“And this is what we bring you in exchange. We bring you the opportunity of living to their full the best years of your life, eighteen to thirty-three. You will dance night after night at the Savoy. Poiret will design your dresses; you will drive through the London streets in the deep comfort of a Daimler; you will meet men of the world, brilliant, interesting men: barristers, financiers, doctors, artists. You will live romance. You will love deeply, you will suffer deeply. You will pass from the extreme of happiness to the extreme of pain. You will love no longer than love pleases. You will be the swinging pendulum. You will never rest. You will fulfil yourself.”
“And afterwards?”
The world shrugs its shoulders.
“That,” it says, “is your concern. You have had those years. It depends on whether you are clever and far-seeing. You may save much money; you may marry; you may become a respectable dowager. Or, with your connection, you may open, very profitably to yourself, a manicure establishment. But that is your affair. If you are wasteful and improvident, life may be very hard to you. That is, we repeat, not part of our bargain. We offer you those fifteen years.”
And is that offer so very different from the offer that the world makes the artist? “You have talent,” the world says. “We found that first book of yours to a high degree diverting. We are content that you should amuse us for a while if you so choose.” And are the alternatives so very different? The future presents no less dark a menace to the novelist. He knows that, sooner or later, he will out-write himself, that the public will get tired of his tricks, that he will cease to be original and they will clamour for something new. If he has saved money during his days of fortune, or if he has managed to establish himself in some sound commercial concern, in an Editor’s chair, or on the board of a publishing house, well and good. But if not, if he has saved no money and is at the end of his resources, he is driven to the equivalent of the courtesan’s dreary tramp down Jermyn Street and Piccadilly to hack ill-paid journalism in the columns of the provincial press. And the artist is in exchange offered the same wages. He is offered the opportunity of living to its full the best years of his life. He has money, he is well known. He is not fettered, as his contemporaries are, with office hours. He is free to do what he likes, go where he likes, make love where he likes.
Much has been written of the amours of poets, and novelists, and actors. They have earned a publicity far beyond the range, possibly also beyond the desire, of the financier’s. And the artist has been always inclined to attribute the dimensions of his success to his personal magnetism, to his powers of finesse and intuition. But it would be more modest, certainly more generous, in him to return gratitude for the unparalleled opportunities for gallantry with which the circumstances of his life provide him. Far let it be from me to disparage in any way the triumphal progress of certain distinguished and notorious persons. I would merely point out the disadvantages under which their less gifted rivals are conducting operations.
Consider the position of the city man. His daily routine is a matter of general knowledge. In order to carry on his business a great number of people must know where he is at any given moment to be found. His secretary should even know where he is lunching. If the telephone may be, and it doubtless is, of considerable assistance in the happy ordering of an intrigue, it is of no less service in the detection of it. If a wife rings up her husband in the afternoon and finds him away she begins to wonder. She knows, too, at what hour he leaves his office in the evening. If he is not home half an hour later her wonderment increases. He has either to resort to a lunch in a cabinet particulier or he has to manœuvre with endless deception a week-end, or a business trip to Leeds. Every assignation has to be skilfully arranged. There is small scope for the sudden, the unpremeditated moment. It is as machine-made as the hosiery he handles.
But if it is hard to conduct an intrigue, it must be infinitely harder to start one. Even nowadays the majority of women are under some sort of masculine protection; there is either a husband or a father, or a fiancé or “an uncle.” And at the only hours when he himself is free that masculine protection is in operation, a fact that the realistic novelist is in the habit of overlooking. One wonders sometimes how they get started, these affairs of which we read every other day in the evening papers. At haphazard, possibly. Adjacent bedrooms at the end of the passage in a country house. A husband detained in town: a sudden opportunity seized at eagerly—the sort of thing, though, that happens more frequently in literature than in life. Certainly not an accident in the hope of which a conscientious Casanova would be prepared to delay action. Either that, though, or else a purely business proposition. A lunch at the Carlton grill, and over the liqueur the offer of a flat and five hundred pounds a year. Paul Bourget is reported to have remarked that the only folk worth writing about were those with large incomes; because it was only people without employment who were able to develop themselves naturally, which sounds foolish enough; but as adultery is the invariable background for Latin fiction, it was possibly some such predicament that Bourget had in mind.
Often enough, indeed, a man’s love-life is a spectacle to the novelist for melancholy contemplation. In the years that should overbrim with kisses, he has neither the money nor the leisure for much love-making. He is economically and temporally dependent. He indulges in occasional flirtations that he dare not pursue, believing it unfair to make love to a decent girl if he is not in a position to propose marriage to her. Occasionally he buys pleasure in some fourth-floor flat in Piccadilly and feels rather “a dog” about it. He marries when he is thirty-four, and the next three years are the most vital, the most personal he will ever know. Rapture passes; and having once drunken, he would drink again. He begins to sow his wild oats; wild oats must be sown at some time in a man’s life, and the casual bartering of sensation is of no significance. But by the time a man is thirty-seven he knows too much and has seen too much to become the light-hearted philanderer he might have been in the earlier twenties. A woman writer—I think it was Rebecca West—wrote somewhere something to the effect that it was not the bad man, not the philanderer against whom a young girl should be warned. The Jurgens and Casanovas and Macheaths have received so much happiness from women that they repay happiness with happiness. They are the sun that shines and leaves, after its setting, a sense of gratitude. It is against the spiteful man, against the man who has been unsuccessful with women that a young girl should be protected. That is the man who will be unkind to her. And I think it is a bad thing when a man on the verge of middle-age sets out deliberately to sow wild oats. He will be taking revenge somewhere for his starved boyhood. The chance to make the most of the years best worth having is the greatest offer that the world makes to the young artist whom it would turn into an entertainer.
But, even so, I doubt whether this bribe would overcome the instinct of preservation that cautions us to play for safety, were there not that other, that more powerful inducement, the love of one’s work for its own sake.