[“Augustus”]
Augustus, though indulgent, did not spare reproof
when he thought it was good for me. One Tuesday morning, when I had been
spending the week-end with him, the post brought me a letter which he must have
written soon after my departure. 'My dear Wilie,' it ran. 'Yesterday when we
came in from our walk you said you were thirsty and asked for a 'drink'. I have
never heard you vulgar before. A gentleman does not ask for a 'drink', he asks
for 'something to drink'. Yours affectionately. Augustus.'
Dear Augustus! I'm afraid that if he were alive now
he would find the whole English-speaking world as vulgar as he found me then.
On another occasion when I told him I had been
somewhere by bus, he said stiffly: 'I prefer to call the conveyance to which you
refer an omnibus', and when I protested that if he wanted a cab he didn't ask
for a cabriolet, 'Only because people are so uneducated today they wouldn't
understand,' he retorted.
I was accustomed to family prayers and I noticed that
some of the prayers Augustus read sounded strangely in my ears. Then I
discovered that he had neatly inked out many lines in the Prayer Book he read
from. I asked him why.
'I've crossed out all the passages in glorification
of God,' he said. 'God is certainly a gentleman, and no gentleman cares to be
praised to his face. It is tactless, impertinent and vulgar. I think all that
fulsome adulation must be highly offensive to him.'
At the time this notion seemed odd to me and even
comic, but since I have come to think that there was some sense in it.
================================================================
[“Reflections on a Certain Book”]
All I venture to claim is that I know from experience
something of the process of creation and as a writer of fiction can look upon
the question of beauty, which is of course the subject matter of aesthetics,
with impartiality. Fiction is an art, but an imperfect one. The great novels of
the world may deal with all the passions to which man is subject, discover the
depths of his variable and disconsolate soul, analyse human relations, describe
the civilisation or create immortal characters; it is only by a misuse of the
word that beauty can be ascribed to them. We writers of fiction must leave
beauty to the poets.
He was not what was called in the eighteenth century
a man of feeling. Twice he thought seriously of marrying, but he took so long
to consider the advantages and disadvantages of the step he had in mind that in
the interval one of the young women he had his eye on married somebody else and
the other left Königsberg before he reached a decision. I think this argues
that he was not in love, for when you are, even if you are a philosopher, you
have no difficulty in finding very good reasons for doing what your
inclinations prompt. His two married sisters lived in Königsberg. Kant never
spoke to them for twenty-five years. The reason he gave for this was that he
had nothing to say to them. This seems sensible enough, and though we may
deplore his lack of heart, when we remember how often our pusillanimity has led
us to rack our brains in the effort to make a conversation with persons with
whom we have nothing in common but a tie of blood, we cannot but admire his
strength of mind.
Now, the ideas of a philosopher are largely conditioned
by his personal characteristics, and, as one might have expected, Kant's
approach to the problems of aesthetics is rigidly intellectual. His aim is to
prove that the delight we take in beauty is one of mere reflection. It is
interesting to see how he sets about doing this. He starts by making a
distinction between the agreeable and the beautiful. The pleasure which the
beautiful occasions is independent of all interest. The agreeable is what the
senses find pleasing in sensation. The agreeable arouses inclination, and
inclination is bound up with desire, and so with interest. A trivial
illustration may make Kant's point clear: when I look at the Doric temples at
Paestum the pleasure they afford me is quite obviously independent of all
interest and so I may safely call them beautiful; but when I look at a ripe
peach the pleasure it causes me is not disinterested, for it excites in me a
desire to eat it and therefore I am bound to call it no more than agreeable.
The senses of man differ and what causes me pleasure may leave you indifferent.
Each of us may judge the agreeable according to his own taste and there is no
disputing that. The satisfaction it gives is mere enjoyment, and so, states
Kant, has no worth. That is a hard saying, which, I think, can only be
explained by his conviction that the faculties of the mind alone have real
value. But now, since beauty has no connection with sensation (which is bound
up with interest) colour, charm and emotion, which are mere matters of
sensation and so only cause enjoyment, have nothing to do with it. This of
course is rather startling, but why Kant makes a statement at first sight so
outrageous is plain. Since the senses of men differ, if the beautiful depends
on the senses your judgement and mine are as good as that of anybody else, and
aesthetics will not exist. If a judgement of taste, or what, I think, we would
now more conveniently call appreciation of the beautiful, is to have any
validity it must depend not on anything so capricious as feeling, but on a mental
process. When you come to consider an object with a view to deciding its
aesthetic value, you must discard everything, its colour, such charm as it has,
the emotions it excites in you, and attend only to its form; and if then you
become aware of a harmony between your imagination and your understanding (both
faculties of the mind) you will receive a sensation of pleasure and be
justified in calling the object beautiful.
