Things near & far
the best, lamb at Easter--is there anything better than spring lamb
with its skin roasted to a golden-brown?--was easily attainable;
fowls and ducks, grouse and partridges and pheasants, with now and
then that most delicious bird the woodcock, were no rarities. And
asparagus might well appear quite early in the spring, and green peas
in advance of the main crop. And sometimes one felt that it would be
amusing to go out to dinner for a change: well, the bill of the Soho
restaurant never gave an indigestion afterwards. Sometimes the Soho
dinners were quite good, they were always amusing; and in those days
there was such a thing as decent Chianti. It came to the cheerful
table in flasks of very thin glass, and between the cork and the wine
was a stratum of olive oil. This the waiter flicked off on to the
linoleum with a swift gesture. The last Chianti of this order that I
tasted was in 1902. I saw great gallon flasks of it standing in the
window of a small shop opposite the stage door of the Palace, and
bought one of these flasks--it cost six shillings, if I remember--and
bore it tenderly to my dressing-room at the St. James’s Theatre. It
was the last night of “Paolo and Francesca,” and we drank the Chianti
merrily in trunk hose and armour when the play was done. And Herbert
Dansey, who was really a noble Florentine, “degli Tassinari,” vowed
you could get no better Chianti in all Tuscany.
Or again, one didn’t fancy roast beef, and yet one didn’t want to
go out dining. There was the middle course; Salame or Mortadella,
half a round of ripe Brie and a bottle of a sufficient red or white
wine. And a half-bottle of Benedictine only cost four-and-six. And
the whole of the small banquet ran into very little: they were
cheap days, and the Income Tax was inconsiderable then. But I was
forgetting. I had no income, so I saved the expense of the tax.
And under these conditions, living very pleasantly, with a month
in France every year, I cultivated literature between 1890–1900.
I refrained, utterly, I am glad to say, from the impious folly of
wondering what would happen when the money should have come to an
end. When that day came, why, that day could see to it.
Living very pleasantly; that is, apart from my chosen sport of making
books. I have already discussed the strange paradox of writing, of
writing, that is, when it is entirely divorced from all commercial
considerations. I wrote purely to please myself; and what a queer
pleasure it was! To write, or to try to write, means involving
oneself in endless difficulties, contrarieties, torments, despairs,
and yet I wrote on, and I suppose for the reason which I have given,
the necessity laid upon most of us to create another and a fantastic
life in order that the life of actuality may be endurable. Look at
the golfer: observe how he toils and frets in that fantastic world
that he has made for himself, a world wherein he who can say, “I did
the fourth hole in two” is happy; while the wretch who had to hit the
little white ball six or seven times before it finally popped into
that fourth hole goes out wretchedly into the night. It is fantastic
nonsense; but for all that the golfers are in the right.
Still, there may be a little more in the sport of literature; and
if the golfers feel hurt by this remark, let them remember that a
man always praises his own game. We understand so little of the real
scheme of things that, for all we know, golf may be the end for which
man was made, as, according to Coleridge, snuff was the final term of
the human nose. But waiving this possibility--I think a remote one--I
would contend that literature has more in it on the whole. Being an
art as well as a sport, there is a question of making something, and
very occasionally of making something that will divert or enchant
others, besides the maker; whereas the sport which is nothing but
a sport has no such by-products as “Don Quixote” or “Pickwick.” Of
course the man who plays a game, such as golf or cricket, often gives
pleasure--or amusement, at all events--to many spectators; but when
the match is over and the last ball bowled nothing permanent remains.
So far as others are concerned the player of games is much in the
position of the player of plays. The actor thrills the house or rocks
it with laughter; but the curtain falls and all is over. We know that
the best judges of the eighteenth century found Garrick natural,
simple, affecting; but we know no more. We have pictures of Garrick
in his favourite situations; but I at least have no distinct image in
my mind of what it was really like to be in the front row of the pit
at Drury Lane and see and hear Garrick play.
And, this apart, I cannot help thinking that the pleasures of the
literary game are more intense and more exquisite than the pleasures
of the other games. I know this is a very difficult question; there
is no final answer to it. But I feel sure that the happiness of
Charles Dickens on writing the last words of “David Copperfield” was
greater than the happiness of the cricketer at Lord’s who carries
out his bat for a faultless innings of two hundred against the most
difficult bowling and the best fielding in England. I do not know
that this is so, but I conjecture that it is so, chiefly because
the joys of the writer of a great romance are so varied and so
complex in comparison with the joys of the man who has played a
perfect innings. In a sense, perhaps, the first-rate cricketer has
achieved the more perfect performance: he has met every difficulty
splendidly, his judgment as to running has been impeccable, he has
not given a single chance. The writer, on the other hand, is--I think
we may say--never perfect: consider those last chapters of “Don
Quixote”; consider Steerforth and that infernal ... woman, Agnes; the
Grandfather and Little Nell. Yet the man of the book has traversed
such an infinitely wider region than the man of the bat and ball:
he has perhaps rectified the work of the Creator and made himself
anew and made himself much better; and so he has worked with all
the world, fashioning a new life, discovering wonders where before
there were no wonders, shewing secrets that had been hidden from the
foundation of things, peering now and again, as Poe and Hawthorne
peered, into the places of thick darkness, and, above all, voyaging
into the unknown, perpetually climbing the steep white track that
vanishes over the hill.
