About a year ago there was a symposium in The Strand in which a number of novelists were invited to name that book of theirs of which they had most enjoyed the writing. Several writers said that they had not enjoyed writing any of them; that they had enjoyed the planning, the revision, but that the actual writing was hard and unpleasant work. I wonder. I suppose they were sincere. But I was glad to see the other day in an American paper an article by Hugh Walpole saying that he continued writing simply because he “loved it—it, telling stories.”
Money and leisure and gratified ambition are prettily coloured toys; but they are flavour, they are decoration; there does not come from them the deep, the sustaining satisfaction of a hard task tackled and carried through. It does not matter whether one writes well or badly: there is the same joy of creation, the same pleasure in watching the blank page fill before one’s eyes, in counting up the number of words that are the outcome of a morning’s work. There is the physical sense of effort; the physical weariness to be fought against, when one’s brain is eager with ideas, but one’s wrist is stiff and tired—when one longs to drop the pen and sink into an armchair. But one doesn’t drop the pen; one goes on, and it is worth it.
It is bowling up hill, against the wind, to keep the runs down while the man at the other end gets wickets. You have bowled ten overs; your legs and arms and back are tired. For sixty balls you have kept that length outside the off stump, just too short to drive, just too far up to cut. You have altered your pace a little; you have bowled first from the far end of the crease; then from close up against the wicket. Little tricks to keep him playing, to break his patience, so that he may make the fatal mistake at the other end against the man with wind and slope to help him. And you are tired. It is heart-breaking, the Fabius Cunctator game. You long to chuck the ball over to the captain, to say, “I’m tired, I can’t go on.” But you know that he cannot trust his other and better bowler to keep on at that length ball: you know that the wickets must come from the top end. You stick to it. You bowl another over and you get your second wind.
There is no such thing as work without physical exhaustion, and writing is physically the most exhausting thing I know, far more exhausting than the hardest game of rugger, or the longest day in the field. It is such an emptying of oneself. I tried dictating once, but I did not like it. I got through a terrific lot of work in a very little while. But I did not like it. I missed the sight of the white page slowly turning black, of the rising pile of paper at my side, and the long struggle of the brain against the growing weariness of wrist and fingers.
For, whatever happens, the love of writing stays even with the sorriest of hacks, the man who can afford to write only occasionally the thing he wants to write, who has to produce magazine fiction, and reviews and paragraphs, so that he may buy the leisure in which to write his verses or his unmarketable stories. We stint ourselves in one way so that we may squander ourselves in another. And, here again, we can find an analogy in the courtesan, in the woman who sells part of herself to one man that she may give herself more fully to another. In a love freely given she recovers her self-respect. “What does it matter,” she thinks, “what I do as long as I can make that one man happy. And because I allow a few favours to that rich old Jew, I can give to that other what he could have never got from those pink and white, those simpering, bread-and-butter misses.” It is in the same spirit that the purveyor of cheap fiction finances the publication of his verses.
We are of the same race and the same blood, speaking the same language, having no part in the world’s business, in what is serviceable to the commercial machinery of life. Even if what we produce is a marketable commodity, even if we bring money into the pockets of publishers and promoters and actor managers, we are still the merchants of entertainment. For a while we have ceased to be rogues and vagabonds. We do not dine, as strolling players did, in the servant’s kitchen. We are, for the moment, almost respectable. We belong to clubs. We wear no distinctive dress. It is indeed the fashion for the artist of the day to look perfectly ordinary, to be, in fact, like everyone else, with short hair and servant problems. To-day Congreve would be content to style himself a dramatist and be a member of the Garrick Club. It is a phase. It is only the surface of life that alters. Another turn of the wheel and the artist will return to his own people. And he will stroll from one town to another, with minstrels and actors and courtesans, a merry, careless company, vagabonds of fortune, useless and ornamental. And once more, perhaps, there will be real play-acting and English singing and a-telling of simple tales.
XI
THERE is an idea that story-telling is a cheap and vulgar thing; that it fulfils no function; that it does not enlarge our knowledge of human character and human life. And yet who is the more distinct to us, Michael Fane or Sir Launcelot, Guinevere or Sylvia Scarlett? The character of Michael Fane has been presented to us through many thousand words of detailed analysis. Sir Launcelot is the hero of a few incidents. But we know Launcelot better than we know Michael, for all his many volumes. And do we know Jean Christophe as well as we know Saul and Joab and the son of Jesse? There are fifteen hundred pages of Jean Christophe, fifteen hundred pages of turmoil and conflict and desire; in retrospect a confused impression. But we never forget the Sabine incident, that perfect story, that diamond in a copper ring. The outline blurs; one character merges into another. But there remains the picture of Sabine sitting listlessly before her house; of Sabine pulling down the blind across the window on the night when she realises that Jean loves her; of Sabine shelling peas; of Sabine searching for a button in the disorder of her shop; of Jean and Sabine shivering on either side of the door afraid to turn the handle. Forty pages out of fifteen hundred, but the most perfect in the prose literature of the last forty years.
Turgenev never organised his thought as Tolstoi did. He did not explain himself in constructive argument. He had no need. There is implicit in his work, the most gentle, the most tolerant, the most harmonious philosophy that has been expounded by man since the Sermon on the Mount. And Turgenev was a story-teller. He knew that no language speaks more directly to the human heart than that of simple narrative. The Russians hated and distrusted him, especially Dostoieffsky, who could never forgive Turgenev for being a gentleman. But there has never been anyone less a snob, intrinsically, than Turgenev, no one who has stood more simply, less assumingly by his achievements. He was content to be an artist, a maker of beautiful things. He did not, as Tolstoi did, assume the rôle of prophet. “If story-telling is a cheap thing,” we can imagine him to say, “I cannot help it. It is the thing that I was born to do.”
Turgenev knew that it was enough to create beauty: that it is unprofitable folly to ask a direct influence of art; that it is for the politician and the journalist, not the artist, to alter the social fabric. Turgenev was an entertainer; nothing more, and nothing less. To-day the artist has developed a sense of mission. He feels that he is here to get something done. And is in danger, consequently, of exchanging a temporal for an eternal view of life. We have come through our familiarity with the daily press to associate the written word with the statement of a case.