SERVANTS
By MAX BEERBOHM
IT is unseemly that a man should let any ancestors of his rise from their graves to wait on his guests at table. The Chinese are a polite race, and those of them who have visited England, and gone to dine in great English houses, will not have made this remark aloud to their hosts. I believe it is only their own ancestors that they worship; so that they will not have felt themselves guilty of impiety in not rising from the table and rushing out into the night. Nevertheless, they must have been shocked.
The French Revolution, judged according to the hope it was made in, must be pronounced a failure: it effected no fundamental change in human nature. But it was by no means wholly ineffectual. For example, ladies and gentlemen ceased to powder their hair, because of it; and gentlemen adopted simpler costumes. This was so in England as well as in France. But in England ladies and gentlemen were not so nimble-witted as to be able to conceive the possibility of a world without powder. Powder had been sent down from heaven, and must not vanish from the face of the earth. Said Sir John to his Lady, "'Tis a matter easy to settle. Your maid Deborah and the rest of the wenches shall powder their hair henceforth." Whereat his Lady exclaimed in wrath, "Lud, Sir John! Have you taken leave of your senses? A parcel of Abigails flaunting about the house in powder—oh, preposterous!" Whereat Sir John exclaimed "Zounds!" and hotly demonstrated that since his wife had given up powder there could be no harm in its assumption by her maids. Whereat his Lady screamed and had the vapours and asked how he would like to see his own footmen flaunting about the house in powder. Whereat he (always a reasonable man, despite his hasty temper) went out and told his footmen to wear powder henceforth. And in this they obeyed him. And there arose a Lord of the Treasury, saying, "Let Powder be taxed." And it was so, and the tax was paid, and powder was still worn. And there came the great Reform Bill, and the Steam Engine, and all manner of queer things, but powder did not end, for custom hath many lives. Nor was there an end to those things which the Nobility and the Gentry had long since shed from their own persons—as, laced coats and velvet breeches and silk hose; forasmuch as without these powder could not aptly be. And it came to pass that there was a great War. And there was also a Russian Revolution, greater than the French one. And it may be that everything will be changed, fundamentally and soon. Or it may be merely that Sir John will say to his Lady, "My dear, I have decided that the footmen shall not wear powder, and not wear livery, any more," and that his Lady will say "Oh, all right." Then at length will the Eighteenth Century vanish altogether from the face of the earth.
Some of the shallower historians would have us believe that powder is deleterious to the race of footmen. They point out how plenteously footmen abounded before 1790, and how steadily their numbers have declined ever since. I do not dispute the statistics. One knows from the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers that Mr. Horne Tooke, dining tête-à-tête with the first Lord Lansdowne, had counted so many as thirty footmen in attendance on the meal. That was a high figure—higher than in Rogers' day, and higher far, I doubt not, than in ours. What I refuse to believe is that the wearing of powder has caused among footmen an ever-increasing mortality. Powder was forced on them by their employers because of the French Revolution, but their subsequent fewness is traceable rather to certain ideas forced by that Revolution on their employers. The Nobility had begun to feel that it had better be just a little less noble than heretofore. When the news of the fall of the Bastille was brought to him, the first Lord Lansdowne (I conceive) remained for many hours in his Study, lost in thought, and at length, rising from his chair, went out into the hall and discharged two footmen. This action may have shortened his life, but I believe it to be a fact that when he lay dying, some fifteen years later, he said to his heir, "Discharge two more." Such enlightenment and adaptability were not to be wondered at in so eminent a Whig. As time went on, even in the great Tory houses the number of retainers was gradually cut down. Came the Industrial Age, hailed by all publicists as the Millennium. Looms were now tended, and blast-furnaces stoked, by middle-aged men who in their youth had done nothing but hand salvers, and by young men who might have been doing just that if the Bastille had been less brittle. Noblemen, becoming less and less sure of themselves under the impact of successive Reform Bills, wished to be waited on by less and less numerous gatherings of footmen. And at length, in the course of the great War, any Nobleman not young enough to be away fighting was waited on by an old butler and a parlourmaid or two; and the ceiling did not fall.
Even if the War shall have taught us nothing else, this it will have taught us almost from its very outset: to mistrust all prophets, whether of good or evil. Pray stone me if I predict anything at all. It may be that the War, and that remarkable by-product, the Russian Revolution, and the whole spirit of the age, have so worked on the minds of Noblemen that they will prefer to have not one footman in their service. Or it may be that all those men who might be footmen will prefer to earn their livelihood in other ways of life. It may even be that no more parlourmaids and housemaids, even for very illustrious houses, will presently be forthcoming. I do not profess to foresee. Perhaps things will go on just as before. But remember: things were going on, even then. Suppose that in the social organism generally, and in the attitude of servants particularly, the decades after the War shall bring but a gradual evolution of what was previously afoot. Even on this mild supposition must it seem likely that some of us will live to look back on domestic service, or at least on what we now mean by that term, as a curiosity of past days.
You have to look rather far behind you for the time when "the servant question," as it is called, had not yet begun to arise. To find servants collectively "knowing their place," as the phrase (not is, but) was, you have to look right back to the dawn of Queen Victoria's reign. I am not sure whether even then those Georgian notice-boards still stood in the London parks to announce that "Ladies and Gentlemen are requested, and Servants are commanded" not to do this and that. But the spirit of those boards did still brood over the land: servants received commands, not requests, and were not "obliging" but obedient. As for the tasks set them, I daresay the footmen in the great houses had an easy time: they were there for ornament; but the (comparatively few) maids there, and the maid or two in every home of the rapidly-increasing middle-class, were very much for use, having to do an immense amount of work for a wage which would nowadays seem nominal. And they did it gladly, with no notion that they were giving much for little, or that the likes of them had any natural right to a glimpse of liberty or to a moment's more leisure than was needed to preserve their health for the benefit of their employers, or that they were not in duty bound to be truly thankful for having a roof over their devoted heads. Rare and reprehensible was the maid who, having found one roof, hankered after another. Improvident, too; for only by long and exclusive service could she hope that in her old age she would not be cast out on the parish. She might marry meanwhile? The chances were very much against that. That was an idea misbeseeming her station in life. By the rules of all households, "followers" were fended ruthlessly away. Her state was sheer slavery? Well, she was not technically a chattel. The Law allowed her to escape at any time, after giving a month's notice; and she did not work for no wages at all, remember. This was hard on her owners? Well, in ancient Rome and elsewhere, her employers would have had to pay a large-ish sum of money for her, down, to a merchant. Economically, her employers had no genuine grievance. Her parents had handed her over to them, at a tender age, for nothing. There she was; and if she was a good girl and gave satisfaction, and if she had no gipsy strain, to make her restless for the unknown, there she ended her days, not without honour from the second or third generation of her owners. As in ancient Rome and elsewhere, the system was, in the long run, conducive to much good feeling on either side. "Poor Anne remained very servile in soul all her days; and was altogether occupied, from the age of fifteen to seventy-two, in doing other people's wills, not her own." Thus wrote Ruskin, in Praeterita, of one who had been his nurse, and his father's. Perhaps the passage is somewhat marred by its first word. But Ruskin had queer views on many subjects. Besides, he was very old when, in 1885, he wrote Praeterita. Long before that date, moreover, others than he had begun to have queer views. The halcyon days were over.
Even in the 'sixties there were many dark and cumulous clouds. It was believed, however, that these would pass. Punch, our ever-quick interpreter, made light of them. Absurd that Jemima Jane should imitate the bonnets of her mistress and secretly aspire to play the piano! Punch and his artists, as you will find in his old volumes, were very merry about her, and no doubt his readers believed that his exquisite ridicule would kill, or his sound good sense cure, the malady in her soul. Poor misguided girl!—why was she flying in the face of Nature? Nature had decreed that some should command, others obey; that some should sit imperative all day in airy parlours, and others be executive in basements. I daresay that among the sitters aloft there were many whose indignation had a softer side to it. Under the Christian Emperors, Roman ladies were really very sorry for their slaves. It is unlikely that no English ladies were so in 'sixties. Pity, after all, is in itself a luxury. It is for the "some" a measure of the gulf between themselves and the "others." Those others had now begun to show signs of restiveness; but the gulf was as wide as ever.
Anthony Trollope was not, like Punch, a mere interpreter of what was upmost in the average English mind: he was a beautifully patient and subtle demonstrator of all that was therein. Reading him, I soon forget that I am reading about fictitious characters and careers; quite soon do I feel that I am collating intimate memoirs and diaries. For sheer conviction of truth, give me Trollope. You, too, if you know him, must often have uttered this appeal. Very well. Have you been given Orley Farm? And do you remember how Lady Mason felt after confessing to Sir Peregrine Orme that she had forged the will? "As she slowly made her way across the hall, she felt that all of evil, all of punishment, had now fallen upon her. There are periods in the lives of some of us—I trust but few—when with the silent inner voice of suffering"—and here, in justice to Trollope, I must interrupt him by saying that he seldom writes like this; and I must also, for a reason which will soon be plain, ask you not to skip a word—"we call on the mountains to fall and crush us, and on the earth to gape open and take us in—when with an agony of intensity, we wish our mothers had been barren. In these moments the poorest and most desolate are objects to us of envy, for their sufferings can be as nothing to our own. Lady Mason, as she crept silently across the hall, saw a servant girl pass down towards the entrance to the kitchen, and would have given all, all that she had in the world, to change places with that girl. But no change was possible to her. Neither would the mountains crush her, nor the earth take her in. This was her burden, and she must," etc., etc.
You enjoyed the wondrous bathos? Of course. And yet there wasn't any bathos at all, really. At least, there wasn't any in 1862, when Orley Farm was published. Servants really were "most desolate" in those days, and "their sufferings" were less acute only than those of gentlewomen who had forged wills. This is an exaggerated view? Well, it was the view held by gentlewomen at large, in the 'sixties. Trust Trollope.
