FORD MADOX FORD

It Was the Nightingale

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JOHN COYLE

It was the nightingale, and not the lark,  Which pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear. 

Romeo and Juliet

Contents

Title Page

Epigraph

Introduction

A Note on the Text

IT WAS THE NIGHTINGALE

To Eugene Pressly, Esquire

Part One “Domine Dirige Nos”

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part Two “Fluctuat Nec Mergitur”

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Part Three “E Pluribus Multa”

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Index

About the Author

Also by Ford Madox Ford from Carcanet Press

Copyright

Introduction

‘There was never a day so gay for the arts as any twenty-four hours of the early twenties in Paris.’ Ford’s arresting opening promises daylight and gaiety, glamour and art in an eye-witness account by one who is at the very centre of things, at the centre of modernism, the greatest editor of his day:

Paris gyrated, seethed, clamoured, roared with the Arts. Painters, novelists, poets, composers, sculptors, batik-designers, decorators, even advanced photographers, so crowded the boulevards that you could not see the tree-trunks. They came from Tokio, they came from Petrograd; they poured in from Berlin, from Constantinople, from Rio de Janeiro, they flew in locust hordes from Spokane, from Seattle, from Santa Fé, from all the states and Oklahoma. If you had held up and dropped a sheet of paper on any one of the boulevards and had said ‘I want a contribution,’ a thousand hands would have torn you to pieces before it had hit the ground. (p. 259)

We are not let down. Scenes and portraits from Ford’s memoir include Ezra Pound bursting into the office of the transatlantic review, ‘waving his cane as if he had been Bertran de Born about to horsewhip Henry II of England’; George Moore as a Flaubert bleached with blotting paper (a precise impression of a blurred naturalist); Joyce and Proust discussing not their art, but their maladies until eight in the morning, surrounded by the awed faithful; Gertrude Stein driving through Paris like a pharaoh in her chariot, as well as appearances by Brancusi, Juan Gris, Picasso, May Sinclair, Frank Harris, D.H. Lawrence, Norman Douglas, Wyndham Lewis, ee cummings, and a cast of White Russian colonels and conscientious objectors, impresarios, bootleggers and gatecrashers. Among the new writers whose influx from the Midwest Ford celebrates is Ernest Hemingway, and one might expect from Ford’s opening sentence something along the lines of A Movable Feast, but it is the special quality of Ford’s highly subtle and novelistic narrative that it invites us to consider not just the parade of literary celebrities à la Hemingway, but at what cost such glamour was won as well as the enormities such glamour offered distraction and oblivion from.

In short. Ford digresses, for about one third of the book, and then digresses again and again until we realise that the real point of the book lies elsewhere. Our anticipation of the delights of Paris is left in abeyance as we return to a haunted night of post-war trauma, This is the first of Ford’s trademark time shifts: the entire first part of the book sees Ford not only absent but banished from Paris and France. The very title speaks of the time being out of joint: Romeo’s exultant appeal to Juliet that it is in fact earlier than she thinks is twisted here into a dark praeterition, the narrative reverting to the limbo between the end of the war and the start of the twenties, as a shell-shocked Hueffer surveys the ruins of his career and the end of another low, dishonest decade. The bird is also, of course, that of Keats, and we are also to think of the moribund’s doomed longing for beauty and the South.

It Was the Nightingale should be appreciated for its evocations of Ford’s great contemporaries at the height of their powers and in their full vitality and pomp; but just as striking, and structurally much more important, are its evocations of the great and the dead, the raising up of ghosts. Ford is fascinated with spectral presences of various kinds: the man himself is a kind of cultural embalmer, haunted by war, a compulsive ghost-seer. The whole narrative is triggered by the deaths within a week of each other of Galsworthy and of George Moore. The last sight of Moore is as a ghost (p. 19). Ford’s uniform renders him invisible, something to be resented, although the invisible are of course better placed to observe. The ghost of Conrad in penury is also summoned, while one of the book’s signal revelations concerns Proust’s influence. It is not the Frenchman’s work or life which spur Ford on, rather his death which gave him the impetus to take up a serious pen again and write Parade’s End. Nightingale concerns itself with various deaths – those of writers most obviously but also the war’s millions of unindividuated dead, as well as the metaphorical deaths of Ford’s career and reputation (he is at one point, he insists, ‘good as dead as a writer’). These deaths are finally succeeded by various rebirths and transformations, but only after much in the way of pain, distraction and expiation. This is a book of transitions, in which Ford portrays himself as crossing a shadow line between an earlier self and a new embodiment, so that Hueffer becomes Ford, The English Review becomes the transatlantic, Marwood becomes Tiet jens, and moribund London yields to the various cultural renaissances of Paris and New York (the book is in three parts, each bearing the motto of its governing city).

James Mizener insists that with It Was the Nightingale and its predecessor, Return to Yesterday, Ford ‘practically invented a form of fictional reminiscence; it may be a dubious genre but in it he wrote two fascinating books’. The fictional nature of the reminiscence is apparent in several ways. Right from the beginning, as we have seen, the strict temporalities of linear narrative are eschewed in favour of a highly mobile and fluid shuttling back and forth between time zones, so that Ford is left teetering on an uneven kerb stone in Campden Hill for some twenty-four pages, while his consciousness sweeps back and forth over past events and their connections. Maintaining this narrative involves a truth to impression which also borrows much from Ford’s fictional practice. While crossing the road from the Champs-Elysées to the Place de la Concorde, part of Ford’s mind is attending to his companion’s eulogy to the plutocratic lawyer and literary impresario John Quinn, while another is intent on negotiating a way between the streams of murderously speeding cars. The work is also, of course, fictional in the more mundane terms of Ford’s notorious habit of taking liberties with the truth: his knowledge of the work of his fellow novelists seems especially unreliable. Those wishing to tease out facts from fiction should consult Max Saunders’ exemplary biography Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life. Many of the versions of events in the volume are contestable, not least by Ford himself in other accounts; yet this is surely to be expected of the author of The Good Soldier, in his own way as keen an explorer of the relation between memory, subjectivity and narrative as Proust or Beckett.

In his preface Ford insists that he has tried to write a novel, using besides the time shift, the progression d’effet and ‘the adaptation of rhythms to the pace of the action’; this last because, as he points out elsewhere, in a passage which insists on the cognitive separation between life and art, ‘I live in my moment’(p. 96). The evocation of this takes great skill: Ford conceals his art with consummate craft, and his artlessness of voice can be a disguise for the subtlest of effects. In part two chapter two, towards the middle of his book, Ford offers the key to his method, characteristically flattering the reader with the assumption that his best trick is obvious to all:

Of course you must appear to digress. That is the art which conceals your Art. The reader, you should premise, will always dislike you and your book. He thinks it an insult that you should dare to claim his attention, and if lunch is announced or there is a ring at the bell he will welcome the digression. So you will provide him with what he thinks are digressions – with occasions on which he thinks he may let his attention relax…. But really not one single thread must ever escape your purpose.

I am – I may hazard the digression! – using that technique in writing this book. You may think it slipshod and discursive. It will appear to drag in all sorts of subjects just to make up the requisite length. Actually it contains nothing that has not been selected to carry forward the story or the mood.’ (pp. 192–3)

And appear to digress he does: a detail is retrieved, and its destiny is made apparent just when the reader has probably forgotten about it, while a harmless-seeming joke will explode with bitter significance several pages on. Marks of ellipsis contribute to an impression of the haphazard, of the imperfectly remembered along with his deployment of droll understatement and self-deprecation. Even when Ford apostrophises destiny, he does so casually and humorously.

While Return to Yesterday took us up to 1914, It Was the Nightingale begins on the day of Ford’s demobilisation, seven years since he had written a word and almost as long since he had spoken to a man of letters. He insists at this point that ‘I was not an artist, I was a broken officer’. Another move, or set of moves, takes us from the distinguished artists to the mute and inglorious to the unnamed and unnumbered dead. Regan, the alcoholic journalist, a smashed crow, mangled by being run over, is an example of these; another is the demobbed soldier who is unfairly punished by a new, petty, bureaucratised Britain – both examples of minds and bodies crushed, maimed and bewildered by war and its aftermath. A ceaseless mobility informs this book: conversations are held on the hoof, a trip into the suburbs forms a resolve to break with London and the movement of time shades into an awareness of mutability, conflict and decay. The first part of the memoir charts a shifting but inexorable flow towards the determination to leave behind an England which is no longer home to Ford. While for him ‘every artist is my fellow countryman’, England has its writers on the run, disavowing its artists, leaving its cultural production to foreigners, and happy to settle back to savouring the complacencies of Charles Lamb and Punch. The betrayals and disappointments of this period are announced in a striking, dream-like scene at a party given at the French embassy, where Ford finds himself out of his element:

I stood then alone and feeling conspicuous – a heavy blond man in a faded uniform in those halls of France. Pale faces swam, inspectantly, towards me. But, as you may see fishes do round a bait in dim water, each one checked suddenly and swam away with a face expressing piscine distaste. I imagined that the barb of a hook must protrude somewhere from my person and set myself to study the names and romantic years of the wines that M. Berthelot had provided for us. (p. 7)

Ford is here ‘a fish in not quite the right water’, as he says later on of Galsworthy (one of Ford’s most subtle effects involves the diffusion of apparently casual idiom so as to contribute to a texture of metaphorically rich motifs). Within a sequence of deceptively casual reminiscences a subtle set of oppositions is set up, between artist and commissariat, France and England, wines and spirits. Ford associates himself with the first term of all these pairings: he has been betrayed by Arnold Bennett as France has been betrayed by Lloyd George, and his dreams of returning to Provence are thwarted when the government refuses him a passport. This spectre at the feast has told him that he is ‘as good as dead as a writer’, and he is trapped between two worlds. Nightingale is all about passages from one state into another, Rubicons crossed (another phrase used casually of Gals worthy), and Ford’s genius is to revivify these dead metaphors, actualising and rendering them with all the physically sharp chiselling of impression. Having said that it was the death of Proust which led him to again take up a serious pen, Ford makes this pen actual, something which is physically lost, longed for and replaced by the pen with which Parade’s End will be written. In another section, various memories and impressions of the Parisian literary scene are punctuated by the reversion to Ford waiting at the Café de Flore for Joyce, who, we are reminded with a kind of comic inexorability, is getting later literally by the minute. We should take with a pinch of salt Ford’s insistence that he is ‘hazy as to … chronology’ (p. 15). The nightingale appears, disappears, calls, reappears. Such are the narrative’s enfoldings of various time-frames and speeds that the illusion or impression of life is maintained. As William H. Gass has pointed out, impressionism has come to connote the vague and indistinct, while its original sense will have been of a sharp and indelible marking of hard experiences. This sharpness is to be found in Ford’s impressions. A recurrent technique is to have several associative clusters of reminiscence orbiting round an actual, and very physically realised series of instants, such as the crossing of a road in each of the three cities. Besides the negotiation of the Place de la Concorde crossing already described, there is the shift from London’s Campden Hill to another road crossed, at East Fourteenth and Fifth in New York, where Ford and Theodore Dreiser share declarations of each other’s genius. The hesitations of the kerb at Campden Hill (an allusion surely to Proust’s famous uneven paving stone in Time Regained, set in a place itself significant, representative of the arts at their height in London) occupies a moment in real time, but the associations and determinations are interleaved and strung out over forty pages between first and last mention, going back as far as 1903 and forward to the writer’s present. For Ford, it is axiomatic that the artist has a divine right to existence, and that it is only by its arts that a nation can be saved (pp. 69–70). ‘The rest of humanity was merely the stuff to fill graveyards.’ It is very rare for an axiom to be delivered, as Ford does, in the past tense and with a specified addressee. Thus the axiomatic is naturalised, drained of its willed sense of universal purport.

If the Francophile Hueffer was never to be the most stolid of Englishmen, his ties to the cosmopolis of London, a city whose soul he had once charted, were much stronger, harder to break. The full significance of the moment at the kerb now emerges. He had always been at his happiest when exploring London, or that part of London which was his. ‘But as I extended my foot to make that crossing something snapped. It was the iron band round the heart that had hitherto made it London’s own’ (p. 64). It Was the Nightingale rehearses the physical horrors of war, now haunting London for the first time in 250 years, and presents them powerfully, but it also feeds into Parade’s End as being about worry, or as Ford has it, ‘the minor malices and doubts’ and ‘the shadows … alive with winged malices’. Worn out, Ford faces his final moment of destiny at Red Ford, where his life is wagered on the behaviour of shallots boiling in a pot and, saved, he determines to become a smallholding farmer. Just as, comically, he affectionately names his potatoes after great writers of his acquaintance, so the writers in turn are presented as familiar animals: Galsworthy as dog, Moore as wolf. A goat is named Penny because of its resemblance to Ezra Pound. Ford writes a movie screenplay and translates Sophocles for the West End Stage, but loses out through dishonoured cheques and the false economy of not having made a copy of his manuscript.

Moving to France, the burden of quotation from nature falls from him. A lightness of heart intrudes: a contract from Hollywood buys him his pigs; he starts writing again; he changes his name from his original Germanic one now that the shedding of this name is no longer ignobly advantageous to him. Yet for all its anecdotal lightheartedness in places, the work to which It Was the Nightingale remains closest in tone is Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, marrying a satirical disdain for England’s descent into tawdry cheapness with a bitter anger at the suffering of war and needless sacrifice ‘for an old bitch gone in the teeth/For a botched civilisation’. In the tenth section of the sequence, Pound imagines the pastoral retreat at Red Ford as a kind of grave:

Beneath the sagging roof

The stylist has taken shelter,

Unpaid, uncelebrated,

At last from the world’s welter

Nature receives him;

With a placid and uneducated mistress

He exercises his talents

And the soil meets his distress.