Kant then claimed that when you have decided that an
object is beautiful by the process I have just described, you can not only
impute the pleasure (a feeling) you experience to everyone else, but also
suppose that your pleasure (a feeling, I repeat) is universally
communicable.This seems very strange. I should have thought the peculiarity of
feeling is that it is not communicable. If I am looking at Giorgione's 'Virgin
Enthroned' at Castel Franco, I can, if I have any gift of expression, tell you
what I feel about it, but I cannot make you feel my feeling. I can tell you I
am in love; I can even describe the feelings that my love excites in me; but I
cannot communicate my love, a feeling, to you. If I could you would be in love
with the object of my affections, and that might be highly embarrassing to me.
Our feelings are surely conditioned by our dispositions. So much is this so
that I do not think it an exaggeration to say that no two persons see exactly
the same picture or read exactly the same poem. I can only suppose that Kant
came by this notion of the universal communicability of feeling owing to his
conviction that feeling was negligible except in so far as by means of the
imagination and the understanding it gave rise to ideas; and since the ideas by
the nature of our cognitive faculties are universally communicable, the feeling
that occasioned them must be so too. He was not, as I ventured at the beginning
of this essay to point out, a man who felt with intensity. That may, perhaps,
be the reason why he insisted that the appreciation of beauty is merely
contemplative.
But contemplation is a passive state. It does not
suggest the thrill, the excitement, the breathlessness, the agitation with
which the sight of a beautiful picture, the reading of a beautiful poem, must
affect a person of aesthetic sensibility. It may well describe his reaction to
the agreeable, but surely not to the beautiful.
It is obvious that the artist, be he poet, painter or
composer, makes a communication, but from this the writers of aesthetics infer
that this is his intention. There I think they are mistaken. They have not
sufficiently examined the process of creation. I don't believe the artist who
sets to work to create a work of art has any such purpose as they ascribe to
him. If he has he is a didactic or a propagandist, and as such not an artist. I
know what happens to a writer of fiction. An idea comes to him, he knows not
whence, and so he gives it the rather grand name of inspiration. It is as
slight a thing as the tiny foreign body that finds its way into the oyster's
shell and so creates the disturbance that will result in the creation of a
pearl. For some reason the idea excites him, his imagination goes to work, out
of his unconscious arise thoughts and feelings, characters crowd upon him and
events suggest themselves that will express them, for character is expressed by
action, not by description, till at length he is possessed of a shapeless mass
of material. This sometimes, but not always, falls into a pattern that enables
him to see a path, as it were, which he can follow through the jungle of this
confused medley of feelings and ideas till he is so obsessed by the muddle of
it that to liberate his soul from a burden that has grown intolerable he is
constrained to put it all down on paper. Having done this he regains his
freedom. What communication the reader gets from it is not his affair.
So it is, I surmise, with the landscape painter, the
young Monet for instance or Pisarro; he cannot tell you why some scene, the
bend of a river, say, or a road under the snow, bordered by leafless trees,
gives him a peculiar thrill so that the creative instinct is stirred in him and
he has the feeling that here is something that he can deal with, and because
nature has made him a painter he is able to transmute his emotion into an
arrangement of colour and form that does not satisfy his sensibility, for I
think it doubtful whether the artist, whatever art he practises, ever achieves
the full result he saw in his mind's eye, yet always the urge of creation which
is at once his delight and his torment. But I do not believe it has ever
entered his head that he was making a communication to the persons who
afterwards see his picture.
So it is, I submit, with the poet and the composer of
music, and if I have spoken of painting rather than of poetry or music it is,
frankly, because it is not so difficult to deal with. A picture can be seen at
once. Not that I mean a glance will give you all that it has to give. That you
can get, if you get it at all, only by giving it your continued and renewed
attention. Poetry deals with words and words have overwhelming associations,
associations different in different countries and in different cultures. Words
affect by their meaning as well as by their sound, and so are addressed to the
mind as well as to the sensibility. The only meaning of a picture is the
aesthetic delight it gives you. In any case I would not venture to speak of
music; the peculiar gift which enables someone to invent it is to me the most
mysterious of the processes which produce a work of art. One is taken aback at
first to find that Kant placed music (along with cooking) among the inferior
arts because, though perhaps the highest among the arts which are valued for
their agreeableness, it merely plays with sensation. It was natural that he
should do this since he estimated the worth of the arts by the culture they
supply to the mind.