Why to a modern gentlewoman would it seem so much more dreadful to be crushed by mountains and swallowed by earthquakes than to be a servant girl passing down towards the entrance to the kitchen? In other words, how is it that servants have so much less unpleasant a time than they were having half-a-century ago? I should like to think this amelioration came through our sense of justice, but I cannot claim that it did. Somehow, our sense of justice never turns in its sleep till long after the sense of injustice in others has been thoroughly aroused, nor is it ever up and doing till those others have begun to make themselves thoroughly disagreeable; and not even then will it be up and doing more than is urgently required of it by our convenience at the moment. For the improvement in their lot, servants must, I am afraid, be allowed to thank themselves rather than their employers. I am not going to trace the stages of that improvement. I will not try to decide in what year servants passed from wistfulness to resentment, or from resentment to exaction. This is not a sociological treatise, it is just an essay; and I claim an essayist's privilege of not groping through the library of the British Museum on the chance of mastering all the details. I confess that I did go there yesterday, thinking I should find in Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb's History of Trade Unionism the means of appearing to know much. But I drew blank. It would seem that servants have no trade union. This is strange. One would not have thought so much could be done without organisation. The mere Spirit of the Time, sneaking down the steps of areas, has worked wonders. There has been no servant's campaign, no strategy, nothing but an infinite series of spontaneous and sporadic little risings in isolated households. Wonders have been worked, yes. But servants are not yet satiated with triumph. More and more, on the contrary, do they glide—long before the War they had begun gliding—away into other forms of employment. Not merely are the changed conditions of domestic service not changed enough for them: they seem to despise the thing itself. It was all very well so long as they had not been taught to read and write, but—There, no doubt, is the root of the mischief. Had the governing classes not forced those accomplishments on them in 1872—But there is no use in repining. What's done can't be undone. On the other hand, what must be done can't be left undone. Housework, for example. What concessions by the governing classes, what bribes, will be big enough hereafter to get that done?
Perhaps the governing classes will do it for themselves, eventually, and their ceilings not fall. Or perhaps there will be no more governing classes—merely the State and its swarms of neat little overseers, male and female. I know not whether in this case the sum of human happiness will be greater, but it will certainly—it and the sum of human dullness—be more evenly distributed. I take it that under any scheme of industrial compulsion for the young a certain number of conscripts would be told off for domestic service. To every family in every flat (houses not legal) would be assigned one female member of the community. She would be twenty years old, having just finished her course of general education at a municipal college. Three years would be her term of industrial (sub-sect. domestic) service. Her diet, her costume, her hours of work and leisure, would be standardised, but the lenses of her pince-nez would be in strict accordance to her own eyesight. If her employers found her faulty in work or conduct, and proved to the visiting inspector that she was so, she would be penalised by an additional term of service. If she, on the other hand, made good any complaint against her employers, she would be transferred to another flat, and they be penalised by suspension of their licence to employ. There would always be chances of friction. But these chances would not be so numerous nor so great as they are under that lack of system which survives to-day.
Servants would be persons knowing that for a certain period certain tasks were imposed on them, tasks tantamount to those in which all their coevals were simultaneously engaged. To-day they are persons not knowing, as who should say, where they are, and wishing all the while they were elsewhere—and mostly, as I have said, going elsewhere. Those who remain grow more and more touchy, knowing themselves a mock to the rest; and their qualms, even more uncomfortably than their demands and defects, are always haunting their employers. It seems almost incredible that there was a time when Mrs. Smith said "Sarah, your master wishes——" or Mr. Smith said "Sarah, go up and ask your mistress whether——" I am well aware that the very title of this essay jars. I wish I could find another; but in writing one must be more explicit than one need be by word of mouth. I am well aware that the survival of domestic service in its old form depends more and more on our agreement not to mention it.
Assuredly, a most uncomfortable state of things. Is it, after all, worth saving?—a form so depleted of right human substance, an anomaly so ticklish. Consider, in your friend's house, the cheerful smile of yonder parlourmaid; hark to the housemaid's light brisk tread in the corridor; note well the slight droop of the footman's shoulders as he noiselessly draws near. Such things, as being traditional, may pander to your sense of the great past. Histrionically, too, they are good. But do you really like them? Do they not make your blood run a trifle cold? In the thick of the great past, you would have liked them well enough, no doubt. I myself am old enough to have known two or three servants of the old school—later editions of Ruskin's Anne. With them there was no discomfort, for they had no misgiving. They had never wished (heaven help them!) for more, and in the process of the long years had acquired, for inspiration of others, much—a fine mellowness, the peculiar sort of dignity, even of wisdom, that comes only of staying always in the same place, among the same people, doing the same things perpetually. Theirs was the sap that rises only from deep roots, and where they were you had always the sense of standing under great wide branches. One especially would I recall, who—no, personally I admire the plungingly intimate kind of essayist very much indeed, but I never was of that kind, and it's too late to begin to be so now. For a type of old-world servant I would recall rather some more public worthy, such as that stout old hostler whom, whenever you went up to stay in Hampstead, you would see standing planted outside that stout old hostelry, Jack Straw's Castle. He stands there no more, and the hostelry can never again be to me all that it was of solid comfort. Or perhaps, as he was so entirely an outside figure, I might rather say that Hampstead itself is not what it was. His robust but restful form, topped with that weather-beaten and chin-bearded face, was the hub of the summit of Hampstead. He was as indigenous as the pond there—that famous pond which in hot weather is so much waded through by cart-horses and is at all seasons so much barked around by excitable dogs and cruised on by toy boats. He was as essential as it and the flag-staff and the gorse and the view over the valley away to Highgate. It was always to Highgate that his big blue eyes were looking, and on Highgate that he seemed to be ruminating. Not that I think he wanted to go there. He was Hampstead-born and Hampstead-bred, and very loyal to that village. In the course of his life he had "bin down to London a matter o' three or four times," he would tell me, "an' slep' there once." He knew me to be a native of that city, and (for he was the most respectful of men) did not make any adverse criticism of it. But clearly it had not prepossessed him. Men and—horses rather than cities were what he knew. And his memory was more retentive of horses than of men. But he did—and this was a great thrill for me—did, after some pondering at my behest, remember to have seen in Heath Street, when he was a boy, "a gen'leman with summut long hair, settin' in a small cart, takin' a pictur'." To me Ford Madox Brown's "Work" is of all modern pictur's the most delightful in composition and strongest in conception, the most alive and the most worth-while; and I take great pride in having known some one who saw it in the making. But my friend himself set little store on anything that had befallen him in days before he was "took on as stable-lad at the Castle." His pride was in the Castle, wholly.
Part of his charm, like Hampstead's, was in the surprise one had at finding anything like it so near to London. Even now, if you go to districts near which no great towns are, you will find here and there an inn that has a devoted waiter, a house with a fond butler. As to butlers elsewhere, butlers in general, there is one thing about them that I do not at all understand. It seems to be against nature, yet it is a fact, that in the past forty years they have been growing younger; and slimmer. In my childhood they were old, without exception; and stout. At the close of the last century they had gradually relapsed into middle age, losing weight all the time. And in the years that followed they were passing back behind the prime of life, becoming willowy juveniles. In 1915, it is true, the work of the past decades was undone: butlers were suddenly as old and stout as ever they were, and so they still are. But this, I take it, was only a temporary set-back. Since peace came, butlers have reappeared as they were in 1915, and maybe will soon be losing height and weight too, till they shall have become bright-eyed children, with pattering feet. Or will their childhood be of a less gracious kind than that? I fear so. I have seen, from time to time, butlers who had shed all semblance of grace, butlers whose whole demeanour was a manifesto of contempt for their calling and of devotion to the Spirit of the Age. I have seen a butler in a well-established household strolling around the diners without the slightest droop, and pouring out wine in an off-hand and quite obviously hostile manner. I have seen him, towards the end of the meal, yawning. I remember another whom, positively, I heard humming—a faint sound indeed, but menacing as the roll of tumbrils.
These were exceptional cases, I grant. For the most part, the butlers observed by me have had a manner as correctly smooth and colourless as their very shirt-fronts. Aye, and in two or three of them, modern though they were in date and aspect, I could have sworn there was "a flame of old-world fealty all bright." Were these but the finer comedians? There was one (I will call him Brett) who had an almost dog-like way of watching his master. Was this but a calculated touch in a merely æsthetic whole? Brett was tall and slender, and his movements were those of a greyhound under perfect self-control. Baldness at the temples enhanced the solemnity of his thin smooth face. It is more than twenty years since first I saw him; and for a long period I saw him often, both in town and country. Against the background of either house he was impeccable. Many butlers might be that. Brett's supremacy was in the sense he gave one that he was, after all, human—that he had a heart, in which he had taken the liberty to reserve a corner for any true friend of his master and mistress. I remember well the first time he overstepped sheer formality in relation to myself. It was one morning in the country, when my entertainers and my fellow guests had gone out in pursuit of some sport at which I was no good. I was in the smoking room, reading a book. Suddenly—no, Brett never appeared anywhere suddenly. Brett appeared, paused at precisely the right speaking distance, and said in a low voice, "I thought it might interest you to know, sir, that there's a white-tailed magpie out on the lawn. Very rare, as you know, sir. If you look out of the window you will see the little fellow hopping about on the lawn." I thanked him effusively as I darted to the window, and simulated an intense interest in "the little fellow." I greatly overdid my part. Exit Brett, having done his to perfection.
