The bravest of the portents that Sunday afternoon – the intrinsic, of course I mean; the only ones to-day worth speaking of – I have yet to mention; for I recall my rather embarrassed inability to measure as yet the contributory value of Mr Aubrey Beardsley, by whom my friend was accompanied and who, as his prime illustrator, his perhaps even quite independent picture-maker, was to be in charge of the ‘art department’. This young man, slender, pale, delicate, unmistakeably intelligent, somehow invested the whole proposition with a detached, a slightly ironic and melancholy grace. I had met him before, on a single occasion, and had seen an example or two of his so curious and so disconcerting talent – my appreciation of which seems to me, however, as I look back, to have stopped quite short. The young recueil was to have pictures, yes, and they were to be as often as possible from Beardsley’s hand; but they were to wear this unprecedented distinction, and were to scatter it all about them, that they should have nothing to do with the text – which put the whole matter on an ideal basis. To those who remember the short string of numbers of The Yellow Book the spasmodic independence of these contributions will still be present. They were, as illustrations, related surely to nothing else in the same pages – save once or twice, as I imperfectly recall, to some literary effort of Beardsley’s own that matched them in perversity; and I might well be at peace as to any disposition on the part of the strange young artist ever to emulate my comparatively so incurious text. There would be more to say about him, but he must not draw me off from a greater relevance – my point being simply that he had associated himself with Harland that brave day to dangle before me the sweetest aid to inspiration ever snatched by a poor scribbler from editorial lips. I should sooner have come to this turn of the affair, which at once bathed the whole prospect in the rosiest glow.
I was invited, and all urgently, to contribute to the first number, and was regaled with the golden truth that my composition might absolutely assume, might shamelessly parade in, its own organic form. It was disclosed to me, wonderfully, that – so golden the air pervading the enterprise – any projected contribution might conform, not only unchallenged but by this circumstance itself the more esteemed, to its true intelligible nature. For any idea I might wish to express I might have space, in other words, elegantly to express it – an offered licence that, on the spot, opened up the millennium to the ‘short story’. One had so often known this product to struggle, in one’s hands, under the rude prescription of brevity at any cost, with the opposition so offered to its really becoming a story, that my friend’s emphasised indifference to the arbitrary limit of length struck me, I remember, as the fruit of the finest artistic intelligence. We had been at one – that we already knew – on the truth that the forms of wrought things, in this order, were, all exquisitely and effectively, the things; so that, for the delight of mankind, form might compete with form and might correspond to fitness; might, that is, in the given case, have an inevitability, a marked felicity. Among forms, moreover, we had had, on the dimensional ground – for length and breadth – our ideal, the beautiful and blest nouvelle; the generous, the enlightened hour for which appeared thus at last to shine. It was under the star of the nouvelle that, in other languages, a hundred interesting and charming results, such studies on the minor scale as the best of Turgenieff
’s,
of
Balzac’s,
of
Maupassant’s,
of
Bourget’s,
and just lately,
in our own tongue, of
Kipling’s,
had been, all economically, arrived at
– thanks to their authors’, as ‘contributors’, having
been able to count, right and left, on a wise and liberal support. It had
taken the blank misery of our Anglo-Saxon sense of such matters to organise,
as might be said, the general indifference to this fine type of composition.
In that dull view a ‘short story’ was a ‘short story’,
and that was the end of it. Shades and differences, varieties and styles,
the value above all of the idea happily developed, languished, to
extinction, under the hard-and-fast rule of the ‘from six to eight
thousand words’ – when, for one’s benefit, the rigour was a
little relaxed. For myself, I delighted in the shapely
nouvelle
– as, for that matter, I had from time to time and here and there been
almost encouraged to show.However, these are facts quite of the smaller significance and at which I glance only because I seem still to recognise in those of my three bantlings held by Harland at the baptismal font – The death of the lion (1894), The Coxon fund (1894), The next time (1895), plus a paper not here to be reproduced – something of the less troubled confidence with which they entered on their first state of being. These pieces have this in common that they deal all with the literary life, gathering their motive, in each case, from some noted adventure, some felt embarrassment, some extreme predicament, of the artist enamoured of perfection, ridden by his idea or paying for his sincerity. They testify indeed, as they thus stand together, to no general intention – they minister only, I think, to an emphasised effect. The particular case, in respect to each situation depicted, appealed to me but on its merits; though I was to note with interest, as my sense more and more opened itself, that situations of the order I speak of might again and again be conceived. They rose before me, in fine, as numerous, and thus, here, even with everything not included, they have added themselves up. I must further mention that if they enjoy in common their reference to the troubled artistic consciousness, they make together, by the same stroke, this other rather blank profession, that few of them recall to me, however dimly, any scant pre-natal phase.
