Things near & far
journalists, ladies of quality, actors, scavengers--I was going to
add bishops, but they rarely speak the honest truth--and myself who
had very much rather not see the famous Primavera and the famous
Monna Lisa Gioconda than see them, who had rather--again I include
myself--listen to George Robey’s songs and gags and wheezes than to
“Hamlet.” But what does that prove? Simply, I suppose, that so far
as the pictures and the play are concerned my friends and myself
cannot rise to these particular heights. As an old friend of mine
once observed very well, “We all of us have some windows that are
darkened.” My friend is a musician, and remembering his maxim, I
was much diverted one day by hearing him speak with easy contempt
of the composer of “Acis and Galatea.” But it is true that each one
of us has some darkened windows: Oscar Wilde confessed to me once,
with shame be it said, that he thought absinthe a detestable drink.
But no inference can be drawn from this undoubted fact. It always
stirs in me a certain feeling of impatience when I see the solemn
correspondence, the more solemn leading articles under the dread
heading, “What is Wrong with the Church?” It is alleged, I am sure
with complete truth, that a great many people do not go to church;
and the conclusion is drawn that the Church must be very gravely
at fault. Now this may be true also--I think it is--but it is a
conclusion not to be deduced from the minor premiss, the sole premiss
stated. Scholastic logic, the only logic that is worth twopence, the
“new logic” being, as an Oxford graduate once very sensibly observed
to me, merely “nonsense about things,” is now unfashionable, so,
I suppose I shall be thought somewhat boorish for exhibiting the
newspaper syllogism at full length, supplying the suppressed major.
But here it is:
That which is unpopular is worthless.
The Church is unpopular.
Therefore, the Church is worthless. In other words, as one of the
ladies in the cabrioily--to which I have already alluded--observed:
“Most Votes carries the day.” Very well; but how does the attendance
on the pictures in the National Gallery compare with the attendance
at “the pictures”? And shall we try the experiment of “knocking”
the music-halls, the revue houses and the musical comedy houses by
running Bach’s Organ and Clavier Fugues at popular prices? Perhaps
the purse of Rockefeller might survive the experiment; certainly
no other purse would hold anything after a year of it. Mr. Walkley
of “The Times” proposes to solve the difficulty of criticism by
making the critic address himself to ὁ χαρίεις, the well-graced and
accomplished man. But who is he? Each one of us is a good judge--in
his own judgment. And technical instruction is nothing. No one in his
senses would seek anything vital as to Greek or Latin poetry from a
classical don at Oxford or Cambridge. Keats, poor, shabby John, who
had only been to a commercial academy, knew more about Greek poetry
than a wilderness of classical tutors.
But, I was going to say, all these considerations apply to the known
and recognised arts, to literature, music, painting, architecture.
In all these I am willing to admit I may be hopelessly wrong--I
have said that I had much rather hear Robey than “Hamlet”--but I
will listen to no objections or criticisms as to the Ars Magna of
London, of which I claim to be the inventor, the professor and the
whole school. Here I am artist and judge at once, and possess the
whole matter of the art within myself. For, let it be quite clearly
understood, the Great Art of London has nothing to do with any map
or guide-book or antiquarian knowledge, admirable as these are; and
indeed Peter Cunningham’s “London” is to me one of the choicest of
books. But the Great Art is a matter of quite another sphere; and
as to maps, for example, if known they must be forgotten. How would
the Odyssey have read, do you imagine, if Ulysses had been furnished
with Admiralty Charts, giving the soundings in fathoms, even to the
exact depth of water in the harbourage of Calypso’s isle? And all
historical associations; they too must be laid aside. Mr. Pickwick
at Bury St. Edmunds has nothing to do with the history of the famous
abbey. Of all this the follower of the London Art must purge himself
when he sets out on his adventures. For the essence of this art is
that it must be an adventure into the unknown, and perhaps it may be
found that this, at last, is the matter of all the arts.
And it was this art of London that I followed, while I lived in
Great Russell Street between ’93 and ’95, and still more earnestly
afterwards when I was living at Verulam Buildings, Gray’s Inn.
Sometimes I took a friend with me on my journeys, but not often.
The secret of it all was hidden from them, and they were apt to
become violent. On one grey day that I remember I had personally
conducted a man on a most interesting exploration of the obscurer
by-ways of Islington. He grew silent as the streets grew greyer
and the squares dimmer and the remoteness of the whole region from
any conceivable London that he knew filtered through his soul. His
London was Piccadilly, the Haymarket, St. James’s, and the many
polite neighbourhoods where there are flats and calls are paid and
tea is taken and literary and theatrical and artistic circles meet
and gather. But this London that was a grey wilderness, these streets
that went to the beyond and beyond, these squares which nobody that
my friend could ever have known could ever inhabit: it was all too
much for him. His face darkened with terror and hate, and with a
poisonous glance at me he struck his golden-headed cane violently on
the pavement, and stopping dead, exclaimed: “I wish to God I could
see a hansom!”
So, of course, I never took him to Barnsbury. As for Brentford,
that is the Great Magisterium, the Hidden Secret. There is a Secret
Society of those initiated in Brentford, and so darkly is the mystery
kept that there have been cases in which members have known each
other intimately for twenty years before the passwords have been
exchanged.