The haven from sophistications and contentions

Leaks through its thatch;

He offers succulent cooking;

The door has a creaking latch

The second book relates the acquisition, at last, of the passport which will allow him to return to his beloved France, a passport accompanied or prompted by the writing of four books. But the ghost-like undertaker-critic still insists that his work looks like it was written in his dressing-gown and slippers, a portrait of the artist which Ford is happy to acquiesce in, for his own reasons. If art conceals art, an image of the artist in dressing gown or surprised in his bathrobe like the emperor Nero, as incongruous as a farmer in evening wear, conceals an ambition to be taken as seriously as any of the modernists:

I am not Picasso. My sympathies are altogether with revolutionary work and with no other. I would rather read work of Miss Stein or Mr Joyce or look at the work of Picasso himself than consider the work of a gentleman who wrote like Thackeray or drew like Apelles. They may write or draw better than either master: I can do without them. But I cannot see that my own work is in the least revolutionary. I go on my way like a nice old gentleman at a tea-party. Occasionally it strikes me that if I change a little my method of sequence in presenting scenes, or shorten my sentences and occasionally put in instead of chasing out all assonances, I may feel a little better. But all over the world there are, I am aware, gentlemen and ladies lamenting that I don’t write as I wrote when I was eighteen or twenty-seven or thirty-six or forty-five. Or even fifty-four. (p. 162)

At the centre of these memoirs is a period of three weeks of which Ford’s memory is completely lost, and it is this blank which forms the seed for his masterpiece, Parade’s End, Very slowly, and through waves of interweaving significance, the real purpose of It Was the Nightingale emerges: as a companion volume to Parade’s End, reiterating the concerns of the tetralogy with renewed urgency, while supplementing its portrayal of a civilisation in decay with the use of a mobile and relativising first person, as in Proust or as in The Good Soldier. The literary geography of Paris is necessary to the work, not vice-versa. Through the shadows of memory the characters of Valentine Wannop and Christopher and Mark Tietjens emerge and take shape, the ideas and themes of Parade’s End coalesce. ‘I had two of my principal characters. Proust was dead and I did not see anyone else who was carrying on the ponderous work that seemed to be needed by the world.’ Here the full burden of Ford’s work is pointed out: Ford wants the novelist to appear in his really proud position as historian of his own time (p. 180). Further to that. Ford wishes, against his own aesthetic instincts, to write in Parade’s End ‘a book with the very grand purpose of obviating all wars’.

It Was the Nightingale closes on a low key, with the death of the transatlantic review, with its editor dwelling on internationalism, the need to avoid war, the transience of literary fame. Parade’s End is seen right through to its publication and reception, always told, as it were, in passing. The final tone is elegiac, telling of resignation and modest probity, aligning the author with his hero Tietjens, the last Englishman, fond of all his countries but always, wherever he is, an expatriate.

John Coyle

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

The text is that of the first British edition (William Heinemann,  1934). This incorporates some 120 minor alterations from the first  American edition (J.B. Lippincott, 1933). These changes are  invariably cosmetic, comprising the correction of misprints, repetitions and other small infelicities, and the substitution of British  for American spellings.

TO
EUGENE PRESSLY, ESQUIRE

My dear Pressly:

You have read every word of this book; thus yon are the only man in the world of whom I can say for certain—or shall ever be able to say for certain!—that he has read every word of it…. To whom can a book be more fittingly dedicated than to its only reader?

I hope you have liked it. If it upholds too noisily for your tastes the banners of the only perfect republic and the only permanent kingdom, forgive that. That is nothing against diplomatists. The Kingdom of the Arts has many subjects who have never employed for expression the permanencies of paper, canvas, stone or catgut, reed and brass. And unless a diplomatist be an artist in those impermanencies, the fates and boundaries of nations, he is no true ambassador. Indeed it is amongst the prouder records of your temporal republic—along with that of France—that it has not infrequently employed and still employs creative artists as its communicating links with other lands. And, since I notice that two of the typed pages of this book have an eagle for their watermark, may I not pride myself on the fact that I thus become, as it were microscopically, a floor-sweeper in the embassy of our lord Apollo, sovereign over Parnassus.

They say every man has it in him to write one good  book. This then may be my one good book that you get dedicated to you. For the man’s one good book will be his autobiography. This is a form I have never tried—mainly for fear of the charge of vanity. I have written reminiscences of which the main features were found in the lives of other people and in which, as well as I could, I obscured myself. But I have reached an age when the charge of vanity has no terrors as against the chance of writing one good book. It is the great woe of literature that no man can tell whether what he writes is good or not. In his vain moments he may, like Thackeray, slap his forehead and cry: “This is genius” … But in the dark days when that supporter abandons him he will sink his head over his page and cry: “What a vanity is all this!” … And it is the little devil in human personality that no man can tell whether he is vain or not. He may—as you certainly have every reason to—assert that at least he has a good nose. But if I advanced the same claim? Or a man might limit his boasting to saying that he was a good trencher-man, and yet be vain since he may delight in wolfing down what,in the realm of the haute cuisine, is mere garbage.

I have tried then to write a novel, drawing my material from my own literary age. You have here two adventures of a once jeune, homme pauvre—a poor man who was, once young. In rendering them, I have employed every wile known to me as novelist—the timeshift, the progression d’effet, the adaptation of rhythms to the pace of the action. If then it is a bad book it is merely because of my want of skill, or because my canons are at fault.

I woke this morning, as is my habit, just before dawn and lay looking, through the mosquito-net, at the harbingers of day and thinking of what I was going to write now…. These words! I saw, in the phantasmagoric way in which one perceives things at dawn when one’s thoughts are elsewhere—something gross descending the trunk of the oak whose boughs overhang my bed. From there the nightingale has awakened me just before every dawn for how long now! … It was a rat, and the nightingale, as it moved, glided down, just three inches from its eyes.

It seemed a fantastic and horrible conjunction, that of rat and nightingale. But after all, all poets are at outs with… let us say, their bankers. Having been, as you see, an editor, I dislike saying that editors are all the same as rats….

I was filled with horror until in a moment peace descended on me. The cat of the house jumped from the roof to a lower roof and so to the path beside me. And at once there went up the long warning note of the male and the answering, croaking menace of the female nightingale when she sits on her eggs. They were then safe…. It is as futile for a rat to try to rifle the nest of the nightingale who is nyctalops as for a banker to ruin the home of a poet. The birds, seeing in the dark, will fly at the rat’s weak eyes until the discomflted quadruped shuffles away down the trunk and the female bird again sits in triumph and peace…. As for the banker, the poet—be it Bertran de Born or Mr. Pound or Mr. Hemingway—will address to him some immortal sirventes or pop him into a novel so that he will never again hold up his head….

Then as soon as it was light I went down into the garden to plan out, in the pitiless Mediterranean drought, the irrigation of the day. The semi-tropical plants and trees—the oranges, lemons, peppers, vines and the rest can do without water for a long time. Musk- and water-melons must have a little water and the Northern plants that for his sins the pink Nordic has imported here—the peas, beans, string beans, cabbages, carrots, and such gross, over-green matter, must have a great deal or incontinently die. It was a whole campaign of irrigation channels that I had mentally to arrange for a day given up entirely to writing and the affairs of the parched earth.

As I went back up the hill to sit down and write this I saw, drinking at opposite ends of my sinking cistern, the great snake who is three foot longer than my six-foot stretch and the emerald green, vermilion-spotted lizard that is as long as my arm. I felt satisfaction. These creatures one only sees drinking in the magic hour between darkness and day. They looked at me with their fateful indifferent glances as I passed, and went on drinking.

For me the great snake, messenger of Aesculapius to whom the cock is owed, represents Destiny, the scarlet-spotted lizard, the imps of discomfort and the little devils of doubt that beset one’s daily path. I know that writer’s cramp will make me have to lay down my pen often to-day and the femme de ménage will be more than usually like a snake in the kitchen. These are the reminders that Fate sends us so that in our baked sanctuary our stomachs be not too haughty or too proud…. But I know that the great snake  will soon swallow the rat. It is true that, being inscrutable and august, it will eventually rifle the nightingale’s nest. But it is fitting that Lilith should ruin poets….

So you see that, to date, this fairy-tale has found its appropriate close. The persons of the transatlantic drama are scattered but all active. You, it is true, are in Paris with Katherine Anne, and Mr. Glenway Westcott is still faithful to the great Faubourg; Mr. Pound is Professor of Economics in Rapallo; Mr. Hemingway is writing a novel in Key West if he is not momentarily shooting lions in Arkansaw or diving to recover bottles of Perrier-Jouet from a sunken rum-runner. Mr. Nathan Ash is somewhere in the State of New York; Mrs. Rodes is shiningly directing the interior decorating of the chief but not capital city of that State; the conscientious objector is on the other side of the frontier near here; the White Russian Colonel is I don’t know where; Mrs. Foster is in Schenectady. And so the city sitteth solitary and the round table is dissolved….

But all, all the Knights, be sure, in their fastnesses seek the Holy Grail…. I read in the newspapers that Mr. Pound—momentarily in Paris—announces that his opera Cavalcanti—more power to his bâton!—will be broadcasted in a month or so. From time to time he writes a line of poetry, too.

The flood of laymen will in the end submerge us all and dance on our graves. The layman hates the artist as the atrocious Mr. Hitler hates learning. Indeed the layman regards the artist as a sort of Jew. But, to the measure of the light vouchsafed, my late comrades  shine in their places and may be content. The pogroms will come but, even as Heine, the greatest of German poets, they have lit beacons that posterity shall not willingly let die.

I had intended to continue this novel to the edge of the abyss of 1929. But I found that subsequent events are too vivid in my mind. I cannot get them into any perspective. Moreover, it is inexpedient to write of living people in their too near presents. It is all right to write of a man in his hot youth. He will regard the record with complacency, knowing that he has now neared perfection. But write about their immediate presents and not only will you find yourself in a hornet’s nest—which is so much my normal situation that it would leave me fairly indifferent—but they will be deeply and really grieved—which would be hateful! I once said to the beautiful and how much regretted poet, Elinor Wylie, that that day she was looking radiantly beautiful. As she was. She said to me with fury:

“That is because you thought I looked like a hag yesterday!” and she never spoke to me again. That grieved me since she and her husband used to be very good friends of mine because, she said, she and Mr. Benet got engaged over reading one of my poems. But—what was worse—she was mortally hurt by that remark and, I have heard, never got over the idea that it had suggested to her. So, for my novel about the years immediately preceding super-Armageddon you will have to wait another decade…. And glad of it! says you….

I don’t wonder. During all these months you, as  Benedict, should have been squiring Katherine Anne Porter-Pressly to Maxim’s, or the Moulin Rouge, or the Chat Noir … I see a smile of polite irony come over your diplomat’s inscrutability: but what do I know or care about the transpontine night life of the Ville Lumière to-day!—Instead you have rushed home from your embassy at the days’ ends and have spent the hours with Katherine Anne poring over my minute and indecipherable script. It is a scandal and I a real scoundrel to have let you do it…. Youth and beauty should be better served, though the sky fall in on the manuscripts of all novels.

But there is this: Whilst you sat quiet at home Katherine Anne has written some more of her exquisite short stones. Thus what youth, beauty and the night club lost on the fugitive swings, Literature has gained for her roundabouts that are eternal….

And there is this, too … I daresay that, in the course of this novel I have rendered humanity as rather chequered. People who owe one a little gratitude or a little consideration now and then fall short. One’s ewe lamb will show the terrible teeth of the lamb in Turgenev’s story…. But you have done that heavy and monotonous work—I dare not say “for the love of God”—but then without any faint hope of any return. For what return could I possibly make you except to subscribe myself

With infinite gratitude,

FORD MADOX FORD.      

CAP BRUN

ON THE FEAST OF ST. EULOGIUS

MCMXXXIII

PART ONE

“DOMINE DIRIGE NOS”

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

THERE WAS NEVER A DAY SO GAY FOR THE  Arts as any twenty-four hours of the early ’twenties in Paris. Nay, twenty-four hours did not seem sufficient to contain all that the day held of plastic, verbal and harmonious sweets. But I had a year or so to wait before that ambience was to enfold me. I begin with the day of my release from service in His Britannic Majesty’s army—in early 1919.

Naked came I from my mother’s womb. On that day I was nearly as denuded of possessions. My heavier chattels were in a green, bolster-shaped sack. All the rest I had on me—a worn uniform with gilt dragons on the revers of the tunic…. All that I had once had had been conveyed in one direction or the other. That was the lot of man in those days—of man who had been actively making the world fit for … financial disaster. For me, as writer I was completely forgotten and as completely I had forgotten all that the world had before then drummed into me of the art of conveying illusion to others. I had no illusions myself.

During my Xmas leave in a strange London I had gone to a party given at the French Embassy by M. Philippe Berthelot, since ambassador himself and for long principal secretary to the French Foreign Office. I swam, as it were, up the Embassy steps. Then I was indeed a duck out of water…. The party was given for the English writers who with the implements of their craft had furthered the French cause. And there they all were, my unknown confrères. It was seven years since I had written a word: it was almost as many since I had spoken to a man of letters. Unknown faces filled the considerable halls that were misty under the huge chandeliers. There was a fog outside…. Unknown and queer!

I cannot believe that the faces of my British brothers of the pen are really more pallid and misshapenly elongated than those of any other country or of any other sedentary pursuit. But there, they seemed all unusually long, pale, and screwed to one side or the other. All save the ruddy face of Mr. Arnold Bennett to which war and the years had added. He appeared like a round red sun rising from amongst vertical shapes of cloud….

But I was not on speaking terms with Mr. Bennett and I drifted as far from him as I could.

Just before the Armistice I had been summoned from my battalion to the Ministry of Information in London. There I had found Mr. Bennett in a Presidential chair. In my astonishment at finding him in such a place I stuttered out:

“How fat you’ve got!”

He said:

“You have to write about terms of peace. The Ministry has changed. France is not going …”

We immediately disagreed very violently. Veryviolently! It was a question of how much the Allies ought to secure for France. That meeting became a brawl. Sir W. Tyrrell got introduced into it at first on the telephone and then personally. He was then Secretary to the Foreign Office and is now British Ambassador in Paris. I have never seen any look so irritated. The chief image of that interview comes back to me as a furnace-hot flush mounting on a dark-bearded cheek. And Mr. Bennett lolling back augustly in his official seat like a marble Zeus on a Greek frieze. I suppose I can be very irritating, particularly when it is a matter of anyone who wants, as the saying was, to do France in the eye. That responsible diplomat uttered language about our Ally! I should think that now, when in his cocked hat he passes the sentry at the door of the Elysée, he would have little chills if he thought of what he then said. I on the other hand had come straight from a company of several million men who were offering their lives so that France might be saved for the world.