In putting them sundry such critical questions so much after the fact I find it interesting to make out – critically interesting of course, which is all our interest here pretends to be – that whereas any anecdote about life pure and simple, as it were, proceeds almost as a matter of course from some good jog of fond fancy’s elbow, some pencilled note on somebody else’s case, so the material for any picture of personal states so specifically complicated as those of my hapless friends in the present volume will have been drawn preponderantly from the depths of the designer’s own mind. This, amusingly enough, is what, on the evidence before us, I seem critically, as I say, to gather – that the states represented, the embarrassments and predicaments studied, the tragedies and comedies recorded, can be intelligibly fathered but on his own intimate experience. I have already mentioned the particular rebuke once addressed me on all this ground, the question of where on earth, where roundabout us at this hour, I had ‘found’ my Neil Paradays, my Ralph Limberts, my Hugh Verekers and other such supersubtle fry. I was reminded then, as I have said, that these represented eminent cases fell to the ground, as by their foolish weight, unless I could give chapter and verse for the eminence. I was reduced to confessing I could n’t, and yet must repeat again here how little I was so abashed. On going over these things I see, to our critical edification, exactly why – which was because I was able to plead that my postulates, my animating presences, were all, to their great enrichment, their intensification of value, ironic; the strength of applied irony being surely in the sincerities, the lucidities, the utilities that stand behind it. When it ’s not a campaign, of a sort, on behalf of the something better (better than the obnoxious, the provoking object) that blessedly, as is assumed, might be, it ’s not worth speaking of. But this is exactly what we mean by operative irony. It implies and projects the possible other case, the case rich and edifying where the actuality is pretentious and vain. So it plays its lamp; so, essentially, it carries that smokeless flame, which makes clear, with all the rest, the good cause that guides it. My application of which remarks is that the studies here collected have their justification in the ironic spirit, the spirit expressed by my being able to reply promptly enough to my friend: “If the life about us for the last thirty years refuses warrant for these examples, then so much the worse for that life. The constatation would be so deplorable that instead of making it we must dodge it: there are decencies that in the name of the general self-respect we must take for granted, there’s a kind of rudimentary intellectual honour to which we must, in the interest of civilisation, at least pretend.” But I must really reproduce the whole passion of my retort.
“What does your contention of non-existent conscious exposures, in the midst of all the stupidity and vulgarity and hypocrisy, imply but that we have been, nationally, so to speak, graced with no instance of recorded sensibility fine enough to react against these things? – an admission too distressing. What one would accordingly fain do is to baffle any such calamity, to create the record, in default of any other enjoyment of it; to imagine, in a word, the honourable, the producible case. What better example than this of the high and helpful public and, as it were, civic use of the imagination? – a faculty for the possible fine employments of which in the interest of morality my esteem grows every hour I live. How can one consent to make a picture of the preponderant futilities and vulgarities and miseries of life without the impulse to exhibit as well from time to time, in its place, some fine example of the reaction, the opposition or the escape? One does, thank heaven, encounter here and there symptoms of immunity from the general infection; one recognises with rapture, on occasion, signs of a protest against the rule of the cheap and easy; and one sees thus that the tradition of a high æsthetic temper need n’t, after all, helplessly and ignobly perish. These reassurances are one’s warrant, accordingly, for so many recognitions of the apparent doom and the exasperated temper – whether with the spirit and the career fatally bruised and finally broken in the fray, or privileged but to gain from it a finer and more militant edge. I have had, I admit, to project signal specimens – have had, naturally, to make and to keep my cases interesting; the only way to achieve which was to suppose and represent them eminent. In other words I was inevitably committed, always, to the superior case; so that if this is what you reprehensively mean, that I have been thus beguiled into citing celebrities without analogues and painting portraits without models, I plead guilty to the critical charge. Only what I myself mean is that I carry my guilt lightly and have really in face of each perpetrated licence scarce patience to defend myself.” So I made my point and so I continued.
