Farewell to Europe

THE NEW ATLANTIC SERIAL

BY RICHARD ALDINGTON

CHAPTERS 1-5

Farewell TO EUROPE

BY

RICHARD ALDINGTON

The story of a man of letters, bred in the old world and finding freedom in the new

POET and novelist, Richard Aldington is an Englishman who speaks for the survivors of the First World War, not as a shell-shocked veteran with iron in his soul, but as a sensitive man of letters. Born in 1892, he came of age in the serenity of Edwardian England; at the close of his education he was recognized as a classicist who loved the ancient beauty of Italy and Greece, a talented poet befriended in his early years by Yeats, Norman Douglas, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, and T. S. Eliot.

Mr. Aldington served as an infant tryman in France, first as a lance corporal, then as an officer, from 1916 until the Armistice, and of the experience of those years and the painful readjustment which followed he has already told with great power and beauty in his best-known novel, Death of a Hero. In the years that followed Versailles, he was a man of two minds, held to Europe by every affiliation of his art and training, yet made increasingly uneasy by the rising tide of revolution which he perceived must lead again to war and the destruction of those things he held dear. This period he characterizes as the Long Armistice.

A free lance, he first visited the United States in 1935, where he fell in love at first sight with the Connecticut River Valley. There in a small farmhouse he found sanctuary for his books and his papers, and there this summer, as an American citizen by adoption, he is putting the finishing touches to his autobiography, the story of a man of letters, bred in the old world and finding freedom in the new.

FAREWELL TO EUROPE

BY RICHARD ALDINGTON

I

‘IT’S long past your bedtime. See! The mist is rising,’ she said, holding me up to the window. There was a blood-red streak on the horizon, and the wheat stooks were dark in the twilight. I didn’t know what mist was, and hopefully expected the piled wheat sheaves would levitate, perhaps fly up into the sky and disappear.

‘There, you see?’ she said. ‘Now off to bed we go.’

But my voice filled the air with wails of protest. The ruthless logic of children and savages was outraged. The mist (i.e. the piled wheat) was not rising; therefore it was not late; therefore I should be allowed to stay up longer. But how to put that into words, how even to formulate it as anything approaching an idea, I didn’t know. All that was manifest and indisputable was the evil nature of my nursemaid. So early do we discover with astonishment and indignation that our view of the universe differs from that of others. So early those who disagree with us are the wicked.

There was a strange narrow little room, with windows at each end and a high green seat along each side. The order of the incomprehensible but allknowing ones was to sit still, when plainly the sensible thing was to profit by the high seat, and slide off and climb back as often as possible. Presently something or somebody uttered a loud shriek and puffed ferociously and the little room began to move. It moved fast, fast, fast, and the flat green earth went circling backwards. Sometimes it slowed and stopped, and you saw the tops of men go by the window. What had they done with their legs? Then on and on, with more stops, until all the green earth had gone in blackness, and you got tired of the little room, and the all-powerful ones refused to produce a glass of milk, and refused to let you get out of the little room, and were annoyed by your protests. And then — O magic! O wonder! the little room glided gently into a high palace of great glittering lights, so good, so dazzling after the long blackness. And you were released from the little room and carried half asleep through a jam of people, looking up, up at the sharp magic lights.

So for a time I became a town child. From the bedroom windows I saw a large asphalt yard with a row of garbage cans and the backs of houses. From the other windows I saw the High Street, full of umbrellas and horses, and the fronts of houses with shops. Whenever I looked at the yard, it was wet with rain; whenever I looked at the street, there were bobbing black umbrellas glistening with rain. Waking in the morning, I would hear dimly the ‘Clop, clop’ of horses’ hoofs on the stones, and because of the queer hollow echoing sound I knew there was rain. Yet even here was magic. On the floor of the two attics lay little colored pictures, heads of men and women, ships, a parrot. If the angels had shed peacock feathers on the floor they could not have seemed more supernatural and delightful. . . .

‘ How did you get hold of those stamps? ‘ said my father severely.

The first time I saw one of the old brownstone houses in New York I stopped to look at it with surprise and tenderness. There in Manhattan was a near cousin to the house I lived in after leaving the one which rained down a manna of postage stamps. True, the English version was in yellow brick and perhaps a little smaller. Everything else was there, down to the awkward flight of stone steps leading to the front door, steps which in those days had to be whitened daily by sad housemaids. There were the same area steps and semibasement, providing the servants with a plentiful lack of air and sunlight. Had there been an international competition in ugliness?

In other respects this move was a gain, because in front of the house stood a fine avenue of old trees, and at the back was a longish but narrow garden, with a large market garden of vegetables, flowers, and fruit trees. So that when I looked from the windows I again saw a green world. From there I went to a small private school, and at an incredibly tender age was set to learning the less important exceptions in the rules of French and Latin grammar. Some of these I still remember. For instance, the words ending in al which form the plural by adding s, instead of changing to aux: ‘Bal, cal, carnaval, chacal, régal, nopal, pal’

Now in the course of my life I have written some hundreds of letters in French, chiefly to writers, without ever having a chance to display this valuable knowledge. For some reason we never discussed balls, calluses, carnivals, jackals, treats, nopals, or instruments for impalement. So I have had to be content with knowing for knowing’s sake.

In that small yellow brick house I first became dimly aware of those public events which are supposed to embody the collective wisdom of nations, but in fact seem devised by crafty monsters to prevent any of us from living a decent and agreeable life. At breakfast, my father rustled the newspaper and spoke anxiously of a certain Lady Smith, who seemed to be in great trouble somewhere or other. The errand boys began to whistle a new set of times of a martial kind. The Queen gave my father a sword and a lovely set of soldier’s clothes, which, however, he had to pay through the nose for; and in the evenings a sergeant came and played games with him with matches. At school there was a fashion for collecting celluloid buttons with colored heads of generals, who possessed odd names such as Gatacre, Buller, Wauchope (who was, I believe, always getting himself and his men ‘cut up’ in some inexplicable way), BadenPowell.

Patriotic pictures appeared on the nursery wall. One represented a British officer with a cluster of Arrow-collar Tommies waving his revolver at a line of unkempt and ugly Boers, with the caption, ‘There’s no surrender here!’ evidently spoken by the heroic English commander. I then blindly admired his courage and determination, but I now think he ought to have been courtmartialed for endangering his men and position by allowing the enemy to come so close without opening fire. Some of these pictures were so downright and defiant about British superiority over everything and everyone that with a little alteration and change of caption they might have later come in handy for Dr. Goebbels.

One night I was suddenly awakened from sleep, hurriedly dressed in my sailor suit, and hoisted into a large cart with a number of other children dressed as soldiers and sailors. We paraded around for a very long time in a torchlight procession, with the populace shouting and singing like a pack of maniacs. I was cold and sleepy, and the boy next me had a real soldier’s suit instead of my commonplace everyday sailor things. All I wanted was to get back to bed, and all I remembered of this strange patriotic orgy was the word ‘Mafeking.’

And as if this were not enough, later on the Queen died. A black band was put on my arm, and I was told to go and play nicely and quietly. As if you can play nicely and quietly! You might just as well not play at all.

II

But before the Queen’s death, and before Mafeking, an event happened of more importance to me. I went to live in the country.

It was no earthly paradise I inherited by this change, but a bleak nearly treeless upland of chalk downs, the South Foreland of England. The roll of these great chalk waves starts inland and grows steeper and steeper as they approach the sea, until the last suddenly breaks into the white cliffs. Memories of calamities haunted that coast. Tradition and history still remembered a night of terror and destruction, far back in the eleventh century, when the rich lands of Earl Godwin, with their villages and churches and cattle, were overwhelmed by the sea. The Earl’s vanished property rights were still commemorated in the Goodwin Sands.

