THE INTERVIEW.
It is now some years ago since I was sitting in Mr. Caliban’s study, writing in his name upon the Balance of Power in Europe. I had just completed my article, and passed it to him to sign, when I noticed that he was too much absorbed in a book which he was reading to pay attention to my gesture.
Men of his stamp enforce courtesy in others by their mere presence. It would have been impossible to have disturbed him. I turned to a somewhat more lengthy composition, which was also to appear above his signature, entitled, “The Effect of Greek Philosophy upon European Thought.” When I had completed my analysis of this profound historical influence, I thought that my master and guide would have freed himself from the net of the author who thus entranced him. I was mistaken. I had, however, but just begun a third article, of which the subject escapes me, when he turned to me and said, closing the book between his hands:
“Will you go and interview someone for me?”
I fear my sudden change of expression betrayed the fact that the idea was repugnant to one familiar rather with foreign politics and with the Classics than with the reporters’ side of the paper.
Mr. Caliban looked at my collar with his kindly eyes, and kept them fixed upon it for some seconds. He then smiled (if such a man could be said to smile) and continued:
“I want to tell you something....”
There was profound silence for a little while, during which a number of thoughts passed through my mind. I remembered that Dr. Caliban was Editor at that moment of the Sunday Herald. I remembered that I was his right hand, and that without me the enormous labour he weekly undertook could never have been accomplished without trespassing upon the sanctity of the Sabbath. After a little hesitation, he pulled down his waistcoat, hitched his trousers at the knees, crossed his legs, made a half-turn towards me (for his study-chair was mounted upon a swivel), and said:
“It’s like this:— ...”
I assured him that I would do what he wished, for I knew, whenever he spoke in this tone, that there was something to be done for England.
“It’s like this,” he went on, “I have found a man here who should count, who should tell. It is a fearful thought that such a mind can have remained so long hidden. Here is a man with something in him quite peculiar and apart—and he is unknown! It is England through and through, and the best of England; it is more than that. Even where I disagree with him, I find something like a living voice. He gets right at one, as it were ... yet I never heard his name!”
Here Mr. Caliban, having stopped for a moment, as though seeking something in his memory, declaimed in a rich monotone:
“Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”
There was a little silence. Then he said abruptly:
“Do you know Wordsworth’s definition of a poet? Take it down. I should like you to use it.”
I pulled out my note-book and wrote in shorthand from his dictation a sublime phrase, which was new to me: “A Poet is a MAN speaking to MEN.”
“This man,” said Dr. Caliban simply, “is a man speaking to men.”
He put the book into my hands; two or three of the leaves were turned down, and on each page so marked was a passage scored in pencil. The lines would have arrested my eye even, had a greater mind than my own not selected them.
“A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.”
“Tied wrist to bar for their red iniquitee.”
“To do butcher work” (he is speaking of war) “yer don’t want genlemen, ’cept to lead.”
“I got the gun-barrels red-hot and fetched the whipcord out of the cupboard, while the other man held the screaming, writhing thing down upon the floor.”
“Under whose (speaking of God) awful hand we hold dominion over palm and pine.”
I have no space to quote a longer passage of verse, evidently intended to be sung to a banjo, and describing the emotions of the author in a fit of delirium tremens when he suffered from the hallucination that a red-hot brass monkey was himself attempting song. The poet showed no jealousy of the animal. There was the full, hearty Anglo-Saxon friendship for a comrade and even for a rival, and I met the same tone again on a further page in the line:
“You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.”
I looked up at Mr. Caliban and said:
“Well?”:—for these short phrases are often the most emphatic.
“Well,” said Dr. Caliban, “that man must not be allowed to go under. He must be made, and we must make him.”
I said that such a man could not fail to pierce through and conquer. He seemed the very salt and marrow of all that has made us great.
