Part 6
_The men engaged were not pretentious, not conceited, not humbugs. They were a group of men, mostly under 30, who just wrote and drew and painted as well as they could, in all sincerity and with no view of financial gain. Dowson, Johnson, Horner, Image, etc., etc., etc., were the humblest, most modest lot of literary men I ever met._
_Their output was not immense: it was infinitesimal, just because they were so careful to produce only work that was “just so.” Think, Stephen. What did Henry Harland, one of the few to live to over 40, put out? ~The Cardinal’s Snuff Box~, ~My Friend Prospers~, ~Mademoiselle Miss and Other Stories~: that is all! Ernest Dowson: two slim volumes of verse, half-a-dozen short stories, a collaborator’s share in two novels. John Gray: one slim volume of verse. Lionel Johnson: God knows how little. And so on. Arthur Symns has worked on steadily, but, though he is getting on for sixty, you cannot say that his output is immense or contains anything that was not worth doing._
_Immensely advertised! Where? And by whom?_
_Beardsley’s output was immense, for his years. Ought not the world to be grateful for it? He told me once that he had an itch for work; and it looked afterwards as if he knew that he was doomed to die at 24 or 26 and wanted to throw off all he could before. When he worked no one knew: no one ever saw him at work and he was always about and always accessible._
_He was not conceited.... Rickets and Shannon were a little conceited: they had a way of “coming the Pope” over the rest, as Will Rothenstein once put it to me. (Will always took “a proper pride” in his excellent work, but no more). But, Lord, hadn’t they the right to be? Was ever a book more beautifully designed than ~Silverpoints~ (cover, page, type, typesetting by Ricketts)? Place Ricketts’ cover of the ~Pageant~ beside any other book in your library and tell me how it strikes you. Look at anything that Charles Shannon condescends to exhibit in the Academy and see how the quality of it slays everything around it exactly as a picture by Whistler or Rossetti would do._
_To revert to immensity of output (I have to keep levanting and tacking about), I call immense the output of Belloc (the modern Sterne), Chesterton (the modern Swift), E. V. Lucas (the modern Addison); they themselves would be flattered at the comparisons. These chaps, though they can and sometimes do write as well as the men of the nineties, spoil their average by writing immensely; and they write immensely because they want a good deal of money. Now the men of the nineties hadn’t clubs, homes, wives or children; lunched for a shilling; dined for eighteen pence; and didn’t want a lot of money. They cared neither for money nor fame; they cared for their own esteem and that of what you call their coterie and I their set._
_And that (to answer a question which you once asked me) is art for art’s sake; and I maintain that it is not right to call this meaningless or pretentious or a sham._
_This coterie, or set, was not noisy: I never met a quieter; it was self-sufficient only in the best sense; and it in no way imposed or impressed itself on the middle and upper classes of London society. How could they? I doubt if any number of the ~Savoy~ ever sold 1,000 copies; certainly no number ever sold 2,000. And they ... were never in society, were never in the outskirts of society and never wanted to be in either._
_But there! I daresay you were thinking of Oscar all the time...._
_Enter on the lawn a nurse bearing my dinner-tray. After dinner I retire to bed...._
_One day, ~Teixeira added, 17.7.20~, I’ll return to those men of the nineties (I will never write a book about them: really I was too much outside them)...._
_I trust that some Leonard Merricks are on the way: I’m nigh starved for books again. Don’t send me Zola or Balzac in English: I couldn’t stomach the translations. And I expect you’re right about Balzac’s French style. Those giants were awful chaps: Balzac, Rubens, the pylon-designing Baines, brrr!..._
On 22.7.20 he writes:
_I beseech you, if you haven’t it, buy yourself a copy of ~The Home Life of Herbert Spencer. By “Two.”~ It is the book praised by “Rozbury” in his letter to Arrowsmith prefacing ~The Diary of a Nobody~. I bought it and began to shake with laughter at Rosebery’s being such an ass. But, after a few pages, I began to see what he meant; and then, time after time, I nearly rolled off my long-chair with laughing not at Rosebery but with him. I’d lend it you, but it’ll only cost you 3/6; and I want you to have it as a companion volume to ~The Diary~._