The intellectual attitude towards aesthetic
appreciation is that of pretty well all the writers on aesthetics. This is
perhaps inevitable, for they are compelled to reason about what has little or
nothing to do with reason, but almost only with feeling. It was certainly the
attitude of Roger Fry. [...] He claimed that a work of art should be conceived
in response to a free aesthetic impulse and so condemned the patron unless he
allowed the artist to go his own way regardless of the patron's wishes. He had
little patience with portraiture because, according to him, people have their
portraits painted for social prestige or for purposes of publicity. He regarded
the painters who accept such commissions as useless, probably mischievous,
parasites upon society. He divided works of art into two distinct classes -
'one in which for some reason the artist can express his genuine aesthetic
impulse, the other in which the artist uses his technical skill to gratify a
public incapable of responding to aesthetic appeal.' This seems very high
handed. Because the Pharaohs had colossal statues made of themselves presumably
with the same intention as Mussolini and Hitler had when they plastered walls with
portraits of themselves, namely to impress themselves on the imagination of
their subjects, there are Bellini's Doge, Titian's 'Man with a glove',
Velasquez' Pope Innocent, to prove that a portrait can be a work of art and a
thing of beauty. We can only suppose that they satisfied their patrons. It is
unlikely that had Philip IV been displeased with the portraits Velasquez
painted of him, he would have sat to him so often.
The flaw in Roger Fry's argument lies in the
presumption that the motives which have led the artist to create a work of art
are any business of the critic's or of the layman's. [...] It is news to me
that the artist who knows his business is hampered by the limitations that are
imposed upon him. When the donor of an altarpiece wanted portraits of himself
and his wife kneeling at the foot of the Cross with Christ crucified, perhaps
for publicity or for social prestige, but perhaps also because his piety was
sincere, in either case the painter had no difficulty in complying with his patron's
wish. I cannot believe that it ever entered his head that he looked upon this
as an infringement of his aesthetic freedom: on the contrary I am more inclined
to believe that the difficulty he was asked to cope with excited and inspired
him. Every art has its limitations and the better the artist the more
comfortably does he exercise his creative instincts within them.
A generation or two ago a claim was made that
painting was an esoteric business that only painters could adequately
appreciate since they alone knew its technique. This claim, [...] was launched
in England
 |
| Degas: L'Absinthe, Musee d'Orsay, Paris, France. |
There is a
painting by Degas in the Louvre which is popularly known as L'Absinthe, but in fact represents an
engraver well-known in his day and an actress called Ellen Andre. There is no
reason to suppose that they were more disreputable than other persons of their
calling. They are seated side by side at a marble-topped table in a shabby bistro. The surroundings are sordid and
vulgar. A glass of absinthe stands before the actress. Their dress is slovenly
and you can almost smell the stench of their unwashed bodies and grubby
clothes. They are slumped down on the banquette
in an alcoholic stupor. Their faces are heavy and sullen. There is an air of
apathetic hopelessness in their listless attitude and you would that they were
dully resigned to sink deeper and deeper in shameless degradation. It is not a
pretty picture, nor a pleasing one, and yet it is surely one of the great
pictures of the world. It offers the authentic thrill of beauty. Of course I
can see how admirable the composition is, how pleasing the colour and how solid
the drawing, but to me there is much more in it than that. As I stand before
it, my sensibilities quickened, at the back of my mind, somewhere between the
conscious and the subconscious, I become aware of Verlaine’s poems, and of
Rimbaud’s, of Manette Salomon, of the quais along
the Seine with their second-hand bookstalls,
of the Boulevard St. Michel and the cafés and bistros in old mean streets. I daresay that from the standpoint of
aesthetic appreciation, which should be occupied only with aesthetic values,
this is reprehensible. Why should I care? My delight in the picture is
enormously increased. Is it possible that a picture which gives one so much can
have been painted, as the distinguished critic, Camille Mauclair, says it was,
because Degas was fascinated by the paradoxical perspective of the
marble-topped tables in the foreground?
