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Title: All the Books of My Life
Date of first publication: 1956
Place and date of edition used as base for this ebook:
  New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956 (First US Edition)  
Author: Sheila Kaye-Smith (1887-1956)
Date first posted: 1 July 2007
Date last updated: 1 July 2007
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #11

This ebook was produced by: Dr Andrew Templeton




ALL THE BOOKS OF MY LIFE

Sheila Kaye-Smith


CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER

 1 FOR INFANT MINDS
 2 THE HIGH SPRINGS
 3 CLASSIC DEBAUCH
 4 READ AND RE-READ
 5 THE PLEASURES OF INSANITY
 6 BOOKS HAVE AUTHORS
 7 SAD PAGEANT OF FORGOTTEN WRITERS
 8 THE MYSTERY OF THE BEST SELLER
 9 BOOKS FOR THE BONFIRE
10 GAPS ON THE SHELF
11 SPEAKING PERSONALLY
12 FOR PLEASURE ONLY



                             INTRODUCTION

               What is our span of days?
               Seventy years it lasts,
               Eighty years, if we count among the heroes.

Thus in an earlier age wrote Moses the Man of God, and since then the
millenniums have brought little change. For the idea that our
expectation of life is much longer than our fathers' is based on a
fallacy due to the misreading of statistics. The 'expectation' is not
for the old, but for the young who a few generations ago would have died
in infancy, and for the middle-aged who can now reckon to survive
diseases that would formerly have proved fatal. The truth is not that
the old live longer but that more live to be old.

That being so, I need not see any premature onset of senility in the
temptation that has been growing upon me to look backwards. By the time
this book appears in print I shall be in my seventieth year, and as I
have no reason to believe that I 'count myself among the heroes', it
does not seem as if any forward gaze will reach very far. So I do not
think I need feel ashamed of looking behind me, but unlike so many I
wish for no return. There is no nostalgia in my contemplation of the
past. I had what everyone would call a happy childhood, with a
comfortable home, kind parents and many friends. But I would never want
to be a child again--ignorant and dependent. Nor would I live through
the silliness and suffering of my early love affairs for the sake of
their brief ecstasies. Even my first literary successes--thrilling as
they were to my inexperience--had about them that same 'unfinished' air
that makes for foolishness. As a child I was less happy than as a young
woman and as a young woman less happy than when middle age, which in my
youth had meant the end, revealed itself instead as a beginning.

But looking back can be a dangerous habit with those who find it easy to
appear in print. For it often leads to an autobiography. Indeed this is
a temptation not always avoided by the middle-aged or even by the young.
We are all liable to think that we are as interesting to other people as
we are to ourselves. Some twenty years ago I made my present situation
worse, for I wrote an autobiographical essay which used up all the chief
events of my life, with the result that now I have achieved the proper
age for such writing I have nothing left to write about. My marriage, my
home and my religion were all disposed of in 1937, and as I have since
then changed neither husband, house nor faith, it is difficult to see
what I could possibly add to the story. My life has not been uneventful,
but its events have been personal and private; I have travelled but I
have never gone off the map; I have met people who were famous and
people who were interesting, but have seldom found those qualities
combined. So events, places and people seem equally barred.

Yet if I fail to resist this temptation to write about the past what am
I to write? Shall I write about the animals I have known and kept? No,
that will not do; for a well-known author has already written his life
in dogs and a well-known actor has written his in cats. Shall I make as
it were a gastronomic tour of the past, starting in the Creamery at
Hastings with the paradise I tasted in chocolate clairs and ending in
the Chapon Fin at Bordeaux with a dinner of the Wine and Food Society?
But a lifetime's gastronomy served up in sixty or seventy thousand words
might well give the reader indigestion; for food in print, unless very
lightly and briefly served, can be as heavy and clogging as a Victorian
plum duff. That is food for the body. What about food for the mind--a
lifetime's reading! There is something more promising here.

In the course of a reasonably long life I must have read many hundreds
of books, some of which I have forgotten, but most of which I remember,
and all of which, remembered or forgotten, must have left some mental
deposit, so that in a sense I am mentally as much the books I have read
as I am chemically the food I have eaten. Their sequence too is very
much the sequence of my life. Certain of them have marked my way like
milestones and others have lit it up like lamps. In writing about them I
am not merely taking the reader into a library, but along the road which
I myself have travelled through the years and telling what, though it
cannot strictly be called an autobiography, is nevertheless my own
story.

The 'all' in the title will naturally be taken as relative. Unlike those
authors who have seen their lives in terms of dogs or cats, I cannot
pretend to an accurate count. Apart from the books I have forgotten, I
have for reasons of safety avoided those whose authors I know
personally; nor do I include any books that I myself have written,
except when their connexion with those I have not makes their mention
inevitable. Few authors would take the trouble to write if they did not
think their books better than they probably are; on the other hand a
modest assessment of one's work is always dangerous, for the public will
take for granted that one has said the utmost in its favour and mark it
some way below one's estimate. In any case such books are output rather
than intake--in fact some might rudely call them waste products--and
therefore cannot be said to have in any degree made me what I am, though
like the scattered trail in a paper chase they may show the way I am
going.



                                   1

                            FOR INFANT MINDS

'Come hither, Charles. Come to Mamma. Sit on Mamma's lap.'

Those were the opening words of the book in which I taught myself to
read--a book written long before my birth or even my mother's by that
pioneer bluestocking, Mrs. Anna Letitia Barbauld. I cannot remember the
title, nor can I tell how it had come into my nursery, but I found it
fascinating and a great improvement on the Royal Reader in which my
nurse had been trying for so long to make me spell out 'The ox is in the
box', 'The cat is on the mat' and other similar pieces of information.
The book about Charles was full of information. Indeed it contained
little else--I remember that I hunted in vain for a story--but it was
exciting to be able to put into practice the knowledge I had so slowly
and painfully acquired, and the fact that I was not totally illiterate
at the age of seven may be attributed at least in part to Charles and
his Mamma.

I do not see why I should have started my adventures with what I now
realize must have been a most uninteresting book, for I had many others
to choose from. The reason was, no doubt, that there were plenty of
grown-up people at hand to read to me out of _Alice in Wonderland_,
_Black Beauty_ or _The Little Duke_, whereas no one but myself was
interested in poor Charles. Indeed when I had had more practice and
could venture by myself into deeper waters, I abandoned him, and of his
subsequent fate I know nothing. But I have never forgotten those three
opening phrases.

It has been said that children's books arrived in numbers only with the
twentieth century. This I am sure is quite untrue. Not only were the
classical writers for childhood and youth--Lewis Carroll, Mrs. Ewing,
Mrs. Molesworth, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Louisa Alcott, Charlotte
Yonge--all writing in Queen Victoria's reign, but there was also a host
of more obscure authors whose names would mostly be unknown today, but
who had nevertheless in a marked degree the gift of entertaining the
young. Furthermore there was in my childhood a number of beautiful
picture books, infinitely superior to most of the stuff that passes for
such at the present time. In some the pictures could be made to stand up
stereoscopically on the page, in others a mechanism not unlike that of a
Venetian blind would at the pull of a cord reveal an entirely new
picture, lovely and surprising. We do not see such wonders now. All I
will grant the present century--in this country at least, for America
seems ahead of us here--are the works of Beatrix Potter and Kathleen
Hale.

These two writers and artists--for both are both--introduce another
difference between children's books then and now. In my childhood
children's books were almost invariably about other children; today the
protagonists seem mostly to be animals. It is true that we had books
about animals in our nursery, but we had them 'straight'. _Black Beauty_
is the factual story of a real horse, but Peter Rabbit is a little boy.
The same applies to all the Beatrix Potter stories. It is slightly
modified in the French _Babar the Elephant_, but even more strongly
emphasized in those two charming American books that have delighted my
second childhood--_The Little Fur Family_ and _The Runaway Bunny_ by
Margaret Wise Brown.

The reason for this substitution may lie in the gap that civilization is
persistently widening between men and animals. Children, so much more
primitive than their elders, long for the older, closer relationship.
This no doubt could be most easily achieved by tales in which boys and
girls live much as animals do--_The Jungle Books_ have always been
popular with the young--but too many tales of children free from all the
inhibitions imposed by society would hardly be to adult advantage. So a
compromise is made, and instead of children returning to the jungle, the
inhabitants of that lost, happy land are properly trained and tamed for
admission to the nursery. The folk tales of nearly all primitive peoples
are about personified animals and to restore them to the nursery
bookshelf is to restore an archetype.

Certainly my sister and I would have welcomed them on ours, for though
we delighted in _Black Beauty_ and had another animal friend in
Cadichon, the hero of Madame de Sgur's _Memoirs d'un Ane_, both these
behaved strictly as animals and emphasized the gap between us. That we
were aware of this gap is proved by our efforts to bridge it in other
ways. What we could not find on the bookshelf we sought in the toy
cupboard. It was always a disappointment to my mother that we did not
care for dolls, but played instead with those shapeless woolly animals
that are nowadays given only to babies. The Teddy Bear had not yet
appeared, and our collection contained no species that could be
identified by any naturalist. It was known as the 'Lodge' and functioned
as an erratic establishment for orphan children run by two very
quarrelsome Kind Friends. Its origins are lost in infancy but it
persisted to my mother's grief and shame until the shame at least became
my own at the age of sixteen. I then heard unmoved that profiting by the
failure of our interest she had burned the unhygienic lot in the kitchen
fire. My sister, young enough to be afflicted, was also young enough to
find comfort in _Peter Rabbit_.


Apart from this deficiency, our nursery was particularly well stocked
with books. For not only did we have our own, but Mona and I were heirs
of two other children's libraries. Both my father and mother had been
married before they met and each had one daughter. Dulcie was eighteen
years older than I and Thea twelve.

The former's collection had been purged of its infantile contents and
consisted mainly of such classics as _Alice in Wonderland_ and _Through
the Looking-Glass_, Mrs. Ewing's tales, Charlotte Yonge's historical
romances, the _Little Women_ series and Susan Coolidge's _Katy_ books.
Thea's, on the other hand were completely juvenile and at first very
much our favourites--with one important exception. My delight in _Alice
in Wonderland_, which I feel with increasing strength every time I read
it, dates from the very dawn of understanding. It is surely a wonderful
achievement to have written a book that does not lose a spark of its
magic in the re-reading of sixty years. As I grew up I came to prefer
_Through the Looking-Glass_--the adventures and characters are more
significant and I am increasingly amazed at the brilliance of its
construction--but my first introduction was to Wonderland, by means of a
version specially prepared for small children and called _The Nursery
Alice_. This had the Tenniel illustrations, but they were all in colour,
and the book must have been an expensive one for it was always kept in
the drawing-room. I remember the panic with which I saw my mother lock
the drawing-room door when a thief was supposed to be about, for I felt
sure that his main design was to steal my _Alice_.

I was not at all a bookish child, infinitely preferring toys--the
disreputable 'Lodge' and such boyish playthings as bricks, soldiers and
horses--and I think one reason for my love of _Alice in Wonderland_ was
that it never was quite a book to me but a dream which reflected in a
measure my own dreams. I did not care much for fantasy in its pure form,
that is in fairy-tales. I liked my dreams to touch earth, and Alice was
no fairy princess but a little girl like myself. I think some of the
magic lies in that.

The only other books in Dulcie's select library which I enjoyed were
Susan Coolidge's _What Katy Did_ and _What Katy Did at School_. I read
these again and again and I find that they too bear re-reading in adult
life. Mrs. Ewing, as represented by _Jackanapes_ and _A Flat Iron for a
Farthing_ I never cared for. I must have lacked the measure of literary
taste necessary for appreciation of their quieter charm. As for
Charlotte Yonge, I found her too adult, with the exception of _The
Little Duke_, which I read many times before I was old enough for _The
Heir of Redclyffe_. My failure ever to read _Little Women_ must be put
down to more humbling causes. I found the March family much too good for
me. I liked children to be naughty--to 'get into scrapes' as we called
it then--so that I need not inevitably feel inferior to those I read
about. The unselfishness of the Marches in giving their breakfast to
feed the poor, and sacrificing their Christmas presents to help the
Union Army was more than I could bear. They had performed actions of
which I was incapable and I hated them for it. I never got beyond Jo's
sacrifice of her hair.


My sister Thea's library was of a different nature. The only classics it
contained were two stories by Mrs. Molesworth--_Two Little Waifs_ and
_The Tapestry Room_--neither of which appealed to me. But there were
various obscure books out of which my literary life was built up between
the ages of five and nine. I wonder who remembers today a writer for
children called 'Brenda'. She was writing in the eighteen-seventies, for
Thea's books dated back to that decade and were illustrated with
pictures of children wearing clothes quite unlike mine--funny, straight
little dresses sashed almost as low as the knee where they ended in a
deep, frilly flounce.

'Brenda' certainly had the gift of writing for very small children, and
our nursery life was enriched by characters whose doings filled us with
breathless interest, though they were only children like ourselves,
living lives not very different from our own. There certainly was no
unhealthy sensationalism in their adventures. Georgie was sent to bed
for frightening the pony and breaking a basket of eggs in _Lottie's
Visit to Grandmamma_, and the same fate befell Lottie for running away
with the baby's perambulator in _Georgie's Visit to London_. These were
the high spots of both stories, and I sometimes wonder what modern
children would make of them. We were both excited and appalled, for
Lottie and Georgie were real people to us, as were Johnny and Benny in
the same writer's _A Pair of Pickles_, and Trix and Pussy, the heroines
of _A Six Years Darling_ and _Only Five_. There were also Milly and
Olly, but these were not 'Brenda's' children, owing their existence to
no less a writer than Mrs. Humphry Ward. The book--the only children's
book she wrote, I believe--was named after them and told the story of a
wonderful summer holiday in the Lake District, which filled us with
envy, because we had never been further north than Yorkshire. Children,
even today, love stories of visits and holidays, and it is notable that
five out of our six favourites were concerned with visits to the
seaside, to relations, and to farms.

There was also another very different set of books, which we called
'books about poor children'. They must have been an exclusively
Victorian phenomenon, for I know of no successors. Certainly we cannot
imagine the children of the nineteen-thirties being regaled with sad
tales of struggle and starvation in the Distressed Areas. It might have
been good for them if they had. But the last decades of the nineteenth
century abounded in such chronicles, and some of them are still
remembered, at least by name--_Christie's Old Organ_, _Jessica's First
Prayer_. . . . There was too much preaching and virtue in these for me
really to enjoy them. But once again 'Brenda' was active, and gave us
_Froggy's Little Brother_, the tale of two little boys who lived alone
in a garret, supported by Froggy's activities as a crossing-sweeper.
Here there was no top-heavy moralizing, but the thrilling story of a
free and glorious life lived by two glamorous beings privileged far
beyond children like ourselves--which I gather was not the impression
the author meant to convey.

Indeed I sometimes wonder what was the intention of so many tales of
poverty written for the nursery and schoolroom, _Saturday's Bairn_,
_Scamp and I_, _City Sparrows_, _Cripple Jess_. . . . I can remember
these and many others and we enjoyed them all. They may have been
written to stir our compassion, but I have already shown that as such
they signally failed. Poverty was too discreetly handled to create
disgust--I remember no scenes of squalor, at least of what appeared as
squalor to a very young mind--and its existence was so completely taken
for granted that it roused no sense of injustice. Indeed, these stories
were to us in the nature of Westerns, opening an unknown, free and
dangerous world to the imagination, revealing lives of excitement and
adventure which perhaps we would rather read about than share.

At the time, of course, slumming was in fashion and the well-meaning
authors may have hoped to groom a new generation of district visitors.
In a London parish which in 1924 boasted only one parish worker there
had once been ninety. No doubt the Victorian conscience was stirring
uneasily at the half-knowledge of the slime on which its comfortable
world was founded, but it seems strange that its uneasiness should have
been expressed mainly in books for children. Dickens wrote of the slums
and so a little later did George Gissing and Arthur Morrison, but their
output was small compared to that which found its way into the nursery,
with unforeseen reactions.

Another puzzle in Victorian books for children is the constant intrusion
of the death wish. There must have been some psychological reason for
the very high death-rate in the stories I read as a little girl. How
many of the children or humanized animals in fiction today are allowed
to die? I venture to say none--not even the bad ones; and in my nursery
stories it was the good children who died. I have sometimes wondered if
the complete sterilization of death in modern books for children may not
be responsible for its more unpleasant serving up in what are known as
Horror Comics; but against this I must set my own reactions of fear and
misery. So often I enjoyed reading about some little girl or boy and
then they--died. It is true that they did not die till the end of the
book, but that made things no better, for I read my books over and over
again and if I knew that the chief character was doomed to die, the
whole tale was, as it were, read in the condemned cell, even though the
last harrowing pages had been gummed together by my nurse.

'Brenda' did not often offend in this way, indeed I have only one
casualty to lay at her door and that I did not particularly object to.
My attitude to death in fiction was strictly personal, and children I
did not like could die as much as their creators pleased. I did not like
Little Willy, hero of a sanctimonious work called _Sir Evelyn's Charge_
by an author whose name I have forgotten. Willy got into trouble with
his elders for refusing to read a newspaper on Sunday and finally died
of consumption. I regarded him with the deepest contempt and loathing,
for he ought to have known that the only secular activities forbidden on
Sunday were sewing and playing the piano. By adding to the prohibitions
of the decalogue Willy had shown himself a priggish ignoramus who richly
deserved all that came to him, including his untimely end.

Very differently did I view the death of Little Peter, eponymous hero of
a story by Lucas Malet. Like Mrs. Humphry Ward this popular novelist of
the eighteen-nineties wrote one children's book, and a very good book it
was except for the end. I still think Little Peter need not have died.
It is true that he had been out all night in the snow, but he had not
been alone; he had been with his mother and big brother who would have
kept him warm, and he was put to bed directly he reached home. The worst
he need have suffered was a severe cold. But he died, and I wept, and
the last pages of the book were gummed together.

Another book that had certain of its pages gummed together--and I think
it would have been as well if the whole had been similarly treated--was
a work entitled _Original Poems for Infant Minds_. I cannot tell how
this came into my possession, for in spite of its title it was a most
unsuitable book for a child. Dr. Watts's hymns, which an exasperated
governess once read to me as a warning, were jovial in comparison. The
cover displayed nothing worse than a simpering little girl holding up
two cherries, but the contents were appalling. Fortunately I can clearly
remember only two items, one was a poem about a little boy who burnt a
mouse's nest, while the second was the long and harrowing recital of a
dying cat. To these I attribute at least in part my almost pathological
horror of suffering in animals. The pages were duly gummed together, but
their contents being in verse still survive in a memory which has lost
the sufferings of Little Peter.


So far I have dealt only with books that, excepting Mrs. Barbauld's,
might have been found in any nursery of the period. But there was
another set that I consider more unusual. Two books that I read and
re-read many times before I went to school were _Robinson Crusoe_ and
_The Pilgrim's Progress_, and lest I should be thought unduly
precocious, let me add that both these masterpieces had been reduced to
words of one syllable. I have no idea how or by whom this feat was
performed and I cannot recall a single phrase from either. But in each
case I thought I was reading the original version and they both stood
very high in my list of preferences, in spite of the fact that they were
about only grown-up people.

Of the two I preferred _The Pilgrim's Progress_. I had always been a
religious child--providing indeed an illustration of Baron von Hgel's
theory that the religious sense appears in children before any sense of
conduct or morality--and though of course Bunyan's masterpiece _is_ a
morality I did not read it as such, but as a book of adventure,
embodying my aspirations at their most concrete. It had indeed some of
the glamour of holy writ as mediated through such collections of Bible
stories as _Line upon Line_ and _The Peep of Day_. Though I did not
actually regard it as factual it embodied facts--facts that I knew and
apprehended with all the literalness of a child. _Robinson Crusoe_, on
the other hand, was only a story--a most exciting story, but staking no
claims to the Kingdom of Heaven. It was not till I was nearly grown up
that I read these two books in their original integrity. _The Pilgrim's
Progress_ came first, in a beautifully illustrated edition belonging to
my father. _Robinson Crusoe_ came later, and curiously enough answered
more to my expectations--possibly because it had never worn that
numinous cloud which rarely survives childhood. Neither book did I ever
read again.

A more surprising favourite in the nursery was Dr. Smith's _Smaller
Classical Mythology_. I think this must have been an old school-book of
my sister Thea's, for it made no attempt to sugar its information and it
is hard to see why I found it so enthralling. It may have been because
it gave me a comfortable sense of superiority in the field of knowledge.
Dr. Smith's approach was from the Greek, and it pleased me to think that
I knew the old gods by their proper names of Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite and
so on, while the grown-ups round me displayed their ignorance by talking
of Jupiter, Juno and Venus. This was another book that I read many
times, with the result that I went to school with a more thorough
knowledge of Olympian theology than is usual in a little girl of nine.

Another subject in which I was better equipped than my schoolfellows was
French--the speaking of it, that is to say, for I could neither write
nor spell. My sister and I were still very young when the death of our
nurse's father compelled her to leave us, and my mother took advantage
of the situation to engage as her successor a French _bonne_. My mother
was of French descent, via the Channel Islands. Her father had been
entirely French-speaking, but on coming to Edinburgh to start in
business as a wine merchant he had met and married a Highland lady who
not only did not speak a word of it herself but would not let him do so.
As a result my mother knew only the halting French she had learned at
school. But she was determined to do better for her children, though she
told me later that if ever she wished to be thoroughly revenged on her
worst enemy she would advise her to engage a French nurse.

Considering the number of kind and intelligent Frenchwomen I have met
since, eminently fitted to have the care of children, it is hard to
understand why Mona and I had to endure so many of a very different
sort. I think my mother must have gone to the wrong place to engage them
and been too little aware of the differences between French and English
society to make a wise choice. At first we seemed to be looking for the
Nanny type, which does not exist in France; but when Anna in her white
frilled cap proved too emotional for the nursery, she moved up in the
social scale and gave us a very juvenile 'mademoiselle', only to find
this species more temperamental still. My sister and I spent two uneasy
years, distressed and bewildered by tears and tantrums we had never seen
before except in people of our own age. It was not till I was twelve
that we really knew tranquillity.

But we knew French; and I think that on the whole the game was worth the
candle. For not only is it a great advantage to be able to speak the
language in many countries besides France, but an almost lifelong course
of bilingual reading has given me much enlightenment and many pleasures.

It started characteristically with _Les Malheurs de Sophie_ by the
Comtesse de Sgur. What a book! I do not know if there has been an
English translation, but if not the reason may well be that Sophie's
misdeeds--it is mere camouflage to call them _malheurs_--might appear
even more fascinatingly wicked in English than they did in French. As a
sinner she was enterprising and highly precocious--I can still remember
the shock I had when half-way through the book her mother said: 'Tu vas
bientt avoir tes quatre ans.' Only three, and she had committed more
crimes than Mona and I had thought of in twice her years! There may have
been doubts in her own country as to her position as the heroine--for
she was certainly a heroine--of a book for children, for her successor
in the Bibliothque Rose was _Les Petites Filles Modles_.

With these no doubt her creator hoped to redress the balance between
vice and virtue, and she was such an admirable writer for children that
she achieved this end without being a whit less entertaining. Camille
and Madeleine were certainly good little girls, but their goodness was
not like Little Willy's, and was soon overlaid by a series of adventures
as exciting as anything that ever happened to Sophie. Moreover, they did
not die. I doubt if any English writer of the period could have resisted
the temptation to kill one or both of them, but they finished their
story in perfect health. Children in the Bibliothque Rose--of which
almost twenty volumes brought a blush to the nursery bookshelf--did not
die, unless they were very naughty, when of course nobody minded. No
tears were shed when '_Hlose mourut etoufle dans son corset_,' for
she was a vain, silly little girl who richly deserved such a fate; and
though Gribouille in _La Soeur de Gribouille_ was intended for a 'nice'
character, we did not like him because he was half-witted and had put
the parrot in the middle of the dinner table instead of a vase of
flowers. He had what I feel sure his creator considered a very beautiful
and touching death-bed, but unlike the death-bed of _Little Peter_ the
pages describing it did not have to be gummed together.

Other pages of Madame de Sgur's works, however, had that fate, though
for a very different reason. My mother could never grow used to the
French lack of reticence with regard to natural functions, and a certain
adventure at the end of _Les Vacances_ was well and truly sealed. Mona
and I thought her unnecessarily prudish. Two years of a French nursery
may not have done much good to our nervous systems but it had removed a
whole set of inhibitions.


There is one last section of the nursery bookshelf that must be examined
if only because it contained not the books we liked but those we were
supposed to like. Such of our other books as were not an inheritance
were gifts, and on the whole we accepted them uncritically. But in two
respects grown-up people were tiresome and obstinate. They would give us
fairytales and they would give us nonsense. Every Christmas we were
forced into the scornful acceptance of the _Green_, the _Yellow_, the
_Red_, or the _Pink Fairy Book_. These collections were edited by Andrew
Lang and I do not doubt that they exhibited both scholarship and
enterprise. But they bored and humiliated us. We did not believe in
fairies--no use appealing to us to save the life of Tinker Bell, had
_Peter Pan_ been then in existence--and we suspected as frauds those of
our elders who gushed about them. I do not know to what our scepticism
was due, nor why we had such an intense love of the factual and
commonplace that we were unable to enjoy anything that we knew existed
only in imagination. All I know is that the only fairy stories that
roused any pleasure or interest were such well-worn nursery legends as
_Cinderella_ and _Red Riding Hood_.

As for the classical writers, Hans Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, I
must acknowledge that as a very small child I enjoyed some of their
tales--such as did not frighten me. Hans Andersen gave me of the two the
greater pleasure and the greater distress. The former came from the
story of Gerda and Kay, the latter from _The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf_,
which frankly appalled me. I think this reaction was due to the reverse
of scepticism, to an uneasy feeling that some of those things might be
true. But whether as believers or unbelievers, my sister and I did not
like fairy-stories.

Nor did we like nonsense--that is nonsense as set forth in Edward Lear's
Nonsense Books. These had been presented to us by a dear old spinster
lady, who thought children would be sure to like the quaint pictures and
funny rhymes. But sense and nonsense are matters on which the nursery
and the drawing-room are not agreed. A great deal of what grown-up
people called common sense seemed nonsense to me. On the other hand much
that I considered perfectly sensible would be treated as nonsense. It
has pleased me greatly to discover in later life that at least one
question I used to ask, far from being nonsensical, was highly
intelligent. When my elders told me, as they sometimes did, that God was
called omnipotent because He could do everything, I would at once ask,
'Could He make a thing happen and yet at the same time not happen?' The
'don't talk nonsense' that inevitably followed could never have come
from a theologian or religious philosopher. But my elders were not
theologians or philosophers, and that was all the answer I ever had.

When it came to grown-up nonsense the situation was reversed. Lear's
Nonsense Books at the present day are still found enjoyable by adults
who like to have their minds tickled, but I maintain that they are quite
unsuited to the literal approaches of childhood. My sister and I were
obliged to accept them with pretty words of thanks and were smilingly
encouraged to read them, but I know that the reaction on my side at
least was of fear and disgust. The pictures seemed to me ugly and badly
drawn and some of the verses were frightening. That about the old person
of Rheims who suffered from horrible dreams, so that to keep him awake
they fed him with cake, had for me an especial dread. Bad dreams were
one of the chief terrors of my nursery life, and that anyone should
suffer from them so severely that he preferred not to sleep at all--and
I had been told that anyone who did not sleep would die--seemed to me a
matter of starkest tragedy. Even the cake that kept him awake was no
amelioration, for the poor old person would be sure to die before long,
or else have to go back to his bad dreams.

I do not suggest that this reaction was typical of most children; for it
was that of an exceptionally nervous and sensitive little girl. Tougher
spirits no doubt would not have quailed, nor I imagine would little
boys. I never met in those days the much pleasanter _Book of Nonsense_,
parts of which would certainly have pleased me, though most of it would
have been beyond my comprehension. I have read this book with the
greatest enjoyment many times since I grew up. But my opinion of the two
Nonsense Books remains the same.

They were the van-couriers of that ugliness which was to invade the
nursery--mercifully not until after I had left it--with the Golliwog. My
sister was young enough to be given a copy of _The Adventures of a
Golliwog and Two Dutch Dolls_, but I had reached an age when I could
feel detached from what I despised. I had never cared for Dutch dolls,
for black dolls, for Japanese dolls, or even for dolls dressed as boys.
My dolls must be pretty, lacy and frilly, for the only thing I liked
about them was their clothes--they had no personalities. It is true that
the 'Lodge' had not been notably pretty, lacy or frilly--indeed some of
its beloved inmates might well have been termed more repulsive than any
golliwog. But unlike the dolls they were all personalities, and their
ugliness was the result of age and use and cherishing. A child who can
cherish a golliwog--ugliness both designed and meaningless--must have
had some damage done to its perceptions.



                                   2

                            THE HIGH SPRINGS

I went to school when I was nine years old, to an establishment called
the Hastings and St. Leonards Ladies' College, which was only a few
yards from our home. Both my half-sisters had attended it, my younger
sister was to follow, and my father was a member of the Governors'
Council, so it might have been considered very much in the family.
Certainly I went to it without fear or reluctance, and in the same
spirit left it nine years later, having received practically my entire
education there.

None of the mistresses had a degree or its equivalent, but they were
women of culture and intelligence and most of them had besides the
priceless gift of making lessons interesting. I do not remember ever
having been bored in class. The day started with prayers at nine, at a
quarter to eleven there was a short recess, and the school broke up
finally at a quarter to one, so the pupils--or students as they were
officially called--could hardly be considered over-driven. Those who
liked could return to the college in the afternoon for an hour and a
half's 'preparation', but it was thought better for me to spend my
afternoon out of doors and do my homework later. Even in the sixth form
this was not supposed to take more than two hours, so it may be said
that learning was less of a rod than a wand waved lightly over me.

I still possess all or nearly all my school prizes. They are a handsome
set of volumes, bound in calf and stamped with the college arms in gold.
The spines are ridged with gold and the pages marbled. But the contents
for the most part need the original thrill of triumph to make them
readable. My first prize was called _Half Hours Underground_ and there
is also _Half Hours in the Holy Land_, though this was never
legitimately mine, representing a secret swop with an unlucky child who
had been given it twice. _Tales of the Great and Brave_ by Margaret
Fraser Tytler seems a better choice for a little girl and was the first
to give me any pleasure as a book and not only as a prize. As I grew
older there were more of these, and in the end I was allowed to choose
my own prizes. Milton's _Collected Poems_ and Dante's _Divine Comedy_
are the result.

A wide gulf yawns between the nursery bookshelf and Dante's masterpiece.
It is filled with eight years of mixed reading, occasionally guided but
mostly spontaneous, moving slowly from the fortuitous to the planned,
from mere inclination to conscientious effort. When I first went to
school I read the popular school stories of my day. The principal author
for schoolgirls then was a Mrs. L. T. Meade and I imagine that her tales
were an earlier, more inhibited version of what may still be in vogue.
There was probably less sensation in them. Cheating at examinations was
the standard crime, and instead of the crooks or spies which I believe
are these days allowed to vary the charms of school life she introduced
a succession of wild Irish girls. _Wild Kitty_ is the only one of these
that I remember by name, but there were others, though they were all
very much alike. They all were wild, all had hearts of gold, all spoke
with a brogue that would have roused comment in a Dublin slum, and
begobbed and begorrahed their way through the conventions of an English
girls' school to a final apotheosis. This character at one time showed
signs of becoming standard, for a successor of Mrs. Meade, Mrs. Champion
de Crespigny, entertained my younger sister with _Pixie O'Shaugnessy_
and _More about Pixie_. But I doubt if the strain continues.

L. T. Meade also wrote detective stories or shockers as they were called
then. Of her performance in that line I am unable to judge, but quite my
favourite serial in _Little Folks_ was _Beyond the Blue Mountains_, her
solitary incursion into allegory, which gave me the double delight I had
found in _The Pilgrim's Progress_--a story both of this world and the
next. Oddly enough it is to Mrs. Meade that I owe my decision to become
an author. I had always been fond of telling myself stories, but it was
too much effort to write them down, and my ambitions lay in quite
another direction. It was my mother who, when after my first violin
lesson, I announced my intention to become a famous musician, offered
perhaps in self-defence the alternative suggestion that I should become
a famous author 'like L. T. Meade'. The idea, thus embodied, appealed to
me and from that moment my goal was switched.

L. T. Meade is fairly representative of my reading standards until I was
well into my teens. I had no idea of a book as literature; it was a
story, or else a collection of interesting information like Dr. Smith's
_Smaller Classical Mythology_. Of course, like most girls, I read and
enjoyed boys' books. The popular writer for boys in those days--the
masculine counterpart of L. T. Meade--was G. A. Henty, and to him I
probably owe my developing interest in history. His tales all had an
historical background, against which the hero--modern except for an
occasional 'prithee'--played his part. The wars between England and
Scotland, between England and France, the struggles of early Indian
occupation--_With Clive in India_ is one of the few titles I
remember--were all laid under contribution, no doubt to the improvement
of my stock of knowledge if not of my literary style. Another writer for
boys whom I greatly favoured was Talbot Baines Reid, whose _Fifth Form
at St. Dominic's_ is still, I believe, regarded as a minor classic of
boys' school life. But I knew nothing of Billy Bunter and his
associates, never having even seen the _Boy's Own Paper_. Dean Farrar's
_Eric_, or _Little by Little_ was presented to me by the same kind old
lady who had presented the Nonsense Books, and read with an almost equal
distaste.

One book for boys, perhaps my favourite, survived from the nursery
bookshelf, where it had remained unread until I was old enough to enjoy
it. I still maintain that Captain Marryat's _Masterman Ready_ is one of
the best adventure stories ever written. There is too much preaching in
it, of course, and the end is overshadowed by that same Victorian death
wish which had already spoilt so many stories for me. But this practical
and credible account of family life on a desert island--written as a
counterblast to the impossible adventures of the _Swiss Family Robinson_
(a book I have never read)--had that basis of common sense and reality
which even at ten years old I was beginning to look for in a book. The
same author's _Mr. Midshipman Easy_ was a disappointment, being
altogether too adult and masculine for my taste.


All this time my reading had been, I will not say unsupervised, for my
mother once stopped me reading the serial in _Home Chat_, but unguided.
I read what I could find to read. Though I was not at all a bookish
child, and if given the choice of a present would always choose a toy,
it was inevitable, especially as I grew older, that books should
sometimes be given to me, whereupon I read them. There were also
occasionally loans from my school friends.

I had not yet reached a class where literature was taught as a subject,
and the classics were unknown to me, except for a few names. I was used
to seeing all the bright backs of the Waverley Novels in my sister
Dulcie's bookcase, but I would not have dreamed of taking one out to
read. It is perhaps strange that I should have had no suggestions from
any of my schoolmistresses. I remember, however, a day when every girl
in my form found herself confronted by a sheet of paper on which she was
asked to write the titles of the twenty books she liked best. I never
heard the reason for this inquiry, but think it must have come from an
outer source--from some investigator of the child mind trying to collect
material. All I know is that I sat in perplexity opposite my blank
sheet, calling up all the titles I could remember and realizing that I
should have to go back ignominiously far into the nursery before I could
produce twenty, until I saw that the girl on either side of me had
headed her list with the Bible. Whereupon I immediately did the same.

This was totally untrue. I did not enjoy reading the Bible as I had
enjoyed reading Bible stories in _Line upon Line_. I possessed a Bible,
but I found it incomprehensible, as I am sure did my companions. It is
true that I regarded it with a certain amount of respect and disapproved
on moral grounds of the transaction by which my sister Mona had traded
away hers for half an Easter egg. But its appearance at the head of my
list was a rank piece of insincerity, and if it also appeared--as it
probably did--at the head of all the others, the inquiry revealed less
youthful piety than youthful humbug.