They were real enough. Not many big winter storms passed without our hearing the cry: ‘Ship on the Goodwin Sands!’ Out we would rush with field glasses and telescope, and there, sure enough, the doomed and battered ship weltered in the waves. Faintly, but with appalling solemnity, the boom of her distress guns came over the wind-torn sea. Next day we would read a curt notice that the coastal lifeboats had or had not saved the crew. No spectacle in towns could approach the terror and grandeur of the lifeboat being launched into seas so tremendous that involuntarily one shrank back from the roar and tumult of waters. For interminable minutes the boat and the men in their shiny oilskins and cork life belts waited on the slips for that briefest lull which would make the hazard of launching not wholly desperate. Suddenly there would be a shout, a rush, the mad water swirling round the knees and waists of the launchers, the last man flinging himself aboard, a dizzy lurch and pitch as the light boat hit the first white comber, a curious gasping cheer from the crowd. Women hid their faces in their hands and aprons. Cold and breathless, your eyes smarting with spray, you watched the steady rhythm of the oars, the wild tossing of the boat, until it was only a brave speck occasionally visible on the crest of a wave. Then slowly, reluctantly, you would go away, leaving the women to their long sea-drenched wait.

Most of the houses were so much exposed to the driving rains that double windows were essential. The icy northeasters were fortunately rare. The usual gales were sou’westers off the Atlantic which came roaring up the bottleneck of the Channel and forced even the biggest ships to anchor in the Deal Roads. At night during such gales I would peer from the warm lighted room into the darkness, and if it were low tide see dimly far below a great belt of raving foam on the rocks. Later I lay awake in bed with the wind screaming and howling outside, the rain rattling against the outer window like buckets full of dried peas flung against the glass, and the flash of the Foreland lighthouse winking through a gap in the curtain.

Naturally life on the South Foreland was not merely a succession of storms and shipwrecks. Incredible as it may seem, my recollection is that the summers were sunny and warm. How otherwise could I have spent so many days in and out of the sea?

There were three ways down the cliffs, of which I naturally chose the shortest, steepest, and least safe. The advantages of going straight up the face of the cliff instead of doodling along a path will be obvious. The cliffs themselves were not wholly reliable. Great cracks formed near the brink, and from time to time a slice broke off like the front of a glacier, walloping down thousands of tons of chalk boulders. I never saw one of these avalanches, but I heard them, a muffled and majestic roar in the distance. It strikes me now that I was a little careless in crossing these cracks to stand on the last verge of the cliff. I knew they portended a fall, but I failed to see that even the slightest extra strain might destroy the precarious balance of weight, and that I might have been the sufficient cause of a cliff avalanche and my own spectacular disappearance.

In the course of ages these falls had formed a band of rocks all along the coast, covered with seaweed, and at low tide full of valuable pools. Exploring these for sea creatures was a timeless pleasure. You wandered on and on in a wilderness of green and brown rocks. At the tide-edge a light blue sea surged gently. The dazzling white cliffs reflected the sunlight and made the blue sky bluer. Hundreds of gulls and kittiwakes soared or perched in crevices, filling the air with sharp plaintive calls. In the transparent rock pools every frond and shell and darting sea creature was exquisitely clear. How unreasonable were complaints and sanctions on account of being late for meals!

A more serious and admissible pleasure than mere wandering was prawning. The outfit for this barbarous and plebeian sport consisted of half a dozen small drop nets with cork floats, a long pole with a cleft end to lift and lower them at a distance, sharp wooden skewers, a blunt knife, and a fishmonger’s straw bag.

The professional prawner began by baiting his net with a bit of spoiled meat. I never reached that distinction. However tactfully I approached cook for a supply of this valuable commodity, I was always driven off with insults. What next! I could only suppose that my more fortunate rivals must have buried their dinners, like prudent terriers, and dug them up again at the right moment.

The only alternative was limpets. You forced some off the rocks with the blunt knife, cut them from the shells, and skewered them into the nets. They soon attracted plenty of green and red crabs. You had to handle these nimble and pugnacious beasts with caution, for their claws can nip hard. Then, I regret to say, the crabs were torn in half and skewered, even as the horrid Polyphemus dismembered and skewered the dear companions of Odysseus. With these you fished for prawns.

Unlike most creatures captured by small boys, prawns were considered delicacies, and after a good catch I had the proud satisfaction of seeing them sent off to gastronomic friends in London. There was one old and extremely gastronomic friend of the family, whom I will call Sir Patrick, a successful Scottish barrister at the English bar, who became a judge and was knighted.

I don’t recollect any tangible expression of gratitude from other beneficiaries, but Sir Patrick did the right thing. Each Christmas, with true Scottish generosity, he sent me a large box of shortbread and a five-shilling piece. Only later and by accident did I learn that parental perfidy deprived me of an annual gold sovereign, under pretext that it was too much money for me. I never heard such nonsense. Nobody needs a sovereign so much as a schoolboy. It would have raised my prestige enormously with my friends. Nor would it have been wasted. This pledge of Sir Patrick’s gastronomic gratitude would have been gastronomically expended — on chocolate cream frogs, Cupid’s Whispers, and tuppenny mixed ice creams.

It was a straggling community. Between the beach and the cliff were some old coastguard cottages, a hotel, and a desiccated bun-shop kept by a religious lady who didn’t believe in pleasure and kept even her buns austere and flavorless. There were also some small residences with wave-eaten lawns in front, and the Green Man, which had a bowling green. On top of the cliff were two long lines of detached houses with big gardens, and about a mile inland the village.

The only buildings of any distinction were a Georgian farmhouse and a Norman church, built of flints, which are the only stones available in chalk countries, massively constructed and set on a knoll. Inside the church was a fine satirical Norman stringcourse of grotesque animals and faces, which I studied during many a cold sermon and unwelcome litany. I was nearly roped into this establishment as a choirboy, but when we were perfidiously told that the vicar was coming to hear us sing, and we were to show him what the school could do, I was suspicious and sang even more out of tune than my natural capacity in that direction. Those drafted as sacred songsters were very much pitied.

The land near the sea, except for a few nooks, was either waste or unenclosed sheepwalks. Then came the familiar English checkerboard of hedged pastures, with farms huddled in the valleys behind wind screens of ancient trees. But six miles or so inland the country was rich with wheat and barley fields, lush pasture, orchards, hop gardens. It was wonderful to cycle through the sunken lanes with their flowery banks and spreading elms and oaks.

It was a land drenched in history. The arms of the county were the Saxon white horse, with the motto ‘Invicta,’ because (so it was claimed) the ancestors had never submitted to Norman William. Saxon place names were common, Worths and Wolds and Hams. There was a Wodensborough with earthworks, said to mark a shrine of Woden. There was once-wealthy Sandwich (deserted by the sea) with its mediæval Fisher Gate and Barbican, its old churches and houses, its narrow twisting streets which then were cobbled and grass-grown. There were Canterbury with its cathedral, Dover and its great castle, which included a Roman watchtower and where they now show some of the actual jousting lances used at the Field of the Cloth of Gold; there was Minster with the church William Morris praised so highly and the monument out in the marshes to the missionary, Augustine.

The utterly peaceful landscape seemed brooding in an ancient primitive dream, as if unchanged for ages. By a wonderful stroke of luck I had glimpses of an England, a nook of it, which had changed little since Shakespeare or even since Chaucer. There were no motorcars and the railways had a splendid inefficiency all their own. Communication was by horse-bus and carrier’s cart. There was no gas, and no electricity. The Bible was still God’s infallible word, except that for purposes of immediate prophecy Old Moore’s Almanac was consulted. On holidays and Sundays many of the girls still wore their purple plush mourning for the great and good Queen. The men were heavy, bread-beef-and-beer Saxons, slow-witted, incredibly opposed to all innovation, respectful of the gentry except in matters of religion, and so moral that the few policemen seldom had anything to do.