But now I must break off to make a confession to the
reader. I have glibly used the word 'Beauty' as though I knew just what it
meant. I'm not at all sure that I do. It obviously means something, but exactly
what? When we say that something is beautiful can we really say why we say it?
Do we mean anything more than that it happens to give us a peculiar feeling?
[...] Kant has given several definitions of it, but they all tend to
substantiate his claim that the pleasure which beauty affords us is a pleasure
of reflection. For all I have been able to discover to the contrary he seems to
have believed that beauty was immutable, a belief I think, generally shared by
the writers on aesthetics. Keats expressed the same idea in the first line of
'Endymion': 'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.' By this he may have meant
one of two things: one, that so long as an object retains its beauty it is a
pleasure; but that is what I believe philosophers call an analytical proposition,
and tells us nothing that we didn't know before, since the characteristic of
beauty is that it affords pleasure. Keats was too intelligent to make a
statement so trite and I can only think he meant that a thing of beauty is a
joy for ever because it retains its beauty for ever. And there he was wrong.
For beauty is as transitory as all other things in the world. [...] Beauty
depends on the climate of sensibility and this changes with the passing years.
A different generation has different needs and demands a different
satisfaction. We grow tired of something we know too well and ask for something
new. The eighteenth century saw nothing in the paintings of the Italian
primitives but the fumblings of immature, unskilful artists. Were those
pictures beautiful then? No. It is we who have given them their beauty and it
is likely enough that the qualities we find in them are not the qualities which
appealed to the lovers of art, long since dead, who saw them when they were
first painted. [...] Beauty in fact is only that which produces the specific
pleasure which leads us to describe an object as beautiful during a certain
period of the world's history, and it does so because it responds to certain
needs of the period. It would be foolish to suppose that our opinions are any
more definitive than those of our fathers, and we may be pretty sure that our
descendants will look upon them with the same perplexity as we look upon Sir
Joshua's high praise of Pellegrino Tibaldi and Hazlitt's passionate admiration
for Guido Reni.
I have suggested that there is between the creation
of beauty and the appreciation of it a disjunction which no bridge can span,
and from what I have said the reader will have gathered that I think the
appreciation is enhanced by, if not actually dependent upon, the culture of the
individual. That is what the connoisseurs of art and the lovers of beauty
claim, and they claim also that the gift of aesthetic appreciation is a rare
one. [...] Is the farmer conscious of the beauty of the landscape in the sight
of which he earns his daily bread? I should say not; and that is natural, for
the appreciation of beauty, it is agreed, must not be affected by practical
considerations, and he is concerned to plough a field or to dig a ditch. The
appreciation of the beauty of nature is a recent acquisition of the human race.
It was created by the painters and writers of the Romantic Era. It needs
leisure and sophistication. In order to appreciate it, then, not only
disinterestedness is needed, but culture and a susceptibility to ideas.
Unwelcome as the idea may be, I don't see how one can escape admitting that
beauty is accessible but to the chosen few.
But to admit this excites in me a feeling of deep
discomfort. More than twenty-five years ago I bought an abstract picture by
Ferdinand Leger. It was an arrangement of squares, oblongs and spheres in
black, white, grey and red, and for some reason he had called it 'Les Toits de
Paris.' I did not think it beautiful, but I found it ingenious and decorative.
I had a cook then, a bad-tempered and quarrelsome woman, who would stand
looking at this picture for quite long periods in a state of something that
looked very like rapture. [...] It seemed to me that she was receiving as
genuine an aesthetic emotion as I flattered myself I received from El Greco's
'Crucifixion' in the Louvre. I am led by this (a single instance, of course) to
suggest that it is a very narrow point of view which claims that the specific
pleasure of artistic appreciation can only be felt by the privileged few. It
may well be that the pleasure is subtler, richer and more discriminating in
someone whose personality is cultivated, whose experience is wide, but why
should we suppose that someone else, less fortunately circumstanced, cannot
feel a pleasure as intense and as fruitful? The object that in the latter gives
rise to the pleasure may be what the aesthete considers no great shakes. Does
that matter? [...] Kant put the matter succinctly when he said that beauty does
not reside in the object. It is the name we give to the specific pleasure which
the object gives us. Pleasure is a feeling I can see no reason why there should
not be as many people capable of enjoying the specific pleasure of beauty as
there are who are capable of feeling grief and joy, love, tenderness and
compassion. I am inclined to say that Tolstoi was right when he said that real
beauty is accessible to everyone if you leave out the word 'real'. There is no
such thing as real beauty. Beauty is what gives you and me and everyone else that
sense of exultation and liberation which I have already spoken of. But in
discourse it is more convenient to use the word as if it were a material
entity, like a chair or a table, existing in its own right, independent of the
observer, and that I shall continue to do.
