Myself When Young: Confessions

by Alec Waugh

Prose narrative could, we felt, attain to no higher level of emotion, and at the end of the day, between lock up and hall, among mauve cushions we would sit and talk of the secret springs, the hidden splendours of life, of how we, too, within a plain shell were beautiful. It passed, of course, that worship that was almost idolatry. It passed in the September of 1913, when a copy of Carnival was bought at a railway bookstall at the close of a summer holiday. That autumn we laid our mantle of sentiment before the tripping feet of Jenny, and when in early summer a copy of Poems and Ballads found its way into the school-house studies, it was the departed glory of Proserpine that we declaimed. We passed from one allegiance to another, as we passed from one size in collars to another. We were growing up.

But it is no part of my intention here, in this chapter, to attempt to trace the growth, the development, or the decay, as you may please to call it, of a literary taste. I am concerned solely with this fact: that ten years ago I held Florence Barclay to be the greatest living novelist, that in her work I found those characteristics, those qualities that to-day I find in the stories of Turgenev; that, as Turgenev moves me in 1923, so Mrs Barclay moved me in the summer of 1912. And this fact I find to be in the highest degree disquieting. There are attached to it a very large number of uncomfortable corollaries.

It depends, of course, on whether one does or does not take a relative view of things. To those who hold that there is a definite standard of literary judgment the tastes of immature, and of uneducated persons, can be of little matter. You tell your form master that you consider Swinburne a greater poet than Matthew Arnold, and he will smile indulgently: “One does think like that at your age,” he will say, “but you’ll find in time that Matthew Arnold is more satisfying stuff.” And I suppose one does. At any rate, the majority of middle-aged persons of my acquaintance seem to find him so. But I can never see that this fact is a proof of Arnold’s superiority, any more than the fact that at forty one plays golf with greater comfort than Rugby football is a proof of the superiority of golf. In an estimate of Victorian poetry a critic considers himself to have proved his case when he has written: “Swinburne is the supreme poet of youth, but as the years pass his tempestuous flow of sound means less to us, and we increasingly appreciate the chastened, harmonious cadences of Matthew Arnold.” Actually, of course, he has done no more than state that Swinburne’s is the poetry of youth and Arnold’s of middle age. That each poet has certain qualities and certain limitations, and in his acceptance of Arnold’s superiority he has assumed that the tastes of a man of fifty are more significant, less impermanent, more surely built than those of a man of twenty-five.

It is an assumption before whose authority most young writers, especially writers of fiction, have been in their time arraigned. “These stories,” the reviewer says, “are well enough written, the characters competently drawn, the situations skilfully prepared. But the book is concerned entirely with the problems of adolescence, problems, that is to say, that will in a few years’ time have ceased to concern the author. Its quality, therefore, is strictly temporal.” The author has been condemned, not on grounds of literary craftsmanship, not because he has failed to do well the thing he set out to do, but because he has employed unprofitable material, because the perplexities and enthusiasms of adolescence that formed the theme of his book are transient and must yield in time to the perplexities and enthusiasms of manhood. It is doubtless inevitable that literary criticism should accept the quality of permanence as its deciding standard, should consider the period of duration rather than the intensity of the fleeting mood; but on its own grounds even would not criticism do well to seek that quality in the skill and sincerity of the treatment, rather than in the matter of the material treated?

For are the tastes of a man of fifty any more permanent than those of a man of twenty-five? Can we not still say to him: “You will feel differently when you are older. You will look back to the person that you now are as to a stranger: to a man with different affections, different ambitions, and a different way of living. These present enthusiasms of yours will in their turn pass, we can assure you. They will pass into the tepid preferences of old age, and you will sit in the smoking-room of your club, the chief pleasure of your life an immunity from gout, the chief problem of it the avoidance of a draught.” Can we, with any greater justice, condemn the problems of twenty before the tribunal of forty-five than we can those of fifty before those of eighty? The brain is not useless now because it will one day soften; teeth not inefficacious because they will eventually decay. The young man will hardly listen to the impotent antiquity who assures him that the charm of woman is a snare and an illusion. “When you have reached my age it will no longer move you.” In a world of fugitive sensation there is no fixed point at which anyone can say, “thus far and no farther.” We have a right to our own age; to the problems, the turmoil, the compensating enthusiasms of our age, and we have an equal right to the literature best suited for their nourishment and inspiration.

