And next day they lunch together, and the wretched business begins again at the beginning. He daren’t bring things to a head; he daren’t part with her. He daren’t make sure, and it was with a strong man’s love he won her.
How does it end? If I were to attempt the conventional magazine short story I should have to contrive, I suppose, a dramatic climax. But things rarely happen like that, really. There is a working up to a point and a falling away from it. As spring passes into summer, so as one enthusiasm wanes another comes to take its place. We are never rid of our desires; we change them, that is all.
The life of all mortals in kissing should pass,
Lip to lip while we’re young, then the lip to the glass.
And of last love, as of second love and first love; it passes calmly enough probably in the end. There will be an American tour, perhaps. And when she returns they will meet as friends. There will be no abrupt severing, “coupé net en plein ardeur.” There will be a pause, and during it he will decide that the time has come for him to grow old decently. But anyway the end is unimportant. The emotional climax is reached on that night of jealousy, in the weakness of a strong man, in his desperate clinging to a waning ecstasy, his cowardice, his determination to know the truth, his pitiful desire to be deceived; and in the rallying of his dignity at the last moment, his refusal to be “gaga,” to play “Père Goriot.”
And it is because the climax of such a relationship comes then, that I have preferred to write of it in the form of an essay, rather than of a story; a short story must close on a dramatic curtain. And if a situation does not offer a dramatic curtain, it is wrong to make a story of it: it would be either a bad story because it would have no climax, or it would be an untrue story with the high light flung on a climax that was manufactured and incidental, instead of the significant, the universal moment, the hour of jealousy and self-contempt, the hour when a strong man sits before a telephone watching the second hand eat away the minutes.
It could be done, though, in a novel; it would make an admirable opening chapter to the story of a woman’s life: it would have to be told probably through the woman’s eyes; its early motif would be the arrogance of youth as it strides contemptuously over age. There would be the middle years of turmoil and success, and then the story would turn back upon itself. The woman would fall in love with a younger man and would find herself, in her turn, being used as a stepping-stone for youth. And as she stands watching youth ride past her, she would know all that her early lover had known and suffered.
The love of a mature woman for a boy is a theme that has been used often enough, especially in French fiction, but never quite in this way, perhaps, never as a key to unlock the heart of a man’s last love. But then it is a woman’s theme perhaps rather than a man’s; and we must remember always that, with the exception of some dozen books, the masterpieces of prose literature, and indeed of all literature and all art, are the work of a masculine intelligence. It may be that the contemporary women novelists are better than the contemporary men novelists. It may be that to the nineteen-eighties the great writers of the post-war period will be May Sinclair and Clemence Dane, and Rebecca West and Sheila Kaye-Smith. It may be, I do not know. I should myself doubt whether there is to-day a single woman writer, with the possible exception of Edith Wharton, who can begin to stand comparison with Thomas Hardy and George Moore, with Cavell, with Conrad, with Max Beerbohm, with Galsworthy, and with de la Mare. But one hesitates to dogmatise on living writers. This, at least, is sure. For many hundreds of years there have been pictures painted, and poetry written, and stories told. There have been a few writers of genius, and many painters, and poets, and musicians of great talent. There have been one or two minor poetesses, and there have been Jane Austen, and George Eliot, and George Sand. Women have inspired books, but men have written them, written them, perhaps, I sometimes think, chiefly with the object of giving pleasure to woman, of making themselves attractive to her. The monkey and the West Indian savage woes its mate with dancing, and ornament, and display. The mediæval baron instituted tournaments and exhibitions of strength and courage. Art is the fine raiment in which the civilised man arrays himself before a woman. And it is, perhaps, because women have need of no such artifice that their contributions to the museum of the world’s art have been so casual and so imponderable.
I believe that some such apologia has been made before, and I am half-inclined to feel that it was George Moore who made it. Certainly he has said somewhere that the most precious service that art has done to life is its exalting of an instinct into a revelation, its gorgeous apparelling of love. And whether or no he stressed the fact that it was a masculine achievement, it is a point certainly not to be disregarded by the critic of prose literature. For this is what it comes to, that the themes of the world’s great stories are masculine. And it is only youth that can write honestly and convincingly of age.
We are under the spell always of what is distant from us. From the bondage of marriage we survey the raptures of free love. And from the deceit, the evasions, the premeditation of an intrigue we turn our eyes towards the decent pasturage of matrimony. Riot is as real to the virtuous, as virtue to the riotous. It is experience that attracts innocence. And if a young man would write of last love, he has, in the love for him of a mature woman, the situation ready to his hand. There is no need for him to search further; it is thus that the story of youth and middle age is told to him. If he would write of a man’s old age, would go beyond maturity, he would select some Père Goriot, some aspect of wronged senility, some Fouan or King Lear. And by the time that he has come himself to middle age, by the time that he has reached that borderland, the theme of age is, because he is no longer remote from it, unattractive. The ageing novelist returns to youth, and first love, and the raptures of spring. In “The Man of Property” Galsworthy told the story of mature, devastating passion; he was then at that point of balance of which Shakespeare wrote. But mature love, and the love of middle age for youth had, when he came to complete the Saga, ceased to appeal to him. The love of Jolyon for Irene is never actual to us; but of first love, of Val and Holly, of Jon and Fleur; of the hesitations, the blindness, the enrapturement of dawning love, he writes as few save Turgenev have ever written.
Youth means nothing to us when we are young. It is gold that we spend freely. We push past it towards the future. To-day is as indifferent to us as yesterday. We set out to write a book and we do not find out till we have finished it what we meant to say. We have lost interest in our book long before we have corrected the final proof. We are at work already on some new thing. We hardly pause to read the reviews of the book that we handed to our publisher with such excitement six months earlier. What does it matter what they say about that book. We have got beyond it. It is a part of our dead self. We are living in to-morrow. People come up and say: “We like your last book,” or “We don’t think that your heroine would have fallen in love with that sort of man,” or, “Do you think that he would really have behaved quite like that?” And we smile and we say, “Perhaps.” But we are thinking of the new story that is shaping itself in our brain, the new story for which we have already prepared a series of brand-new note-books. I am always surprised when I find a writer of under forty genuinely depressed by his reviews. Surely he must know, I think, that all this is only his apprenticeship, that he is learning how to write, and that a generous public is financing his education. He has not begun yet.