The Angel and the Author, and Others

CHAPTER III

Literature and the Middle Classes

I am sorry to be compelled to cast a slur upon the Literary profession, but observation shows me that it still contains within its ranks writers born and bred in, and moving amidst – if, without offence, one may put it bluntly – a purely middle-class environment: men and women to whom Park Lane will never be anything than the shortest route between Notting Hill and the Strand; to whom Debrett’s Peerage – gilt-edged and bound in red, a tasteful-looking volume – ever has been and ever will remain a drawing-room ornament and not a social necessity. Now what is to become of these writers – of us, if for the moment I may be allowed to speak as representative of this rapidly-diminishing yet nevertheless still numerous section of the world of Art and Letters? Formerly, provided we were masters of style, possessed imagination and insight, understood human nature, had sympathy with and knowledge of life, and could express ourselves with humour and distinction, our pathway was, comparatively speaking, free from obstacle. We drew from the middle-class life around us, passed it through our own middle-class individuality, and presented it to a public composed of middle-class readers.

But the middle-class public, for purposes of Art, has practically disappeared. The social strata from which George Eliot and Dickens drew their characters no longer interests the great B. P. Hetty Sorrell, Little Em’ly, would be pronounced “provincial;” a Deronda or a Wilfer Family ignored as “suburban.”

I confess that personally the terms “provincial” and “suburban,” as epithets of reproach, have always puzzled me. I never met anyone more severe on what she termed the “suburban note” in literature than a thin lady who lived in a semi-detached villa in a by-street of Hammersmith. Is Art merely a question of geography, and if so what is the exact limit? Is it the four-mile cab radius from Charing Cross? Is the cheesemonger of Tottenham Court Road of necessity a man of taste, and the Oxford professor of necessity a Philistine? I want to understand this thing. I once hazarded the direct question to a critical friend:

“You say a book is suburban,” I put it to him, “and there is an end to the matter. But what do you mean by suburban?”

“Well,” he replied, “I mean it is the sort of book likely to appeal to the class that inhabits the suburbs.” He lived himself in Chancery Lane.

May a man of intelligence live, say, in Surbiton?

“But there is Jones, the editor of The Evening Gentleman,” I argued; “he lives at Surbiton. It is just twelve miles from Waterloo. He comes up every morning by the eight-fifteen and returns again by the five-ten. Would you say that a book is bound to be bad because it appeals to Jones? Then again, take Tomlinson: he lives, as you are well aware, at Forest Gate which is Epping way, and entertains you on Kakemonos whenever you call upon him. You know what I mean, of course. I think ‘Kakemono’ is right. They are long things; they look like coloured hieroglyphics printed on brown paper. He gets behind them and holds them up above his head on the end of a stick so that you can see the whole of them at once; and he tells you the name of the Japanese artist who painted them in the year 1500 B.C., and what it is all about. He shows them to you by the hour and forgets to give you dinner. There isn’t an easy chair in the house. To put it vulgarly, what is wrong with Tomlinson from a high art point of view?

“There’s a man I know who lives in Birmingham: you must have heard of him. He is the great collector of Eighteenth Century caricatures, the Rowlandson and Gilray school of things. I don’t call them artistic myself; they make me ill to look at them; but people who understand Art rave about them. Why can’t a man be artistic who has got a cottage in the country?”

“You don’t understand me,” retorted my critical friend, a little irritably, as I thought.

“I admit it,” I returned. “It is what I am trying to do.”

“Of course artistic people live in the suburbs,” he admitted. “But they are not of the suburbs.”

“Though they may dwell in Wimbledon or Hornsey,” I suggested, “they sing with the Scotch bard: ‘My heart is in the South-West postal district. My heart is not here.’”

“You can put it that way if you like,” he growled.

“I will, if you have no objection,” I agreed. “It makes life easier for those of us with limited incomes.”

The modern novel takes care, however, to avoid all doubt upon the subject. Its personages, one and all, reside within the half-mile square lying between Bond Street and the Park – a neighbourhood that would appear to be somewhat densely populated. True, a year or two ago there appeared a fairly successful novel the heroine of which resided in Onslow Gardens. An eminent critic observed of it that: “It fell short only by a little way of being a serious contribution to English literature.” Consultation with the keeper of the cabman’s shelter at Hyde Park Corner suggested to me that the “little way” the critic had in mind measures exactly eleven hundred yards. When the nobility and gentry of the modern novel do leave London they do not go into the provinces: to do that would be vulgar. They make straight for “Barchester Towers,” or what the Duke calls “his little place up north” – localities, one presumes, suspended somewhere in mid-air.