Our own policeman was a ponderous yokel named Saunders, who was seldom visible and never needed. Coming home from church one morning, my father and I were astonished to see Saunders, striding along at about three times his usual policeman’s stroll, and beaming with smiles. As he saluted, my father stopped him. ‘Good morning, Saunders. You’re looking very cheerful.’

‘I’ve got a body, sir,’ said Saunders, oozing with self-importance.

‘A body!’ said my father in astonishment. ‘What do you mean?’

‘One of them foreigners over to Ringwold ‘as cut ‘is throat something ‘orrid, sir.’

The foreigners in question came from another county.

Such was the country and such the people of that little pocket of ancient England, an anachronism in the first decade of the twentieth century. Yet before that decade ended the change began. One or two noisy motorcars, forerunners of the coming hordes, began crashing through the narrow lanes, frightening horses and expectant mothers. In 1909 the conservative inhabitants suffered the unbearable affront of having Blériot land his airplane on their cliffs. Since then two coal mines have been opened up, with ‘model’ mining villages of red brick. The roads and lanes are no longer white, but black with asphalt. The widening and straightening have swept away the flowery banks and the old trees. The old dialect talk has almost disappeared before the classy cockney talked in school. The blunt good-natured manners have become wretchedly genteel. Farming is no longer a way of life, following the rhythm of the seasons, but a hard way of earning a poor living. Olde Tea Shoppes lurk round beauty spots, which, because they are spots, are no longer beautiful. The windmills are in ruins. The oast houses are turned into music rooms or cocktail bars by artistic Londoners who come down for week-ends. There are new suburban houses and new suburban people. The old mansions are golf clubs, and the tweeded heroes of the links have frightened away the fallow deer forever.

All gone, as children say.

III

When the Union Jack over the White Ensign fluttered up the mast at the Coast Guard station I ran for my telescope. That meant part of the Channel Fleet was in sight. Usually half a dozen light cruisers and as many torpedo destroyers, with the leading ship carrying the same two flags. Some of H. M.’s ships on their lawful occasions.

It is a known fact that grown-ups have little observation and no sense of fun. It was always necessary to point out to visitors the flags and the warships, but they took no intelligent, interest in the event. The men would pretend to take a squint through the telescope, but you could see by the way they waggled it about that they couldn’t pick up the squadron even after you’d pointed out exactly where it was. The women would say what a dreadful waste of money it was in our modern world, where war between civilized nations had become unthinkable. And then off they’d all go, gabble, gabble, gabble, about the income tax and those dreadful Radicals and how coal had gone up from nineteen shillings to a pound a ton. Horrible, dreadful, we shall all be ruined. Won’t Mrs. Aldington cheer us up with a song?

‘Thank you. Thank you very much. Charming. Delightful. Such exquisite feeling. Lord Henry Somerset’s, isn’t it? Why does he never come to England?’

Those drawing-room ballads! Mr. Noel Coward has pointed out very justly the power of old popular songs in evoking their period. The songs popular with the middle class in my childhood have dropped out of favor, and I am glad to say I now very seldom hear them. But I have only to think of them to evoke their epoch. The most obvious fault of the music was the sentimentality which haunts all middle-class art. But the words were almost always by poets or people supposed to be poets, and never dropped down to the sheer imbecility of contemporary song. There was a complete lack of critical sense, another middle-class trait.

Among the innumerable clues to an understanding of the English which Henry James entirely overlooked are these very songs. The mood of twaddling sentimentality, religious or erotic, which they engendered, plus the physiological stimulus of singing, seemed to be about the only means of breaking down the terrific sex inhibitions of the time. Watchful mammas knew it, and acted accordingly. Only under the stimulus of ‘Pale hands pink-tipped beside the Shalimar’ and a full moon could the elegible but hideously bashful young man be brought to the point of uttering those almost obscene words: ’Darling, will you marry me?’

But I am forgetting my telescope. Somebody must have told me about Galileo, or I read about him. At any rate I burned to see Jupiter’s moons, and harped on the subject of telescopes to such an extent that for the sake of peace I was given one. Alas, it was too low in power to pick up Jupiter’s moons. But one Sunday afternoon, when everybody else was sleeping off the effects of beef and Yorkshire, I turned my telescope landwards and looked idly into a distant valley. And what did I see? Nothing less than one of my schoolmasters kissing the elder sister of one of my friends, in the erroneous belief that they were invisible to human eyes. The importance of taking effective cover on such occasions cannot be overstressed; there may always be a small boy or a lewd old mariner with a telescope.

So narrow is the Channel at this point that on clear summer afternoons the cliffs of France are visible to the naked eye, and with my telescope I could pick out the lighthouse and roofs of Calais. How get there? A Cook’s poster of those days advertised: ‘A Week in Lovely Lucerne, Five Guineas.’ But I hadn’t got five guineas, and I didn’t want to go on a conducted tour to Lucerne. I wanted to go to Calais, and the only way to achieve that was to persuade somebody to take me.

And then, just as I was despairing, the whole problem was solved in an instant by Sir Patrick. When his duties as Recorder brought him to the district, he often spent the week-end in our house. It was an anxious time. Sir Patrick was not only an exacting gourmet, but the most restless of men, unable to sit still for half an hour and demanding a succession of entertainments throughout the day.

Sunday morning was the crucial time. Like other Scots, Sir Patrick was apt to be morose before breakfast. He was also unpunctual. The word was therefore ‘Hold everything’ until his tread on the stairs released the porridge — a special porridge imported from Scotland, which was absorbed in a funereal silence which did honor to any Calvinist Sunday. Then came fish. ‘Every nation,’ says Peacock, ‘has some eximious virtue, and that of the Scots is peculiarly fish for breakfast.’ Then came boiled eggs, probably timed with a stop-watch. A tense moment followed, while Sir Patrick decapitated one and through judicial glasses examined its criminal record. Invariably at that moment he would turn to my father with the same brisk invariable remark: —

‘Well, Aldington, what are we going to do today?’

Glancing anxiously at my mother, my father would detail his program. Generally it was approved, but sometimes captious criticism would force distracting rearrangements. In summer a great standby was: ‘A run over to Calais for lunch, tea at the Lord Warden, and drive back for dinner.’ The advantage of this was that, it filled the whole day.

Sir Patrick was a friend of mine, albeit a somewhat awesome friend. I would sometimes accompany him to his club, where he stuffed my pockets and his own with headed stationary and lavatory paper. As Sir Patrick pointed out, he went to the club so seldom that this was the only way he could get some of his money back. So, one brilliant summer morning when that run over to Calais’ had been proposed and accepted, I found the fearful courage to pipe up and say that I should like to go. Before my parents could refuse, Sir Patrick had settled it: —

‘Certainly. Why not? Do the boy good, and help to keep us amused.’

That settled it. There was a certain atmosphere of indirect disapproval. Luckily, Sir Patrick was impatient to be off, and there I was, in my Eton jacket and school cap, sitting on the box of the landau, rolling in the direction of the port. And at one o’clock we were sitting down to lunch in the Calais buffet.

The Calais buffet was totally unlike the gloomy torture chambers which fancifully call themselves ‘Refreshment Rooms’ in English railway stations. It was spacious and sunny and decorated with potted plants and flowers. Nearly every table was occupied by well-dressed people, chattering and laughing. Waiters went to and fro swiftly and silently. There was a clatter of knives and forks, a popping of corks, an air of abundance and gayety and good cheer. I dare say many of those people had their troubles (I myself was due to return to school shortly), but the whole feeling of the people was unhurried, untroubled, buoyant, carefree, as they have never been in Europe since August 1914.

