One may judge that Lambert was not altogether singular in this; that in the most refined arid efficient human chemistry there is a steady by-product of uncertainty and muddle which must somewhere or other be dumped. Only to the supremely intelligent and favoured – a Goethe, say, or a Hume – is unflawed clarity of perception accorded. The rest of us have a measure of confusion in our portion (some of us indeed have little else) and must cope with it as we can. With Lambert, this drifting shadow, as it may be conceived, had long settled on that part of the mirror of his mind which he was accustomed to direct upon the outer world in the pursuit of his professional purposes. The result was a long series of novels best described as pertinaciously chaotic. Then, perhaps fortuitously, came some shifting of the retorts, some rearranging of the tubes. The by-product was drawn off and spilled over elsewhere – upon that area of his consciousness, we may conjecture, which reflected, and reflected upon, the man Lambert himself in his personal and diurnal relations. Hence the new Lambert upon whom his friends commented. Correspondingly and contrastingly, his work gained clarity and ordonnance. From there in fact the shadow had lifted. He wrote and published The Cosmopolitans.
Thus, it appears, might a psychologist set about explaining that odd quirk or eddy in English literary history which Lambert’s admirers have taken to calling his golden decade. But psychologists are speculative folk at best, and we ought not to apply to them until we have exhausted the unassuming aid of mere chronicle. Lambert’s decade is sufficiently remarkable; but it need surprise us less than it surprised, for example, Henry James when in 1905 it first announced itself. Many artists, even in their pronounced maturity, have undergone personal experiences, or come under intimate influences, by which their work has been transformed, enriched, distorted, or destroyed. And there is nothing preternatural about The Cosmopolitans. The novel is neither quite so good, nor in Lambert’s earlier work so unheralded, as it has now become fashionable to assert. The constituent parts of the contrivance – its cogs and shafts and springs and cylinders – are familiar. Only here they have been put together so as to work, and considerable power is generated as a result. Is there any known influence, public or domestic, we may ask, to which this happy but by no means phenomenal unclogging of Lambert’s artistry may be attributed? We may answer that there is such an influence, but one emanating from an agent so dim and tenuous as not readily to be descried. For the authentic if scarcely massive gilding upon Lambert’s significant decade is indubitably due to the unobtrusive arrival in his circle of a new friend, an unsuccessful painter named Wendell Dauncey, little known in his day and long since dead and forgotten. Dauncey’s influence, if in a fashion a little savouring of the ludicrous, was artistically beneficent; and the degree of his attachment to the novelist, if finally less ludicrous than phrenetic, was remarkable and even moving. Certainly it moved Lambert – moved him many steps up the queer ladder of literary reputation. And that slight but persistent air of bewilderment is susceptible perhaps of an explanation less laboured than I have sketched. It was occasioned by the reflection that the artistic felicities after which he had so long and vainly – in every sense, vainly – laboured had at length been placed within his grasp through the vague tutelary presence of a humble creature whose first impact, if it could be called perceptible at all, had been the occasion of embarrassment and annoyance rather than of gratification.
There is abundant testimony that an admirer was always pleasing to Lambert; and as a writer who still in his early fifties lingered in the outer precincts of the temple of fame he was probably prepared to welcome in that character a Sioux or a Cherokee. Dauncey, although somewhat remote in conception from the Noble Savage, had in fact a touch of these primitive associations, having drifted into Florence some years before, paint-box in hand, from spaces of an openness and blankness beyond ready computation. Only it was not as an admirer of Lambert’s that he now presented himself at the Villa Pastorelli. There can be little doubt that it was as an admirer – even, one seems confidently to discern, a former suitor – of Lambert’s wife. He was older than the lady by only a few years. He was younger by a quarter of a century than her lord.
