Things near & far
columns or three columns were reserved for the “Hookah Tea” stuff
and the “Caravan Girl” stuff and all similar stuff. You could skip
these columns if you didn’t like them, just as I skip the racing
columns, in which I am not interested. But “the women” rule the whole
paper. Not only must the editor put in matter which he knows they
will like, he must keep out matter which he knows they won’t like.
And the result is ... the result as we know it. As the “literary
editor” of a big London paper acutely observed to me not long ago,
the case of the newspaper article is exactly as the case of chops
and steaks, beefsteak puddings and saddles of mutton that were of
old. “The women” have spoilt all. What do they know or care about
man’s food? To them there is nothing to choose between a chop fried
white and hard and greasy in the frying-pan and a chop which has
been purged of all excess by the ardent heat, beneath the gridiron,
which beneath a coat half black, half golden-brown, preserves its
delicious juices, which sizzles on the plate as William or Charles
serves it, which, opened by the eager knife, shews within a hue like
that of a blush-rose in June. These are not matters to enchant the
wayward heart of a young girl, and when once she sets foot inside
the tavern coffee-room, farewell to all such solid merits. There was
once a noble tavern called Herbert’s, famous for two generations. Men
who had spent half a lifetime in Africa or India or in the islands
of the South Seas were sustained by the thought of the beefsteak
pudding at Herbert’s. The times changed and the old tavern with them.
Going there in these later days, I used to wonder why all the meats
seemed to taste alike, why there was no distinctive and peculiar
relish about any of the dishes. I found out the reason why one day.
I had business, oddly enough, in Herbert’s kitchen. One of the cooks
shewed me the joints roasting on the jack; and I perceived that three
different meats were cooking at the one fire, while beneath, in a
common pan, their juices mingled, ready for the basting ladle. It
is not much wonder, I think, that veal and lamb and beef taste all
much alike in this unhappy place, once so high, now fallen so low.
One night I was dining there, and a member of the party asked the
waiter to bring him some Stilton. “I beg your pardon, sir,” said the
man, “we only have _English_ cheeses.” It sounds impossible; but I
heard this with my ears. In the old days Herbert’s was exclusively
masculine in its custom; I do not know what would have happened to
that waiter then. I hardly think that his death would have been an
easy one.
But to “the women” all this is of no account. They know nothing about
man’s food, as I say, and they care less. I do not blame them; I do
not blame myself for being ignorant of the difference between Hopsac
and Gaberdine: but how would _they_ like it if I poked my nose into
their Oxford Street shops and insisted on these shops being carried
on to suit my taste?
So through this monstrous incursion of women, with the war and the
nursery hours of to-day, the old tavern life has gone; utterly and
for ever, I am afraid. A good thing has gone. The old mahogany boxes
with bright brass work and green curtains, the light twinkling in the
dark polished surfaces that were all about the room, the flaming fire
with the plates warming by it, the plain food, the best of its kind,
cooked in the best possible manner, the mighty tankards of mighty
ale, the port that _was_ port afterwards, in itself a great gift
and a curious grace, and later--say about eleven o’clock--Charles
appearing with a large china bowl and a bottle under his arm,
following up these things with lump sugar, lemons, and the hot water:
it is all over. And it is not only the good material things that have
been taken away: the good meats and the good drinks, the glowing
mahogany and the cheerful blaze and crackle of the fire: with them
has gone, I suspect, a certain genial habit of the mind and soul
which was congruous with all the circumstances of the old-fashioned
tavern, which was congruous also with good men and good books and
choice poetry, with all the rich zest and relish and unction which
made the Victorian age of letters a great age; and, in its measure,
a worthy successor to three other illustrious tavern ages: the
Shakespearian, the Caroline, and the Johnsonian. Think of Falstaff
and his tavern bill and his warning against thin potations, think of
Herrick and his address to Ben, his fond remembrance of the taverns
“where we such clusters had as made us nobly wild not mad,” think
of Johnson squeezing the orange into the bowl with antick gestures,
saying “Who’s for _poonsh_?” think of Tennyson and that blest pint of
port at the vanished Cock Tavern, think of Dickens, that great lover
of tavern feasts and immortaliser of them: think of all this, my poor
young man, and beat your breast. There are no jolly taverns for you,
and your favourite authors do not write like men--“my son Cartwright
writes all like a man,” said Ben Jonson--but like psycho-analytical
chemists.