When he had stormed out I asked Mr. Bennett if he still wanted my article about the terms of peace. A Chinese smile went over his face. Enigmatic. That was what it was.

He said:

“Yes. Write it. It’s an order. I’ll have it confirmed as such by the Horse Guards if you like.”

I went back to my regiment where, Heaven knows, the work was already overwhelming. I wrote that article on the top of a bully-beef case in between frantic periods of compiling orders as to every conceivable matter domestic to the well-being of a battalion on active service. The article advocated giving to France a great deal more than Mr. Lloyd George’s government desired to give her. A great deal more! As I have said elsewhere, that article was lost in the post—a fate that must be rare for official documents addressed to a great Government department. A week later I received through my Orderly Room an intimation that, as an officer of His Britannic Majesty’s Army I was prohibited from writing for the Press. And I was reminded that, even when I was released from active service, I should still be an officer of the Special Reserve and a paragraph of the Official Secrets Act was quoted to me. I could not think that I was in possession of a sufficiency of Official Secrets to make that intimation worth while, but at that point I had understood Mr. Bennett’s queer smile.

I like what the Boers call slimness and usually regard with pleasure acts of guile attempted against myself. I fancy it must make me feel more real—more worth while!—if a Confidence Trick man attempts to practise on me. But at that party at the Embassy I felt disinclined to talk to Mr. Bennett. Dog should not, by rights, eat dog.

But patriotism and the desire of Dai Bach’s Government to down the French covered in those days hundreds of sins in London town. Dai Bach—David darling!—was the nickname given to the then Prime Minister in the Welch Regiment for which in those days I had the honour to look after many intimate details. It pleases me still to read the “character” that decorated my Soldier’s Small Book on my resigning those duties:

“Possesses great powers of organisation and has solved many knotty problems. A lecturer of the first water on military subjects. Has managed with great ability the musketry training of this unit.”

I notice on the day on which I begin this book that Mr. George has attained the age of seventy and that his message to humanity is stated as being, on that occasion, that what is needed to save the world is men who know how to save the world. I could almost have thought that out for myself….

I stood then alone and feeling conspicuous—a heavy blond man in a faded uniform in those halls of France. Pale faces swam, inspectantly, towards me. But, as you may see fishes do round a bait in dim water, each one checked suddenly and swam away with a face expressing piscine distaste. I imagined that the barb of a hook must protrude somewhere from my person and set myself to study the names and romantic years of the wines that M. Berthelot had provided for us.

Their juice had been born on vines, beneath suns of years before these troubles and their names made fifty sweet symphonies…. It had been long, long indeed, since I had so much as thought of even such minor glories as Château Neuf du Pape or Tavel or Hermitage—though I think White Hermitage of a really good vintage year the best of all white wines. … I had almost forgotten that there were any potable liquids but vins du pays and a horrible fluid that we called Hooch. The nine of diamonds used to be called the curse of Scotland, but surely usquebaugh—which tastes like the sound of its name—is Scotland’s curse to the world … and to Scotland. That is why Glasgow on a Saturday night is Hell….

A long black figure detached itself from Mr. Bennett’s side and approached me. It had the aspect of an undertaker coming to measure a corpse….. The eyes behind enormous lenses were like black pennies and appeared to weep dimly; the dank hair was plastered in flattened curls all over the head. I decided that I did not know the gentleman. His spectacles swam almost against my face. His hollow tones were those of a funeral mute:

“You used to write,” it intoned, “didn’t you?”

I made the noise that the French render by “!?!?!”

He continued—and it was as if his voice came from the vaults of Elsinore….

“You used to consider yourself a literary dictator of London. You are so no longer. I represent Posterity. What I say to-day about books Posterity will say for ever.” He rejoined Mr. Bennett. I was told later that that gentleman was drunk. He had found Truth at the bottom of a well. Of usquebaugh! That was at the other, crowded end of the room.

That reception more nearly resembled scenes to be witnessed in New York in Prohibition days than anything else I ever saw in London. It must have given M. Berthelot what he would call une fière idée de la Muse, at any rate on Thames bank.

Eventually Madame Berthelot took pity on my faded solitariness and Madame Berthelot is one of the most charming, dark and witty of Paris hostesses…. Et exaltavit!…

A month or so later I might, had it not been too dark, have been seen with my sack upon my shoulder, approaching Red Ford.

That was a leaky-roofed, tile-healed, rat-ridden seventeenth-century, five-shilling a week, moribund labourer’s cottage. It stood beneath an enormous oak beside a running spring in a green dingle through which meandered a scarlet and orange runlet that in winter was a river to be forded. A low bank came down to the North. At the moment it loomed, black, against the bank and showers of stars shone through the naked branches of the oak. I had burned my poor old boats.

My being there was the result of that undertaker’s mute’s hollow tones at M. Berthelot’s party. I had told Mme Berthelot, to her incredulous delight, that as soon as the War was finished I should go to Provence and, beside the Rhône, below Avignon, set out at last as a tender of vines and a grower of primeurs. In the lands where grow the grapes of Château Neuf du Pape, of Tavel and of Hermitage! That had of course been the result of seeing those bottles on the long buffet. For years and years—all my life—I have wanted to live in that white sunlight and, at last, die in a certain house beside the planes of the place in Tarascon. I cannot remember when I did not have that dream. It is the whiteness of the sunlight on the pale golden walls and the castle of the good king René and, across the Rhône, the other castle of Aucassin and Nicolette….

But when at last I was released from service I found myself in a rat-trap. They refused me a passport for France.

I cannot suppose that Mr. George’s government feared that with my single eloquence I should be able to stampede the Versailles Congress into giving France the whole of both banks of the Rhine from Basel to the Dutch frontier. But that singular interference with the liberty of a subject had that aspect—as if they were determined that no Briton should speak for France….

A queer, paradoxical rat-trap! If I cannot say, like Henry James, that I love France as I never loved woman, I can lay my hand on my heart and swear that I have loved only those parts of England from which you can see and most easily escape into the land of Nicolette. And, what was queer, whilst I had been the chained helot that the poor bloody footslogger is supposed to be, I had crossed over to France more times than I can now remember and had passed more time than I can now like to remember in parts of Picardy and French Flanders that I should have been very glad to get out of. Now I was free…. But I was chained to the kerbstone on which I stood, forbidden to make a livelihood and quite unfit to stand the climate in which I found myself.

I paid of course no attention to my being forbidden to write. I did not believe that even with the Defence of the Realm Act at its back Authority could have enforced that prohibition. I was quite ready to chance that and did indeed chance it…. If you have been brought up in England you find it difficult to believe in the possibility of interference with your personal liberty though if, outside that, Authority can hamper the Arts it will hamper the Arts….

But the spectre at M. Berthelot’s feast had told me that I was as good as dead as a writer; I had no one to tell me anything to the contrary, and I was myself convinced that I could no longer write. I had proved it before Red Ford received me.

Some queer lunatics I had been with in the Army had started a queer, lunatic, weekly review. They had commissioned me to write articles on anything under the sun, from saluting in the army to the art of Gauguin and the eastern boundaries of France. I had written the articles and those genial lunatics had received them with wild—with the wildest—enthusiasm. They had also paid really large sums for them. But I knew that they had been the writings of a lunatic.

At the same time a certain Review had asked me to write for it. I had been pleased at the thought. That Review still retained at any rate for me some of the aura that it had when Lord Salisbury who wrote for it had been known as the master of flouts and jeers, and some of the later aura of the days when, under the brilliant editorship of Frank Harris, it had been written for by Mr. Bernard Shaw, Max, Mr. H. G. Wells—and indeed myself.

So I went with pleasure to the office, to find the extremely dingy editorial room occupied by a plump, little, grey man, who welcomed me uproariously. I do not remember his name, but I know that he too seemed to me to be a lunatic. He was both querulous and noisy.

He exclaimed:

“You’re the man I want. You’re the very man to explode all this bunk and balderdash.”

I said: “!?!?!?”

“All this bunk and balderdash,” he repeated. “This heroism in the trenches legend! Explode it! We know it was all nothing but drunken and libidinous bean-feasting. Show the scoundrels up! Blow the gaff on them. You’ve been in it. You know!”

It was the first sound—like the first grumble of a distant storm—the first indication I had that the unchangeable was changing, the incorruptible putting on corruption. Over there we had been so many Rip van Winkles. The —— Review, the Bank of England, the pound sterling, the London County Council, the Lord Mayor and the Court of Aldermen along with the Marylebone Cricket Club—these things had used to be indubitable and as sure as the stars in their courses. And as unquestioned had been the thin red line!

Alas! I continued to regard that fellow as a lunatic, until, slowly, I realised that his frame of mind was common to the civilian population of London and of the world from Odessa to Seattle. It seemed to me that he was mad to want to turn his Review of all papers into an organ of what in my innocence I took to be pro-Germanism. So I declaimed to him the one ethical axiom that seemed to be still unshaken. Dog, I said, doesn’t eat dog. I might have partaken of drunken and libidinous orgies, but I was not the man to blow the gaff on them…. And I was so sure that he could not succeed in his wild project that I offered to write for him some articles on campaigns that I had not witnessed. I have never been able to make up my mind as to whether or no it was proper to write for organs of whose policy one disapproves. Your name may appear to endorse their mischiefs. But you may counteract some of their bad influence and at least you may occupy some space that otherwise might be given over to working evil. I suppose too that I wanted to try my hand at writing. I am not incorruptible!

He was disappointed, but he accepted my offer.

I had been for the whole period of the war on the Western front, with my nose so close to the grindstone of affairs that, as soon as I had any leisure, I really thirsted to know something about the events of war and of the world outside my own three inches on the map. So I read everything I could lay my hands on about the Hindenburg victory at Tannenberg. Then I wrote an article about what I had read. It was of course a bad thing to do.

I went to the office of that journal to correct the proof. That rotund grey ball of a man was fairly bouncing in his shadows with all his feet off the ground over a long, narrow white slip of newsprint. It ran across and fell over the edge of the table in front of him…. I had thought it right to put into my article something about the sufferings that must have been undergone by the Russians and even by the Germans in those terrible marshes where hundreds of men went to their deaths. It seemed to me that though it might be immoral to suggest that my own comrades had found the trenches anything but gas and gingerbread—for of course on the playing fields of Eton and elsewhere one learns that one must never applaud one’s own side—it might be licit at least to say that the men of our Enemy and of our Ex-Ally had had a bad time…. I learned there that I was wrong. I was so wrong that I was propelled out of that obfusc office as if by a soda-water volcano. It was shouted at me that I was never to come there again.

In the outer, sub-editorial room, very slim, tall and sempiternally youthful, Mr. Stuart Rendal was depressedly holding up a long white slip. My article seemed to pain him as if it had been a severe neuralgia. I for my part was depressed to think that anyone, tall, slim and with the gift of eternal youth, should serve as wage-slave under that explosive little ball of suet. And it was still more depressing that it should be a gentleman and scholar like Mr. Rendal…. As if we had not rendered the world free for heroes!

When I had last seen him he had been the all-powerful editor of the Athenæum. I had always disliked the Athenæum, for its grudging omniscience, its pomposity, its orthodoxy and its hatred of the new in letters…. But that an editor of that awful sheet should “sub” it for such an atomy was as if one should see an ex-president of the United States selling papers outside the White House. And with a sense of comradely affection I said:

“Is that article really so awful, Rendal?”

He said miserably:

“You used, you know, to write fairly. Not really well, but at least grammatically.” But this writing was rotten. When it wasn’t rotten it was incomprehensible. He exclaimed: “What’s the ‘Narw Army’? Is Narw the name of a general or a river? I can’t make head or tail of it.”

I drifted slowly away in mute sign that I accepted his stricture. It was true enough. Whilst my thoughts had been working over that piece of writing they had seemed to me to have broken backs…. When a snake has its back broken the forepart glides ahead in waves, the rest drags in the dust….

A few days later—or a few days before—for I am hazy as to this chronology—the other, lunatic paper had ceased its hilarious career. Just after that earthquake, I paused with one foot off the kerb at the corner of the Campden Hill waterworks, nearly opposite the stable in which, thirteen years before, I had used to breakfast with Mr. Galsworthy. I was about to cross the road. But, whilst I stood with one foot poised in air, suddenly I recognised my unfortunate position….

Quite a number of curious things have happened to me whilst I have been in that posture of preparing to cross a road; in particular I have taken a number of sudden resolutions with one foot suspended like that…. In 1923 a gentleman whom I will call the doyen of American letters, invited me to lunch with him at the Brevoort. He telephoned that he was moving into a new apartment in the 50’s and must be there at two o’clock at latest to meet his architect. Would I mind lunching with him at twelve? He must leave at 1.30.

I was stopping at that hotel, so it was no trouble to be there at noon. He arrived at 1.15, which did not surprise me since that was New York. He said he was sorry, but I knew what moving was…. In revenge we talked over luncheon till 4.30, by which time I imagine his architect knew what moving and New York were…. We talked about style. Yes, style!—the use of words minutely and technically employed. And I am bound to say that no one with whom I have ever talked about the employment of words—with the possible exception of Joseph Conrad—no one knew more about them than my friend. Indeed I am ready to aver that I could never have talked with any man for a solid three hours and a quarter on end, unless he had a pretty good knowledge of the use of words.

We discussed every English or American author living or dead who could claim any sort of interest on account of his methods of writing—every writer we could think of except two. And we agreed very closely in all our estimates. The discussion continued up several blocks of Fifth Avenue. We reached East Fourteenth Street, where he was to take a trolley. I knew there was another author whom I ought to have discussed, but I have my shynesses…. At last, with my foot in the air off the kerb I cleared my throat and opened my mouth. Before I could speak he said, also with one foot in the air:

“You know, I’ve read all your books and I like them very much.”

I said:

“Well, you know, Dreiser, I’ve read all your books and I like them very much….”

That is why I think that the act of taking a resolution  in crossing roads may lead to other inceptions in the mind. At any rate I hope Mr. Dreiser spoke as truly as I did!

It is singular how Letters, for me, will come creeping in. I had intended to make this a chapter generally about farming, and when I had written the last word of the paragraph above this one I said: “Now for the hoe and the nitrates!”

