by Grant Allen
Not that the Club can number any of them now on its existing roll-call: the Cheyne Row is for prospective celebrity only; accomplished facts transfer themselves at once to a statelier site in Pall Mall near the Duke of York’s Column. Rising merit frequents the Tavern, as scoffers profanely term it: risen greatness basks rather on the lordly stuffed couches of Waterloo Place. No man, it has been acutely observed, remains a Bohemian when he has daughters to marry. The pure and blameless ratepayer avoids Prague. As soon as Smith becomes Chancellor of the Exchequer, as soon as Brown takes silk, as soon as Robinson is elected an Associate, as soon as Tompkins publishes his popular novel, they all incontinently with one accord desert the lesser institution in the Piccadilly byway, and pass on their names, their honours, their hats, and their subscriptions to the dignified repose of the Athenæum. For them, the favourite haunt of judge and bishop: for the young, the active, the struggling, and the incipient, the chop and claret of the less distinguished but more lively caravanserai by the Green Park purlieus.
In the smoking-room of this eminent and unsuccessful Bohemian society, at the tag-end of a London season, one warm evening in a hot July, Hugh Massinger, of the Utter Bar, sat lazily by the big bow window, turning over the pages of the last number of the Charing Cross Review.
That he was truly great, nobody could deny. He was in very fact a divine bard, or, to be more strictly accurate, the author of a pleasing and melodious volume of minor poetry. Even away from the Cheyne Row Club, none but the most remote of country-cousins — say from the wilder parts of Cornwall or the crofter-clad recesses of the Isle of Skye — could have doubted for a moment the patent fact that Hugh Massinger was a distinguished (though unknown) poet of the antique school, so admirably did he fit his paid in life as to features, dress, and general appearance. Indeed, malicious persons were wont at times unkindly to insinuate that Hugh was a poet, not because he found in himself any special aptitude for stringing verses or building the lofty rhyme, but because his face and bearing imperatively compelled him to adopt the thankless profession of bard in self-justification and self-defence. This was ill-natured, and it was also untrue; for Hugh Massinger had lisped in numbers — at least in penny ones — ever since he was able to lisp in print at all. Elizabethan or nothing, he had taken to poetry almost from his very cradle; and had astonished his father at sixteen by a rhymed version of an ode of Horace, worthy the inspiration of the great Dr. Watts himself, and not, perhaps, far below the poetic standard of Mr. Martin Farquhar Tuppec. At Oxford he had perpetrated a capital Newdigate; and two years after gaining his fellowship at Oriel, he had published anonymously, in parchment covers, “Echoes from Callimachus, and other Poems” — in the style of the early romantic school — which had fairly succeeded by careful nursing in attaining the dignity of a second edition under his own name. So that Massinger’s claim to the sodality of the craft whose workmen are “born not made” might perhaps be considered as of the genuine order, and not entirely dependent, as cynics averred, upon his long hair, his pensive eyes, his dark-brown cheek, or the careless twist of his necktie and his shirt-collar.
Nevertheless, even in these minor details of the poetical character, it must candidly be confessed that Hugh Massinger outstripped by several points many of the more recognized bards whose popular works are published in regulation green-cloth octavos, and whose hats and cloaks, of unique build, adorn with their presence the vestibule pegs of the Athenæum itself. He went back to the traditions of the youth of our century. The undistinguished author of “Echoes from Callimachus” was tall and pale, and a trifle Byronic. That his face was beautiful, extremely beautiful, even a hostile reviewer in the organ of another clique could hardly venture seriously to deny: those large grey eyes, that long black hair, that exquisitely chiselled and delicate mouth, would alone have sufficed to attract attention and extort admiration anywhere in the universe, or at the very least in the solar system.
Hugh Massinger, in short, was (like Coleridge) a noticeable man. It would have been impossible to pass him by, even in a crowded street, without a hurried glance of observation and pleasure at his singularly graceful and noble face. He looked and moved every inch a poet; delicate, refined, cultivated, expressive, and sicklied o’er with that pale cast of thought which modern aestheticism so cruelly demands as a proof of attachment from her highest votaries. Yet at the same time, in spite of deceptive appearances to the contrary, he was strong in muscular strength: a wiry man, thin, but well knit: one of those fallacious, uncanny, long-limbed creatures, who can scale an Alp or tramp a score or so of miles before breakfast, while looking as if a short stroll through the Park would kill them outright with sheer exhaustion. Altogether, a typical poet of the old-fashioned school, that dark and handsome Italianesque man: and as he sat there carelessly, with the paper held before him, in an unstudied attitude of natural grace, many a painter might have done worse than choose the author of “Echoes from Callimachus” for the subject of a pretty Academy pot-boiler.
