Papers from Lilliput

by J. B. Priestley

THE world is at once saner and yet more given to lunacy than it used to be, for the people outside asylums are saner than their grandfathers were, yet there are greater numbers under some sort of treatment, or at least under lock and key, for madness. I do not know whether it is because there is increasing harbourage for lunatics in our time, or because it is merely becoming more difficult, every year, in the face of specialists whose own sanity is never questioned, to prove that one is not yet ready for the madhouse; but it is clear that the eccentrics and half-wits who chuckled and grimaced in our older literature, through the long tales of our grandparents, are fast disappearing. A host of notable figures in Shakespeare, from Hamlet to Petruchio, would not be suffered to walk abroad these days unless they piped in a lower key. It is a great pity that all the crack-brained, whimsical fellows are leaving us; we need a little variety in our experiments with existence, for there is a danger that we are all crazed and have only decided for unanimity, that we are Mad Hatters who will not suffer a March Hare; and these others, extravagant but harmless, have their own visions of life and we cannot prove them wrong, but can only point to the majority—a trick unworthy of us.

These bold experimentalists, the crack-brained, are now so few and so precious, that I travel with one eye open for them; for a man is as well, if not better, occupied collecting eccentric essays in life, as he is casting about for ancient coins or earthenware. Remote towns or villages make the most promising hunting-grounds, and only a short time ago, my search was well rewarded in a certain small market town. I had been in the place several days, and had come to know most of its prominent figures well by sight, when one fellow, whom I was always seeing, here, there, and everywhere, began to excite my curiosity. He was an oldish man, with a close-shaven, tanned face, and always dressed in gaiters and what seemed to be a long smock, with a curiously-shaped cap, of the same material as his smock, pressed down upon his head. These and other particulars I noted with interest, but what intrigued me most was a long pole, roughly shaped like a shepherd’s crook, which he always carried in his hand, and which seemed to be some implement of his trade. But what his trade was, I could not guess; I never saw him employed in any way, never caught him piloting beasts towards the market or making any kind of use of the mysterious pole. Yet whenever I ran across him, which I did frequently, he always seemed to be fully occupied, neither rushing heedlessly nor yet loitering, but resolutely pressing forward to some important piece of business—a sober man of affairs. Even in a little market town, there are many ways of earning bread and beer that fall outside the scope of a stranger’s knowledge, tiny trades that are commonplaces in one shire and unknown in the next, and I might easily have contented myself with assuming that my man was thus engaged. But the archaic costume and the quaintly fashioned pole, now so familiar, were too provocative, and led me to question my landlady, whose talk was fluent and full of good matter, though rather obscure. I had scarcely begun my description of the man before she had snatched the subject from me and panted forth the whole tale.

In spite of his quaint figure, I had set my man down as a sober busy citizen, engaged in some obscure little trade of his own. He was nothing of the kind. He was even more fantastic than his clothes, more mysterious than his own strange implement. For it appeared that this fellow was nothing more nor less than a crack-brained idler, one who had—in my landlady’s words—‘gone soft in the head.’ Up to a few years ago a lonely quiet man, expecting nothing from the world, he had suddenly come into a fortune, and the surprise and joy that followed this stroke of luck had turned his brain; thenceforward he blossomed madly and ran to amazing whims and crotchets, harmless enough, but strangely odd and diverting. His greatest and most delectable fantasy was this, that he took upon himself, from time to time, the duty of acting in a definite character, usually one of the ancient trades of the world; he would dress himself for the part, and, so far as it was possible, take over the habits, the interests, the mode of speech of the particular type he copied. Thus, he would be a sailor for some time, then a fisherman, and after that maybe a gamekeeper or forester; always dressing himself accordingly and keeping strictly to the type, and not declining to the actual indistinguishable characters of our own day, but presenting in his attire, as it were, the ideal sailor or forester; and so, tricked out in such homely yet symbolic vestments, perhaps thinking to take a place with the poet, ‘in the calm and proud procession of eternal things.’

