To morrow?
V >>
Victoria Cross >> To morrow?
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 This etext was produced by Charles Franks, Johannes Blume
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
To-morrow?
By
Victoria Cross
"Cras te victurum, cras dicis Postume semper
Dic mihi cras istud, Postume quando venit?
Quam longe cras istud, ubi est? aut unde petendum?
Cras istud quanti dic mihi, possit emi?
Cras vives? hodie jam vivere, Postume, serum est
Ille sapit, quisquis Postume, vixit heri."
MART. v. lviii.
CHAPTER I.
"REJECTED! rejected!"
I crushed the letter spasmodically in my hand as I walked
mechanically up and down the length of the dining-room, a rage of
anger filling my brain and the blood thundering in my ears.
"Rejected! and that not for the first time. Another year and a
half's work flung away--simply flung away, and I am no nearer
recognition than ever. Incredible it seems that they won't accept
that."
I stopped under the gasalier and glanced again through the letter I
had just received.
"DEAR SIR,--With reference to your last MS., we regret to say we
cannot undertake its publication, owing to the open way in which you
express your unusual religious views and your contempt for existing
institutions.
"At the same time, our reader expresses his admiration for your
style, and his regret that your unmistakably brilliant genius should
be directed towards unsatisfactory subjects.--We are," etc., etc.
The blood flowed hotly over my face, and my teeth closed hard upon
my lip.
Always the same thing! rejection from every quarter.
The last clause in the letter, which might have brought some
momentary gratification to a man less certain, less absolutely sure
of his own powers than I was, could bring none to me.
It only served to make sharper the edge of my keen disappointment.
Brilliant genius! I read the words with the shadow of a satirical
smile.
What need to tell me that I possessed a power that inflamed every
vein, that heated all the blood in my system, that filled, till they
seemed buoyant, every cell of my brain? As much need as to tell the
expectant mother she has a life within her own.
I was tired of praise, tired of being called gifted, tired of
hearing reiterated by others that which I knew so well myself.
We are invariably little grateful for anything freely and constantly
offered to us, and I cared now simply nothing for compliments,
praise, or felicitation.
These had been given to me from my childhood upwards, and yet here,
at six and twenty, I was still unknown, unrecognized, obscure, and
not a single line of my writing had met the public eye.
I craved and thirsted after success far more than a fever-stricken
man in the desert can crave after water, for the longings and
desires of the body are finite, and when a fixed pitch in them has
been surpassed, death grants us a merciful cessation of all desire,
but the longings of the mind are infinite, absolutely without limit
and without period; and where a physical desire, ungratified, must
eventually destroy itself as it wears away the matter that has given
it birth, a mental desire does not wane with the flesh it wastes,
but remains ravening to the last, and reigns supreme over the death
agony, up to the final moment of actual dissolution.
I had done what I could to attain my own wishes; I was not one of
those idle, clever fellows who imagine talent independent of work,
and who are too lazy to throw into words and commit to paper the
brilliant but vague, unformed inspirations that visit them between
the circling rings of smoke from their cigar.
I had no thought, no expectation, no wish even to be offered that
celebrated sweet condition of the palm without the dust of the
struggle in the arena.
But for me it had been dust, dust, and nothing but dust, and there
were times when it seemed to blind, choke, overpower me.
My capacity for work was unlimited; labour was comparatively no
labour to me. The mechanical work of embodying an idea in a
manuscript was as nothing to me.
To write came to me as naturally as to speak.
Therefore work had not been wanting. Manuscript after manuscript had
been completed, submitted to various publishers, and returned with
thanks, with commendation, and regrets that I had not written
something totally different.
And there they all stood in a pile, an irritating, distracting pile,
a monument of unrequited labour, an unrealised capital, a silent
testimony to the exceeding narrowness of the limits of British
indulgence to talent.
My persistent ill-luck was all the more aggravating as I was not
handicapped by poverty, as so many authors are. The question of
terms had not been one to present a difficulty.
I had no need to ask a publisher to accept my MSS. at his own
financial risk.
I was not the traditional struggling young writer of the lady
novelist who treats poverty and genius as convertible terms, making
up with the former quality whatever her hero lacks of the other.
No; although the combination may be very romantic, I confess,
notwithstanding that I was an unrecognised author, I was not living
in a garret, nor writing my MSS. by the proverbially flaring candle,
nor going without my dinner in order to pay for foolscap.