What worries me is not that I showed so little self-command and so much insincerity, but the doubt whether Brett's flawless technique was the vehicle for an act of true good feeling or was used simply for the pleasure of using it. Similar doubts abide in all my special memories of him. There was an evening when he seemed to lose control over himself—but did he really lose it? There were only four people at dinner: my host, his wife, their nephew (a young man famous for drollery) and myself. Towards the end of dinner the conversation had turned on early marriages. "I," said the young man presently, "shall not marry till I am seventy. I shall then marry some charming girl of seventeen." His aunt threw up her hands, exclaiming, "Oh, Tom, what a perfectly horrible idea! Why, she isn't born yet!" "No," said the young man, "but I have my eye on her mother." At this, Brett, who was holding a light for his master's cigarette, turned away convulsively, with a sudden dip of the head, and vanished from the room. His breakdown touched and pleased all four beholders. But—was it a genuine lapse? Or merely a feint to thrill us?—the feint of an equilibrist so secure that he can pretend to lose his balance?
If I knew why Brett ceased to be butler in that household, I might be in less doubt as to the true inwardness of him. I knew only that he was gone. That was fully ten years ago. Since then I have had one glimpse of him. This was on a summer night in London. I had gone out late to visit some relatives and assure myself that they were safe and sound; for Zeppelins had just passed over London for the first time. Not so much horror as a very deep disgust was the atmosphere in the populous quiet streets and squares. One square was less quiet than others, because somebody was steadily whistling for a taxi. Anon I saw the whistler silhouetted in the light cast out on a wide doorstep from an open door, and I saw that he was Brett. His attitude, as he bent out into the dark night, was perfect in grace, but eloquent of a great tensity—even of agony. Behind him stood a lady in an elaborate evening cloak. Brett's back must have conveyed to her in every curve his surprise, his shame, that she should be kept waiting. His chivalry in her behalf was such as Burke's for Marie Antoinette—little had he dreamed that he should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and of cavaliers. He had thought ten thousand taxis must have leaped from their stands, etc. The whistle that at first sounded merely mechanical and ear-piercing had become heart-rending and human when I saw from whom it proceeded—a very heart-cry that still haunts me. But was it a heart-cry? Was Brett, is Brett, more than a mere virtuoso?
He is in any case what employers call a treasure, and to any one who wishes to go forth and hunt for him I will supply a chart showing the way to that doorstep on which last I saw him. But I myself, were I ever so able to pay his wages, should never covet him—no, nor anything like him. Perhaps we are not afraid of menservants if we looked out at them from the cradle. None was visible from mine. Only in later years and under external auspices did I come across any of them. And I am as afraid of them as ever. Maidservants frighten me less, but they also—except the two or three ancients aforesaid—have always struck some degree of terror to my soul. The whole notion of domestic service has never not seemed to me unnatural. I take no credit for enlightenment. Not to have the instinct to command implies a lack of the instinct to obey. The two aptitudes are but different facets of one jewel: the sense of order. When I became a schoolboy, I greatly disliked being a monitor's fag. Other fags there were who took pride in the quality of the toast they made for the breakfasts and suppers of their superiors. My own feeling was that I would rather eat it myself, and that if I mightn't eat it myself I would rather it were not very good. Similarly, when I grew to have fags of my own, and by morning and by evening one of them solemnly entered to me bearing a plate on which those three traditional pieces of toast were solemnly propped one against another, I cared not at all whether the toast were good or bad, having no relish for it at best, but could have eaten with gusto toast made by my own hand, not at all understanding why that member should be accounted too august for such employment. Even so in my later life. Loth to obey, loth to command. Convention (for she too frightens me) has made me accept what servants would do for me by rote. But I would liefer have it ill-done than ask even the least mettlesome of them to do it better, and far liefer, if they would only be off and not do it at all, do it for myself. In Italy—dear Italy, where I have lived much—servants do still regard service somewhat in the old way, as a sort of privilege; so that with Italian servants I am comparatively at my ease. But oh, the delight when on the afternoon of some local festa there is no servant at all in the little house! Oh, the reaction, the impulse to sing and dance, and the positive quick obedience to that impulse! Convention alone has forced me to be anywhere a master. Ariel and Caliban, had I been Prospero on that island, would have had nothing to do and nothing to complain of; and Man Friday on that other island would have bored me, had I been Crusoe. When I was a king in Babylon and you were a Christian slave, I promptly freed you.
Anarchistic? Yes; and I have no defence to offer, except the rather lame one that I am a Tory Anarchist. I should like every one to go about doing just as he pleased—short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed. Domestic service is not one of those things, and I should be glad were there no more of it.
W. N. P. BARBELLION[26]
[26] The Journal of a Disappointed Man. Enjoying Life and Other Essays. By W. N. P. Barbellion. Chatto & Windus. 6s. net each.
By EDWARD SHANKS
WHEN The Journal of a Disappointed Man was first published in March, 1919, the suspicious circumstances that it contained an introduction by Mr. H. G. Wells, and purported to be written by a young assistant in the Natural History Museum at South Kensington, immediately produced the impression that it was a fictitious work, composed by Mr. Wells himself. He was known at that time, from other books acknowledged to be his, to be feeling a particular interest in the philosophical problem of human suffering; he had done something of the kind before, and many readers, it may be conjectured, unconsciously found it a relief to suppose that this almost unbearably tragic history had been invented. But the impression could not long survive a careful study of the book. The author's identity was soon guessed at by a few persons who knew him and suspected by some who had heard of him; and presently Mr. Wells wrote to a newspaper to say that the only fictitious details in the Journal were the author's name and the date of his death, there given as December 31st, 1917. This date was in fact incorrect by nearly two years. Bruce Frederick Cummings lived until October 30th, 1919, that is to say for seven months after the publication of his diary.
Thus it comes about that the later part of it, which has not yet been printed, contains many references to his critics, in whose opinions he was deeply and frankly interested. He remarks again and again on the ordinary incompetence of reviewers, the usual complaint of an author, but especially poignant here. He mentions, once in a letter and once in the diary, an imbecile who thought that he was "a social climber"; and he welcomes with joy the first writer who seemed to him to have read the book carefully. But among all these references to his work there is none more illuminating than the last entry he ever made:
Friends and relatives say I have not drawn my true self. But that's because I've taken my clothes off and they can't recognise me stark! The Book is a self-portrait in the nude.
Thus, with this final self-explanation, he ends his work. The last two words stand alone at the top of a left-hand page, and opposite them in the book lies the blotting-paper he used. He had often before said farewell to his Journal. Once it was in a fit of disgust with it and himself, and he took it up again to record the discovery that he was suffering from an incurable disease. Once again, owing to the paralysis of his right hand, writing became too painful for him, and he thought this the hardest and shrewdest stroke of fate to deprive him of his secret consolation. Last, under the date May 25th, 1919, he made an entry of four pages, chiefly supplementing earlier entries, and concluded with the words, large and scrawled, but legible: "This is the end. I am not going to keep a diary any more." Then on June 1st, without explanation, he made a long entry, recalling an experience of early life, and on June 3rd the very last, which I have quoted. He desired that at the end should be written, "The rest is silence," for an inscription on the base of his "self-erected monument." Genuine self-portraits in the nude occur very rarely in the history of literature. This is a picture of a man of genius superbly drawn by himself. It is an astonishing book about an astonishing man.
Barbellion was born on September 7th, 1889, and was the third son of a reporter employed by a newspaper in a Devonshire town. He was able to remember the first time a bird's nest was ever shown to him; but a passion for natural history became very early the most important part of his life. He was articled as a boy to his father's unattractive and uncongenial profession. He nevertheless continued to pursue his passion with an extraordinary energy and strength of will, and was determined to secure somehow or other an entrance into the desired career. He was otherwise and exactingly occupied and he was entirely self-taught; and in 1910, just when by great good fortune he had been offered, and had accepted, a post in the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, his father's health broke down altogether, compelling him to renounce this dazzling but ill-paid opportunity. But in the following year he won in open competition an appointment in the Natural History Museum, which justified the abandonment of journalism.
In 1909 there first appears in the diary the definite indication of a theme which was soon to rival natural history in importance and at last most horribly to overwhelm it.
Feeling ill—like a sloppy tadpole. My will is paralysed. I visit the Doctor regularly to be stethoscoped, ramble about the streets, idly scan magazines in the Library and occasionally rink—with palpitation of the heart as a consequence. In view of the shortness, bitterness and uncertainty of life, all scientific labour for me seems futile.
After this the subject of his health is rarely absent for many pages together. The deaths of his father and mother deepened the preoccupation, and Barbellion's symptoms and dreads were almost infinite in their variety. He suffered from intermittent action of the heart, from nervous weakness, and from dyspepsia; he feared now paralysis, now blindness, now consumption. The thought of death was constantly with him, but until the end he could not be sure in what form it would come. Sometimes he longed for it to finish his sufferings, sometimes he hoped it would linger enough to allow him to complete the work he had in hand.
Meanwhile, amid the unescapable and agonising reflections which this condition induced, another side of his nature was being developed. In 1910 there is an entry which again is like the first tentative introduction of a musical theme in a symphony:
I hope to goodness she doesn't think I want to marry her. In the Park, in the dark, kissing her, I was testing and experimenting with a new experience.
He was not, of course, by any means so callous and inhuman as this brief note might make him appear; but he was immensely curious about himself and about other people, and immensely greedy for new sensations. He dabbled a good deal in love-making, and his dabbling was prompted partly by the natural pressure of the senses, partly by curiosity. At last he fell in love, could not make up his mind whether he wanted to marry, made it up and was rejected, felt relieved, then unhappy, renewed his suit and was accepted. In September, 1915, he was married. A few weeks before, during a holiday at Coniston, boisterously prosecuted with his usual reckless disregard of his weak health, he had fallen and jarred his spine, and this had brought on a partial paralysis which filled him with the gloomiest thoughts and seemed to suggest the cancellation of all his plans. But his doctor made light of the matter and the marriage took place.
