Things near & far Chapter 14: Part 14

which beneath a coat half black, half golden-brown, preserves its delicious juices, which sizzles on the plate as William or Charles serves it, which, opened by the eager knife, shews within a hue like that of a blush-rose in June. These are not matters to enchant the wayward heart of a young girl, and when once she sets foot inside the tavern coffee-room, farewell to all such solid merits. There was once a noble tavern called Herbert’s, famous for two generations. Men who had spent half a lifetime in Africa or India or in the islands of the South Seas were sustained by the thought of the beefsteak pudding at Herbert’s. The times changed and the old tavern with them. Going there in these later days, I used to wonder why all the meats seemed to taste alike, why there was no distinctive and peculiar relish about any of the dishes. I found out the reason why one day. I had business, oddly enough, in Herbert’s kitchen. One of the cooks shewed me the joints roasting on the jack; and I perceived that three different meats were cooking at the one fire, while beneath, in a common pan, their juices mingled, ready for the basting ladle. It is not much wonder, I think, that veal and lamb and beef taste all much alike in this unhappy place, once so high, now fallen so low. One night I was dining there, and a member of the party asked the waiter to bring him some Stilton. “I beg your pardon, sir,” said the man, “we only have _English_ cheeses.” It sounds impossible; but I heard this with my ears. In the old days Herbert’s was exclusively masculine in its custom; I do not know what would have happened to that waiter then. I hardly think that his death would have been an easy one. But to “the women” all this is of no account. They know nothing about man’s food, as I say, and they care less. I do not blame them; I do not blame myself for being ignorant of the difference between Hopsac and Gaberdine: but how would _they_ like it if I poked my nose into their Oxford Street shops and insisted on these shops being carried on to suit my taste? So through this monstrous incursion of women, with the war and the nursery hours of to-day, the old tavern life has gone; utterly and for ever, I am afraid. A good thing has gone. The old mahogany boxes with bright brass work and green curtains, the light twinkling in the dark polished surfaces that were all about the room, the flaming fire with the plates warming by it, the plain food, the best of its kind, cooked in the best possible manner, the mighty tankards of mighty ale, the port that _was_ port afterwards, in itself a great gift and a curious grace, and later--say about eleven o’clock--Charles appearing with a large china bowl and a bottle under his arm, following up these things with lump sugar, lemons, and the hot water: it is all over. And it is not only the good material things that have been taken away: the good meats and the good drinks, the glowing mahogany and the cheerful blaze and crackle of the fire: with them has gone, I suspect, a certain genial habit of the mind and soul which was congruous with all the circumstances of the old-fashioned tavern, which was congruous also with good men and good books and choice poetry, with all the rich zest and relish and unction which made the Victorian age of letters a great age; and, in its measure, a worthy successor to three other illustrious tavern ages: the Shakespearian, the Caroline, and the Johnsonian. Think of Falstaff and his tavern bill and his warning against thin potations, think of Herrick and his address to Ben, his fond remembrance of the taverns “where we such clusters had as made us nobly wild not mad,” think of Johnson squeezing the orange into the bowl with antick gestures, saying “Who’s for _poonsh_?” think of Tennyson and that blest pint of port at the vanished Cock Tavern, think of Dickens, that great lover of tavern feasts and immortaliser of them: think of all this, my poor young man, and beat your breast. There are no jolly taverns for you, and your favourite authors do not write like men--“my son Cartwright writes all like a man,” said Ben Jonson--but like psycho-analytical chemists. And as I was saying, as with the taverns, so with the papers. When I wrote a little for them, in 1890 or thereabouts, it was allowable to assume a certain amount of literacy, a certain knowledge in the reader. Now that is over. I know the case of a man who, I am certain, pretends ignorance that he may continue to be employed. As it happens, he is an expert in food and drink; but I have known him number Beaujolais with the wines of Bordeaux in a newspaper article, and speak of curry powder and pickles as ordinary ingredients in veal and ham pie. I believe he knows much better; but he has probably found out that a misstatement or two gives an easy careless air that is much admired. Nobody can call a writer of this kind a pedant. A highly