Pleasure has always had a bad name. Philosophers and
moralists have been unwilling to own that it is good and only to be eschewed
when its consequences are harmful. Plato, as we know, condemned art unless it
led to right action. Christianity with its contempt of the body and its
obsession with sin viewed pleasure with apprehension and its pursuit unworthy
of a human being with an immortal soul. I suppose that the disapproval with
which pleasure is regarded arises from the fact that when people think of it,
it is in connection with the pleasures of the body. That is not fair. There are
spiritual pleasures as well as physical pleasures, and if we must allow that
sexual intercourse, as St. Augustine
Kant says that the artist produces a work of art with
no other purpose than to make it beautiful. I do not believe that is so; I
believe that the artist produces a work of art to exercise his creative
faculty, and whether what he creates is beautiful is a fortuitous result in
which he may well be uninterested. [...] It may be that beauty, like happiness
and originality, is more likely to be obtained when it is not deliberately
attempted.
Jeremy Bentham startled the world many years ago by
stating in effect that if the amount of pleasure obtained from each be equal
there is nothing to choose between poetry and push-pin. Since few people now
know what push-pin is, I may explain that it is a child's game in which one
player tries to push his pin across that of another player, and if he succeeds
and then is able by pressing down on the two pins with the ball of his thumb to
lift them off the table he wins possession of his opponent's pin. [...] The
indignant retort to Bentham's statement was that spiritual pleasures are
obviously higher than physical pleasures. But who say so? Those who prefer
spiritual pleasures. They are in a miserable minority, as they acknowledge when
they declare that the gift of aesthetic appreciation is a very rare one. The
vast majority of men are, as we know, both by necessity and choice preoccupied
with material considerations. Their pleasures are material. They look askance
at those who spent their lives in the pursuit of art. That is why they have
attached a depreciatory sense to the word aesthete, which means merely one who
has a special appreciation of beauty. How are we going to show that they are
wrong? How are we going to show that there is something to choose between
poetry and push-pin? I surmise that Bentham chose push-pin for its pleasant
alliteration with poetry. Let us speak of lawn tennis. It is a popular game
which many of us can play with pleasure. It needs skill and judgement, a good
eye and a cool head. If I get the same amount of pleasure out of playing it as
you get by looking at Titian's 'Entombment of Christ' in the Louvre, by
listening to Beethoven's 'Eroica' or by reading Eliot's 'Ash Wednesday', how are
you going to prove that your pleasure is better and more refined than mine?
Only, I should say, by manifesting that this gift you have of aesthetic
appreciation has a moral effect on your character.
In one place Kant makes the significant remark that
'connoisseurs in taste, not only often, but generally are given up to idle,
capricious and mischievous passions' and that 'they could perhaps make less
claims than the others to any superiority of attachment to moral principles.'
This was doubtless true then: it is true now. Human nature changes little. No
one can have lived much in the society of those whom Kant calls connoisseurs of
taste, and whom we may more conveniently call aesthetes, without noticing how
seldom it is that you find in them the modesty, the tolerance, the
loving-kindness and liberality, in short the goodness with which you might have
expected their addiction to spiritual pleasures to inform them. If the delight
in aesthetic appreciation is no more than opium of the intelligentsia it is no more
than, as Kant says, a mischievous distraction. If it is more it should enable
its possessor to acquire virtue. Kant finely says that beauty is the symbol of
morality. Unless the love of beauty ennobles the character, and that is the
only purposiveness of beauty that seems, as far as I can see, important enough
to give it value, then I can't see how we can escape from Bentham's affirmation
that if the amount of pleasure obtained from each be equal there is nothing to
choose between poetry and push-pin.
