rev. t. e. brown—a. r. orage—norman angell—st john ervine—charles marriott—max beerbohm—israel zangwill—alphonse courlander—ivan heald—dixon scott—barry pain—cunninghame graham
i wonder how many readers turn nowadays to the poetical works of thomas edward brown, the manx poet. not a great number, i think. indeed, i doubt if he ever had a large audience, though he had the power of exciting almost unlimited enthusiasm in the breasts of those whom he did attract. he was praised whole-heartedly by george eliot, george meredith, w. e. henley and other famous writers, and the publication of his letters a year or two after his death made a great stir.
in my boyhood’s days i was one of brown’s most devoted disciples. he had a charming trick of infusing scholarship with the real “stuff” of humanity, that appealed to me irresistibly, and i liked the honest sensuality of his roman women and the pathos of such poems as aber stations and epistola ad dakyns. perhaps i could not read his poems now, for, truth to tell, they “gush” almost indecently. however, he remains the most distinguished literary figure that the little isle of man has produced, and two or three of his lyrics will persist far into the future.
i met him at greeba castle, mr hall caine’s manx residence, when i was still a schoolboy. it was just a few months before brown’s death, and a rather sad incident marked his visit to hall caine.
129we were at lunch when he arrived: a rather solemn lunch: a lunch at which the guests were ill assorted. a ponderous scholar from scotland insisted upon discussing the authorship of homer—a subject about which our host evidently knew little and cared less. in the middle of a rather painful silence, brown was ushered into the dining-room; he was carrying a little book of laurence binyon’s that had just been published. his burly figure, his genial face, his ready tongue soon lifted us out of the atmosphere of black boredom that had settled upon us. in five minutes he had disposed of the scottish scholar, had drunk a whisky and soda, and had combated hall caine’s opinion that binyon “had entirely missed the point” in one of the poems he (binyon) had written.
all afternoon we talked. brown had come all the way from ramsey (some twenty-four miles, four of which had to be walked) to spend a few hours with his friend, and, as he was a man greedy of enjoyment, not a single moment was wasted. it soon appeared that brown was a great admirer of hall caine’s—it should be mentioned that mr caine had not then written the prodigal son or the eternal city—and the novelist basked in the tactful praise that was bestowed upon him.
as we were talking, a servant came with the news that eleven americans had arrived and had been shown into the library. hall caine left the room to give them tea. an hour later, he came back, exhausted but not displeased.
“one of the penalties of fame,” he said, with a sigh.
“but you are not the only one who suffers from your own fame,” observed brown. “i am constantly besieged by american journalists, who come to me for private information about yourself. a very persistent lady from new york came only the other day and wished to know if you were educated.”
hall caine laughed.
“what did you say?” he asked.
130“well, i asked her what she meant by ‘education,’ and she replied: ‘is he at all like matthew arnold?’”
towards evening, brown departed.
next morning, a note arrived from him, evidently written immediately on his return home the previous evening. the note expressed the writer’s regret that he had been unable to visit greeba castle that day; he had fully intended coming, but had been prevented at the last moment. this letter disturbed hall caine enormously.
“his mind is going,” he said; “i have noticed several other signs of vanishing memory, if not of something worse, during the last few months.”
there was, indeed, i have always thought, a streak of morbid eccentricity in brown’s intellectual make-up. a careful reader of his letters will notice many moods of fierce exaltation engendered by wholly inadequate and inexplicable causes. his sudden death was perhaps a blessing in disguise.
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there are in london two or three men, not known to the general public, whose influence on modern thought is most profound and most disturbing. of these men a. r. orage, the editor of the new age, is quite the most distinguished. what circulation his paper enjoys, i do not know; it cannot be large; probably it is not more than two or three thousand; perhaps it is not even so much as that. but the men and women who read it are men and women who count—people who welcome daring and original thought, who hold important positions in the civic, social, political and artistic worlds, and who eagerly disseminate the seeds of thought they pick up from the study of the new age. tens of thousands of people have been influenced by this paper who have never even heard its name. it does not educate the masses directly: it reaches them through the medium of its few but exceedingly able readers.