_The Pilgrim's Progress_--which I still thought I had read as
written--followed more naturally, but except for the _Alice_ books and
_Robinson Crusoe_, my list must have been a sorry exhibition of the
second- and third-rate in schoolgirl reading. Though I meant to be an
author myself some day I had no literary standards whatsoever, and apart
from lessons, never opened a book except to while away an idle hour. It
was not till I was twelve or thirteen that an older girl lent me Rider
Haggard's _Montezuma's Daughter_ and for the first time I experienced
something more than entertainment. Indeed this gallant story bewitched
me, and for years I thought it the finest book that had ever been
written. It gave a new life to history and to strange, remote places,
and incidentally it whetted my literary appetite with a taste for better
things.

There was a room in the college known as the Library, but I was half-way
through my schooldays before I discovered this to be more than a name. I
found then a small number of books on loan, and as there was no
subscription--my income was only threepence a week and out of that I had
to support the college mission--I decided to avail myself of the chances
it offered.

These were not very wide. I do not suppose that the collection amounted
to more than seventy or eighty volumes, brought together by chance
rather than choice. Most were ordinary schoolgirl or schoolboy stuff,
but there were some notable exceptions and from these were laid the
reading trails that I have followed all my life.

The three books which I remember most clearly were _The Heroes of
Asgaard_ by an author whose name, unlike that of his work, has been
lost, _The Shadow of Dante_ by Christina Rossetti, and--this certainly
seems odd--_Sir Charles Grandison_.

I never could make up my mind whether I preferred the gods of Asgaard or
the gods of Olympus. I certainly preferred the clear, simple style of
Dr. Smith's _Classical Mythology_. The Asgaard book was written rather
preciously and even in those days made me feel slightly sick. But though
the manner had its drawbacks the matter had none. These tales of the
Scandinavian gods, of Odin, Freya, Thor, Baldur, Loki, thrilled me not
only in themselves but in their contrast with Zeus, Hera, Hermes, Pallas
Athene, my friends on Mount Olympus. On the whole I preferred the Greek
gods, because they were less remote than those of Asgaard, but the
latter had in their stories, in their origins and above all in their end
a sort of painfulness that, as I emerged from childhood, I was beginning
to find agreeable in my contemplation of life. The _Gtterdmmerung_,
with its return of all things, even the gods, to chaos and darkness,
seemed a more poetic conception of finality than the legal decisions of
the Christian Judgment Day. The conception, too, of Yggdrasil, the great
ash, spanned by the rainbow where it reached heaven and ringed by the
serpent where it touched hell, was something more beautiful than the
clouded heights of either Mount Olympus or Mount Sinai. It was not till
nearly at the end of the long course of reading that has followed this
book that I have come to see the nine-branched tree and the nine-story
mountain as one and the same archetypal symbol--the centre where heaven
is joined to earth.

I suppose that my interest in comparative religion started with Dr.
Smith's _Mythology_, but there could be no comparisons till I knew
something of the mythology of another race, and this knowledge _The
Heroes of Asgaard_ provided in its more whimsied way. It had no
immediate successor, for in those days I did not know where to look for
the books I wanted, but its frequent re-reading is doubtless responsible
for my adolescent adventures in the Hastings Municipal Library with
Frazer's _Golden Bough_. Later addictions were the Hindu Vedas and the
Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, but all that remains now of Asgard and its
Olympian precursor is an unfailing interest in primitive religions and
folklore. I do not take myself seriously as a student of these subjects,
but I have read in them widely if not very solidly for the greater part
of my life.


My equally long devotion to Dante's _Divina Commedia_ proceeds from the
college library in a more direct line. Christina Rossetti's _Shadow of
Dante_ was not written for children and there was much in it that I
could not understand; but it stirred deeper thoughts and feelings than
other books and it presented me with something entirely new. I had heard
of Dante, of course, and knew that he had written of that mysterious
Other World I found so challenging and enthralling; but I knew very
little more and it was the details of Christina Rossetti's revelation
that fascinated me. I studied the plans of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven
with an interest only just short of belief, and I was charmed by the
dreamlike beauty of the illustrations--reproductions of Botticelli,
Domenico di Michelini and other primitives--so different from the
three-dimensional art of Raphael and Bouguereau, whose strapping
Madonnas adorned the classroom walls. The effect of this book, first
read, I suppose, when I was about thirteen, made me choose the
_Commedia_ as a prize some three years later. I was given John Carlyle's
translation in the Temple Classics, and read its three volumes very
respectfully.

It was perhaps inevitable that at this time my preference should be for
the _Inferno_. It is the simplest, the least metaphysical, the most
dramatic, and it contains at least two moving human stories--those of
Paolo and Francesca and of Count Ugolino and his sons. This preference
was confirmed by a course of lectures I attended directly on leaving
school.

An elderly lady of those days was wont to eke out an exiguous income
with lectures to such other ladies as aspired after knowledge at a low
price. I had left school still full of the desire to improve my mind
which had come upon me suddenly in my mid-teenage, and I regularly
frequented the boys' preparatory school, where, huddled into their small
desks made vacant by Saturday morning, some twenty of us listened to
Miss Rose's slow, cultured voice exploring the circles of hell. A more
unlikely cicerone could hardly be imagined, and she contrived to make
the ultimate horrors of Malbolgi and Cocytus seem very little more
terrible than a badly furnished drawing-room. I listened attentively and
remember practically nothing except the beauty of the verse. Miss Rose
was a fine Italian scholar and would sometimes for our, and doubtless
her own, delectation read long passages from the original, passages
which reached me entirely as music, for I could not understand a word.

Of late years a very sketchy knowledge of Italian has allowed me to
capture for myself some of the beauty of the _terza rima_, which no
translation seems able to express. Miss Dorothy Sayers has with great
scholarship and industry undertaken the task of putting the whole
_Commedia_ into English verse, but she herself proclaims the
impossibility of making our language sing like the Italian, even
though--as was never suggested by Miss Rose--Dante's verse is not always
poetic but often homely and colloquial. My own opinion is that in these
circumstances a prose translation is the best, because the clearest, and
since we cannot have the music let us have the meaning. So I am still
faithful to the somewhat rugged version of my school prize.

Unlike my interest in folklore and mythology, my interest in Dante has
not been continuous. After those early lectures many years passed before
I read him again, and in the interval I had joined the Catholic Church.
This, combined no doubt with a more mature outlook, made some important
changes in my appreciation. I was able to see, as I could not see
before, the deep springs of his thought in scholastic philosophy, and to
recognize in him not only the poet but the theologian. When as a young
girl I had read the _Paradiso_ I found it so unsubstantial as to be
almost meaningless. It is now my favourite and a book of devotion. The
_Purgatorio_ is still in its old position as a second choice, but aglow
with light and colour hitherto unseen. The _Inferno_ I find too painful
to read at all.


The third trail laid in the college library seems in some ways the most
unlikely, and I shall never know how _Sir Charles Grandison_ found its
way on to those shelves. I do not think it was there at the beginning,
for I could not have been much younger than sixteen or seventeen when I
read it, and at fifteen had developed that conscientious desire to
improve my reading which I have already mentioned. If it had been there
I should have read it earlier as part of my campaign with the classics,
so I can only surmise the date as well as the cause of its appearance.

I had not till then given much attention to eighteenth-century
literature--that is literature of a later date than Pope and Addison. It
is true that I had followed Gulliver in a safely expurgated edition to
Laputa and the land of the Houyhnhnms as well as to Lilliput and
Brobdingnag, but Defoe was still only the author of _Rohinson Crusoe_,
and Richardson, Sterne, Fielding and Smollett were no more than names. I
associated Richardson with _Clarissa Harlowe_ and his authorship of
_Grandison_ came as a surprise. I had also associated him and the other
authors of that period with shocking impropriety, and in spite of its
place of origin, which would have been enough to reassure most people, I
opened the volume with much the same air of suspicious inquiry as that
with which a cat approaches a saucer of milk he is not quite sure about.

I had no sooner begun to read than I was seized. Seized is the only word
that expresses the intensity of my interest. This was not like reading
Scott or even Dickens--it was sheer possession. It is hard to tell at
this long range what it was exactly that so held me. Richardson is no
stylist and the society he describes is in many ways more remote from
ours than that of Dickens or Scott, but there is an extraordinary
lifelikeness about him and also a feminine smother which for me was
something new. I shared the being of Harriet Byron as I had never shared
that of Jeanie Deans or Amy Robsart or Dora Copperfield. I could almost
see and smell her gown. Her story, too, seemed to come straight off her
pen, as if her letters had been written to _me_. Be causes what they
may, I can in this case say literally that I could not put the book
down. I could not, but I feared I ought.

I was at this time going through a phase of extreme prudery. It is not
uncommon at the present day for adolescents to develop peculiarities of
conscience, strange compulsions and inhibitions. These may often be mere
superstition--sevenfold repetitions, touches, charms--but even today the
abnormality may be moral, though it is unlikely to take the same form as
mine. My generation was in many ways more inhibited than those
immediately before it, and as I moved up through my teens I collected
quite a load of taboos.

Very few of these can have originated in my own home. My parents were
sensible and the French influence persisted in the form of a sewing maid
until I was well over fifteen. I think my school must take some of the
blame. We are none of us, especially in our teenage, blank slates on
which other people can inscribe their follies, but I cannot help
believing that a greatly loved and admired heirarchy of spinsters had
something to do with my morbid attitude towards childbirth.

My class was frequently called upon to read aloud from Shakespeare, and
every now and then the mistress would cry, 'Stop! Don't read what
follows. Start again at the bottom of the page.' We always had a special
school edition of whatever play we were studying, one that had already
been revised in the interests of decorum. But the reviser had not
always, it seems, gone far enough. For instance in _A Midsummer Night's
Dream_ he had left the whole of the lovely passage beginning:

                     Set your heart at rest
                 The fairy-land buys not the child of me.

I can clearly remember being made to 'Stop!' before I could get as far
as--

              When we have laughed to see the sails conceive
              And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind.

--missing out everything till Oberon's 'How long within this wood intend
you stay?' restored the play to decency. As a result of all this, I must
be almost the only one of her readers who has ever detected impropriety
in Charlotte Yonge. It was that perfect lady's treatment of childbirth
which made me suspend my reading of _The Heir of Redclyffe_. Fortunately
I told my mother that I had done so and even repeated the shocking
words: 'She is to be confined in the Spring.' Her reaction was not that
of my form mistress. 'But there's nothing improper in _that_! How could
there be? It's _natural_!'

'Natural' was her word of praise and comfort--I have heard her reassure
a kittening cat with 'It's all right, dear, it's natural'--and when she
spoke it one was taken back to Genesis and the early hours of the
world's morning when 'God saw that it was good'. I sometimes wonder if
it was as a result of my strictures on _The Heir of Redclyffe_ that when
my sister Thea came to our home for the birth of her first child, I was
not, like Mona, sent to spend the birthday with neighbours, but remained
in the house throughout it all, being even taken upstairs and shown the
baby when she was only an hour old. The sight of the tiny child and my
sister, flushed and happy and exhausted, broke down the very last of
that especial kind of nonsense in my mind. I seemed at last to see for
myself that these things were 'natural'.

Unfortunately other kinds of nonsense remained, and like the
schoolmistress my conscience would cry 'Stop!' when anything suggesting
deviation from strict propriety occurred or seemed likely to occur in a
book. I had read _David Copperfield_ with grave misgivings on account of
the story of Little Em'ly, and only my mother's casual statement that
she had seen it once as a play in Edinburgh made me feel that a breach
of the seventh commandment had not been made both by Dickens and by me.
_Sir Charles Grandison_ threatened something much worse. It is true that
Harriet's abduction was meant to lead to a forced marriage, but I was
terrified of what might possibly happen _en route_, and I had all the
evil fame of eighteenth-century novelists in general and Richardson in
particular to take into account.

Yet I could not stop reading. I must learn what happened to Harriet,
whether she was married or seduced or rescued, and the hero, Sir Charles
himself, had not yet appeared. The result was a mental conflict that
reduced me to a trembling state of fear, as I risked, I thought, my
eternal salvation just to find out what happened in a book. Luckily when
I could endure no more I had enough sense to apply to the person who had
already resolved similar conflicts for me. My mother, no doubt believing
that my school library was not a likely source of corruption, took the
whole thing very calmly. 'If you find anything that's improper you can
always skip it. It seems a pity not to read the book when you're
enjoying it so much.'

So I read _Sir Charles Grandison_ right through to the end, and as it
happened found nothing to shock me; which does not mean that it could
not have been there, for apart from the scruples I had picked up at
school I was amazingly innocent.


But I must not leave a wrong impression of the college, If in certain
ways it was of its times--and when on leaving school my sister Mona went
to be trained as a children's nurse, she found among her fellow students
one that still believed babies were brought to earth by angels--in
others it was years ahead of them. Every week we had a lecture on
Current Affairs, and after a while it was decided that this should no
longer be given by a mistress but by one of the elder girls. We took
turns on the platform, and it was good training for us in a double
sense--not only in the art of reading a newspaper intelligently but in
the art of facing an audience.

The best-taught subjects were Religious Knowledge and English
Literature. Both were taught by senior mistresses, and were always
interesting and alive. But both suffered from the blight of
examinations. Those days were before the shadow of the School
Certificate came to lie over so many young lives, but the Cambridge
Junior and Senior Local Examinations caused darkness enough. I think I
can say that for several years the Gospels were spoilt for me; I could
see them only as food for examiners. What aspect of revelation, what
miracle, what parable, what verse or verses should I personally be
required to dish up? The approach was completely dry and external. I
remember my instructress telling me in the course of a last-week cram
that one of the questions in an earlier year had been: 'How many times
does St. Mark use the word "straightway" in his Gospel?' I sometimes
wonder if that question is as silly as it seems, for surely the right
answer is 'Never. He didn't write in English.' This would bring it in
line with the intelligence tests which are given to modern children. But
I doubt if it has any right to be let off with this explanation.

Equally a source of trial were the missionary journeys of St. Paul, as
an account of at least one of these with accompanying map would
inevitably be asked for should the Acts of the Apostles be chosen for
examination. The uselessness of such knowledge--for even in those days I
could see that the respective positions of Derbe and Lystra, Corinth and
Iconium, had no real significance in the scheme of man's salvation--gave
me a distaste both for the Acts and for the Apostles which I have only
recently overcome, and that was by reading the book over again in the
new language of the Knox translation, in which at last I no longer see
the reflection of my own awkward red-ink lines looping and scratching
over Asia Minor.

Another victim of the examiners was Shakespeare. Though before the
examination we were taken to see _King Henry the Fifth_ at the Hastings
theatre it still seemed more of an examination subject than a play, and
this impression even now remains, in spite of such actors as John
Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh and Gwen Ffranon-Davies. I also
suffered from the fact that Shakespeare was always treated as a subject
in himself, and never brought under the general head of literature. A
whole term would be devoted to a play, with the result that at the end
of it most of us had had more than enough. The only other poet whom I
remember being treated in this way was Pope, whose _Essay on Criticism_
also once occupied us for a term. It may be thought strange that Pope
did not bore me, whereas Shakespeare did, but the reason is not really
hard to seek. Shakespeare, I insist, is far beyond the scope of the
adolescent mind, which wearies of the effort to produce the
understanding and appreciation demanded. Pope, on the other hand, if
given an adequate commentary, is well within its reach, and the light he
sheds on his own period is a bright and cheerful light to read him by.

But my happiest memories of the literature class are of the term during
which we studied the work of the seventeenth-century poets, including
Milton. Here was a sheltered glade where no examiner trod, and here
among the poems of Herrick, Herbert, Lovelace, Crashaw and Traherne I
first saw the beauty of the written word. That which had been barely
visible in Pope and to which I had been blind in Shakespeare now lit up
my mind with a new radiance and transformed the world. I now read no
longer only to amuse myself, as I had done up to the age of fifteen, or
to improve my mind as I had done ever since. I read as if tasting wine,
savouring before swallowing and then passing on the experience into
reflection.

There was also Milton--less the Milton of _Paradise Lost_ than of
_L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, and above all of _Lycidas_. In a recent
newspaper discussion on the most beautiful line in English poetry, I
noticed that no one brought forward the line I was taught as such--

                Sleek Panope and all her sisters played--

I am not surprised, for it holds almost nothing of evocation, only the
music of sounds, of singing letters. Much better examples could be and
were found. But _Lycidas_ does not depend on Panope.

                   Weep no more, woful Shepherds weep no more,
             For _Lycidas_ your sorrow is not dead,
             Sunk though he be beneath the watry floor,
             So sinks the day-star in the Ocean bed,
             And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
             And tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore
             Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.

In that passage beauty was like a wave, sweeping me over the rocks of
pagan imagery to its climax on the shores of Paradise.

              There entertain him all the Saints above,
              In solemn troops, and sweet Societies
              That sing, and singing in their glory move,
              And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.

These literary delights were bound up with others of a different
kind--with the delights of my last summer at school, of looking over the
edge of school-life into a new, grown-up world, my first novel stirring
in my head--the long delights of blue, sunny days when always (or so it
seems in memory) the classroom windows stood wide open and the air was
sweet with the lilac and syringa in the garden below--of blue velvet
nights, when the cockchafers whirred in a cloud under the street lamps
and the smell of hayfields strayed into the town--the delights of
friendship, as my only close school friendship found at last its adult
seal in love and understanding.

That friend and that summer are inseparably united. She was the same age
as I, but had come to the college some years later. In a very short time
Pansy, as she was always called--she would not tell her real name and I
never knew it--became the most popular girl in the school, and I--a
senior--had it as my great ambition to win her notice and approval. How
I achieved that ambition, actually overshooting it to the undreamed-of
extent of becoming her best friend I cannot say, for our characters and
interests were totally unlike. She was good at all games, whereas I,
whether I held a tennis racquet or a cricket bat, was nothing but a
clown. Her chief subjects were Latin and Greek, whereas I knew only
French and German; she was also brilliant at mathematics, while I was a
duffer who had to be sent down into the class below to learn arithmetic;
and there was furthermore about her attack on life a realism and
toughness to which my curious mixture of romance and pedantry bore no
resemblance. Nevertheless, in spite of these differences we grew closer
and closer together, and for the last summer we were as Rosalind and
Celia in the Forest of Arden.

The latter was represented by Hollington Wood, three miles outside
Hastings and now almost swallowed up by it. In our day it was open,
unspoilt country. Here we would go every Saturday, plunging into the
hazel glades, where I had once found white, scented violets, but which
were now only tunnels of green. Our hope was to emerge in some new
unknown part of the country, where we should find ourselves completely
lost. But it was in vain that we doubled on our tracks and confused
ourselves with turnings, trying desperately to outwit our sure knowledge
of the ground. Indeed only once did we find ourselves really far from
home, when after a morning's wandering in the wood we emerged at last on
the road between Hastings and Battle, about halfway from each.

Our dream then crumbled into the reality of a long, dusty and hungry
walk home, from which I could see no deliverance in the carrier's cart
that trotted past us as we stood by the wayside. These carts were then
the only connexion between Hastings and the outlying villages. They came
in from some places every day, from others as seldom as once a week.
Sometimes of an evening I would enviously watch their slow procession
out of the town, towards the country I loved so dearly but could visit
only in daylight. This one carried no passengers but was stuffed with
hampers of vegetables and bunches of rabbits. I was horribly
disconcerted when I saw Pansy take a flying leap at it and swing herself
on to the tailboard. I could see such behaviour only as it would strike
our headmistress were she suddenly to appear, and all I did for some
time was to run disconsolately behind the cart like a little dog,
begging her to get off.

As she very rightly refused to do so I was forced in the end to join
her, and there we sat with our legs dangling until we were nearly home.
For some time we cherished the illusion that the driver had not seen us
and that in the end we should be able to slip off unnoticed. But he
stopped on the verges of the town to deliver a hamper, and his face as
he came round to take it off the back showed that we were no surprise.
When he stopped at the town centre we slid off and went on our way
without offering to pay him, for the adequate but possibly unacceptable
reason that we had no money.

This behaviour does not very clearly suggest Rosalind and Celia, or
indeed two Edwardian young ladies of eighteen wearing skirts
considerably longer than those we wear today. Of the two it is closer to
the first, for our friendship always had about it a slightly boyish air.
We neither of us ever made the smallest gesture of affection, and I was
greatly surprised (though pleasantly elated) when in her first letter,
written after we had parted for at least a year, she sent me a kiss,
'for I wanted to kiss you when we said good-bye, but I couldn't because
of the people standing round'.

To Pansy incidentally I owe my first experience of joy. I use this word
to denote something distinct from happiness or pleasure. These I can
thankfully say I have often known, but joy has come to me only rarely
and then always as part of the life of another person. So unfailing has
this been that I have come to believe that joy could be defined as our
share in the happiness of a friend. It is the purest feeling that I
know--completely without the sediment that clouds one's personal
blisses. The ecstasy has no flaw.

Pansy gave me my first share of it with her success in the examination
on which her whole future depended. It is part of the general woolliness
of my perceptions at that time that I cannot remember whether it was the
Cambridge Senior or Cambridge Higher Local, but it carried with it all
the chances of her going to Girton. Here she meant to read classics with
a view to taking a post as classics mistress hereafter. It is generally
supposed that in the early years of this century girls left school only
to lead a vapid social life at home until somebody came along and
married them; but nearly all my contemporaries left to take up some sort
of profession--to be nurses, teachers, missionaries and even doctors. I
left to become a writer, to the disappointment of my father, who would
have liked me to go to Cambridge and deplored the mathematical vacuum
which would have prevented me passing Little-go.

Pansy was in many ways a star pupil and great things were hoped from
her, but she herself--perhaps for that very reason--was full of doubts
and anxieties, which naturally I shared. So it was indeed a matter for
joy when I heard that she had passed her examination with first-class
honours and distinction in more than one subject. I must have shown
something of the rapture that overwhelmed me, for I can remember the
mistress who brought me the news saying grimly: 'Don't faint.'

The event turned out to be even more glorious than it seemed at first,
for Pansy actually had the highest marks in the whole country and
received the award of a Girton scholarship, which solved many contingent
problems. And the outcome of it all? She spent four years at Cambridge
and left sadly disappointed with herself because she took only
second-class honours in her tripos. She made up for this by leaving her
Teachers' Training College with a brilliant First. But already her
teaching career was being threatened by recurrent ill-health, aggravated
by those domestic labours and responsibilities which a man in her
situation would have been spared. At last the enemy openly declared
himself and she spent three years in a sanatorium at Davos. The outbreak
of war in 1914 compelled her to return to England before she was
entirely cured, and it took no more than a few wet, cold English winters
to bring back the disease in all its strength. She was only thirty when
she died.



                                   3

                            CLASSIC DEBAUCH

When at the age of fifteen I started my period of conscientious reading,
I received one piece of very good advice. A friend of my mother's
advised me not to read Thackeray until I was grown up. 'You wouldn't
understand him now. You'd miss a lot.'

This was perfectly true and I only wish her advice had been applied more
widely, for I spoilt a number of books and authors for myself by reading
them too early. I was, in the first place, young for my age, I had lived
a very sheltered life, I knew nothing of the world and hardly any men
besides my father. Nor had I at that time had any contacts with good
literature except the Bible and Shakespeare's plays, which were already
spoilt for me by being 'lessons'. If I were ever asked to guide a young
person in a similar situation I should put Dickens and Jane Austen with
Thackeray on the waiting list, also the whole of George Eliot except
_Adam Bede_ and the whole of the Bronts except _Jane Eyre_. I should
insert the thin end of the literary wedge with Scott's _Ivanhoe_ and
_Quentin Durward_; Stevenson's romances and Charles Kingsley's _Water
Babies_, though I should not seriously expect a girl of fifteen (if she
were at all like myself) to enjoy the latter, and then build up on Mrs.
Gaskell, Mark Twain, or Fenimore Cooper, according to the tastes
revealed.

But I had nobody to guide me, and I cannot remember who or what first
put the idea of conscientious reading into my head. I use the word
conscientious because the entire course was directed by the compulsion
of Ought and Ought Not. I was convinced that there was a number of books
that I ought to read if I meant to become an author in my own right. L.
T. Meade had long ago withered as an inspiration, and though I was at
that time passionately devoted to the works of Edna Lyall, I realized
that these had not about them that immortal glow I wished my own to
display. I had heard of course all the great names, and it was now my
ambition to bring the gods to earth.

This shows that Ought was not an exclusively moral compulsion. Ought
Not, on the other hand, was the direct voice of conscience, my own and
other people's. I have shown that my mother was not unduly puritanical,
but she had her literary taboos, one of which was _Jane Eyre_. She could
remember all the fuss there had been when it first appeared, and how
frightening and shocking everyone had thought it. She herself had never
been allowed to read it, so, according to her logic, it followed that I
should not. My conscience would not allow me to disobey hers, and the
very book that I myself would have chosen to start a beginner on the
literary trail was deliberately pushed aside--or rather ahead, for I
fully intended to read _Jane Eyre_ as soon as I was twenty-one. I
attributed almost magical properties to my twenty-first birthday,
believing that it would set me free from all obligation to obey my
parents or accept their point of view. I saw myself on that day as an
independent being, no longer bound by prohibitions which until then I
would not dream of defying. Before that day of liberation dawned _Jane
Eyre_ had been joined by _Adam Bede_ and _Tom Jones_.

So short a list does not point to any very drastic literary censorship.
_Adam Bede_, which is another of my would be introductions, went on it
at the instance of my sister Dulcie. She told my mother she did not
think I ought to read it. She had heard of a subscriber to some library
who had found it so shocking that she had torn out all the last
pages--which seemed much more drastic than my familiar experience of
finding them gummed together. _Tom Jones_ was no individual ban, but a
book which I had been led to believe unreadable by anyone with any
modest feelings. I provided myself with a copy some weeks before my
twenty-first birthday, but I did not open it till then.


It is a pity that I have lost the list I made so carefully at the time,
of all the books I read during the year 1902. But if I remember rightly,
I started off with Dickens. This was an obvious but a bad choice.
Dickens does not require so much sophistication of his readers as
Thackeray, but he demands at least the rudiments of a sense of humour,
and in this I was totally lacking. As a child I had laughed as loudly as
anyone at the misfortunes of Widow Twankey, Fitzwarren's Cook, Dame Trot
and all the other Dames of the Hastings Pier pantomime, but I was now at
a stage when such buffoonery appeared shameful and so far no more subtle
spirit had taken its place. A true sense of humour is an adult quality,
the gift of experience (though I never believe it exists to any great
extent in those who boast of having it), and its full maturity is
attained only when we have learned to laugh at ourselves. Any
schoolchild can laugh when Widow Twankey falls into her wash-tub, but
only the elect can see the joke when they find themselves metaphorically
in the same situation. With most of us the primitive form survives in
the malicious. A 'devastating wit' is often no more than the grown-up
echo of a schoolboy laugh at Widow Twankey.

I do not think a full-grown sense of humour is required to appreciate
Dickens, but it is inadvisable to read him as I did for drama and
pathos. He is primarily a comic writer. His character-drawing--and no
one more signally than Dickens has given honorary members to the human
race--is the drawing of a humorist, that is of a caricaturist, who can
often show more of his model's essential quality than a 'straight'
artist, but certainly requires a mature mind to appreciate him at his
full value. I read Dickens not to laugh but to cry, for in those days
what I wanted most of a novel was the gift of tears. So I wept over
Sydney Carton in _A Tale of Two Cities_ and Paul Dombey in _Dombey and
Son_ and Poor Joe in _Bleak House_, though the biggest cry of all was
denied me, as for some reason I never read _The Old Curiosity Shop_.

I deliberately avoided _Pickwick_, of which I already knew a little, for
at an earlier time than this my sister Thea had shown some concern for
my humorous education. She took me to see _Charley's Aunt_ at an age
when I could still laugh at tea being poured into a top hat, or at a man
showing trousers under a woman's skirt as he ran across the stage. But
anything more subtle was lost on me, and I can remember my sister's
indignant whisper--'Laugh, Sheila! Why can't you laugh?'

The next move in my education was the reading aloud of excerpts from
_Pickwick_ by her fianc, who did it remarkably well. Round the room sat
the whole family, convulsed by Mr. Pickwick's involuntary intrusion into
a lady's bedroom, which I could see only as embarrassing. Other episodes
seemed forced or vulgar, never funny. In fact the reading was one long
humiliation, for everyone commented freely on my lack of response. Some
twenty years later I read and relished _Pickwick_, also _Martin
Chuzzlewit_, which being one of the few works of Dickens I had not
spoiled for myself by reading too early has been my favourite ever
since.

George Eliot was better suited to the heaviness of my mind, but grown-up
intervention had robbed me of the very book that would have suited me
best. _Adam Bede_ is one of the 'easiest' of George Eliot's novels. The
characters and the story are better adapted than in many of the others
to a young reader's perceptions, the comedy is unobtrusive and the
tragedy obvious. Instead I read _Silas Marner_ and found it completely
uninteresting.

_Scenes from Clerical Life_ rewarded me better, though there is much in
it that I must have missed, but I never really liked George Eliot until
I read _The Mill on the Floss_. This is almost as well suited to a
beginner as _Adam Bede_. There is less incident in it and more of
metaphysics, but its tragic ending might have been written expressly for
me. That reference to the 'daisied fields' as Tom and Maggie Tulliver
sank together beneath the waters of the Floss, seemed to me to reach the
highest pitch of literary art, and I longed for the day when at last my
awkward pen should create similar beauties for generations yet unborn.

I followed _The Mill on the Floss_ with _Middlemarch_, a book which of
course I ought not to have read till much later. I read it
painstakingly, without skipping a word, but most of its virtues--and
they are pre-eminent--were thrown away on me. The slow careful building
up of the characters of Dorothea and Casaubon never amounted to anything
I could understand or appreciate. Much of my reading must have been
purely visual, and only the conscientiousness of sixteen carried me to
the end of the book. Indeed I knew that I was bored and felt
disappointed with myself for being so; and perhaps that was the reason
why I read no more of George Eliot until my twenty-first birthday
released _Adam Bede _for my unqualified enjoyment.

I took my prohibitions in the narrowest possible sense. Just as the
banning of _Adam Bede_ had cast no shadow on other works by the same
author, so the banning of _Jane Eyre_ left me free of all the other
works of all the Bronts. The only Bront novels we had in the house
were _Wuthering Heights_ and _Agnes Grey_, so with these two I started.
They were bound together in one volume with an introduction by
Charlotte, in which I read for the first time the story of Currer, Ellis
and Acton Bell. As for _Wuthering Heights_ itself, I read at first no
more than the early chapters, for by them I was so deeply shaken that I
could go no further. It is, alas, a common experience to have one's
reading slowed down by boredom, but this was boredom's antinomy--sheer,
breathless excitement. It was not, however, of the same kind as that
which a short while later was to sweep me to the end of _Sir Charles
Grandison_, for I felt no particular interest in the story as such, and
was able to put it aside for some months while I recovered my breath. I
then made another attempt and penetrated a little further into the book,
but it was some time before I succeeded in reading it to the end. No
other book has affected me in this way, and looking back on the
experience I find it hard to account for its intensity. I was of course
at an age which is liable to emotional disturbance, and considering all
things I can regard it as a mercy that mine should have taken this
harmless, literary form.

After _Wuthering Heights_ I was bound to find bathos in _Agnes Grey_.
Neither in that book nor in _The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_ does Anne
Bront seem to approach her sisters. George Moore used to insist that
she was the most gifted of the three Bronts and that Wildfell Hall is
one of the greatest novels in the English language. But I suspect this
of being more of a challenge than an opinion. Anne Bront lacks both the
fire of Emily and the technical ability of Charlotte. Compared with her
sisters' warmth, colour and strong sweep, her talent is soft and pale.
When she attempts to move swiftly, as in _Wildfell Hall_, she breaks the
book. Indeed I sometimes wonder if we should remember _Wildfell Hall_
and _Agnes Grey_ had there been no _Wuthering Heights_, _Villette_,
_Shirley_ and _Jane Eyre_.

Curiously enough I found this last almost as big an anticlimax as _Agnes
Grey_ when I came duly and dutifully to read it at the age of
twenty-one. It certainly did not lack movement and interest, character
and sensation, but by that time I had read enough good fiction to
realize how far it came as a novel below _Shirley_ and _Villette_. The
whole Rochester episode struck me as fantastic and equally fantastic the
opinion both parental and ancestral which had forbidden such a fairytale
to its young.


It will be seen that my reading consisted mainly of novels, partly for
the reason that I intended myself one day to be a novelist, and partly
because I had never been taught to despise novels. It had never entered
my head that novel-reading needed any apology or explanation--as long as
one did not read them in the morning. This odd condition may merely have
taken into account the dangers of too deep absorption at a time filled
with rival claims, but it is with me still and even now I feel guilty if
I read a novel before noon.

My reading was totally unplanned, and my list of books was written as I
read. Choice was largely the result of opportunity. I could not depend
on the school library, even after its surprising production of _Sir
Charles Grandison_, and I had no library subscription of my own. There
was, however, in my home a number of books that I thought I ought to
read. My sister Dulcie had a specially large collection, and on her
shelves I found much of what I most admired. A fine edition of the
Waverley Novels promised more than it actually performed, for I found
that in order to carry me through Scott's flat-footed advance on his
subject and heavy-handed dealings with it, something more was required
than a mere Ought. I needed the propulsion of some external
enthusiasm--such as had made me read _Waverley_. I was then going
through a period of historical hero-worship, which having at last
detached itself from Charles the First became fixed for a time on the
Bonnie Prince at the end of his line. Owing to a sequence of Scottish
holidays, I was mad about all things Highland, and particularly about
the Gaelic, which I imagined I could speak. _Waverley_ suited and
enlarged all this. The parts that did not I do not suppose I read. The
same craze caused me to dip into _Redgauntlet_, and a very different one
into _Anne of Geierstein_. This unpromising trio came very early in my
debauch with the classics and were read only in part. The first novel of
Scott's I read right through was _Ivanhoe_, which of course I should
have read first of all. Very much later I read _Kenilworth_, _Rob Roy_
and _The Heart of Midlothian_, and saw a little more clearly what others
found to admire. But I have never been able really to appreciate Scott
and I do not think it is only because I read him too young.

On my sister's bookshelf he had a formidable rival as a historical
novelist in the shape of Edna Lyall. This writer who had a great vogue
in the eighteen-eighties and -nineties was a gentle, idealistic
spinster, infectiously addicted to unpopular causes. Under her influence
I became in turn a Parliamentarian, a Leveller, an Irish Home Ruler, and
(for three days only) an atheist. Edna Lyall herself was never other
than a good Churchwoman, but she could not resist championing Bradlaugh,
and I was so powerfully impressed by the discovery that such a thing as
an atheist existed that I had no choice but to be one myself--a most
miserable, frightened atheist, quite unlike any I have ever known or
known of.

Her novels did me no good, and I am thinking now of their literary
influence only. It was very strong, and coloured not only the tales I
was writing at the time--for as a schoolgirl I had begun to write for my
own private delectation--but my first published novel. I remember a
reviewer commenting on the ease with which my hero fainted. This was
sheer Edna Lyall, for her heroes fainted at the smallest shock, and
though she nearly always chose a male protagonist, there would be
nothing masculine about him except his name and his clothes. I learned a
great deal of history from her but very little about human nature, which
was the science of which then and for some years afterwards I stood most
in need.

But as a historian she could compete with Sir Walter--certainly in the
matter of making dry bones live. I know enough history now to realize
that she did not actually transport me into the periods she
described--_Tales of a Grandfather_ came doubtless nearer the truth--but
she made of the past a sort of happy dream in which unhappy things took
place, though always romantically. In those days I would gladly have
gone back with her to the England of the Civil War, or to Charles the
Second's Court, even with Newgate in the background. The past was
painted in colours I failed to see in the present. She certainly was not
good for me.

I think she was the only contemporary author I read at this time. Apart
from her I had no interest in a book that was not at least fifty years
old. Those I could not find in the house or were not given me as
Christmas and birthday presents--for I now preferred books as presents
to anything else--I bought with my pocket-money. This was now a shilling
a week and it was wonderful in those days what a shilling could buy in
the way of books. Indeed I do not think they can ever have been cheaper
at any time before or since.

