Things near & far
Highness the Duchess of Kent.” And the old gentleman who kept this
shop wore what we call evening-dress all day long, and advanced to
meet his customers with an inclined head, his hands clasped together.
The Brothers were a good deal younger, but they were of the same
school. They had a way of putting things. For example, Brother
Charles was trying to teach me how to catalogue their very beautiful
collection of French eighteenth-century illustrated books, the sort
of books that have illustrations by Fragonard.
“And if, Mr. Machen,” said Brother Charles, “if it strikes you that
any of these plates are brilliant impressions--well, we have no
objection to your saying so.”
It may be mentioned that the firm dealt occasionally in works which
would not be suitable for the “center table” of a New England
parlour. For themselves, for their own private taste, they read
George Eliot and thought her by far the greatest novelist that the
English Nation had ever produced. I am sure that they would have held
“Peregrine Pickle”--save in the rare first impression--to be a low
book, and Dickens, I conjecture, would have struck them as funny and
vulgar. But, still, selling books was their business, and it was not
their affair as booksellers to censor the morals of the works they
sold. They dealt in rare books.
Well, one morning as I walked down from Great Russell Street to the
shop, I was reading of the trial and conviction of a minor bookseller
of Charing Cross Road. This Mr. Jackson, or whatever his name was,
had been found guilty of selling obscene books, and had been sent
to gaol, for nine months, if I remember. I mentioned the matter to
Brother Ned as I entered.
“You’ve seen about Jackson?” I said.
“Yes, Mr. Machen,” said Brother Ned, with a certain moral austerity
of demeanour that was new to me. “We _have_ seen about Mr. Jackson,
and we wish to state at once that we have no sympathy with Mr.
Jackson; none whatever. There is a _right_ way, Mr. Machen, of doing
these things and a _wrong_ way.”
Mr. Jackson, I may say, did not deal in rare books. His prices were
low, he appealed to the general public. I hasten to add that on the
whole I sympathise with the Brothers on this matter. And I add also:
that after more recent experiences of mine I am very loath to find
fault with any persons who treat those in their employment as human
beings, with the decent civilities, courtesies and considerations
that are befitting between man and man. In those days I had no
knowledge of the anthropoids; still, I appreciated the pleasant
treatment I received.
Yet, with all their pleasant manners, I am afraid that the Brothers
did not find in me the ideal cataloguer. Anyhow, one day Brother Ned
came down to my darksome place with a queer little quarto in his
hand, a quarto in a dull paper wrapper. He had it open, marked with a
slip of paper, at a certain page, and so far as I remember, without
any particular preface or explanation, he asked me to begin making
a translation of the work from that point. I said: “Certainly, Mr.
Edward,” and began to translate without more ado.
And here I may say that my career as a French translator has always
struck me as highly humorous. At the good old grammar school where
I was educated and educated very well, I think that the headmaster
thoroughly agreed with the boys that Foreign Languages were a
silly game that, for various reasons, one had to play. Education
was Latin and Greek, but a notion had arisen in these late days
that one ought to learn French, and so there was a French master.
But he wore neither cap nor gown, and so he was not a real master,
and so, again, his language was not a real language. Therefore:
poor M. Ménard! And I am afraid that he was a very bad master. If
his authority had been supported, and if we had tried our best, I
do not think we should have learned much; as it was, the French
lessons, three times a week, were a farce. I knew no French when I
left Hereford Cathedral School in 1880, that is, I could not have
conjugated the verb _Aimer_ to save my life. I had read no French to
speak of. Then, in my desolation in Clarendon Road, I had somehow
come across “Gil Blas” and had managed, being interested, to get
through it. Then, the York Street publisher had sent me down the
sixteenth-century “Heptameron” and had ordered me to translate it,
and I did so, somehow. And now, Brother Ned ordered me to translate
from the dumpy quarto which he handed me; and forthwith I set about
translating, not troubling what it was, what it was about, not caring
two straws that I had not the thread of the narrative, nor worrying
over the fact that I knew nothing whatever about the enigmatic
“M.M.” or the mysterious “C.C.” into whose singular adventures I now
plunged gaily. Thus I began the translation of the famous “Memoirs
of Casanova,” and I think the money balance between the Brothers
and myself was readjusted. For if I had been dear as a cataloguer,
at thirty shillings a week, I was decidedly cheap as a translator.
Casanova is a work that runs into twelve sizeable volumes, and the
task of turning it into English took me a year, and I think the cost
to the firm will be held to have been strictly moderate.
And what about these strange Memoirs of the charlatan adventurer?