In what spirit the future Mrs Lambert had first received and rejected the addresses of her artistically-minded cowboy is unknown. It was certainly with humanity, for she was a woman refined in spirit as well as by breeding; and upon this reappearance of a yet more etiolated Dauncey, the slenderness of whose talent as a painter must have depressingly revealed itself almost synchronously with the degree of his ineffectiveness as a lover, she appears to have taken the initiative in receiving him into her new household somewhat in the character of a waif or stray. It had been as the merest girl, it should be remembered, that she had first known him; and when he thus entered her home, Mrs Lambert had been but a few years married and was in her early twenties still. Her motives were virtuous at the beginning and her conduct may conceivably have been wholly so to the end. But, as there are some women who will be satisfied only by a demon lover, so may there be others who realise too late that they would be best accommodated with some mild apparition or gentle ghost. It may be concluded that the acknowledging, even if at a profoundly unconscious level, of a fatally mistaken marriage choice was the ultimate motive of Mary Lambert’s action. The curiosity of the succeeding story is enhanced when we reflect that both her husband and her protégé, surely, must have come to some awareness of this.
It would be misleading however to picture the Villa Pastorelli in those years as presenting any striking appearance – even the most morally innocuous – of a ménage à trois. The Lamberts were hospitable and entertained a great deal; it was their habit to have friends constantly staying in the house, often for considerable periods; and Dauncey’s occasional departure upon wanderings through or glidings over Italy were sufficiently frequent to lend him at least some formal appearance of belonging with these. Lambert’s own absences, if briefer, were more frequent; and little was said of them save that they were to be regarded as in some undefined manner incident to his vocation. All in all, the Pastorelli exhibited a household no more out of the way than did perhaps the majority of emigré establishments in Florence at that time.
Beneath the surface however a remarkable situation was growing up. Whether or not Dauncey continued to adore Mary is unknown; but it is certain that he quickly came to adore Mark. This, if unexpected, will yet prove upon reflection to be explicable; and science will no doubt declare that it was only in terms of such a bold transference that, in the circumstances, any stable relationship was likely to be established. And stable, as such things go in the world, it was. It endured for ten years, and perished, as will appear, only through overreaching itself.
That Dauncey, diffident, defeated, and acquiescent in the role of a mere hovering domiciliary presence, should have adored Lambert is one thing; that he should have attained some ascendancy over him is quite another. We may wonder at it – as Lambert himself to that point of evident bewilderment did. And yet at bottom the explanation is both simple and respectable. If Dauncey was a mere shade, he was thereby the more fit to be a ghostly counsellor. And that indeed is what the younger man with sufficiently striking success became. He possessed, it is clear, not the slightest vestige of artistic talent, and he had filled the resultant void with a high and serious conception of art and the artist. This, no doubt, was what had lured him out of whatever western wildness bore him; yearning for aesthetic revelation, he had been of those who, in his celebrated compatriot’s words, believed that it was only necessary to embark and imbibe. Baffled in practice, he fortified himself in precept. He would have been a terrible bore, and therefore would assuredly have got nowhere with Mark Lambert, but for two things. He possessed great personal beauty and a vast indisposition to speech.
At first it is clear that he only listened. But this itself was a step. Lambert’s was a talkative household, frequented by a talkative society. And Lambert was himself in a special sense a talkative man. From his e
arly manhood he had enjoyed a reputation for especial brilliance in this most ephemeral of human accomplishments. To many of his friends it appeared that he was unlikely ever to attain to great distinction at anything else; and these declared that the relationship discernible between his writing and his conversation was commonly that between ash and flame. Thus it came about that Lambert’s talk was widely regarded as a form of minor artistic achievement in its own right. When he began to speak there was at once generated very much the sort of attention which an immediately succeeding generation was to accord to the caperings of Mr Nijinsky. The expectation was of a performance – and of a performance which, while evincing a high degree of virtuosity, was plainly situated upon one of the minor frontiers of human accomplishment. When Lambert talked, Lambert – as the young people now say – was “putting on a turn”.