'Six shilling novels' as they were called, though they never cost more
than four-and-sixpence, would appear later in a sixpenny edition if they
achieved any measure of success. These reprints were inevitably of poor
quality, and only the price made them preferable to the original
edition. But when Messrs. Nelson found they could provide boards and a
frontispiece for no more than an extra penny, the result was a permanent
ornament to any bookcase, and soon became so popular that publishers
grew nervous, and certain authors had to face a clause in their
contracts which forbade a reprint within two years.

These were all modern, copyright works, but there were innumerable good
and cheap editions of the classics. It was on these that I spent my
shillings; they seldom cost more than one, though occasionally I would
indulge in a leather binding at the extra cost of sixpence. I bought for
three shillings the complete works of Jane Austen in two volumes, bound
in limp leather, and printed on gilt-edged India paper. Fortunately I
did not read them for many years to come, but they looked very well on
my bookshelf in company with several volumes of the World's Classics,
Routledge's Muses Library, J. M. Dent's Everyman's Library and other
cheap reproductions in many-coloured, gold-laced uniforms.

For a shilling I read Watts Dunton's _Aylwin, The Letters of Lady Mary
Wortley Montague_, Miss Edgeworth's _Belinda_, Thomas Love Peacock's
_Nightmare Abbey_ and _Headlong Hall_, Marlowe's plays, the poems of
Herrick and Crashaw, _The Ingoldsby Legends_, _The Vicar of Wakefield_
(though I thought this worthy of the extra sixpence required for a
leather binding), Washington Irving's _Old Christmas_, Defoe's _Captain
Singleton_ and many others. I recall the titles quite at random, but no
more at random than I bought the books. I had only to hear a book
recommended or see it praised in a newspaper in order to buy it--if it
could be bought cheaply.

Some of these purchases I consider unfortunate--the Peacock books in
particular--for I could not appreciate or even understand much that I
read. But at least I no longer read for conscience' sake, and though my
literary taste might sometimes be in question there could be none as to
my literary appetite.


On leaving school this type of reading continued, as I was still in the
same financial situation. I had been invited to change it for an income
of thirty pounds a year, out of which I was to buy my own clothes, but I
saw that the old rate was much more to my advantage. If I dressed as I
should be expected to dress there would be precious little money left
over for books, and at that age books meant more to me than clothes.
Moreover, as my mother bought my clothes and spent considerably more on
them than thirty pounds, that aspect of the situation was also better
left as it was.

There were, however, certain changes, due to the enlargement of my views
with _Sir Charles Grandison_. Reprints of eighteenth-century novels were
not so easy to find or so cheap to buy as those of the Victorian
authors. However, I managed in course of time to possess Richardson's
_Pamela_ and _Clarissa Harlowe_ (I never had a _Sir Charles_ of my own),
and as I reached the age of freedom, not only _Tom Jones_, but all the
works of Fielding, with the exception of the _Voyage to Lisbon_, which I
still have not read. Smollett fortunately came later. He demands more
adult taste and I am glad to say I did not read him till I had acquired
it. Sterne I read much too young, and consequently failed to appreciate
him. Indeed I think it is difficult for a woman at any age to appreciate
Sterne. He is essentially a man's novelist.

It may seem strange that I found in these eighteenth-century writers a
pleasure much greater than any I have found in their successors even
before I read _Moll Flanders_ which, without going so far as George
Borrow's apple-woman, I venture to think is one of the finest novels in
our language. Some of this may be due to the period, which has always
had a special attraction for me, and some of it is undoubtedly due to
the freshness and novelty of the medium. These writers are primitives,
they have not so far succumbed to conventions or false canons. Their
ideas shine in the fresh light of a new discovery. Even the verbosity of
Richardson, the occasional archness of Fielding and uncouthness of
Smollett, the unadorned realism of Defoe, have a gleam.

I would give the position of the earliest English novelist to Defoe
rather than to Richardson. It is true that his factual, detailed
approach to his subject sometimes contradicts the idea that he is
writing fiction--when I first read his _Journal of the Plague Year_ I
took it for a contemporary record--but in spite of this his writing is
genuinely creative and merely represents the first and furthest swing
that the novel has taken from the fantastical romances that preceded it.
Richardson certainly excels him in the power of generating emotion. I
found both _Pamela_ and _Clarissa_ intensely moving and exciting, in
spite of the author's failure to realize in the first what an arrant
little baggage he had chosen as a heroine.

Richardson's novels contain few if any humorous situations. It was for
Fielding to stir into life the embers that _Pickwick_ had fanned in
vain. When I read _Clarissa Harlowe_ I wept, but when I read _Tom Jones_
and _Joseph Andrews_ I laughed, which was much more of a triumph for the
novelist. Indeed I owe these eighteenth-century writers nothing but
gratitude. They were as good for me as some of their predecessors in my
reading had been bad. Neither in subject nor treatment were they perhaps
examples to be followed by a budding novelist, but their robust attitude
to life--and compared with Edna Lyall even Richardson is robust--their
hearty humour, their comfortable acceptance of the anatomical basis of
love, all helped to rescue and preserve me from those romantic fallacies
into which 'the girl of the period'--that period, so different from
this--had been cunningly enticed by her mentors. My heroes no longer
fainted, and though so far not a vestige of humour could be found in
anything that I wrote, I was able to enjoy it in the writings of others.
I am not sure that even then I should have laughed at _Charley's Aunt_,
and still less am I sure that my sister would have laughed at the
midnight adventures of Parson Adams and Mrs. Slip Slop; my sense of
humour was hidden in a cellar of private laughter, but at least and at
last it was in the house.

My eighteenth-century explorations sometimes led me into by-ways, and
when I had read everything Fielding wrote (with that unaccountable
exception) I sought for the same pleasure in a book by his sister Sarah.
I sought but did not find, for _David Simple_ is amateurish and quite
colourless. Novel-writing was as much of an experiment for the brother
as for the sister, but Fielding never writes as an amateur; his wit and
above all his knowledge of life and human nature carry him as surely as
the most practised technique. Sarah Fielding has none of his qualities,
though she seems to have learned from him the desirability of having a
plot.

Fielding is a brilliant plot-maker, and in that respect he may be said
to have done harm to the growing form of the novel. Neither Defoe nor
Richardson contrived plots, that is a pattern of circumstances and
events through which the characters move. They deal in situations, but
not in plots, and as a result are much more difficult for inferior
writers to imitate.

Fielding has had in this respect a lot of inferior imitators besides his
sister. Indeed at the end of the century the novel earned its bad name
by becoming more and more an affair of contrivance and sensation.
Walpole's _Castle of Otranto_ and Mrs. Radcliffe's _Mysteries of
Udolpho_ are the swimming human heads above a sea of misshapen monsters.
The vast majority of novels written at this time--and there were many
published for or even by the newly arisen circulating libraries--would
be found quite unreadable today, and though early in the next century
the art of fiction retrieved itself with Scott and Jane Austen, the
necessity for a 'plot', some sort of artificial construction, persisted
and affected such great writers as Dickens and Charlotte Bront. When I
began to write a plot was still considered essential and I remember with
what conscientious desperation I contrived what my first review rightly
dismissed as 'a mass of wild improbabilities'. Fortunately of late the
two strains have separated. Just as the hunters and gatherers of
primitive society split up into the two different vocations of herdmen
and agriculturists, so the plot-makers now specialize in the mystery or
detective novel, while the 'straight' novelist need look no further for
his theme than human nature.

My reading did not take me far into the Gothic Revival. Indeed the only
author I read who wrote at this time is Henry Mackenzie, whose _Man of
Feeling_ and _Man of the World_ are romantic rather than Gothic. Jane
Austen, of course, also belongs to the period, but its influence on her
work is no more than that of Richardson's _Pamela_ on Fielding's _Joseph
Andrews_. Her _Northanger Abbey_ undoubtedly owes its inspiration to
those novels which appeared 'in three duodecimo volumes, two hundred and
seventy-six pages in each, with a frontispiece to the first of two
tombstones and a lantern'. But the parody is not as close as Fielding's
and much more good-natured.


I was now once again reading bilingually. The Bibliothque Rose had long
faded from the bookshelves, or rather its paper backs had broken, after
the persisting manner of their kind. A few volumes had been bound and
these I still possess, and the memory of the others is exceptionally
clear. While I was at school I read no French at all except in class.
French had become a lesson, and as deeply shadowed by examinations as
the Bible and Shakespeare.

It would be interesting to know on what considerations examiners base
their choice of books. Why, for instance, did they make me waste a whole
term on Erckmann-Chatrian's _Le Blocus?_--struggling to translate a mass
of obsolete military terms which soaked up like a sponge whatever human
interest there might have been in the book. I used to take pride in my
vocabulary, but I had not learned French under Napoleon and did not see
what possible use such knowledge could be to me or to anyone else.
Molire's plays and Racine's were different and my class enjoyed them,
but the examiners did not ask for those and we read them only when no
examination threatened.

As a result I became so bored with French that I read none for some
years after leaving school. I was over twenty-one when I fell in love
with a young man who was partly French. I use the expression 'fell in
love' because that was what I thought had happened. I see the affair now
as a deferred schoolgirl 'crush', such as I had never indulged in while
I was at school. The victim, I am sure, fully realized what was
happening, and in a spirit of self-preservation responded with nothing
more indiscreet than the occasional gift of a novel by Henri Bordeaux or
Ren Bazin. His glamour lay over them and over the whole of French
literature, and while it was still bright I discovered on the bottom
shelf of a small Hastings library a row of French novels. They were
bound in battered blue, which also describes some of their contents. But
my conscience had ceased to function in such matters. Some might have
said it had died of overwork during my teens, or some might have seen in
its quiescence a measure of my growth under the tutelage of Fielding and
Richardson. This I take to be nearer to the truth if combined with the
fact that I did not understand half that I read of this nature--in
either language.

I still had no library subscription, but I read these works at twopence
a volume. A number were by Alphonse Daudet and some of them really
impressed me. _L'Evangeliste_ describes unforgettably the conflict
between a mother and daughter and the last line is still with me (as
clearly as the first line of 'Come hither, Charles'). '_Elles ne se sont
jamais revues--jamais._' Paul Bourget I had been trained by my French
friend to admire, but I could not bring myself to care much for
Maupassant. I cannot remember who the other authors were or if I read
them all.

But I had recovered my taste for French reading, and when in 1912 my
family spent a winter at Montreux, I assuaged the pangs of another love
affair--calf love, belated, but the real agonizing thing--with French
translations of the great Russians. Tolstoy, Gorky, Chekhov, Dostoevski
were a new and exciting adventure, none the worse, since I did not know
the original language, for being experienced in French. At one time I
used to say that Russian translated into French more fluently and
accurately than into English, but on reflection I realize that this was
just talk. I could not possibly know. I do not know how either language
compares with Russian. English certainly has a far wider vocabulary than
'_une pauvre langue qu'on prete  tout le monde_', but it may not suit
the Russian idiom so well.

Actually I read some of Dostoevski in English, for translations of his
novels by Constance Garnett were at this time beginning to appear. In
English I read _The Brothers Karamazov_, one of the most impressive
novels in the world. It moved me more than any other novel since
_Wuthering Heights_, more even than the same author's _Crime and
Punishment_, which I read in French. I doubt if any others of
Dostoevski's novels reach the same heights as these two starry
Gemini--which would incline me to place him even above Tolstoy, were I
not obliged to confess that I failed to finish _War and Peace_.

Curiously enough, it is the Russian novelists who brought me for the
first time into line with the literary fashions of my day. I had by this
time written no less than five novels, but they were written in a world
apart. I took little interest in the work of my contemporaries. Wells,
Bennett, Conrad, Galsworthy, were all writing at this time, but I still
buried my nose in Defoe, Richardson, Fielding and Smollett. The French
novels too belonged to a forgotten vogue. But with the Russians I had by
accident swum with the tide. When I came back from Switzerland I found a
wave of enthusiasm for all things Russian sweeping the coteries. Authors
were going to Russia and writing about Russia, and those who could not
go and write stayed at home and read. This meant, of course, that my
list of Russian novelists was swollen by several new names, as the
demand for translations increased. But I found nothing to equal my first
discoveries.

I attempted Gogol, but failed to appreciate him, though not for the same
reason as I had failed with _Pickwick_. I was now quite capable of
enjoying a humorous novel if the humour were not too subtle, which
Gogol's certainly is not. 'The only difference between Russian tragedy
and comedy,' once said my actor cousin Robert Farquarson, 'is that when
in a tragedy the characters are murdered, executed, beaten or
disembowelled you weep, while in a comedy when exactly the same things
happen to them you laugh.' Even in a wider sense than he intended I
think this is true, and one could make some interesting
experiments--especially with Shakespeare who has of late seemed
peculiarly to provoke and suffer experiments. Is there a chance, I
wonder, of our ever seeing _The Taming of the Shrew_ produced as a
tragedy, or of my being dug in the ribs and told 'Laugh, Sheila!' at
_King Lear_?



                                   4

                            READ AND RE-READ

When a few years ago I was invited to judge a number of short stories by
students at a School of Journalism, I was disappointed to find that none
of the writers seemed to have any higher standard than that of the
average woman's magazine. The stories were slick, romantic and either
sentimental or semi-sophisticated, exactly like other magazine stories
and evidently based on a prolonged and careful study of this type of
literature. I suggested to the Principal that a study of Chekhov;
Maupassant, or Katherine Mansfield would have been more to his pupils'
advantage. To which he replied that his object was to teach them to
write stories that would sell, and for that they must study the market
and model their work on its requirements.

Of course he was right, but he had missed my point. I was not suggesting
that his students should assault editorial offices with imitation
Chekhov or synthetic Katherine Mansfield, but that a grounding in the
classics of their art would materially help them to write in a very
different style. It would give them more depth as well as more
flexibility, and those who really had talent would not have it stifled
in the strait-waistcoat of a passing fashion.

That is the reason why I shall always be glad that I spent so many years
reading the best that has been written in our language, even though my
indifference to, or rather ignorance of, contemporary trends impeded my
own success with the public. I do not think that the books I read had
any direct influence on me as a writer, but they preserved me from
certain follies. The vogue, according to my agent, was 'drawing room
melodrama', and I shudder to think of what my natural inclination to
melodrama would have done if confined to the drawing-room instead of
being allowed to lose some of its fustiness in the open air. It is worth
remarking that such contemporary books as I did read affected my writing
much more obviously than the works of earlier generations, the reason
lying, no doubt, in the strong pull of the current compared with the
peaceful edges of the stream. There is also a certain affinity between
books written at the same period. No matter how much they may differ in
subject or style, they reflect the same, or at least a similar, ethos.
By choosing books more or less at random out of the writings of two
centuries, I was moving in and out of a flux. Worlds of difference roll
between Fielding and Jane Austen, Richardson and Dickens, Smollett and
the Bronts. Even the fact that my reading was not planned, but directed
by anything and everything--conscience, taste, opportunity,
pocketmoney--prevented my ever identifying myself with any particular
style or writer.

More than one reader has detected the influence of Thomas Hardy, but
this must be due rather to the association of ideas than to any real
resemblance. Just as every town with a stream running through it risks
being called the English Venice, so any writer of regional fiction may
be called the Hardy of Sussex, Cornwall, Westmorland, Hertfordshire or
anywhere. As it happened I had written three novels before I read
anything of Hardy's, partly because, being still alive, he had not yet
entered the field of my enthusiasms, partly because I have never enjoyed
reading the same type of novel as I write myself. I started to read his
work when a small provincial journal pronounced him to be my evil
genius. This naturally whetted my curiosity, and I read _Under the
Greenwood Tree_ and _Far from the Madding Crowd_, without being much
impressed by either. Indeed I did not come to appreciate Hardy till I
had read _Tess of the d'Urbervilles_ and _Jude the Obscure_, which
painted life in something more like the lurid colours in which I saw it.
My profound admiration for _The Woodlanders_ came much later and shows
that Hardy, at his best, is for adult readers only.

As a young person I preferred Meredith, who happened to be dead, and in
debates as to whether he or Hardy had a surer place among the immortals,
I took the opposite side to that which I would take now. I thought
_Diana of the Crossways_ one of the finest novels ever written and very
little less of _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_. Of his poetry, by reason
of which, surely he will live if he lives at all, I knew in those days
nothing.


Another reason why the books that I read at this period had no more than
a general influence on me is that only a very few of them did I ever
read twice. I moved from title to title, from author to author, without
lingering long enough to take colour from any. Even those writers that
shocked me--using the word in its electrical sense--made no lasting
impression. It is true that one of the effects of _Wuthering Heights_
was to make me call the heroine of my current novel Emily Branwell, but
the model was the author, not the book. I had just read Mrs. Gaskell's
_Life of Charlotte Bront_ and been deeply moved by her sister's story.
It was Emily Bront in her tragedy, strength and stoicism that I tried
to reproduce. Apart from her the Bront atmosphere was too much diluted
to prevail.

It is not perhaps surprising that I read Richardson's three novels no
more than once. Nor, having once declared my independence with _Tom
Jones_ did I repeat the gesture. I did, however, re-read _Joseph
Andrews_ several times while I was still a girl, but it firmly resisted
an attempt to re-read it two years ago. It belongs as far as I am
concerned definitely to the past, as do the great majority of the books
I read between the age of fifteen and twenty-five.

There are, however, one or two I have not left behind in my youth. I met
them then, but they have remained with me ever since as lifelong
companions.

The first of these was George Borrow's _Lavengro_.

I was introduced to it by a magazine article, which quoted the familiar
'wind on the heath' passage, and was sufficiently attracted to spend two
shillings on the leather-bound volume that is still in my bookcase. I
had only just left school and taken my place in a world of afternoon
calls, 'at homes' and subscription dances--a world so unlike George
Borrow's that I must regard _Lavengro's_ instant fascination as partly
due to escapism. It is true that I had entered that world of my own free
will. My father would have liked me to go to Cambridge, and it was
entirely my own choice to live at home and write. But living at home, I
was forced to adapt myself, when not reading or writing, to a course of
vexatious boredom. My writing had yet to justify itself by results. It
had not yet emancipated me from paying calls with my mother, who loathed
them as much as I did, but whose position as a doctor's wife compelled
her to make them. My father's practice would have declined had she not
done so. Everybody paid calls in those days. A clergyman was not
considered worthy of his orders unless he 'visited', that is paid purely
social calls on his parishioners. Young men had to pay for an invitation
to dinner or to a dance by an afternoon call. If one did not call one
ran the risk of being called upon. It has taken two world wars to bring
this system to an end.

'At homes' were for the most part dreary occasions, sometimes made
drearier by a professional entertainer. They provoked, of course, more
calls. Dances should have been enjoyable, and often were so; but not
always. They were too hazardous. In those days it would have been
considered quite outrageous to bring a partner; indeed it was bad style
if one danced more than twice with the same man. As there were nearly
always more girls than men present, and as each man had to have two
dances free to smoke a cigarette and change his limp, wet collar, the
result was an unfailing display of wallflowers and prolonged visits to
the cloakroom.

In those days I would have given much to be a man, imagining in my
ignorance that men were free of the trammels of an Edwardian world. I
should have liked--or so my imagination told me--to wander about the
English countryside, free of social restraints, or family obligations,
meeting whom I chose. This tall, white-headed young wanderer, who camped
with the gipsies, haunted the booths of fairs, wrote 'Joseph Sell' in an
attic, travelled with a Welsh preacher, lived with a wild girl in a
dingle, was myself set free.

None of this was consciously so. It is only later reflection that has
made me see it in such a light. Nor was escape the only or indeed the
chief reason for my appreciation. I had by that time read enough to see
that George Borrow had rare literary gifts, more I consider than he has
been given credit for. _Lavengro_ disappointed his contemporaries, who
had expected something very different from the author of _The Bible in
Spain_. It was supposed to be his autobiography, and his obvious
aeration of fact with fiction was an affront to Victorian rectitude. At
the present time he is regarded in some quarters as a charletan who
really knew very little about the subjects on which he dogmatized. But
_Lavengro_ has lost none of its charms for me.

One of the greatest is its strangeness. This is not due only to the
subject matter. Many books dealing with stranger subjects have it not.
There are many strange characters in _The Newgate Calendar_ and
Johnson's _Lives of the Highwaymen_, both of which I read at the same
time as I read _Lavengro_, but neither of which has that same magical
quality of strangeness, that aura of strangeness, which so enchanted and
still enchants me. Borrow can make almost anything seem strange--the
English army of occupation in Ireland, fishermen at Berwick-on-Tweed, a
coaching inn, the salesroom of the British and Foreign Bible Society, a
young man about town, all these besides the mass of odd people, places
and situations we should expect to find so.

The latter's strangeness is enhanced by the genteel manner of their
presentation. Borrow's gipsies, thieves and tinkers are not the brutal
characters we meet in the _Calendar_ or in Captain Johnson's book. If
they do not always talk the Queen's English, they nevertheless talk
without offence, using much the same sort of language as Moll Flanders,
for whom a fellow female thief or cutpurse is always a 'gentlewoman'.

I venture to think that this mode of presentation is not only strange
but true. It is certainly true of the gipsies, who are nearly always
superior to the rural populations that despise them. The reason for the
opposite being generally believed is that so many wandering people pass
for gipsies who are nothing of the kind. The pure-bred gipsy, and there
are still some left, is good-mannered and well-spoken. Should he so far
forget his nation as to marry a 'gaujo', the offspring is generally more
graceful and intelligent than any produced by the local stock. In most
of these their superiority is equalled only by their anxiety to conceal
its origins.

_Lavengro_ might be called a gipsy fugue. The gipsy tongue has given it
its name and the gipsy people wander in and out of the various episodes,
a recurrent theme. No one else has quite their significance or beautiful
strangeness of presentation. But there is very much in the book besides
gipsies. It is packed with the life of early Victorian England, before
the railways had made it seem so small. Long, slow journeys take us
through a countryside that is gone for ever--a countryside of humble but
self-sufficient villages, of great houses where privilege often showed
itself in eccentricity, of fairs and horse-markets and prize-fighters,
of inns where carriages still changed horses and postilions were still
employed; inns, moreover, which sold good brown ale, the sort that puts
heart into a tired and broken man--all this seen in the strange,
transforming light of Borrow's eccentric genius, as if Salvador Dali had
painted Frith's 'Derby Day'. Dreaming back over it all one recovers poor
Irish Murtagh who was sent to Salamanca 'to be made a saggarth of', the
apple-seller with her cultus of Moll Flanders, the Welsh preacher who
spread his gospel under the shadow of his own sin against the Holy
Ghost, Beckford and his 'touching' story, the old man who could read
Chinese but not the clock, the Man in Black, who in Borrow's opinion was
responsible for the book's poor reception when it first appeared, since
its 'chief assailants were the friends of Popery in England', and above
all of the gentlewoman from the Great House at Long Melford, big,
beautiful, blonde Isopel Berners, whom Lavengro taught to conjugate 'I
love' in Armenian--surely one of the strangest love scenes ever written.
Much of this overflows into _The Romany Rye_, but one must take
_Lavengro's_ sequel as a continuous part of itself. The book is
incomplete without it.

Having made such a happy discovery in _Lavengro_ and its continuation I
naturally read every other book by George Borrow in the hope of finding
the same charm. The ensuing disappointment may have been a personal
failure on my part, and I have given neither _The Bible in Spain_ or
_Wild Wales_ the chance to prove it by a second reading. In the author's
lifetime they were both considered better books than _Lavengro_, and I
have seen the same opinion expressed today. It is possible that my
preference may be due not only to escapism but to nostalgia. When I
re-read _Lavengro_ I find it clearly evocative--the various scenes are
often transparencies over scenes and circumstances in my own life. Yet I
have said and I still believe that I feel no nostalgia for the past.
Perhaps the nostalgia belongs not to myself but to that first, fresh
reading, when the strangeness that I still can see was new and shining
in the spring light of my own youth.


To turn from George Borrow to Jane Austen is to enter another world, and
the fact that I place her after him in my list of lifelong companions
may suggest that her world is less congenial to me than his. But the
arrangement is purely chronological. I did not read anything of hers
until some years after I had first read _Lavengro_.

I use the word 'read' advisedly, because with me it involves every word.
I do not skim or trade in samples. In that sense--which I fear is the
more common sense--I had already 'read' _Pride and Prejudice_, for I had
often dipped into the copy in my sister Dulcie's bookcase and knew the
characters by sight in Hugh Thompson's illustrations. It was the
illustrations that had set me against the book. They suggested a dainty
period piece--a period, moreover, in which I was not particularly
interested. I have always found this drawback in Jane Austen's
illustrators. They seem to have become mesmerized by the clothes and
furniture, so that the characters are reduced to mere tailors' and
dressmakers' dummies, while the rooms might all be corners of the South
Kensington Museum. The artist whose work has distressed me least is Mr.
John Austin, as his pictures are frankly stylized. But he has his
provocations. Why should even a stylized Captain Wentworth show a face
like Cupid on a Valentine? I have sometimes wondered whom I should
choose to illustrate Jane Austen, and have decided on Mr. Felix
Topolski. His drawing is a lively combination of impressionism with
virility, and his illustrations to Shaw's Charles II play prove that he
can introduce a period without being swallowed by it.

I did not start my reading of Jane Austen with _Pride and Prejudice_. I
began with _Emma_ and found something so very different from what I had
expected that pleasure had all the stimulation of surprise. I found a
young woman who, whether she wore a high-waisted gown or not, was very
like other young women that I knew, including myself. She had her
faults, but the author was not blind to them, and her story is as much
the story of the triumph of an excellent disposition over some very
natural failings as of her discoveries and achievements in friendship
and in love.

With _Emma_ I consider that I began at the top. Some critics would give
this place to _Persuasion_, but though the novel undoubtedly has more
depth and feeling than its predecessor it has certain flaws which, in my
opinion, prevent it ranking so high. The character of Lady Russell, for
instance, on whom so much depends, is never clearly realized, and the
sluggish start suggests a recent reading of _Waverley_. _Emma_, on the
other hand, is technically perfect--too perfect some would say. There is
always a tendency to belittle technical efficiency for the reason that
it is so often only that. But in _Emma_ it is something very much
more--the perfect command by an artist of her medium, so that though the
pattern is there, never does its contrivance do violence to truth.

This is not so in all the novels. Parts of _Pride and Prejudice_ are
obviously contrived, and _Northanger Abbey_ is marred by an incredible
incident. But it is remarkable that each one of Jane Austen's six novels
has readers who would put it in the first place. I have given my own
preference, but none of the others is without support. Next to _Emma_ I
would put _Mansfield Park_, though the drawback here is the important
one of a failure of sympathy between the writer and the reader. As in
the other novels we see events through the eyes of the heroine who,
though she is never presented as faultless, is in all the others a young
woman with whose outlook we can sympathize. But many readers detest
Fanny Price. They regard her as a prig and are antagonized by her
creepmouse ways. Jane Austen's own attitude towards her is certainly
unlike her usual attitude towards her heroines. It has been suggested
that her feeling for Fanny is maternal rather than sisterly, and that is
what spoils the picture. My own impression is different. I have
expressed in another book my belief that in the writing of this novel
Jane Austen was heavily though transiently influenced by the Evangelical
Revival which she would have encountered in Bath. She seems to have
intended to produce a moral work, setting forth the excellence of the
clerical profession and extolling the triumphs of virtue over vice and
frivolity. She was far too big an artist to carry out this plan
entirely, but we are left with an idea of _parti pris_ and the
conviction that the heroine has married the wrong man without her author
being aware of it.

But the greatness of _Mansfield Park_ is shown by its triumph over the
disaffected reader. We may argue and we protest but we cannot cease to
admire. In none of the other novels do we meet a more completely
realized set of characters, and our likes and dislikes are a part of the
life their creator has given them. In the earlier books--and _Mansfield
Park_ is the first of the second triad, written in her maturity, after
she had won success with her 'lopp'd and cropp'd' juvenilia--more than
one character belongs to farce and there is a certain amount of
fumbling. But here all is firm and well proportioned and we have no
difficulty in accepting the whole picture of life as it was then--or
indeed as it is now.

For one of the most striking differences between Jane Austen and most of
her contemporaries is the closeness of her outlook to that of our own
times. In reading Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth, to say nothing of
Mrs. Radcliffe, one is constantly aware of a different period. In Jane
Austen's work it intrudes so seldom that when it does it comes almost as
a shock. 'Elizabeth curtsied . . .' and we suddenly remember we are in a
Regency drawing-room. The March sun is still two hours above the horizon
when Catherine goes to dress for dinner--and we remember that General
Tilney dined at the fashionably late hour of half-past five.


After my long course of more or less archaic reading, which I had just
topped off with Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, I found all this most
refreshing. My superficial study of _Pride and Prejudice_ had not
prepared me for so much ease. I read all the six novels without losing
my first impressions and soon found that I was reading them again. Then
it became a habit, and now, over forty years later, a novel by Jane
Austen is my regular bedside book.

She is of course the supreme novelist of escape, and it may seem strange
that I should escape in two such different directions as she and George
Borrow provide. Her world is not so very unlike the world I wished to
escape from when I first met her--only translate a dance into a ball, an
'at home' into a reception, an afternoon call into a morning visit and
they appear the same. But an escape in literature as in real life does
not necessarily involve a complete change of circumstances and
surroundings. When anxious to lose our cares we may go for a country
walk or we may visit a friend--with George Borrow I follow the first
expedient, with Jane Austen the second.

Of course the idea of reading for escape raises doubts and queries. Some
would condemn it entirely as a substitute for action, others would rank
it with the despicable habit of reading for entertainment. But I see no
harm in it as long as the world one enters is not an illusion. Neither
George Borrow nor Jane Austen transport one into fantasy but simply into
another, less urgent set of facts. They tell no fairy-tale that might
send one back dazzled and reeling to one's contacts with normal life. In
fact in my case it is their realism that provides the escape, for the
fantastic and the improbable have always irritated me.


Both these escapes are significantly by way of prose, and I could write
at some length on why there is not and can never be for me any escape in
poetry. So my third lifelong companion, met first in those days, belongs
to a different order. I was still only half grown-up when I first read
William Blake, and if I seldom read him now it is because I know so much
of his work by heart that there is no need for me to do so.

I came to him after a long school course during which I had learned to
find in poetry a beauty I did not yet even seek in prose. I have already
mentioned my young delight in the seventeenth-century poets, a delight
which was repeated when I first read the eighteenth-century Thomson's
_Ode to Evening_.

This lovely work did more for me even than the Cavaliers, for it moved
not only my imagination but my heart. I shall always remember the hurt
of it--a pain which seems to be, as far as I am concerned, an integral
part of poetry, as it is of music. I had never felt it before then, but
I have felt it many times since. I naturally do not regard it as a
measure of poetic excellence. Pain is a personal matter, and perhaps
pain is not the word I should use. But in all the poetry I love most
there is besides the beauty of thought and language a thrust at the
heart.

Shortly after I left school my friend Pansy, then at Girton, introduced
me to Professor Gilbert Murray's translation of the _Hippolytus_ of
Euripides. She made the introduction with some qualms, being doubtful of
my capacity to appreciate anything so different from my normal reading
but by no means prepared to forgive me if I failed. Fortunately my
delight in it was equal to her own. I was moved almost unbearably by the
sweep of the conflict and the beauty of the verse.

          Eros, Eros, who blindest tear by tear
            Men's eyes with hunger. Thou swift foe that pliest
          Joy in our hearts deep like an edged spear ...

and

            There dwelt a steed in Oechalia's wild,
              A maid without a man, without master.
            She knew not love, that far king's child--
              But he came, he came with a song in the night,
            With fire and with blood. . . .

I quote from memory, for in the course of nearly fifty years my
paper-bound copy has vanished and there is unfortunately no reprint. But
one of the curious effects of this adventure into Greek drama was that I
struggled for almost a year to teach myself the language, in the vain
hope that I should be able to read _Hippolytus_ as it was written.
Needless to say I failed, but poetry has more than once provoked me to
strange reactions, of which by no means the least remarkable was the
idea that I could write it myself.

Though my verse brought me no distinction it gave me comfort of another
kind, for it proved an admirable outlet for the grief engendered by the
painful love affairs I indulged in at this period. The days of
_schwrmerei_ were over, but had been followed by a series of
bewitchments--thus only can I describe my successive involvements with
the very type of young man best calculated to make me miserable.
Fortunately this fact (in humiliating reverse) was always discovered by
him before matters had gone too far, and in a few weeks verse of a
heartrending nature would be celebrating what I now regard as a lucky
escape.

There was, however, one poem, which though not my own seemed to suit
these sad occasions better than anything I myself could write and which
relieved my heart in nearly the same way. It begins:

                     My silks and fine array,
                       My smiles and languished air,
                     By love are driven away;
                       And mournful, lean Despair
                     Brings me yew to deck my grave:
                       Such end true lovers have.

This is not the kind of verse usually associated with Blake, whose fame
rests chiefly on his _Songs of Innocence and Experience_ and the
_Prophetic Books_. But it comes from the only volume of his poems--the
Poetical Sketches--which was not printed by his own effort and published
at his own expense. I forget how, when, where, or why I first read
Blake, but I still possess the shilling volume in Routledge's Muses
Library which is scored and marked with references that it now seems
hard to believe are mine. I read him till I knew most of his poems by
heart, except of course the _Prophetic Books_, which baffled me even
after I had called in Swedenborg and Jacob Boehme for their elucidation.
It was not till some years later that I beheld the loveliness of 'those
illuminated missals of song' into which his own illustrations
transformed the poems I had read only in sober print. But print was
enough to transfer their beauty to my mind and leave it with me till the
end of my life.

In the _Poetical Sketches_ and _Ideas of Good and Evil_ there are many
songs of love. Indeed one might gather together the love songs of
William Blake into a volume--it would be only a small one--of their own.
They are most of them lyrics in the true sense and I wonder why more of
them have not been set to music. 'My silks and fine array' with its
Elizabethan echoes cries out for the lute.

But love--in the narrow sense that met my passing need--is only a small
part of Blake's inspiration. He was mainly, almost entirely, a mystic, a
visionary, and his poems are the embodiment of dreams. This is apparent
even in the simplest, most objective of the _Songs of Innocence_. He
lived on the threshold of another world. Use what explanations you
like--delusion, psychosis, unconscious symbolism, intrusion of dream
images into waking life--you cannot alter the fact that he lived apart
in a world which he himself called a world of imagination, though for
him that did not mean it was imaginary. Indeed he proclaimed it as 'the
body of God' and the only reality.

His philosophy is complicated and obscure. Brought up as a
Swedenborgian, he came in time to free himself from Swedenborg's
'spectral and formal intellect', and to interpret life in the terms of
his own visions, coloured by his readings of Jacob Boehme, the Kabbala
and certain medieval writers of alchemical and magical tendencies. The
student's difficulties are made no lighter by a private mythology decked
out with startling names: Theotormon, Oothoon, Urizen, and so on.

It may be wondered why all this should take such hold of the young woman
I was then, for certainly Blake expressed much more of me than my
emotions. The fact was that I had reached an age when the first
religious skin is due to slough off and the soul waits to be clothed
upon afresh. But nothing fresh was offered me from the sources that
should have provided it, and in my early twenties I found myself, like
so many of my countrymen, a grown-up person swaddled in the religious
beliefs of a child. This period properly belongs to the next chapter.
What belongs here is Blake's share in my religious growing up.

His unorthodoxies stimulated me to fling off the swaddling clothes that
had become grave-clothes, and his revolt against Swedenborg encouraged
mine against the Church of England, with a mocking twist that landed me
finally in Swedenborg's lap. I had come to realize that the doctrines in
which I had been brought up and with which for so many years I had
satisfied the examiners were not generally held in that exciting new
world into which I was just beginning to peep. The free citizens of this
world (as far as I had encountered them) seemed to be either agnostics
or Roman Catholics. The latter offered no attractions, but I could
already see myself as an enlightened specimen of the former, if only I
knew where unbelief would stop.