_However, if you will not buy it, I will lend it to you. You’ve “got” to read it, or I will never write you another letter._
And on 23.7.20:
_Some 32 years ago, “Pearl Hobbes” wrote to me that I ought to translate Balzac; and I am sorry it is too late for me to do ~Goriot~. I am rereading it all the same with much enjoyment, though I think that these gala editions should be at least as well translated as my Lutetian set of six Zola novels._
_Huxley, in his little autobiography, writes:_
_“As Rastignac, in the Père Goriot, says to Paris, I said to London:_
_“‘A nous deux!’”_
_I remembered that this came at the end of the book, turned to it and found:_
_“Rastignac ... saw beneath him Paris, ... The glance he darted on this buzzing hive seemed in advance to drink its honey, while he said proudly:_
_“‘Now for our turn—hers and mine.’”_
_An epigrammatic tag sadly boshed, I think._
_I find that “leave them nothing but their eyes to weep with” occurs in this book; so we must absolve poor old Bismark at any rate from inventing this bloodthirsty phrase._
_And I find the Ukraine mentioned! The Ukraine! The dear old Ukraine! A sweet land of which I—and you? be honest! had never heard before the days of the W.T.I.D._
_I have sent for a complete set of Heine from Heinemann; it just occurred to me that I have read little of this great man’s. And I am told that the translation is good...._
_Do E. and J., ~he asks, 26.7.20~, ever perpetrate those plays upon words of which Heine was so fond? They are not exactly puns; I am not sure that quodlibets isn’t the word for them. E.G.: Herr von Schnabelowpski smites the heart of a Dutch hotel-proprietress. Over the real china cups she gazes at him porcela(i)nguidly._
_That is not a very good example. This one is better: Heine calls on Rothschild at Frankfurt. Rothschild receives him quite famillionairly._
_Good-bye. It threatens rain; and I propose to spend the day in bed, with the proofs of ~The Inevitable~...._
A criticism of Plarr’s Life of Dowson leads Teixeira, 27.7.20, to annotate the letter that contained it:
_... I was suggesting, I wrote, that the effect ... on the minds of a generation which knew not Dowson would be to make it feel that it did not want to know him...._
_(Your cecession from catholicism, he replies, has done you McKennas a lot of harm. You flout tradition and go in for rational inference and deduction in its place. Horrible, horrible! The apostles are not all dead; many of them are your living contemporaries; you could, if you like, receive at first hand their memories of their dead fellows; and you prefer to make up your own mistaken impressions in the light of your own mistaken intellect. Well, well!_
_And, if you write just that sort of life of me, I’ll wriggle with pleasure in my coffin.)_
_This evening Henry Arthur Jones is giving a dinner ... to James M. Beck.... I have been bidden to attend...._
_(Beck is the finest orator I ever heard; and I’ve heard Gladstone ~inter alios~._
_Those Heine quodlibets about which I wrote y’day are, I believe, called “split puns,” though I doubt the happiness of the term. I made one in my sleep this morning: rowdies on the Brighton road indulging in a charabanquet....)_
_I can never have news, as you may imagine, ~writes Teixeira, 29.7.20~; my letters must be always replies to yours...._
_I like your Cave-Brown-Cave story if it was true; it probably was, as a family of that name exists._[17]
_I never heard John Redmond, I am sorry to say. He was, so to speak, after my time. I heard Parnell and, if I were only a mimic, could give you his curiously contemptuous, high-bred, high-pitched voice to-day. I heard Randolph; and at the time, in the eighties, both he and Arthur Balfour used to lisp. Does A. B. lisp now? Answer this: it interests me; and it has a sort of bearing on that passing-fashion competition which you were starting. So essential to birth and breeding was the lisp in those days that even the English-bred Comte de Paris lisped ... in French! I was at his silver wedding and well remember his reception of me._
“Vouth êtes le bienvenu ithi!”
