Part 4
When you go to a bookstore in London and ask for any book, you are told they haven’t got it. Here in Sydney I found the men in the stores abnormally intelligent. You could even get different kinds of books written by the same author, which is a difficult feat anywhere. Most booksellers think that if a man writes a book on, say, poultry, it is preposterous to ask for a work of his on political economy or step-dancing. And yet it happens that many writers write books on different subjects--Andrew Lang, for instance. We received the sad news of the death of Andrew Lang at Fremantle. Andrew Lang is an author who spent the large capital of his wit, his learning, his wide sympathies, royally and generously without stint; he was a master of English prose, and some of the best pieces of prose he ever wrote were flung into leaders in the “Daily News.” Those which were afterwards collected in a book called “Lost Leaders” make the most delightful reading. He wrote just as well and just as wittily on street noises or midsummer heat as on Homer, the Young Pretender, or Joan of Arc. He was profoundly unprovincial; he had a fine and rare quiet appreciation of French poetry; he could write ghost stories, fairy tales, doggerel; he was a supreme dialectician, an amusing parodist, a prince of letter writers, as well as a poet;--perhaps he was above all things a poet. The following translation of Rufinus’ verses to Rhodocleia, sending her a wreath, is a good example of his verse. He has turned an exquisite Greek poem into an exquisite English poem.
“Ah, Golden Eyes, to win you yet, I bring mine April coronet. The lovely blossoms of the spring For you I weave, to you I bring These roses with the lilies set, The dewy dark-eyed violet, Narcissus, and the wind-flower wet: Wilt thou disdain mine offering? Ah, Golden Eyes!
Crowned with thy lover’s flowers, forget The pride wherein thy heart is set, For thou, like these or anything, Hast but a moment of thy spring, Thy spring, and then--the long regret! Ah, Golden Eyes!”
To go back to Sydney and the stores. The trouble is I cannot remember either of their names. I had dinner at a restaurant called the Palace Hotel, and after dinner I visited the office of the Sydney “Herald,” where I spent a very pleasant time. I had already been met by two interviewers in the morning, and they asked me whether I was going to write anything about Australia. I said No, that I had no intention of so doing, as I did not believe in writing seriously about a country where one doesn’t make a proper stay. Practically I saw nothing of Australia; but I suppose there is no harm in writing these notes--the mere rough impressions of a fugitive traveller.
Although I was only twelve hours in Sydney, I had occasion to notice the hospitality of the people. What struck me also was the life and gaiety of the place.
The next morning, which was Saturday, I had to leave the liner, which had been my home for the last six weeks, and embark on the Maunganui for Wellington, whither I was bound.
The Maunganui, which belongs to the Union Steamship Company, is a new vessel, and quite extraordinarily comfortable. The voyage from Sydney to Wellington takes from Saturday to Wednesday, but sometimes if the weather is bad it takes longer.
As we steamed out of Sydney, I at last had a view of the famous bay, and it exceeded all my expectations: the colouring is so rich, the lines and shape of the coast are so nobly planned, and the sky and the sea are so intoxicatingly bright, fresh, and dazzling. I am sorry for people who are disappointed in Sydney.
_On Board the Maunganui: August_
The ship is crowded with passengers. There is a very comfortable smoking-room on the upper deck. The ship is beautifully clean and new-looking. She is a new ship. She made her first voyage in February, 1912.
There are on board fifty “boys” who are going to Buenos Ayres. There are engineers. As for the rest of the passengers, there are many men, many women, and many children. The sea is unusually smooth--unusually, that is to say, for this part of the ocean, which I am told is generally rough.
I settle myself down to read O’Brien’s “Life of Parnell,” one of the best biographies in the English language.
I think a ship is the pleasantest place to read in in the world. First, you have the advantages of being indoors and out of doors at the same time, if you sit on a deck chair, or in a smoking-room near an open door. Secondly, you are just sufficiently and not too much interrupted. You can pause and watch the passengers. You overhear scraps of talk. You engage yourself in desultory conversation.
But during all this first afternoon I am riveted by the doings of Parnell--the man who, so cold and aloof, exercised an electric power over the rest of his fellow creatures: the man who smashed the machinery of the House of Commons, in order to compel the British to deal with the Irish question.
I was at school when some of the most stirring acts of that drama were being played. All schoolboys are, of course, “Conservatives,” and our schoolmaster was a fanatical Tory. The mere mention of Mr. Gladstone’s name maddened him, and I remember one day his telling the boys that he had received a circular from some political Liberal association, and that he intended to send it back to the secretary with a penny inside it, so that the sender should have to pay eightpence. This was a good civic lesson for the young! All the boys professed to be staunch Tories; but if it was discovered that one’s parents were Liberals, one was labelled Liberal. This was my unfortunate predicament.