I went for a walk down through the dim Luxembourg Gardens of the end of January, where they were putting iris plants in among privet bushes. It seemed a curious thing to do. But, of course, they know what they are about. I continued down the rue Férou which, it is said, Dante used to descend on his way from the Montagne Ste. Geneviève to the Sorbonne—and in which Aramis lived on the ground, and Ernest Hemingway on the top, floors. And how many between the musketeer and the toreador! And so across the Place St. Sulpice, more dimmed by the thaw than even the long alleys of the Luxembourg.

Terrible things—for those to whom terrible things occur in their lives—happen in the last days of January. The heavy drag of winter is then at its most dire and your courage at its lowest, as if in a long four o’clock in the morning of the year. You seem to pass as if you yourself were invisible in the owl light of the deep streets…. Between dog and wolf, they say here. It is a good phrase.

Because, through such tenebrousnesses, I made my way to a café where I sat all alone and read that Galsworthy was dead. A week ago it had been George Moore. So the days between—the days of black frost twilight turning to crepuscular thaws—were days between dog and wolf…. Between their deaths!

I sat for a long time looking at the words:

Mort de John Galsworthy

La Carrière du célèbre Romancier.

It seemed wrong to be reading of his death in Paris. In tawdry light above tawdry nouvel art decorations of a café I much dislike, I saw through the white sheet of paper … dull green hop-lands rolling away under the mists of the English North Downs; the sunlight falling through the open door of the stable where he used to give me breakfast; the garden of the Addison Road house. It backed on the marvellous coppices of Holland Park, and the pheasants used to fly from them into the garden.

He had a dog—an immense black spaniel—that seemed to be more to Galsworthy than his books, his friends, himself. A great, dignified, as if exiled-royal creature. That is why I say between dog and wolf. For, when it came to writing, George Moore was wolf—lean, silent, infinitely swift and solitary. But Galsworthy was the infinitely good, infinitely patient, infinitely tenacious being that guards our sheepfolds and farmsides from the George Moores. Only, there was only one George Moore.

In one January week the Western World lost its greatest writer—and its best man! So it seems to be wrong to read about the death of Galsworthy here before the West begins. With George Moore it mattered less. He was as Parisian of the ’70’s to ’80’s as an Anglo-Irishman could be.

The last time I saw him was on the Quai Malaquais. He wandered along before the old book backs, under the grey branches of the plane trees, above the grey Seine. His pale eyes were unseeing in his paler face. They must have seen a Seine and book backs of fifty years before. Sexagenarian greynesses—as, when I saw the news of the other death, my eyes rested on thirty-year-old Kentish greennesses.

I stood with my hat in my hand for several seconds. I always stood with my hat in my hand when George Moore passed me in the streets, and I think that writers of English should stand with their hats in their hands for a second or two on the anniversaries of that January day in 1933…. He was walking very slowly and I waited—as one does when the King goes by—until he was a little way away before I put my hat on again. I don’t think he so much as saw me, though he seemed minutely to acknowledge my salute with the fingers of the hand that hung at his side.

It was as if a ghost had passed—the ghost of a High Priest who had also been a King. I never go along the quays just there without feeling slightly chilled when I remember that it was there that I saw George Moore for the last time. It was just there too that I stood to watch the orators over the coffin of Anatole France … and immediately after that ghost had passed Miss Nancy Cunard flashed, like a jewelled tropical bird along the Quai, going to rejoin him.

At a British military funeral, after the Dead March in Saul, after the rattling of the cords from under the coffin, the rifle-firing and the long wail of the Last Post suddenly the band and drums strike up “D’ye ken John Peel?” or the “Lincolnshire Poacher”—the unit’s quickstep. It is shocking until you see how good it is as a symbol.

I don’t suppose Mr. Moore was really cutting me—though he may well have been! A number of his intimates disliked me a great deal. He told me that Mr.—afterwards Sir Edmund—Gosse had advised him not to give me anything for the English Review.

I did not ever know Mr. Moore at all well. I must first have been in the same room with him in the gloomy house of Mr.—afterwards Sir Edmund—Gosse. It was on the banks of the Regent’s Canal and my father lived opposite across the canal. Mr. Gosse had at one time a subordinate position on a review that my father owned. I was brought up among admirers of Mr. Moore. My grandfather thought very highly of his writings on the French Impressionists; my father was one of the earliest to praise Esther Waters and later nearly all my young friends patriotically championed Mr. Moore in his claim to be the master of Guy de Maupassant. I did not go as far as that but I did believe—as I do now—that Mr. Moore was the only novelist of English blood who had produced a novel that was a masterpiece at once of writing and of form. So in one house or London club or the other when I found that Mr. Moore was there I always effaced myself as much as I could. If I had not had so great an admiration for his greatness, his clarity of mind and the chilliness of his temperament I might have got to know him well for I saw him often enough….

At a later stage I was writing a preface to a volume of translations from Maupassant. Mr. Henry James had told me some singular details about the life and habits of the author of La Maison Tellier. Conrad had said that these stories were all nonsense. I was not writing about the life or personality of Maupassant—only about his methods of writing. But I thought it might clarify my thoughts if I could get myself posted as to the matter upon which James and Conrad disagreed. Moore had lived in Paris in the great age of impressionistic painters and had known all the naturalistic writers of the last decades of the last century. It was a question of French manners, and I do not intend to say what it was for a reason that will appear.

I wrote to Mr. Moore and asked him for information as to two succinct points, so that he need take no more trouble than to answer “Yes” or “No.” … He ordered me to go and see him….

He was in a dressing-gown, recovering from influenza, in a darkish, rather rich room that I found overheated. Before we had even sat down he said:

“So you want to steal my thunder!”

I was then young and that annoyed me. I denied that I had any intention of using anything that he said, but he paid no attention. The interview continued disagreeably for me.

There is an early American folk song:

So I sez to Maria, sez I:

“Praise to the face

Is open disgrace”.

And I have never been able in the presence of the Great to express to them the admiration that I usually feel. I try to bide my time until I can slip into the conversation something like: “Your admirable ‘Nets to Catch the Wind,’” or whatever I judge to be the great one’s favourite work. But Mr. George Moore never gave me the time to manœuvre for position. He said at once that Maupassant had pilfered his ideas in Une Vie and Bel Ami, and hinted that he had made a very poor job of it as compared with Esther Waters and A Modern Lover…. If you put it to me to-day that Esther Waters is a greater novel than Une Vie I do not suppose that I should deny it, for Maupassant, great as he may have been as a short story writer, was not a novelist pur sang. To state that is to deny the gods of my youth, but I was then in the full heat of the Maupassant faith…. And Mr. Moore, if he was unobservant as to material details, was a perfect demon for detecting hesitancies of the voice.

It became worse later, for I distinctly chilled him by obstinately stating that I preferred A Drama in Muslin, he, quite properly, thinking that Esther Waters was his masterpiece. But at the moment I had just finished reading the other and I had read it with a personal enthusiasm for its relative humanity, whereas all the rest of the Master’s novels left me—personally—cold. Intensely admiring—but repelled!

So I have that early image of him, standing rather rigid and grim, chilled and monacal in his long dressing-gown. He was dismissing me with one hand on the door-knob of his dim, overheated room. I had at the moment for the first time the impression of his extreme  pallor. That was owing, possibly, to a shaft of light coming from the passage. And he seemed as aloof as if he had been a denizen of another world, where there was neither sun nor wind. The impression was so strong that I was relieved that he did not remove his hand from the door-knob and offer it to me…. I gathered that he took me for an interviewer. I had told him again and again that I had no intention of printing anywhere anything that he might say, but it had not seemed to make any impression on him. Before I came he had made up his mind that he was going to receive a reporter who would pick his brains, and he was a man who had great difficulty in changing his ideas. In those days an interviewer was regarded in England at once with a sort of fearful fascination, and as a being some degrees lower than the man who comes to check your gas-meter.

So I remained with the impression of something at once querulous and etiolated. Etiolation is what happens to plants if you grow them in the dark. I felt as if a minor James had called on a blotted Flaubert…. I have already recorded elsewhere the repulsion that James said he had felt when Flaubert had opened his front door to Turgenev and himself—and in a dressing-gown! And Flaubert had bellowed at James…. Mr. Moore had a servant to open his front door, and his voice was almost too faint, his dressing-gown almost too elegant. Nevertheless he always gave me the impression of being a water-colour drawing of the sage of Croisset that whilst it was still wet had been nearly bleached with blotting-paper….

It was, I fancy, a sort of nervousness engendered by this particular pallor that prevented my making any effort to see any more of the author of Esther Waters. I called on him once more at his request, and the visit was even more of a failure. As I have said I had asked him to give me something for the English Review. That had been before Marwood and I had actually started that periodical. His first words were:

“Gosse says I should certainly have nothing to do with you…. What do you want of me?”

I never knew what I had done to Mr.—afterwards Sir Edmund—Gosse, and I never enquired. It is natural to dislike the sons of one’s early patrons even more than one dislikes in the end the patrons themselves. That seems to be a law of humanity, and I left it at that. So I answered Mr. Moore’s question. I explained that Marwood and I wanted the review to contain the best writing in the world, so that naturally one came to Mr. Moore at a very early date. We had secured promises of work from Mr. James, Mr. Conrad, Mr. Meredith, Mr. Swinburne, M. France….

Mr. Moore said:

“Not of old Gosse?”

I said we were prepared to pay any price an author asked, leaving it to his conscience not to ask much more than his usual prices, so as to leave something for the others. That had worked very well so far.

He said:

“You must be in possession of gold like the floods of Pactolus!”

I said: No. Some authors asked preposterous prices, but some quite distinguished ones asked nothing at all, so it worked very well.

Then he asked me what sort of writing we wanted from him and we got once more to something like icy bickering. It was, of course, my fault. I had just been reading his reminiscences—Ave, Salve, Vale, I think, and I had felt such admiration for their beauty of expression and poetry that I said that I liked them infinitely better than anything else he had ever done.

You should never say to a novelist that you prefer his “serious” writings to his fiction, though I find that such few novelist friends as I have always say that to me. But novel-writing is a sport infinitely more exciting than the other form, so that almost all writers would prefer to be remembered by their imaginations rather than by their records….

I made it all the worse by telling that great man that his Ave, Salve, Vale was infinitely more imaginative than Evelyn Innes. As imaginative even as Esther Waters! …

I was by then worked into a state of nervous inanity by his mere nearness to me. He was living then in Ebury Street, a neighbourhood that I have always disliked. And I kept looking aside at his pictures and missing what he said.

In the end he said that he was engaged in revising one of his novels, but that if I would ask him again in a month or two he might do something for me. I think he really liked the idea … but to my lasting shame I forgot to write to him and I never saw him alone again.

I suppose it was his aloofness from life that made one always forget George Moore. I have never met a critic with any pretensions to knowledge of letters who would not acknowledge when challenged that Moore was infinitely the most skilful man of letters of his day. The most skilful in the whole world…. Yet in an infinite number of reviews and comptes rendus of the literature of the world that I have read—and written—George Moore was almost invariably forgotten. That was due perhaps to the fact that he belonged to no school in England; perhaps to his want of personal geniality, perhaps to something more subtle.

I was walking last night along a cold dark boulevard with a critic possessing a delicate discrimination in letters. He said, talking naturally of Galsworthy:

“He wasn’t at least wicked, like George Moore….” Then he checked and exclaimed almost in mental distress: “I don’t know why I say that George Moore was wicked. I know nothing against him personally. I have never heard anything against him and the Brook Kerith is one of the most beautiful books in the world. But you know what I mean….”

I knew what he meant. It was that something wicked seemed to distil itself from the pages of Moore’s books, so that whilst you read them you felt, precisely, mental distress. You felt even mentally distressed at merely remembering the writings of George Moore—as if you were making acquaintance with what goes on in the mind behind the glacial gaze of the serpent that is the Enemy of Man….

I will make a personal confession…. It has been my fate to be mistaken for—or to be told that I resembled—three men that I particularly disliked resembling…. Whenever I have gone to public literary assemblies I have inevitably heard two or three people say: “Here’s Gosse!” And two or three others would whisper: “Isn’t that man like Oscar Wilde!” That I could just stomach, though I should much have disliked to meet the fate of either of those writers. But when the late John Quinn, the collector, said to me on our first meeting in Ezra’s studio in the rue Notre Dame de Champs:

“Hullo, George Moore, how well you are looking!” I had hard work to refrain from knocking him down. I think I should have knocked him down if he had not had the sense to see that I looked well … for George Moore! I had so often been taken for Mr. Moore or told that I resembled him that, by that time, it had become an obsession.

There was nothing of that sort attaching to John Galsworthy. When you thought of him you thought of green fields in the cool, calm, bright weather of George Herbert. He had a sort of Greek aura as of perfect physical motion accompanying measured speculations in a halcyon atmosphere of eternal youth….

I, at least, have never got over the feeling that he was as Conrad called him, “young Jack,” and I cannot bring myself really to believe that he ever had any perturbations of the spirit though actually I have known him have—and indeed I have accompanied him through—some dark periods. And even at this moment I cannot think of him as other than the Fortunate Youth—happy at once in the lines on which his life was laid and in the occasion of his death. For it is no sorrow to die amidst the still resounding acclamations of a whole planet—and in the same week as George Moore. You may have the feeling that, however Fate may deal hereafter with your name, you are at least one of twin pillars that were the terminal stones—the portals of an age.

I was some years younger than Galsworthy, but he did not publish his first book until six years after I had published mine. In consequence, he being always unobtrusive and I overbearing, I got very early into the habit of considering him, and of treating him, as a much younger man. So that, when I read of his death it was almost as if I had lost a younger brother in the flower of his age.

I first saw him in a sporting club. They told of him there a curious anecdote; the fame of it hung over him like a curious legend, so that, though I was not introduced to him for several years, I was accustomed to speculate as to what sort of a fellow he could be.

In those days he was the young man about town—at any rate to all appearances. He had eaten his dinners at the Middle Temple, which every young man of good position then had to do, so that he was an unpractising barrister. He was moderate in everything, sedulous in the effort to pass unnoticed in the best places where young men about town show themselves. He had a little bachelor establishment; kept a small stable; drank very moderately and dressed with the careful negligence that was then required of you. So he appeared always to be in harmony with his surroundings. He seemed to sink into his background—on the grand-stand of a good race-meeting, in the stalls of a good theatre, at an afternoon tea in the best of houses—as harmoniously as a thirteenth-century madonna sinks into its gold background in a dim, twelfth-century, Italian church. He was nevertheless marked out—perhaps because of his legend. I have heard elderly colonels say he was not “sound.”

