Things near & far Chapter 13: Part 13

Wellington Street, Bow Street, York Street, anguish possessed me as I remembered how I had once starved and had known something like happiness while I toiled over the ancient occult books in the Catherine Street garret; anguish possessed me as I recollected the happy time in misery. And, as I said to a friend soon afterwards: “In those days I was getting considerably less money in a whole year than I am now getting in a month; and yet....” Again, I say, if our clergy would but mind their business. If instead of enquiring into the exact cut of bodices, instead of passing anxious hours as to the pernicious corruptions of the Fox-Trot and the Bunny Hug, instead of working with all their hearts and souls to make sure that no one can possibly get a glass of bitter beer after ten o’clock, instead of unmasking the inferno of the race-course, the utter levity of much of our railway literature; if, instead of all this accursed drivel, cant and imbecility, they would but say Mass and preach the Gospel, and otherwise quite abide in peace! Let them go to the Book, and there they will find that the most horrible sin denounced in it is neither gambling, drinking nor wantoning, but the sin of shaming a man, of bitterly insulting him, of making him mean in his own eyes, of making him despise his own self as something unutterably fouled and scorned and bewrayed. What is the text? Something like: but he that sayeth to his brother, “Thou fool,” shall be in danger of hell fire. I am drawing a contrast between 1889 and 1921, and hence I say that the Brothers always treated me with the common decency due from one human being to another, though they were rich and I was poor, though they were men of business and I an idiot in all matters of business, though they were masters and I was man. And now as to the famous boast. As I said, I ceased to be in the employment of these good men. I went into the country, up on the Children Hills. We neither saw nor heard anything of each other. But all the while those legacies of which I have spoken came dropping slow, and in 1893, when I had made up my mind to return to London, I think I must have had in bank something between three and four thousand pounds. I was assailed by an unworthy pang of prudence, by one of the foolish notions that the world’s people take for wisdom. It struck me that this living on capital, taking the pieces of eight by fistfuls out of the chest, would never do; that the money ought to be invested, preferably in some business in which I could contribute work as well as money. I looked about me, I advertised, I saw some people in the City and found nothing promising from my point of view, though I found here and there such curiosities as London, I believe, only affords. For example, in a very dim sort of cock-loft in an old house in the heart of the City, I hit upon a firm of general agents who had answered my advertisement. There were two of them: one, a young, rosy, out-in-the-open sort of man, the other elderly, frock-coated, with a kind of dissenting beard on his chin. He talked of the version of Horace’s odes that he was shortly bringing out at his own expense, and discussed with me the true pronunciation of the Latin language with much intelligence. The junior partner’s talk was of trawling, and indeed he said that the firm was a sort of trawling concern--in City waters. But nothing came of it, and at last I bethought me of the Brothers. Brother Charles was as genial as ever. He saw my point. He said: “We are going to issue Casanova at last; why not put a thousand pounds into that for a start?” I agreed, and the matter was settled. And then, very nervously, with a good deal of hesitation, with a certain difficulty in the choice of words, Brother Charles said: “Of course, Mr. Machen, we quite recognise the ... er ... circumstances in which you made your most admirable translation of the book. It was ... er ... in a manner ... er ... task-work; yes, _task-work_. Well ... the case is now, to a certain degree ... altered; you have an interest in the prosperity of the venture, and, in short, we rather wondered whether you would like to ... to ... _revise_ your manuscript.” “Mr. Charles,” I replied, “I did the job as well as I could; and I don’t think I can make it any better.” _Chapter VII_ Beroalde de Verville proved to be what the elder members of the theatrical profession used to call “a pill.” Only the other day I was reading a French account of this author. The critic said in the course of his remarks that many people who had gone to the “Moyen de Parvenir” in search of unpleasantness had turned back from the quest, deterred by the difficulty of the language. And I don’t know that it is more difficult for a modern Frenchman than for an Englishman. It is written in a sort of Babylonish dialect which is not exactly French though it looks like it; as Meredith looks like English to the casual