Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump Part 6

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Mutimer as the plot thickens._]

"Book two opens with Mr. Blandish practically in possession of the facts. Putting the thing coa.r.s.ely, the treasure is--1813 brandy, in considerable quant.i.ties bricked up in a disused cellar of Samphire House. Samphire House, instead of being the fine claret of a refuge Mr. Blandish supposed, is a loaded port. But of course in the novel we shall not put things coa.r.s.ely, and for a long time you will be by no means clear what the 'spirit' is that Mr. Blandish is now resolved to exorcise. He is, in fact, engaged in trying to get that brandy away, trying to de-alcoholize his existence, trying--if one must put the thing in all the concrete crudity of his fundamental intention--to sell the stuff....

"Now in real life you would just go and sell it. But people in the novels of Henry James do not do things in the inattentive, offhand, rather confused, and partial way of reality: they bring enormous brains to bear upon the minutest particulars of existence. Mr.

Blandish, following the laws of that world, has not simply to sell his brandy: he has to sell it subtly, intricately, interminably, with a delicacy, with a dignity....

"He consults friends--impalpable, intricate, inexhaustible friends.

"There are misunderstandings. One old and trusted intimate concludes rather hastily that Mr. Blandish is confessing that he has written a poem, another that he is making a proposal of marriage, another that he wishes an introduction to the secretary of the Psychical Research Society.... All this," said Boon, "remains, perhaps indefinitely, to be worked out. Only the end, the end, comes with a rush. Deshman has found for him--one never gets nearer to it than the 'real right people.' The real right people send their agent down, a curious blend of gentleman and commercial person he is, to investigate, to verify, to estimate quant.i.ties. Ultimately he will--shall we say it?--make an offer. With a sense of immense culmination the reader at last approaches the h.o.a.rd....

"You are never told the thing exactly. It is by indefinable suggestions, by exquisite approaches and startings back, by circ.u.mlocution the most delicate, that your mind at last shapes its realization, that--the last drop of the last barrel has gone and that Mutimer, the butler, lies dead or at least helpless--in the inner cellar. And a beautiful flavour, ripe and yet rare, rich without opulence, hangs--_diminuendo morendo_--in the air...."

CHAPTER THE FIFTH

Of the a.s.sembling and Opening of the World Conference on the Mind of the Race

-- 1

It must be borne in mind that not even the opening chapter of this huge book, "The Mind of the Race," was ever completely written. The discussion in the Garden by the Sea existed merely so far as the fragment of dialogue I have quoted took it. I do not know what Mr.

Gosse contributed except that it was something bright, and that presently he again lost his temper and washed his hands of the whole affair and went off with Mr. Yeats to do a little Academy thing of their own round a corner, and I do not know what became of the emissaries of Lord Northcliffe and Mr. Hearst. One conversation drops out of mind and another begins; it is like the battle of the Aisne pa.s.sing slowly into the battle of the Yser. The idea develops into the holding of a definite congress upon the Mind of the Race at some central place. I don't think Boon was ever very clear whether that place was Chautauqua, or Grindelwald, or Stratford, or Oxford during the Long Vacation, or the Exhibition grounds at San Francisco. It was, at any rate, some such place, and it was a place that was speedily placarded with all sorts of bills and notices and counsels, such as, "To the Central Hall," or "Section B: Criticism and Reviewing," or "Section M: Prose Style," or "Authors' Society (British) Solicitors'

Department," or "Exhibit of the Reading Room of the British Museum."

Manifestly the model of a meeting of the British a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Science dominated his mind more and more, until at last he began to concoct a presidential address. And he invented a man called J. B. Pondlebury, very active and illiterate, but an excellent organizer, trained by Selfridge, that Marshal Field of London, who is very directive throughout. J. B. Pondlebury orders the special trains, contrives impossible excursions, organizes garden fetes and water parties, keeps people together who would prefer to be separated, and breaks up people who have been getting together. Through all these things drifts Hallery, whose writings started the idea, and sometimes he is almost, as it were, leader and sometimes he is like a drowned body in the torrent below Niagara--Pondlebury being Niagara.