I do not know that I ought to tell that story. It is not derogatory to Galsworthy, but it probably belongs to someone else and one should not tell other people’s stories. But most of the people who once knew it must be dead by now, and the tale is infinitely illustrative. It is this:

One night a young man—I think it must have been Earl Bathurst or one of the Bathursts—turned up in that club with another young man—Galsworthy. Bathurst wanted to borrow a fiver from somebody. The two had been to the Derby and had done rather well. In the train with them, coming back, there had been a thimble-rigger. Galsworthy had been perfectly aware that the fellow was a swindler. But he obstinately backed himself to discover under which thimble was the pea—which was, of course, under none…. With the grim persistence that was the main note of his character he had backed himself, doubles or quits, against the thimble-rigger and his confederates. He had lost his watch and chain, tie-pin, signet ring. So they had come to that club to borrow money to redeem the watch, which had sentimental associations for Galsworthy, while the thimble-rigger waited in the hall. Bathurst had eventually got the money out of the club porter.

Grim persistence…. That was what it was. Galsworthy thought that the trick ought to be exposed for the benefit of the public…. “Ought”: that was even then his great word!

His face seemed to be always just about to smile, the lines of a smile being always about his lips. Actually he smiled a real smile—the product of an emotion rather than of a generally benevolent attitude—only rarely. He was “Devonshire,” and proud of being Devonshire, and proud that the chief attribute of the Devonshire man is a surface softness under which lies the grimmest of obstinacies—the velvet glove on a hand of marble…. Nevertheless your main impression of Galsworthy would be his smile…. And his softness.

In his physique too he had those characteristics. He appeared gentle and inactive, as if with a continuous pensiveness. But he had in his youth muscles of iron and, in athletics, the same persistence.

I do not suppose I shall ever forget my surprise just after my first introduction to him. It was at the Pent, when Conrad was stopping with me. I was prepared for something remarkable by Conrad’s really radiant expression when he said: “Jack wants to know if he may come down.” For some days I heard then of “Jack.” I do not know that I even heard his surname, for Conrad had a trick of taking it for granted that you must know everyone whom he knew. Then, at the station, appeared the smiling being of the sporting club…. That was already an astonishment.

I was driving a wagonette with a pretty good mare. He swung his grips over the side of the cart and would not get in because, he said, he wanted some exercise. The road from Sandling Junction goes immediately up a very steep bluff, so he walked beside the box-seat, conversing as Englishmen of his station converse … about the owners of the properties on either side of the road—the Laurence Hardie’s of Sandling; the Deedes of Saltwood Castle; Earl Sondes a little farther on.

At the top of the bluff he would not get in. He said:

“Drive on. That will be all right. I need some exercise.”

I said:

“If you mean to walk there is a kissing-gate in the hedge after the next ventways. On the left…. You cater the field. You’ll be on Pent Land. You’ll see the house.”

He said:

“That will be all right. Drive on. I want some exercise.”

I touched up the mare. She was a pretty good goer, aged, but with a strain of Wilfred Blunt’s Arab blood. I did not expect to see that fellow again until a quarter of an hour after I got to the house…. But there he was, still beside the box-seat, trotting along with the utmost equanimity. And, as if we had been strolling down Piccadilly he continued conversing … about the land of the Pent, which is a clayey loam in the bottoms till it runs into the chalk of the Downs; and about how the young partridges were coming on; and about Selby Lowndes, the redoubtable Master of the East Kent Hounds, who had once had a trencher-fed pack in the Cleveland. Englishmen have to know all these things or they are not “sound.” So he trotted the mile and a quarter to the Pent. I felt like Maupassant when the head of Swinburne rose out of the Mediterranean beside his canoe and the poet swam to shore beside him conversing joyously of Anacreon…. Conrad told me afterwards that Jack had held the mile record at Oxford for several years. That needs persistence.

I remember I once had a sort of portable pulpit built to write at. Someone had told me that the reason why painters usually live to be old men, whilst writers die relatively young, is that they stand at their work and do not lean over tables, compressing their stomachs and lungs…. When Galsworthy saw that pulpit he must have one too, for he wanted to live at least as long as I…. I gave up my monstrosity in a very short time, but he persisted with his for many years…. So that the image I have of Galsworthy at work is that of a painter before his easel. In those days he wore a painter’s gaberdine when he wrote. He had once the idea of using different-coloured pencils or inks for passages of differing character. He was always trying new devices…. So there he would be, an erect figure, thin, not very tall, blond, camped in front of his pulpit with a blue pencil between his lips; in his right hand a red pen that he had just taken up and profusion of other pens and pencils and rubbers and gadgets along the ledge in front of him…. Poor Jack!

It is sad to have to say: “Poor Jack!” he being no longer there. But it comes naturally, because whenever Conrad mentioned him in later years it was always as “Poor Jack.” That was because Galsworthy was so worried about his writing. It did not go very fast in the early days. The life social still had its lure for him; he was not very sure of where, as a writer, he was going. He was grimly determined to produce novels, but he was at first hampered and a little depressed by the influence of Conrad, who knew well enough where he was going…. “Jocelyn” is a palish study in the manner of the early Conrad—the Conrad of the Outpost of Progress. Then Tur genev gripped Galsworthy as he must grip every serious writer, and he produced the Villa Rubein, which is a very charming, young book, with, as it were, the face of Turgenev smiling up through every page….

He still, however, worried in our Campden Hill days. His friends and parents jeered at the idea of his writing. His father was a Tartar. I lived at one time next door to him, and that was what the servants said of the old gentleman. Galsworthy père and mère separated, tired of seeing one another, at very advanced ages. There was something pixy-ish and hard about both those old people; the father ferocious, the mother young for her age, flighty, with bright coloured bonnet ribbons. It was not a usual stock, that from which Galsworthy came.

Nevertheless, say in 1903, he still let social considerations weigh in a major degree in the arrangements of his life, though the Arts began to occupy more of his thoughts. One of his sisters, a few yards away on the Hill, was mélomane and gave wonderful concerts; the other was married to Sauter, the tough, dynamic, Austrian painter and lived just down the Hill. Campden Hill, in the royal borough of Kensington, was like a high-class Greenwich Village in which all the artists should be wealthy, refined, delicate and well-born. It was high in the air. In its almost country roads you met ladies, all of whom wore sable coats—or at least sable stoles; and admirable children all bursting with health; and Whistler and Abbey and Henry James….

I lived myself in a house on the very top of the Hill, Galsworthy in a stable just on the other side of the great covered-in reservoir. It was, of course, a converted stable; very beautifully appointed and suitable for a young bachelor of means and slightly romantic tastes. Here he used to give me those admirable English breakfasts two or three times a week, to the accompaniment of gleaming silver and hissing tea urns, with, as I have said, the sunlight shining in through the open door. For myself I have always hated comfort and all its accompaniments, but here something ascetic mingled with the tempered luxury, and I used to sit there feeling like a pleased fishwife who had got into the basement of a palace….

Galsworthy, however, was still worried. He was preparing to break with Society, but his life was still an energetic round of concerts, receptions, race-meetings, richer studio teas, theatres, dinners and the rest. We used to dispute very vigorously—mostly about writing, I being clamorous and he very determined over his kidneys and bacon. I used to declare that a writer can learn no more of Turgenev than he can of Shakespeare, both being temperaments rather than writers with methods to be studied. That used to pain Galsworthy. He would declare that no one could avoid being benefited by contact with that temperament of infinite pity and charity….

There came the mental crash. He crossed his Rubicon. I can place the very agitating day, and after that Galsworthy was no more the young bachelor about town, even in appearance. Nor was he any longer Poor Jack. He had got religion and his path was plain.

He never looked back and gradually our ways parted. I still saw a great deal of him. We still lived close together, but now down the Hill. I could see the beggars and hard cases from my windows, going from my office of the English Review, round the corner, to Galsworthy’s doorstep, that was never without its suppliants. My hard cases were all of the literary sort, such as come to the office of a journal and go on to a Galsworthy. But he had innumerable others. His charities were inexhaustible.

He was helpful with the English Review, but I always thought he was not very approving. That organ was too distinctly literary and in no way either philanthropic or propagandist of social re-organisation. I used to go for morning constitutionals with him and Gilbert Cannan. Occasionally with Ezra too, across the park to Hyde Park Corner. And always Galsworthy would be rather wistfully suggesting that I should print the work of someone who wanted to reform something—the poor laws, the relations of the sexes…. Marwood also was too Tory for him. He used to spit with indignation over Galsworthy’s humanitarian suggestions, so that my life was not very easy when Marwood walked with us and when, the blameless tool of the Reformers who had by then got the control of the Review, Galsworthy, was induced to sit in my editorial chair, I had really a difficult struggle to prevent Marwood’s assaulting him…. Galsworthy, of course, was completely innocent of any intrigue and the incident caused no shadow to fall between us. I had gone for a week’s rest—which I immensely needed—to the countryside in Normandy. And those Reformers having already a mortgage on the Review, had told Poor Jack that I had left the country for good…. It was curious the difference there was between his proposal for a number and that that I eventually printed. You would have said that it was impossible that Literature could have two such opposed faces.

The difference was that Galsworthy believed that humanity could be benefited by propaganda for virtue of a Christian order, whereas I believed that humanity can only be brought to ameliorate itself if life as it is is presented in terms of an art. And the business of Art is not to elevate humanity, but to render…. Those are the two schools of thought that have eternally divided humanity and no one in the end will ever know which will win out.

Yet it used to fill me with amazement to see Galsworthy at work—the grim persistence with which he made point after point, the dog-like tenacity with which he held to his thesis. He would ponder for hours and hours. Then the little rabbits would creep out to die after the battues; the law-parted lovers would feel the thumbscrews pinching tighter; the convicts batter on their cell doors until the cruel stupidity of men and their institutions was shown at its apogee—and beyond.

I think that that method is better for plays than for other forms and possibly at long last it is by his plays that Galsworthy will be remembered. At any rate for me the Silver Box and Joy were things of rapturous delight when I first saw them and they remain like bright patches in my memory after more than lustres. In them his extraordinary genius for contrasting antithesis with antithesis—his extraordinary gift for sticking to a situation till the last shred of drama was extracted from it—was never thrown away and never grew monotonous. And the structure even of his propaganda plays was almost always impeccable.

He could even keep within his cadre with sureness of touch. I remember that after the second performance of the Silver Box he was a good deal worried about the curtain to one of his scenes—the one in which a child is heard crying outside the house in which its mother has been arrested. He thought that this did not come over—that there was no clou to the scene. He sketched several endings and rejected them. The point was that a middle-class woman, amiable but insensitive, had had the mother of the child arrested on the wrongful suspicion of having stolen the silver cigarette box. The child, finding that its mother did not come home, hung to the railings outside the open window and cried for her, and the scene ended on the sound of the wailing.

I finally suggested that the middle-class woman might send the child out a slice of cake. For the first time in his life I found Jack become really heated. He came out of the depths of his abstraction to say that that was an atrocious suggestion. The woman was a decent, well-brought-up mother. Her maternal instincts—the maternal instincts of any woman—would let her know that a slice of cake was not a fitting substitute for a mother’s care…. So perhaps his detachment from the class that he so constantly held up to scorn was not so absolute as it might seem…. He once told me that never, in his man-about-town days, had he been absolutely in the inner circle. Something always marked him off a very little and he had always the feeling that he was a fish in not quite the right water. But the habits of thought of a youth spent in an atmosphere of so strong a flavour remain singularly in your subconsciousness.

On one of our walks I asked him—just when we were crossing a road—what had become of someone we had both known years before.

He exclaimed:

“Oh, poor chap, his sister’s married a working man!”

But as soon as we were on the opposite pavement he said determinedly:

“Of course there is no reason why one’s sister should not marry a working man. But with poor Dash’s notions it is very disagreeable to him.”

I do not mean that there was anything of the hypocritical about him. Heaven knows nobody could be further from the English governing-class frame of mind than I am. I daresay if it were ascertainable that it might well appear that I am much more alien to that frame of mind than even Galsworthy ever was, if in a different direction. But if anyone suddenly asks me even now what is my opinion of someone, I find myself replying with an estimate that is astonishingly like that of the great English public school that it was my privilege to attend.

I will try to put on paper the occasion of one of his real smiles. I came in on him once; in the later days in his house in Addison Road. He was reading a cutting from some paper. He had a humorous expression and read on to the end without speaking to me. He said:

“Those poor devils of penny-a-liners! What won’t they say and where won’t they get it from!” He tossed the slip to me.

The cutting described the early struggles with poverty, the long years of want of recognition; the bitter sufferings that, according to the writer, Galsworthy had gone through.

It was when he took it back and looked over it again that he smiled—the real smile coming out over the one that was always there, coming out very slowly, as if the emotion came from somewhere very deep and irresistibly moved his features. He said:

“Considering that I never had less than several thousands a year I can’t be said to have suffered…. And I don’t believe I was ever conscious of waiting….”

It comes into my head that I did on another occasion see him in a real temper. You might call it topical, but it happened many years ago. He had remembered after paying his income-tax that he had not included a quite considerable sum that he had received for, say, the near Eastern productions of several of his plays. He had written to the income-tax authorities that he was prepared now to pay this sum. They had answered that the accounts for the year were closed and nothing could be done about it. He had replied by sending a cheque for the amount…. He had received a letter, returning the cheque, and saying that the Lords Commissioners had ordered that his correspondence must now cease….

At that he was enraged. He asked: How could the country be run? How could justice be done? How was it possible to do anything with officials who took serious matters with that levity? He went on being angry about it and worrying officialdom about the matter for a long time. His concern was so great because, he said: How was it possible that the poorer classes should not be unduly burdened when the comparatively wealthy like himself could escape as easily—even involuntarily!

I will conclude with a little, gay story.

I had gone to lunch at the Galsworthys’ one day when he had had to go out to meet a theatre manager before the meal was quite finished. The door closed behind him and Mrs. Galsworthy sprang up and said:

“Now we’re going to have treat!”

