II
If there is no literary London, most men of letters must have encountered a widespread belief that there should be, even that there is. The appropriate atmosphere is sedulously cultivated; undaunted explorers divide the map into private reservations.
Left to themselves and in the absence of a general meeting-place, authors—who are at heart quite normally human, liking and disliking what other men like and dislike—assemble in ordinary clubs and ordinary houses. In the first they are still liable to be from time to time disturbed by an epidemic delusion that they are conversationalists of unusual power and charm: more than one club has suffered from the belief that, because A and B are authors, they must be conversationalists and that, because they are conversationalists, the club must be exceptionally well worth joining; when the premises are sound, more than one club has been ruined by the reputation of its conversationalists; the performers become occasionally despotic and tiresome; and, as in the long run even club bores die, their death leaves among their mute audiences no one to succeed them.
Despite this recurrent danger, certain clubs stand apart from the rest in the love which they inspire among authors. For them the Athenæum ranks first, with its long list of members who have achieved distinction in literature; and the privilege of membership carries with it, by implication, the honour of having been weighed and found worthy of admission to a society which is without rival, among the clubs of the world, for the volume and variety of its learning. To the Reform Club and to its literary roll from Thackeray to Wells reference has already been made; the Garrick can on occasion mobilise an even braver army of authors; and the Savile list is not to be ignored. To men of more Bohemian intention, the Savage has long made a catholic appeal; and the Beefsteak, with its genius for securing a little of the best of everything, has not disdained the man of letters. The clubs in which a veneration for Dickens or Thackeray, Johnson or Omar Khayyám furnishes a pretext to the members for dining together are too numerous to be set out, but no club or group of clubs can constitute anything that may be called literary London; and, though each may foster friendships which might otherwise have been retarded, it remains true for normal men that the largest number of the pleasantest meetings takes place in private houses where the author is invited as a friend instead of being summoned as a purveyor of "literary" atmosphere. There is no law against mental vivisection; but authors might welcome one.
It is not necessary to seek a more recondite explanation than that they are wonderfully like the rest of their fellow-creatures and should be treated no differently. They eat and sleep, they marry and beget children, they entertain and are entertained, they serve on juries and pay income-tax, for all the world as though they were bill-brokers and average-adjusters; if they know their own subject as well as a staff-officer and a cotton-spinner know theirs, it takes little longer to discern their limitations. "All mad—but wonderfully decent" was the verdict passed by Master Stubbs, the budding banker, on M. and Mde. Berthelini in Providence and a Guitar; but the modern imaginative artist is almost distressingly sane and practical; of the leading English novelists several began as schoolmasters, one or two as barristers, one as a solicitor's clerk, another as a merchant-seaman. It is hard to believe that they enjoy being treated as a class apart. A few, indeed, may wear eccentric clothes, for reasons of health, comfort or eccentricity, but then so do a few cabinet ministers, peers of the realm, civil servants and masters of hounds; a few have pronounced mannerisms, but then so have certain bishops, bankers and family-solicitors. A sparse handful may segregate themselves in an artistic secret society, but this same boyish trait can be found in religion, politics and finance. When the conscientiously eccentric have been eliminated, such authors as are to be found in London incline to the same collective average as any other class: there are bores and prigs, rich and poor, puffed-up and humble, dandies and scarecrows, courtiers and hobbledehoys, fanatics and men of the world; and it is only when a man differentiates his species by frank advertisement or by less frank posturing about his art that the rest of humanity has to be careful.
Of convincing any one but an author that this contention is true no hope need be entertained: the glamour and mystery of art are as indestructible as the appeal of the stage. An atmosphere is cultivated for the artist and imposed upon him. "With Rothenstein," says Max Beerbohm in his tender study of Enoch Soames, "I paid my first visit to the Bodley Head. By him I was inducted into another haunt of intellect and daring, the domino room of the Café Royal.
"There, on that October evening—there, in that exuberant vista of gilding and crimson velvet set amidst all those opposing mirrors and upholding caryatids, with fumes of tobacco ever rising to the painted and pagan ceiling, and with the hum of presumably cynical conversation broken into so sharply now and again by the clatter of dominoes shuffled on marble tables, I drew a deep breath, and 'This indeed,' said I to myself, 'is life!'