When I saw him, he was a shepherd; indeed, a shepherd appeared to be his favourite character, for he had maintained the part for some time, and, according to report, showed no signs of changing. There are few shepherds in that part of the country, and the few there are do not wear smocks or carry a crook as he did. But he followed his usual practice, looked back to a simpler, smaller and more clearly defined world, and dressed the part to mark it off from all other trades. It was the least he could do, seeing that he did no actual work and devoted all his energies to the masquerade. His apparent busyness was all moonshine. The sheep he herded could not be driven to any mart in this world, for they were nothing but drifting phantoms. When he walked the sunlit streets, his grotesque shadow pursued by laughter, he hurried to mythical appointments, moved in shadowy markets, and trafficked in thin air. At the end of the day, after being urged here and there by his lively fancy, doubtless he returned home as tired and as well-content with his day’s unsubstantial labour as any sober man of business; sometimes maybe he would return elated, at others mortified, for there must be triumphs and grievous losses even in this matter of pursuing phantoms. Then, in the evening, his crook laid aside, perhaps he would make his plans for the next day; but what such plans could be, no man can imagine, for they must be dreams within a dream and shadows of a shadow. So he would pass his time, hurting no man, his life, like that of all such quaint fellows, only marred by loneliness. Nor would he lack a companion, supposing his present whimsy holds, if I had my way; for somewhere in a large and dirty city there is a sheepdog that I once knew, a dog that had never known the life it was meant to lead, never seen the hills with the sheep scattered upon them, and yet, in the yard of a warehouse, it spent its days herding invisible sheep, running round bales and barking furiously at barrels. Were that dog mine, the crazy shepherd should have him, so that the two might walk the streets together, happily pursuing their mythical flocks and otherwise busying themselves in their dream-pastures.

The maggots of the brain are not to be enumerated and labelled: what led this harmless fellow to such fantasies, no man can know. Perhaps after the sudden stroke of fortune sent his wits wandering he had been mastered by some old thought, some half-forgotten protest against the drab formlessness of labour in our day, against the absence of any marks of distinction between men of one trade and men of another; he had reverted to a more ordered clear-cut time, when every man was stamped with the sign of one or other of the ancient industries. Only in some such way, can one attempt to explain this strange masquerade of his. He has his own vision of life, his own idea of that poetry which transfigures the mechanism of blood and bone; and I trust that he will be left to himself to go his own way, for when he is weary of a shepherd’s life, there are still many time-old tradesmen, from tinker to tailor, that he can personate. Nor will it be long before I see him again, caring little whether he is still a shepherd or metamorphosed into a fisherman or cobbler, so long as he is still with us, going his own fantastic gait.

AUDACITY IN AUTHORSHIP

THERE is one certain characteristic of contemporary literature which everyone must have remarked, but to which it is very difficult to give a name. It is straining language to call it this or that quality; yet a name it must have, and Audacity will do as well as another. At the worst, it is more than audacity, it is downright impudence; at the best, it becomes engaging sauciness, youth pirouetting to the breakfast-table, or rises to magnificent unwisdom and shows us, once again, the bright fool darting before the van of the angels. It must not, however, be confused with stark originality, which presents us with the strange shape of some creature new to this world, and which is far above mere audacity. There are many ways in which a writer may approach his audience: he may seem to let us overhear him, may seem to meditate aloud, in the manner of Pater; he may take us into a corner and pour out a stream of confessions and confidences, in the manner of Hazlitt; or thrust us into the darkness and belabour us back again into the light, in the manner of Carlyle; there are these and a score of other ways, but the most of them are going out of fashion. It is all ‘Boot, Saddle and Away!’ with so many of our writers now, and we, as unoffending readers, are continually harassed by the sallies of these wild horsemen. No longer are we to be soothed, cajoled, fascinated or awed; unless we are shocked or irritated, the trick fails. We must be surprised by one or two great blows, or goaded into admiration by a thousand pinpricks. We must all play the part of poor, elderly, disapproving relatives, while our authors strut about as wild young nephews, who expect nothing from us but unwilling admiration and envious side-glances. Never was there such bravery at the end of a pen.