Above all, there was none of that feverish effort after pleasure so characteristic of the post-war epoch even at its best; and no heavy drinking, such as became regrettably fashionable in the same epoch. My father and Sir Patrick shared a pint of champagne; and Sir Patrick’s conversation was evidently very lively, as they laughed a great deal. The point of his anecdotes missed me because he so often whispered behind his hand. I attached myself warmly to a poulet en casserole with mushrooms. Hitherto I had known only the oversized British fowls, plain roast or plain boiled, and I decided that French chickens must be a totally different species of animal.

After the coffee my father slipped off to pay the bill. Sir Patrick lighted a cigar and surveyed the room. Presently he called my attention to a lavishly dressed lady two or three tables away and said abruptly: —

‘How old do you think that woman is?’

I had no theories, nor could I imagine why her age should interest my venerable friend. I said: ‘I don’t know, sir. She might be any age.’

‘Quite right, quite right,’ he said approvingly. ‘You never can tell with these damned Frenchwomen. Might be anything from fourteen to forty.’

Unluckily at that moment my father returned and interrupted this instructive conversation.

We then took a stroll through the town, where I was delighted by the Sunday animation of the streets, by the sight of policemen wearing cocked hats and swords, by workmen who wore beards and pegtop corduroy trousers and red cummerbunds, and by the bright costumes of the fisher girls with their beautifully goffered white caps and large gold earrings. I approved of France without reserve, in spite of Sir Patrick’s pungent remarks about the state of the drains.

I continued to approve. As I halted to look in a confectioner’s window, Sir Patrick jovially offered to pay for chocolates if I could order them in French without any help. Having studied the shop notices carefully, I went in and asked for ‘Un kilo de chocolats mélangés,’ and was understood. Sir Patrick looked crestfallen; his little joke at my expense hadn’t been so good. But Sir Patrick was a just and honorable judge. He had promised to pay, and he did pay.

Contrary to all misgivings and warnings, there were no gastric troubles even on the return voyage. I felt fine. It was one of those very rare days when the Channel is blue and perfectly smooth. While Sir Patrick relentlessly marched himself and my father up and down the crowded decks, I sat philosophically eating chocolates, watching the marbled foam, and thinking. I was thinking what a nice man Sir Patrick was, and how I wanted to go to France again, and go often. I reflected that the French must be nice, too; and that it was a gross libel to say that they lived on frogs and soup when I had such tangible evidence to the contrary. Dimly and vaguely I began to feel a suspicion that perhaps everything good and virtuous and pleasant was not confined to England.

IV

Along the bare cliffs there were, as I have said, a few fertile nooks where a deep fold in the chalk had gathered soil and gave protection from the winds and yet was open to the sun. In some of these, bright red sainfoin came up every year with a profusion of wild flowers so that the early summer air was sweet with their scent. I was always sorry when I saw the scythes at work destroying this colored flower pattern.

As boys do, I began collecting the butterflies which hovered over these flowers, sticking them clumsily on pins, and trying to make out their names from one or two popular handbooks. And there the matter would have rested but for the Reverend Francis Austin.

Mr. Austin was a burly man with thick eyebrows and Henry VIII legs. He was unlucky enough to offend a very popular lady novelist who satirized him most unjustly with much ribaldry about his ‘grand-pianoforte legs.’ But Mr. Austin was a scholar, and added to his small income by writing books on such pleasant but unremunerative topics as English mediæval seals and the flowers of Shakespeare. He was also a skillful and tireless field naturalist.

George Moore has told how stunned he felt when he read an article by Zola destroying all Moore’s belief in the methods of Monsieur Scribe. That was how I felt when Mr. Austin showed me his collections, all beautifully arranged in tall cabinets, with every specimen neatly labeled. Having no standard of comparison, I had modestly thought I was doing pretty well, and in a flash I stood selfconvicted as an incompetent and ignorant bungler.

This was all the more painful because my favorite book at that time was Bates’s Naturalist on the Amazon, and I had made up my mind to emulate and probably surpass him. I believe Bates’s theory of mimicry has been severely handled by later biologists, for, like certain cannibal tribes, scientists enjoy devouring their ancestors as a sacred rite. But nothing can destroy his work as a field naturalist. The number of species ‘new to Science’ he sent back from Brazil is stupendous. I spent so many hours with Bates on the Amazon (when I should have been asleep or doing my homework) that I began to feel I had been there myself. How often I hunted insects near Para or Obidos, felt homesick for England when I heard a tropical bird with a note like a wren, had fever in Para, grew disgusted with a turtle diet and so yearned for flesh that I ate the roasted arm of a monkey in spite of its dreadful resemblance to humanity.

Possibly — I throw this out as a mere suggestion — part of the lure of the Amazon lay in the fact that there seemed to be no school there, while Bates earned fame and money by doing things I could only do on half-holidays. At any rate, what with Bates and Mr. Austin, I plugged away at natural history in my spare time for years, preparing for the great day when I too should set forth to discover those magical creatures, species new to Science. I have never been to the Amazon, though of recent years I have been tempted to go, and once got as far as looking up shipping lines and rates.

But if I couldn’t go humping off to the Amazon, I began to see a little more of England on summer holidays. Those who have only seen Stratford-on-Avon in a bustle of tourists would find some difficulty in imagining the peace and remoteness of the place in pre-motor days. Except on market days it was so still that footsteps echoed in the silent streets, boys fished from Clopton bridge, and one policeman dozed in solitude by the town hall. Miss Marie Corelli scandalized the natives by driving about in a victoria drawn by six piebald Shetland ponies, and by importing a Venetian gondola which wafted her, a best-selling Cleopatra, up and down the affronted Avon. People agreed that something ought to be done about these insults to Shakespeare, but nothing was done. Apart from this unseemly intrusion, Stratford, with its water meadows and willows and Holy Trinity and ‘the birthplace,’ slept on in a peace which had been scarcely broken since the Great Rebellion. The last time I was there I could scarcely find space to park my car.

A great contrast to this was north Devon, which had not then become the stamping ground for innumerable trippers in motor coaches. The high barren moor there suddenly falls to the sea in rocky cliffs. The sheltered rainy coombes are filled with trees and ferns and mosses, and there are clear rocky trout streams. We saw stags and half-wild ponies on Exmoor, and the wild-looking farmers who rode in to Lynton and Lynmouth on their shaggy horses spoke a dialect we could scarcely understand. We ate the Exmoor mutton and cream and brook trout, and there was a pleasant smell of burning peat and wood. Like every other visitor to those parts, I read Lorna Doone and was greatly disappointed by the Doone valley — which only goes to show that sentimental fiction is no reliable guide to landscape.

In those days I began to form the habit of reading. Whether you consider that a virtue or a vice is apt to depend on whether you are or are not interested in the book and education trades. It is a habit I have no intention of trying to break. Even if all new books become political and economic propaganda I shall go on reading old ones, which are more interesting anyway in most cases. I think it was fortunate that my schools paid no attention to ‘cultural interests,’ so that reading was pure fun. I also think I was lucky in having the run of a large general library.

For some time my attention never strayed much beyond a shelf of adventure stories which my father had collected in his boyhood. Christmas and birthdays provided me with more recent versions of the gory yarns which for some strange reason are thought suitable for youthful minds.

No doubt I should eventually have got free from this childish bugaboo on my own, but I was suddenly diverted from it by the merest chance. Coming into the library one afternoon, I found on the table a dozen or more handsomely bound white books. I knew at once that they were the new limited edition of Oscar Wilde and one of my father’s economies, about which there had been some discussion. I had never heard of Mr. Wilde until this purchase, but from the discussion about it I judged there was something mysterious to be learned.