Well, not long ago I was called upon to write an introduction to a
reissue of the version I had made in the ’eighties. I found this an
extremely difficult task. The obvious solution of the difficulty,
the writing a sort of _précis_ of the book and calling it an
Introduction, did not appeal to me. It was some time before the
“moral” of the Memoirs disengaged itself. The Introduction when
written proved to be an essay on the futility of trying to tell the
whole truth about the relations between men and women. This is what
Casanova, who was highly qualified, in a certain sense, for the
undertaking, tried to do; and the more “frank,” the more “outspoken”
his page the more the secret escapes from it; the more openly he
reveals, the more deeply he conceals the mysteries. For the fact is
that all the real secrets are ineffable; the secrets of love, and
the secrets of the wood; the secrets of the flower and the secrets
of the flame; and the secrets of the Faith. As I point out in my
Introduction, you can enumerate the scientific facts--such of them
as are known--relating to any subject. You can define a horse, for
example, as Bitzer defined it in “Hard Times.”
“Quadruped. Gramjnivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders,
four eye-teeth and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in
marshy countries sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be
shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.”
And so you may discourse of the pistils and stamens of the lilies of
the field, and divide the fowls of the air into genera and species
and sub-species and count the teeth of Keats: and when all is done,
you know--nothing. Nothing that is of the essence of your matter,
nothing of its “quiddity,” a word that we have ceased to use, I
suppose, because we have no use for it, having forgotten that there
is such a thing as that essence which is present in all things,
which indeed makes them to be what they are, which is nevertheless
unsearchable and ineffable. And all this is true, not only of the
matters which the plain man, the man in the street, is inclined to
sniff at, but of all things, of man himself and of the universe of
noumena and phenomena which is presented to him. If you talk to the
plain, practical man about Mystic Theology, Mystic Love, Poetry,
Romance, he will, very likely, brush you aside with his “In my
opinion that’s all imagination”--and serve you right for talking to
him on such subjects at all. The dear fellow has no notion of the
fact that he has never seen a point, a line, a square, or a triangle,
and that he never will see any one of these things--in this life
at all events. He has seen black marks on paper which he has been
told are lines and squares and triangles. Being at heart thoroughly
credulous, he believes what he is told, but if he will dig up his old
“Euclid” and read the definitions, he will find that no mortal eyes
can ever see a square or a circle, since a line is length without
breadth and a plane surface is length and breadth without thickness.
There is nothing in the nature of things to prevent a man from seeing
a dragon or a griffin, a gorgon or a unicorn. Nobody as a matter of
fact has seen a woman whose hair consisted of snakes, nor a horse
from whose forehead a horn projected; though very early man most
probably did see dragons--known to science as pterodactyls--and
monsters more improbable than griffins. At any rate, none of these
zoological fancies violates the fundamental laws of the intellect;
the monsters of heraldry and mythology do not exist, but there is no
reason in the nature of things nor in the laws of the mind why they
should not exist. But no man hath seen a line at any time, since the
manifestation of length without breadth is a contradiction in terms.
And the plain man is probably inclined to believe in the existence
of vulgar fractions; he may tell you that he makes use of them daily
in his calculations. But let him study the story of the race between
Achilles and the Tortoise, and note to what monstrous results his
belief in elementary arithmetic inevitably conducts him; results
which are more intolerable than a madman’s dreams.
And then, again, there are wider, more universal conceptions than
anything contained in the geometry and arithmetic books. In a little
book of mine with the bad title of “War and the Christian Faith”--the
publisher chose the title--I speak thus of Space and Time:
“Take two insistent and unavoidable examples (of the things
which are unsearchable and indefinable), space and time.
No man who strolls from his arm-chair to the mantelpiece
and watches the hands of the clock move round can deny
the existence of either, since he has walked from point
to point in one and seen the other measured before his
eyes. But as to understanding space and time, what highest
philosophy can attain to such a pitch? The limitless cannot
so much as be imagined in the mind, nor imagined in a
nightmare: but that space which you have traversed of some
eight or ten feet is limitless, and must be so.
“It is a sea without a shore. And time, that which your
two-guinea clock ticks off for you, as you watch the dial:
it had no beginning that you can picture; it can have no
end save with God. You cannot understand; you must believe;
and so on your very hearth-rug the infinites and eternities
are before you and confront you, as truly as the clock face
confronts you.”
And the conclusion of the whole matter is that we live and move in
a world of profound and ineffable mystery; that all things from the
most abstract to the most concrete are involved in this mystery,
and, _therefore_, that Casanova as an exponent of love is a futile
fellow. He was a Voltairean; he approached the question as he would
say without prejudices, as the foolish among us would say, without
any nonsense, or, as the still more foolish among us would say,
in a scientific spirit. And the result is exactly what might be
expected: nothing. Love is defined and expounded in the spirit of
Bitzer defining a horse; and one perceives that science misapplied is
just gibberish, nothing more or less. Otherwise, taking Casanova’s
Memoirs from a lower standpoint, they are in many places vastly
entertaining. He knew all Europe from Petersburg and Constantinople
to London and Madrid; he was familiar with the palace and the gutter;
he was the friend of Kings and philosophers and popes--and also of