_Chapter V_
I have been talking of rooms in Gray’s Inn, of trips to Touraine; and
I suppose it will have become evident that the days of the Clarendon
Road cell, of dry bread and green tea meals were over. This was, in
fact, the case. Between ’87 and ’92 I “came into money,” that is,
into what I called money. My mother died in 1885, my father in 1887;
distant and ancient relatives in Scotland who had lived to fabulous
ages died at last, and thus moneys that should have come to my
mother came to me. And I was no longer the lonely man of the earlier
chapters.
Reckoning up the various sums which I inherited, I calculate that
if they had been invested I should have had enough whereon to live
narrowly and meanly for the next thirty years. Somewhere about 1921
a long lease would have fallen in, and two-thirds of my income would
have disappeared. I should then have been left with sixty pounds
a year at the outside, and even with the “aconomy” recommended by
Captain Costigan, there is very little to be done in these days with
£60 per annum. But I did not invest my fortune in sound securities.
Perhaps I might have done so if it had fallen in a lump on my lap;
but this was not the way of it. It came in bits and parcels: £700
one year, £500 eighteen months afterwards. So I adopted the simple,
manly course of putting my money as I got it into a box, as it were,
and dipping my hand into the box when I needed a few gold pieces. I
wish it were possible to do this literally: it must be magnificent
to live on a chestful of gold; but I compromised by getting a
cheque-book.
And I have always been glad that I made this business-like
arrangement. By it I was enabled to live for eleven or twelve
years under pleasant and humane conditions. Not in luxury, be it
understood, for luxury has always been utterly detestable to me.
Detestable to me, I say with emphasis; I do not say that luxury is
detestable in itself. If men like to have it so, by all means let
them dwell in marble halls, with vassals and serfs and wine-stewards
at their side. Let them be as Louisquinzious as ever they please in
their homes and at their hotels; for all I care, they may take their
ease in snuggeries, all gold and mirrors and marbles, fifty feet
high, a hundred feet high, if they like it so. But to me, a poor
clerk, all this has ever been nauseous. When I plied my sorry trade
of journalist, I disliked most things involved in that vile business,
but I hated my occasional missions to the Hôtel Splendide and the
Hôtel Glorieux. I would be sent to these places to find out, say, the
exact method employed by the new chef, M. Mirobolant, in cooking red
herrings for the famous Joy Teas in the Venetian Hall--everybody has
heard of the Joy Teas at the Splendide, and of the Joy Band of twenty
kettle-drums, fifty tea-trays, ten trombones and thirty bassoons.
Well, I would be sent to the Splendide on this errand; or, perhaps,
to the Glorieux to find out whether it were true that the principals
of the Russian Ballet sucked their morning tea through raspberry jam
and declared that this was necessary to their art. I would visit
one or other of these establishments and sit down on Louis Quinze
or Louis Seize chairs and wait there in my dingy old cloak, while
“Reception” and “Enquiries” smiled to see such an incongruous figure
before them, while the guests of the hotel smiled also as they
went in and out, till at last the manager arrived, fretful enough,
usually, at being dragged from his business or his leisure to answer
idiotic questions. I used to wonder on these Splendide or Glorieux
days what I had done to deserve such humiliations. The only thing
that somewhat consoled me was the thought that, whatever pains the
Doctor may have suffered, while he waited in Lord Chesterfield’s
outward rooms or was repulsed from that nobleman’s door, my case was
more humiliating still, since an English nobleman of race is a much
greater personage than the shiniest of hotel managers. And perhaps,
also, I fancied that I was beginning to follow a little in the
faithful steps of Venerable Raymondus Anglus, who was slowly sliced
into little pieces in Cathay.
Rather, I am afraid, in the steps of a relative of my own, some
distant Cousin Machen, whom business, I suppose, took to Cathay in
the ’fifties and ’sixties of the last century. It so fell out that
while this gentleman was in China we declared one of our infamous
Opium Wars against the Dragon Throne and the Vermilion Pencil.
Promptly the local mandarin seized Cousin Machen and put him in a
cage. They then travelled him round the Chinese “Smalls.” When the
cortège got to a village or town, my cousin’s custodians touched him
up smartly with their spears. Cousin Machen would then dance with
anguish, and, I am sure, most ungracefully, and the happy villagers,
howling with mirth, and voting Cousin Machen good goods, would pelt
the poor man with undesirable matters. He got away from them, but I
have heard my relations say that in extreme old age the mere word
“China” was enough to bring a sweat of horror pouring down his face.
And I am in a position to sympathise fully with Cousin Machen----
Well, I was saying, I think, that I never cared for luxury, and
so did not waste my bit of money on it. But if luxury tempts me
not at all, I care a great deal for homely comfort, and I lived in
considerable comfort in the days of which I am speaking. I think that
my annual budget was between four and five hundred a year, and let
me tell an amazed generation that for five hundred a year or rather
less two people could live very sufficiently in the ’eighties and
’nineties. Your saddle of mutton and your sirloin of beef were of