One of the volumes lay open on the table with a heavy ruler across it. Curiosity made me read a paragraph. A sudden and violent interest made me read on. The book, I saw, was called Intentions, and the paragraph I had started on was about a poet called Keats. Presently I went over to the bookcase and found the Moxon edition of Keats. I turned up Endymion and began to read it. I despair of finding words to express the effect of these two books without seeming inadequate to myself or exaggerated to other people. It was like a combination of falling in love at first sight and finding Ali Baba’s treasure cave. But lovers have their woes and Ali Baba his perils; I had neither. There simply was no fly in that ointment. By the merest chance I had stumbled into a world of enchantment, of siren voices

For ever piping songs for ever new.

Now that was really a stroke of good luck. From the obsolete sensationalism of Harrison Ainsworth I might have passed to more recent brands, and have ended up as one of those unhappy people who take their intellectual pleasures so sadly with newspapers, horror stories, jigsaw puzzles, and detective novels.

Observe, too, the good fortune of coming on those two authors. Suppose it had been Matthew Arnold, or — which would have been infinitely worse — one of our own dreary critics who are always laboring to prove something irrelevant, mainly their own superiority. Obviously I should have been repelled. But, with all his faults and affectations, Oscar Wilde’s attitude was one of yea-saying to life and art. In his ornate fanciful way he was telling me why Keats should be admired, and not where he fails to please a super-highbrow taste. And then what poem was fitter to charm an immature mind than the lovely but immature imaginings of Endymion?

Only one thing was required to feed this burning enthusiasm — books. And here again my luck held good. I hadn’t to haunt public libraries or secondhand bookshops. Everything I needed was at hand in my own home — all the major English poets from Chaucer to Browning, dozens of minor poets, the twenty volumes of Chalmers’s British Poets, and a complete collection of Elizabethan dramatists. Here was matter for a lifetime of study. I went through them in two years, reading literally nothing but poetry in all my spare time; and owing to an operation and other reasons I had practically a whole year to myself. When I went to the University I found to my surprise that I had read every poet in the required English course, and scored 98 out of 100 in a special test paper set for me by an incredulous faculty.

So much spontaneous ardor and persistence without the slightest outside pressure seem to show some innate disposition for literature. That may not be good psychology or philosophy, but it is a fact. Nobody had suggested to me that poetry may be an absorbing passion or even a proper study. All we did in that line at school was to parse, analyze, and (heaven help us!) paraphrase Shakespeare’s King John. Moreover, in those days the very word ‘poet’ (usually preceded by the Homeric adjective ‘ long’aired’) was a term of abuse among the robust commonalty. In spite of the conditioned reflexers, I must continue to believe that the love of poetry was there in me and was not induced by my spiritual pastors and masters.

It is even more improbable that anyone on this earth would attempt to condition a fifteen-year-old bourgeois schoolboy into writing poetry. Towards the end of that same summer when I discovered Keats through the kind offices of Mr. Wilde, I was out on the cliffs insecthunting. I was tired and hot from chasing a very active Fritillary up and down a steep slope, and sat down to rest. By accident I had there a very fine view of the cliffs and Channel, floodlit by the late afternoon sun. I wasn’t thinking of poetry or conscious of anything in particular except a feeling of passive contentment, when a line of iambic pentameter suddenly presented itself, followed by another which continued the sense and rhymed with the first.

In my pocket I had a pencil and what I pompously called my ‘field notebook.’ Mr. Austin had gravely urged this course, bidding me to note ‘all scientific phenomena’ I happened to bump into on my walks. (I wish I had that book now to find what ‘scientific phenomena’ I noted.) Turning this book upside down (symbolical gesture), I wrote down the two lines. Immediately others presented themselves, and very soon I had written thirty or forty. In fact, as I perceived with astonishment, I had written a poem.

The experience of writing a poem was entirely delightful, far more satisfactory even than reading poetry. But, how right. Lucretius was! ‘From the midst of the fountain of bliss ever rises up something of bitterness.’ On rereading my poem I discovered that it was a ramshackle affair. From the fountain of creative bliss rose up that horrid spectre of self-criticism which haunts the artist all his life. Dimly and reluctantly I began to see that genius is not enough; one must also work. And yet I believe that I had already doomed myself to what is jestingly called a literary career.

Who shall say what strange hidden motives, what curious aptitudes determined our job in life? We can never sufficiently remind ourselves how different are the ideals of different men. In the year 1918 I was much impressed by an example of this truth. I was then temporarily in command of an infantry company in France, and my sanitary man was wounded. A sanitary man fulfills a useful and hygienic function, but one devoid of glory — the efficient hiding of human ordure.

My sanitary man had worked with silent fidelity, and his loss was embarrassing. Time and tide would not wait. What was to be done? My second in command suggested realistically that I should order somebody to take over the vacant rank, but I did not care to use my undoubted power in so tyrannous a manner. Every soldier is potentially a hero. I didn’t want to wound heroic susceptibilities by an appointment which might be considered insulting.

In this perplexity I consulted my sergeant major, who bade me be of good cheer, and soon brought me a small, dark, rather dirty soldier whom I had more than once been compelled to reprove. The sergeant major was a good and conscientious officer, but, like too many who are entrusted with great, power, apt to be a bit arbitrary. It occurred to my suspicious mind that he might want to humiliate the deplorable soldier who stood before me so patiently and so humbly.

Therefore I sent the sergeant major away and in private questioned the man closely to find out if any pressure had been put on him. If I had trodden on Vergil’s snake I could not have been more startled than I was by his statements. He yearned to be a sanitary man, he said; he had long cherished an ambition for that fetid post— he felt it was his vocation in life. As I signed and handed him the necessary order, he thanked me warmly, as if it were I and not he doing the service.

It seems to me that I too had an inexplicable vocation.

The nature of youth turns to heroworship as unconsciously as plants grow towards the light. By their heroes you shall know them. Instead of prize fighters or political dictators, I admired poets. Indeed anyone connected, however distantly, with writing, even a literary agent who sometimes stayed with us, seemed to me aureoled with prestige. I made two mistakes here. A man who has written great and attractive books is not necessarily a great and attractive person. Moreover, I had in the library the very best of centuries, without the bores and the failures and the false successes. I ought to have seen that in any one generation these were likely to be in the majority, especially since writing had become a trade.

As if by way of warning, I very early ran into one or two specimens of literary fauna. There was, for instance, Mr. Guy Thorne, a novelist, a pale plump man who thought very highly of his abilities. He had been a Fleet Street journalist, but, faced with the alternatives of dipsomania or Cornwall, chose Cornwall. He was an industrious writer, so industrious that half the products of his literary factory were issued under his real name, Ranger Gull. At that time he had topped all other best-sellers with a novel called When It Was Dark, a sensational account of the disasters which happened to the world when it was proved by ‘Science’ that Jesus did not rise from the dead. The British public fairly lapped it up, especially a prudish-prurient chapter headed ‘Mary, Pity Women!’ Of course, in the end ‘Science’ was defeated, and the book ended on a Note of Hope. The idea of the book was said to have been suggested by the author’s parson father, and it was skillfully exploited by an amiable cynic and practised journalist.

Even our village had heard of Mr. Thorne, and there was much excitement when the news went round that he had rented a large farmhouse in the district. There was an orgy of tea fights to discuss what ought to be done about it. Should one call or should one not? Although the book was a snappy piece of Christian propaganda, and owed its initial success to a gratuitous pulpit advertisement from the Bishop of London, the general opinion was that the book was blasphemous and that one definitely should not call. Hovering in the background of these debates, I failed to see that the real reason for not calling was the agonizing suspicion, amounting almost to certainty, that the calls would not be returned.