The general election of 1885 took place when I was at school. The Head Master addressed the school when it began, and he prefaced his speech by saying, “There are only seven Liberals in the school.” This was nice for the Liberals.
On the 5th of November an effigy of Chamberlain was burned in the garden. The effigy bore a large cardboard cow with the words “Three Acres” written on it. Years afterwards I described this incident in an article for a London daily. In mentioning Chamberlain I added the words, “who was at that time a radical.” The editor crossed out these words. The Conservative readers of this daily were not to be reminded that Chamberlain had ever been a radical. It seemed almost like blasphemy to hint at such a thing. And yet it was true. Unless history be suppressed altogether, the fact will have to go down to posterity that in 1885 Chamberlain was a radical. It seemed a terrible shame in those days that one’s parents should be on what, in the opinion of one’s world, was obviously the wrong side.
English private schools are, or were, the most curious institutions in the world. The parents of to-day say they are entirely changed and altered. They may be; but one thing is quite certain, the parents don’t know. The only people who know are the boys, and they don’t reveal the secrets of the fortress until they are grown up; but, judging by what grown-up boys of twenty now tell one, they do not seem to me to be greatly changed.
My school was totally unlike the schools depicted in fiction and pictured by the boyish imagination. There were no bullies--at least, not among the boys; the masters did the bullying. They exercised a reign of terror; they ruled by mysterious hints and vague threats, so that one moved perpetually under the shadow of an impending but unknown doom. The sense of guilt for some crime which one didn’t know the nature of was perpetually being brought home to one. And the boys used to catch the tone of mystery, and act as if they formed part of the conspiracy, which, of course, they didn’t. They were all equally in the dark.
The discretion of boys is extraordinary: their fear of giving anything away; their constant profession of happiness, in spite of obvious misery. But then, of course, it must be remembered that they accept the conditions of school life as the best that life has to offer. They think that _is_ happiness.
* * * * *
In the evening after dinner some of the “boys” played poker. Gradually I made their acquaintance. One of them told me of the life in Buenos Ayres. He asked me to lend him a book. He had a pal who read books, and was in fact reading, he said, a book which he believed to be the _best book in print_. That was a nice phrase, and I have already quoted it. He fetched the book: it turned out to be “Monte Cristo.” I agree as to the description of it.
In another book on English prisons I have read just lately, called “A Holiday in Gaol,” the writer says that “Monte Cristo” was engaged half a dozen deep by the prisoners at Wormwood Scrubbs.
The “boy” turned over the leaves of “Monte Cristo” and came across the name “Sinbad the Sailor,” and asked me whether it was the same story as “Sinbad the Sailor,” because he had seen that played at Sydney, and couldn’t make it out. It is, indeed, not very easy to make out the story of “Sinbad the Sailor” from a pantomime version.
I saw this actual version of “Sinbad the Sailor” later in Wellington, and a very good pantomime it was; but lucidity and cohesion of plot were not its strongest points.
In Sydney pantomimes go on all the year round, I am told, and not only at Christmas time, as in England.
I was playing patience after dinner. This led to talking of fortune-telling by cards, and one of the Sydney “boys” asked me to tell his fortune, which I did, as well as that of five or six others. The next day one of them informed me that I had told their fortunes “to a tick.”
Let me hastily say that I don’t believe there is anything in it; but cards are uncanny things all the same, and fruitful in odd coincidences.
Once when I was travelling in Russia I met a man who professed to tell fortunes by cards. It was in a third-class railway carriage and the man was a poor man. This is how he did it. He told one to wish, and then dealt out his cards in the orthodox manner; but he added, “When you wish, you mustn’t think of a green horse or else your wish won’t come true.” As if after being told such a thing one could help thinking of a green horse.
* * * * *
I am reading a book by that delightful author, William de Morgan, called “Somehow Good.” He is one of those authors who does the work for you. The book reads itself: just in the same way as Italian servants say that crockery breaks. For instance, an Italian servant never says, “The cook has broken a plate,” but “A plate has broken itself to the cook.” (Si e rotto un piatto alla cuoca.)
I have often wondered how housemaids acquired the apparently innate genius they possess for breaking things. It certainly amounts to genius; for it happens automatically and suddenly, as if prompted by divine and authentic inspiration. The gift is apparently shared by steerage passengers in a liner. The chief officer of the liner in which I travelled from England told me, before we had reached Fremantle, that twelve hundred glasses had been broken in the steerage. (There were eight hundred passengers.)