Dr. Caliban laid his hand in a fatherly way upon my shoulder and said:
“You are still young; you do not know how long fame may take to find a man, if the way is not pointed out to her; and if she takes too long, sometimes he dies of a broken heart.”
It was a noble thought in one who had known Fame almost from the very day when, as a lad of 22 years old, he had stood up in the chapel at Barking Level and answered the preacher with the words, “Lord, here am I.”
Dr. Caliban continued in a few simple words to convince me that my foolish pride alone stood between this young genius and the fame he deserved. He pointed out what a weight would lie upon my mind were that poet some day to become famous, and to be able to say when I presented myself at his receptions:
“Get ye hence: I know ye not!”
He added the awful words that death might find us at any moment, and that then we should have to answer, not for our reasons or our motives, but for the things we have done, and for the things we have left undone. He added that he would regard a visit to this new writer as overtime work, and that he was ready to pay my expenses, including cab fares to and from the station. He ended with an appeal which would have convinced one less ready to yield: a magnificent picture of the Empire and of the Voice for which it had waited so long.
It seems unworthy, after the relation of this intimate domestic scene, to add any words of exhortation to the reader and student.
I will not pretend that the interview is a form of true literature. If I have been guilty of too great a confidence, my excess has proceeded from an earnest desire to watch over others of my kind, and to warn them lest by one chance refusal they should destroy the opportunities of a lifetime.
To interview another, even a rival, is sometimes necessary at the outset of a career. It is an experience that need not be repeated. It is one that no earnest student of human nature will regret.
The powerful emotions aroused by the reminiscence of Dr. Caliban’s eloquence, and of the meeting to which it led, must not be desecrated by too lengthy an insistence upon the mere technique of a subsidiary branch of modern letters. I will state very briefly my conclusions as to what is indispensable in the regulation of this kind of literature.
It is, in the first place, of some moment that the young interviewer should take his hat and gloves with him in his left hand into the room. If he carries an umbrella or cane, this also should be carried in the same hand, leaving the right hand completely free. Its readiness for every purpose is the mark of a gentleman, and the maintenance of that rank is absolutely necessary to the sans gêne which should accompany a true interview.
In the second place, let him, the moment he appears, explain briefly the object of his visit. Without any such introduction as “The fact is ...” “It is very odd, but ...”, let him say plainly and simply, like an Englishman, “I have been sent to interview you on the part of such and such a paper.”
He will then be handed (in the majority of cases) a short type-written statement, which he will take into his right hand, pass into his left, in among the gloves, stick, hat, &c., and will bow, not from the shoulders, nor from the hips, but subtly from the central vertebrae.
In the third place he will go out of the room.
There are two exceptions to this general procedure. The first is with men quite unknown; the second with men of high birth or great wealth.
In the first case, the hat and gloves should be laid upon a table and the stick leaning against it in such a way as not to fall down awkwardly in the middle of a conversation. The student will then begin to talk in a genial manner loudly, and will continue for about half-an-hour; he will end by looking at his watch, and will go away and write down what he feels inclined.
In the second case, he will do exactly the same, but with a different result, for in the first case he will very probably become the friend of the person interviewed, which would have happened anyhow, and in the second case he will be forbidden the house, a result equally inevitable.
I cannot conclude these remarks without exhorting the young writer most earnestly, when he is entering upon the first of these distressing experiences, to place a firm trust in Divine Providence, and to remember that, come what may, he has done his duty.
If he should have any further hesitation as to the general manner in which an interview should be written, he has but to read what follows. It constitutes the interview which I held with that young genius whom Mr. Caliban persuaded me to visit, and of whose fame I shall therefore always feel myself a part.
INTERVIEW
WITH HIM.
(Written specially for the Sunday Englishman, by the Rev. James Caliban, D.D.)[8]
“By the peace among the peoples, men shall know ye serve the Lord.”—Deuteronomy xvi. 7.