“I can’t tell you, no, who it is I ‘aimed at’ in the story of Henry St George; and it would n’t indeed do for me to name his exemplar publicly even were I able. But I none the less maintain his situation to have been in essence an observed reality – though I should be utterly ashamed, I equally declare, if I had n’t done quite my best for it. It was the fault of this notable truth, and not my own, that it too obscurely lurked – dim and disengaged; but where is the work of the intelligent painter of life if not precisely in some such aid given to true meanings to be born? He must bear up as he can if it be in consequence laid to him that the flat grows salient and the tangled clear, the common – worst of all! – even amusingly rare, by passing through his hands. Just so when you ask who in the world I had in mind for a victim, and what in the world for a treasure, so sacrificed to the advertisement not even of their own merits but of all sorts of independent, of really indifferent, exhibitory egotism, as the practically harried and hunted Neil Paraday and his borrowed, brandished and then fatally mislaid manuscript, I’m equally confident of having again and again closely noted in the social air all the elements of such a drama. I’ve put these elements together – that was my business, and in doing this wished of course to give them their maximum sense, which depended, for irony, for comedy, for tragedy, in other words for beauty, on the ‘importance’ of the poor foredoomed monarch of the jungle. And then, I’m not ashamed to allow, it was amusing to make these people ‘great’, so far as one could do so without making them intrinsically false. (Yes – for the mere accidental and relative falsity I don’t care.) It was amusing because it was more difficult – from the moment, of course I mean, that one worked out at all their greatness; from the moment one did n’t simply give it to be taken on trust. Working out economically almost anything is the very life of the art of representation; just as the request to take on trust, tinged with the least extravagance, is the very death of the same. (There may be such a state of mind brought about on the reader’s part, I think, as a positive desire to take on trust; but that is only the final fruit of insidious proceedings, operative to a sublime end, on the author’s side; and is at any rate a different matter.) As for the all-ingenious Figure in the carpet, let me perhaps a little pusillanimously conclude, nothing would induce me to come into close quarters with you on the correspondences of this anecdote. Here exactly is a good example for you of the virtue of your taking on trust – when I have artfully begotten in you a disposition. All I can at this point say is that if ever I was aware of ground and matter for a significant fable, I was aware of them in that connexion.”
My plea for ‘correspondences’ will perhaps, however, after all, but bring my reader back to my having, at the outset of these remarks, owned to full unconsciousness of seed dropped here by that quick hand of occasion that had elsewhere generally operated; which comes to saying, no doubt, that in the world of letters things don’t at this time of day very strikingly happen. Suggestive and illuminating incident is indeed scarce frequent enough to be referred to as administering the shake that starts up afresh the stopped watch of attention. I should n’t therefore probably have accumulated these illustrations without the sense of something interchangeable, or perhaps even almost indistinguishable, between my own general adventure and the more or less lively illustration into which I was to find this experiment so repeatedly flower. Let it pass that if I am so oddly unable to say here, at any point, ‘what gave me my idea’, I must just a trifle freely have helped myself to it from hidden stores. But, burdened thus with the imputation of that irregularity, I shall give a poor account of my homogeneous group without the charity of a glance, however brief, at its successive components. However I might have been introduced in fact to Henry St George, of The lesson of the master, or however I might have been deprived of him, my complete possession of him, my active sympathy with him as a known and understood and admired and pitied, in fine as a fully measured, quantity, hangs about the pages still as a vague scent hangs about thick orchard trees. The great sign of a grasped warrant – for identification, arrest or whatever – is, after all, in the confidence that dissipates vagueness; and the logic of such developed situations as those of the pair commemorated at the head of my list imposed itself all triumphantly. Had n’t one again and again caught ‘society’ in the very fact of not caring in the least what might become of the subject, however essentially fine and fragile, of a patronage reflecting such credit on all concerned, so long as the social game might be played a little more intensely, and if possible more irrelevantly, by this unfortunate’s aid? Given the Lion, his ‘death’ was but too conceivably the issue of the cruel exposure thus involved for him; and if it be claimed by what I can but feel rather a pedantic view that so precious an animal exactly could n’t, in our conditions, have been ‘given’, I must reply that I yet had met him – though in a preserve not perhaps known in all its extent to geographers.