131the new age is professedly a socialist organ, but the promulgation of socialistic doctrines is only a part of its policy and work. its literary, artistic and musical criticism is the sanest, the bravest and the most brilliant that can be read in england. it reverences neither power nor reputation; it is subtle and unsparing; and, if it is sometimes cruel, it is cruel with a purpose. all sleek money-makers in art have reason to fear orage, for his rapier wit may at any moment glance and slide between their ribs and release the hot air that is at once the inspiration and the material of all their works.
orage has more than a touch of genius. it was baudelaire (wasn’t it?) who said that genius was the power to look upon the world with the eyes of a child. well, orage has the all-seeing, non-rejecting eyes of a child. he has also the eternal spirit of youth. one cannot imagine him growing old. perhaps his most interesting characteristic is his power of attracting and holding friends; he is the most hero-worshipped of men. having once given his friendship, however, he exacts the utmost loyalty; treachery is the one sin that can never be forgiven.
i knew orage years ago, when he was still in leeds teaching the young idea how to shoot. he was then a prominent member of the theosophical society and lectured a good deal—and rather dangerously, i think—on nietzsche. his gospel, always preached with his tongue in his cheek, that every man and woman should do precisely what he or she desires, acted like heady wine on the gasping and enthusiastic young ladies who used to sit in rows worshipping him. they wanted to do all kinds of terrible things, and as orage, backed by “that great german,” nietzsche, had sanctioned their most secret desires, they were resolved to begin at once their career of licence. they used to “stay behind” when the lectures were over, and question orage with their lips and 132invite him with their eyes, and it used to be most amusing and a little pathetic to listen to the gay and half-veiled insults with which orage at once thwarted and bewildered his silly devotees.
he had in those days a wonderful gift of talking a most divine nonsense—a spurious wisdom that ran closely along the border-line of rank absurdity. the “cosmic consciousness” of walt whitman was a great theme of his, and orage, in his subtle, devilishly clever way, would lead his listeners on to the very threshold of occult knowledge—and leave them there, wide-eyed and wonder-struck.
i have never known an editor more jealous of the reputation of his paper than orage is of the new age. no consideration of friendship would induce him to print a dull article, however sound, and when one of his contributors becomes sententious, or slack, or banal—out he goes, neck and crop. among the contributors to the new age i remember writers as different in mental calibre as john davidson and edward carpenter, frank harris and cecil chesterton, arnold bennett and janet achurch. these and scores of equally distinguished people have written for orage. why? for money? well, scarcely; the new age’s rates of pay must be very modest. for what, then? they have written because in the new age they can tell the unadulterated truth and because they are proud to see their work in that paper.
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to many people norman angell is a rather sinister figure, and the people who attack him most violently to-day are precisely those who praised him most when he wrote his first book. he has been overpraised and spoilt. his intellectual attainments are not greatly above the average, and his thinking is not always honest. in the early days of the war it used to be amusing to see him working among his spectacled and yellow-skinned 133assistants; he was small but magisterial, and he was always tucking sheets of foolscap into long envelopes and looking very important as he did so. i really believe that in those days of august, 1914, he had a vague idea that he and his helpers could stop the war at any moment they chose. certainly, he was very cross with the war. europe was behaving in her old, mad way without having previously consulted him.
“but it will soon be over,” he assured me. “you see——”
he stopped and waved his hand vaguely in the direction of a typewriter, smothered in documents.
“quite,” said i uncomprehendingly. “you mean——?”
“yes; that’s it. exhaustion. it can’t go on for ever. it must stop some time.”
a smile that came from nowhere straggled into his face. i felt vaguely discomfited.
“you see, we are hard at it,” he said, and, as he spoke, be indicated a pale, ill-shaven youth who was wandering aimlessly about the office, his hands full of papers.
a queer little chap, angell. very much in earnest, of course, very sure of himself, very pushing, very “idealistic.”
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st john ervine is a writer who already counts for much but who, a few years hence, will count for a good deal more. he is by way of being a protégé of bernard shaw, and earnest young fabians have already learned to reverence him.
we worked together on the daily citizen, he being dramatic critic. he was not enormously popular with the rest of the staff, for he was very “high-brow”; his face was smooth, sleek and superior, and he had a habit of being friendly with a man one day and scarcely recognising him the next. my own relations with him were of the most disagreeable. a play of his was given at the court 134theatre, and i was sent to criticise it. i did criticise it: the play was ugly, clever and sordid.