Sailors and Chinamen never break anything; but, on the other hand, there is nothing that children will not break. Children are like white ants; they are entirely destructive, and they construct nothing, except sand castles. And sand is the best safety-valve for the terrible and unlimited powers of childhood that exists.
This has been noted by the poet, who says:--
“On the other hand, Children in ordinary dress May always play with sand.”
* * * * *
In reading through the last pages that I have written, I am struck by the fact that there is very little about travel in these supposed notes on travel. The word longitude has not yet occurred, and no scrap of information that could be of any possible practical use to any one has yet been given. Does it matter?
[Illustration: YOU MUSTN’T THINK OF A GREEN HORSE]
Practical information can be sought for in guidebooks. I say _sought for_ purposely, for it can really only be obtained by experience. As for geographical details, I cannot think that the perusal of them is very interesting. And then, in writing on random subjects under a misleading title, I am only following well-known precedents. For instance, if you buy a modern book on “Gardening,” what do you find? You open the book, say, at the chapter headed “June,” and you find this kind of thing:--
I don’t think the pictures in the Royal Academy are so good this year as they were last: but the average level is on the whole higher. I remember Lord Melbourne saying that the Academy was the only picture gallery he really enjoyed, because the pictures told one stories and there was no damned nonsense of art about them. I am sorry that the girls of the present day are no longer taught sketching. Every girl should be able to sketch badly. Albums of sketches, made on the Continent, are a great resource on rainy Saturdays, and do well to sell at bazaars.
Italy is a good subject for sketching. Apropos of Italy, I came across the following poem in the South Wiltshire “Gazette.” It was said to be by Wordsworth, but a kind correspondent tells me that it is really by Miss Ellen F. Winthrope, who died at Beverly, Massachusetts, in 1887, at the age of seventy-three:--
_Lines written at Florence_
Look upward, for the sky is not all cloud. Look forward, think not of the dismal shroud. No lane but has a turning, and no road That leads not somewhere to a warm abode. Take courage. If the day seems rather long, The cooling dew will fall at evensong.
Believe, and Doubt is sure to slink away, Doubt is a cur; and Fear is but a fool; Rely upon yourself and let your stay Be the observance of the heavenly rule. Never say die; and do not be afraid; At eventide the wages will be paid.
A Dutch friend of mine gave me the following very good recipe for cooking anchovies: “Take an old garden hat, boil for seven minutes in boiling water. Add four pounds of cinnamon, one nutmeg, and half a glass of Chablis. Cut the anchovies in pieces and place on china plate. Pour the boiling water over them, and serve tepid with slices of lemon.”
Another friend of mine gave me this quaint, old-fashioned recipe for boiling a turkey: “Gather strawberry leaves on Lamas Eve, press them in the distillery until the aromatick perfume thereof becomes sensible. Take a fat turkey and pluck him, and baste him, then enfold him carefully in the strawberry leaves. Then boyl him in water from the well, and add rosemary, rue, parsefoil, passevelours, carraway, floramour, velvet flower, lavender, thistles, stinging nettles, and other sweet smelling herbs. Add also a pinte of Canary wine, and half pound of butter and one of ginger passed through the sieve. Serve with plums and stewed raisons and a little salt. Cover him with a silver dish cover. The Compleat Cook, 1656.”
Appended to this was the quaint motto:--
“Live and learne, for flowyrres fade, June waiteth not for man or mayde.”
That is the kind of thing you will find in the June chapter of the modern book on “Gardening.”
Then, if you take a book on a definite place, called, say, Rome. What do you find? Facts? No. Dates? No. But something like this:--
_The Spirit of Rome_ (_with apologies to Vernon Lee_)
_May 11._ We drove this afternoon to the Villa Madama; on the way we talked of Richard Strauss and the non-melodic musicians. Strauss is a Dionysiac. We compared his prophetic mood-music with the old-fashioned facile melodies of Wagner that pleased our youth. While we were talking a shepherd passed us. As he passed he took off his hat and said, “Buon giorno.” Very Roman that.
_May 27._ Porta Pia. A ragged cloud in the west and the sun shining very pale and watery. Passed a man playing a harmonium. P---- insisted on stopping to listen and the man asked him the time. This is the kind of thing that only happens to P---- and in Rome.
_May 31._ Mount Aventine. S---- and I strolled up the hill. We walked into a church (blonde marbles and seaweed-coloured pillars). A woman dressed in a bonnet and black silk came in and said her prayers. S---- said this reminded her of Boston. Why?
