Things near & far
Christmastide,” indeed! Ceremonies observed at Reading Workhouse,
more likely!
But the next morning came a letter from Aunt Maria, that Maria who
had walked with Anne to meet John on the white Caerleon road. My
mother was dying; and they sent me the money for the fare, that I
might come home.
_Chapter III_
It is a debatable point, I suppose, whether life, taking it all
round, by and large, as Mr. Bixby said, is a horrible business. On
the one hand, most of us are excessively sorry to quit this world,
so, clearly, there must be something to be said for it. But, on the
other hand, how endless are the devices which we find to give a
seasoning to a dish which is, perhaps, rather insipid than nauseous.
I have eaten cold mutton with relish--after smothering it in about
half a dozen different condiments, sauces, relishes and salads. So
look at all the games we play with desperate earnestness, with a
vigour and delight and, sometimes, an asceticism which we give to no
office routine or serious employment of our lives. Perhaps we may try
and define what “life” means a little later; but, under all ordinary
and respectable conventions, I presume that the business of which
I have been dimly aware on this day of writing can in no wise be
classed as one of the serious employments of life; as, in any sense,
a vital part of life according to accepted doctrine, religious,
scientific or philosophical. The business of which, I say, I have
been dimly aware; for all I have seen of it has been Grove Road,
Grove End Road, and Circus Road and all the roads adjacent lined on
both sides with motor cars of all sizes, splendours and miseries;
the affair being the last day of the Oxford and Cambridge Cricket
Match. And, looking at all this fairly, it comes to this: here are
two wickets placed at a certain specified distance from one another
on a stretch of turf, and here are men with bats and here are men
with balls. Will the men with balls succeed in hitting the wickets,
or will the men with bats succeed in hitting those balls away to
remote parts of the turf? And on the whole: are the eleven young
men of Oxford or the eleven young men of Cambridge the smarter and
more skilled at these pursuits and in the subsidiary pursuit called
“fielding,” or the art of stopping the ball which the man has hit
with the bat from going to a remote part of the stretch of turf?
That, in the very rough, is cricket; and I want to ask the clergy
(if they have any time to spare from their self-appointed tasks of
meddling in politics, “disapproving” of bookstall novels, and serving
tables) what they honestly think Saint Paul would have said, if he
had seen twenty-two of his most promising young converts engaged in
this cricket business, applauded by a vast multitude of the saints?
I desire to put this question not with a wish to “score”--to use an
idiom of the game which we are discussing--but with an honest longing
for information. That is: will theologians maintain that the ’Varsity
Match and First Class County Cricket generally is a part of serious
life, or a serious part of life? Or, will the scientific people or
the philosophical people declare that this game, played as it is
played at Lord’s with desperate earnestness, is a necessary part of
the bodily and mental well-being of the human race? I say the game
as played at Lord’s, that is the great game; for the case of the
old-fashioned, village cricket on the green was somewhat different.
Then you had a number of people with two or three hours of leisure
before them who found a good deal of fun and relaxation and amusement
in bowling balls and hitting balls and running after balls, with
intervals of supping of ale, sitting on the bench under the shady
tree in front of the village inn; this is a very different matter
from the high cricket of our times, just as diverting yourself with a
ball, a racket and a net is remote from Mdlle. Lenglen’s game at lawn
tennis.
And these are the comparatively mild forms of sport. What of
rowing till you are blue in the face, what of climbing frightful
mountain-peaks, with half an inch of rock between you and a fall of
a thousand feet? Why do people do all these things, voluntarily,
gladly, enthusiastically? I can only suppose that they do these
things to make life tolerable, even entertaining, just as I add
tomato sauce, Worcester sauce, pickles, beetroot, cucumber and salad
to the cold mutton, to make _that_ tolerable and even appetising.
It would seem indeed that life must be an awful business, if you
have to plaster yourself on the walls of a sheer Alp before you can
endure it. This is “drowning” your cold mutton in strong sauce with a
vengeance.
And all this by way of a tentative explanation of why I ever wrote
anything at all, and still more why I have gone on writing, with
brief remissions, ever since the autumn of 1880. This problem, as
I have hinted already, is a profound mystery. For, taking first
the plain view of the man in the street, and applying his plain and
simple test, I have just been running through a list of my books from
1881 to 1922, and reckoning--it was an easy task--how much money I
have made by them. The list contains eighteen titles. Of these, the
“Heptameron,” “Fantastic Tales,” “Casanova” represent more or less
laborious translations--“Casanova” runs to twelve sizeable volumes.
And my total receipts for these eighteen volumes, for these forty-two
years of toil, amount to the sum of six hundred and thirty-five
pounds. That is, I have been paid at the rate of fifteen pounds and
a few shillings per annum. It seems clear, then, that my literary
activities cannot be adequately accounted for on the hypothesis of
mere greed and money-grubbing.