But my feelings were as bitter, and the sense of disappointment as
sharp, as any attic-dwelling genius' could have been, even if we
suppose the lady novelist to have thrown in a conventionally
consumptive wife.
In fact they were stronger because more absolute, more concentrated
in themselves.
There were no pangs of hunger to distract my attention, no
traditionally patient wife to look sadly at me, no responsibilities
for others lying upon me and my rejected MSS.
Simply all my own desires for myself centred in them.
There was one side issue which at times seemed to include
everything, to be everything in itself, but the moments when this
forced itself in overwhelming prominence upon my brain were few.
The wish that I had to publish my works could not be traced to
distinct motives; it did not spring from a desire to gain money, nor
yet celebrity.
I was not particularly keen on fame while I lived, and I certainly
had no sentimental ideas of my name surviving me.
I cared little in fact whether my name ever reached the public,
provided only my works were known and read. The wish to give them
out was not a thing of motive, nor thought, nor will. It was the
fierce, instinctive impulse that accompanies all creative power, the
tremendous impetus towards production that is an integral part of
all conceptive capacity. The same driving necessity that compels a
writer in the middle of the night to rise and take his pen and
commit to paper some thought or thoughts that are racing about in
his brain, trying to find an outlet, that compels him to produce
them as far as he is able, this same urgent impulse forces him to
complete his manuscript, and when completed, to strain his utmost to
give it actual life in the thoughts and brains of the public.
The pressing want to produce is as wholly natural, as innate, as
independent of the individual's volition as the conceptive impulse
itself.
And it was thus with me.
I could not be said to wish to publish from this or that motive,
because of this, that, or the other. I was simply dominated by the
instinct to do so, which grew more and more urgent as it found no
gratification.
It had risen now rampant at this last rebuff, and it seemed to rage
about in my brain like a Bengal tiger in a net.
I walked up and down the long dining-room, backwards and forwards,
from the grate where the fire blazed to the glass-panelled sideboard
at the other end, where its reflection sparkled, yawning every now
and then from sheer nervous irritation. "Cursed, infernal nuisance!"
I had just muttered this when the door was pushed open, but the
enterer, on hearing my exclamation, promptly drew it to again, and
would have shut it, but that I caught the handle.
It was the butler.
"What do you want, Simmonds," I said.
"Nothing, sir. I was told to enquire if you was in."
"Well, I am."
"Yes, sir. Please, Mr. Hilton said was you ready for dinner?"
"Certainly; and, Simmonds, where's Nous?"
"Tied up, sir, in the stable."
"Tied up! Again! I gave orders he was never to be tied up!"
"Yes, sir; but please, sir, he was that dirty and muddy to go
scrimmaging over the house, and it's the ruination of the furniture-
-"
"The dog is not to be tied up," I interrupted.
"Have him let loose at once, and in future remember, if he comes in
wet and muddy, and chooses to lie on the drawing-room couch, let
him."
The man disappeared, and I walked over to the hearth.
A minute or two later there was a scratching and whining outside the
door, and I went to it and let Nous in.
He bounded over me, licked my face furiously, and scratched
enthusiastically at my shirt front.
He was wet, and his fur laden with mud, as the butler had said, and
my clothes suffered from his demonstrativeness, but his feelings
were of more import than a dress-coat, and I would not have hurt
them by checking his greeting.
"Dear old boy," I said, taking the collar off with which he had been
chained up,--and just then my father came into the room.
"Ah, got back, Victor?"
"Yes," I said, looking up.
"They've rejected your last, eh?" he said at once.
"Yes. Why? Have they sent it? How did you know it was rejected?"
"By your face, my dear boy," answered my father.
"It's odd that these failures knock you up still. You must be
accustomed to them now!"
That was cutting, and it cut.
"One does not easily get accustomed to anything that is against
natural law," I said, coldly.
"Oh! and you mean that it is against the natural law of things that
so brilliant a genius as yourself should be perpetually rejected?"
I nodded. "Just so," I answered.
"It is a pity they will not take your estimation of your own
powers!"
"There is very little difference in the estimation," I said. "The
difference is in the courage. I have the courage to write things
they have not the courage to print. There is no question as to my
powers. No one, except yourself, perhaps, has ever denied those."
"Well, why the dickens don't you write something that they will
accept? Why not make up something quite conventional?"