And as I was saying, as with the taverns, so with the papers. When
I wrote a little for them, in 1890 or thereabouts, it was allowable
to assume a certain amount of literacy, a certain knowledge in
the reader. Now that is over. I know the case of a man who, I am
certain, pretends ignorance that he may continue to be employed. As
it happens, he is an expert in food and drink; but I have known him
number Beaujolais with the wines of Bordeaux in a newspaper article,
and speak of curry powder and pickles as ordinary ingredients in veal
and ham pie. I believe he knows much better; but he has probably
found out that a misstatement or two gives an easy careless air that
is much admired. Nobody can call a writer of this kind a pedant. A
highly accomplished journalist said to me a few years ago: “Always
remember that we appeal, not to the cabman, but to the cabman’s
wife.” And another instance, though I am afraid it is somewhat tinged
with self-praise. I had written a brief article for the “Evening
News” on a topic that had been given to me; I was to explain _why_
it is that a “mean street” of to-day is, generally, hideous and
appalling, while a row of sixteenth-century cottages is, generally,
a delight to see. I did as I always do when I can, I took the
particular instance and placed it under a general principle. I said
the chief horror of the modern street was not to be sought in the
poverty of the design, though that was, doubtless, bad enough, but
in the fact that in the street of to-day each house is a replica of
the other, so that the effect to the eye is, if the street be long
enough, the prolongation of one house to infinity, in an endless
series of repetitions. And I pointed out that even if you admired
some particular picture or statue immensely, it would be rather awful
to traverse a long gallery in which the picture or the statue were
repeated again and again as far as the eye could see. And then, on
the other hand, I shewed how the sixteenth-century cottages were
each of them individuals, each with some slight difference from
the cottage next door, each with its variety in door or window or
pent-house. And hence, I urged, a continual slight surprise to the
beholder, and taking the supposed row as a whole, that strangeness in
the proportion which Bacon declared, most profoundly, to be necessary
to the highest beauty. Well, I got this with difficulty into the
prescribed 500 words--“nobody will read anything over 500 words”--and
said to myself: “Now that Patmore is dead, nobody else could have
written that article. But ... there will be a row.” There was. Lord
Northcliffe gave the little essay the honour of a special mention
in one of his famous _communiqués_--as I believe they were called.
He spoke of it with venom as “a wiseacre article.” I am sure he was
perfectly right from his point of view. The fault was mine. “When I
am in Rome, I fast on Saturdays,” said one of the Fathers.
Things have changed indeed. I was mentioning Coventry Patmore. In the
Introduction to the “Religio Poetæ,” a collection of short essays of
the profoundest wisdom, he acknowledges his obligations to Greenwood,
once editor of the “St. James’s Gazette.” Some of these essays had
appeared in that journal: the fact is quite stupefying considered in
the light of the journalism of to-day. Education increases; ignorance
grows deeper.
* * * * *
Let me not be understood as claiming that my newspaper work of
thirty-two years ago was characterised by the profoundest wisdom.
Very far from it; my articles were harmless and agreeable enough, I
think, in a small way; and writing them, I first began to get a hint
of my true subject; the country of my childhood and my youth. And I
thus began to move away from the exotic Rabelaisian influence, both
as to manner and to matter: to perceive that not the splendid Loire
but the humble Soar brook, winding and shining in deep valleys and
obscured by dark alder thickets, was my native stream. I began to
see that I was a citizen of Caerleon-on-Usk, and not of Tours or of
Chinon, and that the old grey manor-houses and the white farms of
Gwent had their beauty and significance, though they were not castles
in Touraine. There was something of all this, of course, in “The
Chronicle of Clemendy,” the Great Romance which was neither great nor
a romance; but in this everything was viewed and everything expressed
in an exotic medium: now I saw that a blossoming thorn bush in the
valley of the Soar and the nightingale singing in it and the river
level about Caerleon and the red fires of sunset over the mountain in
the west were all in themselves and by themselves fit matter for the
work; that they needed not to be disguised in a French literary habit
of four hundred years ago.
It was in this summer of 1890 that I wrote the first chapter of “The
Great God Pan.” I have told the whole story in the Introduction to
the latest edition of that fantasy, which is published by Messrs.
Simpkin, Marshall, and whether I should weary my readers I know
not, but I do know that I should weary myself if I told it all over
again. The tale was written in bits, in the intervals between severe
literary cramps, as I have mentioned in this present volume, and it
was published by Mr. John Lane, of the Bodley Head, at the end of
1894, when yellow bookery was at its yellowest. And it aroused a
certain amount of attention. There was a storm--in a doll’s teacup.
The other day a friend of mine said genially to me:
“I have just been reading that ‘Great God Pan’ of yours
over again, and I really don’t see that there’s much in it
to make a sensation of.”
I am sure he was quite right. But a sensation there was, of a minor
kind. It had some mysterious property in it, this little book, which
caused good men to froth at the mouth, greatly to my delight. I have
quoted a good many of the reviews in the Introduction to the Simpkin,
Marshall edition: things like this:
“We are afraid he only succeeds in being ridiculous. The
book is, on the whole, the most acutely and intentionally
disagreeable we have yet seen in English. We could say
more, but refrain from doing so for fear of giving such a
work advertisement.”--“Manchester Guardian.”
“This book is gruesome, ghastly, and dull ... the majority
of readers will turn from it in utter disgust.”--“Lady’s
Pictorial.”
“These tricks have also their ludicrous side.”--“Guardian.”
And so forth. It is very well, but I cannot help saying, as an old
craftsman and an old reviewer, that it might have been better. I
have no fault to find with the technique of the “Guardian”; but