... Leaping into a well-appointed cab, I was soon whirled to a terminus which shall be nameless, not a hundred miles from Brandon Street, and had the good luck to swing myself into the guard’s van just as the train was steaming out from the platform. I plunged at once in medias res, and some two hours later alit in the sunny and growing residential town of Worthing. I hailed a vehicle which plied for hire, and begged the driver to conduct me to 29, Darbhai Road, “if indeed,” to quote my own words to the Jehu, “if indeed it be worth a drive. I understand it is close upon a mile.”
“Yes, sir,” replied the honest fellow, “You will find, sir, that it is quite a mile, sir. Indeed, sir, we call it a little over a mile, sir.”
I was soon whirled, as fast as the type of carriage permitted, to Laburnum Lodge, Darbhai Road, where a neat-handed Phyllis smilingly opened the door for me, and took my card up to her master, bidding me be seated awhile in the hall. I had the leisure to notice that it was lit by two stained glass panels above the entrance, representing Alfred the Great and Queen Victoria. In a few minutes the servant returned with the message that her master would be down in a moment, and begged me to enter his parlour until he could attend me, as he was just then in his study, looking out of window at a cricket match in an adjoining field.
I found myself in a richly-furnished room, surrounded by curious relics of travel, and I was delighted to notice the little characteristic touches that marked the personal tastes of my host. Several skulls adorned the walls, and I observed that any natural emotion they might cause was heightened by a few tasteful lines such as actors paint upon their faces. Thus one appeared to grin beyond the ordinary, another was fitted with false eyes, and all had that peculiar subtle expression upon which genius loves to repose in its moments of leisure. I had barely time to mark a few more notable matters in my surroundings, when I was aware that I was in the presence of my host.
“No,” or “Yes,” said the great man, smiling through his spectacles and puffing a cloud of smoke towards me in a genial fashion, “I do not in the least mind telling you how it is done. I do not think,” he added drily, “that any other fellows will pull quite the same chock-a-block haul, even if I do give them the fall of the halyard. You must excuse these technical terms; I make it a point to speak as I write—I think it is more natural.”
I said I should be delighted to excuse him.
“I hope you will also excuse,” he continued, “my throwing myself into my favourite attitude.”
I said that, on the contrary, I had long wished to see it.
With a sigh of relief he thrust those creative hands of his into his trouser pockets, slightly stooped his shoulders, and appeared to my delight exactly as he does in the photograph he handed me for publication.
“To show you how it is done, I cannot begin better than by a little example,” he said.
He went to a neighbouring table, rummaged about in a pile of the Outlook and Vanity Fair, and produced a scrap of paper upon which there was a type-written poem. His hands trembled with pleasure, but he controlled himself well (for he is a strong, silent kind of man), and continued:—
“I will not weary you with the whole of this Work. I am sure you must already be familiar with it. In the Volunteer camp where I was recently staying, and where I slept under canvas like anybody else, the officers knew it by heart, and used to sing it to a tune of my own composition (for you must know that I write these little things to airs of my own). I will only read you the last verse, which, as is usual in my lyrics, contains the pith of the whole matter.”
Then in a deep voice he intoned the following, with a slightly nasal accent which lent it a peculiarly individual flavour:—
“I’m sorry for Mister Naboth;
I’m sorry to make him squeak;
But the Lawd above me made me strawng
In order to pummel the weak.”
“That chorus, which applies to one of the most important problems of the Empire, contains nearly all the points that illustrate ‘How it is Done.’ In the first place, note the conception of the Law. It has been my effort to imprint this idea of the Law upon the mind of the English-speaking world—a phrase, by the way, far preferable to that of Anglo-Saxon, which I take this opportunity of publicly repudiating. You may, perhaps, have noticed that my idea of the Law is the strongest thing in modern England. ‘Do this because I tell you, or it will be the worse for you,’ is all we know, and all we need to know. For so, it seems to me, Heaven” (here he reverently raised the plain billy-cock hat which he is in the habit of wearing in his drawing-room) “governs the world, and we who are Heaven’s lieutenants can only follow upon the same lines. I will not insist upon the extent to which the religious training I enjoyed in early youth helped to cast me in that great mould. You have probably noticed its effect in all my work.”