accomplished journalist said to me a few years ago: “Always remember that we appeal, not to the cabman, but to the cabman’s wife.” And another instance, though I am afraid it is somewhat tinged with self-praise. I had written a brief article for the “Evening News” on a topic that had been given to me; I was to explain _why_ it is that a “mean street” of to-day is, generally, hideous and appalling, while a row of sixteenth-century cottages is, generally, a delight to see. I did as I always do when I can, I took the particular instance and placed it under a general principle. I said the chief horror of the modern street was not to be sought in the poverty of the design, though that was, doubtless, bad enough, but in the fact that in the street of to-day each house is a replica of the other, so that the effect to the eye is, if the street be long enough, the prolongation of one house to infinity, in an endless series of repetitions. And I pointed out that even if you admired some particular picture or statue immensely, it would be rather awful to traverse a long gallery in which the picture or the statue were repeated again and again as far as the eye could see. And then, on the other hand, I shewed how the sixteenth-century cottages were each of them individuals, each with some slight difference from the cottage next door, each with its variety in door or window or pent-house. And hence, I urged, a continual slight surprise to the beholder, and taking the supposed row as a whole, that strangeness in the proportion which Bacon declared, most profoundly, to be necessary to the highest beauty. Well, I got this with difficulty into the prescribed 500 words--“nobody will read anything over 500 words”--and said to myself: “Now that Patmore is dead, nobody else could have written that article. But ... there will be a row.” There was. Lord Northcliffe gave the little essay the honour of a special mention in one of his famous _communiqués_--as I believe they were called. He spoke of it with venom as “a wiseacre article.” I am sure he was perfectly right from his point of view. The fault was mine. “When I am in Rome, I fast on Saturdays,” said one of the Fathers. Things have changed indeed. I was mentioning Coventry Patmore. In the Introduction to the “Religio Poetæ,” a collection of short essays of the profoundest wisdom, he acknowledges his obligations to Greenwood, once editor of the “St. James’s Gazette.” Some of these essays had appeared in that journal: the fact is quite stupefying considered in the light of the journalism of to-day. Education increases; ignorance grows deeper. * * * * * Let me not be understood as claiming that my newspaper work of thirty-two years ago was characterised by the profoundest wisdom. Very far from it; my articles were harmless and agreeable enough, I think, in a small way; and writing them, I first began to get a hint of my true subject; the country of my childhood and my youth. And I thus began to move away from the exotic Rabelaisian influence, both as to manner and to matter: to perceive that not the splendid Loire but the humble Soar brook, winding and shining in deep valleys and obscured by dark alder thickets, was my native stream. I began to see that I was a citizen of Caerleon-on-Usk, and not of Tours or of Chinon, and that the old grey manor-houses and the white farms of Gwent had their beauty and significance, though they were not castles in Touraine. There was something of all this, of course, in “The Chronicle of Clemendy,” the Great Romance which was neither great nor a romance; but in this everything was viewed and everything expressed in an exotic medium: now I saw that a blossoming thorn bush in the valley of the Soar and the nightingale singing in it and the river level about Caerleon and the red fires of sunset over the mountain in the west were all in themselves and by themselves fit matter for the work; that they needed not to be disguised in a French literary habit of four hundred years ago. It was in this summer of 1890 that I wrote the first chapter of “The Great God Pan.” I have told the whole story in the Introduction to the latest edition of that fantasy, which is published by Messrs. Simpkin, Marshall, and whether I should weary my readers I know not, but I do know that I should weary myself if I told it all over again. The tale was written in bits, in the intervals between severe literary cramps, as I have mentioned in this present volume, and it was published by Mr. John Lane, of the Bodley Head, at the end of 1894, when yellow bookery was at its yellowest. And it aroused a certain amount of attention. There was a storm--in a doll’s teacup. The other day a friend of mine said genially to me: “I have just been reading that ‘Great God Pan’ of yours over again, and I really don’t see that there’s much in it to make a sensation of.” I am sure he was quite right. But a sensation there was, of a minor kind.