So Warren Relf, the unknown marine artist, thought to himself in his armchair opposite, as he raised his eyes by chance from the etchings in the Portfolio, and glanced across casually with a hasty look at the undiscovered poet.
“Has the Charing Cross reviewed your new volume yet?” he asked politely, his glance meeting Massinger’s while he flung down the paper on the table beside him.
The poet rose and stood with his hands behind his back in an easy posture before the empty fireplace. “I believe it has deigned to assign me half a column of judicious abuse,” he answered, half yawning, with an assumption of profound indifference and contempt for the Charing Cross Review and all its ideas or opinions collectively. “To tell you the truth, the subject’s one that doesn’t interest me. In the first place, I care very little for my own verses. And in the second place, I don’t care at all for reviewers generally, or for the Charing Cross Snarler and its kind in particular. I disbelieve altogether in reviews, in fact. Familiarity breeds contempt. To be quite candid, I’ve written too many of them.”
“If criticism in literature’s like criticism in art,” the young painter rejoined, smiling, “why, with the one usual polite exception of yourself, Massinger, I can’t say I think very much of the critics. — But what do you mean, I should like to know, by saying you don’t care for your own verses? Surely no man can do anything great, in literature or art — or in shoe-blacking or pig-sticking, if it comes to that — unless he thoroughly believes in his own vocation.”
Massinger laughed a musical laugh. “In shoe-blacking or pig-sticking,” he said, with a delicate curl of his thin lips, “that’s no doubt true; but in verse-making, query? Who on earth at the present day could even pretend to himself to believe in poetry? Time was, I dare say — though I’m by no means sure of it — when the bard, hoary old impostor, was a sort of prophet, and went about the world with a harp in his hand, and a profound conviction in his innocent old heart that when he made ‘Sapphic’ rhyme to ‘traffic,’ or produced a sonnet on the theme of ‘Catullus,’
‘lull us,’ and ‘cull us,’ he was really and truly enriching humanity with a noble gift of divine poesy. If the amiable old humbug could actually bring himself to believe in his soul that stringing together fourteen lines into an indifferent piece, or balancing ‘mighty’ to chime with ‘Aphrodite,’ in best Swinburnian style, was fulfilling his appointed function in the scheme of the universe, I’m sure I should be the last to interfere with the agreeable delusion under which (like the gentlemen from Argos in Horace) he must have been labouring. It’s so delightful to believe in anything, that for my own part I wouldn’t attempt to insinuate doubts into the mind of a contented Buddhist or a devout worshipper of Mumbo Jumbo.”
“But surely you look upon yourself as a reaction against this modern school of Swinburnians and ballad-mongers, don’t you?” Relf said, with a shrug.
“Of course I do. Byron’s my man. I go back to the original divine inspiration of the romantic school. It’s simple
r, and it’s easier. But what of that? Our method’s all the same at bottom, after all. Who in London in this nineteenth century can for a moment affect to believe in the efficacy of poetry? Look at this last new volume of my own, for example! — You won’t look at it, of course, I’m well aware, but that’s no matter: nobody ever does look at my immortal works, I’m only too profoundly conscious. I cut them myself in a dusty copy at all the libraries, in order to create a delusive impression on the mind of the public that I’ve had at least a solitary reader. But let that pass. Look, metaphorically, I mean, and not literally, at this last new volume of mine! How do you think a divine bard does it? Simply by taking a series of rhymes— ‘able,’ and ‘stable,’ and ‘table,’ and ‘cable;’
‘Mabel,’ and ‘Babel,’ and ‘fable,’ and ‘gable’ — and weaving them all together cunningly by a set form into a Procrustean mould to make up a poem. Perhaps ‘gable,’ which you’ve mentally fixed upon for the fourth line, won’t suit the sense. Very well, then; you must do your best to twist something reasonable, or at least inoffensive, out of ‘sable’ or ‘ label,’ or ‘Cain and Abel,’ or anything else that will make up the rhyme and complete the metre.”
