Papers from Lilliput

by J. B. Priestley

There is one plain reason for the existence, or rather the success, of the audacious in our letters. It is not so much that writers have changed as that the audience has changed. When all that is written goes the round of one small circle of readers, is pondered over by the same leisurely few; when a writer’s style and manner are discussed by those about him, and are matters of some moment, an ordinary man of letters will imitate what seems to him the best manner of the time, and a greater man will be simply himself, bringing something new into the world; but among greater or less there will be little mere posturing. A man addresses his equals jovially, carelessly, angrily, as the mood takes him; it is only for pennies in the market-place or at the fair ground that he continually makes faces and stands on his head. With a small, critical audience, some fashions of writing are not in place, being entirely unwelcome: we have not yet allowed the trombone and big drum into our chamber music. But when the little circle of readers begins to swell until it is enlarged beyond recognition by rush after rush of newcomers; when journals and newspapers begin to thrive, and the old groves and porticos take on the appearance of an auction mart, then it is time to change the manner. The audience is huge, with half its wits gone wandering, a great Saurian blinking at the mud, a thing to be tickled with a ten-foot spike; it plays the part of a vast, drowsy auctioneer lolling above a clamouring crowd of buyers, men-of-letters trying to catch its eye; and what avail now are the level tones and the sober argument when only a squeak or a roar or an insane gesture is likely to attract attention. And now that over a century has passed since the times began to change, since the literary man left his armchair and took to eating fire and swallowing the sword, if we choose to write we shall do well if we escape audacity, for it is woven madly into the texture of our letters, the note of it is louder than the loud bassoon. At the best, with a good will, we may abjure the more impudent tricks, but unless we are towering geniuses we cannot escape the characteristic itself: it is—alas!—the very marrow of this essay.

IN PRAISE OF THE HYPERBOLE

FEW experiences are more distressing to me than being present when a person is checked at the very climax of a tale because of some paltry exaggeration that he or she has made in the heat of the moment. Husbands and wives are always at such tricks, for it very often happens that a genial, expansive, imaginative person is united to one who is somewhat cold, literal-minded, devoid of fancy. A lady, finishing a tale and warming to the task, will cry: ‘No sooner had I opened the door than about fifteen people rushed out—.’ ‘No, my dear, you exaggerate,’ her husband will interrupt, ‘there were only three people there; I counted them.’ And if they are among friends, he will probably turn round and add: ‘Mary will exaggerate, you know; it’s quite a habit of hers.’ The tale then comes to a lame finish, and is indeed quite spoilt. We have been led, as it were, to expect fifteen people; the whole progress of the narrative demanded them; and then at the very moment that we are gratified by their appearance on the scene, four-fifths of them are whisked away and we have to be content with a paltry three merely to satisfy some busybody’s illtimed demand for accuracy. Accuracy, exact statements, hard facts, are very well; they have their uses in the world; but a man must not allow his passion for them to carry him to dangerous lengths, or he will not only give himself a creeping style but will try to spoil every tale that comes his way; such a one will soon be unfit for decent society and will have to take to writing to the newspapers—a vile end. Such literal-minded fellows, without imagination, without any sense of art, are the ruin of good talk; let them do the world’s work in laboratories and counting-houses, but when they are abroad let them keep quiet, or some of us will put them into monstrously exaggerated, scandalous tales, which will be doubly vexatious to them.

I say that these sticklers for the little facts have no sense of art. They appear to think that we distort their trumpery figures or enlarge a statement here and there, for no purpose whatever, but from sheer carelessness, lack of memory, or a mischievous love of lying. They are wrong and it is easy to see why. Such quibblers do not understand the working of the imagination; they have yet to learn that good talk is a form of art, and that exaggeration is one of art’s great devices, a worthy part of its process of selection and emphasis, by which any number of petty details are brought into unity and made to serve great purposes. When we are surrounded by good listeners and in the heat of narration, that swift creative power, the imagination, ransacking heaven and earth for its own ends, takes the reins, and we find ourselves changing the mere facts so that they will produce, at second-hand, the very feelings we experienced at first-hand. Because we are only in talk and make use of the device, clumsily maybe, it is called exaggeration and sneered at by some few, and sometimes even gives rise to charges of open lying; yet this very practice of making the outward show conform to the inward and real truth consumes fully one half the time and energy of every artist, or we are mightily deceived. We have Walter Pater on our side, for did he not write very wisely, in the Essay on Style, of the ‘writer’s transcript of his sense of fact,’ and what is this practice that pedants condemn but an attempt to reproduce ‘the sense of fact’? Nor can it be urged that Pater was prejudiced, for he was the very prince of your scraping, paring, meticulous fellows, and would have scaled greater heights had he had a few pulls at the Falstaffian brew. Why this ‘sense of fact’ should be approved as fine art in writing, and yet solemnly condemned as a wanton meddling with the truth in conversation, is a mystery. If a child catches sight of a very tall man, about seven foot or so, and rushes home screaming that he has met a giant at least four yards high, he will probably be spanked for letting his idle fancies make such a commotion; yet he will be justified by all the canons of good art and talk, for while seven feet sounds to be nothing out of the way, only a few inches above the ordinary run of men, a man actually seven foot tall does look four yards high, and it is only some such figure that will reproduce something like the original experience to persons who were not present.