Ever since my childish concept of a godless universe, followed by one
far more painful in my teens, I feared that it might take me to the
moon, that is to a dead world, a petrified world, opaque, solid and icy
cold. This is the world of Blake's 'single vision', from which I still
pray to be delivered, for it does not threaten only unbelief. The light
he shed then on my vain searchings was bright enough to save me from the
moon and also to prevent my falling into Newton's sleep, where dreams
are 'the delusions of Goddess Nature and her laws'. Among his
drawings--and it was inevitable that my devotion to him as a poet should
pursue him as an artist--is a strange portrait of Isaac Newton in the
'spiritual form' of a splendid, naked youth, stooping low with his
quadrant over a chart on the ground, while above him disregarded spreads
the whole heaven.



                                   5

                        THE PLEASURES OF INSANITY

Looking back on my life I repeatedly meet myself as a stranger. It was
just such a backward glance at his vanished selves that convinced George
Meredith on his death-bed that there could be no such thing as personal
survival. He had been so many people. He could not possibly be them all.
Therefore there was no 'I' to survive death.

But curiously enough this is one of the arguments used by Christian
theology to prove the opposite. As white holds all the colours, so the
transcendent 'I' holds all these different personalities. My life is the
unity that binds them together, weaving them both consciously and
unconsciously into a pattern which when it is complete will be my whole,
my real self.

Meanwhile a backward glance shows me many women I can hardly recognize,
though they call themselves by my name. One of the most baffling sits at
a desk in the Reading Room of the British Museum. She is about
twenty-three years old. Beside her is a packed lunch from the Eustace
Miles Vegetarian Restaurant, and before her is spread a banquet of
ancient books exhaling the very essence of _pourriture noble_.

This is none other than I myself, collecting material for a work to be
called _The Pleasures of Insanity_. The title of course is from Blake,
but the book will also include studies of Jacob Boehme and Emanuel
Swedenborg. If it had ever been written it would have been a shadowy
suggestion of Mr. Aldous Huxley's _Perennial Philosophy_. For in
attempting a synthesis of these three writers, thinkers and dreamers, I
soon realized their common ground in an esoteric philosophy of which it
is hard to believe they could have had any personal knowledge. The
ancient religions of the East, Gnosticism, neo-Platonism, theosophy were
all fish in my net and I thrilled daily at the wonders I dredged out of
the deep.

I had already worked in the British Museum, collecting material for a
monograph on Richardson. For I now spent about a fortnight twice a year
in London. My finances, based on the not very liberal advances on three
novels, allowed this modest flight of independence, which cost me
twenty-five shillings a week at a boarding-house in Redclyffe Gardens.
Here I was given bed, breakfast and dinner, with full board on Sundays.
The house was intended primarily for students at the Royal College of
Music, and their young and cheerful company was part of its attraction.

It was here that I made my first literary friend. Hitherto, though I had
encountered one or two short story writers and been kindly noticed by
two established authors of that day who happened to live at Hastings, my
literary life had functioned almost in a vacuum. But now I was on terms
of equality with another novelist. We were both about the same age, had
written the same number of books, and there was yet another link--our
two latest had appeared at the same time and had often been reviewed
together.

Most authors will know what that means. 'Here we have two novels that
are equally refreshing' or 'disappointing' . . . 'it is with relief that
we turn from Miss Blank's somewhat dreary excogitations to the sparkling
wit and wisdom of Miss Dash' or vice versa. In our case the books
received almost equal praise, though the balance was on her side. It was
therefore a delightful surprise to find the author of _Marcia, A
Transcription from Life_ staying at number 84 Redclyffe Gardens and very
much disposed to make friends.

I do not think my memory exaggerates in recalling her as really
beautiful. She had eyes that were true violet and masses of copper-brown
hair that I once saw tumbling in natural curls to below her waist. She
had come up from the provinces to start work as a journalist and it was
hardly surprising that with her looks and charm and undoubted abilities
she should be successful to the full extent of her ambitions. She had
done some work for Hulton's, who then owned the _Daily Sketch_, and had
pleased them so well that they had made her editor of their Women's Page
and given her an office of her own, which one afternoon she showed me in
process of redecoration. All the plums of interviewing, too, seemed to
come her way. I can still see her leaping out of a taxi outside the
Eustace Miles Restaurant, holding out a huge chocolate box--'Chocolates
from Pavlova!' and while we sat over the nut cutlets with which in those
days for economy's rather than for conscience' sake I entertained my
friends, I heard all the breathless story of an hour spent at the great
dancer's home in Regent Park. She also described an equally exciting
interview and luncheon with Charles Hawtrey, then at the height of his
fame. But her greatest triumph was a ticket for the Royal Enclosure at
Ascot, where she represented her paper. The entire boarding-house
trooped in and sat round her as she described its wonders over the late
supper that had been specially provided for her. It is a tribute to her
rather than to me that with all this I was neither dazzled nor envious.
She was so kind-hearted, unaffected and friendly that one could not
grudge her her successes, and so pretty and charming that one could not
wonder at them. I left London looking forward to our next meeting. But I
never saw her again.

There must have been a longer interval than usual before my next visit,
for what happened after I left could hardly have happened in six months.
I cannot remember if I wrote to her, but I received one letter from her
shortly before I went back to London. To my great surprise it was
written on board ship and told me that she was on her way to America.
She had been ill, she said, and the journey was for her health. Directly
I was back in Redclyffe Gardens I asked Miss Mackintosh, the
proprietress, if she could give me any more news. She could indeed, and
of a most astounding nature.

Marguerite's journalistic career had been entirely in her own
imagination. She had written a few articles for the _Daily Sketch_, but
that was all. There was no sub-editorship, no private office--the place
she had taken me to see did not even belong to her newspaper--there had
been no Royal Enclosure, no interviews with famous people, and
'chocolates from Pavlova' must have been bought with her own money. It
was all a mirage--most people would say a fraud, but Miss Mackintosh did
not take that view and she was a hardheaded Scotswoman whom it would
have been difficult to deceive. She saw the girl as the victim of her
own dream life, and had herself witnessed what was less an exposure than
an awakening.

This is one of the strangest parts of the story. Marguerite had told her
that a distant relative had left her a large sum of money and an estate
in Devonshire on condition that she became a Roman Catholic. This she
had at first refused to do, but on thinking it over she changed her mind
and went regularly for instruction to the Brompton Oratory, finally
driving off in a taxi all dressed in white for what Miss Mackintosh
supposed was her confirmation.

On the secular side of things she started to organize her estate by
hiring an office in the Temple and engaging a young man as her agent.
She also asked if she could permanently rent two rooms in the
boarding-house as her _pid--terre_ when she visited London. She had
been so happy there, she said, that she wanted to make the house her
second home. As such an arrangement would involve certain alterations
and engaging an extra servant Miss Mackintosh asked her solicitor to
draw up an agreement, and this was in process of being done when a
worried little man suddenly appeared. He proclaimed himself to be
Marguerite's father and said that the last letter he had received from
her had made him fear that she was 'in for another of her queer turns'.
Once before this she had built a world out of dreams and her family did
not want to be again involved in the ruins.

Unfortunately they could not escape, for the office in the Temple and
the agent's salary had to be paid for, as well as a very heavy bill for
car hire. They were perhaps justified in packing her off to America
where she saved them further trouble by dying very soon.

Fraud certainly seems the easiest explanation, though there were no
financial gains. Indeed, though her family had been obliged to pay for
her major commitments she must have been involved in quite a number of
incidental expenses that would have had to be met out of her own pocket.
Of course her stories of success and wealth gave her importance in the
eyes of her friends--a motive might lie there. On the other hand
exposure--and exposure was almost inevitable--would do worse than merely
put her back where she had been before. Moreover, she was so attractive
and intelligent that one could see no need for such a difficult and
dangerous method of self-boosting. Nor is there any place here for the
Brompton Oratory sequence, which was as fictitious as the rest.

Miss Mackintosh would have liked to know what she had done when she went
off on these expeditions to places where she never arrived or spent long
days in others which had never existed. Her contact with the family and
the details of the earlier collapse had, as I have said, convinced her
that delusion and not delinquency was the explanation. She had received
one letter from Marguerite after she left Redclyffe Gardens, giving her
minute instructions about a cheque-book which she said was in a filigree
box on her writing-table. There was no filigree box, but in an adjacent
drawer was a pile of 'returned postal packets'--letters she had written
to her non-existent estate, giving orders and information to those her
dream had placed there. If there had been fraud would she have written
these letters? But if it were delusion what did she make of their
return?

I was to find out in rather a surprising manner. Part of the surprise
may be the reader's when I add that not till after all this had happened
did I read Marguerite's book. It is a sign of the remoteness in which I
lived from the literary world of my own times that it had not hitherto
occurred to me to read a novel with which my own had been so often
coupled and whose author was the first writer to become my friend. But
now that she was gone I, as it were, put out my hand to reach her in the
only way I could.

_Marcia_ was sub-titled _A Transcript from Life_, but I had never
expected to find in it the transcript that I found. For it was nothing
less than the transcript of her own obsessive dreams, delusional
insanity described from within. I watched the skilful literary build-up
of a situation very like that which I had myself witnessed. In the book
it was an imaginary lover, and I guessed--though I had no means of
knowing--that it was the story of her earlier breakdown. All this
happened more than forty years ago, so it is not surprising that I
cannot remember everything that I read. I should like to be able to
recall how the delusion started--whether its roots were in sex or in
self-importance. What is clear in my mind is the occasional intrusion of
reality, when some detail which denied the dream--such as a returned
letter or a failed meeting--forced its way into it. These caused painful
moments of doubt and terror, but at first memory was always able to knit
the dream over them. Then as the psychosis grew weaker this technique
failed, reality tore the mirage to rags and the unlucky girl was left
naked and exposed not only to the world but to herself.

I believe it is unusual to recall the details of a psychosis, but this
one can never have been complete. It was in its incompleteness that its
torment lay. A complete illusion of this happy nature might well be
ranked among the pleasures of insanity. No doubt there are some who even
now will prefer fraud as an explanation. The world is full of people who
claim to be what they never were and to possess what they never had.
Scarcely a month goes by without some bogus peer or millionaire being
sent to gaol for false pretences. It is the story of Marguerite Curtis
which makes me think that many of these poor creatures cheat not only
the public but themselves. They have minds in which fact and fiction are
unfortunately blended and probably believe quite a lot, though not quite
all, of their own stories.


The link between the sad little story of Marguerite Curtis and that
glimpse of an earlier self at work in the Reading Room of the British
Museum is the packed vegetarian lunch that lies at my elbow. I have
explained that my addiction to the Eustace Miles Restaurant was less a
matter of conscience than of economy, but I found within its portals
certain gastronomic and intellectual pleasures that would not have
accompanied a meal at the same price elsewhere. For eighteenpence I
could enjoy a feast of mock turkey and its accompanying vegetables, with
a roll and nut butter, followed by fruit salad and cream; while round my
plate would be strewn the literature of the Cosmos Society, inviting me
to meetings, offering me Social Evenings and promising me the answer to
the Riddle of the Universe.

It was perhaps unenterprising of me not to have attended any of these
cosmic functions, but even then I had an uneasy feeling that they might
not live up to their name. Once, a few years later, I went to a meeting
of a similar society and was bitterly disappointed. A few rather shadowy
people listened without much outward show of interest to a lecturer who
had nothing to deliver but a sequence of moral platitudes. I had
expected something very different--some esoteric revelation or at least
some new interpretation of life; instead of which I had a sermon which I
could have heard better expressed and delivered in my parish church.

The Cosmos Society might have done more for me had I given it a chance,
but my experience has been that when these strange faiths and
philosophies emerge from their literature and put on flesh and blood,
they carry their own death-warrant as far as I am concerned. Certainly
my devotion to Swedenborg did not survive a service of the New Church in
Kensington Town Hall.

Myself as an ardent Swedenborgian is one of those selves I find most
difficult to acknowledge as my own. Yet undoubtedly for two or three
years, though I did not join either the New Church or the Swedenborg
Society, I considered myself his disciple.

I met him through reading Blake, who was born in the very year that
Swedenborg had marked as the end of the old theologies and the coming to
earth of the New Jerusalem. Blake never shook himself entirely free of
Swedenborg, and throughout his poems there are echoes of his doctrine,
apart from the parody-reply of _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_. 'A new
heaven is begun,' he writes, 'and it is now thirty-three years since its
advent'--referring thus to his own birthday. 'The eternal hell revives,
and lo, Swedenborg is the angel sitting at the tomb; his writings are
the linen clothes folded up.'

It is not surprising that with my keen literary appetite I should after
reading Blake's _Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ procure the book that had
inspired it, especially as this was to be had for my accustomed
shilling. What really is surprising is that having read this work I
accepted its contents as a new revelation and felt that at last I had
seen the light.

The explanation may be found in that revolt I mentioned in the last
chapter. I had shaken myself free from the old-fashioned Anglicanism in
which I had been brought up, but I had so far found nothing to fill its
place. Blake, though he had saved me from the moon, had also very much
left me in the dark, for his ideas were too obscure for me to follow and
his vision altogether too ghostly for my sharing. Swedenborg's ideas
were clear and precise unto formality and his visions as substantial as
anything seen in _Wonderland_ or _Through the Looking-Glass_.

I was temperamentally unfitted for agnosticism, for my religion, however
formulated, had always been dynamic, which the agnosticism of the period
was not. It was just this dynamic quality which Karl Marx put into
atheism, making it thereby for the first time a serious rival to belief.
I had never heard of Karl Marx, but it may be just as well that
Swedenborg crossed my path instead of him.

The doctrines of the New Church offered not only faith but independence.
Once again I had something to believe, but it was a belief I had chosen
for myself and, what is more, could keep to myself. Swedenborg had never
invited his followers to worship apart, so outwardly I might conform to
the family's religion--thus sparing myself much argument, conflict and
frustration--while comforting my private thoughts with a theology far
more startling than anything in the creeds.

It did not seem strange to me then that I should swallow so huge a
mouthful on the strength of one man's uncorroborated testimony.
Swedenborg's doctrines appeared to me reasonable, and indeed they are
reasonable in the sense that there is nothing in them that suggests any
form of mental derangement. I knew very little theology and no
philosophy or psychology in the modern sense. My alternative to
accepting him as a prophet was to believe him either a lunatic or a
liar, and by this time I knew enough about him to make both these
alternatives more incredible than anything in his books.

My reading during the last few years has revived my interest in
Swedenborg in quite another way. The matter of his revelation now seems
of little importance compared to the manner of it. Psychology,
para-psychology and psychical research all shed their lights upon him,
and caught in these three beams he appears as remarkable a man as he
once appeared as a prophet. In the course of the world's life there have
been visionaries and seers aplenty, but they have mostly been men of
abnormal character, displaying signs of psychophysical disturbance, even
to the point of dissociation.

But Swedenborg throughout his life remained, apart from his trances,
completely normal. He was a man not only of vast learning, but of
practical ability and held an important public post until the onset of
his visions induced him to devote the rest of his life to recording
them. He wrote in Latin with astonishing fluency, alternating his
labours with trance periods that sometimes lasted several days. His
style is precise and clear even to sedateness, and his complicated
system of theology is coherent and consistent down to the smallest
detail.

Of course his case is not unparalleled. Rudolf Steiner based his
'anthroposophy' on a similer set of experiences, and there are also the
voluminous automatic scripts of the Rev. Stainton Moses. Both these
seers claimed to have had direct communication with a world of spirits,
and among much that is contradictory certain ideas are held in common by
all three writers--in common too with the ideas of other seers and
sensitives throughout history. All these may have lived through certain
experiences in another dimension, experiences which on returning to
normal life each one would interpret according to his normal mental or
religious outlook.

The Roman Catholic Church has never guaranteed the 'private revelations'
even of its Saints, and it is notable that St. Paul when 'either in the
body or out of the body' he was caught up into Paradise, says no more
than that he had 'heard mysteries which it is not lawful for man to
utter'. St. Thomas Aquinas after a similar adventure threw down his pen
with the declaration that all his learning seemed to him now 'like
straw'. Both knew that if they tried to describe their experiences they
would be merely attempting a translation of what in its full meaning can
never be translated--as if a man should try to render an abstruse
philosophical work in the language of some primitive African tribe.

But of course it is possible that Swedenborg travelled no further than
his own back door and found in his unconscious the images that his
conscious mind systematized according to its theological preconceptions.
Many of us find that we are in a certain measure able to control our
dreams, and this faculty may have been Swedenborg's to an altogether
abnormal extent. Moreover, the hypothesis of a collective unconscious
would account for what he has in common with other visionaries. In most
newspaper offices there exists a 'write-up man' whose function it is to
recast material in an acceptable form. One detects this write-up man at
work in all the sensitives I have named, and in Swedenborg's case a
mighty intellect would have made him a truly formidable transposer of
dreams.

Looking back on all the books of my life I must, I think, assign a
larger proportion of them to Swedenborg than to any other single author,
for during those years of addiction I read nearly everything he wrote
and his output was formidable. After _Heaven and Hell_ the others had to
be procured from the Swedenborg Society and cost naturally more than a
shilling, but even that did not daunt me and I ordered one after another
as finances allowed.

Then suddenly the spell broke. I must have advanced some way in the
_Arcana coelestia_ when an impulse took me to a service of the New
Church at Kensington Town Hall. Here I found an elderly minister with an
ear-trumpet conducting a scatter of elderly people through a shortened
version of Church of England Matins. There was nothing inspiring or even
distinctive about either the service or the sermon and I came out
bitterly disappointed. The whole thing seemed dead--like a stopped
clock. No doubt I had expected too much, for I had expected wisdom and
worship and neither was there. It was a long time before I found a
religion that could offer them both.


Even at the height of my enthusiasm I could not take Swedenborg
undiluted. Or rather, changing the metaphor, let me say that I could not
eat so much bread without honey. For honey I had recourse, like Blake,
to Jacob Boehme, and honey is the word that exactly suits his brand of
mysticism, which has about it all the sweetness of the flowers he once
saw transfigured in a field.

It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast to Swedenborg. A humble
tradesman, though with more education than the average tradesman of
those times, he never attempted to clothe his vision in the language of
theology. Himself, like Swedenborg, a Lutheran, he realized the
inadequacy of Protestant terminology to convey the wonders of mystical
experience and chose instead the language of alchemy. Unlike Swedenborg,
Boehme was a true mystic, and alchemy provided a rich fount of symbolism
in which his message was less likely to be lost.

This makes him sometimes difficult for modern readers to understand.
Lately there has been a movement to rehabilitate alchemy, but for a
century at least the average man has regarded it as the sort of nonsense
that people believed in until the coming of 'Science'. Actually alchemy
was the physics of the Middle Ages, and developments in modern physics
have shown that certain of its hypotheses had a firmer foundation than
had been thought. It is also realized that alchemy was not only a
science but a philosophy. Physics and metaphysics were not then two
separate systems, but complementary aspects of the same knowledge, and
the language of alchemy is susceptible of a metaphysical as well as a
physical interpretation. The Magus who hunted the Green Lion did not
really believe in the earthly existence of this heraldic beast, but in
the quest of him typified a quest of the soul. Recently C. J. Jung has
taken alchemy into the service of psychology and his own theory of the
unconscious. It was therefore eminently right that Boehme should clothe
his visions in a dress which is part of the vesture of the human mind.

The language, though it makes his message more obscure, gives it a
beauty which Swedenborg's conspicuously lacks. My shilling copy of _The
Signature of All Things_ brought me delights similar to those I had
found in Blake, for Boehme is a poet though he writes in prose, and in
addition to his fount of alchemical symbolism he has another in nature.
It was in a field of flowers that he first saw the Signature; as he
walked in a common field outside the town the very grass became
transfigured with the Glory of God. This was not mere nature-mysticism,
for the glory of the grass lay not in itself but in the Signature of its
Creator. The field for a brief moment became Paradise--an Eden to which
when at last the Magnum Opus is accomplished and the Green Lion lies
down with the Lamb of God, Adam shall return to enjoy the Eternal May.

Boehme's visions affected me very differently from Swedenborg's. In the
case of the latter it was the content of the vision that appealed to me
rather than the vision itself, which was often too prim for beauty, his
heaven suggesting nothing so much as the White City hired by a Diocesan
Conference. But Boehme's visions of the spiritual realities within the
material forms I longed to see with my own eyes.

At that time I read Evelyn Underhill's _Mysticism_ and also _The Column
of Dust_, a novel which must have been a byproduct of the larger book.
Later she was to become a valued friend, but I did not know her in those
days when evidently her mind was moving on a similar track to mine,
though with considerably more industry and learning. She too had
obviously come under the spell of Boehme and one of the characters in
the novel has an experience similar to his in the Thor Field. For this
character a wayside tree is suddenly transfigured and seen in its
eternal tree-ness. Blake had seen a tree full of angels at Peckham Rye,
but that was not at all the same thing, for the vision was primarily of
the angels, with the tree no more than a stage property. But in Evelyn
Underhill's book the vision is of the tree, seen for the first time
really as a tree, fresh from the Artist's hand and signed with his
Signature. That was the sort of vision that I longed for, and I tried
hard to make it come to me.

Naturally this type offers more chances to the imagination than Blake's
or Swedenborg's, but even so I had no success. I would earnestly
contemplate my surroundings in the hope that they would suddenly become
changed into the furniture of another world; but they never did. I once
thought one sunny day that I had witnessed a change in the Hastings
Pier, which shows how utterly I had misunderstood the whole matter.
Boehme proclaims that the glory of all things lies not in themselves but
in their signature, and the signature on the Hastings Pier was obviously
not by the same hand that had signed the wayside tree.

I fed my purpose with other mystical writers. There was an anonymous
work entitled _The Canon_ which introduced me to the mysteries of the
Kabbala, and there was Paracelsus with his Four Pillars--Philosophy,
Astronomy, Alchemy and Virtue. I also read a great deal of theosophy,
varying between the pamphlets of the Theosophical Society and Madame
Blavatsky's monumental excogitations. Thus it was--much wind, many
sparks, but no fire.


And the result of it all? This is humiliating, for after all my effort
and preparation there was not only no vision but no book. _The Pleasures
of Insanity_ was not even begun, and apart from the vague general
memories of my reading I cannot recall any plan for its construction. It
was to be a synthesis of esoteric doctrine as taught by such conflicting
prophets as Boehme, Swedenborg, and Blake, but of the lines on which I
hoped to achieve this I have no idea. Nor can I remember what brought my
grandiose project to an end, whether it died suddenly or whether I just
grew weary. The girl friend who had introduced me to _Mysticism_ and
_The Canon_ had also introduced me to a young man; it may have been
that--or it may not. Anyway, the time was now close at hand when I
should forget my dreams and feel a little ashamed of having overslept
so long.



                                   6

                           BOOKS HAVE AUTHORS

My awakening, like most, was due to an outside noise. Hitherto the
noises of the outside world had reached me only in sufficient strength
to become part of my dream. But as sleep grows lighter the traffic in
the busy street becomes itself and the sleeper in proportionate measure
himself, so that when a voice bids him wake consciousness is already at
hand and able to recognize that what up to now had been taken for
consciousness was only a dream.

In my case it was two voices that bade me wake--the voices of two
friends who had long been wide awake themselves. In fact I doubt if
either of them had ever dreamed as I did.

W. L. George and G. B. Stern were not my first literary friends. Besides
my encounter with Marguerite Curtis I had for some years been on
friendly terms with two poets, Robert Nichols and Trevor Blakemore. But
both of these, the first especially, had been part of the dream.

My friendship with Robert Nichols started with what would now be called
a 'fan letter'. He had admired one of my novels and wrote to tell me so.
I had already received a few such letters, but not enough to prevent me
regarding the writers with awed gratitude. In this case the letter had
other merits besides its appreciation. It was long and interesting,
revealing what I thought a most unusual and attractive personality.
Robert was then cramming for Oxford at a Suffolk parsonage, and already
writing poetry. In the course of the next year or so I was to read a
great deal of his unpublished work, for my answer to his letter had the
unprecedented result of inspiring another, and soon we were both deep in
a most voluminous exchange and writing with all the unreserve natural
when in correspondence with somebody one has never seen and never
expects to see.

That being so it was perhaps unwise to arrange a meeting, but we were
both dreamers, Robert with more excuse than I, for he was five years
younger. His share of the dream encouraged him to think that our meeting
would be much more interesting if we were in love. This was rather
difficult to arrange at short notice, but by no means beyond the powers
of either of us. A friend of mine had recently received a proposal of
marriage from a man she had never seen (and indeed such things do happen
because 'if they did not,' as Jane Austen says, 'we should never read of
them'), so his declaration both in prose and verse did not provoke the
laughter that would have saved us both a lot of real as well as
imaginary distress. Our romance lasted about a week, but my broken heart
was still painful a year afterwards, and in fact did not completely
recover till I came out of the dream.

Years later I married a man who in rummaging through some of his
possessions turned up an old photograph that had once been the light of
my eyes. 'That's Robert Nichols--we were at Winchester together, in the
same house.' The coincidence went further in the discovery that Robert
himself was living only a few miles away. Inevitably we met, but his
greeting, after twenty years, sent a chill down my spine. 'Hullo,
Sheila! So we meet again. I've still got all your letters.'

By then he had made his name as a war poet, though his published work
since the war had been mainly in prose--a poet's prose of an obscurity
that baffled some of his readers while it flattered others. There had
always been an element of roughness and wildness about him, making him
fly widdershins both with people and ideas. But through it all shone a
deep sincerity and a perfectionism which would not let him approve his
work while he could still improve it. In consequence he was a slower
writer than almost any I know, and when death took him in middle age the
amount he had published was out of all proportion to the amount he had
written. He set before me a very high standard of literary integrity and
I shall always be grateful to him for some painful truths.

My other poet friend, Trevor Blakemore, was a very different type of
man. He was not only a poet but a _bon viveur_, famous for his
dinner-parties, and he raised my standards in gastronomy as much as in
poetry. I first met him at a dinner which a friend of his and mine was
giving at the Cheshire Cheese for me to meet Hugh Walpole. I fear that
on that occasion he shone only with a reflected light, for Walpole was
not only a rising novelist but a critic who had given me one of the best
notices (in the old Standard) that it would ever be my lot to receive.

No doubt Walpole and I expected too much of each other and in
consequence were both disappointed. I had expected him to be as friendly
in speech as he had been in print, while he had expected--it is not for
me to say, but probably nothing like the shy, awkward, creature that I
doubtless appeared. In any case, though the evening ended in a
friendship it was not between me and Hugh Walpole.

Trevor Blakemore proved himself my friend in a number of ways, not the
least of which was his taking in hand the fortunes of my only book of
verse. He did this in a double sense, for he not only helped me on the
business side but--which was much more necessary--to revise and improve
the contents. He himself published several volumes of verse, but he had
not the force or the originality of Robert Nichols, except when he wrote
in rage, and then the results were unfit for publication. I remember him
most vividly as a connoisseur of other people's work. He loved to read
aloud in a singing, sepulchral voice that set the words like bells in
one's memory. I first met Rupert Brooke that way.

                Mamua, when our laughter ends,
                And hearts and bodies, brown as white,
                Are dust about the doors of friends,
                Or scent a-blowing down the night. . .

The words are Brooke's, but it is Trevor's voice that reads them even
now.


W. L. George and G. B. Stern also entered my life on the fan mail. By
that time I took such letters more calmly, but fortunately I had not
learned what many would have learned from my experience with Robert
Nichols and refused to meet my correspondents. If I had my life would
have been considerably the poorer.

They both wrote in the same year, but under a different impulse. G. B.
Stern wrote to praise my latest novel; W. L. George wrote in more
general terms. He had seen in my recent book a decline from the one
before it. In the latter lay buried the seed of future success, for it
was about farm life and country people, and not, as the other, about
townspeople living in the country.

Naturally he did not tell me this when he first wrote, but we soon came
to know each other well, for our meeting took place very early in our
acquaintance and he preferred talking to writing letters. He was
infectiously interested in the process of book construction, and one of
the many debts I owe him is that he entirely reformed mine. Till then I
had followed blindly a hit-or-miss method. I sat down and wrote in
pencil till the book was finished. Then I made in ink a second version
which was supposed to be a fair copy but actually turned out very
differently from the first. Endless revisions and adjustments followed,
for I had no detailed plan, only 'an idea in my head'.

Willy George taught me to plan beforehand in great detail--almost down
to paragraphs; then having got my blueprint absolutely clear, to follow
it closely in a single script which would need only slight revision.
This method not only made writing a simpler and less harassing
occupation, but I venture to think it obtained better results. Certainly
the novels I wrote after I changed to it had greater success and longer
lives.

When I met him George was the author of three novels, all of which had
aroused discussion and one of which had caused a storm. _A Bed of Roses_
was the story of a prostitute, and what is more, of a successful
prostitute, who instead of coming to a bad end lived happily ever
afterwards. This would not do for 1912 and the libraries refused to
handle the book. It is not a masterpiece, or indeed literature of a high
order, but it is intensely vital, like all his work, and chock-full of
intelligence. He accepted its fate with a shrug, and wrote _The City of
Light_, which is the only novel of his I have not read. His third, _The
Making of an Englishman_, was very much his own story.

Unlike the hero of that book, W. L. George was not a born Frenchman, but
he had spent so much of his life in France that this made little
difference. French civilization is intensely penetrating, and when he
came to England as a young man he had as much difficulty as his
Cadoresse in turning himself into an Englishman. He never completely
threw off his French accent or learned that there were things one must
not say and, above all, things one must not wear. When I first met him
he was wearing cloth-topped boots, and though he progressed beyond this
stage he never shared the Englishman's horror of being too well dressed.
If he had I should not have a very pleasant memory of him in splendid
attire, top hat, lavender waistcoat and sponge bag trousers, scouring
the meaner shops of Soho for stale bread and bad bananas as a
preliminary to taking me to the Zoo on the top of a bus.

He taught me not only to work but to play. He saw both as ways of
enjoying life, whereas I was inclined to take both too solemnly. Writing
books he once declared was no more than a pleasant way of earning one's
living, which, though not entirely true, was a wholesome change from the
rather highfalutin attitude of the little group of authors I had known
in Hastings. Equally commercial was his idea that every author should
wear a label, in order to impress his work more clearly on the public's
mind. In my case this did not do much harm, for I had already chosen my
own course and only required encouragement in it. But with himself he
was less fortunate, for he decided to appear as 'the man who understands
women'. This led to some painful publicity, of which perhaps the worst
example was the photograph of an embarrassed Willy sheepishly holding up
a pair of silk stockings reputed to have been sent to him by a female
reader so struck by his understanding of women that she was quite sure
he must be one. Knowing him as I did, I was not surprised to hear that
the photograph was no display of blatant self-advertisement, but of
sheer good nature. A young journalist, anxious for a 'story', had
brought the stockings along in the hope that he would be induced to pose
with them; and Willy was one of the few men he would have found willing
to make a fool of himself to give him his chance.

I am convinced that he unnecessarily belittled his own talents and that
he was a much better writer than he would acknowledge. Towards the end
of his life he produced too much, but the greater part of his work
deserved to live longer than it has; his fourth novel, for instance,
_The Second Blooming_, was a vital and intelligent study of married
life, in which he really seemed to come close to the understanding of a
woman's heart.

'Vital and intelligent.' Those adjectives apply to him as much as to his
work, and his influence was bound to be good for anyone like myself who
was in danger of becoming over-sublimated. He loved music-halls, which
till then I had never entered (except in their more high-class
manifestations at the Palace and the Coliseum), and he loved big, noisy
thoroughfares, and crowds on Hampstead Heath. He warned me repeatedly,
though quite unnecessarily, against making too many friendships among
authors. Authors gave a literary slant to life, they did not see it as
it was. How he would have loathed the Bloomsbury School and the coterie
novel had he lived to see them!

This view of authors did not prevent him taking a lively interest in the
writers of his own day, though it was an interest rather like that of
those who study 'form' in horses. He had his team of probable winners
among the women novelists, to match Henry James' team of promising young
men--Hugh Walpole, Compton Mackenzie, Gilbert Cannan, E. M. Forster,
'with D. H. Lawrence panting in the dusty rear'. George's selection
included myself, Ivy Low, Amber Reeves, Viola Meynell and Bridget
McLagan; but he proved (in spite of the D. H. Lawrence gaffe) a less
accurate tipster than James, for three at least of his favourites
dropped out of the race. Ivy Low married Litvinoff, the Russian Foreign
Minister, and went to live in Russia, while Amber Reeves and Bridget
McLagan gave up writing for other activities. I suppose that women will
never be as safe a bet as men, for life is only too likely to nobble
them.

Actually the only author to whom he introduced me was D. H. Lawrence,
and the meeting was nearly as disappointing as that earlier one with
Hugh Walpole. It failed, too, for the same reason, though this time the
shyness was Lawrence's. He had just made his name with _Sons and
Lovers_, had just come to London and just got married when George gave a
dinner-party for him--at which we were bidden 'not to dress', a
circumstance that in those days emphasized the peculiarity of the guest
of the evening. In conversation our host dwelt characteristically on the
commercial side of authorship, ignoring its more soulful aspects.
Lawrence had been offered for his next book an advance of a hundred and
fifty pounds, which seemed to him the fortune that it seemed to me. He
and his wife now considered themselves free of financial anxieties and
were planning to range the world. I liked her very much better than I
liked him, and for the very qualities that were to make strife between
them later on, one of which was her readiness to laugh. As a personality
I found him uncouthly knotted up in his own past and a tangle of ideals
and prejudices, but she was simple and merry, and the part of the
evening I enjoyed most was the half-hour we spent alone together.

No doubt it is unwise to meet authors whose work we admire, because it
is impossible for most of them to come up to the expectations aroused by
their books. Indeed, the better the book the less likely the writer to
live up to it in his manner and conversation. The author of a witty play
or novel may give evidence of it in his speech, but profounder subjects
do not come near enough to the surface to be displayed at a first
encounter. But that people will persist in expecting great things of
authors is shown by the following pathetic little story.

I was staying with a friend at a country inn when an elderly man with a
small brown moustache arrived on a bicycle and signed the hotel register
in the name of Thomas Anstie Guthrie. I at once recognized him as 'F.
Anstey', author of those immortal fantasies _Vice-Versa_ and _The Brass
Bottle_ and I unwarily passed on the knowledge to my friend. She begged
me to speak to him, which was not difficult as we were the only other
guests and there was only one room for us to sit in. I found him
cheerful and friendly and the three of us spent a pleasant evening
playing poker patience. But my friend was not satisfied.

'You haven't told him who you are.'

Nor had I, as it happened, mentioned his own work. We were just a couple
of strangers meeting at an inn. I pointed out that as he did not write
under his own name he might not wish to be recognized, and as for my
name, he had signed his own under it in the hotel register, so he must
know it without being told, and either it meant nothing to him or he had
the same scruples as I.

But she would have none of this, and in the end I grew impatient.

'Why are you so anxious for me to "tell him who I am"? He couldn't be
more friendly than he's been tonight, so what difference would it make?'

'If he knew who you were he wouldn't just spend the evening playing
poker patience. He and you would have such a deep, thrilling, wonderful
conversation, and _I would sit there drinking it all in_.'


G. B. Stern did not share W. L. George's views on authors. Indeed, under
her auspicies I was to meet more authors in a year than I had hitherto
in the course of my life. This was done by means of a trip to Cornwall.
Unlike me, she was sensitive to literary fashions and Cornwall had long
been the fashion among novelists. Hugh Walpole lived there and had used
it as a background for more than one of his novels, so did Compton
Mackenzie; and when G. B. Stern and I arrived at St. Merryn towards the
end of the First World War we found already in residence and within easy
reach of us J. D. Beresford, Kenneth Richmond, Dorothy Richardson, and
C. A. Dawson Scott.

The last seemed to be in some sort of unofficial charge of the colony. I
shall never forget her as she appeared on the doorstep of the
coastguard's cottage where we were to stay, majestic in a purple velvet
tea-gown, under which her bare feet showed the travel stains of a mile's
walk. She welcomed us very kindly to St. Merryn and ordered us to take
off our shoes and stockings.