Galsworthy kept an admirable table, but it was one relatively chaste when compared with my reprehensible culinary feats with garlic and condiments. So Mrs. Galsworthy produced from secret recesses in the sideboard a very wrapped-up Camembert. And when it was unwrapped…. Well, it was a Camembert! … She said:

“Poor Jack doesn’t forbid me to eat things like this. But nothing so pagan must ever appear when he’s at table.”

When the cheese was quite unwrapped and oozing over our plates Poor Jack put his head around the door with his slow, friendly air of reconnoitring. He wrinkled up his nose, smiled as if he had caught two children stealing jam.

“Isn’t that,” he asked, “what you would call being caught en flagrant délit?… Or is it fragrant delights?”

So he was not above making a pun on occasion.

The last time I saw him was at one of those attempts to establish an entente between Anglo-Saxon and French writers over which he admirably shed his aureole. Curiously enough it was in Paris. The French loved him for his admirable presence, his old-world dignity, his aureole and his charming French that was hesitant only because of his modesty. And standing, dominating that crowd of hard-shelled Gallic writers as a white swan might float over an assembly of black herons, he told them that if he had any skill in letters, it came from France. It came from a long discipleship to Flaubert and Maupassant and Anatole France … and to Turgenev and Conrad, who themselves had learned all that they knew of writing from French writers.

It was curious and touching to hear that valiant pronouncement.

PART ONE

CHAPTER TWO

THERE WAS ONE POOR FELLOW—A MOST  horrible physical mess. I used to see him from the windows fluttering like a smashed crow from my doorstep to Galsworthy’s. In 1911 that would be. I do not remember his name; it was something like Regan, and his was one of those cases that neither Galsworthy nor I could do anything to relieve, rack our brains how we might. He had one of those distorted faces that give the Irish a reputation for humour, though I never heard him make a joke. He smelt, of course, of whisky, and his crushed limbs were hidden in the folds of a black Inverness.

He had been for many years a reporter on a Sheffield paper; then, for more years, on a Brighton afternoon sheet. His record had been admirable. One day he had been riding a bicycle on the Downs behind the city, after some country news story. An automobile had come on him from behind and passed over him. It had broken both his legs and both his arms and had gone on without doing anything to help him. All this as well as the excellence of his character was confirmed by the journalists’ benevolent association to which I subscribed.

He had been for more than two years in hospital and for two years more in a home. Now he could just drag himself along—a man of perhaps thirty-five…. During his absence from it one of those shake-ups that characterise the English journalistic world had taken place. Provincial papers had been merged one into the other; London journals had split up or had disappeared. He found himself alone in a completely changed world. I don’t know how he had been employed before he came to see me. Certainly he had acquired a craving for drink. How should he not have?

I was at that time running what appeared to be an opulent monthly, so I was being inundated with hard cases and the habitually mendicant. It was really a nightmare. Men came looking like blackmailers, looking like police sergeants, like Montmartre poets, like sailors ashore. They all began by saying:

“I’m a journalist myself, Mr. H——.”

As such they tried to sell poems, or the family secrets of distinguished personages, or balls of opium or adolescent chorus girls. Usually I sent them on to the journalists’ benevolent society. That may seem a cold-blooded course, but I was overwhelmed with work, and even to deal with the major hard cases was by itself exhausting. Henry James once said that I possessed an unrivalled knowledge of the bas fonds of journalism. I certainly did by the time that inundation had passed over me.

But Regan’s seemed to me to be the hardest of all cases, for he was a man of intelligence and great shrewdness. Unfortunately his journalistic brilliance was of a sort that I could not employ in the English  Review. I got Mr. Anderson Graham, the editor of Country Life, to promise him a job. Mr. Graham was a great, kindly, grey, home-spun Scot. He had plucked the fine gowans of Edinburgh nights with Henley and Stevenson and Whibley and that gang, so he was not to be frightened, as others might have been, of addicts to usquebaugh, and the stories about him were innumerable. In his more expansive moments he used to say that, in the office, they called his periodical Pig & Piffle and edited it in their sleep. I was once calling on him when a reporter from the Daily Mail came in to ask if Country Life would oblige by saying when cub-hunting began. Cub-hunting is the process by which supernumerary fox-cubs are chopped out of coverts and young hounds blooded in the early autumn before regular fox-hunting begins, and it opens at different dates in various hunts according as the corn-crops are off the furrows. But no one in the office of that agricultural journal, nor to all appearances did anyone in the offices of the great metropolitan daily, know that cardinal fact of the country year. In those days, yearly, on the 12th of August, the “festival of St. Grouse,” the Daily Mail used to announce that the crack of the rifle would be heard on the Scottish moors…. But I am bound to confess that once when a detachment of the Welch were stationed outside some French coverts near a place called Béhencourt I have disgracefully shot pheasants, at night, with a Morris-tubed rifle…. I suppose that now I shall never again be able to go to England!

At any rate, Country Life was the first English journal to find that when its circulation exceeded a certain figure it lost money. I remember Graham’s perplexity at being faced with that dilemma. Circulation they had to have in order to attract advertisers; but when the bulk of advertisements became enormous the paper began to cost more than a shilling to produce and the postage rate went up….

We shared sub-editors, Anderson Graham and I, in the golden and decorative person of Mr. Douglas Goldring, then, and still, the most elegant and youthful of traveller-novelists. So I had hoped that with Graham and Goldring and myself to keep an eye on him poor Regan might hold down his job.

But he never turned up in the offices of Country Life. Instead, after a week’s drunk and a week to sober himself he once more visited me. He was bone-sober, reasonable, cajoling and his Inverness coat was torn…. It was then that I discovered that he was also tapping poor Galsworthy. It was obvious that with the small sum I had given him to get presentable clothes for his job he could not have paid for a whole week’s alcohol. So I begged Galsworthy not to give him any more money without warning me; got someone in the office to take him and order some clothes from my own tailor, paid his bill for a week in advance at a temperance hotel and rang up Lord Northcliffe. Lord Northcliffe was the most generous of men and was perfectly ready to give Regan money. He said that since Regan had worked and had incurred his wounds in the service of papers that he, Northcliffe, had acquired it would be only decent to provide for him. But at last I persuaded him to give Regan a job on one of his domestic-interest papers.

For that week Regan wrote brilliantly about suburban festivities and underlinen. Then he was paid—and wrecked the office with the fireman’s hatchet from the corridor. I tried him in my own office for a week—carrying out proofs. He left all the proofs undelivered except for one batch that he took to the printer’s. At the printer’s he nearly murdered a young compositor. I handed him over then to Galsworthy.

Galsworthy believed that the country would cure him and got him jobs successively with a gamekeeper, in a park lodge, and as several things that I have forgotten. The end was always the same. As soon as he touched money the drink drove him to commit light-hearted but ferocious outrages, so that it was a tribute to the goodness of heart of humanity that none of his victims ever handed him over to the police. And there was no way out of it. He was in perpetual physical pain from which only drink would give him oblivion. Once Galsworthy put him with a country doctor who doped him with cocaine or morphia for a longish period. But in addition to that he had to have drink. At last he was run over and killed by a heavy motor-lorry as he lay at night across a narrow country lane, outside a public-house….

So, on that early day of 1919, I stood on the kerb by the Campden Hill waterworks and suddenly believed that I saw Regan flutter brokenly in the shadows across the road. There were in those days an infinite number of Regans and for myself I knew that my mind had had both its legs and arms smashed.

London then was no place for me. The London that I had left had been gay, if only with the hectic gaiety that was supposed to distinguish Paris. It had shot defiant rays of light to the peak of Heaven, and beneath them one had gone with insouciance on careless errands. One had had little sense of the values of life if indeed one had the sense that life had any values at all.

Now it was as if some of the darkness of nights of air-raids still hung in the shadows of the enormous city. Standing on the Hill that is high above that world of streets one had the sense that vast disaster stretched into those caverns of blackness. A social system had crumbled. Recklessness had taken the place of insouciance. In the old days we had seemed to have ourselves and our destinies well in hand. Now we were drifting towards a weir….

You may say that everyone who had taken physical part in the war was then mad. No one could have come through that shattering experience and still view life and mankind with any normal vision. In those days you saw objects that the earlier mind labelled as houses. They had been used to seem cubic and solid permanences. But we had seen Ploegsteert where it had been revealed that men’s dwellings were thin shells that could be crushed as walnuts are crushed. Man and even Beast … all things that lived and moved and had volition and life might at any moment be resolved into a scarlet viscosity seeping into the earth of torn fields…. Even omnibuses had picked their lumbering ways, crowded with obfusc humanity, dulled steel and bronze, between pits and hillocks of the tortured earth until they found the final pit into which they wearily subsided. It would be long before you regarded an omnibus as something which should carry you smoothly along the streets of an ordered life. Nay, it had been revealed to you that beneath Ordered Life itself was stretched, the merest film with, beneath it, the abysses of Chaos. One had come from the frail shelters of the Line to a world that was more frail than any canvas hut.

And, more formidable than the frailness of the habitations was … the attitude of the natives. “We who returned—and more particularly those of us who had gone voluntarily and with enthusiasms—were like wanderers coming back to our own shores to find our settlements occupied by a vindictive and savage tribe. We had no chance. We were like poor Regan after his four years in hospital. The world of men was changed and our places were taken by strangers.

As to my own fate I was relatively unmoved. Very early in life I had arrived at the settled conviction: Homo homini lupus—man is a wolf to his fellow-men. And I have always believed that, given a digging-fork and a few seeds and tubers, with a quarter’s start, I could at any time wrest from the earth enough to keep body and soul together. I thought so when I was twenty; I thought the same when I stood on that Campden Hill kerb and I am again preparing to set out on that adventure at this moment of writing with the world seeming to crumble around us.

I wrote then, in the columns of that lunatic journal, that England had suffered more, at least in her mentality, than any other of the nations that had shared in the war…. We fought in the beginning, and for more than half of the duration of the fighting with volunteer soldiers. Thus in 1919 England found herself in the position of Bulgaria at the end of the Balkan War of 1913…. Bulgaria had formed a battalion of élite troops out of all the educated men in that relatively illiterate country. This battalion she hurled against the barbed wire of the impregnable Turkish entanglements round Tchatalja. It was entirely wiped out and Bulgaria found herself deprived of intelligentsia and almost of men who could read and write.

In 1919 England was in an almost parallel position. It was not her intelligentsia that she had lost. They had embusquéd themselves in government offices, in munition works, in prisons or in the posts vacated by fighting men…. But the most vigorous and alert of the young men had been killed or mangled—physically and mentally. It had been impossible for a young man sound physically and of healthy imagination not to volunteer in the years between 1914 and 1917. Those who remained and filled all the posts in 1919 were the physically unfit and the mentally frigid. So those poor boys came back; maimed and bewildered to a world administered by those born to detest them….

When I stood on the kerb watching the shade of Regan creep past on the opposite side of the street I had just come back from a police-court. One of the younger officers of my battalion had been sentenced to a month’s imprisonment…. At the beginning of the war he had been in a First-class Government Office. He was a remarkable Greek scholar and possessed an extraordinary, sardonic wit. He lost a leg and an eye at Gheluvelt. His Government Office refused to re-employ him because he had lost an eye. He might, they said, lose another, poring over papers in their halls. Then he would become a charge on the peaceable taxpayer. The taxpayer must be protected from men who had chosen to endanger their eyes and limbs. It was a First-class Office.

On being demobilised my poor young friend had gone with a number of other young, just-demobilised officers to a Regent Street café. Its doors of revolving glass are regularly smashed every Boat Race night by Oxford or Cambridge undergraduates. He and his young friends, all from one University or the other, had duly smashed those revolving doors—to commemorate the end of a Boat Race of a larger kind. The regular punishment for that offence is forty shillings or a month. It has been that since shillings were shillings. The magistrate gave the other young fellows the option of paying the fine. My young friend he sentenced to a month’s hard labour—not because he had been a ringleader, but because he had two decorations for gallantry. The magistrate said that the public must be protected from a brutal and licentious soldiery. He used that actual cliché phrase. If you consider what that poor young man had been … protecting when he had lost his eye, his foot and his sense of the fitness of things you will find that those words are of a singular piquancy. The young man, however, went to the bad. He became a hopeless case. Worse than Regan.

I suppose the fate of England would not have been much better or England truer to her old self if public opinion had insisted on saving for the public service the poor flotsam of its best blood, its best sinews and best, normal brains. Yet it would have been better….

That savage, that hysterical determination to extirpate—as rats—the men to whom the very same public had been on its knees but a few months before … that St. Bartholomew’s Day engendered in its victims a cynicism of the betrayed and in the others a still more fatal cynicism of the traitor that were alike of almost infinite detriment to the poor old ship of the British state.

That day, immediately after seeing that poor boy martyrised, I wrote for my lunatic journal some comments on his case. That periodical welcomed it, as you might say, with cheers and tears, but on the next day ceased to exist. The rest of the Press naturally refused to print those words. They were engaged in applauding the magistrate for his courageous pronouncement. Thus those words never saw the light. I will here summarise what I said. It was by way of being a grave warning….

England had paid a terrible toll of the most English of its youth. In Notre Dame there was—there still is—a small tablet not much larger than a sheet of The Times of New York or London. It was surmounted by the pretty royal arms of England and her Dominions and announced that it was there to the glory of God and to the memory of more than a million British dead who lay for the most part in the fields of France…. It is a fine piece of English swank that that solitary tribute should be so small and so restrained. It is the fitting tailpiece to the answer to the Scrap of Paper speech, and if England had compassed nothing else she would be justified of her national and emotional rectitude. For myself I never come in the shadows on that lettering and those symbols in gold, azure and vermilion without feeling more emotion than—even in shadows—my British upbringing will let me express….

More than a million is a great many men. To them you may add twice as many more of those who were mentally warped by mutilations, rough living and subsequent betrayal. Add some couple of million children that those dead youths might have had. (I am dwelling on factors making for change in national characteristics and fortunes and we may postulate a certain inheritance of character in children.) So you arrive at a people destined to be very markedly changed in aspect as in functioning in the comity of nations. You will arrive at a commonwealth whose youth will be cynical and lack initiative and whose rulers will be wearied intelligentsia. They will, these last, be theorists … and it was the very quality of such merits as England possessed that her lawmakers had always been empiricists. Pre-war England had not been a very satisfactory affair. She had been distinguished in her intellectual as in her material harvests by the dead hand of vested interests. Questioning and innovation had been very difficult. But there had been at least some youth, some intellectual clarity, some carelessness, some iconoclasts. And her laws had been made for men relatively free.