Even when there is no interference with the fine flushed narration of others, this cheeseparing habit in talk is detestable. There are some men who will handle words and images in their talk as if they were making miniature watches instead of re-creating a world. Give me a man like Carlyle, who roared for the truth night and morning, and yet did not hesitate to juggle with the universe, to cut and carve it and parcel it out afresh, for his own good purposes. Where there is such divine bounty, to cut the fashion of one’s speech like some pitiful little tailor snipping his own cloth is the very height of meanness. It is base ingratitude, an affront to the maker of the stars, which are themselves numberless and born of a stupendous prodigality. Nature herself, the mother of us all, has a most queenly and delectable passion for hyperboles; the shadows of her monstrous exaggerations sprawl across the world, trumpeting through the forest as the elephant and floundering in the water as Leviathan. If it is Madame Nature who gives us the truth, who sets up the standard by which our talk must be judged, then there is hardly room in this universe for bold lying and no man should be accused of it.

The great poets follow Nature as closely in this love of the hyperbole as they do in other matters. It is your little poets, your timid versifiers, who write in fear of the raised eyebrows of the pedant and the guffaw of the unimaginative, and keep their images down to the level of coffee-room gossip. It is true that a man may rant it and roar it with the best, may try to scale Parnassus as the Titans did Olympus and pile up gigantic image upon image, and yet be no poet; but it is equally true to say that all great poets have shown the same love of amazing hyperboles. Those extraordinary persons who hate a swelling image, a genial exaggeration, who distrust the hyperbole, may read their Shakespeare (though I doubt it) but they cannot read him with constant pleasure. Most of his best things are either the most audacious yet triumphant specimens of the hyperbole to be found in literature or they are pieces of sheer nonsense. And with the poet’s own creatures we may note differences in the manner of their talk that are significant, some characters contenting themselves with merely taking hold of stubborn fact, and others fashioning the whole world to suit their particular moods. But all the great characters, the poet’s own darlings, whose speech and gestures linger in the memory, are lovers of hyperbolism and talk greatly. Dismissing Othello, Macbeth, Lear, Mercutio, Imogen, Perdita, and a host of other fine figures, we have only to examine the four that are considered his most perfect creations, Hamlet, Falstaff, Cleopatra, and Iago, to discover the truth of this. Iago has the trait in a less marked degree than the others; his talk keeps a closer hold upon circumstance; but then he is a deep rogue and has to act an unimaginative part. When he is left to himself and talking for his own satisfaction, we soon discover what manner of man he is, for then his fancy begins to boil and we hear muttered talk of Hell and Night, of poppy and mandragora. As for Hamlet and Cleopatra, they often seem to destroy the world and recreate it again in a single casual sentence; only the most towering images are allowed to wait upon their gigantic moods. And Falstaff—what of him? There are persons who disapprove of Falstaff; probably they are the very same people who will not tolerate any sort of exaggeration, who sniff at hyperboles, who dislike a thousand other fine things. We who love the hyperbolical both in literature and talk will take our stand on Falstaff, a sufficient bulwark against legions of such sticklers and quibblers. Small pedants thrive and statisticians creep on like an army of ants; the fiery nimble spirits that can turn mere words into so many soaring coloured balloons are departing from the world; if it were not for the poets, the Sporting Press and Mrs. What’s-her-name’s publishers, the hyperbole would be almost unknown to our generation. In a world of calipers, ammeters, burettes, speedometers, calculating machines, card index cabinets, and blue books, where the fact is everything and its significance nothing, fortified by the great rampart of Falstaff, we will see to it that the hyperbole does not perish. Standing in that vast shadow, I for one am prepared to defend to the death even the story of the eleven men in buckram.