In every social circle exist great souls with yearnings towards higher things. Even among the labouring classes one meets with naturally refined natures, gentlemanly persons to whom the loom and the plough will always appear low, whose natural desire is towards the dignities and graces of the servants’ hall. So in Grub Street we can always reckon upon the superior writer whose temperament will prompt him to make respectful study of his betters. A reasonable supply of high-class novels might always have been depended upon; the trouble is that the public now demands that all stories must be of the upper ten thousand. Auld Robin Grey must be Sir Robert Grey, South African millionaire; and Jamie, the youngest son of the old Earl, otherwise a cultured public can take no interest in the ballad. A modern nursery rhymester to succeed would have to write of Little Lord Jack and Lady Jill ascending one of the many beautiful eminences belonging to the ancestral estates of their parents, bearing between them, on a silver rod, an exquisitely painted Sèvres vase filled with ottar of roses.

I take up my fourpenny-halfpenny magazine. The heroine is a youthful Duchess; her husband gambles with thousand-pound notes, with the result that they are reduced to living on the first floor of the Carlton Hotel. The villain is a Russian Prince. The Baronet of a simpler age has been unable, poor fellow, to keep pace with the times. What self-respecting heroine would abandon her husband and children for sin and a paltry five thousand a year? To the heroine of the past – to the clergyman’s daughter or the lady artist – he was dangerous. The modern heroine misbehaves herself with nothing below Cabinet rank.

I turn to something less pretentious, a weekly periodical that my wife tells me is the best authority she has come across on blouses. I find in it what once upon a time would have been called a farce. It is now a “drawing-room comedietta. All rights reserved.” The dramatis personæ consist of the Earl of Danbury, the Marquis of Rottenborough (with a past), and an American heiress – a character that nowadays takes with lovers of the simple the place formerly occupied by “Rose, the miller’s daughter.”

I sometimes wonder, is it such teaching as that of Carlyle and Tennyson that is responsible for this present tendency of literature? Carlyle impressed upon us that the only history worth consideration was the life of great men and women, and Tennyson that we “needs must love the highest.” So literature, striving ever upward, ignores plain Romola for the Lady Ponsonby de Tompkins; the provincialisms of a Charlotte Brontë for what a certain critic, born before his time, would have called the “doin’s of the hupper succles.”

The British Drama has advanced by even greater bounds. It takes place now exclusively within castle walls, and – what Messrs. Lumley & Co.’s circular would describe as – “desirable town mansions, suitable for gentlemen of means.” A living dramatist, who should know, tells us that drama does not occur in the back parlour. Dramatists have, it has been argued, occasionally found it there, but such may have been dramatists with eyes capable of seeing through clothes.

I once wrote a play which I read to a distinguished Manager. He said it was a most interesting play: they always say that. I waited, wondering to what other manager he would recommend me to take it. To my surprise he told me he would like it for himself – but with alterations.

“The whole thing wants lifting up,” was his opinion. “Your hero is a barrister: my public take no interest in plain barristers. Make him the Solicitor General.”

“But he’s got to be amusing,” I argued. “A Solicitor General is never amusing.”

My Manager pondered for a moment. “Let him be Solicitor General for Ireland,” he suggested.

I made a note of it.

“Your heroine,” he continued, “is the daughter of a seaside lodging-house keeper. My public do not recognize seaside lodgings. Why not the daughter of an hotel proprietor? Even that will be risky, but we might venture it.” An inspiration came to him. “Or better still, let the old man be the Managing Director of an hotel Trust: that would account for her clothes.”

Unfortunately I put the thing aside for a few months, and when I was ready again the public taste had still further advanced. The doors of the British Drama were closed for the time being on all but members of the aristocracy, and I did not see my comic old man as a Marquis, which was the lowest title that just then one dared to offer to a low comedian.