"It was the hour before dinner. We drank vermouth. Those who knew Rothenstein were pointing him out to those who knew him only by name. Men were constantly coming in through the swing-doors and wandering slowly up and down in search of vacant tables, or of tables occupied by friends. One of these rovers interested me because I was sure he wanted to catch Rothenstein's eye. He had twice passed our table, with a hesitating look; but Rothenstein, in the thick of a disquisition on Puvis de Chavannes, had not seen him. He was a stooping, shambling person, rather tall, very pale, with longish and brownish hair. He had a thin vague beard—or rather, he had a chin on which a large number of hairs weakly curled and clustered to cover its retreat. He was an odd-looking person; but in the 'nineties odd apparitions were more frequent, I think, than they are now. The young writers of that era—and I was sure this man was a writer—strove earnestly to be distinct in aspect. This man had striven unsuccessfully. He wore a soft black hat of clerical kind but of Bohemian intention, and a grey waterproof cape which, perhaps because it was waterproof, failed to be romantic. I decided that 'dim' was the mot juste for him. I had already essayed to write, and was immensely keen on the mot juste, that Holy Grail of the period...."
Max Beerbohm was writing of 1893; and, though it is presumption to criticise this sketch of the domino room, he has not explicitly described one aspect of the Café Royal which was observable in that year, which is observable still and which, no doubt, will endure as long as the building itself. Though the cape, perhaps because it was waterproof, failed to be romantic, it enclosed a spirit hungry for romance; the Café Royal is still full of souls no less hungry, though it has never yet succeeded in being romantic. Odd apparitions are frequent enough; some writers of this era try to be distinct in aspect; they have not outgrown their keenness for the mot juste; and all their spirit's striving is of Bohemian intention. In the hour before dinner vermouth is still drunk; there is still a hum of presumably cynical conversation.
The Café Royal, indeed, changes but little because it satisfies an unchanging need: a literary conception of Bohemian life has created a demand for its embodiment in a "haunt of intellect and daring," tentatively Parisian if a little self-conscious, very fearless if never quite at ease. Year after year, wide-eyed new generations say to themselves, "This indeed is life." The Café Royal is more than a literary institution, it is a social safety-valve: romance, after its little seething, disappears in steam; an hour's cynical conversation, a glass or two of vermouth, a display of the distinctive aspect enable many a young man to return home healed in spirit to tidy himself and to reappear next morning as a sober, laborious and punctual British subject.
If chance or design closed this safety-valve, the pent passion for romance would be driven inwards until it exploded in the very heart of domesticity. Intellectual adolescence must play at Bohemianism as youth plays at soldiers; it is better to restrict the game to one lawful area than to allow it to rage unconfined, for the English home is not adapted to absinthe-drinking, and a general repudiation of morality shocks without elevating. Under the unsettling influence of war, which closed the Café Royal at night before the taste for literary romance had been satisfied, there was a severe outbreak of studio-parties at which every one shewed himself conscientiously unrestrained and fearless; poets and painters discussed the aims and methods of their art; strange food and drink appeared disconcertingly; conversation was carried on in shouts; there was more colour than line in the dresses; every one sat on the floor until the host gave the signal for dancing; only Virginian cigarettes were smoked; and, at the end, it was never possible to find a taxi. It is to be hoped that the artists worked the better for this breezy liberation of soul; it is to be wished that they had done more and talked less of what they were going to do; but it is to be realised that they were unwitting and perhaps unwilling victims of a conspiracy to make London literary.
This craving finds its frankest expression in the meetings of certain more formal literary seminars. Here, though the dresses, the intellectual freedom and the insufficiency of chairs are the same, there is strict procedure: the guest of the evening is received with deference and heard with attention; there follows a grave debate in which conventional compliments usher in a set speech of destructive criticism; after a vote of thanks, the address is once more examined in the candid atmosphere of lemonade and sandwiches, and the guest is asked whether he really meant all that he said. Rash is the man who trifles with such earnest desire for improvement: he might well find himself not invited a second time.