On the whole the atmosphere of the great conference was American, and yet I distinctly remember that it was the Special Train to Bale of which he gave us an account one afternoon; it was a night journey of considerable eventfulness, with two adjacent carriages de luxe labelled respectively "Specially Reserved for Miss Marie Corelli," and "Specially Reserved for Mr. and Mrs. George Bernard Shaw," with conspicuous reiterations. The other compartments were less exclusive, and contained curious minglings of greatness, activity, and reputation. Sir J. M. Barrie had an upper berth in a _wagon-lit_, where he remained sympathetically silent above a crowd of younger reputations, a crowd too numerous to permit the making of the lower berth and overflowing into the corridor. I remember Boon kept jamming new people into that congestion. The whole train, indeed, was to be fearfully overcrowded. That was part of the joke. James Joyce I recall as a novelist strange to me that Boon insisted was a "first-rater." He represented him as being of immense size but extreme bashfulness. And he talked about D. H. Lawrence, St. John Ervine, Reginald Wright Kauffman, Leonard Merrick, Viola Meynell, Rose Macaulay, Katherine Mansfield, Mary Austin, Clutton Brock, Robert Lynd, James Stephens, Philip Guedalla, H. M. Tomlinson, Denis Garstin, Dixon Scott, Rupert Brooke, Geoffrey Young, F. S. Flint, Marmaduke Pickthall, Randolph S.

Bourne, James Milne----

"Through all the jam, I think we must have Ford Madox Hueffer, wandering to and fro up and down the corridor, with distraught blue eyes, laying his hands on heads and shoulders, the Only Uncle of the Gifted Young, talking in a languid, plangent tenor, now boasting about trivialities, and now making familiar criticisms (which are invariably ill-received), and occasionally quite absent-mindedly producing splendid poetry...."

Like most authors who have made their way to prominence and profit, Boon was keenly sympathetic with any new writer who promised to do interesting work, and very ready with his praise and recognition. That disposition in these writing, prolific times would alone have choked the corridor. And he liked young people even when their promises were not exactly convincing. He hated to see a good book neglected, and was for ever ramming "The Crystal Age" and "Said the Fisherman" and "Tony Drum" and "George's Mother" and "A Hind Let Loose" and "Growing Pains"

down the throats of his visitors. But there were very human and definite limits to his appreciations. Conspicuous success, and particularly conspicuous respectable success, chilled his generosity.

Conrad he could not endure. I do him no wrong in mentioning that; it is the way with most of us; and a score of flouris.h.i.+ng contemporaries who might have liked tickets for the Conference special would have found great difficulty in getting them.

There is a fascination in pa.s.sing judgements and drawing up cla.s.s lists. For a time the high intention of the Mind of the Race was forgotten while we talked the narrow "shop" of London literary journalism, and discovered and weighed and log-rolled and--in the case of the more established--blamed and condemned. That Bale train became less and less like a train and more and more like a descriptive catalogue.

For the best part of an afternoon we talked of the young and the new, and then we fell into a discussion about such reputations as Pickthall's and W. H. Hudson's and the late Stephen Crane's, reputations ridiculously less than they ought to be, so that these writers, who are certainly as securely cla.s.sic as Beckford or Herrick, are still unknown to half the educated English reading public. Was it due to the haste of criticism or the illiteracy of publishers? That question led us so far away from the special Bale train that we never returned to it. But I know that we decided that the real and significant writers were to be only a small portion of the crowd that congested the train; there were also to be endless impostors, imitators, editors, raiders of the world of print.... At every important station there was to be a frightful row about all these people's tickets, and violent attempts to remove doubtful cases....

Then Mr. Clement K. Shorter was to come in to advise and help the conductor.... Ultimately this led to trouble about Mr. Shorter's own credentials....

Some of Boon's jokes about this train were, to say the best of them, obvious. Mr. Compton Mackenzie was in trouble about his excess luggage, for example. Mr. Upton Sinclair, having carried out his ideal of an innocent frankness to a logical completeness in his travelling equipment, was forcibly wrapped in blankets by the train officials.