Now how are we middle-class novelists and dramatists to continue to live? I am aware of the obvious retort, but to us it absolutely is necessary. We know only parlours: we call them drawing-rooms. At the bottom of our middle-class hearts we regard them fondly: the folding-doors thrown back, they make rather a fine apartment. The only drama that we know takes place in such rooms: the hero sitting in the gentleman’s easy chair, of green repp: the heroine in the lady’s ditto, without arms – the chair, I mean. The scornful glances, the bitter words of our middle-class world are hurled across these three-legged loo-tables, the wedding-cake ornament under its glass case playing the part of white ghost.

In these days, when “Imperial cement” is at a premium, who would dare suggest that the emotions of a parlour can by any possibility be the same as those exhibited in a salon furnished in the style of Louis Quatorze; that the tears of Bayswater can possibly be compared for saltness with the lachrymal fluid distilled from South Audley Street glands; that the laughter of Clapham can be as catching as the cultured cackle of Curzon Street? But we, whose best clothes are exhibited only in parlours, what are we to do? How can we lay bare the souls of Duchesses, explain the heart-throbs of peers of the realm? Some of my friends who, being Conservative, attend Primrose “tourneys” (or is it “Courts of love”? I speak as an outsider. Something mediæval, I know it is) do, it is true, occasionally converse with titled ladies. But the period for conversation is always limited owing to the impatience of the man behind; and I doubt if the interview is ever of much practical use to them, as conveying knowledge of the workings of the aristocratic mind. Those of us who are not Primrose Knights miss even this poor glimpse into the world above us. We know nothing, simply nothing, concerning the deeper feelings of the upper ten. Personally, I once received a letter from an Earl, but that was in connection with a dairy company of which his lordship was chairman, and spoke only of his lordship’s views concerning milk and the advantages of the cash system. Of what I really wished to know – his lordship’s passions, yearnings and general attitude to life – the circular said nothing.

Year by year I find myself more and more in a minority. One by one my literary friends enter into this charmed aristocratic circle; after which one hears no more from them regarding the middle-classes. At once they set to work to describe the mental sufferings of Grooms of the Bed-chamber, the hidden emotions of Ladies in their own right, the religious doubts of Marquises. I want to know how they do it – “how the devil they get there.” They refuse to tell me.

Meanwhile, I see nothing before me but the workhouse. Year by year the public grows more impatient of literature dealing merely with the middle-classes. I know nothing about any other class. What am I to do?

Commonplace people – friends of mine without conscience, counsel me in flippant phrase to “have a shot at it.”

“I expect, old fellow, you know just as much about it as these other Johnnies do.” (I am not defending their conversation either as regards style or matter: I am merely quoting.) “And even if you don’t, what does it matter? The average reader knows less. How is he to find you out?”

But, as I explain to them, it is the law of literature never to write except about what you really know. I want to mix with the aristocracy, study them, understand them; so that I may earn my living in the only way a literary man nowadays can earn his living, namely, by writing about the upper circles.

I want to know how to get there.

CHAPTER IV

Man and his Master

There is one thing that the Anglo-Saxon does better than the “French, or Turk, or Rooshian,” to which add the German or the Belgian. When the Anglo-Saxon appoints an official, he appoints a servant: when the others put a man in uniform, they add to their long list of masters. If among your acquaintances you can discover an American, or Englishman, unfamiliar with the continental official, it is worth your while to accompany him, the first time he goes out to post a letter, say. He advances towards the post-office a breezy, self-confident gentleman, borne up by pride of race. While mounting the steps he talks airily of “just getting this letter off his mind, and then picking up Jobson and going on to Durand’s for lunch.”

He talks as if he had the whole day before him. At the top of the steps he attempts to push open the door. It will not move. He looks about him, and discovers that is the door of egress, not of ingress. It does not seem to him worth while redescending the twenty steps and climbing another twenty. So far as he is concerned he is willing to pull the door, instead of pushing it. But a stern official bars his way, and haughtily indicates the proper entrance. “Oh, bother,” he says, and down he trots again, and up the other flight.

“I shall not be a minute,” he remarks over his shoulder. “You can wait for me outside.”