She was too firm about this for us to disobey her, and after one or two
agonizing experiments we both became so accustomed to going barefoot
that we were quite sorry when the time came to put on our shoes again.
The tea-gown I never understood, but I soon diagnosed the bare feet as
part of an anti-convention complex as powerful as any Victorian
manifestation of its opposite. Though herself a woman of the utmost
integrity--her nickname of Sappho had no connexion with anything more
sinister than her early efforts as a poet--she loved to think of authors
as emancipated from all the usual moral ties and the ordinary
conventions of society. I fear that I must have sometimes caused her
great distress, because I lived with my parents and on the only occasion
she called at my home tea was served in a silver teapot. If I had
offered it to her in a saucer with Dog on it she could not have been
more upset. 'Why do you have a silver teapot? Do you use it every day?'
It was all in character that she should be annoyed when authors weakly
yielded to temptation and got married instead of living together in sin,
and I know of one couple who did not dare tell her of their nuptials and
allowed her to think the best of them until by some inadvertence their
guilt appeared. When G. B. Stern and I married we both had great
difficulty in reconciling our husbands to what she said about them,
neither of them enjoying being treated as our seducers.

In spite of this nonsense I became sincerely attached to her, for under
it all was a warm, kind, friendly and essentially humble nature. She was
quite without vanity or self-seeking. She herself was a very good
writer, and her novels deserved far more praise and notice than they
received. She dealt mainly in rural subjects, and was perhaps too much
inclined to see 'something nasty in the woodshed', but she wrote with
strength and originality, and her characters all had the stamp of truth.
But no novel of hers had any material success, and the essential
generosity of her nature was shown in her lack of resentment or envy. On
the contrary, she delighted in the successes of other authors, many of
whom had less talent than she, and her ambition found an extra-personal
satisfaction in the founding of literary societies.

The first of these, the Tomorrow Club, was being formed in her mind
during that Cornish summer and was launched immediately on her return to
London. The members met once a month to be addressed by one of their
number, and at first these gatherings were highly stimulating, almost
all the young writers of note belonging and attending. But before long
the floor was taken too often by those who confounded wit and impudence,
and Sappho herself grew weary of her boisterous creation. It was run for
a considerable time by Trevor Blakemore, but changed its nature,
becoming a club where the nonliterary public were given a monthly
opportunity to hear the lions roar.

Sappho transferred her energies to the P.E.N. (Poets, Editors,
Novelists), which has long outlived her. Unlike Tomorrow it was to be a
dining club, and I remember its first dinner in a room above a Soho
restaurant, with Galsworthy, its first president, presiding over some
twenty authors at a single table. Soon vast rooms and many tables were
required for its accommodation, and it was not very long before branches
of P.E.N. had been established in most European capitals. Galsworthy
believed strongly in an international body of authors as a safeguard to
peace, but it is noteworthy that those who organized the Authors' Peace
Movement ignored P.E.N.

Through these two clubs I naturally came to meet most of the authors of
my day. Those first years of peace seemed to have been particularly
favourable to novelists. The war had been a poets' war, but when it
ended those of the poets who had not lost their lives seemed to lose
their voices. Novelists, on the other hand, found encouragement in the
thought of life returning to its normal problems and relationships
without the eschatological complications of war.

Many young writers produced their best work at this period. Compton
Mackenzie, having consolidated the fame he had won with _Sinister
Street_ by what many considered his best novel, _Guy and Pauline_, had
started to write of _Sylvia Scarlett_. Hugh Walpole, having also won
fame with _Fortitude_ and _The Dark Forest_, was reviving his own youth
in the _Jeremy_ books. D. H. Lawrence had unfortunately fallen foul of
the censors with _The Rainbow_, but was soon to write that lovely book
_The Lost Girl_. J. D. Beresford had completed the _Jacob Stahl_
trilogy, and Somerset Maugham, long famous as a playwright, had launched
with _Of Human Bondage_ into another type of success. Alec Waugh had
returned from a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany to show that _The Loom
of Youth_ had not been a literary flash-in-the-pan, while other young
novelists, such as Frederick Niven, Oliver Onions, F. Tennyson Jesse,
Rose Macaulay, Stella Benson and Viola Meynell were forging ahead into
acceptance by the public and the critics.

The way of the young writers was made easier by the fact that the older
generation, those who had established themselves before the war, seemed
now to be marking time. Wells, having become a war-time best seller with
_Mr. Britling Sees it Through_ and its theological chaser _God the
Invisible King_, was producing novels of no heavier calibre than _The
Wife of Sir Isaac Harman_ and _The Secret Places of the Heart_. Arnold
Bennett was turning from the Five Towns to the worship of _Hotel
Imperial_, while Galsworthy had unfortunately been caught in the wheel
of his own creation and with _The Forsyte Saga_ was delighting those
whose feelings he had outraged in _The Man of Property_.


Undoubtedly those immediately post-war years belonged to youth and
imagination, and to them also belong my happiest literary memories. I
was no longer a lone fish but swimming with the shoal, no longer lurking
in a backwater but carried on the tide. In fact I might have been
accused of keeping too carefully mid-stream, for I took no part in the
new literary experiments that were being made around me.

It was natural that at such a time new ideas should arise and take
shape. One of the most widely tried-out was the 'stream of
consciousness' novel, in which the author abandoned his god's-eye view,
and became purely immanent in his creation. This method had been put
into practice before the war, when Dorothy Richardson started her
_Miriam_ sequence of eight novels. But now it was taken up by other
writers, and in some circles it was considered as old-fashioned to know
what your characters were doing as it had formerly been to address the
reader.

Dorothy Richardson, though she was the founder of this school of
fiction, was not its best exponent. She was too unselective. Miriam's
mind-stream carries an overwhelming amount of debris, too much when we
consider that in all but certain pathological types consciousness itself
is selective and is continually sweeping flotsam to the sides and
clearing the main current. Many novelists, especially the more
experienced, realized this, and the technique is seen at its best and
clearest when used by that very fine though almost forgotten novelist,
May Sinclair.

Ever since _The Divine Fire_ appeared in the nineteen hundreds May
Sinclair had stood in high repute with the critics. She had also had a
measure of popular success. Her novels were in a true sense a criticism
of English family life and manners, written with thoughtfulness and
distinction. She had also written at least one book on philosophy. She
was now no longer young, but for some reason she never took her place
among the top-ranking novelists, such as Wells, Conrad and Galsworthy,
or even with that no more gifted and much more boring writer Mrs.
Humphry Ward. She was deeply interested in the craft of writing and it
was characteristic of her to try out an entirely new technique towards
the end of her literary career.

With her the immanental method was completely successful, for her
self-discipline and artistic discernment saved her heroine from drowning
in her own stream of consciousness, which had been the fate of many.
Indeed I would say that _Mary Olivier_ is May Sinclair's finest book. It
has more emotional strength than its predecessors and a deeper insight
into character--virtues which flourish through the technique and not in
spite of it.

There is, however, the drawback inevitably attached to any literary
fashion--a certain datedness. Of course all novels date--Fielding could
never be taken for a contemporary of Dickens or Dickens of Graham
Greene--but more widely, in generations or even centuries, whereas a
limited and passing fashion stamps the year. And for some reason the
'stream of consciousness' fashion quickly passed. It is true that
Virginia Woolf's novels are immanental, but the stresses are so
different that we cannot compare them. Nor does the curious, jerky but
completely clear style of _Mary Olivier_ flow logically into the
obscurities of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein.

There were other and perhaps more potent influences at work, influences
as far apart as Freud and Proust. The technique of psycho-analysis had
come before the public during the later stages of the war, and certain
novelists grabbed it as a means of displaying their characters. Novels
became full of dreams, and secret motives were pulled out from under
actions and laid on the dissecting table. The result was very much as if
an artist should draw a figure showing all the muscles and viscera. Some
of Blake's drawings are of that kind, just because he did not as a rule
draw from the living model, but Blake was a genius who could put life
and meaning into the Ghost of a Flea. It was perhaps fortunate that the
Freudian craze in fiction soon died down, leaving however a contribution
to the novelist's art similar to that offered to painting by a knowledge
of anatomy.

The influence of Proust was more subtle, more beneficial and more
lasting. Indeed it is still at work and may be said to have changed the
technique of the English novel from narration to evocation. Proust has
the further distinction of being the first important foreign influence
on English fiction. The novel in its origins is an essentially English
form of art and the first English novelists made a deep impression on
the Continent. Richardson especially had his disciples and imitators
both in France and Germany. In the eighteen-nineties it was considered
smart and _fin-de-sicle_ to read French novels, because they were
supposed to be 'naughty', but it was not till the First World War made
of France an ally that Stendhal, that giant of French literature, became
generally known over here. Romain Rolland had had a certain popularity
before the war, but his pacifism destroyed it. Proust became the god of
the post-war novelists. The old gods of the nineteenth-century classics
were dethroned and even some later theophanies. His influence was
discernible in our leading writers, obvious in the less accomplished.

Another outside influence came from America. Before the war only a few
American authors were at all well known over here, and they mostly
belonged to the past. When I was a child my father's non-medical
bookcase--otherwise a barren hunting ground--displayed a copy of
_Roughing It_ and _The Innocents Abroad_ bound in a single volume. I had
been told that Mark Twain was a comic writer, but my repeated efforts to
read him provided even less amusement than _Charley's Aunt_. It was not
till many years later that I came to read and re-read with unfailing
delight his _Huckleberry Finn_. That book alone proclaims him a genius.
But I doubt if he ever had much influence on English fiction, nor had
those American writers of the tough school, Bret Harte, Jack London and
Upton Sinclair. They were read and admired, but always regarded as
exotics.

To balance the toughs there had been quite another school of American
fiction. I refer to the transatlantic version of the Scottish Kailyard
school of writing. In my mother's bookcase--separated from my father's
by a whole forbidden library of medical text-books--was _Timothy's
Quest_, an early work by Kate Douglas Wiggin. This I also had tried in
vain to read and later years provided no successor with the magic of
_Huckleberry Finn_, for I failed equally with _Rebecca of Sunnybrook
Farm_, the tale which brought its author fame and fortune.

After that there came from the United States a veritable sunburst of
which I absorbed only a single beam. I do not remember much about _Mrs.
Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch_ by Alice Hegan Rice, but I owe it a grateful
tribute because, read aloud to me by my sister Mona, it provided my
first release from the misery of a long and painful illness. Mrs. Wiggs
indeed had shown a certain homely wisdom, but wisdom soon melted away in
the smiles of _Pollyanna_ (the Full-of-Smiles Girl) who followed her
across the Atlantic.

Perhaps syrup is less cloying when it is called molasses, and no doubt
it provided a welcome change from the horrors on which the public was
supping at that time. In any case, the popularity of a succession of
Polyannas encouraged G. B. Stern and myself to make her the heroine of
an unpublished collaboration entitled _Borrowed with Thanks_ which we
wrote in a small, depressing, cockroach-infested inn somewhere in the
Chilterns. Our idea had been to borrow a character from all the best
known novelists of the day and combine them in adventures of our own
construction. Our hero was Michael Fane from Compton Mackenzie's
_Sinister Street_; we had also borrowed characters from Somerset
Maugham, Hugh Walpole, Viola Meynell, W. L. George and many others, but
I cannot remember what we did with them. There were attributions at the
end of the cast such as: 'Love scenes by D. H. Lawrence', 'Theology by
Mrs. Humphry Ward' (who had just published a sequel to _Robert Elsmere_
called _The Case of Richard Meynell_). Otherwise nothing remains in
memory but the general idea, which I still think was a good one, though
the book itself probably was not, for no publisher would accept it.


I doubt if the sunshine school of American fiction had much influence on
our own Kailyard, which under Barrie's direction had always been a
wistful sort of place. But immediately after the war there was a new
invasion by transatlantic novelists of a very different order. Some of
these no doubt had been with us before, but as with France, a military
alliance seemed necessary to make us truly appreciate the literature of
another country. It must also be remembered that for most of the
nineteenth century, when the peace and security of the Victorian era had
provided a soil in which literary giants could flourish, America had
been still in the pioneer stage of venture and experiment, coming to
birth as a nation through internal strife and all that is most
unfriendly to the arts.

But now war and peace had established her in the same position as
ourselves, with the same vain hopes from one and of the other. We no
longer imported only great names and bestsellers but a rising generation
of 'younger novelists'--Fanny Hurst, whose _Lummox_ had just made a
stir, Sinclair Lewis, newly established with _Main Street_, Theodore
Dreiser of _An American Tragedy_, and perhaps most significant of all in
his influence on the novel, Ernest Hemingway with _Farewell to Arms_.
Willa Cather did not, in my opinion, produce her best work till the
nineteen-thirties, when she won praise in two continents for her
magnificent _Death Comes for the Archbishop_, but that superb artist
Edith Wharton maintained her fame among us, keeping her head well above
the jostling crowd of younger people.

The trans-ocean traffic was still unequal, for this country was unable
to offer American novelists the lecture opportunities that the United
States provided for ours. Between the two World Wars almost every
English novelist of note must have visited America, either to lecture or
to write scripts for films. My father's death prevented me going when
first invited, and it was not till my husband's and my own withdrawal
from the Anglican Church made us both independent of time and place that
I finally succeeded in arriving where I had long wanted to be. I must
have been among the last batches, for Italy's war with Abyssinia started
just after our return, to be followed by the Civil War in Spain and the
general break-up of that world in which books rather than bombs were
international exchange.

But as the sands ran out during the thirties it seemed as if more and
more, and yet more and more, novels were being written; and that was in
spite of the fact that biography had been brought back to life by the
'debunking' methods of Lytton Strachey. There were many new names,
though perhaps fewer in Britain than in America, where a new school of
fiction had been started by Thornton Wilder's _Bridge of San Luis Rey_.
The thirties saw the rise to fame, if not the first appearance, of J. B.
Priestley, Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Graham
Greene, and with these the literary future seemed to lie.

Indeed it did lie. For when _New Writing_ revived after the Second World
War, with a bright glitter of stars as its contributors, at least one
critic pointed out that those same stars had been shining in the
literary heavens for twenty years. The war, unlike its predecessor, had
produced nothing that was both new and important in the way of either
poets or novelists; so one was obliged to assume that being a New Writer
was a purely literary status and had no more to do with the time of
first appearance than being a Younger Novelist had to do with age.

The latter point had been decided in 1920, at a meeting of 'younger
poets and novelists' convened for the purpose of sending a tribute to
Thomas Hardy on his eightieth birthday. Hugh Walpole was in the chair
and considered our first business was to fix an age-limit for those we
were to approach for signatures and subscriptions. 'At what age,' he
asked, 'does one cease to be a "younger novelist"?' He suggested
thirty-five, and a murmur of consternation went through those assembled.
I was safe at thirty-three, and so I suppose was Walpole or he would
have suggested a higher figure, but most of the company feared they
would be excluded. Forty, then? But no, that would not do either. Some
of the most important names were attached to even greater ages.
Forty-five left still some uncovered, and Hugh Walpole finally
exclaimed--'Very well, then--say fifty. Surely a "younger" poet or
novelist can't be over fifty!' But a little dark man stood up at the
back of the room--I heard afterwards that he was W. H. Davies--and said
apologetically: 'I'm afraid I'm fifty-three.'

It was therefore decided that being a younger poet or novelist was an
entirely literary status. You could be one till you were eighty or never
be one at all. It was your work, not you, that was 'younger'. And with
that definition we have still to be content.



                                   7

                    SAD PAGEANT OF FORGOTTEN WRITERS

On our schoolroom bookshelf for many years stood a thick, shabby, brown
novel, which according to its geographical position should belong to my
sister Dulcie. Actually it belonged to my mother and I do not know for
what reason it was banished to the schoolroom, but she proclaimed her
ownership when once in a reminiscent mood she said to me--'I told your
father he was not to come home without a copy of _Cissie_. He was not
clever at buying books, but I told him I must have it, and that day he
brought it home with him.'

_Cissie_, by Emma Worboise.

Does any eye but mine recognize that title of the eighteen-eighties and
does anyone remember Ernma Worboise or any other book she wrote? All I
know of her myself is _Cissie_, and perhaps that was all she wrote, but
I do not think so, for though the author of many books may make a name
with one of them I doubt if a single novel, especially at that period,
would have penetrated into my family. We were not a literary household,
and for my mother to have so set her heart on reading _Cissie_ points to
a certain amount of talk and discussion during afternoon calls. Or could
it have been--for she was newly married then--just a sick fancy of
pregnancy, and can I attribute my own literary tendencies to the
pre-natal influence of Emma Worboise? If so, the influence is not
entirely benign, for no one could be more completely forgotten.

I made several attempts to read _Cissie_ and finally succeeded in
getting within a measurable distance of the end. But it was a depressing
story. I had not reached an age when I could judge it from any literary
point of view, but the sufferings of the eldest daughter of a
poverty-stricken doctor (it may have been the medical setting that
brought _Cissie_ into our house) discouraged me profoundly, and again
and again I put the book aside and turned to something more in accord
with my tastes and also with my years. But final perseverance showed me
that Cissie's hard luck was changed by a carriage accident conveniently
happening just outside her father's house. This brought the doctor
wealthy patients, and Cissie ceased to be the household drudge. Whether
she was also provided for in matters of the heart I do not know, for I
was totally uninterested in such things. But I think there must have
been a romantic issue in the book somewhere, though I do not remember
it.

An author I remember even less clearly is Amy Reade, whose novel of
circus life, _Ruby, or Slaves of the Sawdust_ created quite a stir in
the eighteen-nineties. I did not at that time read it myself, for it
belonged to my Swiss nursery-governess who considered it improper on the
strength of the dashes and asterisks with which its pages were
sprinkled. But many years later I was in correspondence with Madame
Reade Jamet (she had married a Frenchman and lived as _dame
pensionnaire_ in a French convent) and she lent me a copy of the book,
which had, according to her, done great things for the reform and
general cleaning-up of circus life. The slaves of the sawdust were not
performing animals, as they would be had _Ruby_ been written today, but
young girls enslaved and maltreated by unscrupulous circus proprietors
and ring-masters. Their story was told with much emotion and very little
art, and the only part of it I remember is the part I read when the book
was for a brief moment in my hands at the age of nine. But as it
penetrated the House of Commons as well as our nursery its fall into
oblivion seems even more tragic than the fall of _Cissie_.

Both _Cissie_ and _Ruby_ were stories for adults, but when I was a
schoolgirl there was a writer called Emma Marshall whose books were
considered highly suitable for young people. She wrote historical novels
with an architectural setting--_Under the Dome of St. Paul's_ and _Under
Salisbury Spire_ are titles I remember--and these were published in a
uniform edition with graceful line drawings of churches and cathedrals
as illustrations. She had a great vogue--more, I should say, among those
who like to give suitable presents to the young than among the young
themselves. No doubt she combined instruction with entertainment in an
agreeable form at a reasonable price. But personally I found her dull
and boring. Her style was flat and her characters never seemed to come
off the page. I had passed the age that doted on L. T. Meade, but these
half grown-up stories were not to my taste. The only one of her novels I
really liked was _The Parson's Daughter_ and that was a freak, for in
writing it she had renounced the framework of ecclesiastical
architecture which earned her the title of 'sweet, temple-haunting
martlet' from an admirer, and substituted a gallery of portraits by
Romney and Gainsborough. Romney's 'Parson's Daughter' married his 'Young
Squire', and their story ended tragically, which was all in its favour
where I was concerned. I read the book more than once before I passed on
to the more adult but still youthful thrills provided by Edna Lyall.

Another writer for girls at this period was Rosa Nouchette Carey. I do
not think there are any special writers for girls at the present day, at
least not for the sort of girls who when I was nineteen or twenty read,
as I did not, Rosa Nouchette Carey, Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey and Mrs.
Philip Champion de Crespigny (who could forget such names?). There will
always be special writers for schoolgirls, but the modern girl who has
just left school reads, if she reads at all, what her parents read, and
would think poorly of the literary rice pudding and lemonade which her
grandmother considered a suitable diet for her mother at her age.

'The loveliest thing about a young girl is her bloom,' a middle-aged
spinster said to me once long ago when she caught me reading George
Moore's _Evelyn Innes_. 'It is sad indeed when she loses it. If you read
that sort of novel you will lose your bloom.'

I doubt if in these days anyone troubles much about a young girl's bloom
apart from her complexion, but at that time it was carefully preserved
by a definite school of writing. This could be described as
romantic-domestic. My memories are sparse, for I could not bear this
sort of thing myself; but once when I was ill and defenceless I had one
of those novels read to me. It was called _A Houseful of Girls_ and was
about a large all-female family, who had tremendous fun over the spring
cleaning and finally all got married except one who stayed at home to be
a comfort to her parents. Evidently thought of any kind was considered
destructive to bloom, for there was never in these tales any reference
to religion (apart from incidental churchgoing), politics or public
events. This ruled out Edna Lyall, who gave her readers plenty to think
about, though nothing that could do them any harm. Otherwise, at a time
when there were so many novels besides hers that one would have thought
eminently suitable for girls---Stanley Weyman's, for instance, or
Baroness Orczy's or Francis Marion Crawford's to name only a few--it
seems strange that there should have been a whole school of fiction
catering for a public which surely never before or since was so well
provided for. But those writers undoubtedly had their reward or they
would not have written, though I doubt if the public they reached was
always the public they aimed at. My mother, for instance, adored this
type of novel and would gladly have read nothing else. It seemed a cruel
irony of fate that gave her a daughter who preferred _Humphry Clinker_.


That writers for girls in age or in mind should be forgotten by the next
generation is not perhaps surprising or particularly sad. Oblivion is
tragic only when it swallows what should be remembered, and we may ask
ourselves: Has anything been lost that was worth keeping? I should say
that it had. Some of the novels of Edna Lyall, for instance, seem to me
as well worth keeping as some of the novels of Charlotte Yonge. Of
course the term oblivion is relative, and I am using it only as
equivalent to 'out of print', for obviously no book I mention here has
been completely forgotten. Others besides myself must remember it. But
to survive only in the minds of a few middle-aged or elderly people
might have seemed a hard fate to those writers who enjoyed even a brief
period of fame and prosperity.

I have already drawn attention to the little group of authors living at
Hastings when I began to write. One might in a sense have called them
retired authors, for they no longer produced much and their fame lay
mostly behind them. Foremost among these was Coulson Kernahan, who had
made a name for himself by writing what I can describe only and
inadequately as pious allegories, such as _The World Without a Child_
and _God and the Ant_. These were little more than booklets, but they
had delighted and edified the first years of the century, and--though he
also wrote thrillers--there hung about him somehow the mantle of a
prophet.

On the other hand his wife, Jeanie Gwynne Kernahan, made no claims to be
other than a commercial novelist. 'Every book I write,' she once told
me, 'is sure of a two thousand sale to the libraries, but of course the
reviewers never notice me.' In time it became apparent that on those two
thousand copies the household depended rather than on the past glories
of _God and the Ant_. She wrote at night--all night: 'for then I can't
be interrupted and I am free to attend to my housekeeping during the
day.' I suppose she sometimes slept, but I cannot think when. Memory
must play me false when it shows her presenting me with a copy of her
thousandth novel. It must have been her hundredth. Yet other writers
have produced a hundred novels--G. B. Burgin, for instance--and I cannot
get rid of the impression that Jeanie Gwynne Kernahan wrote more than
anyone has ever written before or since. She was a brave, humble,
industrious devoted woman, quite prepared I am sure to be forgotten
while her husband's fame echoed down the centuries.

He was excessively kind to me and I would not like to say anything that
might seem ungrateful, but it was very much the kindness of God to the
ant--a kindly, benevolent god to an ant he wished to encourage, but
certainly between us a gulf was fixed. I was abashed by the great names
that rolled off his tongue. He knew practically all the established
authors of the day and had a large collection of their letters and
signed photographs. In his later years he became so obsessed by this
that he refused ever to leave home, under the impression that, if he
did, anything so valuable would be immediately stolen. His greatest
kindness to me was when he invited me as his guest to a dinner at the
Whitefriars Club and I had the surpassing thrill of shaking hands with
G. K. Chesterton, Clement Shorter, Clive Holland and others whose
greatness reduced me to trembling and silence.

Another Hastings author was Matilda Betham-Edwards, who in the past had
won a reputation in France as well as in England for her educational
work. She had also written novels, and one of these, _The White House by
the Sea_, had just been published in the World's Classics, thus
establishing her, she told me, among the immortals.

She lived in a tiny villa at the end of the quaint street of Georgian
houses that straggles along the slope of the East Hill above the Old
Town. Here I was brought more than once by a friend to take tea. It was
made and poured into cups by her elderly maid outside the room where we
sat round a miniature table laid with dainty fringed napkins, tiny
plates and cakes and sandwiches so minute that I found it difficult not
to swallow them in a single bite.

It was all, including the hostess, indescribably minuscule--all, that
is, except her idea of her own position, which I fear was larger than
life-size. Going to see her was like being received in audience and her
relations with the other inhabitants of the street were more queenly
than neighbourly. Like many writers she was sensitive to noise, even
noises that most people would consider agreeable. Just opposite her
lived a lady who was a gifted pianist, but if she played at an
unacceptable time or played too long, a message would be sent across the
road requesting silence. The same happened if anyone played the piano
next door or even next door but one. It is a mercy she did not live long
enough to have to contend with radio. Her worst experience was when in
the First World War the troops stationed at Hastings inconsiderately
sounded their bugles on the hillside below her house, and no
representations to the military authorities could induce them to desist.

She was once persuaded to leave home and stay with a family who lived
near Tunbridge Wells. They thought so highly of this achievement that
they had an account of it printed and circulated among her friends. She
made a condition that if she came there was to be no sound or movement
in the house before nine o'clock. Rather strangely determined to have
her with them in spite of this, her hosts contrived to arrange with
their servants for complete domestic immobility up to that hour. But
they had forgotten the farmer who owned the field beneath her bedroom
window, into which soon after seven he loosed a herd of inconsiderately
lowing cows. She left that day.

One of her hosts on this occasion was the novelist Sarah Grand, whom I
once met at her house. I wonder how many remember the shock and
sensation created by her novel _The Heavenly Twins_. I did not read it
till some time after it was published, but I had always heard it talked
of as something rather dreadful, possibly because the author was an
advocate of Women's Rights. Of the book which I read in a sixpenny paper
edition, I can recall very little. It seemed to me harmless and I dare
say it was, but I was very young and innocent and possibly did not
understand what was censured.

The novelist herself was a big, impressive, handsome woman, whom I
remember dressed in black under a towering black hat. She was, like
everyone else, extremely kind to me, but she too had that Olympian
attitude, that sweep of condescension which then seemed characteristic
of the established author towards a young beginner. I do not know if it
is the same nowadays, but I rather think the situation is reversed.


I cannot take leave of those gods and goddesses now swallowed up by the
_Gtterdmmerung_ of two generations, without offering the contrast of
my single encounter with a writer who is not forgotten and never will
be. From Thomas Hardy I received all the kindness without the
condescension. He gave himself no airs that would distinguish him from
any elderly gentleman with what might be called cultivated country
tastes. We spoke chiefly of the country, Wessex and Sussex, and his only
deliberate reference to writing, his or mine, was a joking order not to
come further west than the Isle of Wight.

I had spent the day at Max Gate and in the evening he walked with me to
the station. Here we met a farmer with whom he at once started a
conversation on local affairs, in the midst of which he must have
remembered his guest, for he introduced me, adding: 'She's just written
a novel called "Green Apple Harvest".' This information did not seem to
impress the farmer and the conversation closed over it. It was not till
we were both seated in the train on our way to Bournemouth that he
obviously remembered something, and diving into a bag produced a fine,
healthy specimen of Cox's orange pippin: 'Now didn't Mr. Hardy say you
liked apples?'

How greatly W. L. George would have approved of Hardy had he known him,
for he certainly dwelt in no literary enclave, and--though George would
not have approved of it for such a reason--this may have something to do
with the greenness of his memory in the public mind. It was Dr. Johnson
who said that an author's enduring reputation is not made by the critics
but by the people, and I think that many names have been forgotten
because of the narrowness of their appeal.

The great novelists of the eighteenth century were read not only by the
intellectuals but the general public of their day, and the same may be
said of the Victorian giants. Later on writing became much more
specialized and though it would not be true to say that this is the
reason why so much of it has been forgotten it has certainly had
something to do with it. The public memory functions on the same lines
as in the individual. We remember certain events because they are
outstanding, others because of the circumstances in which they happened,
others because of their consequences. So it is with authors. Those who
are really outstanding are safe to be remembered in their own right. But
many others survive more fortuitously.

An example of this latter type of survival is Mary Webb. For many years
she wrote novels of a high quality which made little general appeal; and
I doubt if she would now be remembered by more than those who knew her
and admired her work while she was alive if after her death her name had
not been brought before the public by a Prime Minister. Stanley Baldwin
praised her in an after-dinner speech, the newspapers fastened upon it
and bounced her into fame. Soon all her novels were being reprinted and
in great demand among those who had never heard of her before.

To her friends it was tragic, for no one would have valued such
widespread recognition more than herself. She was a timid little
creature who, shy and silent, never missed a literary gathering. She
took her work, the literary life and literary people all very seriously,
and put the whole of herself into everything she wrote. I know that she
was anxious about her own position, for on one occasion she expressed
her relief when I told her that there were days when I too received no
letters. She thought it a bad sign if an author did not have a heavy
post, and would rather think the post office was keeping her letters
from her than that none had been sent.

The question arises--would her name still be remembered if it had never
been uttered by a Prime Minister? One cannot be sure, but I do not think
so. She wrote six or seven very fine novels, but as studies of rural
life they were limited in their appeal. Though sensitive to pain and to
beauty, she created no memorable characters, and was without that
humanity which has made Hardy's work live on in spite of its restricted
setting.

I doubt if there is a parallel case in George Orwell, but it is just
possible that he too might have survived only with the discriminating
few had not the B.B.C. seen fit to smite the council houses with a
television broadcast of 1984. He had a very different talent from Mary
Webb's--a dynamic, intellectual, masculine talent in contrast with her
poetic, sensitive, feminine one--and he counted, as she did not, in the
progressive thought of his day. But I mention him in this connexion
because, like her, he had only a restricted audience until given a boost
by circumstances. With him this took the more remarkable form of the
translation of his work from one medium to another. _Animal Farm_ and
1984 made little impression on the general public until they were
translated into the language of the cinema and television respectively.
This literary metempsychosis is a new form of survival. But naturally it
will affect the books themselves as originally written, and it is too
early as yet to speak of the future. We must give the dust of publicity
time to settle before we see what deposit of enduring fame it has left
behind.

In another case where the dust has finally settled it should be easier
to judge, and it certainly would be interesting to speculate as to what
Oscar Wilde's position would be today without the impact on Society of
his tragic downfall. Of course the situations are not parallel, for
Wilde's catastrophe added _De Profundis_ and _The Ballad of Reading
Gaol_ to his literary reputation. But we may ask: Could he have survived
on the strength of that reputation alone? His comedies are brilliant,
but they date outrageously, and his more serious work, _Salome_ and _The
Portrait of Dorian Gray_, does not detach easily from its background of
peacocks' feathers and the Yellow Book. If he had died at the height of
his fame and prosperity, death alone might have been enough for the same
sort of survival as Aubrey Beardsley's--as the symbol of a period. But
if he had lived to old age, written one or two theatrical flops, and
ended perhaps after some years of silence. . . .


These are vain speculations, and it would be possible to contend that in
no circumstances would these three writers have been forgotten. The
surviving memories of Thomas Love Peacock and Samuel Butler proclaim
that a lasting reputation _can_--despite Dr. Johnson--be built on a
narrow base. Contrariwise, publicity alone will not make a man immortal.
Real talent may survive without it, but without real talent Prime
Ministers, television and the law-courts are of no avail.

The authors we come to next once stood high in popular favour without
extraneous helps. But who now reads E. L. Voynich, Beatrice Harraden,
Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler, Tom Gallon, Guy Thorne, John Oxenham, Robert
Keeble? The list could be much longer and made to include names that
should not be in it, such as A. Neil Lyons and May Sinclair. It could
also include those I have forgotten myself. But as it stands it is a
fair sample of public inconstancy.

_The Gadfly_ by E. L. Voynich created quite a sensation when it was
published over forty years ago. It was held to be a work not only of
great power but of high literary merit, and it was recommended to me by
no one less discriminating than my friend Pansy, who had also
recommended Gilbert Murray's translations of Euripides. She herself had
read it with tears, and so did I. We and some thousands of others found
this story of the illegitimate son of an Italian Church dignitary
intensely moving, and only a few months ago I was discussing it with a
little group of authors all of whom confessed to having once regarded it
as a work of genius. The story, as I remember it now, was incredible,
melodramatic and more than a little vulgar, but literary taste in those
days was all for the 'powerful' in fiction, and it was not only the
circulating libraries who spread the author's fame.

It did not last, for her second novel was a failure and I cannot
remember a third. No doubt if she had written half a dozen novels of the
same quality as _The Gadfly_ her name might be remembered with those of
Mary Cholmondeley, Rhoda Broughton, Lucas Malet and Mrs. Humphry Ward,
who were all in high reputation at the turn of the century; but
single-book authors seldom live long.

There is, however, rather a curious postscript to her story. In the 1955
spring number of _The Author_ I saw a list of 'British Writers published
in the fifty-three languages of the Soviet Peoples', which includes
Shakespeare, Dickens, Defoe, Fielding, Shaw, Galsworthy, indeed most of
our best-known authors, living and dead, but ends surprisingly with 'E.
Voinich' and The Author's comment 'whoever E. Voinich may be'. Of course
I cannot be sure that it is E. L. Voynich, but that tale of the wicked
and immoral ecclesiastic might well have appealed to the Russian
translators, and _The Gadfly_ may now be in great demand in one or more
of the fifty-three languages of the Soviet Peoples. But _The Author's_
comment shows how completely the writer is forgotten here.

Another single-book novelist was Beatrice Harraden. Actually she wrote
several novels besides _Ships That Pass in the Night_, but that was the
book which made her reputation and by which she is still remembered by
an older generation of readers. It is, I venture to think, a much better
book than _The Gadfly_, more balanced, more credible, better conceived
and better written, but I doubt if any publisher would venture a reprint
today. Other novels crowd upon my memory, among them the Anglo-Indian
stories of B. M. Croker and Flora Annie Steele. They would now be
hopelessly out of date and yet a most interesting reconstruction of the
India that is gone, the India of the Army and the memsahibs, the ayahs,
the Eurasians, the young English girls sent out to find the husbands
that did not offer themselves at home--a whole vanished phase of British
middle-class society which was once of great importance to the nation
but has fortunately not been allowed to outlive its day.

A vanished way of life is also shown in the novels of Ellen Thorneycroft
Fowler, who was at the height of her popularity at the same time as Mrs.
Croker and Mrs. Steele. She wrote of the British middle-class as it
lived at home, and her novels, though definitely more adult than those
of Rosa Nouchette Carey and her kind, were always considered 'safe'. If
we were to re-read them now we should probably call them 'cosy', but
here again I doubt if any publisher will give us the chance.

None of those writers obtained notoriety by anything scandalous; for
that aid to circulation we must turn to the men. Robert Keeble shocked
the nineteen-twenties--which, though they were considerably less
shock-proof than today, implies a high voltage as compared with the
eighteen-nineties--with _Simon called Peter_, the story of a clergyman
who renounced his orders and went sensationally to the bad. It was the
proud boast of the late Bertram Christian of Nisbet's that he had
declined _Simon Called Peter_ though the firm had published all the
author's earlier work. Some of this I remember as both distinguished and
devout, but it certainly had not the sales of his later, and I think
last, book. A different form of shock tactics had been tried some years
earlier by Guy Thorne with _When it was Dark_, but this book strictly
belongs to those which owe something to outside help. The Bishop of
London recommended it from the pulpit of St. Paul's. His praise was
echoed from other pulpits throughout the country, with a resulting
sensation in the pews.

The name of Tom Gallon can never be quite forgotten, for it is attached
to a literary award. But I doubt if many or any of those who have
benefited by it know much about his work. I confess that I cannot
remember a single title, though he had at one time a very great vogue.
His novels were all in the Dickensian manner, and he wrote a great
number.

John Oxenham was another voluminous writer, who combined uplift with
romance. He had all the status of a best seller in those early
nineteen-hundreds when it was always profitable to bring God into a
title. He also wrote a book, _My Lady of the Moor_, about another best
seller, Beatrice Chase, whose own personal blend of piety and whimsy
found innumerable readers.