In the same way a particular period has a right to the literature best suited to its needs. Books follow a wave of recurrent popularity and depreciation. The masterpiece of 1820 is the Aunt Sally of 1850, but by 1880 it has been restored to favour. “The masterpiece is the mood, and all moods pass save Shakespeare and the Bible.” This from George Moore. But of Shakespeare, as of others. He had little, or nothing, to say to the eighteenth century: to that unrivalled period of elegance and polish. They re-wrote “King Lear”: they made it end happily with Cordelia in Edgar’s arms. Shakespeare’s tragedy was described by Mr Tate in the dedicatory epistle to his own version “as a heap of jewels, unstrung and unpolished, yet so dazzling in their disorder that I soon perceived that I had seized a treasure.” We are inclined to smile at such ridiculous folly. “So that is all they knew,” we say. But I think Mr Tate did wisely to rewrite “King Lear” in the idiom of his own time. The eighteenth century which produced Swift, and Addison, and Pope, was not less cultured than the century that produced Shakespeare, and Donne, and Milton, and compares very favourably with ours that has produced—but I will not be personal. It is enough to say that the eighteenth century had a perfect right to say: “This is what we like.” It could justify by its creations its exclusiveness. And, at the time, it was so very certain it was right—as certain as we are to-day that Clifford Bax is abundantly justified in the slaughter of Mr Gay’s dialogue and verses that he has made in his new version of “Polly.”

With what emotions, I wonder, must the wraith of John Gay have witnessed at the Kingsway Theatre the triumph of his opera. He can have hardly failed to find, after an interval of two hundred years, the enraptured reception of his work intensely gratifying. But he can equally have hardly failed to wonder what in that interval can have happened to his play. “This,” we can imagine him to have said, “is all of it, of course, perfectly delightful.” But it was for a very different thing that London was divided into two camps, and the Duchess of Queensberry was forbidden the Court. I wrote a political and social satire. I transported to the West Indies the most notable of my creations in “The Beggar’s Opera.” Mrs Trapes I placed in charge of an establishment which courtesy permitted me to describe as an “academy for young gentlewomen in song and dance.” Of Macheath I made a pirate chief, disguised with a blackened face, and wedded, to his no great comfort, to Jenny Diver. In the scandalous person of Mr Ducat, the colonel of the militia, I satirised British colonial administration. Polly Peachum, who had come to the island in search of her rascal husband, alone, I permitted to be an agreeable and virtuous creature. And by making her marry, after the well-merited execution of Macheath, the Indian Prince Cawwawkee, I established the superiority of the “noble savage” over the weak, cowardly, and self-indulgent white man. That was my opera. But of all this I find remarkably little in the version that Mr Clifford Bax has so elegantly adapted and Mr Nigel Playfair so successfully produced.

“The social and political satire has been removed, No comparison is drawn between the virtues of the black man and the white. Macheath is never even threatened with the fate that I had prepared for him, but is restored in health and charm and vigour to the eager embraces of his faithful Polly. A good two-thirds of the play is not mine at all, and though I am highly sensitive to the charms of its many bewitching lyrics, I can claim but a small share in their authorship. It is all, as I have previously remarked, perfectly delightful; but what has happened to my play?”

We like to think that Mr Gay must have, by now, realised how extremely bad his own edition was. We venture, whatever biographers may state, to discern in his work the presence of a genial unpretentious personality. By now, we say, he should have acquired a sufficient sense of detachment from the jealousies and rivalries and feuds of the early eighteenth century to realise that he himself had made a sad mess of it, that Clifford Bax is perfectly right, and that it would have been impossible for Macheath to die, or the divine Polly to be wedded to a black.

Doubtless they said much the same of Mr Tate two hundred years ago. To the dandy of 1720 it seemed as impossible that Lear should die as is to-day the execution of Macheath. And, as Clifford Bax has found in Polly’s misfortunes the single string on which might be threaded the characters and incidents that would have been otherwise irrelevant, so Mr Tate discovered in the love of Edgar for Cordelia the missing unity of Lear. Mr Gay’s Polly was as impossible to-day as Mr Shakespeare’s Lear was in 1720. In 2020 who knows but Mr Tate’s version will be upon the boards of the Lyric, Hammersmith, and His Majesty’s will be staging an unexpurgated Gay. Each age takes the food it needs. Like wine in bottles, some books deteriorate and others mature.