In the following November, having formally presented himself for recruitment, he was led by curiosity to read the sealed certificate written by his own doctor, not supposing that its being sealed had any particular significance. Thus he discovered, while sitting in a railway-carriage, that eighteen months before he had shown the first symptoms of a terrible and incurable disease and that this had been concealed from him, though it had been communicated to his relatives. He found later that it had been known to his wife before their marriage and also that his fall at Coniston had reawakened activity among the bacteria and hastened the end. In 1916 his daughter was born, and in July of the following year his rapidly failing strength compelled him, after ineffectual periods of sick leave, to resign his appointment at the Museum. His health varied; he grew worse and recovered a little, but never recovered what he had lost. He prepared his diary for publication, but the publishers who had accepted it became afraid of it when it was partly set up in type and asked to be relieved of the undertaking. Another publisher was found. The book appeared, and its reception did something to soften the miseries of his last months.
How profound and unremitting were these miseries, and how he bore them, is shown in the last section of the diary. His disease was painful and the end certain. He had a wife, who was often fatigued and ill, and a child, and he had next to no money. The strain of witnessing his sufferings, as well as the necessity of earning her living, made it imperative that his wife should spend long periods of time away from him. In 1919 there was an idea that a certain prolonged and troublesome treatment might possibly, though only possibly, effect an improvement. But he did not care to be experimented with then. He was already dead, he said, it was too late, he could not bear the burden of a fresh hope. He continued to be tortured by the long-drawn-out agony of his dissolution, by the defeat of all his ambitions, and by the black prospects of his wife and child. But the success of his book brings a curiously sweeter and gentler note into the diary, a note most poignant to the reader who could understand his refusing to be grateful for anything.
I am still miserable [he writes], especially on E.'s account—that dear, brave woman. But I have suffered a change. My whole soul is sweetened by the love of those near and dear to me, and by the sympathy of those reading my book.
Grants were made to him out of various funds, and, just before his death, a committee of distinguished literary men was formed to see that his wife and child did not want. This in particular touched him to gratitude, and he died proud and happy in the thought that those who should have been dependent on him had so many good friends to serve them instead. A few hours before the end he said to his brother, "You will soon be able to blow the trumpets and bang the brasses"; but his eyes were full of a pathetic desire to have it denied.
It is not difficult to understand the complaint made by his friends and relatives that he had drawn a misleading portrait of himself, any more than it is difficult to understand his own protest that he had drawn himself with the clothes off. Both points of view are exceedingly natural, and perhaps it is possible for a disinterested observer to see in the diary the whole truth which could not be immediately obvious either to himself or to those who were closely connected with him. We need not involve ourselves very deeply in the theories of psycho-analysis to make the point that a man who keeps a journal will use it very largely to put down what he can say nowhere else, and to express that side of him which cannot be expressed in the ordinary world. Why else indeed should he keep a journal? It is thus that arise apparent contradictions between the outward appearance and the confession. On one occasion Barbellion says:
I have no personal courage and all this pride boils up behind a timid exterior. I quail often before stupid but overbearing persons who consequently never realise my contempt of them.... Of course, to intimate friends (only about three persons in the wide, wide world), I can always give free vent to my feelings and I do so in privacy with that violence in which a weak character usually finds some compensation for his intolerable self-imposed reserve and restraint in public. I can never marvel enough at the ineradicable turpitude of my existence, at my double-facedness, and the remarkable contrast between the face I turn to the outside world and the face my friends know. It's like leading a double existence or artificially constructing a puppet to dangle before the crowd while I fulminate behind the scenes. If only I had the moral courage to play my part in life—to take the stage and be myself, to enjoy the delightful sensation of making my presence felt, instead of this vapourish mumming—then this Journal would be quite unnecessary.
No man who is a hero to himself stands a very good chance of seeming a hero to other people. But in this passage Barbellion not only shows the difference between his appearance and his self-portraiture, but also directs attention to one of the factors which make his diary so extraordinary a document. He was aware of the contrast between what he allowed the world to see and the rest of his nature; but this contrast remained profoundly mysterious to himself. He understood himself enough to be able to describe himself, but not so thoroughly that the knowledge could remove all curiosity; and, in fact, while he knew much of his own character that no one else knew, there was left something over of which he was ignorant.
He once said:
I am apparently a triple personality: (1) The respectable youth. (2) The foul-mouthed commentator and critic. (3) The real but unknown I. Curious that these three should live together amiably in the same tenement.
One might also say that the reader of the diary discovers another triple personality: (1) Barbellion as he must have seemed to others. (2) Barbellion as he thought he seemed to others. (3) The real Barbellion, not fully known even to himself, yet, between his appearance and his confessions, for ever unconsciously betraying himself. In actual fact, he was, it is agreed by all who knew him, a man of enormous, almost dæmonic force of character. I have already alluded to the reckless vigour with which he drove his failing body through all manner of tasks and difficulties, and this trait in him gives a fair idea of his spirit. From boyhood onward he was weakened by continual ill-health. The diary is full of medical observations and forebodings, but no one, not even his family, realised how constantly the fear of sickness and death attended him. He never mentioned his health save in a tone of cheerful cynicism: he never pampered himself or allowed himself to be pampered. In spite of his palpitating heart, he exposed himself to fatigues and performed feats of endurance which a sound man might well have avoided. He worked furiously and unceasingly. He kept his balance and his courage under staggering blows of ill-fortune. Never was there so impossible an ambition as that of this sickly youth in a provincial town, already chained to the dreary work of a reporter, who desired, without any help, without even any decent opportunities for self-instruction, to obtain a scientific appointment. Yet he overcame these obstacles and his ambition was fulfilled. And when this was taken from him, when nothing was left but a few painful months of life and his Journal, when it was infinite labour even to trace a few words on the page, he continued the self-portrait which had become his last ambition as long as he could hold a pen at all. The straggling, irregularly-formed letters which sprawl across the paper are the last witnesses of his invincible courage.
And to others this timid and cowardly young man seemed strong, masterful, difficult to manage, frightening, sometimes savage and bitter in conversation, but always magnetic and fascinating. "I know," he says, "I am not prepossessing in appearance—my nose is crooked and my skin is blotched." In reality his height, his distinction of bearing and fine hair produced an immediate effect of good looks—which, with the emaciation of his final days, changed into an austere and painful beauty. He had particularly beautiful hands, and his photographs certainly represent him as being not only noticeable but also attractive. The disparity between what he says of himself and what others thought of him involves no real contradiction. He is writing of the hidden and secret personality whom no one else knew, and the fact that no one else could know this personality, save by his own deliberate act of revelation, is another proof of his strength. He is describing the other side of the moon.
His ambition was the one part of his secret life which was too great and too violent for even him to hide altogether. He might doubt his own qualities, but he could not conceal from himself or from others what he desired to be and to do. His ambitions were, he thought, very soon and very easily defeated, but the title he gave to his book, a catchpenny title, as he owned, and something wanting in sincerity, confessed to a graver defeat than he actually sustained. His achievements were not great in bulk. His scientific triumph was the triumph of reaching a self-proposed aim in spite of almost impossible obstacles; but it was worth less in itself than as a witness to character. He might have become one of the greatest of English biologists; but promise is only promise, and this, besides, is promise of a kind with which we are not concerned here. "In time," he once said, "I should have revolutionised the study of Systematic Zoology." But he was not allowed time, and his scientific observations will be amplified, superseded, heaped under at last by an accumulation of the work of his successors. In literature his position is very different.
When his book was being prepared for publication and while he was still ignorant what reception it would have he remarked without hesitation that he "liked to look at himself posthumously as a writer"; and it appears from the introduction to Enjoying Life that his friends had long before expected him to turn his whole attention to literature. Even here his work is comprised in small space. It consists of three things: the published Journal of a Disappointed Man, containing extracts from his diaries between 1903 and 1917, the posthumous volume, Enjoying Life and Other Literary Remains, containing, together with a number of essays and articles, long passages omitted for the sake of space from the previous book, and the still unpublished diary from the beginning of 1918 onwards. Even from this certain deductions must be made. The scientific articles in the second volume were only just worth reprinting; and the essays on journal-writers and the two short stories, though they are promising, are yet no more than the experiments of a man who was considering giving himself formally to the profession of literature. But when all these deductions are made there is a residue which is unique in value.
In the introduction to the first volume Mr. Wells very comprehensively lays stress on the circumstances of Barbellion's fate. He represents the diarist as saying, "You shall have at least one specimen carefully displayed and labelled. Here is a recorded unhappiness. When you talk about life and the rewards of life and the justice of life and its penalties, what you say must square with this." This is, of course, an aspect of the matter which no reader could manage to overlook, even if he desired (as he might conceivably desire) to do so. It would be a pity, however, if we were to consider it to the exclusion of every other aspect. Barbellion was not essentially a specimen who by good luck had the ability to display and label himself. If his circumstances had been quite other than they were, he would still have been a remarkable man and would almost certainly have done remarkable work. His disease and death ought to play the same part in our conception of him that they do in our conception of Keats, with whom, besides, he had certain affinities which he half-consciously recognised. We do not know what part disease played in creating or forcing or conditioning Keats's genius; we only know that it infuses a poignancy and a colour into our picture of his life. He does not appear to us as the diseased poet, but as a poet who, as it happened, was stricken with disease. So with Barbellion: he had a personality and a gift for describing his experiences; and, since it fell out that his experiences were tragic, therefore the story he tells is a tragedy. But the tragedy is not interesting only as such. It is interesting because the principal figure in it is Barbellion.
The comparison with Keats is natural, is suggestive, and can be supported by a number of particulars, both accidental and essential. "Since the fateful November 27th," says Barbellion, "my life has become entirely posthumous. I live now in the grave and am busy furnishing it with posthumous joys." Keats writes in his last letter, from Rome, "I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that I am leading a posthumous existence." But there is a closer similarity between them than the superficial parallel suggested by their use of the same word. Barbellion himself made the comparison more than once, and once in a very significant context.