Than this manner of regarding the loquacity of the novelist nothing could in fact have been more inept. Lambert’s talk was not a matter of entrechats and pirouettes; it was rather a powerful and blundering assault, under a generalship mysteriously chaotic and uncontrolled, upon the impregnable citadel of the novel conceived as a major literary form; it was such an assault, perpetually repulsed and perpetually renewed. It has been well remarked by Sir Charles Shaxby, whose graceful meanderings in the recent past are not frequently lit by such perspicacity, that bafflement experienced almost to the point of madness was the deepest note sounded in Mark Lambert’s restless and hungry rhetoric. Lambert was doubtless a vain man. But his conversation was not directed to eliciting applause; it had no thought, even, of giving pleasure. And this Dauncey appears to have understood.
There is no reason to suppose that this cloud-like personage was more intelligent than Lambert’s other friends; indeed it seems very likely that he was rather stupid. But he did, together with his silence, bring a superior seriousness to the purposeful, if for long so obstinately un-nutritious banquet of the novelist’s talk. More important still, he brought faith. Entirely devoid of literary taste or sophistication, he had, at first at least, no notion that the God of his idolatry was, or had ever been, other than a highly significant writer; and no notion that Lambert’s talk represented other than a majestic, ordered and invincible advance upon the next outlying citadel of artistic achievement. He listened with all the awe, all the essential incomprehension, and all the inexhaustible patience of a child. And here was one reason – if not yet the chief reason – why the mild little miracle occurred. Lambert talked on, undistracted at last by the presence of inept expectations. And, as he talked himself out, the bits and pieces began to dispose themselves, for the first time in his career, into a dynamically effective order. The springs compressed and decompressed themselves in appropriate tensions, the valves opened and closed when they should, the pistons pounded and the wheels were ready to revolve. At length one sees the great moment come. The Cosmopolitans, a full-scale express, moves majestically from a platform on which stands an awed small boy – or something, perhaps, as unobtrusive, as cloudy, as an awed small boy’s ghost. This ghost, the spiritual form of Dauncey, sees the great engine as a glory beyond his ken, its impetus no more of his creating than is that of a planet in its orb. He has no motion that in the intricate chemistry that gives motive-power to the machine he has himself acted as an obscure catalyst.
At first, I say, it is clear that Dauncey only listened. In the relation that we have so far considered, indeed, it is unlikely that he ever did anything else. He was young still, and he possessed, as has been remarked, beauty – although his beauty, like the rest of him, was elusive and insubstantial, having always, one senses, something of the character of a pleasing apparition haunting the mere fringes of a dream. With intellect he was not endowed; and his acquaintance with any technique of imaginative creation was confined to his own quite unsuccessful endeavours to learn the art of spreading pigments speciously upon canvas. Aesthetic disquisition or specific critical appraisal from young Dauncey could scarcely have been other than disenchanting. There was however another aspect of Mark Lambert’s activities upon which any honest man might speak. And Dauncey appears to have spoken.
It is always to be regretted when the image of a person distinguished in the arts may not be transmitted to posterity in the colours of a full moral rectitude. But so too frequently it is. Often indeed criticism may here be silent without incurring reproach, since the frailty of the man and the achievement of the artist need have little to do with each other. With Lambert however it is otherwise, since his art and his conduct were bound together by a perverse aesthetic of his own creating. In part his theory (if it is to be called that) may have derived from Zola, who believed that the writer is helpless before any territory which he has not himself actually visited with a notebook. In part it was influenced by a not very perceptive attention to the methods of experimental science – which was to be the actual sphere, it may passingly be remarked, of one of Lambert’s legitimate children. And in part it was simply a rationalising of impulses obeyed at the prompting of a strong native sensuousness and sexuality.
