While I Remember

by Stephen McKenna

III

So much for the atmosphere which is imposed upon an author. If he be more man than peacock, flattery will bring him less gratification than embarrassment; and he may ask in modesty and wrath why he should be subjected to treatment from which others are exempt. The barrister is not forced to expound the principles of pleading to a hushed dinner-table; no one collects a party to meet the chairman of an insurance-company. The answer, presumably, would be that, while there is a legal London and a financial London, no one has yet created a literary London and all are entitled to try.

The initial procedure is commonly the same. Dotted over a wide expanse between Chelsea and St. John's Wood are scores of houses in which one determined woman has, in the first instance, caught and tamed a single author: he is as much a member of the family as the butler; and his employer would be justly incensed if any one tried to tempt him away with an offer of better wages. At first he is a prize in himself, and in his honour parties are given until his owner has established her reputation as a patron of literature; later he is a decoy for other prizes; and B., who might not come of his own accord, is invited to meet A. Here the artistic ambition is reinforced by the social: the Duchess of Stilton, who has hitherto ignored Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns, is lured by the bait of Mr. Cimabue Brown and Mr. Postlethwaite; and the churl who tosses all invitations unread into his waste-paper-basket may quite possibly do for the Duchess of Stilton what he has always refused to do for Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns. Noblesse oblige has been freely rendered: "One must be obliging to duchesses." From this point the game develops automatically; and the triumphant hostess realises her ambition as the acknowledged ruler of one or other postal district of London. If any one would meet this Bloomsbury impressionist or that Hampstead sculptor, he must meet him in her house; she has proclaimed her reservation, and henceforth, so long as she can maintain herself, Westminster or Pimlico, Chelsea or Golders Green, with all that they contain, are hers. Ceasing to court others, she is herself courted.

Whether she is repaid in the result for her necessary first humiliations she alone can decide. Her pretensions are ridiculed by those who accept her hospitality; she is too busy adding to her acquaintances to spare time for making friends; and amid all the insincerity of her life the one thing brutally sincere is the ingratitude of those who treat her house as a free menagerie. So it has been since the days of Du Maurier; but, in spite of satire and ridicule, her breed continues. Perhaps her only alternative is to look after a husband and children; perhaps she is consoled by the magnitude of her achievement in founding a salon on the strength of a resident poet; perhaps she is unconscious of the figure which she cuts. Literary snobbishness is no more attractive than any other kind; and it is to be hoped that she sins of ignorance rather than of malice.

If, no longer hoping, some continue to wish that her breed were less hardy, that is because all efforts to create a literary London inspire misgivings for the free development of literature. It is an author's own fault if he submits to being petted by otherwise sensible men and women who will lavish on novelists, actors, musicians and artists a flattery of which they cannot spare one thousandth part for scientists, philosophers, humanitarians and the great industrial rulers;[53] it is a fault for which he shares responsibility with his maker if he allows his head to be turned by it.

The danger to author and reader from any organised or even stimulated literary discussion is one which he cannot control; and, realising that there is, indisputably, a "musical London" and that its existence has sent musical snobbishness to a premium and the freedom of musical development to a discount, he fears the same fate for literature. It is the common vice of the salon, of the critical syndicate (if such exist) and of any unofficial "academy" that they tend equally to pass premature judgements and to force uniformity upon the hangers-on. They hustle their heroes into the Pantheon or the pauper-grave before life is out of their bodies. Prizes are now awarded for the best imaginative work of the year. The critics are already trying to decide which of the younger men and women are qualified to succeed H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett. Macaulay himself could not have displayed a wilder passion for class-lists and labels.

Side by side with the thoughtful articles which undertake to spot literary winners are articles no more thoughtful but perhaps playfully philosophical in which to-day's tipsters expose the folly of their predecessors. Who now reads Mrs. Humphry Ward? Yet it is less than forty years since Robert Elsmere marked her out as the successor to George Eliot. Who now reads George Eliot? "Herbert Spencer," recalls Mr. Edmund Gosse, "... expressed a strong objection to the purchase of fiction, and wished that for the London library no novels should be bought 'except, of course, those of George Eliot.' While she lived, critics compared her with Goethe, but to the disadvantage of the sage of Weimar.... For Lord Acton at her death 'the sun had gone out'; and that exceedingly dogmatic historian observed, ex cathedra, that no writer had 'ever lived who had anything like her power of manifold but disinterested and impartial sympathy. If Sophocles or Cervantes had lived in the light of our culture, if Dante had prospered like Manzoni, George Eliot might have had a rival.' It is very dangerous," adds Mr. Gosse judiciously, "to write like that...."

In fifty years' time will any one read Herbert Spencer? Or Lord Acton?[54] It was stated at the time of George Meredith's death that his executors refused for him the honour of burial in Westminster Abbey because one of them believed that in a hundred years' time he would be unread; his admirers are even now divided over the question whether he was a great novelist who wrote less great poetry or a great poet who wrote less great novels. The same fate lies ahead of Thomas Hardy. Battle has already been joined over the body of Henry James: to one school he is the great analytical psychologist who revolutionised novel-writing, the perfect artist, the subtile craftsman with the inimitably personal style; to another he is the pretentious, untidy amateur, the man who never learned to select or to compress, the pompous pet of a Chelsea group, the windy impostor with thumbs for fingers who partially buried under involution his lack of style and his ignorance of punctuation. One school swears by "the novels of the middle period"; another harks back to Roderick Hudson; a third prays The Turn of the Screw in aid and proclaims him less a novelist than a master of the short story; one of the three most highly esteemed living English novelists likens him to an elephant trying to pick up peas with its trunk; and he was decorated with the Order of Merit.

What hardly any one will do is to suspend judgement; and the first business of literary society is to ensure that judgement shall not be suspended. Not only has a label to be fixed, but the humblest amateur feels obliged to say whether it was rightly fixed: praise and proscription are bandied among those who have hardly learned to read and those who have never been trained to think. When the Henry James cult became fashionable, he received equally rapt devotion from those who disliked him, from those who did not understand him and from those who had not read him. James was elevated into a literary standard; he collected a following of disciples; those who flattered him by imitation were flattered in turn by his frank approval. The bellow of the herd drowned the voice of the individual. In all the calendar of critical crime there is no more soul-destroying dishonesty than a second-hand opinion.