My mother, ever ardent in generous opposition, decided that she would call, and thus I frequently had the privilege of seeing and listening to Mr. Thorne. I confess that at first his appearance was a shock. From the strong moral line he took in print, I had expected somebody rather austere and Dantesque, instead of a tubby little bon vivant who never refused a double whiskey. Glass in hand, he invariably stood in front of the fireplace and discoursed. My awe at this eminent personage was tempered by the fact that his conversation was very worldly, not to say mundane, and apt to run on the theme of his superiority to all other living authors. He had a ‘Morton’s Fork’ line of argument which is still popular with his tribe. Those writers who might have claimed superior literary merit were dismissed because they hadn’t his sales; and the few who had his sales were easily disposed of for having no literary merit.

Through this modest genius I met my first minor poet, Cotsford Dick. He was known to the middle classes as a writer of drawing-room ballads, but I have since come across one or two of his poems in late Victorian anthologies. Mr. Dick was a slim, dapper, bright-eyed little man, frothing with verbal witticisms and looking rather like an intelligent groom. And did you once see Shelley plain? The last thing in the world Mr. Dick wanted to talk about was poetry. He affected a fine indifference for his own talents, but would have been greatly offended by anyone who shared it. With his affected Oxford accent, his ‘witty’ chatter, his artless familiarity with titles, he was the prototype of the literary lounger with a small income, the social hanger-on, the bachelor who can be depended on to fill a seat at dinner on a moment’s notice and pay for it by gossip and jokes filched from the greenroom and the bohemian club. Non sic itur ad astra.

But I was not easily cured of this literary hero-worship. Evidently it was still with me three or four years later when I was in London and spent part of an afternoon at The Pines, Putney Hill. At that time I had a great admiration for Swinburne, which I am glad to say I have not lost even now. Unluckily Mr. Swinburne had recently died, but, his friend or keeper, Watts-Dunton, still lived.

Admirers of Swinburne will always look on the relations of these two with mixed feelings. It is well known that young Swinburne drank. The pious old Admiral Swinburne used to say: ‘God who has given my son the gift of genius has denied him that of self-control.’ Watts-Dunton undertook to be the control. It was rumored that he diverted Swinburne from brandy to port because that was the drink of the Laureate, Tennyson; from port to claret because the three musketeers drank it; and from claret to beer because beer should be the drink of an English patriot. He even induced the sedentary bard to take exercise by making him walk (some said, sprint) across Putney Common to a pub for his morning bottle of Bass.

Unhappily, as Algernon Charles became more and more sober, Swinburne became duller and duller, until the author of Atalanta and Poems and Ballads vanished in clouds of meaningless words and walloping rhythms. Swinburne survived his genius nearly forty years. Thus, owing to Watts-Dunton, England gained a respectable citizen (of which she already had far too many) and lost one of the last of her great poets.

Nevertheless I had my own reason for wanting to visit The Pines. I sent WattsDunton some of my poems, and he invited me to tea. The door of The Pines opened into a hall hung with PreRaphaelite pictures, and the servant led me to an overfurnished parlor with more pictures. After a formal and funereal pause I was shown into a large gloomy library, where a shriveled old man was reading David Copperfield. We talked a little about Dickens, a lot about Swinburne and the Victorians, a little about my poems. He showed me Swinburne’s writing table and chair and some of his books, and then I was once more on Putney Hill, feeling rather like a tourist who has been conducted round the historic mansion by the old family retainer.

My reason for intruding on the old man was a sentimental one. Swinburne had known Landor; Landor, Southey; and at one time Southey was very friendly with Shelley. The chain was a short one, and I was never likely to get humanly so near to Shelley again. He was only five handclasps away. In my enthusiasm I didn’t even stop there, but somehow made the link back to Pope, and through Wycherley and Davenant to Shakespeare. An absurd fancy, but my own.

A far different character was Mr. Dudley Grey, who was for some time my closest friend. A second father would perhaps more accurately define the relation of a man of fifty to a schoolboy of sixteen. In the language of his own generation, Mr. Grey was a gentleman and a scholar. In Marxian terms I suppose he would be called a bloodsucking rentier permeated with bourgeois ideology. He was a Christian and a patriot, owner of a historic castle, yet a traveled cosmopolitan, widely read in several languages, an amateur poet, and an indefatigable art collector. He was an accomplished man of the world, well-bred, with charmingly easy manners, dressed with a careless elegance, a good shot, a good horseman. Though not so picturesque or so big a swell as Wilfrid Blunt and Cunninghame Graham, he belonged to their type, the embodiment of the words of Euphues: ‘It is virtue, yea virtue, gentlemen, that maketh gentlemen ‘ — ‘ virtue’ here being meant in the Italian sense of virtù, all-round worth and accomplishment.

I never saw Mr. Grey in his castle. When I knew him he lived in a mediumsized house, rather crowded with old furniture, works of art, books, and a valuable collection of old jewelry. These were only a fraction of his collections which I saw years later, after the castle had been sold, in a large mansion Mr. Grey had bought in Buckinghamshire.

Now why had the owner of a castle come to live in a small house in an undistinguished community? His explanation was that the low-lying situation of his home and the worry of a staff of servants had made Mrs. Grey ill; that she no longer cared to travel out of England; and that the doctor had recommended our high, dry, windy downs as healthy. A reasonable and simple explanation, but far too simple for our middle-class gossips, who resented Mr. Grey because, simply by being himself, he made them feel inferior. They said he was a degenerate (i.e. a homosexual) hiding from the police — because he once casually mentioned dining with Oscar Wilde. They said he had been forced out of ‘decent society’ because he had married his cook; and this was founded on the fact that Mr. Grey was a good amateur cook and enjoyed preparing a good French meal. They also insinuated that he was a secondhand furniture dealer, only too willing to sell his Sheraton chairs and Renaissance cabinets.

Under pretext of playing chess (the only quasi-intellectual activity tolerated in our village) I visited Mr. Grey regularly. But we soon abandoned chess for better things. In his young days Mr. Grey had been a poet. At the age of nineteen, he said, he had gone about Venice in a cloak and a gondola, imagining himself another Byron. He appointed himself my poetic guardian, and each week read and criticized what I had written. Stimulated by this, his own Muse awoke from a long and frozen sleep. Mr. Grey read his verses in a strange droning chant which is said to derive from Tennyson. Afterwards it took me some time to get rid of the habit.

Mr. Grey was a most valuable ally. In spite of the twaddling gossips, he had considerable prestige, if only because he paid his bills so promptly. His wholehearted encouragement of my writing was a shield against opposition. Even more to the point was the privilege of intimacy with a good European. Mr. Grey had lived in London, Paris, and Berlin, and could talk amusingly of life there. He talked of the theatre and grand opera, of symphonic and chamber music, when the best I knew were the Stratford performances of Shakespeare and my mother’s playing of Chopin and Schumann. The classics, which had been a dreary school task, he brought alive. He made me see that Homer and Horace were as much living poetry as Keats and Shakespeare. Under his urging I made a strenuous effort and taught myself to read French. He introduced me to French poetry, and it was charming to see his enthusiasm for Ronsard and André Chénier. He started me off on Italian. He made me learn to ride a horse, and implored me not to marry my landlady’s daughter. He was exacting and worked a willing pupil relentlessly, for, after all, during much of this time I had to cope with a full school program; and I am very grateful to him.

But Mr. Grey’s deepest enthusiasm was for Italy, for Italian art and literature. He was impatient for me to learn Italian, and would read and translate passages from Dante and Petrarch to goad me on. In the leisurely Victorian way Mr. Grey had traveled through Italy in his own carriage. Everywhere he went he bought or took photographs of cities, landscape, architecture, sculpture, pictures, gardens, fountains. I forget how many large albums of these photographs he had, but they seemed endless. With one of them open before us Mr. Grey was willing to talk for hours and I was as willing to listen. No doubt he saw these things through the eyes of Ruskin, Pater, and Addington Symonds, but that is vastly better than not seeing them at all or seeing them through the hard-boiled optics of the New Yorker. Certainly Mr. Grey was a dilettante, but the meaning of the word is ‘one who takes delight’; and what is art for if not to delight us?