I do not think we have done those authors an injustice in allowing them
to slip out of mind. They provided a past generation with entertainment
and received in return their meed of praise. I hope that they also
received good incomes, for I am pretty sure that some of them at least
took the same view of authorship as W. L. George, and I doubt if many of
them expected much more or would quarrel with our times for letting
their work go out of print.

It is to be noted that they were all novelists, and the novel has
necessarily a more uncertain life than other types of writing. This is
not to cast a slur upon it--indeed, as I hope to show later, I hold the
novel as an art-form inferior only to drama and poetry--but, being a
work of imagination, it must rely for survival entirely on its literary
merits, whereas what is called general literature has an independent
value in its subject. A poorly written history or biography, if not
superseded by something better, will continue to be read for the
information it provides, and if the subject be of sufficient interest,
will be consulted as a standard work for many years.

Do writers in general hope that their work will live and have I been too
sweeping in my attribution to so many of the views expressed by only
one? I do not think so--that is, if we take into consideration a
writer's whole lifespan and not just what he hoped and believed of
himself at the start. Often a young writer is a poet even if he writes
in prose, and poetry carries hope and imagination to heights that sober
experience will never climb. I suppose that at one time most of us soar,
but either our wings are singed off, or else like larks we fold them and
drop contentedly back to earth, where we may still find things better
worth having than fame.



                                   8

                     THE MYSTERY OF THE BEST SELLER

It is more than thirty years since I sat with Compton Mackenzie and
Trevor Blakemore in a little wood on the summit of the island of Herm.
On the hillside below us stood Prince Blcher's empty castle, looking
like a piece of discarded stage scenery, while on the other side spread
the dazzling blue floor of the sea, eddied with currents flowing among
hidden rocks, and dotted with those queerly shaped 'moies' and 'grunes',
which at first sight I had taken for an anchored fleet.

'You will find,' said Compton Mackenzie, 'that once you sell more than
twenty thousand copies, the critics will lose all interest in you. You
will automatically become a best seller and considered unworthy of
serious note.'

That is the gist of his words, anyhow, and I listened to them
respectfully, for they were his, but they hardly concerned me, for I
could not imagine my books ever selling to such an astronomical extent.
I think we were talking of Hugh Walpole.

Twenty thousand copies would not be considered such a vast sale
nowadays, when best sellers in this country alone often reach twice that
figure. But I doubt if I myself have passed it more than twice, so I
cannot claim to be what I am sometimes called, a popular novelist. I
speak of sales on first publication only, not those that dribble on to
some high figure through cheap reprints and overseas editions.

If more writers than would now like to acknowledge it have hoped at one
time that their work will live, probably more still have hoped some day
to write a best seller. Even if they shared Compton Mackenzie's view of
the results they would willingly pay the price of a little critical
neglect for the sake of a short cut to wealth and fame. But there is, I
am convinced, one unfailing law for best sellers--they can be written
only by accident. They are like the weather and no more susceptible to
planning than a thunderstorm. By this I do not mean there is anything
fortuitous in the continued sales of authors who have captured the
popular market. As long as they continue in the line of their first
success they are pretty safe, for on the whole the public is faithful.
But it is that first success which cannot be accounted for by any rule.

I have known an author deliberately attempt to write a best seller,
carefully weighing and choosing ingredients and cooking them according
to his considered opinion of the public taste, but I have never known
such an attempt succeed. One reason, I think, is the common assumption
that best sellers must be bad. I do not know how this belief arose. Some
would say from pride and some from envy, and some from best sellers. But
for an author purposefully to write down to an imaginary level of human
intelligence is to court disaster. Human intelligence is seldom so low
that it does not realize when it is being written down to.

Besides, I do not believe that all best sellers are bad. Some of them
are very good indeed. If we assemble half a dozen more or less at
random--_Gone With The Wind_ by Margaret Mitchell, _The Constant Nymph_
by Margaret Kennedy, _Rebecca_ by Daphne du Maurier, _The Cruel Sea_ by
Nicholas Monsarrat, _If Winter Comes_ by A. S. M. Hutchinson, _A Town
like Alice_ by Nevil Shute, _The Heart of the Matter_ by Graham
Greene--we must agree if we are honest that certain of these are very
much better than many that have won distinction with more modest sales.
Indeed, some are so good that we may never have thought of them as best
sellers; yet they all had sales far beyond Compton Mackenzie's estimate.

I do not deny that many best sellers--perhaps the majority--are bad; but
the point is that they are all sincere. The author has put his best into
even the worst of them and is the last to realize how bad they are.
Another interesting point to note in this connexion is the improvement
in public taste. I should say that the quality of a best seller is now
immeasurably higher than when I was a girl.

In those days the two acknowledged best sellers were Hall Caine and
Marie Corelli. No doubt they were not the first to sell widely--Dickens
and certain other nineteenth-century novelists might be termed best
sellers, and of course there is always Ouida; but Victorian methods of
publication, with their three volume novels and 'fortnightly numbers',
were so unlike ours that it is difficult to compare results. Hall Caine
and Marie Corelli both had enormous sales in the modern manner. I have
little fear of contradiction when I say that neither of them was a good
writer; but they both took themselves and their work with intense
seriousness--they are indeed laboratory specimens of best-selling
sincerity.

On the strength of some unfavourable reviews Marie Corelli refused to
let her later novels be exposed to the critics. Hall Caine, as befitted
his sex, was of sterner stuff and chose rather to ignore their opinion.
He was, I should say, much the better writer of the two. His work had
drive, and when as a schoolgirl I read _The Deemster_ and _The Bondman_
I was completely carried away by the taste of strong meat. Marie Corelli
was not considered suitable reading for the young and I do not think I
could even attempt to read her now. I once heard her speak at a Women's
Club luncheon and thought her a dainty, attractive little person. Of
Hall Caine I saw more, for we once stayed at the same hotel, where every
evening he took a Shakespearian stance at the dinner table, his
dome-like forehead resting on his hand. He never spoke to me, but he
told my mother I wrote too fast.


Both Hall Caine and Marie Corelli belonged to the sensational school of
fiction and to the days when 'it's just like a novel' was applied to any
startling or apparently incredible situation. They believed in drama,
and Hall Caine no doubt also considered himself a realist--an opinion in
which he must have been encouraged by the libraries' ban on his _The Woman
Thou Gavest Me_. But they were both at heart romantics, and romance is the
surest way to the public heart. Their successors in the market served it
plain and without trimmings. I am thinking of Charles Garvice and Florence
Barclay. Here we have another best-selling pair, alike and yet unlike, for
Mrs. Barclay made her reputation with a single novel at a single blow,
whereas with Garvice it was more by weight of numbers.

He was incredibly prolific, and though I cannot claim a close
acquaintance with his work I should say he was not nearly so good a
writer as Hall Caine, nor did he write as well as Mrs. Barclay, though
here again I cannot rate her so high as her predecessor. Her first
novel, _The Rosary_, is most readable, but some of her later work is
very bad indeed. The critics of course ignored her, but unlike Marie
Corelli she did not resent it. She was a clergyman's wife, humble,
friendly, ignorant of the world and of human nature, but gifted with a
romantic imagination which could pack a novel with the secret fantasies
of the female heart. Both she and Garvice wrote mainly for women,
whereas men had enjoyed both Marie Corelli and Hall Caine.

Of a very different order was Baroness Orczy's success at about this
time with _The Scarlet Pimpernel_. Here was what could unhesitatingly be
called a rattling good story, full of drama and suspense. But here again
was a strong romantic interest. When the book first appeared I was going
through a superior phase with the classics and did not condescend to
read it. But my sister Mona was young enough to enjoy it in both its
aspects of adventure and romance. She quoted with rapture the scene in
which Sir Percy Blakeney kneels down and kisses the pavement at every
spot where Lady Blakeney's little feet have trod. All I thought was what
an ass he must have looked while he was doing it, and I wondered if he
had proceeded on all fours or whether he had stood up after each kiss
and then knelt down again. In such conjectures my mind was not only out
of tune with my sister's but with the minds of several hundred thousand
other people.

_The Scarlet Pimpernel_ is still a household word and I doubt if it will
ever be forgotten. It achieved fame in many other media besides print,
and as a play, as a film, as a broadcast, it is safe in the memory even
of those who no longer read. Just as Anthony Hope enlarged popular
geography with a supernumerary Balkan State, so Baroness Orczy gave a
popular name to those who make it their business to assist escapes from
political hot-spots. The Scarlet Pimpernel is in our language with
Ruritania.

The book has another claim to honour. In spite of some romantic
exaggeration it is thoroughly wholesome, a fine, healthy, satisfying
meal for schoolboys and schoolgirls of all ages. This cannot be said of
all best sellers, certain of which owe their success to their appeal,
sometimes veiled, sometimes open, to the dark side of public psychology.
Even in some of Mrs. Barclay's novels there was a pathological undertow,
never consciously realized, I am quite sure, by the author or by ninety
per cent of her readers, but giving to those it did not repel a certain
cryptic satisfaction. The same could be said much more strongly of the
novels of Ethel M. Dell, who leapt into fame out of Fisher Unwin's First
Novel Library (a fine enterprise which one would like to see reborn)
with _The Way of an Eagle_. Here violence was the theme, with erotic
implications that in later novels became much stronger. Love and
violence also swelled the sales of another spinster novelist, E. M.
Hull, author of _The Sheik_, whose remarkable picture of desert life
started a public demand for sheiks that was fostered by the cinema until
it died of its own absurdity.

But a best seller is not as a rule hampered by its lack of resemblance
to life, for the reader will provide that as long as the book gives him
certain aspects that he recognizes and approves. It is a case of
wish-fulfilment, though the wish, as in a dream, may be distorted out of
knowledge, and the grateful dreamer-reader rationalizes his delight into a
conviction of the author's truth and skill.

'That woman knows life. She's seen it--she understands it. It's real
life you meet in her books.'

Thus spoke long years ago a friend of mine, an honest, practical,
hard-working woman, who had brought up a family under immense
difficulties, and the author she spoke of was Elinor Glyn.


None of these novels treated sex as openly as it was to appear in the
best sellers of the next generation. From Here to Eternity, The Naked
and the Dead, The Cruel Sea are novels that would have roused the
clucking indignation of those who read Ethel M. Dell, Mrs. Barclay and
even Mrs. Glyn. Undoubtedly their outspokenness had something to do with
the magnitude of their sales. The reason why the police intervened in an
exhibition of D. H. Lawrence's paintings was that the milling crowds
outside the gallery convinced them that something besides art was on
view.

I cannot myself altogether deplore the substitution of the outspoken for
the unspeakable, and the literary quality of the three books I have
mentioned was very much higher than any of the traumatic fantasies they
succeeded; but in my opinion they erred not so much as to what they put
in as to what they left out. They were indeed the polarization of
_Polyanna_ and _Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm_. A far closer approximation
to life combined with a still higher literary merit is to be found in
that rather unexpected best seller of the nineteen-twenties, _The
Constant Nymph_. I call it unexpected, because its setting is so unlike
that of its kind. Most best sellers ignore the arts, but here is the
musical world all round us; the characters and the story are well within
it, and the drama depends for its full effect on a certain amount of
sympathy with its ways.

The fact is that here at last we have a book that sells largely on its
merits. There are other attractions but they are all legitimate; the
author has done no violence to truth or honesty or human nature. Even if
one swallow does not make a summer, here is the true harbinger of a
larger flight of best sellers written by authors who are also men and
women of letters J. B. Priestley, H. E. Bates, Nevil Shute, Evelyn
Waugh, Graham Greene. Margaret Kennedy proves herself of their company
by the novels she has written since _The Constant Nymph_. I doubt if any
one of them has been a best seller in the same sense, but each one of
them is of high quality, and proves that she has not aimed merely to
repeat the pattern of success.

It is interesting to speculate on what has so changed the literary
market that books which twenty years ago would have been read by a
comparatively small fastidious number now sell in their twenty (or fifty
or even seventy) thousands without finding themselves in the critics'
waste-paper basket. Some would say it is because the tosh-loving public
now reads no more, having become an addict of television or radio, just
as the quality of stage plays has improved since the cinema removed the
tosh-loving playgoer to a more congenial atmosphere. I think this is
half the truth. The other half is that a great impetus was given to
reading during the last war. The blitz and the blackout not only made
public entertainment precarious but shut up men and women for long hours
in A.R.P. and N.F.S. control-rooms. There, waiting on the telephone,
many took to reading who had seldom or never read before.

Paper rationing had drastically reduced the popular reading matter of
newspapers and magazines, so that such invigilators were forced to rely
on books. These were supplied from the libraries of various welfare
organizations, some of which were very good indeed. Naturally they
included a certain amount of rubbish, but there were also a number of
classical authors and well-known writers of our own day--Wells,
Galsworthy, Bennett, Conrad--whom many inexperienced readers met for the
first time. One could not fail to be impressed by the pleased surprise
with which these men and women realized that they enjoyed books which
till then they had shunned as 'highbrow' and unlikely to entertain them.

The same sort of thing was happening in homes, hospitals and air-raid
shelters, where many started to read for want of anything better to do
and read good books for lack of worse. A new reading public arose in
consequence, and its improved taste ran no risk of contamination from
current fashions in the book trade. There were no best sellers, because
there could be no big sales. Authors were for the most part limited to a
quota based on the publisher's paper allowance, and a vast public demand
for any single book could not have been supplied.

To a taste so purged by austerity the riotous successes of an earlier
age would have no appeal, and it would be impossible to find a big sale
for Charles Garvice, Marie Corelli or even Hall Caine at the present
day. Their public has vanished, having either moved up into a higher
literary class or turned for its satisfaction to other media. In
addition to the radio, television and the cinema, there is now all the
output of 'space fiction', and for those who still cling to romance the
bright paper jackets of the Twopenny Library, where the names of so many
unknown authors suggest dual personalities for those we know.


Nearly all the best sellers I remember have been novels, which is hardly
surprising, since romance, sex, and sensation all thrive more
luxuriantly in fiction than in fact. When I was a girl Lady Cardigan's
_Memoirs_ shocked Edwardian society and achieved big sales, as for very
different reasons did Ian Hay's _First Hundred Thousand_ at the
beginning of the First World War. But for the most part memoirs,
biographies and indeed all general literature had very little popular
appeal. Some might regard it as another sign of the improvement in
public taste that recently this situation has changed, and booksellers'
returns for the past year (1954) show that works of history, biography,
criticism and travel have had bigger sales than fiction.

Naturally I accept the facts but I cannot agree as to their
significance, for I will not accept the notion that the novel is of
itself inferior to other kinds of writing. A bad novel is no worse than
any other bad book, and a good novel can be more nearly a perfect work
of art than any other type of literature except perhaps a play or a
poem. When I read Mr. Patrick Leigh Fermor's _Traveller's Tree_ I
enjoyed and admired a travel book of quite unusual quality, but it did
not give me the deep aesthetic thrill, the movement of wonder, with
which I read his _Violins of Saint Jacques_ and saw the same theme
transformed by creative imagination into unforgettable beauty. It
might be argued (though I shall not attempt it) that it is better to
read for instruction than for entertainment, but both these motives
are beside the point, for in my opinion it is the novel's position as
a creative art which gives it a value independent of its abuses.

The non-fiction best seller is, of course, no novelty in America. But
American best sellers are in a category apart, not only because of the
magnitude of their sales, but because the size of the country allows for
several literary publics. There was a large enough public interested in
life in a trappist monastery to secure an enormous sale for Thomas
Merton's _Seven Story Mountain_, which as _Elected Silence_ had only
modest success in Britain, and at the same time steal no readers from
Kay Boyle, Herman Wouk, Erskine Caldwell or other tycoons of the fiction
market. There is also a large enough selective public to make
'nation-wide best sellers' of Charles Morgan's _Sparkenbrook_ and
Rosamond Lehmann's _The Ballad and the Source_. But apart from this I do
not think that a non-fiction list which includes such works as _How to
Make Friends and Influence People_, _Worlds in Collision_, _Flying
Saucers Have Landed_ or even _The Kinsey Report_ need involve us in
shaming comparisons.



                                   9

                         BOOKS FOR THE BONFIRE

Many years ago when I was still a green young author I received a letter
which perturbed me greatly. The writer was an old school friend of my
sister Thea, who for years had been an heroic figure in my eyes because
she wrote short stories which were sometimes accepted by monthly
magazines. 'Poppy has a story in this month's _Royal_,' my sister would
say and we would read it very respectfully and in my case enviously, for
I was still some years short of publication. I did, however, send her a
story of my own, which she very kindly criticized, offering the
invaluable advice to choose next time a subject I knew something about.
But when I finally achieved publication with a full-length novel she was
not among those who congratulated me, and the letter she wrote me after
I had repeated the offence showed plainly the reason why. She considered
my books improper.

Our family had long known that she was prim, for when she acted as
bridesmaid at my sister's wedding, she had caused a certain amount of
domestic inconvenience by refusing to let the hairdresser attend her
unless somebody sat in the room to act as chaperon. But though I knew of
this it had not prepared me for the onslaught. The main objects of her
attack were a row of asterisks, the function of which she had
misunderstood, the fact that one of my characters, a farmer, read _The
Sporting Times_ and a quotation from _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_. The
first she had told me suggested something 'too terrible to think of',
the other two were evil boasts of knowledge usually veiled from decently
brought-up girls. At the end of her letter she switched over to my first
novel, the last page of which, she asserted, contained a phrase so
shocking that she could conceive only that it had been written in
ignorance.

This was perfectly true, but the curious thing is that the ignorance
extended also to my father and other elder members of my family, as well
as to friends to whom I showed the offending passage with an earnest
request for enlightenment. No one could help me, it all seemed quite
blameless, and seems so still.

I was reminded of this episode when in Bow Street police court a police
officer stood in the witness-box and read a passage from Radclyffe
Hall's _The Well of Loneliness_. I wonder how many of the general public
remember that _cause clbre_ of the nineteen-twenties which brought
almost all the well-known authors in London to Bow Street as witnesses
for the defence.

It is a curious story and even now I do not understand it. Radclyffe
Hall was a talented poet and novelist who had recently distinguished
herself by winning the Femina-Vie-Heureuse Prize with her novel _Adam's
Breed_. It's successor, _The Well of Loneliness_, was a serious and
sympathetic study of sexual inversion in women. It was well written and
intelligent and received good notices from the leading journals and
reviews until, six weeks after publication, it was violently attacked in
a popular Sunday newspaper. So far not a single reviewer had raised any
moral objection to the book, which had been taken for what it was, a
serious study of a serious subject, written with commendable restraint.
But now prosecution followed on attack, and the most natural defence
seemed to be an assemblage of author-witnesses to give their testimony
as to the work's true nature.

It was an assemblage which might have been called a galaxy, for almost
every author of repute was there, some two dozen of them, squeezed into
the back of the court. There had been a preliminary meeting at which
Bernard Shaw had spoken. He told us we should not be allowed to give
evidence, that the prosecution would take the line that the book's
literary status was irrelevant. Nevertheless the authors flocked to Bow
Street--only to learn how right he was.

But the prosecution had their difficulties. In order to prove that the
book was an 'obscene libel', likely to corrupt the morals of anyone into
whose hands it might fall, an obscene passage had to be read from it,
and this the author had churlishly failed to supply. We had been
prepared for the subject itself being regarded as inadmissible and to
see the action fought on those lines; but that apparently would not
'lie' in law--though in view of some later effusions one might wish it
did--and it was necessary to convict from the text. Hence the appearance
of the police officer in the witness-box to read the passage which
reminded me of my own experience of long ago, for it did not appear to
contain the smallest impropriety.

Not only to myself but to all the other seasoned writers present this
description of two women bidding each other a sad farewell at a railway
station seemed entirely void of offence. What the official mind had seen
in it was indeed, in the language of my own persecutor, 'too terrible to
think of', though I have thought of it quite a lot. The policeman was
succeeded by Desmond McCarthy, who stood silent in the witness-box for
the rest of the morning while King's Counsel debated as to whether or
not he should be allowed to give evidence.

There was a strange foredoomed air about the whole proceeding and, apart
from Bernard Shaw's warning, I doubt if anyone was surprised when Mr.
McCarthy finally left the witness-box without having uttered a word. But
now things became livelier, for the defence having lost its first line
set up another, which was that the relations between the two women were
no more than romantic and sentimental, a schoolgirl crush transferred to
adult life and innocent of sexual implications. This was listened to
rather incredulously by everyone, and it led to an unexpected burst of
drama in the afternoon. On our return to the court after the luncheon
interval we found the defendant waiting for us in what could only be
described as a passion of indignation. Not only did she repudiate her
Counsel's defence, but she had told him that if he persevered with it
she would shoot herself in open court in front of us all. As a result of
this threat he had promised to retract what he had said. It is not a
common privilege to sit watching an eminent K.C. eat his own words, and
I thought it rather ungracious of some of my fellow-witnesses to say
they would have preferred the alternative entertainment. But in order to
collect this large body of evidence which was never heard the defence
had combed all the cliques and coteries, and from the beginning such
mutterings could be heard as--'I hope I shan't be asked to say it is a
work of genius' . . . 'I don't want to stand in the witness-box and
declare it is well written' . . . 'If they want it regarded as
literature I hope they won't call on me.' To these the prosecution's
blocking of the evidence must have come as a relief. Of course, _The
Well of Loneliness_ was not a work of art or a work of genius, but a
serious, capable book by a serious responsible author, and written in a
style which, whether good or bad, was (in fact by virtue of a certain
heaviness) most unlikely to attract anyone susceptible to corruption
from it.

But after that day's work its condemnation was a foregone conclusion.
The court sat another day, but the witnesses did not attend, and
scarcely needed to read the result in their evening papers.


All this happened thirty years ago, but recent events seem to have
brought it close to us. For some reason determined efforts have lately
been made to clean up the literary scene, and the result has been a
number of trials, ranging from the normal activities of the police in
suppressing unabashed pornography to the prosecution of reputable
publishers and responsible authors under the same act that prosecuted
Radclyffe Hall. The first roused little comment, except when a bench of
magistrates ordered the confiscation of _The Decameron_, but the second
led to three or rather four remarkable trials.

_The Well of Loneliness_ had been condemned by a single voice, that of
the Bow Street stipendiary magistrate, Sir Charters Byron, but _The
Philanderer_, _September in Quinze_ and _The Image and the Search_ were
tried before a judge and jury. The results were interesting if only by
way of contrast, and not having read any of the works involved I am
unable to say whether my sympathies are with the jury who acquitted the
first or the jury who condemned the second, or with the two juries who
failed to agree over the third.

My impression is that both the two first juries relied on the judge's
opinion rather than on their own. For Mr. Justice Stable in his summing
up was clearly in favour of the author of _The Philanderer_. He refused
to regard sex as a subject in itself obscene or its frank treatment as
necessarily leading to corruption. The book must be judged not by single
scenes or passages taken out of their context but as a whole and also in
relation to the public for whom it was written--obviously in this case a
sophisticated public whose ideas were already formed by experience. The
problematic young person 'into whose hands it might fall', need not be
considered, as such would be unlikely to read it. One could not write
books under the threat of their being read by someone for whom they were
never intended. This judgment was thankfully received by the writing
profession as a whole, but their satisfaction lasted only till the
Recorder of London had summed up in exactly the opposite direction. He
asked the jury what they would feel if they saw _September in Quinze_ in
the hands of their young daughters, with the result that the author and
publishers were found guilty and heavily fined.

In the case of _The Image and the Search_ either the judicial lead was
not strong enough or the juries at the two successive trials contained
warring elements that could not be reconciled. Indeed the system of
trial by jury seems more than likely to break down when the verdict is
to be based not on fact but on opinion. Our method of scrambling a jury
together out of the citizenry produces a mixture of types which though
perfectly capable of agreeing on a verdict according to the evidence
when the evidence consists of facts, is not so likely, indeed is most
unlikely, to agree on matters involving taste, education, upbringing,
knowledge of human nature and of books, especially when all these are
clogged up with a subject where judgment in the average man is already
prejudiced by subconscious motivations.

Some years ago a very charming old lady told me with a stricken face
that she had read a most dreadful book. She had found it in a friend's
house and though soon aware of its appalling nature she had been unable
to put it down. As a result she was thoroughly ashamed of herself and
being a devout Catholic had told her confessor, who had breathed fire in
consequence.

My first reaction was to ask the name of the book, and soon I was
stutter-butting like a machine-gun through her story. 'But--but--but
. . . .' I knew that book and had read it myself, or rather a part of
it, for after the first few chapters I had found it uninteresting and
returned it to the library. It was an American work which had been
published by a most reputable firm of publishers and had moreover won
the Pulitzer prize. It might be described as 'adult', but nothing more
sinister than that. Yet to my dear old friend it was pornography, and
had it been brought into court as an 'obscene libel' and she been on the
jury, both religion and morality would have obliged her to condemn it.
Imagine a jury, one half of which is made up of herself and others like
her and the other half of myself, and, say, the awarders of the Pulitzer
prize, and you have a pretty good example of an immovable mass being met
by an irresistible force.


No doubt age has a great deal to do with these matters, for nothing has
changed more in the last two generations than our attitude towards them.
When I began to write, words like 'damn' and 'hell' were seldom printed
in full but were represented by an initial and a dash. Throughout the
nineteen-twenties which were supposed to be so uninhibited, the word
'bloody' was always queried in my proofs, even on one occasion when not
used as an oath. Also queried was the expression 'in the family way',
which I had learned from my mother. One was driven to the conclusion
that there were no more chaste ears on earth than those of a printer's
reader. But now all is changed, and it is my generation's turn to be
shocked by words which we ourselves should not dream of using and never
saw before in print.

It is the same with situations. When I was a girl the most daring
situation an author could contrive was a man and a woman living together
without being married, and it was that situation which brought an early
novel of mine under fire not only from that lily-maid called Poppy but
from two local booksellers, one of whom summoned me into his presence
and gave me a long lecture on its moral shortcomings. He happened to be
the purveyor of those battered blue French novels to which some might
have attributed my downfall, but as I doubt if he was able to read them
I will not accuse him of hypocrisy. I remember that I was very much
surprised by it all and considerably shaken, though I fear that his bad
opinion of me would have been confirmed had he known that the part of
his discourse that upset me most was the incidental information that the
book gave the wrong month for drilling turnips.

These were only small-town reactions. The rest of the country was less
easily excited. Nevertheless, those novels which were given notoriety by
the library censorship that functioned for a short time in King Edward's
reign would seem harmless enough at the present day. I cannot remember
all of those whose works were regarded as untouchable, but Hall Caine
and W. B. Maxwell were among them. In the end it was found that the
censorship far from reducing the sales of the novels in question
actually increased them, so it had to be abandoned in the interests of
that same morality it was established to defend.

I do not think that any attempts have been made since to revive it.
There is of course always the Irish censorship, of which I once
erroneously believed myself a victim. I had been told that a novel of
mine was on the Index, and well aware that nothing could be more
unlikely I imagined that the speaker had confused Dublin with Rome. But
on a visit to Ireland I found that the book had not been banned over
there at all. I also found Dublin literary circles inclined to regard
the censorship quite tolerantly as one of their national jokes. 'It's
the priests in their fatherly kindness trying to protect us from a
knowledge of those things we tell them on Saturday nights.' I was then
told of a typically Hibernian occasion when a high literary award was
made to a novelist whose book was afterwards discovered to have been
banned. All the arrangements were complete for a complimentary dinner at
which the author was to be presented with a specially bound copy of the
work in question. But in the circumstances all that could be done was
what the Dodo did when Alice won the Caucus-race--'We beg your
acceptance of this elegant novel,' presenting her with the copy she had
been asked to provide.

It is worthy of note, however, that some, if not more of the best novels
of this half-century were written between the year nineteen hundred and
the First World War, when freedom both of subject and treatment was so
very much more restricted than it has been since. All Wells' best work
belongs to this period, also the best of Arnold Bennett, Galsworthy and
Conrad. The restrictions imposed by public taste had apparently no
adverse effect on the literary quality of books and plays. Indeed I
think it could be argued that in some quarters their removal had the
same effect as a gardener's abandonment of the pruning knife.

It would seem as if after the explosion of war, when the first clouds of
hate and anger have cleared away, there is an outfall of moral laxity.
In the nineteen-twenties we shook our heads over the Victorian prudes
who condemned _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_ and _Jude the Obscure_, in the
nineteen-fifties we wonder at the prosecution of _The Well of
Loneliness_. With each successive war more inhibitions disappear. The
twenties had a few left, but as far as I can see the fifties have none
save what the law imposes. 
The tendency of fiction must always be to exaggerate, as more and more
authors go in pursuit of a limited number of situations and mechanisms.
At one time the figure of maternal mortality in novels must have about
trebled those in real life, while before the motor-car came on the scene
the number of literary carriage accidents must almost have equalled the
slaughter on the roads today. Throughout the country one marriage in ten
ends in divorce, but on the bookshelf it must be more like one in three.
That being so, it is not surprising that the position of sex in fiction
is out of all proportion to its position in the life of most intelligent
human beings. Now that the romantic trappings in which it was wrapped up
in Victorian and Edwardian times have been stripped off (though in
certain quarters the ghastly word 'glamour' adheres instead), the
externals of love have been given an almost religious significance.

This is undoubtedly due in part to the influence of D. H. Lawrence, for
whom sex assumed the mystical power of religion. He writes of it in
terms some of which might have been, some of which actually were, used
by St. John of the Cross. He reverses the old jibe against those who
were supposed to find in religion a substitute for sex by obviously
finding in sex a substitute for religion.

'And here Lawrence the genius, like other geniuses, is representative of
an active movement of thought and feeling among more ordinary men. He is
the spokesman of all those who today, more or less consciously, make sex
a religion. Rationalism has robbed them of faith in God, and the
spiritual love-life of union with Him. Being men and not calculating
machines or vegetables, they must have a life concrete, intense,
passionate. They therefore turn to sex, the biological image of
spiritual life, its passion and union--not for what it really can give
and has given in all ages, but for the content of that other and supreme
love-life which it reflects.'

I quote here from Mr. E. I. Watkins' _Bow in the Clouds_. He is not
dealing specifically with writers, but his study of Lawrence, from which
I have taken only a short passage, is most penetrating and illuminating.


How unlike is all this to the attitude of the eighteenth-century
novelists. I choose them for comparison rather than the Victorians,
because they are as outspoken in their language and bold in their choice
of subjects as the writers of today. But their attitude is entirely
different. They regard sex as a normal if turbulent human activity,
which needs to be kept in order but often escapes its bonds, causing
situations which provoke a tolerant shrug, horror or a smile, according
to the author's temperament. But they would one and all recoil from the
idea of it as a mystical experience--'a mystery, the reality of which
can never be known . . . living body of darkness and silence and
subtlety, the mystic body of reality.' Indeed I can imagine no one more
shocked than Fielding were he ever to pick up in the Elysian fields a
copy of Lawrence's _Women in Love_. We may similarly entertain ourselves
with the picture of Smollett reading Christopher Isherwood's _World in
the Evening_, or Sterne wondering what to make of Rosamond Lehmann's
_Echoing Grove_, while to Richardson we would give E. Arnot Robertson's
_Devices and Desires_, because the heroine, having maintained that
favourite commodity of his, her 'virtue', for several months among a
horde of Greek bandits, suddenly and improbably flings it away as a
preliminary to entering a select boarding-school.

We know that Richardson regarded _Pamela_ as a work of high morality,
and though that opinion was not shared by later generations nor
universally held by his own, at least it might be said that the book was
unlikely to corrupt the minds of the young. Any young girl who attempted
to follow Pamela's example would reap nothing worse than disappointment.
Similarly Fielding is always outspokenly moral, and so--apart from his
wearisome practical jokes--is Smollett. Sterne indeed received a certain
amount of criticism in his own day, but only for being, as he says, like
a small child tumbling about in play and exposing much that is generally
hidden. In none of these authors could one find any encouragement to
break marriages, hearts or the commandments in the name of love.

If they had, I imagine that public opinion would have been much more
clamorous in its disapproval than it is today. For we seem with our
restored freedom of speech to have fallen into a certain confusion, and
to have decided that now we are once more allowed to call a spade a
spade it does not matter how we use it. Our heroines can be allowed
pre-marital experiment without a stain on their characters, and lovers
are given to the most unlikely wives. Divorce has become respectable and
can be used in quite 'nice' novels as a substitute for the death of the
unwanted partner. Both religion and morality have been curiously twisted
by quite well-meaning people into shapes that used to be the shapes of
their enemies.

That being so it seems futile to prosecute obscenity under laws that are
as out of date as the McNaghton rules. Even out-and-out pornography
might be less likely to corrupt than a subtle denigration of
ideals--ideals which the utmost eighteenth-century laxity never lost
sight of. In a modern version of _Joseph Andrews_ either Lady Booby or
Mrs. Slip-Slop might find themselves the heroine with Joseph himself
written off as a prig. Again our sympathies might be asked for Booth in
his betrayal of Amelia, and Clarissa Harlowe be dissected as a
psychopath. Apart from conjecture, there are on offer, in the cheap
forms most easily available to the young, all the corruptions of false
romance and glamorized wealth. As it would be impossible as well as
undesirable to prosecute works of this kind, and as the prosecution of
more serious efforts has so far resulted only in ridicule, could we not
accept the belief that law and morality are not inevitably synonymous?
Just as a man can be arrested for stealing his neighbour's watch but not
for stealing his wife, so 'obscene libels' are not necessarily approved
if we cease our attempts to suppress them by means that only give them
greater publicity.



                                  10

                           GAPS ON THE SHELF

The scene is Hugh Walpole's flat in Hallam Street, and I--greatly awed
and deeply thrilled but as usual completely silent--am having tea with
him and May Sinclair. They are deep in the discussion of a novel he is
writing--_The Prelude to Adventure_, an early work, as yet I believe
unincorporated in the canon of his reprints. The climax of the story is
a mystical experience which overwhelms his hero while engaged in playing
football, and both he and Miss Sinclair have a lot to say about and to
quote from Francis Thompson's _Hound of Heaven_.

I think I must have resented being left out of the conversation, for
when at last it veered in my direction I announced rather bluntly that I
had never read anything by Francis Thompson. For a moment they looked at
each other, then Hugh said in a shocked voice--'I don't know what we're
to make of that confession.'

A similar situation is approaching now. I have already explained that
the 'all' of my title is relative, and though these pages are crammed
with the names of authors and the titles of books, the reader has
doubtless noticed many omissions. Some of these are blameless, but not
all. There are books that I ought to have read but have not--and if this
is to be in any sense an autobiography the time has come to consider
these, for no doubt they shed as much light on my character as those I
have read. That this light is not always flattering has been shown by
the only case I have mentioned so far, Louisa Alcott's _Little Women_. I
have already confessed the unworthy reason for my failure to read it as
a little girl, but a still more disabling confession must follow. My
lapse over Francis Thompson has been abundantly retrieved since the
Hallam Street tea-party, but my attempt similarly to retrieve myself
over _Little Women_ ended in an even more humiliating failure. Only a
few years ago, conscious of the gap in my reading and hoping to find in
the book the pleasure and entertainment others have found, I bought a
copy and settled down to enjoy it. But exactly the same thing happened.
I found myself reacting to the same episodes in the same way, and I gave
up the attempt once for all.

Let me say this, however, in my own defence. My reaction may not have
been entirely due to the persistence of a selfishness so crass that I
could not bear even to contemplate unselfishness in others, but to the
persistence of certain brain traces which a second reading had restored
to potency. This persistence is doubtless responsible also for the
pleasure with which many of us re-read our childhood's favourites. In
the _Katy Did_ books for instance, where the moralizing is even heavier
than in _Little Women_, I found on re-reading, all the accumulated
pleasures of memory. When reading in 1956 the book one first read in
1896, one does not read with the eyes of 1956 only. The first reading is
there, and the second and third with their stored affections to add to
the pleasures of rediscovery. On the other hand if one approaches an
old-fashioned children's book for the first time in 1956, its effect on
a mature mind is likely to be disappointing. One cannot take hold, if
there has been no earlier grasp. A friend who constantly re-reads
_Little Lord Fauntleroy_ attempted to communicate her pleasure by
lending me the book. She had been brought up on it and in each
re-reading had revived the happy impressions of childhood, but I who had
never read it before found it quite unreadable.