glance. And then, it is not only difficult, but obscure; not only are the sentences queerly constructed, but the subject-matter is of a highly dubious and cloudy character: when you have found out what Beroalde is saying, you begin to wonder what he is saying it about. And, then, there are bits of old dialect peppered about this excessively odd volume. I remember coming upon two words: “iquent hesne.” I sat down in front of them, and looked at them from every angle. I don’t know how I found out at last that “iquent hesne” was a sort of seventeenth-century French “Zummerzet” for “cette chêne”--“thicky oāk.” Again the “Moyen” is thick with puns, of the kind that used to be called in the golden days of Burlesque “outrageous”: and the time I wasted in trying to turn these silly French tricks into sillier English contortions! On the whole, I would say that “Le Moyen de Parvenir” in literature is as a cathedral constructed entirely of gargoyles would be in architecture. Rabelais is full of gargoyles, “apes and owls and antics,” as he calls them, on the outside of the jar. But within, as he rightly claims, there are precious medicines, aromatic balms of singular power and virtue. And so far as I can judge, Beroalde is all oddity and nothing else. He cost me a year’s hard labour; the version was issued and is now valued by collectors; and that is all that need be said. And now--in 1890--I began to try a little journalism of the more or less literary kind. I began, I think, by writing “Turnovers” for the “Globe,” and miscellaneous articles for the “St. James’s Gazette,” and at length stories for the latter paper, which was then edited by Mr.--now Sir--Sydney Lowe. The “Globe” is extinct, the “St. James’s Gazette” is merged and submerged in the “Evening Standard”; there are no papers of such metal now in existence. The difference between them and the evening papers of the day is a very simple one: the former were meant to please the educated, the latter are designed to entertain the uneducated, and the uneducated may be equated, very largely indeed, with women. It is an odd paradox: there is no doubt, I suppose, that the instruction--or, if you like, education--of women has made immense strides in the last thirty years; and yet it is true that when a newspaper editor says to himself: “We have an immense number of women readers and we must see that they get what they like,” the result is drivel. This sort of thing: Madame has just discovered a new craze. Jewelled clay pipes and shag tobacco delicately sprinkled with gold-dust are now quite _démodés_ when once we cross the borders of Balham; but my lady prides herself on her collection of hookahs, the water-pipes of the gorgeous East. It is quite the thing, I hear, amongst really smart women to give “Hookah Teas.” Everybody wears Oriental costume, and sits on cushions piled on the floor, and delicately draws in the aroma of the rarest Turkish Tobacco, scented by its passage through rosewater or lavender-water. At Lady Clarinda Belsize’s Hookah Tea last Wednesday, two native musicians played the tom-tom and the _guzla_ behind a curtain, or _purdah_, as I am told it is called. Of course _yashmaks_ were worn by all the guests. There; it is not worth parodying. And there is another sort of terrible tosh which deals with the doings of “The Summer Girl” and “The Winter Girl” and “The Marathon Girl”: all of it a very feeble imitation of the cheapest American journalism. In the ’nineties this kind of thing existed, but it was confined to the columns of one or two ladies’ papers. In those days, I would not say that the editors of evening papers brought out their journals exclusively for the benefit of the members of the best clubs of St. James’s and Pall Mall; but I certainly should say that they had the clubs in their mind’s eye; that they presumed a certain standard of education and culture in their readers. All that ended when the evening “Westminster Gazette” came to an end. But indeed there would be little harm done if a column or two columns or three columns were reserved for the “Hookah Tea” stuff and the “Caravan Girl” stuff and all similar stuff. You could skip these columns if you didn’t like them, just as I skip the racing columns, in which I am not interested. But “the women” rule the whole paper. Not only must the editor put in matter which he knows they will like, he must keep out matter which he knows they won’t like. And the result is ... the result as we know it. As the “literary editor” of a big London paper acutely observed to me not long ago, the case of the newspaper article is exactly as the case of chops and steaks, beefsteak puddings and saddles of mutton that were of old. “The women” have spoilt all. What do they know or care about man’s food? To them there is nothing to choose between a chop fried white and hard and greasy in the frying-pan and a chop which has been purged of all excess by the ardent heat, beneath the gridiron,