ON CARTOMANCY

A SHORT time ago, in a strange town, evil chance confined me in a dingy room overlooking a dismal little street and then, having done this, left me to my own devices, without company and with few books. A grey tide of boredom and depression was already threatening and would have soon engulfed me, had I not come across a little volume in a corner of the bookshelf. It was—to set forth the full title—Cartomancy, or Occult Divination by Cards. The identity of the writer was not revealed; he or she was shrouded in true oracular fashion. I had heard of fortune-telling by cards; indeed, I had vague memories of having my destiny unfolded, in the dim past, by elderly ladies who tapped the assembled cards impressively and talked of letters, journeys by land, and dark ladies. But I had no idea such occult knowledge could be gleaned from books. If I had thought about the matter at all (which is doubtful), I had probably imagined that the art of Cartomancy was preserved by oral tradition, handed down through generations of maiden aunts; or that the clue to its mysteries was the inalienable property of a League of Decayed Gentlewomen. But no, here it was in a trumpery little volume, sold everywhere for a shilling. Truly, this is an age of books.

So I lost no time in making myself acquainted with the art, and boredom fled. Nor could I have found a better preceptor, for in this little book all was revealed; with fitting gravity and wealth of detail, it set forth the meaning of the cards and the various methods of laying them out. Each card had a distinct meaning, which was modified by the presence of other cards. All this was made clear, but the instructions were delightfully free from pedantry: ‘If intuition leads you to give a different meaning, do so’ was the advice it tendered—and what could be better? There was good reason attached to the meaning of some few of the cards, which had a very pretty symbolism. What else could the Queen of Hearts be but a fair woman? What could be a better symbol of death than the Ace of Spades reversed? Never again shall I see that innocent piece of pasteboard without feeling a sudden chill. But the symbolism of most of the cards was not so obvious. Why—it might be asked—should the eight of diamonds represent a roadway journey, the nine of spades disappointment and tears, the ace of clubs a letter of good news? These are mysteries, and not to be lightly comprehended. All the cards, however, are alike in this: they stand for the life that the centuries leave unchanged, the eternal verities of human existence, the things that are significant alike to the emperor and the clown; they do not adapt themselves to any pale, half-hearted way of living, but are downright and talk boldly of birth, death, and marriage, of jealousy, love and anger, of quarrels, accidents, and sudden endings. As to the various methods of shuffling, cutting and laying out the cards, the little book dealt with all these matters with high seriousness and at some length; and no sooner was I acquainted with one or two of the methods than I began to put them into practice. ‘These coloured scraps of pasteboard,’ I said to myself, as I ranged the cards, ‘shall be the tiny windows through which I will stare at the past, and peer wonderingly into the future. And I shall be as a god.’

As no other person was near, I decided to read my own fortunes, past, present, and future. I learned from the book that this was a difficult thing to do, and so I found it. True it is that through the medium of the cards, ‘the gay triumph-assuring scarlets—the contrasting deadly-killing sables’—as Lamb called them, my fortunes appeared to take on richer hues, to run to more passionate extremes, than I had imagined; and in the vague mass, both my past and future took on the aspect of a riotous, crowded pageant of love and intrigue, of tremendous sins and strange virtues. All this was heart-stirring enough, but there were difficulties waiting upon any sort of direct interpretation. Though I lived splendidly, and appeared to swagger through an existence crowded with incident, the whole fifty-two, hearts and all, seemed to combine to make me out a rascal, whose mind must have been corroded with the ‘motiveless malignity’ of an Iago. Why, for example, should I rejoice at the death of a dark boy in a railway accident? Why should I hound a white-haired old gentleman to his grave? And why—for there were numerous other incidents of this kind foreshadowed—should my villainy always take this vile form? Was I this kind of man, I asked myself and the cards, after each new instance of my calculated knavery, and if not, at what precise moment in the near future were all the forces of evil to take command of my soul. So I abandoned the attempt to discover my own fortunes, and, turning to the book, found that if one ‘thought strongly of one’s absent friends’ it was possible to dip into their past and future.