I looked across the hearth at him with a half amused, half ironical
smile, and said nothing. It is so hard to explain to an outsider the
involuntariness of all real talent.
This great leading characteristic is invariably but imperfectly
grasped by others.
They cannot realise it.
I was too flat in spirits and too tired in body to feel inclined to
enter then into an abstruse discussion with him, and I would have
let the matter slide.
His last remark to the ear of anyone who has genuine talent, whether
artist or author or poet, or what you please, sounds like a
sacrilegious blasphemy.
"Make up something!"
Great heavens! What an expression!
Is a writer, then, a cook, preparing a new dish? Is he a nursery
maid soothing a refractory child? Is he a woman's dressmaker taking
her mistress's orders?
Dinner was served just then, and we took our seats at the table in
silence.
I thought I should have no need to answer.
However, when the butler had deposited the soup and shut the door
after him, my father returned to the attack.
"Yes, Victor," he said in a friendly way, as if a happy solution of
my difficulties had just occurred to him, "why don't you make up
something quite orthodox and keep your own opinions out of it?"
I sighed and took half a glass of claret to fortify me. I saw I was
in for propounding my views upon genius, and I did not feel up to
it.
I could have avoided the argument, doubtless, by seeming to assent,
by promising to "make up something," and saved myself a number of
words.
But there is a strong impulse in me to revolt against allowing
myself to seem to accept a false statement or opinion that I do not
really hold.
And I pulled myself together with an effort.
"I don't think you understand in the least my view of a writer and
his writings," I said. "It is not a voluntary thing, led up to by
pre-determination. There can be no question of making up. I never
try to write nor to think. I do not invoke my own ideas. They spring
into being of themselves, quite unsought. And, in a measure, they
are uncontrollable."
My father was staring at me in silence.
"Eh?" he said merely as I paused.
I laughed.
"What I mean is, that a man, as a man, endowed with will, control,
wishes, and so on, ceases to exist, you may say, while he is
writing. He becomes then the tool of that peculiar, mysterious power
that is moving in his brain. He writes as a clerk writes from
dictation. He is the clerk pro tem of the impulse stirring his
being, which dictates to him what it pleases. There is no
consideration in his mind--'I will write this or that' or 'I won't
write the other.' He simply feels he must write a particular thing;
it crowds off his pen before he can stop it. He does not know where,
whence, how, or why the idea came to him. But it is there,
clamouring to be written, and he writes it because he must. The
expression, very often, of a thought is as uncontrollable as a
physical spasm, and the man who writes it cannot always be held
responsible for it."
"My dear Victor!"
"No, really," I said, laughing, "I am simply stating ordinary facts.
I believe any writer, any acknowledged writer of talent, will bear
me out, more or less. It is the old idea of inspiration--one cannot
express it better--a breathing into. It is exactly that. The man of
genius, in any form, feels at times-that is to say, when his fit is
on, that there is a breathing into his brain. It becomes full of
images he is unfamiliar with, crowded with thoughts that are quite
foreign perhaps to the man himself, to his life, to his habits, and
invested with a peculiar knowledge of things he has had no personal
experience of. Then as suddenly as it came the fit goes; it is over,
and he can write no more. Should he be so foolish as to try, his
sentences become mere linked chains of nouns and verbs; his
inspiration has gone. He cannot invoke it, cannot restrain it,
cannot retain it, cannot recall it, and only very slightly control
it."
"Ha!" said my father reflectively, going on with his soup, "deuced
inconvenient."
"Inconvenient it may be," I said quietly. "All the same, that which
is written under inspiration is the only stuff worth reading. The
Greeks expressed the peculiar feeling that a man has when his
inspiration comes upon him by the phrase, entheos eimi, and we can
hardly find a better one, only unfortunately we don't believe in
gods. Otherwise, entheos eimi contains everything, for the man who
was only common clay before his inspiration, and will be common clay
when it departs, feels, for the time, as if a god had descended, and
was within him. And when, afterwards, he looks at what he has
written he feels it is something not wholly his own, but that it is
the work of some powerful influence he can hardly comprehend, and
cannot certainly rule."
"But really I don't see that this has much relation to what I said
about your writing something to please the British public!"