_Incidentally I remember that good King Edward (“then Prince of Wales,” as the memoir-writers say) glared at me furiously on that occasion, because I was wearing trousers of the identical pattern as his: an Urquhart check with a pink line...._
In the course of a dinner-party given at this time, the conversation turned on those men and women who had won everlasting renown with the least effort or justification. The United States Ambassador (Mr. Davis) proposed Eutychus, of whom little is known but that he fell asleep during a sermon and tumbled from a window: I suggested the uncaring Gallio, who did less and is better known. Some one else put forward Melchisedec. Agreeing that every name in the Bible has a certain immortality, we turned to secular history. At the subsequent instigation of Mr. Davis, Lord Curzon of Kedleston propounded “the apple-bearing son of William Tell.” I invited Teixeira to give his opinion.
_I can’t compete with Curzon, ~he replied on 6.8.20~, though I’ve tried. After all, he was one of the Souls! I did think of Alfred and the cakes; but that monarch owes only 5/6 of his immortality to those cakes and young Tell owed all his to the apple. But stay! Many hold Tell and his offspring to be mythical persons. If so, what about the good wife who scolded Alfred? I should like you to find some one who will say that I have beaten Curzon...._
_I shall be in town from 8 September to a few days later. If you want to see me, you must arrange your engagements accordingly. I am the colour which we can never get our brown shoes to assume till just before the moment when they drop off our feet. But I am as weak as ten thousand rats...._
On 7.8.20 he writes:
_You will remember that ... I declined to join your Passing Fashion Research Society, or whatever you decided to call it. But I have no objection to being an honorary corresponding member. And I will set you a subject._
_To establish the year in which it first became the vogue for smart British males to don a deliberately dowdy attire._
_The dowdiness all burst upon my astonished eyes at once: the up-and-down collar worn with a top hat and a morning coat; permanently turned trousers worn with Oxford shoes, so as to display an inch or so of sock; tie usually to match the socks and often “self-coloured” and patternless. There are three items of sheer deliberate dowdiness for you. Another dowdy item was even a little earlier, I believe: the one-buttoned glove, showing a bit of bare wrist between it and the shirt-cuff. But the soft-fronted dress-shirt, also a piece of dowdy dandyism, came in much at the same time as the three specimens cited above._
_I should guess the year to be either 1907 or 1908, but I am not quite sure. You, with your wonderful memory, may be able to place it, for 1907-8 marks the period when you burst upon the London firmament._
_I—who can remember witnessing a departure for Cremorne—I, I need hardly tell you, remember much older and almost as strange things. I remember peg-top trowsers, skin-tight trowsers, bell-shaped trowsers, though I can’t fix the epoch of any of these phenomena; and I can remember when we deliberately wore our trowsers so long that we trod upon them with our heels and frayed them; and that was in 1880-1._
_But all I ask that you should fix is the date of the deliberately dowdy well-dressed man...._
_I think, ~he writes, 9.8.20~, that the time has come for you to write ... a big political novel, a big, serious, flippant, earnest, sarcastic, political novel.... Your book should be quite Disraelian in scope; it should be a ~roman a clef~ to this extent, that it would contain half—or quarter-portraits; and you ought to concentrate on it very thoroughly. I am convinced that the world is waiting for it._
_Do you observe the comparative sweetness of my mood. It is doomed entirely to this glorious weather. For the rest, I hope and believe that you never resent those whacks with which, when the sky is overcast, I am apt to belabour my correspondents like an elderly Mr. Punch on his hustings._
_My good, kind Brighton doctor—good because he is clever, kind because he charges me no fee—was over here from Brighton y’day to see me. He tells me that this peculiar susceptibility of mine to atmospheric influence is a symptom of convalescence rather than ill-health. He is much pleased with the improvement in my condition; and he approves of my winter plans, though he would rather have dispatched me to San Remo or even Egypt had either been feasible._
_Read Max on Swinburne in the ~Fortnightly Review~ when you get the chance and contrast it with George Moore’s account of his visit to Swinburne, in which he can only tell us that he found the poet naked in bed. I forget where it occurs...._
In answering this letter I pointed out that Disraeli avoided the great political issues of the days in which he was writing and that any author, such as H. G. Wells in _The New Machiavelli_, Granville Barker in _Waste_ and H. M. Harwood in the _Grain of Mustard Seed_, who attempts a political theme is almost bound to impale himself on one or other horn of a dilemma; if his novel or play revolve round a living controversy such as the right to strike in war-time or the justice of ordering reprisals in Ireland, the theatre may become the scene of a nightly riot and the critics will consider their own political preferences more earnestly than the literary merits of the book; if the action of play or novel be based on a dead or unborn controversy, it will fail to arouse the faintest interest. I was sure that the other admirers of the three works which I quoted were unmoved by the endowment of motherhood, by educational reform and by housing schemes.