I did not read it as a child for the sound reason that it was never
given to me. I was given a Lord Fauntleroy doll which I greatly
disliked, because I disliked boy dolls anyhow and thought the clothes of
this one ridiculous. There were also some unfortunate little boys who
had earned my contempt by wearing long curls and velvet suits, so I
might not have liked the book even if I had read it.

What one did not read as a child was decided by grown-up people rather
than one's self. If my elders failed to provide a book that book would
remain unread, without I trust a stain on my own character. But I cannot
find this excuse for not having read Kingsley's _Westward Ho!_, for this
was one of my sister Dulcie's books and for years I was familiar with
its title and binding. I actually made one attempt to read it, and I
cannot tell why that failed, for I liked adventure stories and
historical stories and this was both. I did, however, intensely dislike
the same author's _Water Babies_ (though again my reason for doing so
eludes me) and this may have started me off with a prejudice which
explains my failure at least in part. Several years later Pansy gave me
_Two Years Ago_ and I read every word with the keenest pleasure, though
this may have been on account of the giver.

It is rather too late now to repair the omissions of my youth and I have
given my reasons for believing that any attempt to do so would end in
disappointment. Otherwise I should be tempted to read _Moby Dick_. For
one thing, Mr. Somerset Maugham has included it in his list of the ten
best novels, for another the film that has been made of it suggests an
exciting story which would have lightened the conscientious labours of
my later teenage, when I read so much that bored me just because it was
a 'classic'. Another book I missed at the same period was Gibbon's
_Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_.

My reason in this case was financial. The work was published in
Everyman's Library in six volumes at a shilling each. If I had bought it
I should have mortgaged six weeks' pocket-money and at the same time
deprived myself of six other books that something told me I might find
more interesting. So I kept on putting it off; with the result that my
period of classical enthusiasm passed without it. By the time I was able
to afford the purchase I no longer wished to make it, and that
disinclination still prevails. More than one friend has told me that I
have missed a fine thing, but though I might now afford its six volumes,
even though the price of the original six would buy only one, that does
not make them less than six ... so once again a figure defeats me.


But these are juvenile errors, for which no doubt I shall not be held
greatly to blame, either at the time or for some later failure to repair
my loss. I do not expect to see the shocked glance or hear 'I don't know
what we're to make of that confession' until I acknowledge the gaps on
my shelf at the present day. One of them is very large, for it involves
the whole of Trollope except _Framley Parsonage_ and _Is He Popenjoy?_

The first I read during my period of conscientious reading, to which no
doubt many later aversions are due. I do not know why I chose that
special novel--for it was my own choice and my own purchase in the
World's Classics, bound in leather, too. Probably some magazine or
newspaper article had recommended it. Anyhow I bought it, read it and
found it inexpressibly dull. Many years later a friend who was a
Trollope addict lent me _Is He Popenjoy?_, and once again I am puzzled
by the choice. But he insisted that it was better Trollope than the more
popular clerical novels, and realizing that my experience with _Framley
Parsonage_ was really nothing to go by, I jumped at the chance of
becoming a Trollope addict myself, with over fifty novels to gratify the
passion which in the case of Jane Austen had to be satisfied with six.
If only I could find in Trollope even half the delight I found in Jane
Austen, and many were those who would find as much or more, I was in my
middle age discovering a treasure that would last me for the rest of my
life.

But once again I was disappointed, and this time I think I know why. It
was Jane Austen herself who robbed me of what might well have been a
very cosy experience. I had been reading her constantly and regularly
for nearly thirty years and her vital language, salty humour, sharply
incised yet roundly studied characters were with me all the time I
waded--yes, that is my word--through Trollope's prosy style, in which
his characters struggle for life like sheep in a swamp. The contrast is
that between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the former of
which is so much nearer than the latter to our own day. In comparison
with Trollope Jane Austen is modern. No doubt his present vogue is
partly due to the revived interest in Victoriana, and my inability to
read his novels is part of my recoil from the art of Rex Whistler,
Victorian fashions in house decoration and so on. No doubt also that I
am the loser in every way, but so it is and the gap on my shelf remains.

Another gap is smaller, but perhaps still more serious. I cannot read
Henry James. At the Hallam Street tea-party he was under discussion when
the subject was not Francis Thompson, but in his case I wisely concealed
my ignorance, and in time I learned to talk about him as if I had read
him, an art in which I fear I have become proficient.

I need not have been ignorant, for once again my sister Dulcie had
provided the means of initiation. Her bookshelf contained one of the
lesser-known of his works--I must humble myself still further by
confessing that I have forgotten the title--and I once asked her if it
was a book I might read, for this was during my prudish-priggish phase.
She replied that it was but that I should find it difficult, as it was
written in a very involved style. This discouraged me and not long
afterwards I was still further discouraged by certain parodies that came
my way. It is true that Henry James very soon became the fashion, and
authors whose work I admired were said to model themselves upon him, but
I have always had a strong sales-resistance and this universal literary
reverence by no means disposed me to overcome my dislike of his
labyrinthine style.

This dislike of obscurity has grown with the years. I do
not care how hard and knotty the subject of a book may be if only it is
clearly presented. But even fiction defeats me if the style is mannered,
and this applies to French as well as English. I disappointed W. L.
George because after a long course of novels by various authors I failed
with Flaubert's _L'ducation Sentimentale_. Equally difficult to read I
found a translation of one of my own works. It is a question of the
writer's effort communicating itself to the reader. If the best word is
chosen only after a long search that search should be concealed, and in
Henry James' work the sentences often seem to grope after their own
meaning. But then I have not read Henry James.

I think he is the only really important English or American author with
whom I have failed completely, most others having left some shreds of
themselves in my hands. I read only the first few chapters of Tolstoy's
_War and Peace_, but I had already read his _Kreutzer Sonata_ and _Anna
Karenina_. I might even have finished _War and Peace_ if my family had
stayed longer in Montreux that winter. But when we moved on into Italy
the volume had to be returned to the library when it was only just
begun. It is true that I might have found another copy in England and
the fact that I did not even look for one must I fear be used in
evidence against me.

At that time, or rather a little earlier, readers and critics alike were
praising the novels of William de Morgan. I was naturally stirred by the
idea of fame achieved at so late an age after a life spent in very
different pursuits, and was as eager as anyone else to read _Joseph
Vance_. But once again I was defeated by a rambling style. In this case
the rambling involved no strain, but the Dickensian echoes both in style
and character-drawing which delighted so many of my contemporaries
prevented me from enjoying the book and I do not remember that I
attempted any of the others. Evidently I am over-sensitive to manner,
which seems strange when I remember how often as a girl I must have
struggled through works written in a totally different vocabulary and
idiom from my own. What is there in Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_
that kept glued to the page the eye that wandered from the pages of
_Joseph Vance_? I cannot find the explanation in a younger eye, for I
read both books at about the same age. But it is possible that
conscience co-operated in the case of the first while taking no interest
in the second. When I reflect on my present reading habits I sometimes
wonder what books I should or should not have read had my conscience
never been involved.


There are of course many more gaps on my shelves than these, but I do
not think they stand in the same need of apology. Even at the age of
fifteen I did not believe it my duty to read every book that ever was
written. Some might think I should explain why I have never read
Voltaire and others why I have not read Newman's _Apologia pro Vita
Sua_. I doubt if I can explain either, for there was a time when the
former's arguments would have been as grateful to me as the latter's
would have been later on--and I may still read both.

For among the books I have not read are many that I still hope and
intend to read. If I had written these lines only two months ago I
should probably have linked with the name of William de Morgan that of a
very different type of novelist--I. Compton-Burnett. For many years I
found her unreadable, and the praise of her admirers was as the
meaningless clamour of those who worship strange gods. I myself bore all
the marks of the Philistine--I complained that her novels were only
dialogue, that the characters all talked alike, that they did not belong
to the story and so on. When J. B. Priestley in one of the Sunday papers
investigated her cultus and found it more of a craze, I murmured 'the
Emperor's clothes. . . .'

Then came what can only be called my conversion. It was one of those
mental switch-overs in which a pattern that had seemed meaningless as
black on white is suddenly filled with meaning by the discovery that it
is really white on black. I. Compton-Burnett's novels are not pictures,
they are designs, and bear the same relation to life as the stylized
rose on the wallpaper bears to the realistic illustration in Flowers of
the Field. One does not quarrel with the wallpaper flower because it has
a symmetry and formality which the model lacks. We obtain both from the
book and from the wallpaper the essential meaning of a rose--indeed
there may be more abstract meaning in the wallpaper design than in the
naturalistic picture. I. Compton-Burnett is definitely an abstract
novelist.

We have become used to abstract painting and abstract sculpture, even to
abstract poetry, and now here at last is the abstract novel. What else
can we call this formal pattern of story-telling out of which only ideas
emerge? The characters are invariably divided into three
groups--servants, children, and adults--which in their turn are split
into two households. They converse in a stylized language which no one
speaks or ever spoke, but which yet conveys most clearly the thought of
the speaker. There is practically no background, and such inevitable
interventions of the author as occasionally break up the dialogue amount
to little more than stage directions. Emotion is entirely suspended, and
death, illegitimacy, adultery, incest, are swallowed as calmly as bread
and cheese.

Compare this with the average novel wherein the characters, so far as
they are not directly presented by the author, express themselves in a
variety of conversational styles, tricks and gambits, where the
background is elaborately filled in and the story, for the most part
unintricate and unsensational, is worked through all the emotions of the
psyche, and you are comparing Edward Wadsworth's diagrammatic
_Embarquartion pour Cyther_ with Watteau's luxuriant painting of the
same subject.

Yet so final is I. Compton-Burnett's art that its abstraction and
austerity seem to enhance rather than limit the life-likeness of any
situation she chooses to create. Her characters are as living and in
spite of their uniform speech as sharply differentiated as those of the
most expansive novelist--in _Mother and Son_ even the two cats have
distinct personalities. The story does not touch the heart but it
stimulates the mind, and the method of its telling crackles with wit and
observation in dialogue that as securely reveals the character of the
speaker as any varieties or tricks of speech.

This novelist is not merely original. She is unique. Practically alone
in English literature she has no imitators. None of her many admirers
has so far attempted the sincerest form of flattery, and with good
reason. I do not think we could tolerate an I. Compton-Burnett School of
fiction, for unlike other schools it has only one class. The
stream-of-consciousness novel, the Proustian novel, the Dickensian novel
can ring endless changes on themselves, and their pioneers can be
followed without any risk of mere imitation. But in this case the design
is so simple that it admits only of exact reproduction, and any
adaptation would destroy its essence. Also it must be consummately well
done, for it has been done no other way by what is probably the only
novelist that can do it.

There is a further point to consider. Could we read many such novels,
however well written? When with a deep sigh of satisfaction I closed
_Mother and Son_ I did not at once, as I should have in the case of any
other author who had so delighted me, rush to order more books by the
same hand. I shall doubtless read them all in time, but they must be
spaced out--probably as far apart as their actual dates of publication.
To sit down and read, say, six I. Compton-Burnett novels in succession
would be like sitting down to a six-course dinner consisting entirely of
caviare. The addict would find that bad for the palate as well as the
digestion--time must pass and other food be eaten if he is to recapture
the original savour. So promising myself a treat in the future not too
far away, I open a novel by Monica Dickens.



                                  11

                          SPEAKING PERSONALLY

I do not want to exaggerate the effects of reading on character, but the
influence of a book is probably as strong as any to be gained from most
human contacts. After all, a book is the voice of a fellow creature,
calling through the print, perhaps from somewhere close at hand among
our own interests and occupations, perhaps from across the world,
perhaps from across the ages. It is one of the many forms taken by
experience, and through reading it we may find ourselves transported
into an entirely new field of perception. Even if we do not choose to
remain there we probably shall not leave it as if we had never entered
it.

Here is a trivial and personal example. In Miss Rosamond Lehmann's
delicious portrait of youth and innocence, _Invitation to the Waltz_,
the little heroine prepares for a visit to London by putting on not only
her best dress but her very best silk underclothes; the reason being, as
she tells her sister, that if she meets her death in a street accident
she would like the newspapers to describe her as 'the body of a
well-dressed woman'. Ever since I read the book I have been unable when
setting out for London to prevent myself choosing my clothes both
visible and invisible with a view to this contingency.

It might, of course, be said that the book did not so much give me the
notion as make me conscious of it. In which case it has helped me to
know myself better--another advantage to be gained from books. These
trifling influences and revelations might be indefinitely multiplied;
for accepting suggestions and criticism from a book is like accepting
them from a stranger--so much easier than when these things come from
within the family circle.

But if I consider the major incidents of my life it is more difficult to
tell if or how books have influenced me. My marriage, for instance, had
as far as I can see no connexion with anything I have read. The position
of marriage in books is peculiar, for in the great majority it has
always been regarded as the goal and ultimate reward of love, while in a
minority--though a minority that is steadily increasing--it is no more
than the beginning of regrets and complications. I am writing of novels;
of course, for marriage in history and biography is much as one observes
it in life. But the novel has inherited the fairy-tale tradition of
'they lived happily ever afterwards'. In all the early novels marriage
involved the disappearance of the principal characters and was the end
of the story. It is true that Pamela reappears as a married woman in
_Pamela in High Life_, but that was a sequel called for by the almost
pathological curiosity of Richardson's public, on whom this first
incursion of the novel into ordinary female life had much the same
effect as _The Archers_ and _Mrs. Dale's Diary_ on their publics today.
Otherwise, it is only in the last pages that Tom Jones marries his
Sophia or Humphry Clinker his Winifred, and even at the turn of the
century when plots became more complicated and horror shared the scene
with love, Jane Austen can remark 'the anxiety which in this state of
their attachment must be the portion of Henry and Catherine can hardly
extend, I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will see in the
tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all
hastening together to perfect felicity'.

That perfect felicity can be questioned in couples already
married--Parson Adams may be henpecked, Mr. Bennet may despise his wife
and make fun of her before her children, Lord and Lady Castlewood may
quarrel in public--but for the hero and heroine the curtain rings down
on a stage lit up with hope and glory. For them everything will be
perfect--perfect felicity.

That was the attitude to marriage on which my youth was fed, first in
fairy-tales and then in fiction, and yet--oddly enough--I never wished
to be married. This did not mean that I took no interest in men; I did,
and would have liked to find myself more sought after by them than I
actually was. But in my dreams and plans for the future I never saw
myself as a married women, and was inclined to look down on those of my
friends who did. I remember feeling shocked and disappointed when Pansy,
at the beginning of what promised to be a triumphant university career,
told me that her great ambition was to marry and have a large family of
children. I saw myself as a successful writer living alone in a cottage,
and actually selected my future abode in the countryside beyond
Hastings. Later on I added a service flat in town, but in both these
places I dwelt alone.

It was not the marriages of my family or of my friends which caused
these unlikely day-dreams. My mother had been married twice, each time
most happily. Her happiness with her first husband I could know only by
hearsay, but her happiness with my father was obvious every day of the
year. My sister Thea had made a happy, successful marriage, and none of
the young married women we knew seemed to regret their state, even those
who had made what appeared rash choices. Indeed divorce might not have
existed in the professional middle-class society in which I was brought
up. It was not till I was very much older that I met unhappy or unstable
marriages and by then I had learned all about them from books.

It was not observation or experience but books that first taught me that
marriage, which I had begun by thinking dull, was also difficult and
could be dangerous. The 'happy ever after' novel was already going out
of fashion when I started to write and marriage often began instead of
finishing the story. At first it nearly always survived its
vicissitudes; misunderstandings were cleared up, infidelities forgiven,
and husband and wife achieved in the end their own version of 'perfect
felicity'. It was not till much later that they set to different
partners and we were back in the old days of 'boy meets girl', with the
difference that one, if not both, was already married and the interest
centred as much on getting rid of the old marriage as getting on with
the new.

These novels had no more influence on me than the fairy-tale sort--if
they made marriage appear more interesting they also made it appear even
less attractive. The only, occasional, change in my attitude was when I
fell in love and found myself wanting to marry a certain man. But it was
definitely Tom, Dick or Harry, not just anybody, and when the business
was over my wish for marriage went with it. Indeed at the beginning of
these affairs, before my heart was engaged but I could see what was
coming, I would often feel fear and reluctance, as if I were expecting
to be asked to give up something I wanted to keep.

What changed my attitude was nothing that I read but, curiously enough,
something that I wrote. I do not think it is usual for authors to be
converted by their own works, though it has happened before. Not long
ago Catholics were surprised to see a book written by one of their
number published by the Rationalist Press, the explanation being that
the author had been converted to Catholicism in the course of writing a
commissioned work against it. In my own case the commissioned work was
nothing more intellectual than four articles on marriage and family life
for a woman's weekly paper. But somehow the planning and writing of
these articles showed me how entirely selfish and sterile my plans for
my own life had been. To live and write where and how I liked, was all
that in substance they amounted to. I was in my thirties and a
successful novelist, but I could not deceive myself with the thought
that the world would be poorer if I did not write another line. I had,
like so many unmarried women, lived too long in my parents' home and was
willing to pay the price of independence with solitude. Since Pansy's
death I had never dreamed of living with another woman, and I felt no
religious urge to consecrate my life to God in a convent or to my
neighbour in practical good works. If I was not to end up utterly
withered as a human being I must marry, and I had better be quick about
it, for I was no longer so very young.

At that moment there was no one with whom I could possibly fall in love,
so in cold blood I decided to accept the first man who asked me, whether
I was in love with him or not--always provided that I liked and
respected him. This resolution did not result in my marrying without
love but in my marrying a man of a totally different type from those
that had hitherto attracted me. In the past I had yielded to feelings
that were stronger than my judgment and had been willing to risk a life
in which my husband and I while superficially united would have been
fundamentally apart. I cannot lay down my experience as the law, for I
have known some very happy marriages where the husband and wife had not
apparently an idea or a taste in common, but I now see clearly that I am
personally unfitted for a marriage of this type and it is more than as
well that I did not make it. The marriage I made has lasted over thirty
years without a single regret.


No doubt it is unrealistic to expect anyone to be influenced by reading
in such a matter. Men and women marry in response to a biological urge
and did so for thousands of years before a book was written. It is true
that this same biological urge, ennobled by love, has been the
inspiration of poets and storytellers from the very beginnings of
literature, but it was not literature that first ennobled it. And if our
moralists are inclined to blame trashy novels and magazines for the
lower standards of today, they should remember that these are not there
to create a demand but to supply it. The trash is already in the minds
of their readers.

When, however, we turn from marriage to religion the case is altered. We
are not guessing--we know for certain that in respect of religion many
lives have been changed by books. _Tolle lege, tolle lege_ are words
that have been spoken to many besides St. Augustine. Newman was impelled
to leave the Church of England for the Church of Rome largely through
reading the early Christian Fathers, and numbers have moved in the same
direction through reading Newman. Edith Stein, the Jewish
philosopher-Carmelite whom Hitler slew at Auchswitz, 'read herself' into
the Church on the works of St. Teresa of Avila. St. Ignatius of Loyola
read the lives of the saints as he lay wounded and as the result
exchanged an earthly for a heavenly chivalry. Many more such stories
come into one's mind--they could be endlessly multipled.

So I hesitate to claim that my conversion to Rome had nothing to do with
reading. On the surface I appear exactly the sort of person who would
'read herself' into Catholicism, as indeed I had many years earlier read
myself into Swedenborgianism. But it is a fact that I read absolutely no
Roman Catholic apologetic until I had already made up my mind, when on
the advice of a friend I read in a translation Karl Adam's _Spirit of
Catholicism_.

I cannot say, however, that books influenced my change of religion no
more than they had influenced my marriage, for though I read no
apologetic or indeed any specifically Roman Catholic writings as _such_,
my spiritual reading as an Anglican was almost entirely from Catholic
sources, even though in many instances these had been specially adapted
for Church of England readers.

When Baron von Hgel set about the religious training of his Anglican
niece his first idea was to recommend to her only books written by
members of her own communion; but he very soon realized that this would
be a starvation diet. The Church of England has produced nothing to
compare with the writings of St. Francis of Sales, Laurence Scupoli,
Augustine Baker, Fenelon, de Caussade, St. Teresa, St. John of the
Cross, to name only a few. The only Anglican writer who approaches them
is Jeremy Taylor, but though I tried hard I found myself unable to read
his _Holy Living and Holy Dying_, in spite of the unforgettable language
in which it is written. On the historical side there is, of course,
Hooker's _Ecclesiastical Polity_ (and it is a Catholic who has called
Hooker 'the English Aquinas',) but I am thinking of devotional books,
the spiritual reading on which the religious character as distinct from
religious opinion is built up.

These in my case came almost exclusively from Catholic sources. I began
at the age of fifteen with _The Imitation of Christ_. This I fortunately
had in a complete edition, though the parts which the editor thought
incompatible with Anglican doctrine were enclosed in square brackets. I
adored this book and read it again and again before my religious life
became dissipated in occult fancies. But it is a curious fact that when
years later I took it up again it had, as far as I was concerned, lost
much of its attraction. I was oppressed and overpowered by what von
Hgel calls 'the world-fleeing element' in  Kempis' thought. So much of
it seemed negative, censorious of that which is evil only in abuse. I
know that this is an unusual reaction, and though I have von Hgel on my
side, I do not attempt to defend it.

_The Confessions of St. Augustine_ was another early favourite of mine.
I read this many times before passing on to St. Francis of Sales, whom I
met first not in his own writings but in an enchanting contemporary
portrait _The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales_ by the Bishop of Bellay.
This led me on to _The Love of God_ and _The Devout Life_, which were
published in an edition specially prepared for Anglicans, and were well
supplied with footnotes correlating the Saint's teaching with that of
contemporary Anglican divines, such as Cosin and Taylor. We know that he
was read in other communions besides his own. Characters as different
from each other as James the First and John Wesley carried his works in
their pockets, for though a militant Catholic, specially appointed to
recover the lost diocese of Geneva, both his preaching and his writing
so transcended the controversies of his day that to hear him or to read
him was a religious experience even for those who were not of his faith.

I must include St. Francis among those authors whose books have directly
influenced me, if only in trivial matters, for it is to him I owe the
substance of a most successful short story. In _The Spirit of St.
Francis de Sales_ the saint tells how a mother whose son had been
murdered stretched Christian charity and forgiveness to the point of
sheltering his unwitting murderer. In his case the setting was Italian,
but its transfer to the Kent and Sussex borders is about the only change
I made. The story was first published in _John o' London's Weekly_, just
after the First World War, and after a long career through various
collections and anthologies is about to appear (much to the author's
surprise) in a magazine devoted to Science Fiction. I owe the saint this
acknowledgment of his inspiration.

Another debt is more obscure, for it amounts to little more than the
thought after reading in succession _The Devout Life_ and the _Love of
God_ that the ideal marriage would be that of Philothea and Theotimus. I
do not pretend that this thought consciously influenced my choice of a
husband, but even lying dormant in my mind it probably had its share in
making my marriage a success.

Among other Catholic devotional books I read or attempted to read as an
Anglican were Laurence Scupoli's _Spiritual Combat_, which repelled me
with its mixture of floridity and hardness, like a Victorian arm-chair,
and _The Hidden Life_ by Jean Nicholas Grou, which with the opposing
qualities attracted me as much as it had attracted my Presbyterian
mother whose gift it was. I also read--though this came later, after my
marriage--the _Sancta Sophia_ of Augustine Baker. Of Anglican books I
read none or almost none and these were controversial rather than
devotional, maintaining my position as an Anglo-Catholic against the
Church of Rome on one side and my own church on the other. Every year
the Bishop of London recommended a special book 'for Lenten reading',
but these were nearly always pale, washy stuff, as he had to choose a
work that would not offend any of the warring sections in his diocese.
On the whole, then, my spiritual reading was Catholic. I doubt if I
chose the best--both St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila are
lacking--but I do not doubt that a Catholic system of religious thought
was throughout the years being built up in me. And though, as I said,
this thought contained no apologetic, it nevertheless began in time to
find itself at war with my Anglican expression of it, and I should not
be surprised if it was that hidden conflict which finally led to my
change of faith.


But what about the Bible? anyone might ask. Surely a child born as long
ago as Queen Victoria's jubilee was brought up on the Bible and taught
from it at school; and surely the Bible had as strong a share in forming
that child's character as any haphazard collection of Catholic pious
writings.

The answer is that I was indeed brought up on the Bible. I knew the
principal Bible stories before I could read, through having had read to
me _Line Upon Line_, which dealt with the Old Testament, and _The Peep
of Day_ which disposed of the New. Both these works were Protestant and
Fundamentalist and very much more entertaining to the youthful mind than
the actual Scriptures themselves. These I did not really encounter till
at the age of nine I went to school, when my sister Mona and I were each
presented with a large Bible in a black, shiny cover. She, as I have
already told, traded hers away, but mine survived until my confirmation,
when my mother gave me a beautifully produced and bound copy of the
Authorized Version, which I still possess.

At school I 'satisfied the examiners' in knowledge of the Scriptures,
and in my early teens was persuaded by a friend to join an organization
rather cumbrously entitled Our Bible Reading and Missionary Band. This
involved reading a daily portion of Scripture, normally in private but
once a month aloud, when we met at certain members' houses and each read
a verse in turn. We read as far as I can remember almost exclusively
from the Old Testament, and it always seemed my luck to get a verse
choked up with Hebrew proper names, for which I had to find my own
pronunciation. A rich and abundant tea made up in some measure for what
I suffered on these occasions, but I never felt really happy or at ease,
for not only was I becoming more High Church in my sympathies but also a
little nauseated by the Bible worship which this rigorously Low Church
and Protestant Society indulged in. When I left school I took the
opportunity also to leave the Band, and I am afraid that its activities
combined with those of the examiners induced me not long afterwards to
give up reading the Bible altogether.

For many years I never read it or heard it read except in church. During
those years I lost my belief in the religion in which I had been brought
up, and with that naturally went my belief in the inspired Word on which
I had been told its teaching was founded. Those were the days when
Modernism was flying about the Church of England like sparks in a
stubble fire. Anglican divines shook their heads at its forcible
extinction in the Church of Rome and foresaw many things that never
happened. What they did not foresee was their own Bible-reading flock in
danger of losing its faith with its Book.

By the time I was grown up the Old Testament had been made to appear to
me and to many others as a mere bloodthirsty jumble of Jewish history
and folk-lore. Nor had the New Testament been spared, for the
authenticity of most of it seemed to be held in doubt, while the Godhead
of Christ had declined from Bishop Gore's doubtfully conservative
estimate in _Lux Mundi_ to the near-Unitarianism of Canon Streeter.
Many, of course, rose in defence of the old orthodoxy, but they were
hampered by the grave-clothes of a Protestant theory of literal
inspiration. It had been the letter rather than science which some years
earlier had killed Bishop Wilberforce's challenge to the British
Association.

My interest in these controversies was part of the increasingly superior
attitude I maintained towards 'organized religion'. The only good I got
out of it was the reading of Dr. Charles's _Jewish Apocrypha and
Pseudo-epigraphia_, a truly fascinating collection of ancient documents
which, though their religious value may be no greater than their
authenticity, shed a most interesting light on the canon of Scripture
and helped bridge the gap--so much wider in the Authorized Version than
in the Catholic Bible--between the Old and the New Testaments. In it I
revived all the blisses first bestowed by Dr. Smith's _Smaller Classical
Mythology_ and passing on to other studies of the same nature, including
the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, was actually moved to poetry. It is a
curious fact that as only unhappy love had power to inspire my verse, so
only a groping faith could give religion a voice. I could sing the songs
of a broken heart, of alien folk-lore, or later of questing
Anglo-Catholicism, but these were all marching songs for the road only,
and ever since reaching my journey's end I have been dumb.

Though I had given up Bible-reading in the accepted sense I was in
course of time brought back to a certain interest in the text by my
occult preoccupations. 'Gematria' or the Hebrew science of numbers, sent
me wandering on a new track, and Swedenborg with his theory of
'correspondences' gave new life to the old dead letter. My escape, as I
see it now, had been largely from the sentimental Bible-worship of my
school society and the snippet reading which had accompanied it. I must
have been nearly thirty when I decided to start reading the Bible again,
but as I would read an ordinary book, not in 'portions', but one or two
chapters or even several chapters at a time. I began with St. Mark's
Gospel, which my Modernist dabblings had taught me was the purest and
least fabled of the four, but I had not read more than one or two
chapters before I found myself drowned in tears.

               The vision of Christ that thou dost see
               Is my vision's greatest enemy.
               Thine is the Friend of all Mankind,
               Mine speaks in Parables to the blind,
               Thine loves the same world that mine hates,
               Thy heaven-doors are my hell-gates ...
               Doth read the Bible day and night,
               But thou readest black where I read white.

The Christ I found on re-reading the Gospels was not necessarily the
Christ of William Blake, but nor was He the Christ I had expected to
find there. I found a stern, sorrowful, lonely figure, very different
from the 'gentle Jesus, meek and mild' of the children's hymn, for
though patient with children of all ages and full of compassion for the
griefs and sufferings of mankind, He burned with indignation against
men's indifference towards God and injustice to one another; to all who
opposed Him He showed Himself completely intolerant.

Nor could I find the lovable but self-deceived prophet and moral teacher
of Renan's _Vie de Jsus_. If He was not in the fullest sense what He
claimed to be, the Son of God, He was a victim of paranoia, one of the
least lovable forms of madness. His moral teaching was only a small part
of His gospel compared with its directly religious and doctrinal
aspects, and though much of it was revolutionary--too revolutionary even
for our times--much of it was not new. His concern was only for the
Kingdom of God and for those things to which the world, no more then
than now, paid little heed. It was in vain that both His friends and His
enemies tried to drag Him into the controversies of His day, even those
that seemed nationally and morally urgent.

At the time of the General Strike I was present at a little gathering of
good, well-meaning people who met together in the hope of finding a way
out of the mess. A constant phrase heard then was: 'If Christ were here
today He would'--whatever the speaker thought the best course to take.
It never seemed to occur to anyone that if the Son of God had been
incarnate in 1926 He might have refused to be drawn into a political
struggle between capital and labour ('Lord, speak to my brother that he
divide the inheritance with me'. 'Man, who made me a judge over you?')
just as He had refused to be drawn into that between the Jews and the
Roman power.

I sometimes wonder what some Christians would make of Christianity if
Christ had lived not in Roman-occupied Palestine but in German-occupied
France. The two situations are almost parallel. There was in each case
the occupying military power, also the puppet government, Ptain's or
Herod's. Then there were the collaborationists, men who in their own
interests served those of the enemy, and finally there was the
resistance movement of those who on patriotic grounds opposed both
occupier and collaborationist, looking for deliverance, sometimes in
unlikely places.

The Jewish nation being a theocracy, the national resistance was
primarily religious, made up of those who zealously followed the Law of
Moses and all the minutiae of observance that had been added by
tradition. The Pharisees were not just the smug, narrow-minded
hypocrites of popular imagination, but patriots whose patriotism had
taken a religious disguise, and the publicans were the collaborationists
of Roman occupation, traitors to their country and in many cases the
robbers and exploiters of their own countrymen. The word publican is one
of the many that in the course of the last three hundred years has
completely changed its meaning. St. Matthew did _not_ keep a public
house and 'this man eateth with _collaborationists_ and sinners'.


It may seem strange to some people when I say that the Bible did not
become for me a true part of religion until after I had joined the
Catholic Church. Until then it could be impressive, moving, inspiring,
enlightening, but never really devotional. The Catholic attitude towards
the Scriptures is so different from the Protestant that it has given
rise to the idea that Catholics are not allowed to read the Bible. One
reason for this is that the Church does not hold every part of Scripture
to be of equal value to everybody, and recommends certain parts more
than others for general reading; whereas for the old-fashioned
Protestant every word not only of the original language but also
apparently of the translation was directly dictated by God Himself.
Evelyn Underhill had a story about a preacher at a revival meeting who
held up a copy of the Authorized Version declaring: 'Every word between
these covers comes straight from the Holy Ghost'--to be answered by a
voice at the back of the hall: 'Aye, and the covers too.'

Where a Catholic child, if brought up according to the mind of the
Church, would be given a book of the Gospels, I at the age of nine was
presented with an entire Bible, most of which was incomprehensible, and
some of which, if it had appeared between any other covers, would have
been snatched away from me. I can recall my sister Mona innocently
looking up from her reading to ask:

'Father, what's a wore?'
My father jumped.
'Wh-what book are you reading?'
'The Bible, Father.'
No answer to that.

We met all sorts of strange words and inexplicable events. If by mistake
one overran the Scripture Union portion by a single verse one was apt to
land in a mystery. But nobody ever made the smallest attempt to stick
the pages of the Bible together with stamp paper. I do not think they
did us any harm, and when I grew older I developed the habit of looking
up in the dictionary words I could not understand, since grown-ups when
asked to interpret were apt to be evasive, if not hostile. As a result I
obtained my earliest sex-knowledge from sources more accurate and
austere than many. But surely that is not why one reads the Bible.

The idea of the Bible as milk for babies is I am sure at the root of
many of those misunderstandings that have turned a number of thoughtful
people from religion. The Old Testament in particular is something very
tough and raw, requiring the most careful treatment if it is not to give
its readers indigestion. There is a sickening page in Sir Laurence
Jones's _A Victorian Boyhood_ where he describes how at Eton 'Sunday Q's
took us at large through the Old Testament', and then proceeds to
enumerate all the massacres, plagues and other 'goings-on of this fierce
tribal God whom we were expected to equate with a God of Love'. I myself
can remember the controversies that raged over the 'imprecatory psalms',
when Christian people objected to singing: 'O, daughter of Babylon,
wasted with misery; yea, happy shall he be that rewardeth thee as thou
hast served us. Blessed shall he be that taketh thy children and
throweth them against the stones.'

I understand that lately the Anglican psalter has been made more
selective, but in my young days to object to the public singing of any
psalm or verse of a psalm was to raise doubts as to one's orthodoxy. Of
any mystical interpretation we had no inkling, and I have heard sneers
at what was imagined to be the 'Roman' way in such matters. But it is
remarkable how different those psalms appear when their violence is
translated into terms of the Spirit and the light of the New Covenant
shines through the war-clouds of Jahveh.

In the Catholic Church I learned to know the Bible as a Voice rather
than as a book. A book must be read more or less as it is written,
whether it be in the 'portions' of my Scripture Union or in my father's
gallant attempt as a boy to read the whole Bible aloud without a single
stumble or mistake, anything of this nature sending him back for a fresh
start (the fact that he reached the middle of Leviticus says much for
his perseverance). But a voice, the voice of a living body, can change
its mood or its emphasis, can repeat its words or transpose them, can
interpret its own utterances, can chime with other voices. This is the
Voice I now hear uttering its wisdom from day to day, the prophets
answering the apostles in the Proper of the Mass, deep calling to deep
in a dialectic of spirituality, for which the Canon provides the final
synthesis. The singers are there too--David restored to innocence by his
Son, Solomon wearing the diadem with which his mother crowned him in the
day of the joy of his heart. The Old Testament has been baptized in the
liturgy and 'the fierce tribal God' is finally equated with the God of
Love.



                                  12

                           FOR PLEASURE ONLY

When the last war began, uncertain of what degrees of isolation lay
ahead of me, I provided myself lavishly with the works of two authors,
Baron von Hgel and P. G. Wodehouse. Apart from the fact that in their
different ways they give me almost equal pleasure, I chose them as
representative of two trends in reading, both of which I must follow if
I am to be happy among my books. I must have knowledge and I must have
entertainment and I do not want the two to be combined. As a child I
hated such books as _Fairy Know-a-Bit_ which were supposed to sweeten
the bitter pill of knowledge for the young, but--as I have already
told--would pore contentedly over the unflavoured paragraphs of Dr.
Smith's _Smaller Classical Mythology_. On the other hand, I could not do
without _Lottie's Visit to Grandmamma_ or _Froggy's Little Brother_.
Fiction was as necessary as fact.