You can search all history [he exclaims] for an ambition more powerful than mine and not find it. No, not Napoleon, nor Wilhelm II., nor Keats.
And this uncontrollable ambition in both of them was one manifestation of the innermost ruling characteristic which they had in common, the passion for life in all its shapes and forms, for all the sensations life can bring, which inspires Barbellion's Journal as surely as it inspires Keats's poetry and letters.
The title of Barbellion's second book was not, as it might seem, intended in irony. He enjoyed life to a terrifying degree and could abandon himself to the ecstasy which it produced in him.
As you say [he writes in a letter, referring to a review of the Journal] the rest of the notice distinguishing Marie Bashkirtseff from me by her zest for life is an astonishing and ludicrous misreading. Why, even since I became bedridden, as you will see one day, my zest for life took a devil of a lot of killing—like a sectioned worm with all the parts still wriggling....
In the last part of the diary his assertion is amply proved. Here the zest for life, in a man who could no longer indulge it save in memory, is sublimated to a piercing but sweet lyrical cry, which is one of the most moving utterances in literature. Before, when he was in possession of all his faculties, when the shadow of illness could sometimes be forgotten, it is a rapturous and boisterous expression of infinite energy, high spirits and gusto. Almost any paragraph in the essay called Enjoying Life would serve to demonstrate this:
"Dans littérature," said M. Taine, "j'aime tout." I would shake his hand for saying that, and add: "In life, Monsieur, as well." All things attract me equally. I cannot concentrate. I am ready to do anything, go anywhere, think anything, read anything. Wherever I hitch my waggon I am confident of an adventurous ride. Somebody says, "Come and hear some Wagner." I am ready to go. Another, "I say, they are going to ring the bull"—and who wants to complete his masterpiece or count his money when they are going to ring the bull? I will go with you to Norway, Switzerland, Jericho, Timbuctoo. Talk to me about the Rosicrucians or the stomach of a flea and I will listen to you. Tell me that the Chelsea Power Station is as beautiful as the Parthenon at Athens and I'll believe you. Everything is beautiful, even the ugly—why did Whistler paint the squalor of the London streets, or Brangwyn the gloom of a steam-crane? To subscribe to any one particular profession, mode of life, doctrine, philosophy, opinion, or enthusiasm, is to cut oneself off from all the rest—I subscribe to all. With the whole world before you, beware lest the machinery of education seizes hold of the equipotential of your youth and grinds you out the finished product! You were a human being to start with—now, you are only a soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor. Leonardo da Vinci, racked with frustrate passion after the universal, is reported to have declared that only to do one thing and only to know one thing was a disgrace, no less.
Crying for the Moon, the essay which follows, also extracted from the Journal, is the obverse of the same coin:
I am passing through the world swiftly and have only time to live my own life. I am cut off by my own limitations and environment from knowing much or understanding much. I know nothing of literature and the drama; I have but little ear for music. I do not understand art. All these things are closed to me. I am passing swiftly along the course of my life with many others whom I shall never meet. How many dear friends and kindred spirits remain undiscovered among that number? There is no time for anything. Everything and everyone is swept along in the hustling current. Oh! to sun ourselves awhile in the water meadows before dropping over the falls! The real tragedies in this world are not the things which happen to us, but the things which don't happen.
There are critics who would trace the source of such outbursts as these and of the joy in life that constantly appears in Keats to the effects of bacterial disease. We cannot contradict the conclusion, which may have a certain truth. We can only point out that the same cause does not always produce the same effect, and we must therefore deduce a particular genius in those in whom this spirit manifests itself. Barbellion was, from one point of view, a case of pathology, but he was not, any more than was Keats, nothing but that. He had a fine temperament which he expressed very finely.
There is a temptation when one is considering the Journal, to which Barbellion's work must eventually be reduced, to consider it as so much raw material and to speculate how, if he had lived, he would have used the many talents he displays in it. He began it as a record of a naturalist's observations, and it developed only very gradually into a self-portrait and a repository for all his reflections and impressions. He was still, when his last illness overtook him, a professional scientist, scribbling in his diary at night for a hobby. But he was thinking of going over to literature; and one cannot help asking whether, if he had done so, he would not have turned his genius to some more formal and less miscellaneous method of expression. It is easy to discern in him any number of capacities. He might have become a critic—a statement which can be proved by a few examples taken at random:
I thoroughly enjoy Hardy's poetry for its masterfulness, for his sheer muscular compulsion over the words and sentences. In his rough-hewn lines he yokes the recalcitrant words together and drives them along mercilessly with something that looks like simple brute strength.... All this pleases me the more for I know to my cost what stubborn, sullen, hephæstian beasts words and clauses can sometimes be. It is nice to see them punished. Hardy's poetry is Michael Angelo rather than Greek, Browning not Tennyson.
It amuses me to discover the evident relish with which the author of The Daffodil Fields emphasises the blood and the flowers in the attack on Achi Baba. It's all blood and beautiful flowers mixed up together to Masefield's great excitement.... Still, to call Gallipoli "bloody hell" is, after all, only a pedantically exact description. You understand, tho', a very remarkable book—a work of genius.
... James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist—one of those books which the mob will take fifty years to discover but once discovered will again neglect.
He might have been a psychological or a satirical novelist, a metaphysician, a casual essayist. He might have been a poet of nature. His diaries are studded with the most exquisite descriptions of landscapes and living things, which grow only more vivid and moving as the end approaches and they become transcripts from memory instead of recent impressions. The last long entry in the Journal is one of them, and it is so good and so characteristic that it insists on being quoted:
Rupert Brooke said the brightest thing in the world was a leaf with the sun shining on it. God pity his ignorance! The brightest thing in the world is a Ctenophor in a glass jar standing in the sun. This is a bit of a secret, for no one knows about it save only the naturalist. I had a new sponge the other day and it smelt of the sea till I had soaked it. But what a vista that smell opened up!—rock pools, gobies, Blennies, anemones (crassicon, dahlia—oh! I forget). And at the end of my little excursion into memory I came upon the morning when I put some sanded opaque bits of jelly, lying on the rim of the sea, into a glass collecting jar and to my amazement and delight they turned into Ctenophors—alive, swimming, and iridescent! You must imagine a tiny soap bubble about the size of a filbert with four series of plates or combs arranged regularly on the soap-bubble, from its North or to its South Pole, and flashing spasmodically in unison as they beat on the water.
But I think that this way of looking on Barbellion's work, excusable as it might be, would nevertheless be mistaken. Every author writes the book that it is given to him to write, and Barbellion's book was the Journal. If, as seems very likely, he had developed altogether into a writer, he might still not have abandoned this form which had become by a gradual process peculiarly his own. Goethe said that all his works were the fragments of a great confession, and this is true, in a greater or lesser degree, of most authors. Barbellion would have differed from the rest only in that his works would have been ostensibly and formally, as well as actually, his confessions.
And this view is supported by the fact that up to the last he was improving the flexible and accommodating method of literary expression which his diary had become. The last eighteen months of it seem to me to show an advance on the third part of the published Journal almost as striking as the advance of that third part on the first. The form fitted very closely to Barbellion's many-sided and individual temperament; and, as time went on and he understood better what he was doing, he made it fit more closely still. It was a frame into which he could put with perfect ease all that his roving perceptions picked up in life: an impression of a landscape or an animal, a conversation overheard in the street, a suddenly flashing truth about himself or some other person, a general reflection upon humanity. As a journal-writer he is not, of course, alone; but, being a strongly-marked personality, he is unique even among journal-writers. His intense interest in his own consciousness does not, as it did with Amiel, blind him to the actual outside world; he has more humour, more gusto in concrete detail than Marie Bashkirtseff, a vein of sheer poetry that we do not find in Pepys. This is not intended to rank him above the writers with whom he loved to compare himself, but rather to emphasise his individuality among them.
We find ourselves at last wondering not how he would have employed the gifts he displays in the Journal, but to what pitch of excellence he might have brought the Journal itself. The last entries are admirably full of matter and admirably worded. The passage I have quoted on the Ctenophors is of almost perfect lyrical beauty—not a random jotting, but an impression seized and made permanent with all the proportion and balance of a sonnet by Hérédia. Over against it there might be quoted passages on the old village nurse who attended him for months, closely and humorously observed and set down without the waste of a syllable. Or there are pages of reflections like this:
The Icons.
Every man has his own icon.
Secreted in the closet of each man's breast is an icon, the image of himself, concealed from view with elaborate care, treated invariably with great respect, by means of which the Ego, being self-conscious, sees itself in relation to the rest of mankind, measures itself therewith, and in accordance with which it acts and moves and subsists. In the self-righteous man's bosom, it is a molten image of a little potentate who can do no wrong. In the egotist's, an ideal loved and worshipped by almost all men, addressed with solemnity and reverence, and cast in an immutable brazen form. Only the truth-seeker preserves his image in clay, covered in damp rags—a working hypothesis.
A man towards his icon is like the tenderness and secretiveness of a little bird towards its nest, which does not know you have discovered its heart's treasure. For everyone knows the lineaments of your image and talks about them to everyone else save you, and no one dare refer to his own—it is bad form—so that in spite of the gossip and criticism that swirls around each one's personality, a man remains sound-tight and insulated.
The human comedy begins at the thought of the ludicrous unlikeness, in many cases, of the treasured image to the real person—as much verisimilitude about it as, say, about a bust by Gaudier-Brzeska.
Heavens! what a toy shop it will be at the Last Day! When all our little effigies are taken from their cupboards, undraped, and ranged along beside us, nude and shivering. In that Day how few will be able to say that they ever cried
"God be merciful to me a sinner," or "a fool," or "a humbug."