In reply, Teixeira wrote, 11.8.20:
_... Don’t slay the suggestions of the big political novel off-hand or outright. I mean a bigger thing than you do; a thing that not Wells nor Barker nor Harwood ... could write, whereas you, I think, could; a thing as big as ~Coningsby~; a thing called ~The Secretary of State~ or ~The First Lord of the Treasury~, or some such frank affair as that._
_You have kept up a “very average” logical position in life. You know a number of statesmen, but you know only those whom you like and you like only those whom you esteem. Your portraits of those whom you esteem could not offend them; your sketch even of a genial rogue ... could not offend him; and you don’t or ought not to care if your daguerreotypes of S., M. and B. offended them or not...._
_Incidentally you might do no little good, to Ireland, which should have been your native land, to England, which by your own choice remains your home, and to the world in general, to which I hope that you bear no ill-will...._
In his next letter, 14.8.20, he returns to the same subject:
_Your letter ... pretty well convinces me, at any rate about the Coningsby novel. Dizzy never wrote about the period in which he was just then living. All his novels are antedated a good many years. This by way of defending him against any idea that he ever offended by betraying private or official secrets in his novels...._
One of Teixeira’s last letters (19.8.20) from Crowborough contained a translation of the terms (already quoted) in which Couperus congratulated him on his version of _The Tour_:
Couperus writes:
_“Your last envoi has given me a most delightful day. What a magnificent translation. ~The Tour~ is; what a most charming little book it has become! I am in raptures over it and read and reread it all day and have had tears in my eyes and have laughed over it. You may think it silly of me to say all this; but it has become an exquisitely beautiful work in its English form. My warmest congratulations!..._
_“Thank McKenna for his assistance: the hymn has become very fine. For that matter the whole book is a gem, if I may say so myself.”_
_So I’ve had one appreciative reader at any rate!..._
On 27.8.20 he adds:
_Tell Norman ~[Major Holden, then liberal candidate for the Isle of Wight]~ that, should there be an election in “the island” before I leave Ventnor, he’ll find me both able and ready to impersonate the oldest inhabitant and gallop to the polling-station, in my bath-chair, and vote for him...._
And, finally, in praise of toleration:
_31 August 1920 (being the birthday of Her Majesty the Queen of the Netherlands)._
_It won’t do to insist on this racial aspect of things. I was never of those who called L. G. a damned little Welsh solicitor. He would have been just the same had he been Scotch or English or Irish. After all, our friend R. is little and Welsh and was a solicitor and will as likely as not be damned if he doesn’t join his wife’s church. And there is the converse case, when you hear men describing an outrage committed by Englishmen as “unenglish.” How can the things be unenglish which the English do?_
_Like yourself, the late W. H. Smith was shocked when Parnell stood up and told the House of Commons ... that he had lied to them in the interests of his country. I like to think of you as occupying a subtler and more philosophical standpoint than the late W. H. Smith...._
_I continue to feel better; and the arrival of two very pretty women patients has loosed my tongue and given me an outlet for many a childish and innocent jest. I excuse these jests by saying that they’re due to Minerva._
_“Who’s Minerva?”_
_“Mi-nervous breakdown. By the way, I hope you like your Alf?”_
_“Our Alf? What do you mean?”_
_“Your al-f-resco meals.”_
_Just like that!..._
XI
For the next few days Teixeira was absorbed in his preparations for leaving Crowborough. On arriving in London, he came to stay with me until he and his wife went to the Isle of Wight for the autumn and winter.
