Mentally, I acquiesced in her condemnation. And it was not worth while to explain that I assisted at these beanfeasts because I believed they amused Barbara.
3
“This is what remains,” I told Bertrand, when he insisted on holding a post mortem.
“These people don’t amuse you?,” he cried.
“They interest me,” I answered. “Looking on, listening . . .”
Since I had given up dancing on the outbreak of war and am one of the three worst bridge-players in London, I was thrown back on the delights of conversation; and, as every gathering included a contingent of Barbara’s literary friends, I tried to discover what inspiration they had won from the war. It was soon, however, made abundantly plain to me that the dangers of this quest were more apparent than the delights. I was welcomed at first—I hoped for my own sake—to the little circles of young writers, who—for want of better accommodation—camped on the landing and stairs outside my dressing-room. Soon, however, I found myself being used as a stick to beat my literary editor for having beaten one or other of my bitter-tongued guests. When I refused to help, they took the beating into their own hands. The “top-hat school of fiction” was flayed by the “sham-corduoroy school”, the “high-brows” by the “pin-heads”, the “best sellers” by every one. Shocking tales of self-advertising were exchanged for dire revelations of log-rolling; and critics who had been unanimously condemned a moment before were unanimously reprieved on condition of their taking service against yet another school that did not happen to be represented in our symposium.
“Aren’t you perhaps exaggerating the importance of contemporary opinion?,” I asked as soon as I could make myself heard. “If the men who praised and blamed twenty, forty, sixty years ago could read their notices now, they’d find they hadn’t spotted one winner in five hundred. If you’re suffering at the hands of irresponsible reviewers, you’re suffering in the company of Meredith and Hardy.”
And then I left the rising generation of writers, who had slain more reputations in half an hour than my staff could hope to scotch in six months. Truth to tell, I felt rather unworthy of their too discriminating society. Hampstead was so suspicious of Chelsea; Chelsea was so contemptuous of Bloomsbury; and all three were so scornful of Mayfair that I thanked Heaven my house was two hundred yards north of Oxford Street. The few names that these exotics praised were always unknown to me; and I was ashamed to admire publicly the work which they damned so comprehensively. If the war was to produce a new Elizabethan splendour of imagination, I saw no sign of it at present: perhaps we should have to wait a generation till the stench of blood and the shriek of shells had been forgotten.
“Are your very modern friends doing any good?,” I demanded of Barbara, when our party had dispersed. “If you were analysing the effect of the war on art . . .?”
“D’you get any reaction from their work?,” she asked. “In art there’s no such thing as absolute good.”