“but,” protested ervine, pale with vexation, the next time he met me, “but you have entirely misunderstood my play. you can’t have stayed till the end.”
“it was very painful for me, ervine,” said i, “but i really did stick it out to the finish. why do you young fellows write so depressingly? you look happy enough, ervine——”
“the close of my play is the part that matters. bernard shaw said so....”
we parted: he, with a look of successful hauteur; i, broken and crushed.
a week or so later i met him at one of herbert hughes’s jolly sunday evenings in chelsea.
“you know gerald cumberland, of course,” said someone who was introducing him to people.
he drew himself up with great dignity and stared at me through his pince-nez.
“i think,” said he, “yes, i believe we have met before somewhere. where was it, mr ... er ... cumberland?”
shortly after, he left the daily citizen, and i was given the position which he had occupied with so much conscious distinction. i somehow think that when the war is over and we meet, he will not know me. ervine is very much like that.
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fifteen years is a long time in the literary world, and charles marriott’s the column, which threw everybody into fever-heat somewhere about 1902, is, i suppose, forgotten. it was a “first” novel. uncritical ouida loved it; w. e. henley unbent and wrote a meredithian letter to its author; w. l. courtney seized some of his short stories for the fortnightly review; and i suppose (though i really don’t know this) the spectator wrote five lines of disapproval. it was a brilliant book; fresh, 135original, provocative. it promised a lot: it promised too much; the author has since written many distinguished books, but none of them is as good as the column said they would be.
marriott was living at lamorna, a tiny cove in cornwall, when i first knew him. he was tall, lantern-jawed and spectacled. he was interested in everything, but it appeared to me even then that he was a little inhuman. he lacked vulgarity; rude things repelled him enormously, unnaturally; he had no literary delight—or else his delight was too literary: i don’t know—in coarseness. fastidious to the finger-tips, he would rather go without dinner than split an infinitive. since those days marriott has gone on refining himself until there is very little marriott left. even the longest and the thickest pencil may be sharpened too frequently.
many years after i met him at an exhibition of pictures in bond street. he was then almost old, tired, preoccupied. he is quite the last man to be a journalist; his art criticism is wonderfully fine, but a life standing on the polished floors of galleries between bond street and leicester square is soul-corroding and heart-breaking. marriott’s mind no longer darts and leaps. it moves gently, very gently.
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max beerbohm is not so witty in conversation as one might expect. on the spur of the moment he has little verbal readiness; his mind is purely literary. he bears no resemblance to his late brother, sir herbert beerbohm tree, one of the cleverest conversationalists i have ever met.
a short, mild and debonair figure received me one may afternoon in a house which, if not in cavendish square, was somewhere in its neighbourhood. in my later schoolboy days max was very much cultivated by those of the younger generation who liked to think themselves 136enormously in the swim. we used to “collect” max beerbohm’s—not his caricatures, for they were far and away beyond our means; but his articles. i remember a rather startling article of his in the yellow book which i had bound in lizard-skin, and a friend of mine had all max’s saturday review articles beautifully typewritten on thick yellow paper and bound in scarlet cardboard. max was precious, max was deliciously impertinent, max was too frightfully clever for words.
when i called upon him four or five years ago i had, i need scarcely say, long outgrown my early infatuation, for he had begun to “date,” and was safely in his niche among the men of the nineties. but half-an-hour’s talk with him revived some of the old fascination. he had “atmosphere”; his personality created an environment; he brought a flavour of far-off days. we talked quite pleasantly of his art, but he said nothing that has stuck in my memory, and my questions seemed to amuse rather than interest him. his small dapper figure gave one the impression of a schoolboy who had grown a little tired, who had prematurely developed his talents, and who had just fallen short of winning a big prize.
he led the way to the front door, shook me by the hand, looked at me meditatively for a moment, smiled faintly, and ... vanished.