_Chapter VI_
We are, I think, in the period 1890–1900; or, perhaps, to be more
accurate, let us say 1889–1899. Between these dates I made a
translation of “Le Moyen de Parvenir,” an early seventeenth-century
book by an odd follower of Rabelais. I wrote “The Great God Pan,”
“The Inmost Light,” “The Three Impostors,” “The Hill of Dreams,”
a short collection of experiments called “Ornaments in Jade,”
“Hieroglyphics,” “The White People,” the first part of “A Fragment of
Life,” and “The Red Hand.” As I have said, I had inherited a little
capital and spent it, and at ample leisure wrote these books and
tales, instead of doing honest work. In the words of some character
in “The Three Impostors,” I regarded my various legacies as an
endowment of research.
Now, as to the first title on this list, I was inspired to translate
“Le Moyen de Parvenir” by that earlier Rabelaisian enthusiasm, which
had lasted on. I found the book (in the original edition, I think),
a little dumpy volume, while I was in the employment of a firm of
second-hand booksellers who lived not far from Leicester Square. I
have been called a modest man in an after-dinner speech, and I hope
I am one; but I am sure I was modest in 1888. For, finding that I
could not get a “rise” on the £60 a year which York Street afforded
me, I tried Leicester Square and asked as much as £80; thirty
shillings a week. I think the firm were amused; but they gave it me,
and I set about cataloguing books for them.
I did this under odd conditions. When I made my application, the
Brothers--let us say--took me down to the place in the basement where
my work would have to be done. Once, I suppose, it had been the
underground back-kitchen of the house. The kitchen was occupied by
two other employees of the firm. One of them kept the accounts; the
other treated “foxed” plates and pages in baths and made them fresh
again, and “grangerised” and packed up books that had been bought.
And the kitchen had the illumination from the solid glass over which
people walked as they passed the shop, and some sort of air from the
outer world. But my workshop had neither one nor the other. Save for
gas, it was in total darkness. Its air was dead. And the House asked
me very fairly whether I thought I could stand it. I said I could,
and so I went to work.
I was never any good at cataloguing, real, technical cataloguing. I
was explaining the other day to a friend of mine, a most accomplished
and learned cataloguer, how I despised his work. “This business,”
I said, “of putting little slanty lines between the words of a
title-page. A pitiable job,” I proceeded, “it must be so since I
could never make anything of it.” But, the truth is, I never had any
heart for the work. I don’t care twopence whether a book is in the
first edition or in the tenth; nay, if the tenth is the best edition,
I would rather have it. To me it appears mere childishness to
consider whether Lowndes--I think that is one of the authorities--has
seen three copies of some particular book or three hundred; the
only question being: is the book worth reading or not? Then, when
it comes to measuring an Elzevir, say, with a graduated rule, and
pronouncing a little book three inches and a half high to be a “tall
copy,” my common sense revolts. In other words, I am sure that
Bibliography is a capital game, but it is not my game. I disliked
my work of cataloguing; but I loathed another branch of my work,
that was indexing. Everybody knows about “grangerising.” You take a
book, say, Smith’s “Life of Nollekens.” In it many eighteenth-century
personages are mentioned, and many London streets and public places.
The indexer has to read through the book, noting every person, every
place, and compile an index. And on this index the grangeriser, the
bookseller, goes to work hunting his stock of plates, hunting certain
well-known sources for pictures with which he can stuff the original
work. He will destroy a dozen or a hundred or a thousand other books
of less value to produce a kind of monster: “The Life of Nollekens,”
by Joseph Smith, 1 vol., 8vo., 17--. Enlarged to 3 vols. quarto, and
furnished with 250 extra illustrations, comprising portraits, views,
plans, maps, and original and facsimile letters from Blank, Dash,
Chose, and other famous persons of the period. Purple Levant Morocco
Jansenist; in watered purple silk case, gilt. Price: A great deal.
There. I am afraid I have forgotten the trick of the business and my
friend the expert cataloguer will say that it is a good thing indeed
that I have changed my trade; but it is something like that. Well,
indexing is a horrible job; a weariness, a nuisance; a matter of
covering the table with innumerable little slips of paper that flow
over on to the floor; and one must be careful and accurate, and I
have always hated being careful, and accurate--unless I happen to be
interested in what I am doing. Besides, I hold that “grangerising”
is both barbarous and silly. So I didn’t like my work, but I liked
the Brothers. They were always most courteous. Near our establishment
was a shop where a very old gentleman sold precious things. His
shop windows were made of small squares of glass. Above them was
an inscription to the effect that the firm were “Goldsmiths and
Silversmiths to Their Majesties the King and Queen and to Her Royal