‘You must go to Italy,’ Mr. Grey would end up.

I didn’t need any urging. I was already more than impatient to be off. But distances were longer in those days and Italy seemed a long way off. Having pushed me on too far, Mr. Grey now tried to restrain me. I must prepare myself first by learning Italian and something of Italy’s complicated history. I must see first the collections in London and Paris, and learn to recognize styles and schools. Certainly I should not attempt to visit Italy until I finished with the University. And then, seeing me still unconsoled, he added: —

‘If you want to go to Italy badly enough, you’ll get there somehow.’

I didn’t believe him, but he was right.

V

Does it sound absurd to list ‘learning to walk’ among the pleasures and discoveries of those days? As I grew up I accepted without question the walking habits of a sedentary class. I thought walking a slow, tedious method of covering distances, and that four miles were about the limit of human capacity. If you had to go any further you naturally took a carriage or a train. Walking for pleasure was limited to golf and the constitutional.

I was freed from this error by an old friend, who is now one of His Majesty’s judges but was then merely a barrister’s devil. The experience made such an impression that I remember the exact date — the second of June. After breakfast Malcolm suggested a walk. It was a brilliantly sunny day; the fields were rich with daisies and buttercups; the young green leaves glittered; birds sang, and we talked and sang. I dare say Malcolm talked of his literary heroes, Henley, Pater, and Louis Stevenson. But after two or three miles I fell silent. I began to consider the distance back and was convinced that I already felt tired. I suggested we should turn back, or we might be late for lunch.

From his six feet three Malcolm looked upon me with scorn. Did I really propose to waste such a glorious day mugging indoors? Was I such a confounded weakling that I quailed at a mere fifteen or twenty-mile stroll? I gasped. Why, Malcolm continued, he and George Somebody often did twenty-five to thirty a day. But lunch? I protested, imagining a picturesque vignette of my disabled body lying huddled on the dusty road far from human succor. But there is no getting past legal acumen. Pooh! We had some money in our pockets, hadn’t we? Wasn’t there a pub in nearly every village? Allons, en route. Afoot and light-hearted we take to the open road.

Even a quotation from Whitman was no comfort, for at that moment I didn’t feel at all light-hearted; but I was ashamed to give in tamely. Bracing muscles which I firmly believed could not carry me much longer, I plodded on. And as we went on I seemed to get a second wind. I recollected that I had once run seven miles in a paper chase, and began to enjoy the rhythmic movement and exploring new country.

Sometime after noon we came to the then remote and very picturesque village of Barfreston, and went into an old thatched pub (I believe it was called The Oak) with cool stone floors and scrubbed wooden tables and benches. There we ate bread and cheese, and I drank my first half-pint of ale. Later we looked at the remarkable Norman carvings on the church, and sat in the sunshine on a low tomb facing the sculptured porch. A butterfly settled on a lichened gravestone, and we remembered that for the Greeks it was a symbol of the soul, and we discoursed of Plato and the myth of immortality.

A memorable day. My legs got me home all right, though I was stiff next morning. What did that matter? Malcolm had given me the freedom of the road. There was one amusing aspect of that expedition which his present lordship might consider. If the contemporary restrictions on the sale of drinks in England had been in force then, my friend who now condemns people for such trifles as murder and robbery with violence might himself have been indicted of a horrid crime — to wit, that he did procure a minor to be supplied with half a pint of beer which the said minor consumed on licensed premises in contempt of our Sovereign Lord the King his crown and dignity.

We got our walking done just in time. Within ten years the roads of England changed entirely and lost that empty, leisurely quality that had been theirs since the railways had taken over all long-distance travel. Thousands and eventually millions of people came to possess the equivalent of a private train with access to all roads. And many of them were not exactly the sort of persons who seek green haunts and loneliness; and if they did, their presence in such numbers destroyed the very things they sought. England is a small country with a network of roads, so that three decades have been enough for the motorcar to suburbanize many of the areas which industrialism had not touched. It isn’t much fun to walk there now.

Well, I’ve had a car myself for many years and know what fun it is, and yet the losses are serious. The long raw gash of a new motor road changes a whole landscape, especially when there is a ribbon development of new houses. What was yesterday still a stretch of eighteenth-century England looks like a dreary suburb.

The highways and the main streets of old towns in summer are as crowded as Piccadilly and far noisier. Moreover, everything supposedly beautiful or interesting is exploited for admission charges. Stonehenge has a barbed-wire fence round it and a turnstile. At the Devil’s Bridge notices read: ‘One shilling to see the landscape immortalized by Wordsworth.’ It isn’t the shilling one minds, especially since that is probably the only way of protection from complete wrecking. The trouble is the banality of it all. When such places lose their remoteness and wildness they lose their charm. The genius loci evaporates, and what is left is a mere curiosity. As Lawrence says, everything has been seen to death.

When it comes to a choice between the fun of motoring and the fun of walking, I think walking has it.

Consider. With a car one hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty miles are easily covered in a day, and at the end you crawl away from the wheel, unexercised yet stiff and tired, having had innumerable hurried glimpses of things you immediately forgot. In a day or two your nerves are on edge with the strain of speed, and if you were asked to describe the country and places you have been through, you couldn’t do it.

On foot fifteen to twenty-five miles are about the limits to a reasonable day’s march. In the morning when you start off you need a silent mile to get into stride and shake the rucksack into place. But as oxygenation livens up the blood, there is a gradual but quite irresistible trend towards exhilaration, not to say hilarity. You begin to talk to your companion, and find him responsive. After three or four miles mere talking is not enough; you shout, you sing, you bring out such good jokes that you both halt, doubled up with laughter. Your companion seems the wittiest and most delightful fellow in the world.

You proceed in this way for a length of time which seems twice as long and ten times as pleasant as a whole day in a car, when you observe an inn sign. This reminds you that you are hungry and you innocently suggest lunch, only to discover with astonishment, that your watches and the church clock agree that the day is young—a few minutes past eleven, in fact. Congratulating each other on this unexpected gift of time, you march on.

Meanwhile there isn’t much in the slowly moving landscape that you have missed. As you look back you can still see the spire over last night’s village, and the hill which was in front of you for the better part of a day. The names of villages and hamlets on the map become realities. You potter about them, looking at the big elms on the green and at old cottages. Or you drop in at the parish church, where you are rewarded by a crusader’s tomb, a sixteenth-century brass, or a fine window which luckily escaped the Reformers’ philistine zeal. You come to the bridge over a stream and peer down at the green waving weeds and the shadowy fishes flitting about their watery shrubberies like dim subaqueous birds. For half an hour you have a succession of views of an old mansion in a park; you fit it up with a library and other necessities and live there for the rest of your life. And no sooner is it out of sight than you come to the crest of a hill, and look over a wide valley to blue hills.

How much better are bread and cheese and beer in a cheerful taproom than a ghastly English hotel lunch in a prunesand-prisms atmosphere of gentility and a doddering waiter with grease-spotted clothes! After a pipe or two comes the afternoon walk. This is a more sober intoxication of air and sun than the morning’s. The world and yourself seem bathed in a warm golden glow; you linger more frequently on the way, and wonder how anyone can be a pessimist. You are filled with a placid satisfaction, and not even dismayed by the certainty that at your night’s lodging you will get nothing but ham and eggs. You are carefree, and yet as virtuously tired as if you had done a hard day’s work.

Such at any rate is my recollection of a fortnight’s walk through the west of England in 1910 and many another since. That was part of the good life.