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of israel zangwill i can give only an impression. i see him now as i saw him one hot afternoon at his rooms in the temple. a dark man, a spare man, a man very much in earnest and anxious to be just. he was perspiring slightly, i remember, and he bent forward a little so as to hear and understand every word i said. i had a request to make: a favour to ask. he listened patiently, gave me a cup of tea, and stirred his own. for a little he ruminated. then he turned to me and lifted his eyebrows—lifted his eyebrows rather high. i repeated my 137request, giving further details. i was a little confused. he studied my confusion, not cruelly, but in the way that a trained observer studies everything that comes under his notice. then: “ye-es,” he said; “i see. i see.” and then there was a minute’s silence.
“i will do what you want,” he remarked, at length. “i will do it willingly—most willingly.”
and he did. our little business entailed some subsequent correspondence, and some work on zangwill’s part. the work was done promptly; his letters answered mine by return of post. he gained nothing by his work, whereas the paper i represented gained a great deal.
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alphonse courlander was one of the many young and promising writers whom the war has killed. he was one of the most hard-working journalists in fleet street, and if he was not precisely brilliant, he had unusual gifts and used them to good purpose. i could never read his novels, but i understand they met with a certain success, and people whose opinion i respect have spoken highly of them.
he represented the daily express in paris at the time the war broke out. he was the most conscientious of men, and he grappled with the extra work that grew up with the war with a fierce and fanatical energy. he overworked himself, and the horror of the war appears to have got on his nerves. he disappeared from paris and was found wandering alone in london, neurasthenic, beaten, purposeless. a week or two later he died.
courlander was a good example of a not unusual type of man one frequently meets in fleet street—a type that, in the end, is bound to meet either failure or tragedy. he was too highly strung for the rigours of the game: too sensitive; too ambitious for his weak frame. the type either takes to drink or wears itself out long before 138middle age. courlander was an abstemious man; perhaps if he had “let himself go” occasionally, he would have stood the strain of his work better. when i saw him, he was always busy, always up to date, always writing or going to write a novel in his spare time. he had very little inventive faculty and used to worry over his plots and worry his friends over them. “plots! ... as if plots matter if you have anything to say!” i used to urge. and then he would look at me, mystified.
“but, cumberland, what can you know about it? you have never written a novel.”
“oh, but i have,” i would reply, “but no one will publish them.”
“ah! that’s the reason.”
and he really believed that that was the reason.
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ivan heald was a colleague of courlander—a colleague any man in fleet street would have been glad to possess. heald was original, and he created a record in so far as he was the first and, so far as i know, the only man to be employed by a british daily paper to write a “funny story” each day. he made a wide reputation, a reputation that, no doubt, pleased him, but he had no real ambition. people who “got on” rather amused him—that is to say, if their success was won at the expense of experience of life. i never met a man more full of zest for life, a man more eager for experience, a man who retained his youth so successfully. he was vivid, careless, tolerant and, in spite of every appearance to the contrary, essentially serious-minded. it was the simple pleasures of life that attracted him.
he had no scholarship, but his mind was well ordered, and his appreciation of natural and artistic beauty was of the keenest.
i remember that when we were holidaying together at oxford he would become almost angry with me because i 139could not immediately perceive the beauty of certain lines—the outlines of trees, the curve of a table-napkin, the pattern made by the ropes of a tent, and so on.
“you should get eddie or norman morrow to go a walk with you,” he said. “they would make you see things.”
he loved folk-songs, irish peasants, the plays of synge, the russian ballet, the thames, the homely comfort of a country inn. his feeling for family life was strong, and friday evenings at the healds’, where one met his mother and sisters, as clever if not so vivid as he himself, were one of the great recurring pleasures of many men’s lives.