Most of that was to go. For a generation England was to sink back—I am quoting from the memory of my article—into a slough in which despondency and vested interests, however changed in incidence, must strangle all initiative. You cannot kill off a million of your most characteristic young men, cram your workhouses and jails with all that they will hold of the rest and for ever disillusionise those that remained outside those institutions—you could not do all that without at least modifying your national aspect. A nation—any body of men—cannot flourish either as empire-builders or poets, or in any department of life that lies between those extremes without cherishing its illusions. And in England of those days all the great words upon which are founded the illusions of life lay under the shadow of reprobation…. In London Town of those days it was more than unfashionable to speak with commendation of Faith, Loyalty, Courage, Perseverance, God, Consols, the London Police Force or the Union Jack.

It was a matter of reaction. War-time England had been like a lunatic asylum. To go from London with its yells, posters, parades and exhortatory beanfeasts to Paris, dead, grey, silent, overshadowed, had been to go from a parrot-house in Coney Island to a Cathedral cloister. The reaction had to come in both cases. In Paris—even as in Berlin—the reaction must be against negationalism. That we shall witness. In London it had to be towards it.

I got as far as that in my article….

… I don’t know that the large words Courage, Loyalty, God and the rest had, before the war, been of frequent occurrence in London conversations. But one had had the conviction they were somewhere in the city’s subconsciousness…. Now they were gone. So at least I felt, standing on the Campden Hill kerb….

I don’t, again, know that large words in conversations are indispensable to make me happy. I knew that, at that moment, all was over between me and London. I had loved that vast, quiet agglomeration as few men had loved it. If I had never been—except for the duration of the war—English, even when buried in the deep woods of Kent, I had always been a Londoner. A Cockney. Born within sound of Bow Bells and proud of it….

You can be a Londoner and not in the least English, just as you can be a New Yorker and remain quite un-American. It is curious.

… Years and years ago I was talking to Mr. E. V. Lucas. I hope he is now Sir E. V. L…. We were lying on the grass at Kent Hatch, looking out over the great view that goes away into West Kent. … Mr. Lucas was then publishing his Edition of Charles Lamb, and I was abusing Lamb and De Quincey and Hazlitt and all the tribe of English essayists. I was saying that it was with their works—and particularly with those of Charles Lamb—that the English people anodyned what passed for their brains so that Pure Thought was a thing unknown in all that green country. It comes to me suddenly and for the first time after thirty years that I was not tactful!

But Mr. Lucas seemed most amiable. Like all English humorists he was of a mournful and taciturn cast. On the very finest days he carried an umbrella. He listened for a long time to me, slim, dark, puffing at his pipe and looking out over the view.

I said:

“Damn it all, Lucas, you are an intelligent fellow. How can you read this buttered-toast-clean-fire-clear-hearth-spirit-of-the-game-beery-gin-sodden sentimentalism? What can you see in it? For Heaven’s sake tell me what you see in it!”

Mr. Lucas let ten puffs of his pipe eddy away towards the great, green-grey vale below us…. I kept on with invectives, asking him to tell me. Why wouldn’t he at least tell me?

Between the tenth and eleventh of his next set of puffs he said:

“Because you wouldn’t understand.”

I said:

“Damn it all, why shouldn’t I understand? Has not your servant eyes? Has not your servant ears? A tongue to savour meats? A belly for their digestion?”

Mr. Lucas gave four puffs at his pipe. He said:

“‘Belly’ is not a very nice word.”

I said fiercely:

“But why can’t I stomach Lamb and Hazlitt and the whole boiling? Why?”

He removed his pipe from his lips to say:

“Because you use words that are not quite nice. Charles Lamb would never have used them. You remember that Thackeray, speaking of Lamb, removed his hat and whispered ‘Saint Charles.’”

I said:

“Lamb was a drunkard. His sister committed a murder. Wainwright, another English essayist, committed a murder and was hanged. I never was drunk in my life. I never attempted to murder anybody. I was never hanged. I detest buttered toast. Is that why I do not appreciate Elia? Or is there another reason?”

Mr. Lucas did something with his pipe. Perhaps he put it back in his mouth. At any rate, his pipe like that of later British prime ministers, was an integral and active part of the landscape. I said insistently:

“Why — cannot — I — appreciate — Charles — Lamb?”

Mr. Lucas, always the gentlest of human beings, said more gently than usual:

“Because you are not really English.”

That hit me in the face like a discharge from a fireman’s hose.

I said:

“Why am I not English? I play cricket not quite as well as you do, but with as much pleasure. I play golf more often, if not so well. I went to as great a public school as yours. I take a cold bath every morning. I know as much about flower-gardening and more about kitchen-gardening, sheep, the rotation of crops, hops, roots and permanent pasture. I drop my aitches before words derived from the French. My clothes are made by a Sackville Street tailor who made for my great-grandfather and has never fitted me too well. I never let anybody see me writing and deprecate as far as possible the fact that I follow an art. I shave every morning and have my hair cut every fortnight at the proper shop in Bond Street. Why, then, am I not English?”

Mr. Lucas said with dejection:

“Because you do not appreciate …” He paused; I supplied:

“Charles Lamb?”

He said:

“No, I am thinking.” He added: “Punch.”

I exclaimed heatedly that I was the sole owner of the recipe for the world-famous Prince Regent’s brew. It had been all that my great-uncle Tristram Madox had had to leave my grandfather.

Mr. Lucas said that he did not mean the beverage. He meant the journal. A number of Englishmen had not read or heard of Lamb, but no one who was not English could appreciate him. Equally no one who could not appreciate him after they had read him could be English. But every Englishman read, appreciated and quoted that journal unceasingly.

I daresay the diagnosis was correct….

Till that day in 1898 I had never given the matter of my own nationality a thought. I gave it very little after that. There remained in my subconsciousness a conviction that must have grown stronger—that I was not English. Not English at all, not merely “not really English.” I never had much sense of nationality. Wherever there were creative thinkers was my country. A country without artists in words, in colours, in stone, in instrumental sounds—such a country would be forever an Enemy Nation. On the other hand, every artist of whatever race was my fellow-countryman—and the compatriot of every other artist. The world divided itself for me into those who were artists and those who were merely the stuff to fill graveyards. And I used to feel in the company of those who were not artists the same sort of almost physical, slight aversion that one used, during the war, to feel for civilians.

I do not apologise for these dicta. Humanity must divide itself into capillary groups or the Arts and the Crafts must die. If the blacksmith ceased to say: “By hammer and hand all Art doth stand,” or if the road-mender no longer boasted: “Les cantonniers ce sont des bons enfants,” we should have atrocious roads and lame vehicles whose axles break in their ruts … and indeed, since, say, bankers say worse than hang of artists, why should artists take it lying down?

That became my settled conviction an immense number of years ago. I remember writing it in a diary that I kept in the washstand in the top back bedroom of my grandfather—the artist’s house. That was before I was eighteen. “Every artist is my fellow-countryman,” I wrote—so early did that flame of patriotism burst out in me…. Mr. Lucas had supplied the corollary….

That was hardly necessary. Englishmen of both camps declared—the one side with complacency, the other with dejection—that none of the great artists of that day was pure English. Conrad was a Pole, James an American, Hudson an American born in La Plata, Meredith a Welshman, Yeats an Irishman, Whistler an American, Sargent the same. Even Thomas Hardy was popularly credited with French ancestry…. And indeed the Englishman—the homme moyen sensuel—was more and more assuming the attitude of the Imperial Roman whose works of art were all produced by Greek slaves. The tendency had begun even earlier indeed—with the Art of Music. It was not merely conceded: it was part of a passionate national belief that no Englishman could be anything so effeminate as a musician—and that led to the equally passionate conviction that if, for your private ends, you desired to listen to music it must be composed and purveyed by some sort of unwashed foreigner. With the acknowledgment of the French Impressionists it appeared evident that the plastic arts, too, were the province of the lesser breeds without the law—the people who do not appreciate Mr. Lucas’s favourite journal. Writing was on the run.

It was the passion of Germany in those days to be able to explain that every great man and especially every great artist was of Teutonic descent. The discovery that Dante, as a supporter of the Guelfs, was really a German and that the real name of Bertran de Born was Bernstein van Bornhofen caused little emotion in the shires. But, in the suburbs, great enthusiasm attended the announcement that Rossetti was really a German. “Rossetti” means “little red head,” and everyone with a small red head to be found in Italy is obviously Teutonic. And when it came to the turn of Shakespeare—the spear is an Allemannic weapon and everyone whose ancestors shook spears is of German descent!—then indeed a sigh of relief went up from the Land’s End to Berwick….

I am writing much more than half seriously. The normal Englishman did in those days—say at the time of the Boer War or during the Fashoda incident—seriously believe that too much study of the Arts would make the youth of England effeminate or that we should fare badly in our next war with France. During the Boer War I lunched after a foursome at Rye with a provincial Lord Mayor and a London Alderman who had passed the chair—who had, that is to say, been Lord Mayor of London. It was shortly after the terrible disaster to British troops at Spion Kop. The Londoner said that it had been proposed in the Court of Common Council to present a humble petition to Her Majesty praying that, for the duration of the war, all theatres, music-halls, public libraries, picture-galleries, and other places of amusement might be closed. That was to stimulate recruiting and to force the youth of the nation to take a sterner view of life whilst employing its leisure exclusively on field sports. The proposal was not accepted by the Councillors of London City. One of them pointed out that, if the theatres were closed, Shakespeare could not be played. Shakespeare was one of the most patriotic of English writers.

The provincial Lord Mayor did not agree. All these fellows were pestilential and should be suppressed at once. They made young men effeminate and vicious. His son, very much against his wishes, had gone to Paris to study French. After the boy’s return, the Lord Mayor had found, actually hung on the wall of the boy’s bedroom, an indecent photograph. The Lord Mayor had confiscated it and it had caused a sensation when he had passed it round his court of Aldermen. The son had said that it was a photograph of a celebrated Greek statue in a State Museum in Paris—the Venus of something. All the Lord Mayor could say was that if that was the sort of filth they showed in these places the sooner they were shut for good the better…. He was the typical Englishman of those days.

That being so it could not be wondered at if I did not feel very English. Indeed I do not know that I ever had a very strong sense of nationality at all. But till the moment of the early spring of which I am talking—go as far from London as I might or stay away as long as I would—I remained a Londoner. Indeed, once after I had lived in the country a number of years, making only the merest swallow flights to town, I wrote a book about London. It was a monument of affection, was received with rapture and remained for a time a classic.

To be a Londoner is a singular, amorphous state. It is a frame of mind rather than a fact supported by domicile. The passion for London is a passion for vast easinesses and freedoms in which you may swim as in a tepid and tranquil sea. You are surrounded by infinite multitudes, yet you know that no eye will be upon you. You know that because you know how completely unobservant you yourself are whilst you walk the streets. I suppose one could say: “Now I will go and take a look around and see what I can see in the highways and byways of London.” It would “pay” to explore London, and one knows that it would pay…. But one never does it. After I had written my classic about the soul of London I discovered that I had never been in the Tower or St. Paul’s…. Americans will not understand that. Every Londoner will.

Nevertheless the fascination of London is that it can be explored. You could not explore New York: you go from place to place. You can know all the arrondissements of Paris sufficiently well to have in your mind a bird’s-eye view of the city. But whoever carried about with him at the back of his brain a bird’s-eye view of London? … No one. I knew my London—the four miles from Hammersmith Broadway to Piccadilly Circus and I have been the mile or so eastward from the Fountain to the Mansion House…. But London is ninety miles across. What happens in Battersea Park? Where is Norwood? I have not the ghost of an idea. Perhaps in the one they practise voodo or play pelota; the other may be somewhere near Bogotá or Ispahan and have hanging gardens….

So it can be explored. It ought to be explored. Sitting here in Paris I find myself filled with an itch to spend a hundred years strolling between St. Paul’s Cray and the Monument—with an English descended American, of course, to keep my interest alive and tell me all about it…. I was not telling the strict truth when I said I had not seen the Tower before I wrote my classic about Dick Whittington’s city. I went there once when I was nineteen. But I went with a young lady from Richmond, Va., long, long since dead, and of such a charm, vivacity and accent! So of course I did see the Tower, but not to notice! …

It was in that way that I should still have written of this city of my birth until I stood on that kerb in Campden Hill, say on the 1st March, 1919…. But as I extended my foot to make that crossing something snapped. It was the iron band around my heart that had hitherto made it London’s own. “London only! London only! This train London only!” say the porters beside the trains in Ashford or Darlington or Exeter…. That could never again be said of me. When I went to London after that it would never be “back to London.” I should be visiting a town where I had no place and that knew not me! I was perfectly aware of that. The motto of the citizens and city of London is “Domine dirige nos….”—“Lord guide us.” The arms of Paris show a ship and beneath it: “Fluctuat nec mergitur. …”—“It goes up and down and is not sunk….” That was thenceforth to be my device and condition. But now one may be sinking. With all the world and the dollar.

And I knew then that that was to be my fate. I had known it, probably, in my deep sub-consciousness perhaps a year before. The conviction had reached the surface of my mind only that afternoon.

That afternoon I had driven in an open taxi with a lady novelist of position and activity to a garden-party at the house of another lady novelist of extraordinary position and activity. It may have been the lady who wrote the Rosary, or it may have been Mrs. Annie S. Swan and the place may have been Ashford, Middlesex, or it may have been Uxbridge. I suffered from complete failure of memory for a period after the first battle of the Somme and my memory of events for some twelve months after the war is still extremely uncertain. But I do remember that drive with a queer distinctness as to one episode…. I said, as it were out of the blue:

“I shall leave London now, for good!”

We were passing through some horror of a suburb with wide streets and a railed-in Green. It comes back to me now as resembling any raw assemblage of filling-stations and new villas on the Albany Post Road. I do not think that I had ever been in an outer suburb of London before and the squalor of that sight completed my depression.