Meanwhile other things had been happening. With my father I spent a week in Brussels and Antwerp. Brussels was the first capital I really enjoyed. My first memories of London are very confused, a medley of fog, mud, an endless rumble, the violent ammonia smell of horses at Victoria, the stifling coal smoke in the underground, hansoms, growlers, pantomimes, the Tower, the Abbey, the Zoo, the portentously solemn rooms of the Grosvenor Hotel, and the Natural History Museum. Belgium was very different. I feel some compunction when I think of how much I must have bored people after I got back. For several days I literally could not stop talking about all I had seen, from the dogs harnessed to market barrows up to High Mass in the Cathedral at Antwerp.

What I remember most vividly now is not the sight-seeing or even the first real contact with Continental life, but something I was quite unconscious of at the time. I mean the peaceful busy life of the Belgians which was so abruptly and cruelly ended in August 1914. One day my father took me to lunch at a large restaurant on one of the main streets of Brussels. We went up to the second floor and got a table by the window so that we could look up and down the street. There were throngs of people passing, an endless procession of fiacres among the trams, and every café and restaurant seemed crowded. It was the beginning of a holiday, and there was an indefinable sense of good humor and well-being about the whole scene. A woman on the street corner was selling flowers, and I watched a waiter at the café opposite joking and laughing with his customers as he served them.

If somebody had told me then that in a very few years an invading army would march down that street, I should have thought him mad. I should have thought him even more mad if he had gone on to say that 1 should be one of a vast English army levied to eject that invader. Certainly our inability to foresee the future is one of the most merciful conditions of our existence. I shouldn’t have enjoyed my lunch at all if I had known what was coming.

Yet if I were superstitious I might claim one flash of prophetic insight. Soon after I returned from Belgium I had a very vivid dream, wherein I saw the angels of the Lord riding upon white horses and slaying the wicked. The gruesome part of it was that as this divine vengeance proceeded the white angels and white horses became red with blood. I was so much impressed by this dream that I made a little story of it, the first piece of prose I ever wrote. I can’t explain this apocalyptic vision, except that I was scheduled for an operation; and my subliminal self, or whatever it is that functions in dreaming, exaggerated the extent of the coming massacre and effusion of blood.

In a moment of artist’s vanity I read this precious composition to my mother and one of my great-aunts. That excellent lady paid me the flattering compliment of shedding tears. Since I had already had my first poem printed in a London periodical that week I naturally began to feel as if the Nobel prize were just around the corner. Whereupon my mother got hold of a copy of this work and—just imagine! — sent it to Bernard Shaw. What she wrote to him I don’t know, nor what her motive was, unless she thought that Mr. Shaw might turn his satire on me and drastically cure me of the itch for writing. If so, she was disappointed. I haven’t got Mr. Shaw’s letter, but it ran something like this: —

MADAM,
Your son has obviously too much literary talent to earn his living in an honest way.
I enclose a guinea which he is to spend in some thoroughly selfish way.
Yours faithfully,
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

I wish I could remember what I did with that guinea. I believe I was so revolted by Shaw’s cynicism that I insisted on giving it to my mother. As to Shaw’s opinion, who am I to dispute it? If earning money by writing is dishonest, I can only say that I have done my best to follow in his footsteps.

In spite of all this glory and the efforts of Mr. Grey, I still needed educating. Mr. Grey was angry with me for having a poem published, and quoted Horace about keeping a poem seven years before publication. If only that rule could be rigidly applied to all books, the art of literature might be saved; and all the publishers would go bankrupt.

At that time it seemed to me a fantastic proposal; why, if I followed it, I should be an old man of twentythree before I had another poem published. However, I heeded Mr. Grey to the extent that for a time I made no further efforts towards publication and settled down to other work, to prepare for the University.

Hitherto I have said little or nothing about my schools, because I wanted to look on the bright side of life. I can’t agree with the men who won’t allow any criticism of the old school and who grow maudlin about the happiest days of their lives. Nor do I suffer from the infantilism which makes them yearn to be back in those days. My days at school were far from being happy, were indeed a perpetual struggle against a conditioning which was repulsive to me. Unluckily this resistance was extended to the purely educational side, so that I was regarded as rather a dull pupil. And yet, as a greater man said, I cannot think that I was disqualified for all literary pursuits.

I have no particular criticism for the system as such. Later researches enable me to say with some confidence that it was an imitation 01 Dr. Arnold’s imitation of the methods worked out by Vittorino da Feltre for educating Renaissance nobles. There was a time when I thought it fantastic to apply these methods to middle-class boys in the twentieth century. But having observed the results of the various brands of reformed, scientific, practical, enlightened, and psychological education, I have changed my mind. Without the humanities, education is defective, and I find myself unexpectedly in agreement with the classical don who saw no reason why scientists should not be educated.

I am not a Renaissance noble, but I should not in the least object if I had really received the education of one. It could not possibly be as futile as the smattering of innumerable more or less fake ‘subjects’ now fashionable. ‘Modern ‘ education is as certainly a recipe for making sciolists as the feudal system was a recipe for civil war. My objection, therefore, is not that they taught so-called obsolete subjects, but that they taught them with miserable inefficiency.

One reason for this is that, even if they knew their subjects, they had no enthusiasm for them. Languid teachers can expect nothing but languid scholars. But a more potent, reason was the conditioning or training, which laid far too much stress upon mere games and upon a narrow-minded bourgeois outlook. Backed by a quasi-military discipline, this inculcation of prejudices was harmful. Under the guise of turning out gentlemen it produced a pack of stupids. In their anxiety for the mass production of too-respectable citizens incapable of reacting against the prejudices instilled in them, they forgot (if they ever knew) Vittorino’s cardinal principle that instruction must be adapted to the individual. Consequently, I had to expend a great deal of nervous energy in preventing them from turning my silk purse into a sow’s ear.

Everything comes to those who wait, even unconscious apologies. A few years ago I returned to the old school, and walked on the sacred Close with the headmaster, who had been my housemaster. He talked very nicely about my books and then, turning to me with the most, disarming naïveté, said: —

‘And now tell me, my dear Aldington, where on earth did you get your scholarly knowledge?’

The price paid for this successful resistance was considerable, both in nervous tension and in ignorance, which had to be made good by desperate hard work later. But suppose I had not rebelled — suppose I had succumbed to the conditioning and, what was worse, the suggestion of the provincial middle-class milieu? I think I can make a rough guess at what I should now be.

I should be a fairly prosperous provincial lawyer, married to the daughter of some local personage who could bring business my way. Daily I should drive between my office and a modestly opulent country house in an expensive but not flashy car. In politics I should invariably support the Conservative candidate, and should discharge various municipal offices with unintelligent integrity. I should attend church regularly and act as churchwarden, subscribing to the right charities and denouncing respectable trade-union leaders as Bolshie agitators.

I should not read much beyond journalism and detective stories, but for social purposes I should maintain an unread library. Much of my leisure would go to golf and tennis, and I should turn out to cheer the Old Boys when they played cricket against The School. I should be a modestly prominent member of the British Legion, a Freemason, and one of the Watch and Ward committee for the suppression of vice. Occasionally I should take my wife to London, and when we returned invariably express the original idea, that there’s no place like home. I should drink water with my lunch, and a couple of whiskeys after dinner. My sons would attend the worst best schools, the kind which teach biology without reference to either evolution or sex. I might even have risen to the heights of preferring to see my daughters dead rather than reading Aldous Huxley.

In exchange for security and good opinion I should have lost nearly everything that has made life valuable — freedom of living, thinking, and utterance; the exercise of a natural aptitude and talent ; disinterested friendship, passionate love, travel, the arts, idleness.

(To be continued)

With each twelve months of the Atlantic

THREE GREAT BOOKS OF THE YEAR