“And is that your plan, Massinger?”
“Yes, all this last lot of mine are done like that: just louts rimes — I admit the fact; for what’s all poetry but bouts rimes in the highest perfection? Mechanical, mechanical. I draw up a lot of lists of rhymes beforehand: ‘kirtle,’ and ‘myrtle,’ and ‘hurtle,’ and ‘turtle’ (those are all original); ‘pæan,’ ‘Ægean,’ ‘plebeian,’ and ‘Tean’ (those are fairly new); ‘battle,’ and ‘cattle,’ and ‘prattle,’ and ‘rattle’ (those are all commonplace); and then, when the divine afflatus seizes me, I take out the lists and con them over, and weave them up into an undying song for future generations to go wild about and comment upon. ‘What profound thought,’ my unborn Malones and Furnivalls and Leos will ask confidingly in their learned editions, ‘did the immortal bard mean to convey by this obscure couplet?’ — I’ll tell you in confidence. He meant to convey the abstruse idea that ‘passenger’ was the only English word he could find in the dictionary at all like a rhyme to the name of ‘Massinger.’”
Warren Relf looked up at him a little uneasily. “I don’t like to hear you run down poetry like that,” he said, with an evident tinge of disapprobation. “I’m not a poet myself, of course; but still I’m sure it isn’t all a mere matter of rhymes and refrains, of epithets and prettinesses. What touches our hearts lies deeper than mere expression, I’m certain. It lies in the very core and fibre of the man. There are passages even in your own poems — though you’re a great deal too cynical to admit it now — that came straight out of the depths of your own heart, I venture to conjecture — those ‘Lines on a Lock of Hair,’ for example. — Aha, cynic! there I touched you on the raw. — But if you think so lightly of poetry as a pursuit, as you say, I wonder why you ever came to take to it.”
“Take to it, my dear fellow! What an Arcadian idea! As if men nowadays chose their sphere in life deliberately. Why, what on earth makes any of us ever take to anything, I should like to know, in this miserable workaday modern world of ours? Because we’re simply pitchforked into it by circumstances. Does the crossing-sweeper sweep crossings, do you suppose, for example, by pure preference for the profession of a sweep? Does the milkman get up at five in the morning because he sees in the purveying of skim-milk to babes and sucklings a useful, important, and even necessary industry to the rising generation of this great Metropolis? Does the dustman empty the domestic bin out of disinterested regard for public sanitation? or the engine-driver dash through rain and snow in a drear-nighted December like a Comtist prophet, out of high and noble enthusiasm of humanity?” He snapped his fingers with an emphatic negative. “We don’t choose our places in life at all, my dear boy,” he went on after a pause: “we get tumbled into them by pure caprice of circumstances. If I’d chosen mine, instead of strictly meditating the thankless Muse, I’d certainly have adopted the exalted profession of a landed proprietor, with the pleasing duty of receiving my rents (by proxy) once every quarter, and spending them royally with becoming magnificence, in noble ways, like the Greek gentleman one reads about in Aristotle. I always admired that amiable Greek gentleman — the megaloprepês, I think Aristotle calls him. His berth would suit me down to the ground. He had nothing at all of any sort to do, and he did it most gracefully with princely generosity on a sufficient income.”
“But you must write poetry for something or other, Massinger; for if it isn’t rude to make the suggestion, you can hardly write it, you know, for a livelihood.”