The human tragedy begins as soon as one feels how often a man's life is ruined by simple reason of this disparity between the image and the real—the image (or the man's mistaken idea of himself)—like an ignis fatuus leading him through devious paths into the morass of failure, or worse—of sheer, laughing-stock silliness. The moral is:
γνῶθι σεαυτόν {gnôthi seauton}
(My dear chap, quoting Greek at your time of life.)
The mellowness and sweetness of these lines are worth noting as characteristic of a transformation which is obviously taking place through all the last pages of the diary. This transformation adds something in the nature of a rounding and a completion to the whole work, which might otherwise have been merely an interrupted record. It enlarges too our conception of the author's character and capacities and fills in, most graciously, our picture of him.
Barbellion was accustomed to accuse himself of being an egotist; but, on his own definition, he was a truth-seeker. His portrait of himself was not immutable. It grew clearer as he understood himself better and it changed as he changed. It was not complete when he died because his own development was not complete. But he carried it as far as he could and made of it a singular picture. His Journal is a book of an enduring sort, not merely because it is an accurate and candid self-portrait, but also because of the inherent attractions of its subject. Barbellion was a poet, a humorist, an observer, a philosopher, as well as a truthful, passionate, and extraordinarily courageous man. In drawing a picture of the last he also made a picture of the world as it seemed to the first four and thus captured in it poetry, humour, observation, and philosophy. The subject is still too fresh, and, by the vividness of its presentment, too painful, for any attempt at a final valuation to be made. A few months ago Barbellion was still alive, suffering and hoping; and, with the best will in the world, no critic can avoid being influenced by this fact. But his book is a fair topic for prophecy; and it is not very rash to predict that, as it loses the sharpness and painfulness of a record of fact, so its qualities as a work of literature will come more into prominence and we shall realise that Barbellion was not only a genius untimely overwhelmed by an evil fate, but a genius who, before he was overwhelmed, had opportunity to do some at least of his appointed work. Then, whatever may be the theoretical views we hold on the connection between disease and genius, we shall be able to think less of Barbellion as a "case" and more of him as a writer. We shall, perhaps, not think that we have a complete portrait of him in his Journal any more than we have a complete portrait of Keats in the Odes or even in the Letters. The greatest of artists cannot entirely disclose himself in his work. Barbellion did so no more than others. But he was an artist, and, between what he wrote of himself and what was otherwise revealed, it is possible to form a picture of an extraordinary personality.
A LITTLE CLASSIC OF THE FUTURE[27]
[27] Bibliographical Note: Principal Works by Edith Œ. Somerville and Martin Ross: An Irish Cousin, 1889; Naboth's Vineyard, 1891; Through Connemara in a Governess Cart, 1893; The Real Charlotte, 1895; The Silver Fox, 1897; Some Experiences of an Irish R.M., 1899; All on the Irish Shore, 1903; Some Irish Yesterdays, 1906; Further Experiences of an Irish R.M., 1908; Dan Russell the Fox, 1911; In Mr. Knox's Country, 1915; Irish Memories, 1917; Mount Music, 1919. All published by Longmans.
By ORLO WILLIAMS
THE evanescence of laughter is most pathetic. Its bubbles vanish from the sparkling wine that held it so soon after it has been uncorked, leaving a sadly flat beverage to the critical palates of future generations. Wit, being a subtler and less easily disintegrated essence, does not so quickly pass away, but the buoyant bubbles of laughter, except in some rare vintages, survive but a moment the uncorking of their bottle. We may smile at the things that aroused the laughter of our ancestors, bringing our intellect and our imagination to the tasting, but it is seldom that we experience spontaneously the "sudden glory" of bursting sides when we read the words which aroused it. It is almost painful to look through the files of Punch of some sixty years ago, for it arouses that agonised shame with which one witnesses the failure of an inferior joke injudiciously introduced into superior society. One blushes for its pitiful exposure. Nor is it any consolation to reflect that the laughter of our own day will, for the most part, seem like the cracking of most unsubstantial thorns under ghostly pots to those who come after us. Very little of the literature of the past which truly survives is really provocative of hilarity. The Falstaffian passages of Shakespeare at once leap up as if to deny this statement; but, in the first place, Shakespeare brewed one of those rarer vintages whose beaded bubbles wink ever at the brim, and, in the second place, dramatic literature can always be revived by the fresh infusion of a living actor's personality. It is the purely written word of humour which will not give that sudden jerk to our emotions which it gave on its first outpouring. We say that we can appreciate Rabelais and the comic tales of the Canterbury Pilgrims; we profess to revel in Tristram Shandy, and to find the Pickwick Papers delicious, and we are not wrong; but it is a soberer enjoyment than that which these works of art gave to their first audiences. We pick them up, certainly, when we wish to be entertained, but seldom when we wish to laugh. There was a tutor at Oxford—there may be one still—who was invariably annoyed when any of his pupils attributed a historical phenomenon to "the spirit of the age," averring that there was no such thing. But surely he was wrong in coupling this convenient spirit with the ghosts of Stephen Sly and old John Naps of Greece, for the peculiar changes undergone by laughter are there to prove its existence. Laughter is compounded of the spirit of the age: it is excited by peculiar and irrecoverable felicities and conjunctions of temperament and environment, all of which are ingredients in that very real but intangible spirit. We can guess at this spirit, but we cannot recapture it, any more than we can recapture the light effervescence of its laughter.
Further, laughter is not a lofty emotion. The beasts, they say, have it not, but those who are little better than beasts laugh heartily. We ourselves are not so proud of our laughter that we wish it to echo through the ages, as we would have our high thoughts ring and our tears, perhaps, drip. The heady wine that moves it is often an unworthy vintage, more like the champagne which Murger's Schaunard christened coco épileptique than the true Hippocrene. So it has been in the past. The shelves of libraries are full of these flat draughts from which all the liveliness that alone gave them savour has departed. Yet in all ages there have been nobler bins of these light literary wines which, for all that they no longer catch at the throat, have a more lasting quality and never entirely lose their gratefulness to the tongue of the taster. They may not have sparkled in their prime more brightly than their now neglected contemporaries, but they live for certain finer essences in their composition, wit, style, finish, colour, bouquet, or something even subtler than these, that indefinable taste which distinguishes all that has been grown on a rich literary soil, warmed by the sun of beauty and matured by a vintner who has carefully and lovingly learned his trade. Such, after exciting the laughter of the present in their youth, may in their ripeness, and even in their decline, earn the humour of posterity. They may possibly be numbered among the classics, that is to say, among the productions of any age which deserve to live as models for the future or as peculiarly happy expressions of a bygone time. The test of a classic is what men and women of any age will always call its modernity, which means that it possesses some of those timeless qualities of greatness or artistic excellence which permeate the spirit of any age. Skill in construction and delineation, accuracy of vision, fine rhythm, perfect choice of language, happy adaptation of form to matter, sense of beauty, all these, like beauty itself, do not die. The work which holds them, even though thinly commingled, will outlive the evaporation of its bubbles, and may by their preservative effect become, if not a great, at least a little classic.
To have done, then, with the bush which no good wine needs, I would like to taste again, in the company of the reader, what, if I may prophesy in hope rather than in certainty, may become in English literature a little classic of the future. The bush would not have been so thick had it not been, on the face of it, unusual so to greet a work that has moved so many thousands of us to hearty and inextinguishable laughter. I mean the work of Miss Edith Somerville and her mourned-for second self in letters who wrote under the name of Martin Ross. Few humorists who write merely to catch the passing fancy of the day can have been more successful or more popular: in the merely temporary quality of effervescence they can compete with any of their contemporaries. The sportsman who hates art and loathes poetry has the Irish R.M. and its fellows in well-thumbed copies on his bookshelves; the man who only reads for laughter and never for improvement praises these authors as highly as the most discriminating, and those who would faint at the suspicion of becoming in any way involved in classic literature will joyfully immerse themselves in "Somerville and Ross," like thirsty bibbers quaffing a curious vintage for its exhilaration rather than its quality. Appreciation has poured in upon them from all sides, from those who know and delight in the comic sides of Irish life, when treated observantly and not fantastically, from those to whom hunting and horseflesh are almost the be-all and end-all of existence, from those who treat their brains to a good story as to a stimulative drug, as well as from those who bring more discrimination to their appraisement. The devotees will often claim that they alone can scent the subtler flavour from these hilarious pages. The Irishman, unless he be of the kind that despises all light-heartedness in writing of his country, will assert that none but he can get the exquisite appreciation of comparing the work of art with the reality which inspired it: the hunting fraternity will find it hard to suppose that one who knows not what it is to be
Oft listening how the hounds and horn
Clearly rouse the slumbering morn
From the side of some hoar hill,
Through the high wood echoing shrill,
can possibly enjoy the skill shown by these authors in describing the joy of horses and the thrill of hunting. Nevertheless, the books of Miss Somerville and Martin Ross are heartily enjoyed by a host of readers who are neither Irish nor hunting people, for the simple reason that they are prompted to an explosion of laughter whenever they take up one of these stories. The bulk of these readers would wish to go no further in their appreciation: they embrace the givers of present laughter with so full a measure of enjoyment that it would seem to them unnecessary to probe any further into the chemistry of such excellence, nor perhaps would they deem it possible that any higher praise than their freely-expressed enjoyment could be looked for by any authors. Yet to my mind it is possible. While including in one's general testimony all that can be said by the most extravagant of these admirers, the taster who is considering the cellar of English literature which is being laid down for posterity may discern qualities not so apparent to the quaffer for immediate exhilaration. It is hard to conceive it, but the bubbles may vanish: if they do, the question is, what will be left? My point is that the work of Miss Somerville and Martin Ross has the qualities of a wine that will keep.