I said I had.
“Well, then, first and foremost, I have in this typical instance brought out my philosophy of the Law. In my private conversation I call this ‘following the gleam.’”
“Now for the adventitious methods by which I enhance the value of my work. Consider the lilt. ‘Lilt’ is the ‘Túm ti ti túm ti túm’ effect which you may have felt in my best verse.”
I assured him I had indeed felt it.
“Lilt,” he continued, “is the hardest thing of all to acquire. Thousands attempt it, and hundreds fail. I have it (though I say it who should not) to perfection. It is the quality you will discover in the old ballads, but there it is often marred by curious accidents which I can never properly explain. Their metre is often very irregular, and I fancy that their style (which my Work closely resembles) has suffered by continual copying. No: where you get the true ‘Lilt’ is in the music halls—I am sorry it is so often wasted upon impertinent themes. Do you know ‘It is all very fine and large,’ or ‘At my time of life,’ or again, ‘Now we shan’t be long’?”
I answered I had them all three by heart.
“I shouldn’t say they were worth that,” he answered, as a shade of disappointment appeared upon his delicate, mobile features, “but there is a place where you get it to perfection, and that is Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome. They are my favourite reading. But that is another story.”
“To turn to quite a different point, the Vernacular. It isn’t everything that will go down in ordinary English. Of course I do use ordinary English—at least, Bible English, in my best work. For instance, there is a little thing called ‘In the Confessional,’ which I propose to read to you later, and which has no slang nor swear-words from beginning to end.”
“But, of course, that is quite an exception. Most things won’t stand anything but dialect, and I just give you this tip gratis. You can make anything individual and strong by odd spelling. It arrests the attention, and you haven’t got to pick your words. Did you ever read a beautiful work called Colorado Bill; or, From Cowboy to President? Well, I can assure you that when it was in English, before being turned into dialect, it was quite ordinary-like.”
“But that ain’t all. One has now and then to strike a deeper note, and striking a deeper note is so simple, that I wonder it has not occurred to others of our poets. You have got to imagine yourself in a church, and you must read over your manuscript to yourself in that kind of hollow voice—you know what I mean.”
I swore that I did.
“Now, you see why one puts ‘ye’ for ‘you,’ and ‘ye be’ for ‘you are,’ and mentions the Law in so many words. It is not very difficult to do, and when one does succeed, one gets what I call A1 copper-bottomed poetry.”
He went to a corner of the room, opened a large, scented, velvet-bound book upon a brass reading-desk, looked at me severely, coughed twice, and began as follows:
“I am about to read you ‘In the Confessional.’ The greatest critic of the century has called this the greatest poem of the century. I begin at the third verse, and the seventeenth line:—
“Lest he forget the great ally
In heaven yclept hypocrisy,
So help me Bawb! I’ll mark him yet—
Lest he forget! Lest he forget!”
He closed the book with becoming reverence.
And there was a silence, during which the grand words went on running in my head as their author had meant them to do. “Lest he forget! Lest he forget!” Ah, may heaven preserve its darling poet, and never let him fall from the height of that great message.
“Well,” said he, genially, anticipating my applause, “Good-bye. But before you go please let me beg you to tell the public that I lately wrote something for the Times a great deal better than anything else I have ever written. Nobody seems to read the Times,” he continued, in a tone of slight petulance, “and I have not seen it quoted anywhere. I wonder if it is properly known? Please tell people that that little note about ‘copyright’ is only for fun. Anyone may use it who likes—I had a paragraph put in the papers to say so. It’s like this—” He then added a few conventional words of God-speed, and I left him. I have never seen him since.
And yet ... and yet....