Experimental science requires guinea-pigs; and a scientist may at times act as his own guinea-pig with an intrepidity deserving every commendation. Broadly put, Lambert’s persuasion was that the novelist too ought to be his own guinea-pig more often than not; that he should write not simply out of his generalised experience as an enjoying and suffering human being, but upon a basis of actual participation in specific situations holding promise as the raw material of his art. He was always on the look-out, as it were, for some current table-d’hôte of human hopes and fears and passions upon which he could drop in with more than a merely artistic appetite; nor does he appear to have held that any marked digestive pause need delay his presenting a rifacimento of these feasts to the novel-consuming public. Emotion was not to be recollected in tranquillity. For, like electric power, it could not really be effectively stored. It must be used even as it was generated. What was not dissipated in the heat of actual experience could be turned into that full and clear illumination of life that we call the novel.
The absurdity of this scheme was apparent in the artistic nullity of the result, for upon its basis Lambert produced that mass of confused, shapeless, undistinguished and patently improvised fiction which constitutes his early work. It is important that its absurdity must already in fact have been obscurely known to him, since this renders more intelligible what was presently to happen. And that it was so – that he was never wholly without a lurking sense of artistic irresponsibility and moral indiscipline – is apparent in those occasional sonorous tributes to the impersonality of great art with which he was accustomed to edify his acquaintance from time to time. Yet his better understanding can never have been more than very partial. He must have read, it is certain, those great fables – “The Lesson of the Master” chief among them – in which his infinitely more perceptive friend Henry James so movingly shows that the artist must be dedicated always to intellectual and not to personal passion, that his noblest wine comes from the broad vineyards of his contemplative habit, and can only be contaminated by the attempt to fortify it with the hard spirit of raw and immediate experience. But reading, Lambert was inattentive or unconvinced. The Master, massive in intellect and majestic in art, taught him no lesson. The task fell upon Dauncey – the dim domiciliary presence, the ghost.
We must suspect that it was as a moralist rather than a literary critic or theorist that the excellent creature first viewed the situation. Into the vagaries of Lambert’s private life we need not, fortunately, with any particularity enquire. It is certain that the licence accorded to it by his singular theory of professional study was intermittently a matter of distress in his household; and it is likely that to Dauncey, the rapt admirer of both Lambert and Lambert’s wife, such a state of affairs would be doubly painful. When moreover Dauncey became aware – as even in his large artistic innocence he must eventually have done – that Lambert’s life was bedevilling his art, was grotesquely jos
tling with it to effects of intolerable banality and confusion: when Dauncey, I say, became aware of this, Dauncey acted. He acted with startling and long-sustained success. But how? Lambert was fifty-three, with a positive and indeed powerful personality, long since firmly set in its ways. Dauncey was under thirty, and already little more than a walking or gliding or hovering system of inhibitions, reticences, withdrawals and evasions. How did this shy, sad and shrinking soul effect what he did? He possessed, it is true, that inexhaustible capacity for sympathetic listening that was itself, as we have seen, to be no inconsiderable factor in the clarifying of Lambert’s art. But he also changed – or at least for long modified and deflected – Lambert’s course of life. How was this done?
Married comparatively late, Mark Lambert was as yet the father only of a single infant son. On this child – such is the vanity of human wishes – large hopes were doubtless centred by his parents. But he was not yet conversible – it can hardly be maintained that he ever became so – and Lambert was of an age at which it is natural for a man to have sons and daughters of his own inches around him. Did Dauncey perhaps step into this gap, and more effectively indeed than a shade might be expected to do? Such a development is not improbable. Or did a more complex sentiment – and one from the most ancient times frequently more productive in the field of art – establish itself, if only hoveringly, between the older and the younger man? Because he was a little aside from the human, I have more than once called Dauncey a ghost. But at times he may have had some appearance of a visiting angel taking form of air: at least to the making of such an impression there was his beauty to help him. If Lambert did develop for the youth a feeling at once strong and purely contemplative – and it can hardly have been other than that – he may therein have found a stepping-stone, as it were, to a better and more significantly productive relationship with his art. Certain it is that, for nearly ten years, this better relationship, this more truly seminal mode of feeling, prevailed. The golden decade was the Dauncey decade. It came very oddly to its end.
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