It cannot be a great wine, for the vineyard is too restricted. The high winds of emotion have not swept over its soil, nor has the soft rain of tenderness moistened it. It will always be bright and rather dry like Vouvray, gay but with a little bite in it: posterity may even call it "curious." But they will recognise that it holds the authentic flavours that distinguish infallibly the finer products of English literary bins. The authors have chosen a small field, but they direct on it an accuracy of vision which is remarkable, and, seeing that they were two, a unity of vision which is a miracle. In the expression of this vision they display an unfailing sureness of touch and a precision which is perfect in its admirable economy. They handle our language with a deftness and flexibility which is a rarity in itself, and their style, though always original, is nourished by a recollection of great models both in prose and poetry. Theirs is a literary equipment of the first class, solidly framed, well clothed, attractive in appearance, and ornamented with taste. They touch nothing that they do not embellish: events by their unflagging narrative power, which goes as unfalteringly as one of their choicest hunters, character by their sympathetic insight, scenery by their love of natural beauty, dialogue by their dramatic sense. It is not all Ireland that they draw, let that be admitted; they prefer to laugh, letting others weep. Yet, if the whole heart of Ireland does not beat within their pages, a part of it is there, pulsing with true Irish blood and throbbing with truly Irish emotions. Their aspect is no more that of Mr. James Joyce or Mr. Synge or Mr. Yeats than it is that of Mr. George Moore or Mr. Devlin, but, if they are justly praised for their merits, that praise cannot be diminished because they looked on Ireland with laughing eyes through a West Carberry window. Their books are literature no less certainly than Castle Rackrent is literature, and for very similar reasons.
Well, let us taste. It is a bright dry wine, I have said. It is not, perhaps, the quality which the authors would ascribe to what they consider their best work, The Real Charlotte—an estimate in which Mr. Stephen Gwynn agrees with them. This is a fine sombre story of a middle-aged woman's jealousy, for Charlotte is a kind of Irish Cousine Bette. But, if the subject is comparable to that of Balzac's novel, the treatment is certainly not so, and that is my reason for not regarding this as the work by which their achievement can best be judged. It is the work in which they have aimed highest, and the measure of their success is not small, but the theme of Charlotte's jealousy and the havoc in other lives which it caused needed for its convincing development all the powers of a great tragic artist. It is with no want of recognition of the authors' artistic aims or want of sympathy with their regret at abandoning them for others less lofty that this is said: but the work of an artist can best be judged from that part of it which most nearly reaches perfection. Miss Somerville and Martin Ross most nearly reached perfection in their lighter stories of Irish life, and it says much for their acumen that they saw the line on which their talent could naturally reach its maturity, courageously turning their backs on higher and more tragic paths likely to tax them beyond their capabilities. At the same time, it would be unjust not to point out that even in their best work comedy does not exclude the more poignant feelings. It would be the greatest mistake to regard these two writers as nothing more than jesters. Their humour is the true humour which runs hand-in-hand with pity, and the sympathy mingled with their laughter robs it of any taste of bitterness. There is a chapter in Some Irish Yesterdays which shows how their hearts were touched.[28] It treats of marriage and love, death and birth among the peasantry in the south-west of Ireland with a delicacy of feeling which is beyond praise, and shows that the writers did not observe with the aloofness of an explorer among savages, but that for them seeing and describing alike were deeply-felt emotional experiences. The chapter opens with a memory of a wedding in the little Roman Catholic chapel of the village, a simple ceremony, after which the bridegroom hauled his wife up beside him on to a shaggy horse and started for home at a lumbering gallop. Then, in a brilliant transition by way of Tom Cashen's reflections on marriage and a glimpse of his married life, we are introduced at Tom Cashen's funeral to the bride of twenty-five years ago, "a middle-aged stranger in a frilled cap and blue cloak, with handsome eyes full of friendliness," with her ill-health, her profusion of children, and "himself" whose "nose glowed portentously above a rusty grey beard and beneath a hat-brim of a bibulous tint." Then listen to the passage which follows:
[28] In Irish Memories Miss Somerville says that this chapter is the reprint of an article by Martin Ross—a fact which throws some light on the respective contributions of the two collaborators. I should like to mention another passage in which these writers touch the pathetic with distinction. It is that chapter in Dan Russell the Fox in which, while tending a poisoned hound, the Irish mother tries vainly to persuade her younger son to propose to the infatuated young lady. He rejects her suggestion as an outrage on the lady, and sets his face towards America. As the saved hound licks her hand, "It's no good now, poor puppy," she says.
The sunny Shrove Tuesday in early March lived again as she spoke, the glare of the sunshine upon the bare country brimming with imminent life, the scent of the furze, already muffling its spikes in bloom, the daffodils hanging their lamps in shady places. How strangely, how bleakly different was the life history summarised in the melancholy October evening! Instead of the broad-backed horse, galloping on roads that were white in the sun and haze of the strong March day, with the large frieze-clad waist to meet her arms about, and the laughter and shouting of the pursuers coming to her ear, there would be a long and miry tramping in the darkness, behind her spouse, with talk of guano and geese and pigs' food, and a perfect foreknowledge of how he would complete, at the always convenient shebeen, the glorious fabric of intoxication, of which the foundation had been well and truly laid at the funeral.
From the funeral we pass again to the cottage in which "the Triplets" are holding their reception, the three day-old babes cradled in the stuffy room, hazy with the smoke of the turf fire, the crowd in the doorway, the old woman rocking the cradle:
Obscure corners harboured obscure masses, that might be family raiment, or beds, or old women; somewhere among them the jubilant cry of a hen proclaimed the feat of laying an egg, in muffled tones that suggested a lurking-place under a bed. Between the cradle and the fire sat an old man in a prehistoric tall hat, motionless in the stupor of his great age; at his feet a boy wrangled with a woolly puppy that rolled its eyes till the blue whites showed, in a delicious glance of humour, as it tugged at the red flannel shirt of its playmate.
Such a passage in a Russian novelist would warrant ecstasies on the part of our illuminati: let us no less highly praise our own art when it is possible. The chapter concludes with some lights on the commercial methods of matrimony practised by the peasant class: the writers do not defend them, but call attention to the surprising bloom that is apt to spring from them. "From them springs, like a flower from a dust heap, the unsullied, uneventful home-life of Western Ireland." "There is here no material, of the accepted sort, for a playwright; no unsatisfied yearnings and shattered ideals, nothing but remarkable common sense, and a profound awe for the sacrament of Marriage. Marriage, humorous, commercial, and quite unlovely, is the first act; the second is mere preoccupation with an accomplished destiny; the last is usually twilight and much faithfulness." The dialogue is a masterpiece throughout, epigram, heart-piercing pathos, with humour, heavenly and inveterate, lubricating all. Of an elderly couple, married by a happy thought some thirty years before, it was said, as the authors' record, "their hearts were within in each other." This chapter, through which breathes all the soft beauty and humour of the soil, is a sufficient answer to those who would tax these writers with a uniform attitude of rather heartless derision or with following—what a blind criticism!—in the benighted footsteps of those who have given us the dreary horror of the traditional stage Irishman.
Then, again, there is another spirit that breathes delicately through these stories, tempering their outlines as the mists of the Atlantic those of the craggy western hillside. It is the spirit of natural beauty, which, to the hearts of Miss Somerville, herself an accomplished draughtsman, and Martin Ross, makes ever the sharpest appeal. They make the reader plainly feel that if the unconventional dignity and penetrating wit of the Irish folk clutches powerfully at their feelings, the inexhaustible beauty of its surroundings pierces to their very marrow. Quotation after quotation might be given to show their remarkable gift of rendering the scenery which has so moved their imaginations. I can only choose a few, embarrassed at the richness of the field of choice. The last chapter of Some Irish Yesterdays opens with an example which it is hard to surpass:
The road to Connemara lies white across the memory—white and very quiet. In that far west of Galway, the silence dwells pure upon the spacious country, away to where the Twelve Pins make a gallant line against the northern sky. It comes in the heathery wind, it borrows peace from the white cottage gables on the hillside, it is accented by the creeping approach of a turf cart, rocking behind its thin grey pony. Little else stirs save the ducks that sail on a wayside pool to the push of their yellow propellers; away from the road, on a narrow oasis of arable soil, a couple of women are digging potatoes; their persistent voices are borne on the breeze that blows warm over the blossoming boglands and pink heather.
Scarcely to be analysed is that fragrance of Irish air; the pureness of bleak mountains is in it, the twang of turf smoke is in it, and there is something more, inseparable from Ireland's green and grey landscapes, wrought in with her bowed and patient cottages, her ragged wails, and eager rivers, and intelligible only to the spirit.
Here is another landscape, the Irish R. M.'s view of his own demesne:
Certainly the view from the roof was worth coming up to look at. It was rough heathery country on one side, with a string of little blue lakes running like a turquoise necklet round the base of a firry hill, and patches of pale green pasture were set amidst the rocks and heather. A silvery flash behind the undulations of the hills told where the Atlantic lay in immense plains of sunlight.
What, again, could be a more delightful overture to the lifelike description of the regatta on Lough Lonen than the short paragraph which conveys in a few touches all the beauty of the scene?
A mountain towered steeply up from the lake's edge, dark with the sad green of beech-trees in September; fir woods followed the curve of the shore, and leaned far over the answering darkness of the water; and above the trees rose the toppling steepnesses of the hill, painted with the purple glow of heather. The lake was about a mile long, and, tumbling from its farther end, a fierce and narrow river fled away west to the sea, some four or five miles off.
In these descriptions there is no striving for elaborate effect: the authors simply place the scene before our eyes with that aptness of language which is like the unerring needle of a master etcher. To travel on the wings of Miss Somerville and Martin Ross gives one constant thrills of amazement at their hawk-like swoops after a telling phrase: they catch an apt simile on the wing with an arresting suddenness which adds moments of breathlessness to the already exhilarating flight of their rapid narrative. Instances can be picked out from any of the stories like plums from a pudding.
In the depths of the wood Dr. Hickey might be heard uttering those singular little yelps of encouragement that to the irreverent suggest a milkman in his dotage....
