“All great men work slowly,” he said. “Flaubert took seven years over Madame Bovary, and I shall take only a year over this,” and with a sudden sweep he flashed the discussion back on to his pet subject of words.
“You see, I’ve done 48,374 words, and there are three more chapters of approximately 3000 words each. Now will that be enough?”
I told him that Mr. Grant Richards had stipulated in one of his weekly advertisements, that if he liked a book, it could range between the limits of 45,000 and 200,000 words, and Tarrant once more returned peacefully to his addition.
Stone, Tarrant’s constant companion through the tedium of eighteen months’ imprisonment, was chiefly conspicuous for his conversation. Nobody ever actually saw him writing, or had indeed read anything he had written, but he always carried about with him a notebook, that gave the impression that he had either just risen from his labours, or was merely waiting the inspiration of the moment. As a scholar and a critic he was easily the most brilliant of our little circle, and it was delightful to hear him dethrone the idols of the twentieth century. He had very little use for any critic since Pater, or any novelist since Sterne. Of the modern novelists he maintained that the only two worth considering were H. H. Richardson and Arnold Bennett, though to Gilbert Cannan he extended a hand of deprecatory welcome. Wells was the chief target of his wit.
“I don’t know what to make of him,” he used to say. “Sometimes I think we may almost excuse him on the ground that if he had not written the New Machiavelli, Perkins and Mankind would not exist. But, really, as I read his recent stuff, Marriage, The Soul of a Bishop, Joan and Peter, why, Max has ceased to be the parodist of Wells, Wells has become the parodist of Max.”
As an actual “Wordsmith” Stone enjoyed a reputation something similar to that of Theodore Watts. One felt that he had only to publish what he had written, and he would receive world-wide recognition. In the notebook that never left him, he was supposed to carry the key that should unlock his heart. There lay two completed poems, and a tenth of a novel. But they were quite illegible. None of us ever saw them. Occasionally when the influence of Rhine wine had somewhat weakened the phenomenal barrier that separated Stone’s mentality from the real world of his metaphysics, he would promise to inscribe them for us in the morning in the full indelibility of purple pencil. Once he even went so far as to recite one of them; but the words came to us droningly sweet through a mist of inaudibility, and there remains only the recollection of certain sounding words, a low murmur as of a distant waterfall. In the morning all the promises were forgotten, and sometimes I have been tempted to wonder whether those poems had any real existence in the sphere of phenomena. Stone was so at the mercy of his metaphysics, he indulged in expeditions into a world whither I had neither the wish nor the ability to follow him, and perhaps he merely imagined those two poems as some manifestation of that inexplicable “Thing-in-itself” over which he was so concerned. Perhaps they had no counterpart in that draggled notebook; and though it is quite possible that some day we shall see those poems immortally enshrined in vellum, personally I rather doubt it.
Those hours in the Alcove contain all I personally would wish to remember of my captivity. It was a delightful room, with its white tables and windows opening on the fowl-run; it was a perfect place in which to write. The click of billiard balls, and the murmurous rise and fall of inaudible conversations provided the ideal setting for thought. Personally I can never write in a room that is quite silent; its isolation frightens me, and through an open window I listen in vain for the indistinct noises of humanity.
And then towards evening, when the labours of the day were ended, we would sit together round a bottle of a villainous brand of Laubenheimer and discuss the merits of Tchecov and de Maupassant. Long contests were waged there on the vexed problems of æsthetics; the limits of dramatic art, vers libre, the function of criticism. All these in their turn passed through the sieve of dialectic. At times even captivity seemed a pleasant business, so full of leisure was it, after the bustle of the months that had preceded it. And no doubt years hence, when the rough outlines have become gently blurred against a harmonious background, we shall cast a glamour over those lazy days, and see in them a realisation of Bohemian dreams, of a Paris café and Verlaine leaning over a white table-cloth declaiming his lovely valedictory lines. And perhaps Time, that great alchemist, may even go so far as to transmute that foul white wine into the purest absinthe. We shall think of Dowson and the Cheshire Cheese, of the Rhymers’ Club and the delightful artifice of the nineties, and we shall claim companionship with those brave innovators to whom a finished work of art was a sufficient recompense for their weariness. But within it was not really like that; and as Pater has said, no doubt that ideal period of artistic endeavour has never had any existence outside the imagination of the dreamer, sick with a sort of far-away nostalgia, a vague longing for wider prospects and less narrowing horizons. Every generation has flung its eyes backwards over the past, and thought “if it had only been then that we had lived—then, when the values of life were still clear and simple,” and round certain names and ages there has been woven in consequence the thin gossamer of Romance, and the artist has found comfort in his conception of a world that has been passed by. From these backward glances and averted faces has emerged much that will never pass—Thais and Salambo, Henry Esmond and Marius the Epicurean.
During the last three years I have often wished that I had been born thirty years earlier, at a time when the influence of French literature was making itself so keenly felt, and when Verlaine was the light about the young men’s feet. It is a glamorous world that we catch glimpses of through the opening doors of Mr. George Moore’s confessions. But I suppose that really it would not have been so very wonderful after all, and that those delicate creatures whose feet moved through Symons’s verse to a continual rustle of silk and cambric, were probably the most tawdry of grisettes, and those Paris cafés and the many-coloured glasses of liqueur, they were very much like the Alcove, I expect; and the Alcove is a place where no one would wish to sojourn indefinitely.
But we shall always look back at it with some affection. We spent there many happy hours, and there the weariness of captivity was relieved by the human comradeship that alone makes life endurable. We shall not easily forget how, when the billiard-room was closed for the night, we used to step out into the square, just as the sunset was flooding it with an amber haze, and walk beneath the chestnuts, prolonging the conversations of the afternoon, until the cracked bell and waking lights drove us back to the barracks. I shall never forget those evenings. Probably never before was the citadel—that home of militarism—the scene of so much artistic discussion; and it may be that in after days our ghosts will linger round those memorial places, and that on some quiet evening two tenuous and ungainly forms will be seen swinging down the avenue beneath the chestnuts—