So because of some mental trick of connection I had said to my companion:

“I shall leave London for good.”

The announcement did not much move her, but she was polite enough to ask why.

I said—and I didn’t in the least mean to say it:

“Because there is no one here I can talk to.” I added: “No one understands what I say.”

Then I got, I assure you, what at school we used to call a wigging! I was upbraided for my conceit until, if I had cared about the matter, my ears would have tingled. I was told that London was full of the most brilliant men and women imaginable. On account of the sparkle of its society, London was the most exciting place in the world. How then dare I say what I had said? … Besides, whilst I had been absent on my nonsensical job a whole crop of lady novelists had sprung up and taken the amazed world by storm…. There were Dash and Dashdash and Blank … a rush of feminine names that were entirely unknown to me.

My head bowed humbly before the storm. I have not the slightest objection to being called conceited, but I do not think that conceit had had anything to do with what had slipped from me at that moment. I hadn’t meant to say what I had said. I was unconscious that I had even thought of leaving London for more than a country visit. And I don’t think I had even meant to high-hat anybody on that occasion, though I am perfectly ready to high-hat people when I am in the mood. What I think I had really in the back of my mind was the feeling that for my friends—as opposed to my acquaintances—London had become a terribly sad place. The people I had known and liked before the war seemed to have fallen all alike under a curse. Several had died in their beds, many had been killed in the war, some had aged disproportionately; all were terribly impoverished and shabby. Some had been militantly pro-German and I didn’t want to see them; some were actually German and still interned, so that I could not see them.

My acquaintances, on the other hand, when they had not been killed or promoted to incredible elevations, had prospered unbelievably. Except those who had been rich already, they had all become war-rich, whilst those who had been rich now exuded gold from every pore. They provided the brilliant society of which the lady novelist had spoken, but it was a society in which, for financial reasons, I could hardly hope to share. My British upbringing had seen to it that I was—as indeed I remain—a determined chop-for-chop man.

Less expensive brilliance was provided by the semi-militantly pro-Germans who had done themselves well in government jobs and by conscientious objectors who emerged from various obscurities and proved themselves heroes indeed to the sound of the gramophone and beer bottles, tankards and pails. I have never seen such hilarious and noisy assemblies, not even in Greenwich Village during Holy Week. I didn’t like them much.

And, in the meantime, as I have said, my late comrades were a prey to every kind of disaster and persecution. I would not like to say how many of the ex-officers of one regiment with whose mess I was intimately acquainted went to prison and God knows how many of its other Ranks were a prey to the vengeance of the Law. And all for small crimes, disturbances of the peace and trivial misdemeanours that, had they been committed by non-combatants, would have received the benefit of the First Offenders Act. It was not right and it was driving me mad.

I was talking yesterday to a French comrade of the war. He said: Yes … for the year after 1919 they were all mad—all those who had fought. And they were allowed to dissipate their energies and get themselves  back to a normal frame of mind. In his riverine pays they would get themselves up as Red Indians, get barges, go into town in them, paint shop-fronts in astonishing colours, play the wildest practical jokes. All the while the police would go round corners or, with their hands behind their backs, gaze up at the weathercocks on the church-steeples. The more sober elders and employers of labour grumbled about the génération perdue—the lost generation that would not labour soberly in their workshops. But at the end of the year authority gradually reasserted itself and the young men got tired of playing pranks that grew dull because they were met with no resentment. So that generation became inspired with hope and with ideas of reconstruction. It conspuéd Anatole France on his deathbed, eschewed all negational writers … and was found again….

But our martyred generation was lost for good—for sheer want of imagination….

The lady novelist in the open taxi was continuing to belabour me for my conceit. We were passing old manor houses, mangled and martyrised, and old roadside oaks, felled. It did not raise my spirits. She was upbraiding me for saying that I found no one to talk to. She supposed that was because I considered myself an “artist.” Did I consider that the brilliant Miss Bullock-White, the adorably witty Miss Mary Gordon Prince, the admirable Miss Gwillyson Jones, Miss Brandon Churchill, the poetess, and innumerable other women-writers of whom the crop had blossomed since the war….

I interrupted her to say that I hadn’t based my allegation that I was not understood on the fact that I considered myself an artist. I was not an artist; I was a broken officer. I expected no quarter on that account. But I claimed the right to have my view of the universe….

She was not, of course, listening to me. She was asking me to consider how inconsistent I was. I had always been a supporter of Woman’s Suffrage. That was what had made her tolerate me, in spite of my conceit. Did I then consider that I was subtler than … and she reeled off all those names again? Was I so subtle that I could not be understood by them?

I continued my own speculations. I said I supposed I was misunderstood by most people I talked to because I took as the basis of all my conversation two axioms: the first was that the artist—the man who added to the thought and emotions of mankind, and he alone—had any divine right to existence. The rest of humanity was merely the stuff to fill graveyards….

At that my companion screamed: really as if she had found herself alone in a taxi with a satyr. She delivered herself of names of the Great…. Her friend Lord X—— who owned a thousand papers; her dearest friend’s husband, Lord Y—— who had revolutionised cobalt for accumulators, nickel, salt, glass-making; Lord Z—— who had invented X-rays; or even the splendid athlete, Sir Archibald Mac Gregor, who could go round the tennis-court in sixty-eight…. Did I consider myself immortal whilst all those were merely common clay? …

I said that my second axiom was that it was only by its arts that a nation could be saved—even commercially.

A loud, dull explosion made her scream again…. It was only the blowing out of the stump of a cedar in a nearby field that had once been a lawn. She apologised for having—involuntarily—clung to me for protection. Her nerves were still on edge from the late air-raids….

I said that it wasn’t to be expected that anyone who took those as his axiomatic facts of life could be understood by people whose axioms were different. If I said that someone was a good man, I meant one who had evolved a new technique in painting or had a keen brain that let him demolish accepted ideas. If the infinite and the sane majority of the inhabitants of London called someone a good man they meant one who subscribed freely to charity for the well-behaved poor, or who read and acted on the work of Mr. Samuel Smiles or did not sleep with his housemaids…. So I differed from most Londoners as to the mere meaning of words.

She was saying that it was like my snobbishness to be contemptuous of housemaids. Surely one of the elementary teachings of the Suffragette movement had been that domestic service was as worthy an occupation as any other! Besides, there were no housemaids. They had all gone into Armaments. If you could find as much as a tweeny you were lucky. Even house-parlourmaids were unattainable.

… So you see it was difficult for me to find comprehension. Even the most spirituelle of lady novelists found me incomprehensible—and unpleasant at that. If you are spirituelle the incomprehensible must be unpleasant to you. And one may take it that lady novelists are the most comprehending of the sex that claims to be the more subtle.

And I am not sure that it was not the lady novelists of that day—the new crop—that really drove me out of London. I do not know how I got to any literary teas. I was no longer a literary figure and I was battered and mournful. I suppose I had nothing to do and drifting, drifted into old places. And there I had the unpleasant experience that was once R. L. Stevenson’s. You remember—I must have told the story several times, for I had it from my father who had it from the author of Treasure Island—Stevenson in search of local colour once dressed up as a working man and so walked the streets. I do not know that he found any adventures, but he came upon one definite and mortifying side of life. He found that women completely ignored him. As if he had been invisible! Normally, when he went his way women passing him would at least show a sense of his existence. It might not go as far as what was called a glad eye. But in every woman—as in every man—there is hidden something of the goose-girl who dreams of fairy princes…. Dressed as a working man he found none of this and he was mortified. He could only attribute his normal attractions to his clothes!

Well, it was like that with me and the lady novelists. At the literary teas I must have been as a ghost. Occasionally a man—presumably a writer—would address a word to me. They would even ask me if I hadn’t once written something. One young fellow—thirtyish and dark—told me he had once read a hunting scene of mine and thought it rather good. I had never written a hunting scene, and his breath was very bad. So I did not pursue the conversation….

But for the ladies I did not exist. Not one of them addressed a remark to me. They sat, awfully gazing into the distance. Occasionally they spoke one to the other. If I said anything they stopped talking as if a disagreeable sound were interrupting them. Then they went on with their conversation. It was, of course, a matter of dress. I was still in uniform….

However, I went to one reception—at Lady Ottoline Morrell’s, I should think. I knew no one there, and was sitting on a scarlet divan beside an unknown man. The gracious hostess with an attendant band was going by. She stopped and pointed one finger at the two of us.

“Those two,” she said, “are the only men in the world who can write English.”

She passed on. I do not think I had ever seen her before. My divan-mate and I inspected each other with curiosity and suspicion. I mentioned my name and he said that he had never heard of me. Then he said that he was Mr. Ben Hecht. I said I admired his work very much.

I do not want to be taken as decrying lady novelists. It was only the 1919–20 crop that, as far as I know, displayed these characteristics…. And why shouldn’t they? They were very conscious that their tender hands had preserved for the world the arts and amenities that, the world over, barbarians like myself had been violating. And they had just come into their own and women had the vote. Why should they not take themselves seriously?

There was, however, one woman writer whose acquaintance I was privileged to make about this time who took her work more seriously than herself. That was Miss Braddon, the authoress of Lady Audley’s Secret…. I had always had the greatest possible respect for this literary figure. Few novelists of her day had her workmanlike knowledge or could write such sound English—like Cobbett’s. And I had a great liking for her son, Mr. W. B. Maxwell, whose novels had the qualities of hers …. Conrad, by the by, used to say that he had learned English from Lady Audley’s Secret.

She lived down Richmond way, if my memory is not playing me tricks, in one of those old manor houses that are gradually being crowded out by the raw villas that disfigure all the approaches to London. The legend of her youth was that her husband—Maxwell, the publisher—used to take away her riding habit and lock her in her room every day until she had turned out her quota of writing. She preferred hunting in those days.

At eighty-two or thereabouts she naturally no longer rode to hounds, but her mind chased thoughts with astonishing nimbleness. In dress and appearance she equally naturally resembled the late Queen Victoria, but at eighty she had set herself to learn Greek in order to read Homer “in the original.” She was then reading the Iliad. I hope she finished the Odyssey, too, before she died.

At any rate there she sat, with her family, W. B. Maxwell and his wife, who had once I think been carried off by a Khan of Afghanistan and held for ransom, and another Mr. Maxwell, who, I think, was a publisher, and with vicars and maids of honour and vaguely theatrical early lights of the stage of the tradition of Mrs. Kendal. There she sat with her court and the Greek words running round in her mind. And her room even was perfection.

There were long, black velvet curtains with gold-edged scallopings a-top, and embroidered fire-shields like the pennants of knights and a great Turkey carpet with a pile into which the feet sank as if into a Scotch lawn. And there was the great ormolu drawing-room table. Upon it was a great album of Views of Venice; on that a slightly smaller Views of Rome; a still slightly smaller Views of Heidelberg, and so, on the top of the pyramid, an ivory model of the Taj Mahal. When Miss Braddon did not talk of the Iliad, she talked of the Indian Mutiny and the first London appearance of Sir Henry Irving. Her voice was low, soft and, as it were, inexorable, as if some of the intolerant youth of the young woman who had ridden to hounds remained at the back of that acute brain. The good sea-coal fire shone on gleaming steel and gilt accoutrements. So there you had the clean fire, the clean hearth, and the vigour of the Victorian game.

You might have had worse. I think that in those days I might have read even the essays of Elia….

Regent Street was coming down…. I think that that was the final reason for leaving London that I gave to that Lady Novelist in the taxicab—that Regent Street was coming down…. As who should say: “Oh, Troy town, tall Troy’s on fire!”

She said:

“Why not? Surely Swan and Edgar’s have a right to enlarge their premises. Not that I ever got anything there. But you must move with the times.”

I think sometimes you shouldn’t!

For the young of my days, Swan and Edgar’s corner was the throbbing heart of the Kingdom, of the Empire, of the Universe…. The sub-lieutenants and second mates keeping their lonely dog-watches whilst reading Miss Braddon beneath the blazing tropical stars, the subaltern in the parched ghâts, and the shadeless veldt, the trooper of the N.W. Mounted police—all Mr. Kipling’s caboodle that gave us dominion; all these in dreams beheld, not the Hebrides, but that blunt-nosed, three-storeyed redan that, in all but height, is most resembled by the Flat-iron itself. And if, when I was young and far away—and so long ago!—we wanted to show what devils of fellows we were, we would begin our stories: “As I was looking into Swan and Edgar’s window….” Why, once in Cornwall, which is as far as you can get from the Circus without falling off into the Atlantic—at the time when King Edward’s coronation was put off because of his illness, I heard in a third-class smoker an enormous blue-jacket thus address a trembling and pallid little Cockney clerk…. The unfortunate small being had been uttering some small Socialist twitterings. The blue-jacket held a black-haired fist as large as a leg of lamb under the other’s nose and said:

“Don’t you dare say a word against ’Is Gracious Majesty! Don’t you dare!” He turned to the rest of us and said: “Don’t we all know what a boiling good sport ’e is? … Ain’t we all seen ’is brougham waiting on the kerb at Swan and Edgar’s corner? … Ain’t we?”

It was things like that that—under the tremendous hand on far-flung dunes and pines—set in the hearts of an adoring people the features of an almost worshipped good sport! …

And I had heard that they were to tear down and re-edify Swan and Edgar’s, and hideously restore the Quadrant and convert the Palladian curve of Soane’s Regent Street, with its broad and gracious sweep, into a congregation of reinforced-concrete mud-pies, so many-storeyed that they would make the broad street look narrow and squalid—and yet so low that they would have none of the soaring dignity that great heights will give to roads till they look like cañons at the foot of great crags! … And what made it the more bitter was that the land of Regent Street belongs to the Crown…. For a little paltry gold that which should preserve not only the liberties, but the beauties of its lieges was ruthlessly to destroy the most beautiful street in the Empire….

And what made it the more bitter still for me was this…. One evening of a great air-raid I had been on leave and in pitch-black silence had wandered out of the jetty darkness of Glasshouse Street into the dimness of London’s Great White Way beneath the stars…. The white, Greek houses loomed against the celestial pin-points, like temples, like forums. And it was as if, awfully, they listened, awaiting doom….

The minute was majestic; it had been as if I were alone in a vast cave, the heart of a city that had paused in its beat…. And the houses all listening….