It was a gleaming morning in mid-May, when everything was young and tense, and thin and fit to run for its life, like a Derby horse....
I followed Dr. Hickey by way of the window, and so did Miss M'Evoy; we pooled our forces, and drew her mamma after us through the opening of two foot by three steadily, as the great god Pan drew pith from the reed....
Old McRory had a shadowy and imperceptible quality that is not unusual in small fathers of large families; it always struck me that he understood very thoroughly the privileges of the neglected, and pursued an unnoticed, peaceful and observant path of his own in the background. I watched him creep away in his furtive, stupefied manner, like a partly-chloroformed ferret....
Miss McRory's reins were clutched in a looped confusion, that summoned from some corner of my brain a memory of the Sultan's cipher on the Order of the Medjidie.
Like smuts streaming out of a chimney the followers of the hunt belched from the lane and spread themselves over the pale green slopes....
Though the temptation is almost irresistible, I refrain here from displaying this incisive power applied to character, notably to Irish character. The success of our authors in this respect is so notorious that further testimony is superfluous. If we have any appreciation of their art at all, the Major and the gentle Philippa, his wife, Flurry and Sally Knox, old Mrs. Knox looking as if she had robbed a scarecrow, with her white woolly dog with sore eyes and a bark like a tin trumpet, against the inimitable background of her ramshackle mansion of Aussolas, scene of many wit-combats between her and Flurry, Miss Bobbie Bennett, the McRory family, John Kane, Mrs. Knox's henchman, and Michael the huntsman, all are as vivid to us as our dearest friends. It is worth pointing out, however, that an almost diabolical power of delineation is not the only compelling quality in these portraits. There is in their introduction of their characters that natural dramatic instinct which they have so humorously observed in their Irish neighbours. I need only instance the ingenuity by which Mrs. Knox is first heard "off," easily vanquishing in speech that doughty antagonist, an Irish countrywoman: or the introduction of John Kane in "the Aussolas Martin Cat," in two inimitable pages, which are followed by another perfect passage of comic drama, the entry into the old demesne of Aussolas of vulgar Mr. Tebbutts, the would-be tenant:
Away near the house the peacock uttered his defiant screech, a note of exclamation that seemed entirely appropriate to Aussolas; the turkey-cock in the yard accepted the challenge with effusion, and from further away the voice of Mrs. Knox's Kerry bull, equally instant in taking offence, ascended the gamut of wrath from growl to yell. Blended with these voices was another—a man's voice, in loud harangue, advancing down the long beech walk to the kitchen garden. As it approached the wood-pigeons bolted in panic, with distracted clappings of wings, from the tall firs by the garden wall in which they were wont to sit arranging plans of campaign with regard to the fruit. We sat in silence. The latch of the garden gate clicked, and the voice said in stentorian tones:
"My father 'e kept a splendid table."
Every gathering of their countrymen—the meet, the run, the horse show, the races, the regatta, the auction—have an intensity of motion and character which is achieved not by the tiresome enumerative methods of some modern realists, but by the skilful selection of the practised artist, and by a clever condensation of observations—their only form of exaggeration—gathered over a wide range of times and places.
Finally—the word starts up all too soon—let us praise the powerful sweep of their narrative, for it is this rapidity and staying power which sets the crown on their achievement. When they are out with the hunt, whatever be the quarry, they are as "crabbed leppers" as ever moved the picturesque admiration of an Irish hunt following. They are off at the first cry of the hounds and nothing stops them, they drop over the slaty fences, change feet on the banks, thread the rocky paths of steep ascents and career down the craggy hills, like Flurry Knox's mounts to the discomfiture of staider Saxon hunters. With them, moreover, there is never a check; they gallop hot on the scent from first to last, and run the story to a triumphant death in an ecstasy of unquenchable laughter. Their climaxes are marvellous, led up to as they are by a brilliant and sustained crescendo. Think of the mêlée at the end of "High Tea at McKeown's," or of the "Dane's Breechin'," with its exquisite interlude of the search for the "pin" in the village post-office; think of the finale to "Philippa's Foxhunt," with the Irish clergy and Mrs. Knox pulling the small boy out of the drain; or of Lady Knox's ominous arrival at the end of "Oh, Love! Oh, Fire!" and the escape of Sally in Mrs. Knox's pony-chaise, or of the combined catastrophe that fell upon the Major's household in "A Royal Command." For pure art in narrative construction these finales are unexampled in English literature of to-day, all the more because they are free from all buffoonery. Here is one that starts a movement con brio:
A shout from the top of the hill interrupted the amenities of the check. Flurry was out of the wood blowing shattering blasts upon his horn, and the hounds rushed to him, knowing the "gone away" note that was never blown in vain. The brown mare came out through the trees and the undergrowth like a woodcock down the wind, and jumped across a stream on to a more than questionable bank; the hounds splashed and struggled after him, and as they landed the first ecstatic whimpers broke forth. In a moment it was full cry, discordant, beautiful, and soul-stirring, as the pack spread and sped, and settled into line.
It is only one of many such. Let me send the reader to his shelf to take down In Mr. Knox's Country, and read "Put Down Two and Carry One," with its account of the events which led to Miss McRory's riding pillion behind the Major into the scandalised sight of Lady Knox, or to expire once more over the mingling of Mrs. McRory's golden butterfly with Philippa's hat-trimming at the harvest festival ("The Bosom of the McRorys"). I am compelled to quote, for its rendering of the purely ludicrous, from the incident of Playboy's nocturnal rescue in "The Conspiracy of Silence" (Further Experiences of an I.R.M.). Major Yeates, as deputy master in Flurry Knox's absence, has taken the hounds over to hunt with Mr. Flynn, who, after a run full of incident, has connived at the secretion of Playboy, a fine hound of the old Irish breed, in a bedroom at the top of the house. The Major is warned of this by the youngest boy, whose gratitude he has earned by giving him a mount that day. The pair thereupon grope their way upstairs to raid the bedroom in its owner's absence:
A dim skylight told that the roof was very near my head; I extended a groping hand for the wall, and without any warning found my fingers closing improbably, awfully, upon a warm human face.
[It was the servant, Maggie Kane, bringing up a drumstick of a goose to pacify the hound. They open the door of the room, and Playboy is revealed tied to the leg of a low wooden bedstead.] He was standing up, his eyes gleamed green as emeralds, he looked as big as a calf. He obviously regarded himself as the guardian of Eugene's bower, and I failed to see any recognition of me in his aspect, in point of fact he appeared to be on the verge of an outburst of suspicion that would waken the house once and for all. We held a council of war in whispers that perceptibly increased his distrust; I think it was Maggie Kane who suggested that Master Eddy should proffer him the bone while I unfastened the rope. The strategy succeeded, almost too well, in fact. Following the alluring drumstick, Playboy burst into the passage, towing me after him on the rope. Still preceded by the light-footed Master Eddy, he took me down the attic stairs at a speed which was the next thing to a headlong fall, while Maggie Kane held the candle at the top. As we stormed past old Flynn's door I was aware that the snoring had ceased, but "the pace was too good to inquire." We scrimmaged down the second flight into the darkness of the hall, fetching up somewhere near the clock, which, as if to give the alarm, uttered three loud and poignant cuckoos. I think Playboy must have sprung at it, in the belief that it was the voice of the drumstick; I only know that my arm was nearly wrenched from its socket, and that the clock fell with a crash from the table to the floor, where, by some malevolence of its machinery, it continued to cuckoo with a jocund and implacable persistence. Something that was not Playboy bumped against me. The cuckoo's note became mysteriously muffled, and a door, revealing a fire-lit kitchen, was shoved open. We struggled through it, bound into a sheaf by Playboy's rope, and in our midst the cuckoo clock, stifled but indomitable, continued its protest from under Maggie Kane's shawl.
And now, if I may close with a recollection of what is, perhaps, the most brilliant of all these brilliant narratives, I will call to the reader's mind the story of "The Pug-nosed Fox," from the same volume. Every gift of language, delineation, vigorous intensity, dramatic gradation, and swiftness of progress over a series of crises to a perfect culmination has been lavished by the authors on this story. From the misguided efforts of the photographer to take a picture of the hounds on a sweltering August day, all through the untimely chase of the old fox to the discovery of Tomsy Flood sewn up in a feather mattress in the loft of the McRorys' stable, and the raid of the hounds upon the wedding breakfast at the moment of the entry of the guests, there is not a moment in which to draw breath. It is life itself, with all the added quickness to its revolutions and intensity to its vision that art can give. With this memory I must leave this little classic to its future, but so that art, rather than criticism, shall have the last word, a typical passage, showing the authors' ease of transition from beauty to comedy, shall close this grateful appreciation:
At the top of the hill we took another pull. This afforded us a fine view of the Atlantic, also of the surrounding country and all that was therein, with, however, the single exception of the hounds. There was nothing to be heard save the summery rattle of the reaping-machine, the strong and steady rasp of a corn-crake, and the growl of a big steamer from a band of fog that was advancing, ghost-like, along the blue floor of the sea. Two fields away a man in a straw hat was slowly combing down the flanks of a haycock with a wooden rake, while a black-and-white cur slept in the young after-grass beside him. We broke into their sylvan tranquillity with a heated demand whether the hounds had passed that way. Shrill glamour from the dog was at first the only reply; its owner took off his hat, wiped his forehead with his sleeve, and stared at us.
"I'm as deaf as a beetle this three weeks," he said, continuing to look us up and down in a way that made me realise, if possible, more than before, the absurdity of looking like a Christmas card in the heat of a summer's day.
"Did ye see the HOUNDS?" shouted Michael, shoving the chestnut up beside him.
"It's the neurology I got," continued the haymaker, "an' the pain does be whistlin' out through me ear till I could mostly run into the say from it."
"It's a pity ye wouldn't," said Michael, whirling Moses round.