================================================================
["The Decline and Fall of the Detective
Story"]
When, after a hard day's work, you are spending the
evening alone and you look at your bookshelves for something to read, do you
take down War and Peace, L'Education Sentimentale, Middlemarch or Du Cote de
chez Swann? If you do I admire you. Or if, wishing to keep up with modern
fiction, you take up a novel the publisher has sent you, a harrowing story of
displaced persons in Central Europe, or one that a review has induced you to
buy, a ruthless picture of the lives of poor white trash in Louisiana, you have
my hearty approval. But this is not the sort of person I am. For one thing, I
have read all the great novels three or four times already and they have
nothing more to tell me; for another, when I look at the four hundred and fifty
closely printed pages which according to the jacket are going to lay bare to me
the secrets of a woman's soul or wring my withers with the horrors of life in
the slums of Glasgow (all the characters speaking broad Scots), my heart sinks;
and I choose a detective story.
In fact, in The
Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade, the detective, pins the murder of Archer on
Brigid O'Shaughnessy by pointing out to her that she is the only person who
could have committed it, whereupon she loses her presence of mind and admits
it. If she hadn't done this, but had coolly answered 'Prove it', he would have
been nonplussed; and in any case had she got Perry Mason, Erle Stanley
Gardner's astute lawyer, to defend her, no jury would have convicted her on the
flimsy evidence which was all that Sam Spade had to produce.
================================================================
[“After Reading Burke”]
It is not often that you come across a man the
features of whose personality are so incompatible as was the case with Burke.
He was upright and abject, straightforward and shifty, disinterested and
corrupt. How is one to reconcile characteristics so discordant? I don't know.
In his study he was no longer the reckless punter,
the shameless sponge, the unscrupulous place-hunter (not for himself, but for
others), the dishonest advocate who attacked measures introduced to correct
scandalous abuses because his pocket would be affected by their passage. In his
study he was the high-minded man whom his friends loved and honoured for his
nobility of spirit, his greatness and his magnanimity. In his study he was the
honest man he was assured he was. Then, but only then, you can say of Burke: Le style c'est l'homme meme.
================================================================
[“Zurbaran”]
Beauty is a grave word. It is a word of high import.
It is used lightly now - of the weather, of a smile, of a frock or the fit of a
shoe, of a bracelet, of a garden, of a syllogism; beautiful serves as a synonym
for good or pretty or pleasing or nice or engaging or interesting. But beauty
is none of these. It is much more. It is very rare. It is a force. It is an
enravishment. It is not a figure of speech when people say it takes their
breath away; in certain cases it may give you the same suffocating shock as
when you dive into ice-cold water. And after that first shock your heart throbs
like a prisoner's when the jail gate clangs behind him and he breathes again
the clean air of freedom. The impact of beauty is to make you feel greater than
you are, so that for a moment you seem to walk on air; and the exhilaration and
the release are such that nothing in the world matters anymore. You are
wrenched out of yourself into a world of pure spirit. It is like falling in
love. It is falling in love. It is an ecstasy matching the ecstasy of the
mystics. When I think of the works of art that have filled me with this intense
emotion I think of the first glance at the Taj Mahal, the St. Maurice of El
Greco, seen again after long years, the Adam with his outstretched arm in the
Sistine Chapel, Night and Day and the brooding figure of Giuliano on tombs of
the Medici and Titian's Entombment of Christ. Such an emotion I, for my part,
have never received from the highly competent, well-painted, well-drawn,
dignified, thoughtful canvases which Zurbaran painted for the altars of
churches and the sacristies of convents. They have great qualities, but they
appeal to the mind, to the intelligent appreciation, rather than to the heart
and nerves which are thrilled and shattered by the rapture of pure beauty.
================================================================
[“Some Novelists I Have Known”]
Henry James's fictions are like the cobwebs which a
spider may spin in the attic of some old house, intricate, delicate and even
beautiful, but which at any moments the housemaid's broom with brutal common
sense may sweep away.
If in these pages I have made Henry James, I hope not
unkindly, a trifle absurd it is because that is what I found him. I think he
took himself a good deal too seriously. We look askance at a man who keeps on
telling you he is a gentleman; I think it would have been more becoming in
Henry James if he had not insisted so often on his being an artist. It is
better to leave others to say that.
At the end of the second act [of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde] she gathered her
ermine cloak around her shoulders and, turning to her companion, said: 'Let's
go. There's not enough action in this play.' Of course she was right, but
perhaps that wasn't quite the point.
