Collected Essays (14 page)

This is surely one of the great scenes in literature, the scenes which suddenly enlarge the whole scope of fiction and like new discoveries in science alter the future and correct the past. Never again will it be possible to write off the infantile devils of
Doctor Faustus
with their fire-crackers and conjuring tricks. They are more understandable now, masks of the horse-dealer who made his own kind of Host with childish malice out of a pebble. ‘
Un jeu d’enfants
’, he called it in proud mockery, for infantility, if the inferno exists at all, must surely be a mark of that Hell which is the home of the eternally undeveloped.

1968

THE BURDEN OF CHILDHOOD

T
HERE
are certain writers, as different as Dickens from Kipling, who never shake off the burden of their childhood. The abandonment to the blacking factory in Dickens’s case and in Kipling’s to the cruel Aunt Rosa living in the sandy suburban road were never forgotten. All later experience seems to have been related to those months or years of unhappiness. Life which turns its cruel side to most of us at an age when we have begun to learn the arts of self-protection took these two writers by surprise during the defencelessness of early childhood. How differently they reacted. Dickens learnt sympathy, Kipling cruelty – Dickens developed a style so easy and natural that it seems capable of including the whole human race in its understanding: Kipling designed a machine, the cogwheels perfectly fashioned, for exclusion. The characters sometimes seem to rattle down a conveyor-belt like matchboxes.

There are great similarities in the early life of Kipling and Saki, and Saki’s reaction to misery was nearer Kipling’s than Dickens’s. Kipling was born in India. H. H. Munro (I would like to drop that rather meaningless mask of the pen name) in Burma. Family life for such children is always broken – the miseries recorded by Kipling and Munro must be experienced by many mute inglorious children born to the civil servant or the colonial officer in the East: the arrival of the cab at the strange relative’s, house, the unpacking of the boxes, the unfamiliar improvised nursery, the terrible departure of the parents, a four years’ absence from affection that in child-time can be as long as a generation (at four one is a small child, at eight a boy). Kipling described the horror of that time in
Baa Baa Black Sheep
– a story in spite of its sentimentality almost unbearable to read: Aunt Rosa’s prayers, the beatings, the card with the word
LIAR
pinned upon the back, the growing and neglected blindness, until at last came the moment of rebellion.

‘If you make me do that,’ said Black Sheep very quietly, ‘I shall burn this house down and perhaps I will kill you. I don’t know whether I
can
kill you – you are so bony, but I will try.’

No punishment followed this blasphemy, though Black Sheep held himself ready to work his way to Auntie Rosa’s withered throat and grip there till he was beaten off.

In the last sentence we can hear something very much like the tones of Munro’s voice as we hear them in one of his finest stories
Sredni Vashtar
, Neither his Aunt Augusta nor his Aunt Charlotte with whom he was left near Barnstaple after his mother’s death, while his father served in Burma, had the fiendish cruelty of Aunt Rosa, but Augusta (‘a woman’, Munro’s sister wrote, ‘of ungovernable temper, of fierce likes and dislikes, imperious, a moral coward, possessing no brains worth speaking of, and a primitive disposition’) was quite capable of making a child’s life miserable. Munro was not himself beaten, Augusta preferred his younger brother for that exercise, but we can measure the hatred he felt for her in his story of the small boy Conradin who prayed so successfully for vengeance to his tame ferret. ‘“Whoever will break it to the poor child? I couldn’t for the life of me!”. exclaimed a shrill voice, and while they debated the matter among themselves Conradin made himself another piece of toast.’ Unhappiness wonderfully aids the memory, and the best stories of Munro are all of childhood, its humour and its anarchy as well as its cruelty and unhappiness.

