Another of our guests was Mrs. Justice Partridge, who was one of the first of my sex to take the silk, and actually the first, I believe, to attain the Bench. She used to tell the story of one of the first cases she had to try. The offence was criminal wife-beating, and everybody was expecting her, as a woman, to be particularly severe over it. The accused, an Irishman, was equal to the occasion, and explained that he was “just taychin’ her her place in the house, the same as you would your old man, yer Honour.”
Talking of Irishmen reminds me of another distinguished visitor of ours, Daniel Geraghty, the Prime Minister of Ireland at that time. I remember asking him why it was that Ireland, since her liberation in the twenties, had never done much that was memorable in the way of literature, having produced so much till then. “It’s a simple thing,” he said, “it’s just that we Irishmen have no imagination. We’re hard, business folk by nature. When you English had it all your own way, you always liked to believe, and always wanted us to believe, that we were just dreamy sort of fellows, only fit to dream in a pig-sty or a garret, the way we’d starve contented. It’s always the way with you conquering races, you admire your subjects for the qualities that won’t be dangerous to you. Excudent alii—it’s the same all the world over.” I have never made up my mind whether he was right, but it certainly looks as if he was justified.
At another time, we entertained Fothergill—the younger Fothergill, of course, not the one who wrote Fifteen Years in a Fijian Larder. He came to us when he had just had the distinction of discovering the last race that was left to be discovered—the Ibquo’s in South America. He said they were a fascinating people, very simple in their character and very primitive in their habits. They knew nothing of flying, of electricity, or even of steam, and they used petrol only as an intoxicant. When they had to travel a long distance, or to pull heavy weights, they would take one of their tame mustangs and fasten it to a wheeled cart, and then drive it along with a whip, pulling the cart behind it. Their cooking was done over a fire, usually of coal; and their sacrificial meals were always cooked in vessels of iron, not aluminium, because it would be “bad magic.” They believed in a good Spirit which ruled the world, and in a bad Spirit which only had power to hurt them if they did wrong. They had great respect for old age, and generally chose some of the older men of the tribe to be their counsellors; if a child disobeyed its parents, it was punished. They also regarded their women with great veneration, and you would often see a man getting up from his place by the fire to make room for a woman who had none. When there was a marriage, the bride was solemnly escorted by her friends to the house of her future husband, where she was henceforward to live. The men worked in the fields; the women stayed at home and cooked for them, and also looked after the children, of whom there were often as many as eight or nine in one family. I seldom remember spending such an interesting evening.
It was not at my own house but at Lady Leek’s that I used to meet the literary men of the period. I did not care for having them at Greylands, or even at Chiswick, because they were liable to wear such odd clothes, and to talk so very loud, and to bring the strangest people in with them, quite uninvited. But they were very interesting people to meet, there is no doubt. The trouble about their writings was that they spent almost all their time writing about one another; sometimes in appreciation, sometimes in criticism. Occasionally one of them would break away from the tradition by writing about the men of a previous generation—there was Bernard Sykes, for example, who wrote a book that was very much talked about at the time, in which he tried to show that Lord Kitchener was a bad general, and that Herbert Wells was not really religious. But mostly they stuck to their own generation and criticized each other’s works about each other. The novelists could not do this exactly, but even in the novels the heroes were always novelists and the heroines female novelists, and they all settled down in Chelsea and lived unhappily ever after. Novels were very long in those days, running to three, or four, or even five volumes. Archie Lock used to say that he always took Debrett with him when he went on a journey, because it was the only book you could still get in one volume. “And very creditable to them,” he added, “considering the pressure on their space.” Of course the old “adventure stories” had not quite died out, but they were dying out rapidly—the Tarzan Syndicate, for example, decided to confine itself to films about this time. Publishing was already so expensive that all books except technical ones had to be produced by subscription. So the only novels one had were very long and very literary. It was only Jenkins’ invention in the seventies that made them cheap again.
