Eight, and the poor sad men of the house
slave at wretched articles and come home to hear more literature and
more appreciations, and the unholy women do nothing and attend to
local government, that is, the oppression of the poor; and altogether
this accursed everyday life of theirs is instinct with the four sins
crying to heaven for vengeance, and there is no humanity in it, and no
simplicity, and no recollection. I know whole quarters of the towns of
that life where they have never heard of Virtus or Verecundia or
Pietas.
LECTOR. Then -
AUCTOR. Alas! alas! Dear Lector, in these houses there is no honest
dust. Not a bottle of good wine or bad; no prints inherited from
one's uncle, and no children's books by Mrs Barbauld or Miss
Edgeworth; no human disorder, nothing of that organic comfort which
makes a man's house like a bear's fur for him. They have no debts,
they do not read in bed, and they will have difficulty in saving their
souls.
LECTOR. Then tell me, how would you treat of common things?
AUCTOR. Why, I would leave them alone; but if I had to treat of them I
will show you how I would do it. Let us have a dialogue about this
road from Moutier.
LECTOR. By all means.
AUCTOR. What a terrible thing it is to miss one's sleep. I can hardly
bear the heat of the road, and my mind is empty!
LECTOR. Why, you have just slept in a wood!
AUCTOR. Yes, but that is not enough. One must sleep at night.
LECTOR. My brother often complains of insomnia. He is a policeman.
AUCTOR. Indeed? It is a sad affliction.
LECTOR. Yes, indeed.
AUCTOR. Indeed, yes.
LECTOR. I cannot go on like this.
AUCTOR. There. That is just what I was saying. One cannot treat of
common things: it is not literature; and for my part, if I were the
editor even of a magazine, and the author stuck in a string of
dialogue, I would not pay him by the page but by the word, and I would
count off 5 per cent for epigrams, 10 per cent for dialect, and some
quarter or so for those stage directions in italics which they use to
pad out their work.
So. I will not repeat this experiment, but next time I come to a bit
of road about which there is nothing to say, I will tell a story or
sing a song, and to that I pledge myself.
By the way, I am reminded of something. Do you know those books and
stories in which parts of the dialogues often have no words at all?
Only dots and dashes and asterisks and interrogations? I wonder what
the people are paid for it? If I knew I would earn a mint of money,
for I believe I have a talent for it. Look at this -
There. That seems to me worth a good deal more money than all the
modern 'delineation of character', and 'folk' nonsense ever written.
What verve! What terseness! And yet how clear!
LECTOR. Let us be getting on.
AUCTOR. By all means, and let us consider more enduring things.
After a few miles the road going upwards, I passed through another gap
in the hills and -
LECTOR. Pardon me, but I am still ruminating upon that little tragedy
of yours. Why was the guardian a duchess?
AUCTOR. Well, it was a short play and modern, was it not?
LECTOR. Yes. And therefore, of course, you must have a title in it. I
know that. I do not object to it. What I want to know is, why a
duchess?
AUCTOR. On account of the reduction of scale: the concentration of the
thing. You see in the full play there would have been a lord, two
baronets, and say three ladies, and I could have put suitable words
into their mouths. As it was I had to make absolutely sure of the
element of nobility without any help, and, as it were, in one
startling moment. Do you follow? Is it not art?
I cannot conceive why a pilgrimage, an adventure so naturally full of
great, wonderful, far-off and holy things should breed such fantastic
nonsense as all this; but remember at least the little acolyte of
Rheims, whose father, in 1512, seeing him apt for religion, put him
into a cassock and designed him for the Church, whereupon the
youngling began to be as careless and devilish as Mercury, putting
beeswax on the misericords, burning feathers in the censer, and even
going round himself with the plate without leave and scolding the rich
in loud whispers when they did not put in enough. So one way with
another they sent him home to his father; the archbishop thrusting him
out of the south porch with his own hands and giving him the Common or
Ferial Malediction, which is much the same as that used by carters to
stray dogs.
When his father saw him he fumed terribly, cursing like a pagan, and
asking whether his son were a roysterer fit for the gallows as well as
a fool fit for a cassock. On hearing which complaint the son very
humbly and contritely said -
'It is not my fault but the contact with the things of the Church that
makes me gambol and frisk, just as the Devil they say is a good enough
fellow left to himself and is only moderately heated, yet when you put
him into holy water all the world is witness how he hisses and boils.'
The boy then taking a little lamb which happened to be in the
drawing-room, said -
'Father, see this little lamb; how demure he is and how simple and
innocent, and how foolish and how tractable.
