Judgments in Vacation

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

But although we may accept the statements of living authors, that they never feel moved to authorship by vanity, yet if we look at the records of those who are gone we shall find schools of literature whose mainspring has been conceit. Of such are the French Philosophes of the reign of Louis XV. of whom Carlyle writes: “They invented simply nothing: not one of man’s powers, is due to them; in all these respects the age of Louis XV. is among the most barren of recorded ages. Indeed, the whole trade of our Philosophes was directly the opposite of invention: it was not to produce that they stood there, but to criticise, to quarrel with, to rend in pieces, what has been already produced;—a quite inferior trade: sometimes a useful, but on the whole a mean trade; often the fruit, and always the parent of meanness in every mind that permanently follows it.”

And indeed in all critics there must be a marrow of conceit stiffening the backbone. Else how could they—who fell out of the ranks footsore on the march to battle—come along so complacently when the fight is over, to talk to the soldiers covered with the grime and sweat of their work, and tell them how easily it might all have been done without soiling the pipeclay.

All critics however do not write merely from this motive. There are many of course writing from the far higher motive of greed. Then there are some few who do it for the rare fun of the thing—to enjoy the intense annoyance it gives to foolish, sensitive artists—these are the mud flingers and corner boys of the trade, and of course a few critics have lived who played the game and knew it and brought a message of heaven-sent sympathy to the artist. Maybe such a one exists to-day, in some corner behind the clouds, struggling to let his rays shine encouragement on honest endeavour.

But apart from the writings of critics vanity and conceit have always been strong motives of authors. They are found especially in schools of literature, where the form is preferred to the substance. Take our eighteenth century writers and read the story of their lives. Can it be denied that they were a vain crowd? Even Swift, Pope and Addison—the greatest of them—were not without it. As for the smaller fry, with their degrading squabbles and jealousies—their very faces seem to me pitted with the small-pox of conceit. And throughout this period you have one symptom;—the writer exalting the letter above the spirit,—and when you find that, it is invariably the indication of disease, and the disease is vanity.

This is not only the case in writing. It is so in nearly all pursuits. When you begin to believe in technical excellence of form as an end in itself, it is necessary to become to some extent narrow, vain and conceited or you will not achieve your end. In those arts in which form is more essential to the art than substance, vanity and conceit are more commonly found. Thus actors, singers, dancers, and schoolmasters are often not without vanity. You may notice, too, that the minor technical pursuits of life produce a certain conceit. It is occasionally observable in the semi-professional lawn-tennis amateur. In a lesser degree too by many golfers the same vice is sometimes displayed, but more often in the club-house and on the first tee than during the progress of the game. When a man is deeply bunkered style becomes a secondary consideration.

But generally speaking all writers who think literature an affair of quantities, metres, syntax and grammatical gymnastics, all men who reverence literary form rather than practical substance, are bound to write in a spirit of vanity and conceit, which is the only petrol that can push them along the weary road they have chosen. It oppresses you to-day to find this spirit in nearly all the great writers of the eighteenth century. How Oliver Goldsmith stands out amongst them as the one great writer with a human heart; how we readers of to-day love him and reverence him with an enthusiasm we cannot offer to Addison himself.

But enough of conceit and vanity, let us turn to our second motive—a far pleasanter and more everyday affair—greed. I should put Shakespeare among the first and greatest whose motive was greed. I cannot imagine anyone taking the trouble to write a play from any other motive, certainly not from a lower motive. Shakespeare’s main desire in life, if we may trust his biographers, was to become a landowner in Warwickshire—possibly a county magistrate. What an ideal chairman he would have made of a licensing bench. Would Mistress Quickly’s license have been renewed? I doubt it. Shakespeare wrote plays for the contemporary box office to make money out of them and thrive. As Mr. Sidney Lee tells us he “stood rigorously by his rights in all business relations.” There being in those days no law of copyright he borrowed all he could from common stock, added to it the wonderful flavouring of his own personality and served up the immortal dramatic soup which nourishes us to-day. After this fashion of borrowing, if Emerson be right, the Lord’s Prayer was made. The single phrases of which it is composed were, he says, all in use at the time of our Lord in the rabbinical forms. “He picked out the grains of gold.” It is the same if you think of it with Æsop’s fables, the Iliad and the Arabian Nights, which no single author produced. And so must all great work be done, for we are nothing of ourselves and if we do not take freely of those who are gone before we can do naught. But only those have the right to borrow who can embroider some new and glorious pattern on the homely stuff they appropriate. Shakespeare had no vanity and conceit; no doubt he wrote for the fun of the thing, as all writers who are worth their salt must do, possibly—though I for one doubt it—he knew of the message he was delivering to the world; but that he wrote his plays primarily for greed, the few records of his life that we possess seem to me to prove beyond reasonable doubt. Unless, of course, you are mad enough to believe Bacon wrote the plays. Then indeed the motive power of the author was greed—greed of a baser sort than Shakespeare’s—for the great Lord Chancellor never did anything that I know of, except a few trivial scientific experiments, from any other motive.

But when I speak of Shakespeare and greed, I speak as a modern and not as an Elizabethan. Greed in Shakespeare’s day meant the greed of filthy lucre, the insatiate greediness of evil desires. It was an insanitary word in those days. But greed to-day means something quite otherwise. When I speak of greed as the main motive of authorship I use the word, not with any old-fashioned dictionary meaning, but in an up-to-date, clear-sighted, clarion, socialist sense. You speak to-day—those of you who are in the movement—of the greed of the capitalist, the greed of the employer. In this way I speak of the greed of the author. The greed of anyone to-day is the greed which urges him to endeavour to enrich himself and provide for himself and his family by using his brains in producing things. Incidentally he may employ a vast number of people with less brains or no brains, incidentally he may ruin himself after he has used his brains, and paid a large number of people in publishing the result of his brain-work; but do not let us in an age of socialism gainsay that it is pure greed to use your brains for the purpose of putting money into your own pocket. It is true this kind of greed led to Columbus discovering America—but if he had not done so how many fewer capitalists there would have been. Sir Walter Raleigh, too, was a bad instance of a man moved by greed; we cannot acquit Drake, or the great Lord Burghley or even my own historical heroine the Maiden Queen herself. The greed of Elizabethan England is a thing to shudder at, if you are a real socialist, and Shakespeare, I fear, must be found guilty from a modern standpoint of having written his plays from the simple motive power of greed.

I am the more certain of this for the only Shakespearean play of modern times “What the Butler Saw,” was written, I am ashamed to say, from similar motives. I happen to know that this is a play after Shakespeare’s own heart. I learned it in a vision. I am not a believer in dreams myself, but there must be something in some of them, and mine is worthy of the consideration of the Psychical Research Society. It was after the first night of the Butler in London, and after a somewhat prolonged and interesting supper with some of those responsible for the production,—in psychical research supper should always be confessed to,—that I had a curious dream of the people who were present at the theatre. Many who appeared had actually been present, others had not. Milton and Oliver Cromwell, both came up to me and hoped it would not have a long run—Wordsworth, I remember, wanted to know what the Butler really did see, and Charles Lamb, winking at me, took him away to tell him. It was then that Shakespeare came and patted me lightly on the shoulder, saying “It’s all right, my young friend”—young of course from Shakespeare’s point of view—“I couldn’t have done it better myself.”

Many will wonder why this story has not long before this gone the round of the press. The answer is that I am not a business man. I once mentioned the dream to a spiritualist, who said that there was no evidence that it was the shade of Shakespeare—it might have been the astral body of one of the inhabitants of the Isle of Man. I replied that then we should have heard of it long ago.