I once met Henricourt and heard from him the story of his early struggles. He was a Civil Servant on £600 a year when he wrote his first masterpiece, The Kleptomaniac. It was one of the most realistic books of the century, and critics said that Chapter LXVII of the first volume, which begins with the hero falling into a deep, dreamless sleep, and ends just before he wakes up, was one of the most powerful things ever written. He took it to a publisher, who said there was a printers’ strike on, and they were not producing anything but school books at the moment; why didn’t he film it? He said he had thought of that, but the manager had said it would want a reel about as long as the Equator, and asked him to cut it: he said that would be false to his Art. The publisher said he’d better store the manuscript somewhere and write another book that would catch on with the public—his reminiscences, for example—and then have the Klep. in reserve. He said it was the one thing they weren’t allowed to do in the Civil Service, write Reminiscences, it was so apt to create a false impression. Couldn’t the publisher see his way to producing the first volume, anyhow, dividing the risks? The publisher said it couldn’t be done unless he could guarantee a sale of 4,000. In despair, he went to a Touting Agency, and asked them if they could find him 4,000 subscribers for what was really rather a remarkable novel. They asked if any important public characters came into the book under pseudonyms. He said no, that was against the principles of his Art. Finally the agent said he thought he could get the signatures if Henricourt wouldn’t mind his pretending that the book was a translation from the Lithuanian, written by a blind Lithuanian patriot. Henricourt agreed to this, and so the subscribers were procured and the great work was produced after all.
Poetry in those days had hardly felt the influence of the neo-classical school, and our poets still went in for using the language of common life, the commoner the better. To show the sort of thing that was popular, I don’t think I can do better than give you a page from the Index of First Lines in a volume of collected Edwardian Poetry, which Lady Travers-Grant[[14]] gave me on my fiftieth birthday:
| EDWARDIAN POETRY 1960–1965—INDEX | |
|---|---|
| Damn all these lousy pamphleteers | 87 |
| Damn and blast, blast and damn | 36 |
| Damnation! has that flat-faced woman gone? | 103 |
| Damn Billy Smith, he’s pinched my girl | 45 |
| Damned if I care what these nincompoops say of me | 156 |
| Damned if that stud hasn’t come loose once more | 43 |
| Damned if we’ll sweat, you greasy sycophant | 52 |
| Damned in these mucky estuaries of hell | 113 |
| Damn her! Where did she get those saffron eyes | 11 |
| Damn him! | 73 |
| Damn him! What the | 128 |
| Damn it all, I’ve swabbed these beetle-squashers | 59 |
| Damn kindness! damn faith! damn humanity! | 97 |
| Damn my eyes, if yonder paling moonlight | 77 |
| Damn Nero for a mawkish hypocrite | 80 |
| Damnonian maidens, in your sluttish smocks | 34 |
| Damn silly? Yet if this damned silliness | 62 |
| Damn the Church and damn the State | 39 |
| Damn those little ears of yours, my darling | 101 |
| Damn you, Charles, you’ve spoilt it all | 1 |
| Damp as the Morgue on autumn afternoons | 100 |
I suppose the mechanical school of poets are hardly to be found at all in modern bookshelves, and yet there was a time when Edgar Pirbright was enthusiastically reviewed, and you would see his book, “By Helico to Helicon,” lying on the tables of all his personal friends. He was obsessed with the idea that mechanical triumphs, being part of Man’s self-assertion on the planet, are infinitely better subjects to be celebrated by the poet’s typewriter than Nature, “that irrelevant mass of geological strata and atmospheric effects,” as he called it. He even went so far as to bring out an anthology from the older poets, in which he included a great deal of Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold and other writers who had shown themselves hostile to the march of civilization; but he had, as he said, adapted them—which meant that he had altered them freely so as to suit his own doctrines. Some of it was ingenious, and even contained a good deal of original work: for instance, when you read the stanza:
Our fathers watered with their tears
The sea of time whereon we sail;