These two tastes have accompanied me all though life. Sometimes one has
been in the ascendant, sometimes the other, but I do not think that
either has ever been entirely missing. There are human beings who have
no small talk and others who have nothing else. I do not know which is
the greater bore. By the same token I am exasperated by those who never
read novels, especially when a superior attitude is adopted in
consequence, but often feel at a loss with those who never read anything
else. And by anything else I do not mean journalistic cook-ups, ghosted
autobiographies, or 'popular' science, but good solid works on science,
history, philosophy, theology, psychology and so on.

There is not much fear of my ever taking myself too seriously as a
reader or thinker--average middle-brow in both is the highest praise I
would give--but if my brow is not high, neither is it narrow, and if I
have not read deeply I have read widely; so I may hope to escape Robert
Graves' judgment--'To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric
mind.'

The two authors with whom I chose to start the war are neither of them
strictly representative. In fact they might both be called extremists in
their different lines. But they gave me that which in those strained and
troubled times I wanted most--religion and laughter. I could not have
faced the future without both of these.

After all that I have said about being easily daunted by a difficult
style it may seem strange that I should find such constant, unfailing
pleasure as well as enlightenment in von Hgel's work, where thought and
language are sometimes equally obscure. But so it is and I have read and
re-read practically all he has written, finding strangely enough a
stimulation in that very style--such as comes from a swim in waters that
are not only deep but tingling cold. Moreover, once one has mastered it
with the help of some slight knowledge of German methods of
construction, the language is seen so closely to fit the thought that
every word, or even the position of every word, has a significance.
Frequently there are paragraphs that have to be read twice and there are
also moments of exasperation--as when in _The Mystical Element in
Religion_ an austerely beautiful human story is so clumsily mishandled
that it almost disappears under a metaphysical superstructure.

But if von Hgel's manner is occasionally frustrating, the matter of his
work is that of which as I grow older grows my need. I can remember my
husband and myself as young people on holiday in Jersey attending the
French Catholic Church for the reason that there was always a sermon
about--God. It is a curious fact that at home in the Church of England
we hardly ever heard a sermon on this subject. Neat little discourses on
points of doctrine, moral principles, or even topics of the day were
what we had to listen to. But in the Catholic Church as we partially
knew it then, the preacher talked only of God. And God is the subject,
or rather the summit, of all von Hgel's work. _The Mystical Element_,
_Eternal Life_, the _Essays and Addresses_, the _Letters_ even, all move
towards that height, which he might have scaled still further had he
lived to complete his supreme work, _The Reality of God_. Philosophies,
moralities, sanctities are by the way; there is always that peak ahead,
rising above the clouds of 'the half-world of creatures'.

'Pray notice first,' he writes to Maude Petre, 'that when we say we
believe in the Creation, especially when we profess belief in each
single soul's free will, we profess the mysterious belief that God has
somehow alienated a certain amount of His own power and given it a
relative independence of its own; that He has, as it were, set up
(relative but still real) obstacles, limits, friction as it were against
Himself. And thus we may well wonder at this mysteriously thin barrier
between our poor finite relativity and the engulfing infinite Absolute,
a barrier which is absolutely necessary for us, for though God was and
could ever be without us, God is no more God for us, if we cease to be
relatively distinct from Him. Let a drop be put in the ocean, and for
the drop there is no more either ocean or drop.... And note further that
this poor little shelter of reeds, with the Absolute ever burning down
upon it; this poor little paper boat, on the sea of the Infinite--God
took pity upon them, quite apart from sin and the Fall--God wanted to
give their relative independence a quite absolute worth, He took as it
were sides with His own handiwork against Himself and gave us the
rampart of His tender strong humanity against the crushing opposition of
the pure time-and-space-less Eternal and Absolute of Himself.'

Von Hgel is one of the few writers whose letters can be compared with
their finest work. Unlike Jane Austen whose letters have been a shock to
those of her admirers who did not expect to find her in some ways so
like Lydia Bennet (or indeed the letters of most authors who, weary of
writing, merely scribble to a friend), he put the best of himself into
an envelope. His letters to Maude Petre are especially illuminating, so
full of pain and tenderness, yet showing the essential strength of his
character in contrast with the obstinacy of hers. His letters to Father
Tyrrell, too, are valuable in the light they shed on those dated
controversies which first united and then divided them--Tyrrell to go
out to Loisy in the wilderness, von Hgel to remain in the fold at the
cost not of intellect but of pride.

His _Letters to a Niece_ are a minor classic and show the breadth as
well as the depth of his mind. In acting as spiritual director to this
young woman he strives above all to enlarge the base on which her
religious life is to be built. We may smile at a knowledge of ancient
Greek coins being considered a necessary foundation for the spiritual
life, but his indignation against 'the poor thin thing' to which a
narrow outlook has reduced religion, and his belief that a woman's
religion particularly suffers this contraction--these explain the zeal
with which he ransacks paganism on her behalf before introducing her
specifically to Christianity. With him Robert Graves' sentence, 'To know
only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind' applies with special
force when the one thing is religion.

I have sometimes regretted that I did not take the chance my friendship
with Evelyn Underhill could have given me to meet her own great friend,
'the Baron' as she always called him. But I did not become really
familiar with his work until after he was dead. Before then, though I
often heard about him from her, the attraction was not strong and I
doubt if meeting him would have increased it. He was a great man in
every sense--of few contemporaries have I heard the word 'great' used so
often--but greatness does not always appear at a first meeting. I might
have seen only an old man with an ear-trumpet, with whom I should have
found it difficult to converse. It is better that I should not have
known him until his deafness had been put aside with his mortality and I
could meet only his great mind and heart. Few men have greatness in both
as he had; so often intellect seems to wither affection, so often it
seems clouded by it. But with him the mind enlightens the heart which
warms and comforts it. He is always 'creaturely'--a word he loved--great
but creaturely. I write of him as if he were still living and so indeed
he is.


'The half-world of creatures' is not von Hgel's phrase. It comes from
E. I. Watkin's _A Philosophy of Form_. I have already quoted from this
author, whom I read with appetite. He is more metaphysical than von
Hgel, more poetical, more mystical, more of a theologian. The Baron on
seeing himself described somewhere as a Catholic apologist said he felt
like a dog who has won a prize at a cat show, but Mr. Watkin is openly a
Catholic philosopher, though I should say more of a Platonist than such
usually are. He is less concerned than von Hgel with the post-Descartes
philosophies, but he makes a case against Logical Positivism, which in
the Baron's lifetime has not begun its full assault on metaphysics.
Also, if more theological he is less ecclesiastical and controversial in
his interests, and he has read widely in the present as well as in the
past.

Another writer for whose new books I look out eagerly is Pre Louis
Bouyer, for French has come with me into religious philosophy and the
Bibliothque Rose fulfils itself in Les ditions du Cerf. Pre Bouyer is
less of a philosopher than either von Hgel or Mr. Watkin, but he is, as
might be expected, more of a theologian and also very much more of a
liturgist. The first book of his that I read, _Le Mystre Pascal_, is in
fact a liturgical meditation on the Easter rite. Its successor, _Le Sens
de la Vie Monastique_, is something different. Of the second part I am
not qualified to write, for it concerns the special demands of the
religious life, but the first part with its speculations on
'eschatological humanism' I found as exciting as any novel. I use the
comparison advisedly, for I had already met the same speculations,
disguised as fiction, in Mr. C. S. Lewis's two 'Space' romances--_Out of
the Silent Planet_ and _Perelandra_. He no doubt as well as Pre Bouyer
has read the neo-Platonist Greek fathers. He cannot have read Pre
Bouyer's book, for it had not yet appeared, and though I think it more
than probable that Pre Bouyer has read C. S. Lewis (for his references
suggest that he has read everything that has been written in French or
in English) he obviously takes his ideas from the fountain head and not
from the cup that has been filled at the same source.

I confess having read only religious philosophy. Philosophy without
religion would be, for me, without interest, because without meaning.
The same, of course, applies to history, but in the process of education
one has become so used to the idea of history without a meaning that one
can still read it that way. It is not in my case, like philosophy, an
interest acquired late in life, but one with which I have grown up, so I
can still read history as I read it as a girl with little thought beyond
its passing significance. Lately Professor Toynbee has linked up history
once more with religion, but the adverse criticism of his _Study of
History_ did not come entirely from unbelievers. For ever since the
Renaissance history--religious in its origins and essence--has belonged
to the 'half-world of creatures'.

That this could ever be the whole world is one of the many dreams of
Newton's Sleep. Separate that half-world completely from its spiritual
complement and it ceases even to exist. If this could be done
entirely--which, thank God, it cannot while man remains a living
soul--all meaning would depart from it, leaving only the empty, broken
shell. There is a passage in Charles Williams' _Descent into Hell_ which
describes how a meeting of savants and scientists to which the
historian, Lawrence Wentworth, has long been looking forward becomes
through his spiritual suicide a mere mess of meaningless shapes and
sounds. 'There were faces, which ceased to be faces, and became blobs of
whitish red and yellow, working and twisting in a horrible way yet did
not surprise him. They moved and leaned and bowed; and between them were
other things that were motionless now but might at any moment begin to
crawl . . . there entered into him a small, steady, meaningless flow of
sound, which stung and tormented him with the same lost knowledge of
meaning. . . . The shapes turned themselves into alternate panels of
black and white. He had forgotten the name of them, but somewhere at
some time he had thought he knew similar forms and they had names. These
had no names, and whether they were or were not anything, and whether
that anything was desirable or hateful he did not know.'

In other words he is sitting at dinner, surrounded by his illustrious
friends in their white shirt fronts and 'tails', listening to their
learned conversation. But 'the magical mirrors of Gomorrah had been
broken and the city itself had been blasted, and he was out beyond it in
the blankness of a living oblivion'.


I believe it is true that man began his long assault on knowledge with
the stars. Lifting up his eyes from the world around him, the world of
his daily struggle with life, he searched the heavens for their lights
and laws. The cave drawings of prehistoric man are no proof to the
contrary, for these almost certainly belong to rite rather than
investigation. Their marvellous accuracy comes no more from a deliberate
study of nature than their beauty comes from a deliberate study of art.
They are supreme examples of the 'analeptic method . . . the intuitive
discovery by poetic thinking of truths which can afterwards be
prosaically supported by reason.'

No doubt it was poetic thinking that first reached the stars, but in
course of time astronomy had passed from myth to science. The Chinese,
Hindus, Egyptians, Chaldeans, Greeks and Arabs looked up into their
clear skies, and with no instrument other than their eyes not only named
the stars but plotted their courses. Each civilization as it rose
stamped the heavens with new signs, but was apparently quite content to
know little or nothing of the earth which it dominated. Centuries later,
when the Copernican system was universally accepted and the telescope
was drawing from outer space the galaxies that we know today, men still
believed that India could be reached via a mysterious 'North-West
Passage' and that the human body was governed by 'humours'. As for
plants and animals these seem to have been more accurately observed in
the Auricignan caves, but Copernicus turned the heavens inside out a
hundred years before Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood and
nearly another hundred before Linnaeus made a science of natural
history. And still, though Pope's line had long been hackneyed, man
himself, in his essence and personality, was not yet universally
regarded as the proper study of mankind. The surgeons could by now
dissect him, and the philosophers were always making new nets for him to
slip through, but only the 'analeptic method' of poets and novelists
seemed to touch the mystery of his being until late in the nineteenth
century the new science of psychology prosaically supported the
intuitive discoveries of the poetic approach.

There is an almost exact repetition in my own life of this descent from
the skies. When I was a very little girl, no more than a child, I was
almost painfully interested in astronomy. I say 'painfully' because my
unfortunate parents had to take me not once but twice to a lecture on
popular astronomy given in the Hastings Pier Pavilion by Sir Robert
Ball. I enjoyed it so much the first time that I insisted on hearing it
all over again. The second time there was an additional attraction in
the form of what must have been one of the very first movies, lasting
about ten minutes. But this did not thrill me nearly so much as the
lantern slides that accompanied the lecture--the orbits of the planets,
the mountains of the moon, and always at the end the brightly coloured
text: 'The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament sheweth
his handywork.'

This early interest in astronomy evaporated very soon, and I cannot say
that since then I have read much of what used to be my favourite
subject. I have not even read the popular elucidations of Eddington and
Jeans. My interests like those of humanity in general came down to
earth. But it was not till I was near middle age that I occupied
myself--apart from 'poetic thinking'--with the proper study of mankind.
Then, like so many others, I began to read Freud.

Psychology as we know it now did not come before the general public
until the First World War. By then the doctrines of Freud and Jung and
the technique of psycho-analysis had spread from the clinics to the
coteries and 'free association' became a sort of literary parlour game.
Freud attracted more attention than Jung, as he was supposed to
attribute all human reactions to the unfulfilled needs of sex, and
sinister stories were told of the remedies advised by practitioners of
his method. No doubt a certain amount of harm was done both to his
reputation and to the more gullible members of the community by
unqualified 'psycho-analysts' who had swallowed but not digested him,
and a quite terrible lot of nonsense was talked on all sides. But it is
notable that at a recent congress of psychologists in Vatican City,
Freud was very much in the ascendant over Jung, who had always been
supposed to enjoy the favour of religious circles because of his
emphasis on religion as a human need and the general build-up of his
system of archetypes, which lends itself to religious interpretation.

Advised by Evelyn Underhill, who greatly disliked Freud as she
understood him, I read a certain amount of MacDougal and William Brown;
but one had not the sensation with them as one has with Freud--and also,
indeed, with Jung--of adventuring on a totally new path towards
discoveries that have never been made before. I gather from what I have
read (and I have no other source of knowledge) that Freud's methods, if
rightly interpreted, are of more use than those of other psychologists
to the psychiatrist, as long as they are kept firmly apart from their
originator's epilogue, that _Weltanschauung_ which has done so much to
discredit him in fields which are not, properly speaking, his own.

It is one of the curiosities of human nature, this tendency to a
_Weltanschauung_. So many scientists who were safe enough on their own
empirical ground have courted disaster by rash adventures into
metaphysics. It seems almost inevitable that any new idea or discovery
will be used sooner or later as a key to the riddle of the universe. In
the case of Freud it is not so much a key as a club--a club to beat the
idea of God into the Oedipus complex. Indeed the violence of his assault
has led to the comment that where God is concerned Freud himself is in
need of analysis. But Freud is not the only one to spoil good practice
with bad theory. J. B. Rhine adds a final chapter to his _Reach of Mind_
in which he shows what amounts to a world redeemed by Extra-Sensory
Perception; while the late J. Dunne failed to realize that his
_Experiment with Time_ did not necessarily involve _The New
Immortality_. Until a short while ago I thought that Jung had escaped
the snare and would remain a determined empiricist throughout other
people's speculations on his psychology. But in his recently published
_Answer to Job_ he seems to have attempted the analysis of Jahveh and in
the course of it to have become most unprofessionally angry with his
patient.


The night I finished reading Freud's _Interpretation of Dreams_ I
dreamed the perfect text-book Freudian dream. I cannot now, perhaps
fortunately, remember the details, but they fitted his theories exactly.
The same thing happened when I first read Jung--a text-book dream,
containing in this case some additional material I did not meet till
later. The neatest fit of all was the dream I had after reading
Dunne--drawing for exactly one-half on the past, for the other on the
future. In none of these dreams was there any extraneous matter. They
were the carefully written exercises of my sleeping mind for which it
deserved full marks.

Long before I read Dunne I was accustomed to the idea of pre-vision in
dreams, for my mother dreamed ahead of some important events in her
life--to the exasperation of my father who believed such a thing to be
impossible. Like many good and devout men of that period he kept his
religion in a separate compartment from his other beliefs. Faithfully
accepting all the miracles in the Bible, he utterly refused to believe
in any anywhere else, and Bradlaugh could not have been more of a
sceptic than he on such matters as ghosts, telepathy, pre-vision or
even--until medically certified--hypnotism. He must have found my
mother's dreams distinctly trying, though he never would acknowledge
their fulfilment. Needless to say I did not tell him mine.

These did not start till I was grown up and with one or two exceptions
were much more trivial than my mother's. On only one occasion has a
dream clearly foretold anything of real importance to me. For the most
part my dreams have born the same relation to the future as to the
past--that is they have complicated and smudged the small skeleton of
fact with extraneous symbols. Nevertheless it was my dreams that aroused
my interest in Extra-Sensory Perception, that set me to read Dunne and
Rhine and Soal and Saltmarsh and others who have occupied themselves
with prediction, whether spontaneous or controlled.

From prediction I passed on to other departments of what is loosely
called 'psychical research', my reading, I hope, becoming more
scientific as I drew further and further away from Borley Rectory.
Psychical research has been bedevilled by spiritualism, by the desire
not only to investigate phenomena but by such investigation to prove an
already accepted belief. It can of course be said that Myers set the
pattern with his _Human Personality and its Survival after Bodily
Death_, but the fact that the second half of the title is seldom used in
modern references is not entirely due to its cumbrousness.

Myers is now considered old-fashioned, but he was a pioneer in those
regions which the psycho-analysts have mapped out more impressively.
Comparing him to Freud and Jung is like comparing an explorer to a
cartographer, and the fact that the regions he explored are, in spite of
all the maps, still largely unknown is owing to the reluctance of those
best fitted to study them to awake from Newton's Sleep. It seems more
than possible--it seems probable--that if the mystery of man were fully
known it would involve as big a change in scientific thinking as did the
astronomy of Copernicus.

The late G. N. M. Tyrrell, in the course of his Myers Memorial Lecture
[1] states that: 'All the facts we have brought to light clash violently
with a widely accepted view about the nature of things. You cannot take
facts like telepathy and precognition and simply tack them on to this
accepted outlook. . . . In general, the entire outlook necessitated by
the findings of psychical research breaks up the naive realism in which
the human mind is steeped and shows it to be largely illusory.'

[1] Delivered in 1942 and published in book form by Duckworth in 1943 as
_Apparitions_.

This is turning the world inside out with a vengeance; but here the
world is not the macrocosm of Ptolemy's heavens but the microcosm of
man's personality. We know from the histories of Kepler and Galileo that
Copernicus's discoveries had to wait more than a hundred years before
they were universally accepted by orthodox science (the fact that the
scientists were also theologians is irrelevant, since in those days few
besides the clergy had any learning), and it seems likely that history
will be repeated--if there is time. Tyrrell laments that 'the idea that,
through the study of human personality, our whole conception of the
nature of things may undergo a radical change is as far as ever from
making its appearance in the philosophic and scientific worlds'; and
though Rhine has tried hard to make telepathy and clairvoyance
respectable by introducing scientific methods of research, the result
has been little more than to sow uneasiness in the minds of some of his
fellow researchers. 'The quantitative methods of research,' writes
Tyrrell, 'on which we are now concentrating, although useful and perhaps
indispensable for the solution of certain problems, are in many ways
unsuitable for psychical research . . . [which] is in a very different
position from physics and is a very different type of inquiry. It is
unexplored, virgin territory in a sense in which the physical sciences
are not. We are eminently pioneers. These people want to build a
railway, whereas our first duty is to make a rough map of the terrain.
We have, I feel sure, to begin by forming _new ideas_ about it. These
ideas will be quantitative and very new, and probably very upsetting to
common sense and logic. [2]

[2] _Apparitions_. Revised edition, 1953. Pp. 162, 163.

My personal belief is that psychical research has been foxed not only by
spiritualism but by the tacit relegation in some quarters of everything
outside the field of the physical sciences to 'the supernatural'. I feel
sure that telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis and so on belong equally
with biology, physics and psychology to the natural order. I do not
believe that psychical research will ever by itself 'prove' the
immortality of the soul, but I believe that its discoveries may in time
shed an entirely new light on human personality and 'the nature of
things'. The Book of Genesis gives the picture of man renouncing the
Tree of Life for the Tree of Knowledge. Is it perhaps a fact that the
mystery of life might already have been solved if we had not spent so
much human study and effort on the physical sciences--if I dare say so,
barking up the wrong tree? It would be a sad irony if our long struggle
for knowledge of the physical world around us should end in our blowing
that world to smithereens before we have found out what it really is or
who we really are.


All this and Ouspensky too has provided my mind with as it were its
protein diet for the last fifteen years. But it also needs its
carbohydrates and these I take in the form of fiction. I did not start
the war alone with a philosopher in whose company I could face its fears
and anxieties but with a jester in whose company I could forget them.

P. G. Wodehouse is of course the supreme refuge of the escapist, for he
opens the frontier of another world. Other novelists invite us into
worlds which are reflections of the world we know and resound with its
echoes; they create characters and situations but not worlds. P. G.
Wodehouse creates worlds--worlds in any number: the world of Jeeves and
Bertie Wooster, the world of Blandings Castle (sometimes under another
name but smelling just as sweet), the world of American
theatre-business, the worlds of the Mulliners, the Goofs and the Young
Men in Spats. This rare power to create worlds is also, I venture to
believe, part of the fascination of I. Compton-Burnett.

At first sight these two novelists are not remarkably like each other,
but I could argue that they have more in common than their respective
admirers would allow. It is true that she draws in straight lines,
whereas he is all curves, that her characters are blueprints of humanity
while his are caricatures, that she is a wit where he is a humorist. But
they both provide an escape from life as we know it today, and they are
both inimitable--though here again there is a difference, for no one has
ever attempted to imitate Miss Compton-Burnett, whereas Wodehouse has
had many imitators, for whose achievements the only word is Dire.

But what links them most closely together in my mind is their style--not
that in this they have many points of resemblance, but I am sure that in
the case of both it is manner and not matter that forms their main
attraction. We do not read Miss Compton-Burnett for her story or her
characters but for the dry, crackling dialogue that sets them before us.
Nor do we read P. G. Wodehouse for his ingenious plots or farcical
situations. We read him for that command of language which caused a no
lesser judge than Hilaire Belloc to describe him as 'the best writer of
English now alive'.

It is true that this verdict caused a certain amount of surprise in
America where Mr. Belloc pronounced it, but he was perfectly well able
to explain and defend it. In his introduction to _The Week-End
Wodehouse_ he writes: 'His object is comedy in the most modern sense of
that word: that is, his object is to present the laughable, and he does
this with such mastery and skill that he nearly always approaches, and
often reaches, perfection.' He illustrates this statement with an
analysis of Wodehouse's construction and style, particularly with his
use of parallelism. 'Now in parallelism Mr. Wodehouse is again supreme.
There is no one like him in this department. One may say of him as he
might say of his own Jeeves, "There is none like you, none"'--and
certainly Lord Chesterfield's august pronouncement that 'there is
nothing so vulgar or illiberal as audible laughter' comes to startling
life in Wodehouse's comparison of a certain lady's laugh to 'cavalry
clattering over a tin bridge'. Belloc continues: 'Mr. Wodehouse has done
the trick. In every case the parallelism has enhanced to the utmost the
value of the thing described. It appears not only in phrases, but in the
use of one single metaphorical word, and especially in the use of
passing vernacular slang.' He ends with some strikingly uninhibited
praise of Jeeves as a literary creation--'In his creation of Jeeves he
has done something which may respectfully be compared to the work of the
Almighty in Michael Angelo's painting. He has formed a man filled with
the breath of life.' But here I venture to disagree; for though I could
not bear to lose a word that Jeeves has uttered or has had uttered about
him, he does not really belong to human nature. And why should he? He is
a citizen of Mr. Wodehouse's world, not ours, and as such belongs
properly to Space Fiction.

In a review of Mr. Wodehouse's latest novel there was a sneer at
'septuagenarian humour'. Being nearly seventy myself my opinion may be
biased, so I will say no more than that I found him equally amusing when
I was thirty. It was during middle age that I began to feel superior and
to neglect his work, with the undeserved reward that in my later years I
have had very much more of it to read and enjoy than I should have
otherwise. There is also this to be said for septuagenarian humour--that
as more and more people live to be over seventy it is likely to become
more and more in demand and would be better supplied by a contemporary
than by a superior young person who considers we ought to be thinking of
our graves, or better still, be in them. May Mr. Wodehouse live to
entertain the octogenarians and the nonogenarians and even the
centenarians. His humour knows no uncleanness and no unkindness. It is
true that he has a deep-set dislike of aunts and lady novelists, both of
which I am, but I hope that will only increase the value of this
tribute.


P. G. Wodehouse provides the richly sherried trifle that ends the meal
that started with I. Compton-Burnett's caviare. In between are more
sustaining courses and some of these also are fiction. If I read more
philosophy and psychology than I did in the past I also read more
novels. For the novel interests me rather more now than when I first
began to write. Some writers have told me that novels no longer appeal
to them as they grow older, that 'love' as one of the mainsprings of
human behaviour has become a bore and they would rather have their ideas
served plain. But personally I find that ideas presented through the
medium of a good novel have the vitality and stimulation of ideas
presented by life itself. Of all the various definitions of the novel I
would choose that which calls it 'a criticism of life'.

I would not like to be misunderstood when I talk of 'ideas' in fiction.
I am not particularly partial to novels written expressly to illustrate
their author's views on time or eternity, but a novel which has no
critical approach to life, which is only a story, I find as
unentertaining as the better-class women's magazines (the other class
has for me the same fascination that I imagine Horror Comics have for
those whose morbid tastes take a different line). There has lately been
some discussion of the novel's right to be entertaining, and certain
novelists have been commended for being above this weakness, whereas
others have succumbed to it. I note, however, that I have personally
received more entertainment from the first class than from the second. I
find D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster more entertaining than Arnold
Bennett or Hugh Walpole. But perhaps I am misusing the work. I should
have said that I find more pleasure in their work. Yet surely to settle
down for any hour's pleasure is to be entertained, no matter how much
the entertainers would (or possibly would not) scorn the idea. I am long
past the age for reading, as I used, for fashion's or for conscience'
sake, and if I am not to be entertained I will not read at all. Any
well-written novel that presents life, any sort of life, and ideas, any
sort of ideas, inevitably entertains me, and if by this I am insulting
the author I can only apologize.

There is, however, one class of novel in which entertainment is always
considered respectable, and that is the mystery, 'tec, thriller, blood,
whodunnit class. At one time this kind of fiction was considered beneath
contempt, the province of office boys and inferior housemaids, but
lately it has become a recreation for intellectuals. Actually it was a
nun who first pointed out to me its value as a hypnotic, but I had
already discovered most of its other uses, and was a confirmed addict of
the late Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke.

I met him and Sherlock Holmes together during the First World War, when
I was staying unhappily at a cheap and battered club in Maida Vale,
trying to warm my heart at the ashes of an extinguished love affair. I
used to read both Austin Freeman and Conan Doyle as I sat alone at tea,
and was surprised to find how interesting and how comforting they were.
In the end I came to prefer Freeman, and I believe I must have read
everything he wrote. His extraordinary lucidity and directness, and the
width of his interests, among which however medicine predominated, made
up for Doyle's superiority in presenting life and character. Even his
occasional introduction of a love affair--which I can seldom forgive in
this type of fiction--was atoned for by the quaintness of its setting in
hansom cabs and in the 'milk shops' where the lovers met for tea.
Freeman was already an old man and had been writing for some time, so I
had a lot of leeway to make up. There is no one writing quite in his
style at the present day.

The scope of my reading was greatly enlarged by the discovery of the
thriller's narcotic properties, which made it necessary to have one
always available. It may seem strange that murder and its detection
should induce sleep, but it supports my idea that this kind of novel is
really a grown-up fairy-tale. It does not and should not bear any close
resemblance to life, and the attempts of various authors to make it do
so lead only to sleeping-pills. Murder is not of itself in the least
entertaining, but sordid and horrible, and its detection is seldom a
mystery but a wrestle with legal obstructions. Therefore if we are not
to be first horrified and then bored, the world in which it takes place
should not be too much like our own. But when I am invited to combine
detection with a psychological or sociological study I find myself in
the same mental state as when confronted with an ape, a parrot or an
earwig--all creatures who suggest a class of life above them without
actually belonging to it. I find it painful to look at an ape because I
do not see it as the animal it is but as the human being that it
grotesquely is not; nor is a parrot with its preferences and jealousies
quite a bird but the ape of a dog or a cat; while and earwig, with the
horrid appearance of intelligence with which it evades destruction, will
not allow me to see it only as an insect. By the same token the novels
of Miss Dorothy Sayers, Miss Margery Allingham and Miss Ngaio Marsh
suggest a serious criticism of life to which their murders and their
detectives do not belong.

I use the word 'detective' rather than 'detection' because all these
three novelists have added to my difficulties as a reader by entrusting
their detection to a glamour boy. Reared as it were on Sherlock Holmes
and Dr. Thorndyke, I cannot stomach Mr. Campion and 'Handsome Alleyn',
while as for Lord Peter Wimsey . . . I can only say I was one of the few
who rejoiced when Miss Sayers turned from crime to theology. Apart from
personal dislikes I consider that a detective story should have no
concern with a detective's love life. Dr. Thorndyke might beam on the
lovers sitting at tea in the milk shop but he himself was totally immune
from such concessions to human nature; and as for indulging in a
honeymoon. . . . Agatha Christie does not present the same difficulties,
for neither of her detectives, male or female, shows any signs of
becoming glamorous, and the settings of her mysteries, though life-like,
are never so close as to make the mysteries themselves seem incredible.
There is nothing so good as a vintage Christie--I say vintage, because
she runs another cellar _pour le soif_ which depends too much on mere
technical ability and where murder and murderer do not always match. But
_The Murder of Roger Ackroyd_, _Murder on the Orient Express_ and
_Crooked House_, to name only three out of many, are superb examples of
what the whodunnit can be when uncontaminated by masculine glamour or
feminine intellect.

Another writer who keeps my rules, and I do not think they are only
mine, is Mr. John Rhode. Here we have detection without a detective,
glamorous or otherwise, for Jimmy Waghorn is only a pleasant, rather
short-sighted police superintendent, who though in one of the earlier
novels he married somebody, has steadfastly ignored her ever since. The
story is entirely devoted to crime, and it is not only its detection
that arouses respect. Mr. Rhode has devised more brilliant and unusual
ways of getting rid of unwanted members of the human race than any other
writer I know.


But the novel has had more serious charges brought against it than that
of being entertaining. It has been stated to be dead; or if not dead,
then dying--'a vanishing art-form'. This diagnosis is not new. I made it
myself as long ago as 1911, when at a loss for something to say at the
end of a lecture, and many others have made it both before and since.
But recently it has been more formidably revived by Sir Harold Nicolson
on the score that the novel is the youngest of the literary arts and
therefore likely to be short-lived. It would indeed be _The Story of a
Short Life_ were it to vanish now, for the novel as we know it has been
in existence for less than three hundred years. But why should we be so
Victorian as to expect the young to die early? After all, prose is a
more recent literary form than poetry but at the moment shows every sign
of outliving it.

If the novel died it must be either from external assault or internal
decay. The assault no doubt is expected from television. Televiewers
will not read. The same, however, was said of the radio, which in so far
as it has affected the sales of novels has only increased them. A vast
popular network has brought books and authors before a public which
might otherwise never have heard of them, and as far as I can see it
will be the same with television. I forecast that the effect on the
novel of television will be similar to the effect of the cinema on the
stage--not a kill, but a purge. No doubt it may be the death of the
fiction magazines and of those curious literary offerings that appeared
on the bookstalls when the newspapers did not; but I do not believe that
the serious novelist has anything to fear. Those who read novels either
for edification or for entertainment will continue to do so, and many
who did not may begin on the strength of some recommendation or
reproduction on the screen. If the novel dies, it will not be the work
of an outside enemy.

But perhaps the novel is its own enemy, and there are inevitably moments
when one fears the public may become bored by the sheer ugliness of many
novels that are published today. I see, however, no general signs of
failing circulation and though the output of novels was slightly less
last year than it was the year before, it was substantially greater than
even a few years ago. As for standards, I cannot see that those have in
any way declined. We may perhaps have fewer giants than we had in the
past but the average is very much higher than in the days of the great
men.

We think so often and so much of the leaders that we forget how poor the
average used to be. After Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne and
Smollett came the circulating libraries with a sea of rubbish out of
which Jane Austen rose like Venus from the waves. How many of those
strong souls who can still read Scott could read his immediate
predecessors in the Gothic Revival? It is the same with the Victorian
novel. Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, the Bronts were the flagships
of a three-decker navy which if any of it still survives--and possibly
in some old-fashioned rectory or manor house copies may still be found
of _Beulah_, _Ben Hur_ or _The Bachelor of the Albany_--it can attract
readers only as a curiosity or a joke.

Even the great names will not always bear too close an examination. Any
novelist in the second or third rank today could make rings round Maria
Edgeworth; and compare Bulwer Lytton's method of writing history with
that of Oliver Onions or H. V. Prescott--it is not only changing fashion
that has blurred the colours of the earlier writers. They were always
dingy and no closer to what they represented than a Victorian
stained-glass window. As for life and character, there is more of it in
one chapter of Monica Dickens than in the whole of Kingsley and
Disraeli, and if it were published today would anyone made the fuss that
was made over _John Halifax, Gentleman?_ We have too many just as good.

But it is not only the high standard of the average that makes me think
the novel very much alive. Another sign of life is its adaptability.
Changing fashions in reading are continuously met by changing fashions
in writing and new experiment is constantly enriching the traditional
main body of English fiction. The experimental novel is not an attempt
to keep a dying craft alive but a sign of its vitality, and though some
experiments may fail and deserve to fail they nearly all in some way
enter the classic stream and thus prevent its stagnation. Henry James,
Dorothy Richardson, Ernest Hemingway, Thornton Wilder, and many others
have put life and adventure into the traditional English novel at times
when, no doubt, it was like other established forms, showing signs of
decline. The novel can and will survive as long as it remains a valid
interpretation of life and human nature. There are other forms of
entertainment, there are other means of communicating ideas, but as a
criticism of life--of society and humanity--there is nothing that can
quite take its place.

As I write in my oast-house study I seem very far from my nursery
bookcase. Yet the shelves which a local craftsman has so skilfully
moulded to the circular walls are prismatic with the spines of books
which derive in true succession from those I read all those years ago.
Of actual survivors hardly any remain--only a few volumes of the
Bibiothque Rose are there to face Les ditions du Cerf across the room.
But the others live on in their descendants.

These take a fairly direct line. Any book I pick up now can take me back
without genealogical complications to a nursery ancestor. On the same
shelf as Les ditions du Cerf stand Pre Bouyer's two great works, two
Romano Guardinis and half a dozen von Hgels--a long way, it might seem,
from _Line Upon Line_ but most surely the ripening of those interests
which started there. The shelf of the psychologists and anthropologists
bears the same relation to Dr. Smith's _Mythology_, and the novels no
doubt derive from _Lottie's Visit to Grandmamma_. It might be more
difficult to trace the descent of the poems of Blake, Crashaw, Treherne,
T. S. Eliot and Edith Sitwell from _Original Poems for Infant Minds_.
Indeed I cannot claim that my love of poetry was inspired by that
depressing work. But poetry, the oldest literary form, is mysteriously
the last to be loved for its own sake--take for example Lord Samuel's
contempt of a lovely but obscure poem by Dylan Thomas--and it was not
till I had been some years out of the nursery that I came in any degree
to value any poetry apart from what that same patron of the arts would
probably call its meaning.

My early reading was dictated by chance and the choice of others. I read
what was there or what I was given, and the contents of my school
library was no doubt as fortuitous as that of the nursery bookshelf.
Then came an interval in which my choice was directed by what I thought
I ought to read and later by what other people were reading. I have not
until the last fifteen years been entirely independent in my reading of
either conscience or fashion. Now I read for my own pleasure--what
interests and what entertains me, what stimulates and what relaxes me.
This may be why reading has come to mean so much more to me than it did,
this and the subsidence of other activities, as the years close round me
with their short list. Not long ago I heard a country neighbour tell her
ninety-year-old mother: 'Every year's a year now', and though myself
still far from such an impressive figure, I can truthfully say that
'Every book's a book.' For in spite of all the books I have read there
are so many more that I want to read and there is so much more that I
want to know.

The End