Mr. Thomas Hardy had a first-cla.s.s ticket but travelled by choice or mistake in a second-cla.s.s compartment, his deserted place being subsequently occupied by that promising young novelist Mr. Hugh Walpole, provided with a beautiful fur rug, a fitted dressing-bag, a writing slope, a gold-nibbed fountain pen, innumerable introductions, and everything that a promising young novelist can need. The brothers Chesterton, Mr. Maurice Baring, and Mr. Belloc sat up all night in the _wagon-restaurant_ consuming beer enormously and conversing upon immortality and whether it extends to Semitic and Oriental persons. At the end of the train, I remember, there was to have been a horse-van containing Mr. Maurice Hewlett's charger--Mr. Hewlett himself, I believe, was left behind by accident at the Gare de Lyons--Mr.

Cunninghame Graham's Arab steed, and a large, quiet sheep, the inseparable pet of Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson....

There was also, I remember, a description of the whole party running for early coffee, which gave Boon ample and regrettable opportunities for speculations upon the _deshabille_ of his contemporaries. Much of the detail of that invention I prefer to forget, but I remember Mr.

Shaw was fully prepared for the emerging with hand-painted pyjamas, over which he was wearing a saffron dressing-gown decorated in green and purple scrolls by one of the bolder artists a.s.sociated with Mr.

Roger Fry, and as these special train allusions are all that I can ever remember Boon saying about Shaw, and as the drawing does in itself amount to a criticism, I give it here....

[Ill.u.s.tration: _How Mr. Shaw knocked them all on Bale platform, and got right into the middle of the picture. Remark his earnest face.

This surely is no mountebank._]

-- 2

Boon was greatly exercised over the problem of a president.

"Why have a president?" Dodd helped.

"There must be a Presidential Address," said Boon, "and these things always do have a president."

"Lord Rosebery," suggested Wilkins.

"Lord Morley," said Dodd.

"Lord Bryce."

Then we looked at one another.

"For my own part," said Boon, "if we are going in for that sort of thing, I favour Lord Reay.

"You see, Lord Reay has never done anything at all connected with literature. Morley and Bryce and Rosebery have at any rate written things--historical studies, addresses, things like that--but Reay has never written anything, and he let Gollancz make him president of the British Academy without a murmur. This seems to mark him out for this further distinction. He is just the sort of man who would be made--and who would let himself be made--president of a British affair of this sort, and they would hoist him up and he would talk for two or three hours without a blush. Just like that other confounded peer--what was his name?--who bored and bored and bored at the Anatole France dinner.... In the natural course of things it would be one of these literary lords...."

"What would he say?" asked Dodd.

"Maunderings, of course. It will make the book rather dull. I doubt if I can report him at length.... He will speak upon contemporary letters, the lack of current achievement.... I doubt if a man like Lord Reay ever reads at all. One wonders sometimes what these British literary aristocrats do with all their time. Probably he left off reading somewhere in the eighties. He won't have noted it, of course, and he will be under the impression that nothing has been written for the past thirty years."

"Good Lord!" said Wilkins.

"And he'll say that. Slowly. Steadily. Endlessly. Then he will thank G.o.d for the English cla.s.sics, ask where now is our Thackeray? where now our Burns? our Charlotte Bronte? our Tennyson? say a good word for our immortal bard, and sit down amidst the loud applause of thousands of speechlessly furious British and American writers...."

"I don't see that this will help your book forward," said Dodd.

"No, but it's a proper way of beginning. Like Family Prayers."

"I suppose," said Wilkins, "if you told a man of that sort that there were more and better poets writing in English beautifully in 1914 than ever before he wouldn't believe it. I suppose if you said that Ford Madox Hueffer, for example, had produced sweeter and deeper poetry than Alfred, Lord Tennyson, he'd have a fit."

"He'd have nothing of the kind. You could no more get such an idea into the head of one of these great vestiges of our Gladstonian days than you could get it into the seat of a Windsor chair.... And people don't have fits unless something has got into them.... No, he'd reflect quite calmly that first of all he'd never heard of this Hueffer, then that probably he was a very young man. And, anyhow, one didn't meet him in important places.... And after inquiry he would find out he was a journalist.... And then probably he'd cease to cerebrate upon the question...."

-- 3

"Besides," said Boon, "we must have one of our literary peers because of America."

"You're unjust to America," I said.

"No," said Boon. "But Aunt Dove--I know her ways."