In the last twenty-five years I have had a lot people
staying with me, and sometimes I am tempted to write an essay on guests. There
are the guests who never shut a door after them and never turn out the light
when they leave their room. There are the guests who throw themselves on their
bed in muddy boots to have a nap after lunch, so that the counterpane has to be
cleaned on their departure. There are the guests who smoke in bed and burn
holes in your sheets. There are the guests who are on a regime and have to have
special food cooked for them and there are the guests who wait till their glass
is filled with a vintage claret and then say: 'I won't have any, thank you.'
There are the guests who never put back a book in the place from which they
took it and there are the guests who take away a volume from a set and never
return it. There are the guests who borrow money from you when they are leaving
and do not pay it back. There are the guests who can never be alone for a
minute and there are the guests who are seized with a desire to talk the moment
they see you glancing at a paper. There are the guests who, wherever they are,
want to be somewhere else and there are the guests who want to be doing
something from the time they get up in the morning till the time they go to bed
at night. There are the guests who treat you as though they were gauleiters in
a conquered province. There are the guests who bring three weeks laundry with
them to have washed at your expense and there are the guests who send their
clothes to the cleaners and leave you to pay the bill. There are the guests who
take all they can get and offer nothing in return.
There are also the guests who are happy just to be
with you, who seek to please, who have resources of their own, who amuse you,
whose conversation is delightful, whose interests are varied, who exhilarate
and excite you, who in short give you far more than you can ever hope to give them
and whose visits are only too brief. Such a guest was H. G.
I think this is why his [H. G. Well’s] novels are
less satisfactory than one would have liked them to be. The people he puts
before you are not individuals, but lively and talkative marionettes whose
function it is to express the ideas he was out to attack or defend. They do not
develop according to their dispositions, but change for the purposes of the
theme. It is as though a tadpole did not become a frog, but a squirrel -
because you had a cage that you wanted to pop him into.
But that Arnold Calais
I remember that once, beating his knee with his
clenched fist to force the words from his writhing lips, he said: 'I am a nice
man.' He was.
In one of his aphorisms Pearsall Smith said: 'Hearts
that are delicate and kind and tongues that are neither - these make the finest
company in the world.' I do not know whether Elizabeth
Reggie Turner was on the whole the most amusing man I
have known. [...] He was by way of being a novelist, but somehow, when he took
up his pen his gaiety, his extravagant invention, his lightness deserted him,
and his novels were dull. They were unsuccessful. He said of them: 'With most
novelists it's their first edition that is valuable, but with mine it's the
second. It doesn't exist.'
He was one of the few of Oscar Wilde's friends who
remained faithful to him after his disgrace. Reggie was in Paris
when Wilde, living in a cheap, dingy hotel on the left bank of the Seine , was dying. Reggie went to see him every day. One
morning he found him distraught. He asked him what was the matter. 'I had a
terrible dream last night,' said Oscar, 'I dreamt I was supping with the dead.'
'Well,' said Reggie, 'I am sure you were the life and soul of the party,
Oscar.' Wilde burst into a roar of laughter and regained his spirits. It was
not only witty, but kind.
'And what do you think of Edgar Wallace?'
'Who is Edgar Wallace?', she replied.
'Do you never read thrillers', I asked.
'No.'
Never has a monosyllable contained more frigid
displeasure, more shocked disapproval nor more wounded surprise. I will not say
she blenched, for she was a woman of the world and she knew instinctively how to
deal with a solecism, but her eyes wandered away and a little forced smile
slightly curled her lips. The moment was embarrassing for both of us. Her
manner was that of a woman to whom a man has made proposals offensive to her
modesty, but which her good breeding tells her it will be more dignified to
ignore than to make a scene about.
'I'm afraid it's getting very late,' said Mrs.
Wharton.
I knew that my audience was at an end. I never saw
her again. She was an admirable creature, but not my cup of tea.
But the chief reason why I have never become easily
familiar with the men of letters I propose to write about is owing to some
fault in my own character. I am either too self-centred, or too diffident, or
too reserved, or too shy to be able to be on confidential terms with anyone I
know at all well, and when on occasion a friend in trouble has opened his heart
to me I have been too embarrassed to be of much help to him. Most people like
to talk about themselves and when they tell me things I should have thought
they would prefer to keep to themselves I am abashed. I prefer to guess at the
secrets of their hearts. It is not in me to take people at their face value and
I am not easily impressed. I have no power of veneration. It is more in my
humour to be amused by people than to respect them.
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