In acknowledging, on 1.9.20 his instructions about the diet on which he now lived, I wrote:
_Many thanks for your letter written on the anniversary of Her Majesty the Queen of the Netherlands. Do not forget to date any letters you may write on Friday the anniversary of Naseby, the crowning mercy of Worcester and the death of O. Cromwell._
Teixeira interpolated here:
(_And the birthday of my late aunt Judith Teixeira._)
On 2.9.20 he writes:
_Dodd ~[Dodd, Mead and Co. Inc.]~ is going to reissue ~[Couperus’]~ ~Majesty~ in America and would like you to write a preface to it.... Will you do this? I should very much like you to. It involves re-reading the book, I fear; but after that you will not have much to do except to draw an analogy between the hero and the poor Czar, on whose character the recent articles in the ~Times~ have thrown an interesting light._
I reminded Teixeira that I had never read _Majesty_, as I had never been able to secure a copy.
_You’re perfectly right, ~he replied on 5.9.20~. I’ll bring the only copy in the world, that I know of, in my suit-case._
_You will be able to point to some remarkable prophecies on C’s part (he foretold the Hague Conference years before it happened) and, for the rest, to let yourself go as you please on high continental dynastic politics. I doubt if any writer ever entered into the soul of princes as this astonishing youth of 25 or so did...._
_I propose to revise ~Majesty~ so thoroughly that I shall be entitled to eliminate Ernest Dowson’s name from the title-page, even as I eliminated John Gray’s from that of ~Ecstacy~. There was no true collaboration in either case; and they did little more for me than you did in ~Old People~: not so much as you did in ~The Tour~. Neither had the original before him._
_I look forward greatly to my stay with you.... Eimar O’Duffy ~[the author of The Wasted Island]~ has been married by another novelist and has gone to live with her in a cottage in Wexford. She spells her name Cathleen; and he has sent me his early poems, in which he spelt his name Eimhar. He tells me that this spelling was abandoned because it didn’t look well; this I accept. He adds that it is pronounced Avar: this I do not believe...._
On leaving me, Teixeira wrote 24.9.20 to tell me that he had reached Ventnor without mishap:
_This is not to acknowledge the receipt of any letter from you that may or may not be awaiting me at the County & Castle Club, an edifice into which I have not yet made my comital and castellated entry. Rather is it to announce my safe arrival, after four hours of wearying travel, and my complete revival, after ten hours of refreshing sleep, and to repeat my thanks for your utterly exceptional and debonnair hospitality._
_The first impression of Ventnor is favourable...._
This pococurantist attitude, if I may employ a phrase beloved by Teixeira, was not supported by his wife in the postscript which she added:
_Poor fellow, he was so tired travelling and so good over it. This place one could wear rags in, it’s so antiquated; and we shall return confirmed frumps and bores. There is some miniature beauty in a low hill and a tinkly pier that would be blown away in a quarter of a gale...._
_I have seen the sun and feel reasonably well and happy, ~Teixeira proclaims in a second letter on the same day~...._
From the end of September to the end of December, when I left England, our letters—though we corresponded almost daily were much taken up with business matters. I therefore only reproduce such extracts as throw light on Teixeira’s literary opinions and on his life at Ventnor.