And so back to that original, that disconcerting fact that Florence Barclay was to me ten years ago an equivalent for Turgenev. She meant as much; she revealed as much. She touched the heart as surely and as deeply. And again comes that uncomfortable knowledge that a book is after all only a focus for ourselves, a spade to unearth the absolute. And does it matter what sort of a spade you use as long as the work gets finished? The object of any emotion is of less matter than the intensity of the emotion that object has evoked. Is a love any the less real, less tender, less passionate, less unselfish because it has been inspired by a shallow, trivial, worthless woman? Does it very much matter whence we derive that state of heightened consciousness that we undoubtedly reach through literature, as long as we do reach it? We come the richer from King Lear, from Anna Karenin, from Lycidas, because these books have revealed to us what is eternal in ourselves. In their company we have forgotten momentarily the anxieties, the ambitions, the frivolities that dazzle and distract us, that move in glittering, bewildering profusion on the surface of our lives, that belong to time and space. In such moments of heightened consciousness we are in harmony with ourselves, we see ourselves as a part of that pattern that Pater spoke of, the pattern whose threads pass out on either side of us.
And it is towards such moments that we are always striving, for the most part indirectly, striving in our work, our love affairs, our amusements and distractions. We are dissatisfied with what we are and with what we have. That which is immortal in us struggles towards what is remote, in the hope, in the belief that it may prove immortal. It may be that books add something to our emotional, our intellectual stature, that they are the rich soil in which we dig for treasure; but I prefer to think that we are the rich soil, that we contain an immortal spirit, and that our ultimate success or failure must be judged by our ability to keep that spirit nourished and alive. If this be so, and it is a philosophy that commended itself to Wordsworth, are we not right in saying that Florence Barclay and Turgenev are fulfilling a similar function in different spheres?
There is no difference in the quality nor the intensity of the emotion. I am, I believe, tone deaf, and I have a perfectly deplorable taste in music. But by some music I am very profoundly moved. Sometimes it is by music with which I have personal associations—marches and dance tunes, and that, of course, strictly speaking, should not count. The emotion is inspired not by the music, but the scene evoked through it. But quite often it is by some catchy affair heard for the first time in a restaurant or across a street. I listen to it with enraptured pleasure, thrilled by the tricks and twiddles and syncopations, and I am quite prepared to accept my companion’s assurance that it is a cheap, vulgar, sentimental thing. “I do not care,” I say, “these things are relative. It moves me, therefore to me it is a masterpiece.”
Everyone has, I suppose, at one time or another paused to examine the windows of the type of bookshop that abounds in certain streets in the west end of London. They are curiously alike, these places. One side of the window is stocked with articles the nature of which it is unnecessary to particularise, and the other side with such literature as the management appears to consider most likely to encourage the purchase of them. The selection of that literature does not greatly alter with the passage of time. There are no spring and autumn seasons in these bookshops. Occasionally some new novel finds a home there; occasionally a callous or unenterprising publisher allows some fading favourite to pass from circulation. But there is, on the whole, a commendable fidelity to old friends. Were you to be transplanted miraculously to the Piccadilly of 1926 you would find of the volumes that to-day adorn so proudly the front tables of Mr Hatchards’ bookshop scarcely half a dozen, but the appearance of the questionable shop window will be probably no more altered by 1930 than it has been since 1910. Victoria Cross will be there, and Elinor Glyn, and the confessions of the retiring aristocrat who is content to sign himself “A Peer.” There will be the same French classics, Droll Stories, Madame Bovary, A Woman’s Life. The alliterative titles of Gertie de S. Wentworth James will show against a circle of entwining arms. Between Bel-ami and Anna Lombard will be spread enticingly A Bed of Roses. The public, whatever it be, that patronises such establishments knows its mind.
They are good hat-racks, these bookshops, for ridicule, for denunciation, for satire. They can make a sermon for the priest, a middle for the journalist, a simile for the politician. For the student of life they are a subject of speculative curiosity.
What is, we ask ourselves, this public with so catholic a taste? We rarely see anyone enter one of these bookshops. There are always two or three people gazing enviously at the window, but self-consciousness restrains them. They dare not publicly declare their interest by purchasing a volume. Indeed, there are times when we wonder how these shops carry on their business at all. Are they, we wonder, a spectacle and nothing else? Do the same books remain there from one season to another for the simple reason that no one buys them? A pleasant fancy, but apparently they do carry on a very excellent, a very thriving, trade. I once asked a proprietor if the trade slump had at all affected him. “Very little,” he said. “Just before the armistice I ordered two thousand copies of Five Nights, and I sold the last one yesterday.”
Two thousand copies of one book in one shop in three years. That man must have sold on an average two copies of Five Nights every day. Can Mr Bumpus say as much for Shakespeare? Two thousand copies in three years! It is easy, of course, to shrug one’s shoulders, to say: “But for such stuff there will always be a public.” And yet so vague a gesture provides no explanation of this incredible popularity. The appeal of Five Nights is not, I believe, due to what bishops describe as the baser instincts of human nature. Victoria Cross wrote it in the innocence of her heart, firmly believing it to be a good book. It is a sincere book as The Rosary is sincere, and The Way of an Eagle is sincere. It is written with feeling; she enjoyed writing it. Its sentimental sensuality is warm and cloying and pleasant, like a hot bath after too good a dinner. There even comes a moment when the heat of the bath mingling with the heat of Pommard makes us ask ourselves whether it is such appalling drivel after all. A couple of pages more we decide it is; but there was that moment of doubt.
Thus it happens, I conjecture.
The shop assistant as he hurries homewards at the close of his day’s work is moved with a sense of envy for the eager life of pleasure that wakes in the city only at the moment that he leaves it. His own life is tedious, with small excitements. He feels the need of vicarious sensation. The cover and title of Miss Cross’s masterpiece allures him. And as he journeys home he is pleasantly excited by the description of the painter’s intrigue with the Chinese. He feels otherwise, however, when he meets the heroine, and is confronted with what appears to him as a picture of nobility and self-sacrifice. He is deeply moved. That it is bad literature does not matter. It is enough that it should arouse in him the same thoughts and emotions that Anna Karenin stirs in a man of letters. He feels himself in touch with a great passion, a passion that can override the convention of an hour and a place, that destroys life but makes of it first a thing worth having. In the world of popular fiction Five Nights bears to The Rosary the same relation that in the world of literature Manon Lescaut bears to On the Eve.
I read while I was a prisoner in Germany Elinor Glyn’s novel, Three Weeks, and I remember thinking that it was of its kind the very worst novel that I had ever read. The grand passion is as rare as genius, and it is as difficult to make the grand passion convincing in a novel as to make a genius convincing. The novels in which a grand passion has been “got over” could be counted on the fingers of one hand. But never, I felt, had any novel of passion failed more lamentably, more inexcusably, than Three Weeks.