Of such a fantasy as The next time the principle would surely soon turn up among the consulted notes of any sincere man of letters – taking literature, that is, on the side of the money to be earned by it. There are beautiful talents the exercise of which yet is n’t lucrative, and there are pressing needs the satisfaction of which may well appear difficult under stress of that failure of felicity. Just so there are other talents that leave any fine appreciation mystified and gaping, and the active play of which may yet be observed to become on occasion a source of vast pecuniary profit. Nothing then is at moments more attaching, in the light of ‘comparative’ science, than the study of just where and when, just how and why recognition denies itself to the appeal at all artfully, and responds largely to the appeal coarsely enough, commingled. The critical spirit – with leisure indeed to spare – may well, in its restlessness, seek to fix a bit exactly the point at which a beautiful talent, as I have called it, ceases, when imperiled by an empty pocket, to be a ‘worldly’ advantage. The case in which impunity, for the malheureux ridden by that questionable boon, insists on breaking down would seem thus to become susceptible of much fine measurement. I don’t know, I confess, that it proveably is; but the critical spirit at all afraid of so slight a misadventure as a waste of curiosity is of course deplorably false to its nature. The difficulty here, in truth, is that, from the moment a straight dependence on the broad-backed public is a part of the issue, the explicative quantity to be sought is precisely the mood of that monster – which, consistently and consummately unable to give the smallest account of itself, naturally renders no grain of help to enquiry. Such a study as that of Ray Limbert’s so prolonged, so intensified, but so vain continuance in hope (hope of successfully growing in his temperate garden some specimen of the rank exotic whose leaves are rustling cheques) is in essence a ‘story about the public’, only wearing a little the reduced face by reason of the too huge scale, for direct portrayal, of the monstrous countenance itself. Herein resides, as I have hinted, the anxious and easy interest of almost any sincere man of letters in the mere vicinage, even if that be all, of such strained situations as Ray Limbert’s. They speak of the public, such situations, to whomever it may concern. They at all events had from far back insidiously beset the imagination of the author of The next time, who can scarce remember the day when he was n’t all sympathetically, all tenderly occupied with some presumed literary watcher – and quite of a sublime constitution – for that postponed redress. Therefore in however developed a state the image in question was at last to hover before him, some form of it had at least never been far to seek.
I to this extent recover the acute impression that may have given birth to The figure in the carpet, that no truce, in English-speaking air, had ever seemed to me really struck, or even approximately strikeable, with our so marked collective mistrust of anything like close or analytic appreciation – appreciation, to be appreciation, implying of course some such rudimentary zeal; and this though that fine process be the Beautiful Gate itself of enjoyment. To have become consistently aware of this odd numbness of the general sensibility, which seemed ever to condemn it, in presence of a work of art, to a view scarce of half the intentions embodied, and moreover but to the scantest measure of these, was to have been directed from an early day to some of the possible implications of the matter, and so to have been led on by seductive steps, albeit perhaps by devious ways, to such a congruous and, as I would fain call it, fascinating case as that of Hugh Vereker and his undiscovered, not to say undiscoverable, secret. That strikes me, when all is said, as an ample indication of the starting-point of this particular portrayal. There may be links missing between the chronic consciousness I have glanced at – that of Hugh Vereker’s own analytic projector, speaking through the mouth of the anonymous scribe – and the poor man’s attributive dependence, for the sense of being understood and enjoyed, on some responsive reach of critical perception that he is destined never to waylay with success; but even so they scarce signify, and I may not here attempt to catch them. This too in spite of the amusement almost always yielded by such recoveries and reminiscences, or to be gathered from the manipulation of any string of evolutionary pearls. What I most remember of my proper process is the lively impulse, at the root of it, to reinstate analytic appreciation, by some ironic or fantastic stroke, so far as possible, in its virtually forfeited rights and dignities. Importunate to this end had I long found the charming idea of some artist whose most characteristic intention, or cluster of intentions, should have taken all vainly for granted the public, or at the worst the not unthinkable private, exercise of penetration. I could n’t, I confess, be indifferent to those rare and beautiful, or at all events odd and attaching, elements that might be imagined to grow in the shade of so much spent intensity and so much baffled calculation. The mere quality and play of an ironic consciousness in the designer left wholly alone, amid a chattering unperceiving world, with the thing he has most wanted to do, with the design more or less realised – some effectual glimpse of that might by itself, for instance, reward one’s experiment. I came to Hugh Vereker, in fine, by this travelled road of a generalisation; the habit of having noted for many years how strangely and helplessly, among us all, what we call criticism – its curiosity never emerging from the limp state – is apt to stand off from the intended sense of things, from such finely-attested matters, on the artist’s part, as a spirit and a form, a bias and a logic, of his own. From my definite preliminary it was no far cry to the conception of an intent worker who should find himself to the very end in presence but of the limp curiosity. Vereker’s drama indeed – or I should perhaps rather say that of the aspiring young analyst whose report we read and to whom, I ruefully grant, I have ventured to impute a developed wit – is that at a given moment the limpness begins vaguely to throb and heave, to become conscious of a comparative tension. As an effect of this mild convulsion acuteness, at several points, struggles to enter the field, and the question that accordingly comes up, the issue of the affair, can be but whether the very secret of perception has n’t been lost. That is the situation, and The figure in the carpet exhibits a small group of well-meaning persons engaged in a test. The reader is, on the evidence, left to conclude.