Massinger’s dark face flushed visibly. “I write for fame,” he answered majestically, with a lordly wave of his long thin hand. “For glory — for honour — for time — for eternity. Or, to be more precisely definite, if you prefer the phrase, for filthy lucre. In the coarse and crude phraseology of political economists, poetry takes rank nowadays, I humbly conceive, as a long investment. I’m a journalist by trade — a mere journeyman journalist; the gushing penny-a-liner of a futile and demoralized London press. But I have a soul within me above penny-a-lining; I aspire ultimately to a pound a word. I don’t mean to live and die in Grub Street. My soul looks forward to immortality, and a footman in livery. Now, when once a man has got pitchforked by fate into the rank and file of contemporary journalism, there are only two ways possible for him to extricate himself with peace and honour from his unfortunate position. One way is to write a successful novel. That’s the easiest, quickest, and most immediate short-cut from Grub Street to Eaton Place and affluence that I know of anywhere. But unhappily it’s crowded, immensely overcrowded — vehicular traffic for the present entirely suspended. Therefore, the only possible alternative is to take up poetry. The Muse must descend to feel the pulse of the market. I’m conscious of the soul of song within me; that is to say, I can put ‘Myrrha’ to rhyme with ‘Pyrrha,’ and alliterate ps and gs and ws with any man living (bar Algernon) in all England. Now, poetry’s a very long road round, I admit — like going from Kensington to the City by Willesden Junction; but in the end, if properly worked, it lands you at last by a circuitous route in fame and respectability. To be Poet Laureate is eminently respectable. A man can live on journalism meanwhile; but if he keeps pegging away at his Pegasus in his spare moments, without intermission, like a costermonger at his donkey, Pegasus will raise him after many days to the top of Parnassus, where he can build himself a commodious family residence, lighted throughout with electric lights, and commanding a magnificent view in every direction over the Vale of Tempe and the surrounding country. Tennyson’s done it already at Aldworth; why shouldn’t I, too, do it in time on Parnassus?”
Relf smiled dubiously, and knocked the ash off his cigar into the Japanese tray that stood by his side. “Then you look upon poetry merely as an ultimate means of making money?” he suggested, with a deprecatory look.
“Money! Not money only, my dear fellow, but position, reputation, recognition, honour. Does any man work for anything else? Any man, I mean, but cobblers and enthusiasts?”
“Well, I don’t know. I may be an enthusiast myself,” Relf answered slowly; “but I certainly do work at art to a great extent for art’s sake, because I really love and admire and delight in it. Of course I should like to make money too, within reasonable limits — enough to keep myself and my people in a modest sort of way, without the footman or the eligible family residence. Not that I want to be successful, either: from what I’ve seen of successful men, I incline to believe that success as a rule has a very degenerating effect upon character.
Literature, science, and art thrive best in a breezy, bracing air. I never aim at being a successful man myself; and if I go on as I’m doing now, I shall no doubt succeed in not succeeding. But apart from the money and the livelihood altogether, I love my work as an occupation. I like doing it; and I like to see myself growing stronger and freer at it every day.”
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“That’s all very well for you,” Massinger replied, with another expansive wave of his graceful hand. “You’re doing work you care for, as I play lawn-tennis, for a personal amusement. I can sympathize with you there. I once felt the same about poetry myself. But that was a long time ago: those days are dead — dead — hopelessly dead, as dead as Mad Margaret’s affidavit. I’m a sceptic now: my faith in verse has evaporated utterly. Have I not seen the public devour ten successive editions of the ‘Epic of Washerwomen,’ or something of the sort? Have I not seen them reject the good and cleave unto the evil, like the children of Israel wandering in the Wilderness? I know now that the world is hollow, and that my doll is stuffed with sawdust. — Let’s quit the subject. It turns me always into a gloomy pessimist. — What are you going to do with yourself this summer?”
“Me? Oh, just the usual thing, I suppose. Going down in my tub to paint sweet mudbanks off the coast of Suffolk.”
“Suffolk to wit! I see the finger of fate in that! Why, that’s just where I’m going too. I mean to take six or eight weeks’ holiday, if a poor drudge of a journalist can ever be said to indulge in holidays at all — with books for review, and proofs for correction, and editorial communications for consideration, always weighing like a ton of lead upon his unhappy breast: and I propose to bury myself alive up to the chin in some obscure, out-of-the-way Suffolk village they call Whitestrand. — Have you ever heard of it?”
“Oh, I know it well,” Relf answered, with a smile of delightful reminiscence. “It’s grand for mud. I go there painting again and again. You’d call it the funniest little stranded old-world village you ever came across anywhere in England. Nothing could be uglier, quainter, or more perfectly charming. It lies at the mouth of a dear little muddy creek, with a funny old mill for pumping the water off the sunken meadows; and all around for miles and miles is one great fiat of sedge and seapink, alive with water-birds and intersected with dikes, where the herons fish all day long, poised on one leg in the middle of the stream as still as mice, exactly as if they were sitting to Marks for their portraits.”