"It is the whole gist of the matter," I said. "I am proving to you
that I am, to a certain extent, helpless in what I write; that it is
impossible for me to think of publics, British or otherwise, of
publishers or critics, when I am writing. I have no time to consider
them, no space in my brain for them, no memory that such things, or
anything outside of what I am describing, exists even. My only
thought is to drive along my pen fast enough, in obedience to the
strenuous impulse urging me. I do not 'make up,' as your phrase is,
anything. I simply put down on paper, as fast as I can, the thoughts
that are pouring into my brain, like the waves of a flood flowing
over it. I am whirled away on the stream myself; my identity is
lost, submerged. Now look here, I'll give you a cut and dried
instance which will make clear how it is that I offend the
prejudices, or the proprieties, or whatever you call it, in my
books; at least I imagine it is in this way: Suppose I have a death
scene to write. My MS. is waiting for that to complete it. I don't
say to myself beforehand, Now there shall be a bed with Tomkins
dying in it; there shall be Maria at the left-hand corner, and Jane
at the right. The wife and doctor shall be grouped artistically at
the foot. Tomkins shall make two speeches before he dies; no, three-
-three is more natural--uneven number. Now what shall Tomkins say?
Yes. Ah--hum--what the deuce shall I make him say? It must not be
too much like what a dying man would say, because the British public
is dead against realism. It must not either show any strong contempt
for religion; a little mild contempt, of course, goes down and is
fashionable, but I must not express it forcibly. He must not either
evince a disbelief in immortality--at least that's dangerous ground.
Some publishers will accept it and some won't.--Better leave it out.
Ah--hum--what shall Tomkins say? I have it! A retrospect of his past
life! And yet--No, stay! that won't do. Something that sounds like
something that might possibly be immoral might turn up in it, and
that would be fatal--damn the MS. utterly. Well, look here, Tomkins
has got to die, and I've got to finish the book, so I must get
something down. 'Darling Mabel, this parting is terrible, but still
I feel we shall meet in another world.' Now, is that safe? Has a
similar phrase been put in heaps of novels before? Because the
British public won't have anything too new. It likes to head over
again what it has heard at least fifty thousand times before, and
then it knows it won't be shocked. Yes, that sentence will do. Now I
must put in a few more and then, thank goodness, the scene will be
done! Now," I said, springing up from the table, "do you call that
art? do you call it genius? Is a collection of bald phrases and
second-hand sentiments, hooked together like that, worth anything
when it's done?"
"My dear boy, don't excite yourself like that," my father answered
deliberately. "Sit down and finish your soup."
"Oh, hang the soup!" I said, resuming my seat. "Shall I sound the
gong? I have not told you my way yet, but I'm coming to it when the
man's gone." I sounded the gong, and the butler came in with the
next course.
There was no carving ever done at our table, so my father had only
to tranquilly continue eating while I talked. He had forced me into
the discussion, and now he should hear it to the end.
"Of course, if you do write the death of Tomkins like that you can
keep your scenes orthodox, or whatever word you have in view. But,
supposing my MS. is lying incomplete;--I have a conviction that I am
going to write of death, but the method of the man's death is at
present unknown to me, unthought of.--Then, some afternoon, I happen
to be sitting smoking, and just perhaps wondering whether I shall go
round to the club or not, when suddenly a scene, a death scene, the
scene I have been waiting for, comes rushing through my head. It
comes upon me with tremendous impetus; mechanically, almost
unconsciously, I take up a pen and write. Space opens before me and
I see a hospital ward. A blaze of light floods it. Rows of narrow
beds are there, and on one I see Tomkins--dying. I make my way to
him: now I am by his bed. I see him stretched beneath my eyes. I see
the pillow dark with the sweat of his death agony--the night-shirt
torn at his throat to get air. Have I time to consider then whether
the British public like the word night-shirt, and whether it would
not be safer to put Tomkins into a dressing-gown? The man is there
before me, dying, and he is in his night-shirt, and I must write it.