What then, one asks, are the signs and marks of audacity in literature by which it can be recognised in this place or that. They are countless. The ramifications of this fantastic growth cannot be traced; it blossoms so wantonly, drops such strange fruit, that a man has already seen it everywhere, or almost everywhere, or is by nature blind to it, having perhaps been nourished upon it, and knowing nothing else. It comes out in so many different ways that only a few can be noticed here. When a writer shows undisguised contempt for his readers, as so many writers do, then audacity is degenerating into sheer impudence. This sort of contempt is usually shown in two ways: firstly, by supreme carelessness in matter, as if to suggest that the very dregs of our author’s mind are good enough for his particular audience, and perhaps better than the best of his fellow authors’ brains; secondly, by supreme carelessness in manner, as if one were to receive callers in a greasy dressing-gown. Persistently to attack the cherished illusions of the reading public or to run athwart the accepted morals of the time, are tricks that will bring their own rewards while audacity is in the ascendant; but they are not lasting. A modern dramatist who has made much capital out of these tricks must be puzzling his brains now to know what to do with a generation that has no illusions left. Again, one of our novelists who has played the naughty young man from Paris for some thirty-odd years, now finds himself regarded as a respectable elderly man-of-letters. To many, Bernard Shaw’s Life-Force seems a sentimental crotchet, and George Moore’s earlier works seem more fatuous than disreputable. If, however, there are enough of the disillusioned to make an audience, a writer who knows the value of audacity will not hesitate to swing back the pendulum by defending the old prejudices with all the force at his command. This may be the clue to the audacity of G. K. Chesterton, who has spent his time declaiming against the only people who can understand and enjoy him. Again, the characteristic may take other unwelcome forms that bring it near to impudence, as for example in the work of men who gain the ear of the public in one capacity, and then insist upon acting in another, as when a good teller of tales turns without warning into a philosopher or prophet: it is as if M. Pachmann were to ignore the piano before him and treat his audience to a few fumbling conjuring tricks. Moreover, to pronounce judgment on matters about which one knows nothing is to carry audacity to doubtful lengths. Criticism offers, and has always offered, a good field for the audacious, but a great many of us now tend to abuse our freedom. Without knowing a word of Italian and Portuguese, a man will undertake to write twenty essays proving that Camoens was a better poet than Tasso. And of late it seems that audacity of the baser sort has invaded the realm of verse; every day, our poets are more startling, though not so startling as their friends and critics.

Looking about then, with no unfriendly eye, we shall discover that audacity, not of the worst kind, is to be found in much of the best known work of to-day. It is not everywhere: there is little or no trace of it in the work of Hardy, Bridges, Henry James, Conrad, W. H. Hudson, Galsworthy, Maurice Hewlett, to name only a few. But elsewhere, though mingled with other finer qualities, there is no lack of it. It takes many strange shapes, and can be discovered lurking under many disguises. It has proved itself no small part of Bernard Shaw’s stock-in-trade. It roars lustily through the essays and ‘histories’ of Messrs. Belloc and Chesterton, peeps slyly from Max Beerbohm’s essays, screams in the devastating contributions of H. G. Wells, leers through George Moore’s endless reminiscences. It drove Arnold Bennett to write essays, and is now urging John Drinkwater to create dramas. After being long the servant, it is now the master of Barrie. There is no end to it. Fortunately, these are not gentlemen of one characteristic alone; they do not content themselves with crying ‘ducdame,’ for they have still something to say when the circle is formed. But there are others, novelists, verse-writers, critics, and what editors call ‘publicists,’ who think to run their course with nothing to speed them but audacity alone, which makes them doubly audacious, but nothing more. The drums beat, the trumpets sound, the crowd is hushed, and then follows a cough and a splutter—and then silence.

When did it begin? In its primary form, no doubt it is a characteristic as old as literature itself. It is there, full-fledged, in Aristophanes. The Hebrew chroniclers and prophets had audacity of a sublime kind. Perhaps there were once wild young literary men in China, and no doubt many an impudent papyrus in Babylon and Ancient Egypt. But in the more questionable shape we know, audacity in literature is a thing only of yesterday and to-day. Going back, we come first to Wilde, who was nothing if not audacious, an impudent confidence-trick man-of-letters. Then, Stevenson and Henley, not without a touch, surely, though more audacious in the flesh perhaps than on paper. Again, Butler, a very clever man, perhaps a great man, but still a shockingly bad precedent for young men inclined to flippancy and petulance. There is Bagehot, whose genuine originality is not unspeckled; and further back, we see the young Disraeli, busy upon Contarini Fleming, and compounded of velveteen, macassar oil and impudence. And now we come to Blackwood’s young men, Christopher North and Company, beginning a career of literary swashbuckling with the Chaldee MS., and culprits one and all, triple-dyed in the fearful purple. And if a poetic criminal is wanted, there is Byron, who, from the sheer impertinence of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers to the magnificent audacity of Don Juan, gives us every form of impudence rhymed and rhythmed; who began the game of making the bourgeois pay for being shocked, and continuously boiled his pot with the heat of their disapproval. But can we stop here? The graves stir, and a crowd of thin ghosts press forward, waving innumerable ragged volumes. There is the lean spectre of Yorick, and, close by, the author of Jonathan Wild, while a little way behind, one catches a glimpse of Swift, and Defoe, and Buckingham, and a hundred more. But their claims must be denied, for we must not fall into the error of using our make-shift term ‘audacity’ in its widest sense, and thereby running back to the Ptolemies in search of origins; we must save something for ourselves in literature, and we have already confessed that a certain audacious trick of writing belongs to our own age; so we will take our stand upon Byron and Blackwood’s merry men, and go no further.