For Munro reacted to those years rather differently from Kipling. He, too, developed a style like a machine in self-protection, but what sparks this machine gave off. He did not protect himself like Kipling with manliness, knowingness, imaginary adventures of soldiers and Empire Builders (though a certain nostalgia for such a life can be read into
The Unbearable Bassington
): he protected himself with epigrams as closely set as currants in an old-fashioned Dundee cake. As a young man trying to make a career with his father’s help in the Burma Police, he wrote to his sister in 1893 complaining that she had made no effort to see
A Woman of No Importance.
Reginald and Clovis are children of Wilde: the epigrams, the absurdities fly unremittingly back and forth, they dazzle and delight, but we are aware of a harsher, less kindly mind behind them than Wilde’s. Clovis and Reginald are not creatures of fairy tale, they belong nearer to the visible world than Ernest Moncrieff. While Ernest floats airily like a Rubens cupid among the over-blue clouds, Clovis and Reginald belong to the Park, the tea-parties of Kensington, and evenings at Covent Garden – they even sometimes date, like the suffragettes. They cannot quite disguise, in spite of the glint and the sparkle, the loneliness of the Bamstaple years – they are quick to hurt first, before they can be hurt, and the witty and devastating asides cut like Aunt Augusta’s cane. How often these stories are stories of practical jokes. The victims with their weird names are sufficiently foolish to awaken no sympathy – they are the middle-aged, the people with power; it is right that they should suffer temporary humiliation because the world is always on their side in the long run. Munro, like a chivalrous highwayman, only robs the rich: behind all these stories is an exacting sense of justice. In this they are to be distinguished from Kipling’s stories in the same genre –
The Village That Voted The Earth Was Flat
and others where the joke is carried too far. With Kipling revenge rather than justice seems to be the motive (Aunt Rosa had established herself in the mind of her victim and corrupted it).

Perhaps I have gone a little too far in emphasizing the cruelty of Munro’s work, for there are times when it seems to remind us only of the sunniness of the Edwardian scene, young men in boaters, the box at the Opera, long lazy afternoons in the Park, tea out of the thinnest porcelain with cucumber sandwiches, the easy irresponsible prattle.

Never be a pioneer. It’s the Early Christian that gets the fattest lion.

There’s Marion Mulciber, who
would
think she could ride down a hill on a bicycle; on that occasion she went to a hospital, now she’s gone into a Sisterhood – lost all she had you know, and gave the rest to Heaven.

Her frocks are built in Paris, but she wears them with a strong English accent.

It requires a great deal of moral courage to leave in a marked manner in the middle of the second Act when your carriage is not ordered till twelve.

Sad to think that this sunniness and this prattle could not go on for ever, but the worst and cruellest practical joke was left to the end. Munro’s witty cynical hero, Comus Bassington, died incongruously of fever in a West African village, and in the early morning of 13 November 1916, from a shallow crater near Beaumont Hamel, Munro was heard to shout ‘Put out that bloody cigarette.’ They were the unpredictable last words of Clovis and Reginald.

1950

MAN MADE ANGRY

I
T
is a waste of time criticizing Léon Bloy as a novelist: he hadn’t the creative instinct – he was busy all the time being created himself, created by his own angers and hatreds and humiliations. Those who meet him first in this grotesque and ill-made novel
*2
need go no further than the dedication to Brigand-Kaire, Ocean Captain, to feel the angry quality of his mind. ‘God keep you safe from fire and steel and contemporary literature and the malevolence of the evil dead.’ He was a religious man but without humility, a social reformer without disinterestedness, he hated the world as a saint might have done, but only because of what it did to him and not because of what it did to others. He never made the mistake by worldly standards of treating his enemies with tolerance – and in that he resembled the members of the literary cliques he most despised. Unlike his contemporary Péguy, he would never have risked damnation himself in order to save another soul, and though again and again we are surprised by sentences in his work of nobility or penetration, they are contradicted by the savage and selfish core of his intelligence. ‘I must stop now, my beloved,’ he wrote to his fiancée, ‘to go and suffer for another day’; he had prayed for suffering, and yet he never ceased to complain that he had been granted more of it than most men; it made him at the same time boastful and bitter.

He wrote in another letter:

I am forty-three years old, and I have published some literary works of considerable importance. Even my enemies can see that I am a great artist. Also, I have suffered much for the truth, whereas I could have prostituted my pen, like so many others, and lived on the fat of the land. I have had plenty of opportunities, but I have not chosen to betray justice and I have preferred misery, obscurity and indescribable agony. It is obvious that these things ought to merit respect.