But if you know your way about, you follow him in. There are seats within, and you have a newspaper in your pocket: the time will pass more pleasantly. Inside he looks round, bewildered. The German post-office, generally speaking, is about the size of the Bank of England. Some twenty different windows confront your troubled friend, each one bearing its own particular legend. Starting with number one, he sets to work to spell them out. It appears to him that the posting of letters is not a thing that the German post-office desires to encourage. Would he not like a dog licence instead? is what one window suggests to him. “Oh, never mind that letter of yours; come and talk about bicycles,” pleads another. At last he thinks he has found the right hole: the word “Registration” he distinctly recognizes. He taps at the glass.

Nobody takes any notice of him. The foreign official is a man whose life is saddened by a public always wanting something. You read it in his face wherever you go. The man who sells you tickets for the theatre! He is eating sandwiches when you knock at his window. He turns to his companion:

“Good Lord!” you can see him say, “here’s another of ’em. If there has been one man worrying me this morning there have been a hundred. Always the same story: all of ’em want to come and see the play. You listen now; bet you anything he’s going to bother me for tickets. Really, it gets on my nerves sometimes.”

At the railway station it is just the same.

“Another man who wants to go to Antwerp! Don’t seem to care for rest, these people: flying here, flying there, what’s the sense of it?” It is this absurd craze on the part of the public for letter-writing that is spoiling the temper of the continental post-office official. He does his best to discourage it.

“Look at them,” he says to his assistant – the thoughtful German Government is careful to provide every official with another official for company, lest by sheer force of ennui he might be reduced to taking interest in his work – “twenty of ’em, all in a row! Some of ’em been there for the last quarter of an hour.”

“Let ’em wait another quarter of an hour,” advises the assistant; “perhaps they’ll go away.”

“My dear fellow,” he answers, “do you think I haven’t tried that? There’s simply no getting rid of ’em. And it’s always the same cry: ‘Stamps! stamps! stamps!’ ’Pon my word, I think they live on stamps, some of ’em.”

“Well let ’em have their stamps?” suggests the assistant, with a burst of inspiration; “perhaps it will get rid of ’em.”

Why the Man in Uniform has, generally, sad Eyes

“What’s the use?” wearily replies the older man. “There will only come a fresh crowd when those are gone.”

“Oh, well,” argues the other, “that will be a change, anyhow. I’m tired of looking at this lot.”

I put it to a German post-office clerk once – a man I had been boring for months. I said:

“You think I write these letters – these short stories, these three-act plays – on purpose to annoy you. Do let me try to get the idea out of your head. Personally, I hate work – hate it as much as you do. This is a pleasant little town of yours: given a free choice, I could spend the whole day mooning round it, never putting pen to paper. But what am I to do? I have a wife and children. You know what it is yourself: they clamour for food, boots – all sorts of things. I have to prepare these little packets for sale and bring them to you to send off. You see, you are here. If you were not here – if there were no post-office in this town, maybe I’d have to train pigeons, or cork the thing up in a bottle, fling it into the river, and trust to luck and the Gulf Stream. But, you being here, and calling yourself a post-office – well, it’s a temptation to a fellow.”

I think it did good. Anyhow, after that he used to grin when I opened the door, instead of greeting me as formerly with a face the picture of despair. But to return to our inexperienced friend.

At last the wicket is suddenly opened. A peremptory official demands of him “name and address.” Not expecting the question, he is a little doubtful of his address, and has to correct himself once or twice. The official eyes him suspiciously.

“Name of mother?” continues the official.

“Name of what?”

“Mother!” repeats the official. “Had a mother of some sort, I suppose.”

He is a man who loved his mother sincerely while she lived, but she has been dead these twenty years, and, for the life of him he cannot recollect her name. He thinks it was Margaret Henrietta, but is not at all sure. Besides, what on earth has his mother got to do with this registered letter that he wants to send to his partner in New York?

“When did it die?” asks the official.

“When did what die? Mother?”

“No, no, the child.”

“What child?” The indignation of the official is almost picturesque.

“All I want to do,” explains your friend, “is to register a letter.”

“A what?”

“This letter, I want – ”

The window is slammed in his face. When, ten minutes later he does reach the right wicket – the bureau for the registration of letters, and not the bureau for the registration of infantile deaths – it is pointed out to him that the letter either is sealed or that it is not sealed.

I have never been able yet to solve this problem. If your letter is sealed, it then appears that it ought not to have been sealed.