_June 2._ Sunday. Heard a sermon in the afternoon at the church of St. Praxed. (Alas! the tomb of Browning’s Bishop is not there, nay, probably Browning had another church in his eye.) The priest in the middle of his sermon, yawned, and said, “Basta!” Then, for the first time during this visit, for the first time since twenty years, I felt the unmistakable thrill of recognition, and said, “This is Rome.”
Or there is another method. That is the contemplative historic description of something you have never seen (the Belloc method). You don’t pretend to have seen it; but you describe what you might have felt, had you seen it. It is something like this:--
I have never been to Arles. But yesterday as I was walking along the Roman Road between Chanctonbury and Horsham, I thought of Arles. Arles is perpetually seeking new things in Europe. Arles has the spirit, the judgment, and the greatness of the thirteenth century. Chicago differs utterly in mood from Arles. In Chicago there is war. You buy a newspaper and ten to one the leading article will be an affirmation or a denial of a creed or a dogma. In Arles you may buy newspapers for a month and get nothing but the record of the weather, two days old. And, as I consider the two towns, neither of which I have visited, I find almost as great a pleasure in imagining them as in remembering the sharp pictures of Birmingham and Swindon. I have been to Swindon; and that reminds me, Swindon has a song of its own. It is called “If the Swin was in the Swim.” I have great hopes of the town of Swindon.
The world has become introspective and subjective. People no longer write about what they heard or saw. They assume that the reader knows all that. But they describe what they felt and thought on Monday, or on Tuesday, or on any other day of the week. Anatole France started the game by saying that criticism was the adventures of the soul among masterpieces.
This method came as a boon to reviewers and critics: they no longer had to pretend to read the books they reviewed. To dramatic critics, especially, the system was invaluable; but they have now carried it further still. The “literary” critic who wrote an account of a play instead of telling you what the play was about and the effect it had on the audience, gave you his “impressions” of the play. But now he just gives you his impressions: not his impressions of the play, but his impressions of anything: the Woman’s Suffrage Movement--the Rocky Mountains. He need scarcely mention the play; but it is generally done. These impressions he will write in the obscure dialect of modern Oxford, which consists of a complicated kind of literary slang. He writes so carefully that it is impossible to know exactly what he means. He will begin by describing a journey he has just made; he will continue to give you his views on Henry James, or the principles of art, then he will suddenly find after two columns of disquisition that he has come to the end of his space, and he will put off dealing with the play to the following week. By that time he will have forgotten what he meant to be going to say, and he will be obliged to write a new disquisition on something else. That is how the “literary critic” deals with the drama to-day. I find no fault with the system.
This is how the “literary” critic would deal with “Hamlet” were “Hamlet” a new play:--
_A Non-Conductor_
Last week I had a good deal to say about the possible effect of woman’s suffrage on art, and this led me to disagree, as the French say, on the attitude of Aristophanes towards the woman question. The fault I have to find with Mr. Shakespeare’s play which was produced tentatively at the Repertory Theatre in Wolverhampton last Tuesday, will be plainer when I have first explained the reason why Walt Whitman never wrote a play.
Walt Whitman had probably the greatest unexpressed dramatic gift of the century. He was the most potentially dramatic of all the modern poets: although his centrifugality led him out, so to speak, of his perspective, and shifted his dioramic outlook from the psychologic-human to the devisualized-ideal. Yes, Whitman was perhaps the greatest dramatist who never wrote a play: with the possible exception of Browning, who wrote plays which were in reality unbegun novels. Unlike Swinburne, whose system consisted of finishing his play before it began and filling up the space with deciduous phrases. Swinburne and Browning are the two great negative poles of drama: Whitman is the inverted mute magnet, who repelled drama from him instead of attracting it. I will explain, and in order to explain, we must go back to the Indian drama; etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.
Here, on the other hand, in contrast to this, is an example of the older impressionist method; a short notice written in a cheap newspaper, by a critic who has not had time to see the last act, and to whom the manager has refused to give a sketch of the plot:--
_Hamlet: Puzzle-Play at the Pantheon_
Mr. Shakespeare is presumably a new writer. I don’t remember having seen any of his work before, although it was rumoured last night that he had once been guilty of some sonnets. He may be able to write sonnets; but writing sonnets is one thing and writing a play is another. Not that there is no cleverness and no promise in “Hamlet”; but it is a literary cleverness, and not a dramatic cleverness.
The play suffers from dullness, length, and want of action. There is far too much talk from beginning to end. And the talk is not dramatic. Mr. Shakespeare has made the unpardonable mistake of not making his intention clear.
Is Hamlet, the hero of this rather disagreeable family imbroglio, meant to be mad, or is he meant to be simulating madness? Is the ghost a real ghost? Are we to take it seriously, or is it merely the practical mystification of a royal buffoon?