LITMIR.BIZ

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or set any store by it. But in my articles of faith the "I" is just what I would accentuate most, the "I" through which for each of us the universe flows, by which any truth must be perceived in order to be true, and which is not to be replaced by that false abstraction, the communal mind. Here are a laughing philosopher's definitions of some cardinal things:

      Philosophy—All my I.

       Art—All my Eye.

       Religion—All my Ay.

      Also at the outset let it be distinctly understood that I write without any prejudice in favour of grammar. The fear of the critics is the beginning of pedantry. I detest your scholiast whose footnotes would take Thackeray to task for his "and whiches," and your professor who disdains the voice of the people, which is the voice of the god of grammar. I know all the scholiast has to say (surely he is the silly [Greek: scholastikos] of Greek anecdote), and indeed I owe all my own notions of diction to a work on "Style" written by him. It was from the style of this work that I learnt what to avoid. The book reminded me of my old schoolmaster, who grew very angry with me for using the word "ain't," and vociferated "Ain't! How often am I to tell you ain't ain't a word?" I suppose one may take it for granted that the greater the writer the worse the grammar. "Fools follow rules. Wise men precede them." (Query: this being a quotation from myself, was I bound to put the inverted commas?) Shakespeare has violated every rule of the schoolroom, and the more self-conscious stylist of our own day—Stevenson—would be caned for composition. I find him writing "They are not us," which is almost as blasphemous as "It's me." His reputation has closed the critics' eyes to such sentences as these in his essay on "Some Portraits by Raeburn": "Each of his portraits are not only a piece of history … "; "Neither of the portraits of Sir Walter Scott were very agreeable to look upon." Stevenson is a master, but not a schoolmaster, of English. Of course bad grammar does not make a genius, any more than bad morals. (Note how much this sentence would lose in crispness if I made it grammatical by tacking on "do.") My friend the musician complained to me that when he studied harmony and form he was told he must not do this, that and the other; whereas, when he came to look into the works of the great composers he found they made a practice of all the three. "Am I a genius?" he queried pathetically. "If so, I could do as I please. I wish I knew." Every author who can read and write is in the same predicament: on the one hand his own instinct for a phrase or a sentence, on the other the contempt of every honest critic. The guardians of the laws of English have a stock of taboos; but unlike the guardians of the laws of England they credit every disregard of them to ignorance. They cannot conceive of malice aforethought. We are forbidden, for example, to use the word "phenomenal" in the sense of "extraordinary." But, with Mr. Crummles's Infant Phenomenon in everybody's mind, can we expect the adjective to shake off the old associations of its parent noun?

      Last year I culled an amusing sentence from a "Standard" criticism of a tale of adventure: "The story is a well-told, and in spite of the word 'unreliable,' a well-written one." Now just as many foolish persons object to "a … one" as to "unreliable." As for the first phrase, I am sure so great a writer as Tom Hood would have pronounced it A1, while "unreliable" is defended with unusual warmth by Webster's Dictionary. The contention that "reliable" should be "reli-on-able," is ridiculous, and Webster's argument is "laughable," which should obviously be "laugh-at-able." These remarks are made quite without prejudice, for personally I have little to complain of. (By the way, this sentence is as open to blame as that of the professor who told his pupils "You must not use a preposition to end a sentence with.") Though I have sat under an army of critics, I have but once been accused of inelegant English, and then it was only by a lady who wrote that my slipshod style "aggravated" her.

      Finally it will be remarked that by dispensing with illustrations I preserve intact my egoism and the dignity of a rival art. Nothing can be more absurd than the conventional illustration which merely attempts to picture over again what the writer has already pictured in words. Not only is the effort superfluous, a waste of force, but the artist's picture is too often in flat contradiction of the text. Whom are you to believe, the author or the artist? the man who tells you that the heroine is ethereal, or the man who plainly demonstrates that she is podgy? How often, too, do the people dress differently in the words and in the picture, not to speak of the shifting backgrounds! Dickens had so much difficulty with his illustrations because he saw his characters so much more clearly than any other novelist; the sight of his inner eye was so good. And one can understand, too, how Cruikshank came to fancy he had created Oliver Twist, much as an actor imagines he "creates" a character. The true collaboration between author and artist requires that the work should be divided between them, not reduplicated. Those parts of the story which need the intervention of words should be allotted to the writer, while to the artist should be entrusted the parts better told by pencil. Neither need trench on the other's province. Description—which so many readers skip already—would be abolished. Even incidents—such as murder—could be caught by the artist in the act. And after the artist had killed a character, the author could preach over his corpse. Thus there would be an agreeable reversion to picture-language, the earliest way of writing, and the latest. The ends of the ages would meet in a romance written on these lines:—

      "Sick at heart we watched till the grey dawn stole in through the diamond-paned casements of the Grange, and then, at last, when we had given up all hope, we saw coming up the gravel pathway——"

      [Illustration.[*]]

      After which the author proceeds: "Fascinated by the blood that dripped from the edges of the eight umbrellas, we stood silent; then, throwing off our coats, we——

      [Illustration.[*]]

      "So that was how I won the sweetest little bride I ever wedded. But if I live to wed a hundred, I shall never forget that terrible night in Grewsome Grange.

      "THE END."

      My friend the artist once collaborated with me in an experiment of this sort, but we did not pursue it, discovering how feeble an advance ours would be after all; for there were points at which both of us felt we ought to give way to the tone-poet. When the emotions became too intangible for intellectual expression I asked my friend the musician to insert paragraphs in a minor key. The love-scenes I was particularly anxious to have written in musical phrases. But he shrank from so unconventional a form, not being sure he was a genius. I was also disheartened by the disappointing behaviour of the diverse scents with which I had expressed myself on certain blank pages. They would not remain in their places.

II

       Table of Contents

      TUNING UP

      They were "tuning up" in a wooden hall, stupidly built on the pier to shut off the sea and the night (a penny to pay for the privation), and in that strange cacophony of desolate violin strings, tuneless trombones, and doleful double basses, in that homeless wail of forlorn brass and lost catgut, I found a music sweeter than a Beethoven symphony; for memory's tricksy finger touched of a sudden the source of tears, and flashed before the inner eye a rainbow-lit panorama of the early joys of the theatre—the joys that are no more. Was it even at a theatre—was it even more than an interlude in a diorama?—that divine singing of "The Last Rose of Summer" by a lady in evening dress, whose bust is, perhaps for me alone in all the world, still youthful? Was it from this hall of the siren, or was it from some later enchantment, that I, an infant Ulysses, struggled home by night along a sea road, athwart a gale that well-nigh blew me out to sea? How fierce that salt wind blew, a-yearn to drive me to the shore's edge and whirl me over! How fresh and tameless it beats against me yet, blowing the cobwebs from my brain as that real breeze outside the pier could never do! When my monitory friends gabble of change of air I inhale that wind and am strong. For the child is of the elements, elemental, and the man of the complexities, complex. And so that good salt wind blows across my childhood still, though it cannot sweep away the mist that hovers thereover.

      For who shall say whether 't was I or my sister who was borne shrieking with fear from the theatre when the black man, "Othello," appeared on the boards! The first clear

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