stir, and final expressiveness which belong to
life and to life alone. You have not finished with it because you have
read it, any more than friendship is ended because it is time to part.
Life wells up and alters and adds. Even things in a book-case change if
they are alive; we find ourselves wanting to meet them again; we find
them altered. So we look back upon essay after essay by Mr. Beerbohm,
knowing that, come September or May, we shall sit down with them and
talk. Yet it is true that the essayist is the most sensitive of all
writers to public opinion. The drawing-room is the place where a great
deal of reading is done nowadays, and the essays of Mr. Beerbohm lie,
with an exquisite appreciation of all that the position exacts, upon the
drawing-room table. There is no gin about; no strong tobacco; no puns,
drunkenness, or insanity. Ladies and gentlemen talk together, and some
things, of course, are not said.
But if it would be foolish to attempt to confine Mr. Beerbohm to one
room, it would be still more foolish, unhappily, to make him, the
artist, the man who gives us only his best, the representative of our
age. There are no essays by Mr. Beerbohm in the fourth or fifth volumes
of the present collection. His age seems already a little distant, and
the drawing-room table, as it recedes, begins to look rather like an
altar where, once upon a time, people deposited offerings—fruit from
their own orchards, gifts carved with their own hands. Now once more the
conditions have changed. The public needs essays as much as ever, and
perhaps even more. The demand for the light middle not exceeding fifteen
hundred words, or in special cases seventeen hundred and fifty, much
exceeds the supply. Where Lamb wrote one essay and Max perhaps writes
two, Mr. Belloc at a rough computation produces three hundred and
sixty-five. They are very short, it is true. Yet with what dexterity the
practised essayist will utilise his space—beginning as close to the top
of the sheet as possible, judging precisely how far to go, when to turn,
and how, without sacrificing a hair’s-breadth of paper, to wheel about
and alight accurately upon the last word his editor allows! As a feat of
skill it is well worth watching. But the personality upon which Mr.
Belloc, like Mr. Beerbohm, depends suffers in the process. It comes to
us not with the natural richness of the speaking voice, but strained and
thin and full of mannerisms and affectations, like the voice of a man
shouting through a megaphone to a crowd on a windy day. “Little friends,
my readers,” he says in the essay called “An Unknown Country”, and he
goes on to tell us how—
There was a shepherd the other day at Findon Fair who had come from the
east by Lewes with sheep, and who had in his eyes that reminiscence of
horizons which makes the eyes of shepherds and of mountaineers different