The subject of The Coxon fund, published in The yellow book in 1894, had long been with me, but was, beyond doubt, to have found its interest clinched by my perusal, shortly before the above date, of Mr J. Dyke Campbell’s admirable monograph on S. T. Coleridge. The wondrous figure of that genius had long haunted me, and circumstances into which I need n’t here enter had within a few years contributed much to making it vivid. Yet it ’s none the less true that the Frank Saltram of The Coxon fund pretends to be of his great suggester no more than a dim reflexion and above all a free rearrangement. More interesting still than the man – for the dramatist at any rate – is the S. T. Coleridge type; so what I was to do was merely to recognise the type, to borrow it, to re-embody and freshly place it; an ideal under the law of which I could but cultivate a free hand. I proceeded to do so; I reconstructed the scene and the figures – I had my own idea, which required, to express itself, a new set of relations – though, when all this is said, it had assuredly taken the recorded, transmitted person, the image embalmed in literary history, to fertilise my fancy. What I should, for that matter, like most to go into here, space serving, is the so interesting question – for the most part, it strikes me, too confusedly treated – of the story-teller’s ‘real person’ or actual contemporary transplanted and exhibited. But this pursuit would take us far, such radical revision do the common laxities of the case, as generally handled, seem to call for. No such process is effectively possible, we must hold, as the imputed act of transplanting; an act essentially not mechanical, but thinkable rather – so far as thinkable at all – in chemical, almost in mystical terms. We can surely account for nothing in the novelist’s work that has n’t passed through the crucible of his imagination, has n’t, in that perpetually simmering cauldron his intellectual pot-au-feu, been reduced to savoury fusion. We here figure the morsel, of course, not as boiled to nothing, but as exposed, in return for the taste it gives out, to a new and richer saturation. In this state it is in due course picked out and served, and a meagre esteem will await, a poor importance attend it, if it does n’t speak most of its late genial medium, the good, the wonderful company it has, as I hint, æsthetically kept. It has entered, in fine, into new relations, it emerges for new ones. Its final savour has been constituted, but its prime identity destroyed – which is what was to be demonstrated. Thus it has become a different and, thanks to a rare alchemy, a better thing. Therefore let us have here as little as possible about its ‘being’ Mr This or Mrs That. If it adjusts itself with the least truth to its new life it can’t possibly be either. If it gracelessly refers itself to either, if it persists as the impression not artistically dealt with, it shames the honour offered it and can only be spoken of as having ceased to be a thing of fact and yet not become a thing of truth. I am tempted to add that this recommemorative strain might easily woo me to another light step or two roundabout The Coxon fund. For I find myself look at it most interestedly to-day, after all, in the light of a significance quite other than that just noted. A marked example of the possible scope, at once, and the possible neatness of the nouvelle, it takes its place for me in a series of which the main merit and sign is the effort to do the complicated thing with a strong brevity and lucidity – to arrive, on behalf of the multiplicity, at a certain science of control. Infinitely attractive – though I risk here again doubtless an effect of reiteration – the question of how to exert this control in accepted conditions and how yet to sacrifice no real value; problem ever dearest to any economic soul desirous to keep renewing, and with a frugal splendour, its ideal of economy. Sacred altogether to memory, in short, such labours and such lights. Thus The Coxon fund is such a complicated thing that if it still seems to carry itself – by which I mean if its clearness still rules here, or still serves – some pursued question of how the trick was played would probably not be thankless.