“HOPED FOR THE DAY WHEN THE ISSUE
MIGHT BE TRIED OUT PHYSICALLY”
Then he took his departure with interesting abruptness. Almost immediately the Lady B. was extending her hand in an almost pathetic farewell. Her voice was lofty, sad, sustained. I wish I could describe it. There was just a suggestion of Lady Macbeth in the sleep-walking scene. As she made her slow, graceful exit, I wanted to applaud loudly.
Mrs. W. turned to me as the nearest source of interest, and I realized with horror that she was going to fling her Picasso at my head again, and with as much haste as was decent I, too, took my leave.
Another evening I went with an American friend to call on two professional critics, one working in the field of literature, the other in art exclusively. I mention these two men and their labors because they were very interesting to me, representing, as they did, two fields of artistic livelihood in London, and both making moderate incomes, not large, but sufficient to live on in a simple way. They were men of mettle, as I discovered, urgent, thinking types of mind, quarreling to a certain extent with life and fate, and doing their best to read this very curious riddle of existence.
These two men lived in charming, though small, quarters not far from fashionable London, on the fringe of ultra-respectability, if not of it. Mr. F. was a conservative man, thirty-two or thirty-three years of age, pale, slender, remote, artistic. Mr. Lewis was in character not unlike Mr. F., I should have said, though he was the older man, artistic, remote, ostensibly cultivated, living and doing all the refined things on principle more than anything else.
It amuses me now when I think of it, for of course neither of these gentlemen cared for me in the least, beyond my momentary vogue or repute in their small world. I must have appeared somewhat boorish and supercilious, but they were exceedingly pleasant. How did I like London? What did I think of the English? How did London contrast with New York? What had I seen?
My head was ringing with what I had already seen. London was going around in a ring for me. Its vast reaches were ever in my mind. I stated as succinctly as I could that I was puzzled in my mind as to what I did think, as I am generally by this phantasmagoria called life, while Mr. Lewis served an opening glass of port, and I toasted my feet before a delicious grate-fire. Already, as I have indicated in a way, I had decided that England was deficient in the vitality which America now possesses, certainly deficient in the raw creative imagination which is producing many new things in America, but far superior in what, for want of a better phrase, I must call social organization as it relates to social and commercial interchange generally. Something has developed in the English social consciousness a sense of responsibility. I really think that the English climate has had a great deal to do with this. It is so uniformly damp and cold and raw that it has produced a sober-minded race. When subsequently I encountered the climates of Paris, Rome, and the Riviera, I realized clearly how impossible it would be to produce the English temperament there. One can see the dark, moody, passionate temperament of the Italian evolving to perfection under his brilliant skies. The wine-like atmosphere of Paris speaks for itself. London is what it is, and the Englishmen likewise, because of the climate in which they have been reared.
I said as much without much protest, but when I ventured that the English might possibly be falling behind in the world’s race, and that other nations, such as the Germans and the Americans, might rapidly be displacing them, I evoked a storm of opposition. The sedate Mr. F. rose to this argument. It began at the dinner-table and was continued in the general living-room later. He sneered at the suggestion that the Germans could possibly conquer or displace England, and hoped for the day when the issue might be tried out physically. Mr. Lewis laughed as he spoke of the long way America had to go before it could achieve any social importance even within itself. It was a thrashing whirlpool of foreign elements. He had recently been to the United States, and in one of the British journals then on the stands was a long estimate by him of America’s weaknesses and potentialities. He poked fun at the careless, insulting manners of the people, their love of show, their love of praise. No Englishman, having tasted the comforts of civilized life in England, could ever live happily in America. There was no such thing as a serving class. He objected to American business methods as he had encountered them, and I could see that he really disliked America. To a certain extent he disliked me for being an American, and possibly resented my literary actuality for obtruding itself upon England. I enjoyed these two men as exceedingly able combatants—men against whose wits I could sharpen my own.
I mention them because, in a measure, they suggested the literary and artistic atmosphere of London. They went about, I was informed, to one London drawing-room and another. Mr. F. was considered an excellent judge of art; Mr. Lewis an important critic. Their mode of living constituted a touch of the better Grub Street of to-day. It was not bad.
“London sings in my ears.” I remember writing this somewhere about the fourth or fifth day of my stay. It was delicious, the sense of novelty and wonder it gave me. I am one of those who have been raised on Dickens and Thackeray and Lamb, but I must confess I found little to corroborate the world of vague impressions I had formed. Novels are a mere expression of temperament, anyhow.