Besides, my pen is tearing on. I cannot stop--he is dying. Will he
speak before he dies? I do not know yet. His eyelids quiver, the
black veins in his throat knot up, he gasps. I bend lower: 'his
breath comes hurriedly: his eyes open and fix upon me: they are red,
vitreous but conscious: then I know he will speak, he is going to--
the next moment his half-strangled voice reaches my ear. He is
speaking, and that which I hear him say, I write: no more, no less,
no different. His voice dies away, inarticulate. I see his lips
whiten and draw back upon his teeth. His hands clutch me as a
convulsive spasm wrenches his muscles. There is a tense, rigid
silence, and then one deep-drawn groan. Nerve, limb, muscle, and
flesh collapse as the Life is set loose. The damp body sinks back,
leaving its death sweat on my arms, its gasp in my ears. Tomkins is
dead. But the impulse is not done with me yet. I cannot get out of
that hospital ward till I have done everything, passed through all
the circumstances that crop up naturally from the death of Tomkins.
There is no ' making up.' The scene is being enacted before me. It
is. It exists. It is the truth for the time being, and, as the
truth, I write it. There is the miserable girl, sobbing
convulsively, with her arms out-stretched in the bed-clothes. Can I
leave her without some words of consolation? I must write down that
she is there, because I see her there. There are some arrangements
to be made with the nurse, and then, when I am leaving the ward, or
at least intend to, my brain hurries the doctor up the ward to me. I
don't ' make him up.' I had not the remotest idea of the head doctor
appearing when I sat down to write. But now I see him approaching me
between the beds, and before I can pass him, as I want to, he
button-holes me and proceeds to explain that Tomkins never would
have died if he had undergone an operation that the doctor had
perceived from the very first moment was necessary. After a long
talk with him, perhaps, my pen stops. I pause: and when I pause I
know the inspiration has gone. As the ancients would say, the Muse
or the God has departed and dictates no more. I fling aside the
paper and look at my watch. Several hours passed in the hospital,
but I'll go round to the club now. And I go. I know Tomkins is dead.
It only occurs to me afterwards, as a secondary consideration, that
in consequence the MS. is finished. Tomkins was not for the
manuscript, but the manuscript for Tomkins. Now the point is--Can I
be held responsible for that scene? It is not my fault that I have
mentally seen a private soldier dying in hospital. The whole thing
was involuntary."
"Very extraordinary views!" muttered my father.
I shrugged my shoulders in silence, and called up Nous to give him
my untouched dinner.
"The best joke of it is, too," I said, suspending a strip of sirloin
over the collie's nose, "the publishers admit if I had less talent
they would print my things. I could not understand why my 'Laura
Dean' was refused, so I went down to the publishers to try and find
out. I saw the reader himself, and an awfully nice fellow he is,
too. In reply to my question, he said the objection to the book was
that it dealt with a wife leaving her husband. I stared at him in
amazement. 'But, great Scott!' I said, 'that's a good old-fashioned
theme enough. It's as old as the hills. It's the subject of--' and I
gave him a list of about a dozen eminent novels. 'Yes,' he admitted.
'But they are not written in the same way.' 'Is there anything
coarse or low in the writing?' 'Oh, no! I should not say that!'
'Well, what is the matter with it, then?' 'The thing is too much
brought before you. Of course, in these books you have mentioned the
wife runs away, but it does not make much impression. You have put
it all so forcibly, and given the characters and episode so much
life, and driven the idea of her infidelity so far home to one,
that, well, it becomes a different thing--one realises it.' 'Oh,
then you admit the immoral theme and the language to be
unobjectionable, and the book would have been accepted by the
British public provided only it had been less well written?' 'Yes, I
suppose it comes to that.' And then I caught his eye, and we both
laughed. He is a clever fellow himself, I should think, and the
ludicrousness of the idea tickled him as much as it did me. I came
away. His admission was quite the truth. It is the British way to
take the second-rate in every art and scout the best. Write a book
poorly and feebly, and it passes. Write the same thing powerfully
and well, and the cry is--It's improper! It's just the same thing in
painting. Paint a nude woman snowy white, without a shade or a
shadow, and looking altogether as no mortal woman ever did look, and
the picture will be hung at the Academy, and people will say, 'How
charming! So artistic!' But paint a woman with a glow on her neck
and bosom, and the warm blood running in her arms, dare to make her
a living, breathing thing on canvas, and your picture will be
rejected. 'Excellent, unequalled, perfect, but--it cannot be seen!'
And what is British art as a consequence? Justly is it looked down
upon by the other nations. We simply set our heel upon the best men.
And look at our productions! Look at the rot and the trash that
floods the libraries every year! Look at the average novel! It's a
disgrace to our intellect! Look at the woodeny dolls that are its
men and women! And behold our Academy! See our pictures!"
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14