The student will now pardon me, I trust, if I go somewhat more deeply into things than is customary in text books of this class. That little conquest over pride, that little task honestly performed, earned me something I shall value for ever, something that will be handed down in our family “even unto the third and the fourth generation” (Habb. vii. 13). It is something that means far, far more to me than a mere acquaintance with an author could possibly have done. For who can gauge so volatile a thing as friendship? Who could with certitude have pointed me out and said, “There goes His friend”? The Written Thing remained.
In my room, nay, just above me as I write, hangs framed the following note in pencil.
“Awfully glad to see the stuff in the ‘Herald,’ but say—are you old Caliban? That was rather stiff on a jack high? Wasn’t it? Never mind. You didn’t ask me for my auto, but I send it herewith right along, for I like you.”
There is the Man Alone as He IS—.... It seems of small moment, but there is something more. Framed in dark oak and gold very sumptuously, and hanging quite apart, is the little shred of paper which He enclosed. Shall I whisper what is written upon it?...?... The first few jotted notes of the glorious song which rang through the Empire like a bugle-call, and hurled it at Nicaragua.
Mem.—Can a preposition begin with a capital?
Hark and attend my Chosen: Ye have heard me
ye people
Out of the East,
with an introduction?
Mem.—Alternative, “with a bag and a blanket.”
I came and the nations trembled: I bore the Mark
with a ■■■■■■■■■■■■
■■■■■■■
glory about me?
of the Beast,
Good!
And I made ye a hundred books—yea! even an hundred and one
Of all the labours of men that labour under the sun,
Second “yea”? Uncle says “delete.”
And I clad me about with Terrors: Yea! I covered my paths with dread,
And the women-folk were astonished at the horrible things I said.
And the men of the Island Race were some of them woundily bored,
But the greater part of them paid me well: and I praised the Lord.
And when—as the spirit was full—I sniggered and lapped and swore
Dick says “Days of Yore” is commonplace. Tore? Gore? Lore? More? provisional: see Emily also about it.
As ever did men before me, men of the days of yore
(?)
When-as the spirit was full—But when it was rare and low
I copied the Psalms at random; and lo! it was even so!
■■■■■■■
(Fill in here: ask ■■■■■■■)
Publisher
Uncle says that repetition is Greek. Mem.—plagiarism?
Then up and arose the Daughter-Nations: Up and arose
Fearless men reciting me fearlessly through the nose,
Some of them Presbyterian, and some of them Jews, and some
Frivolous. Change.
Of the Latter-Day Church, King Solomon’s sect—which is awfully rum.
(Stuck.)
... the lot of it ... Anglo-Saxons ... shout it aloud
... at it again? ... back the crowd?
(Fill in. Mem.—must be consecutive)
Things are not as they were (commonplace)
(delete)
Things are not as they.... Things and the Change....
Things and ... things....
(Leave this to fill in)
And some of ye stand at a wicket, and they are the luckier men,
Whenas. Good. Mem.—use in “Horeb.”
But others field afar on a field, and ever and then,
When-as the over is over, they cross to the other side,
A weary thing to the flesh and a wounding thing to the pride.
He will have to go.
And Cabinet Ministers play at a game ye should all avoid,
It is played with youngling bats and a pellet of celluloid,
And a little net on a table, and is known as the named (better)
Ping and the Pong.
England, Daughter of Sion, why do you do this wrong?
And some, like witherless Frenchmen, circle around in rings,
England, Daughter of Sion, why do you do these things?
Why do you....
(Mem.—after Uncle to-morrow. Billy’s: refuse terms.)
These are the chance lines as they came—the disjointed words—everything—just as He wrote them down.
Reader—or whatever you be—was that a small reward? Are you willing now to say that Interviewing has no wages of its own? Will you sneer at it as unfit to take its place in your art? Truly, “Better is he that humbleth himself than a pillar of brass, and a meek heart than many fastenings.”
PERSONAL PARS.