And, then, taking another side of the question: consider the debit of
toil and endeavour and mortification and disappointment that these
forty-two years of book-writing have cost me. I believe that business
men, engaged in manufacture, always “write off” a considerable sum
for legitimate wear and tear and depreciation of plant. What about
the wear and tear of mind and heart and that T,e,a,r, which is
pronounced in another manner; what about the depreciation of the
plant--a highly important one--of self-confidence that my writing
has inflicted on me? I have described some of the pains I endured
when I set out to write the thing which afterwards became the
“Chronicle of Clemendy,” and that was only the beginning of months
of hard and agonizing labour. And then I remember another occasion.
The “idea” which turned into “The Great God Pan” came to me; again
that delicious glow of delight. Now at last I had got hold of a
real notion; I had a curious tale, a rare fantasy set in a rarer
atmosphere to work upon: I thrilled at my heart as the explorer
must thrill as he comes suddenly to the verge of the dark forest,
or to the summit of the high mountain and sees before him a new
and wonderful and undiscovered land. Well I remember how all this
exquisite bliss was bestowed on me, one dark and foggy afternoon of
1890–91, in rooms in Guilford Street, not far from “The Foundling.”
The foul air shone bright, the dingy street, the dingy room were
irradiated: here was happiness almost too keen to be endured. With
no delay I got notebook and pencil and proceeded to “lay out” the
story; that is, to set down the various scenes and incidents by which
the plot was to be developed. Afterwards; the writing, and on the
whole I was not altogether so ill-contented--though I daresay that I
ought to have been disgusted--till it came to the last chapter. And
that simply would not be written. I tried again and again; it was
impossible. I could hit on no incident that would convey the required
emotion; and at last I put away the uncompleted MS. in despair; I was
within an ace of tearing it to bits. But think of the suffering, the
misery, the bitter disappointment of those evenings. True it was all
a silly thing, a toy; but an authority quoted in “The Water Babies”
says that one of the saddest sights in the world is a child crying
over a broken toy. My scheme was all silly, I allow; but I had set my
heart on it, I had glowed with pride over it: and here it was all
broken to pieces in my hands, a sorry, spoilt, piteous thing. True,
I found some sort of an ending six months later; but that was not
the same. There was no fun in that. You remember the party in the
cabrioily that called on Mrs. Bardell? There was a dispute about the
precise situation of Mrs. Bardell’s house, and finally the driver,
who had dismounted, led the horse by the bridle to the house with the
red door.
Here was a mean and low way of arriving at a friend’s
house! No dashing up with all the fire and fury of the
animal; no jumping down of the driver; no loud knocking at
the door; no opening of the apron with a crash at the very
last moment.... The whole edge of the thing had been taken
off; it was flatter than walking.
So with me and my story: I got to the house with the red door
eventually; but the whole edge of the thing had been taken off. And
so it has been with most of my books; I get, somehow or other, to the
house with the red door, or to a house which I try to persuade myself
is just as good; but on the way in the cabrioily I have suffered so
many disappointments that I am in no condition to enjoy the pleasure
of Mrs. Bardell’s society. I remember that, in writing “The Hill of
Dreams,” I sat down every night for three weeks with blank paper
before me, trying to get the second chapter. On some nights I wrote
half a dozen lines, on other nights a couple of pages--before the
evening’s work went, hopeless, into the drawer. A few months later,
having fallen on the wrong path, I had the pleasure of casting aside
about 30,000 words that I had written; and by the time the book was
at last ended there were two neat piles of MS. in my drawer; the one
a little higher than the other. The bigger pile consisted of the
folios that I had written and had been forced to reject. And think of
what that means: a heartbreak to every other page and the comment of
the author on himself and to himself: “You fool! Why do you pass your
life in rending your heart, in trying to do the thing that you can’t
do? Why weren’t you brought up to sit by a brazier in the streets, to
see that nobody steals the planks and railings and the wood pavement:
to do something that with an effort you might be able to do?” Or, to
return to our former metaphor: “Don’t you see that you haven’t the
knack of the toy maker? Then why will you persist in trying to make
toys which always break in your hands, while you fill the air with
lamentable boohoos?”
And yet, as I have said, such has been my employment, with
intermissions, from 1880 to 1922. It was like that in 1885–86. Night
after night, when my father had knocked out his last pipe at eleven
o’clock, did I draw out my papers from the table-drawer and set them
under the lamp. Winds came from the mountain of the west and shook
the trees about the house and sighed and wailed; snows came from
the mountains of the north and whitened the terraced lawn, black
clouds drifted over Wentwood, the winter rains scourged the land; and
still I wrote on in the silent house; struggling against the bitter
conviction of my incapacity, as a man struggles and claws at the
crumbling earth when his foot has slipped and he is over the edge of
the cliff. Yet, stubborn, I wrote on late into the night, far into
the morning, and as the year advanced I often drew the heavy crimson
curtain and looked out after I had put away my papers in the drawer,
and saw a red or golden dawn streaming above the forest in the east.
And as to the work itself? Let us not enquire too curiously; though I