It is obvious too that these things would have been better claimed for him by others. It is the self-pity of this attitude the luxurious bitterness that prevents Bloy from being more than an interesting eccentric of the Catholic religion. He reminds us – in our own literature – a little of Patmore, and sometimes of Corvo. He is near Patmore in his brand of pious and uxorious sexuality which makes him describe the character of Clotilde, the heroine of his novel, as ‘chaste as a Visitationist Sister’s rosary’, and near Corvo in the furious zest with which he takes sides against his characters: ‘She bellowed, if the comparison may be permitted, like a cow that has been forgotten in a railway truck.’ Indeed the hatred he feels for the characters he has himself created (surely in itself a mark of limited imagination) leads him to pile on the violence to a comic extent – ‘a scandalous roar of cachinnation . . . like a bellowing of cattle from some goitred valley colonized by murderers’.

No, one reads this novel of Bloy not for his characters, who are painted only deformity-deep, not for his story, but for the occasional flashes of his poetic sense, for images like ‘upright souls are reserved for rectilinear torments’; for passages with a nervous nightmare vision which reminds us of Rilke:

A little middleclass township, with a pretension to the possession of gardens, such as are to be found in the quarters colonized by eccentrics, where murderous landlords hold out the bait of horticulture to trap those condemned to die.

We read him with pleasure to just the extent that we share the hatred of life which prevented him from being a novelist or a mystic of the first order (he might have taken as his motto Gauguin’s great phrase – ‘Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge’) and because of a certain indestructible honesty and self-knowledge which in the long run always enables him to turn his fury on himself, as when in one of his letters he recognizes the presence of ‘that bitch literature’ penetrating ‘even the most
naif
stirrings of my heart’.

1939

G. K. CHESTERTON

1

I
T
is possible to argue that the best biographies have been the result of conflict and not of surrender. One pictures the biographer, however cheerfully he may have undertaken his task, glowering with sullen determination and resentment at the huge mass of intractable material any life must represent. A man lives for seventy years: to make sense of this is a worse labour than reducing to order the record of a mere four-years’ war. To simplify is essential: so we see Boswell brushing aside in a few pages more than half his subject’s lifetime, or Lytton Strachey choosing one characteristic sentence and holding it like a thread of cotton through the maze.

Mrs Ward, however, is too fond of her subject and too close to it to reduce her material into a portrait for strangers. Her biography
*3
is often of great interest: it is a useful and sometimes explicit corrective to Mrs Cecil Chesterton’s vulgar and inaccurate study of the Chesterton family; but it is too long for its material, too cumbered with affectionate trivialities. When we love we hoard a scrap of dialogue, a picture postcard, a foreign coin, but ‘these foolish things’ must be excluded from a biography which is written for strangers. Mrs Ward has amiably supposed her readers to be all friends of her subject: her book would have been better if she had realized – as Stevenson’s biographers also failed to realize – that in the case of a great writer the years inevitably produce enemies. One wishes, too, that she had remembered more frequently her non-Catholic audience. Remarks such as ‘the “holier bread” came perhaps to his [Chesterton’s] mind from the fact that the average of Daily Communion is unusually high at Notre Dame’ display the embarrassing parochialism which haunts so much Catholic writing in England.

Chesterton’s bibliography consists of one hundred volumes, the ‘quiet resolute practice of the liberty of a free mind’, as Mrs Ward admirably expresses it. Out of this enormous output time will choose. Time often chooses oddly, or so it seems to us, though it is more reasonable to suppose that it is we ourselves who are erratic in our judgements. We are already proving our eccentricity in the case of Chesterton: a generation that appreciates Joyce finds for some reason Chesterton’s equally fanatical play on words exhausting. Perhaps it is that he is still suspected of levity, and the generation now reaching middle age has been a peculiarly serious one. Mrs Ward should at least alter that opinion: she dwells at great length on Chesterton’s political opinions. He cared passionately for individual liberty and for local patriotism, but the party which he largely inspired has an art-and-crafty air about it today. He was too good a man for politics: he never, one feels, penetrated far enough into the murky intricacies of political thought. To be a politician a man needs to be a psychologist, and Chesterton was no psychologist, as his novels prove. He saw things in absolute: terms of good and evil, and his immense charity prevented him admitting the amount of ordinary shabby deception in human life. At their worst our politicians were fallen angels.