he was wounded in gallipoli, nursed back to health, transferred to the r.f.c., and died (in all probability, for the exact manner of his death is not certainly known) in the air. a death he would have desired. but ivan heald should not have died, and sometimes i am tempted to think that he still lives, that something in him still lives—something that was rich and strange and beautiful. the other day i came across one of the little notes he used to scribble to me. it is written from ireland, and because it is so like him i give it here:
dear gerald,—if only i had the nice stiff paper and the delicate pen nib, i would try to write a letter to you like the ones you send me. there came a thrill yesterday. as i sat in my little parlour toying with my last month’s ulster guardian, there leapt out of the page your poem, fashioned of dreams you are [reprinted from a magazine]. it was as though the sea between us had suddenly shrunk to a couple of glasses of whisky. i shall never pass a poet’s corner again without looking for you. there are poets here, too. an old-age pensioner describing a wonderful fish he had seen told me that it was “a gay and antic fish, fresh and smart and soople.” i shall leave for 140home to-morrow evening and see you on sunday night, and if there is one bottle of red wine left in the world, you and i will surely drag it out of the dust. how the bottles must wonder under their cobwebs at this strange turn of fate—that the master butler may either transform them into sparkling phrases and beautiful thoughts through rare fellows like us, or send them to dreary death in the paunch of fools like ——
ivan.
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dixon scott used to throw me into little ecstasies by his reviews in the manchester guardian, and i often used to wonder if i should meet him. our paths crossed for a brief minute not long before we left england—he to meet his death in france, and i to sit and wait in serbia. it was at the end of one of my evenings in the café royal, where one used to sip absinthe, smoke a cigar, and listen to orage. it was “time, gentlemen, please”: 12-30 a.m.: in army parlance, 0030 hours. we were all very merry as we crowded into regent street, and i heard a voice behind me say: “dixon scott.”
i turned round immediately.
“are you dixon scott?” i asked a man—a man who looked as unlike my preconceived picture of him as possible.
“yes, and someone has just told me you are gerald cumberland.”
“how awfully jolly,” said i, “for now i have the opportunity of telling you how much i admire your wonderful genius.”
“tophole!” said he. “i love praise, don’t you?”
“ra-ther!” said i.
and then i fought for a taxi and saw scott no more.
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barry pain, like the gentleman who used to be known as adrian ross, leads a double intellectual life. he earns 141his bread by writing humorous literature; he is the king of modern jesters; but secretly (and perhaps in shame) he studies philosophy and metaphysics and is known to have written a big two-volume work dealing with the furtive processes of the human mind. he is a scholar, but fate has made of him a manufacturer of jokes. while his tougher intellectual faculties are wrestling with the basic problems of the universe—the whence, whither and why of things—his observing eye is noting the little discrepancies of life, the jolly frailties of human nature, the absurdities of our everyday existence.
he revealed little of his capacity for humour when he entertained me to whisky and soda at his club. i found a big, bearded and rather fleshy man rolling about in a very easy chair. i had been sent to interview him by one of those very pushing newspapers that, in the silly season especially, run absurd “stories.” i have not the slightest recollection of the particular story that took me to barry pain, but i am perfectly certain that it was preposterous, and i am perfectly certain that my news editor—he was stanley bishop, of blessed memory—expected me to bring back to the office several gems of humour tempted from the brain and stolen from the lips of the famous writer. but pain was coy. perhaps he does not believe in giving away jokes for which coin of the realm is usually paid.
i presented my “story” to him and tried to make him talk about it, but he looked glum and stared stonily into the empty fire-grate.
“really,” he began, at length, “i can’t think of anything to say. can you? if you can think of something very clever, put it in your article and say i said it. yes, do say i said it. but, of course, it must be very clever.”
and he lapsed into a long, depressed silence. i was very glad when a friend of his popped his head into the 142room and shouted: “what about that game of bridge?” i rose hastily and escaped.
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it would be difficult to find a more picturesque figure than r. b. cunninghame graham. i always picture him sitting on a bare-backed mexican steed, his shirt open at the throat, a long whip in one hand, a lasso in the other, his eyes, like blake’s tiger, burning bright, his boots fantastically spurred, his hat flapping in the wind, and his steed galloping ventre à terre. in south and central america, no doubt, he does run wild, but in london of late years he has always been most respectable. and yet even west end respectability cannot kill his picturesqueness. he has a shining mind, and everything he says is youthful and spirited.
most of his literary enthusiasms are for the younger—the youngest—generation, but as his mind is essentially uncritical and impulsive, his judgments are not very trustworthy. i remember his praising unreservedly a young alleged poet who in recent years has made himself known by his scholarship and impudence, and, as far as i could gather, it was chiefly his impudence that had attracted cunninghame graham.