If, on the other hand, you have omitted to seal it, that is your fault. In any case, the letter cannot go as it is. The continental official brings up the public on the principle of the nurse who sent the eldest girl to see what Tommy was doing and tell him he mustn’t. Your friend, having wasted half an hour and mislaid his temper for the day, decides to leave this thing over and talk to the hotel porter about it. Next to the Burgomeister, the hotel porter is the most influential man in the continental town: maybe because he can swear in seven different languages. But even he is not omnipotent.

The Traveller’s one Friend

Three of us, on the point of starting for a walking tour through the Tyrol, once sent on our luggage by post from Constance to Innsbruck. Our idea was that, reaching Innsbruck in the height of the season, after a week’s tramp on two flannel shirts and a change of socks, we should be glad to get into fresh clothes before showing ourselves in civilized society. Our bags were waiting for us in the post-office: we could see them through the grating. But some informality – I have never been able to understand what it was – had occurred at Constance. The suspicion of the Swiss postal authorities had been aroused, and special instructions had been sent that the bags were to be delivered up only to their rightful owners.

It sounds sensible enough. Nobody wants his bag delivered up to anyone else. But it had not been explained to the authorities at Innsbruck how they were to know the proper owners. Three wretched-looking creatures crawled into the post-office and said they wanted those three bags – “those bags, there in the corner” – which happened to be nice, clean, respectable-looking bags, the sort of bags that anyone might want. One of them produced a bit of paper, it is true, which he said had been given to him as a receipt by the post-office people at Constance. But in the lonely passes of the Tyrol one man, set upon by three, might easily be robbed of his papers, and his body thrown over a precipice. The chief clerk shook his head. He would like us to return accompanied by someone who could identify us. The hotel porter occurred to us, as a matter of course. Keeping to the back streets, we returned to the hotel and fished him out of his box.

“I am Mr. J.,” I said: “this is my friend Mr. B. and this is Mr. S.”

The porter bowed and said he was delighted.

“I want you to come with us to the post-office,” I explained, “and identify us.”

The hotel porter is always a practical man: his calling robs him of all sympathy with the hide-bound formality of his compatriots. He put on his cap and accompanied us back to the office. He did his best: no one could say he did not. He told them who we were: they asked him how he knew. For reply he asked them how they thought he knew his mother: he just knew us: it was second nature with him. He implied that the question was a silly one, and suggested that, as his time was valuable, they should hand us over the three bags and have done with their nonsense.

They asked him how long he had known us. He threw up his hands with an eloquent gesture: memory refused to travel back such distance. It appeared there was never a time when he had not known us. We had been boys together.

Did he know anybody else who knew us? The question appeared to him almost insulting. Everybody in Innsbruck knew us, honoured us, respected us – everybody, that is, except a few post-office officials, people quite out of society.

Would he kindly bring along, say; one undoubtedly respectable citizen who could vouch for our identity? The request caused him to forget us and our troubles. The argument became a personal quarrel between the porter and the clerk. If he, the porter, was not a respectable citizen of Innsbruck, where was such an one to be found?

The disadvantage of being an unknown Person

Both gentlemen became excited, and the discussion passed beyond my understanding. But I gathered dimly from what the clerk said, that ill-natured remarks relative to the porter’s grandfather and a missing cow had never yet been satisfactorily replied to: and, from observations made by the porter, that stories were in circulation about the clerk’s aunt and a sergeant of artillery that should suggest to a discreet nephew of the lady the inadvisability of talking about other people’s grandfathers.

Our sympathies were naturally with the porter: he was our man, but he did not seem to be advancing our cause much. We left them quarrelling, and persuaded the head waiter that evening to turn out the gas at our end of the table d’hôte.

The next morning we returned to the post-office by ourselves. The clerk proved a reasonable man when treated in a friendly spirit. He was a bit of a climber himself. He admitted the possibility of our being the rightful owners. His instructions were only not to deliver up the bags, and he himself suggested a way out of the difficulty. We might come each day and dress in the post-office, behind the screen. It was an awkward arrangement, even although the clerk allowed us the use of the back door. And occasionally, in spite of the utmost care, bits of us would show outside the screen. But for a couple of days, until the British Consul returned from Salzburg, the post-office had to be our dressing room. The continental official, I am inclined to think, errs on the side of prudence.