VI NASCITUR MY DEAR X, You have often peered over the rim of your knowledgeable country into the dim Inane of ours, you who have often let down the subtile hook of your curiosity into our so enigmatic vortex, you who have baited many specimens of dogma, opinion, creed and apology, jerrybuilded by various classes of the community through all grades from the simple to the artful and crafty, cannot fail to have hauled up that of the Spontaneity of Expression. "Nascitur, non fit" chant these priests of the Lightning God. The Salvator Litterarum occupies the vale of Tempe, armed with nothing but a type-writer. He is no hoplite, who staggers through a desert of erudition, encumbered with baggage, wives, concubines and camp-followers. He is, in fact, the literary evidence of spontaneous generation. Work? Would ye have the iridescent wings of Ariel droop with long-distance flights? Training? Would ye tame him to perform the "goosestep"? Tradition? Would ye mew him in the dull fence of yesterdays? Maturity of thought and conviction? Would ye clap a solid and lugubrious top-hat on his hyacinthine pate? No, sir. Let him only be a novelty and he is spontaneous as well (of course) as a genius. Let him claim the sun for his sister, the moon for his mother, the firmament for his father, Boreas for his brother, Arcturus for his aunt, all the elements for his relations and we are content! Let him worship Behemoth before altars of sardonyx and chrysoprase, to the reek of incense and the pungent odour of festering lilies, white-livered emblems of Scarlet Sin, and we shall adore him! Let him clash his barbaric cymbals of door-handles and railwaygirders in a Maenad rage of cacophony and we shall salute his ecstasy! Let his alchemy transmute Pence into Pounds and we shall be the richer! Let him lisp in infantilist numbers and we will rock his cradle! Let him stand foursquare to the winds, belted, like the poster of a nerve-tonic, with the lightning, and tossing, in feats of high jugglery, scarred granite boulders of poetic expression, and we will cry-plaudite! Let him show himself a patched Autolycus—a gimcrack Beloved Vagabond, with cigar-boxes and liqueur-bottles in his pack and we shall feel to radiate from him the beams of the morning of the world! Let him weave a circle round him and catalogue with meticulous care each several object within its radius and we will find him a government post! Let him make anagrams out of amours and asterisks, and we will give him a pension for life! Let him jug the Hare of Reality and roast the Passional Lamb of Insubstantial Transcendentality, and we will present him with the prize gold nimbus of mysticism at a ceremonial dinner! Let him call a spade an agricultural implement and a shot a little steel pellet ejaculated by concussion from a hollow tube of metal, and we will pay him ten guineas a column ! Let him pipe what sweet jargonings he will, and he shall have rings on his fingers, bells on his toes, and motor cars to ride upon wherever he goes! These reputations! "Frail mushrooms, must we weep to hear Your fame so soon is done? As yet you have not gone beyond The tenth edition : Nay, nay, Your caravan away Is bound Unto America, Laden with victuals, shares and beer I am convinced that the decay of the art of reading has something to do with it all. Not reading and seeing, but the art of reading and seeing. I apologize for an epigram of mine own devizing: The Harmsworth Press and Bull not Red but John. I am still optimistic enough to believe that the public does not quite deserve what it gets. It soon will, unless it knocks some sense into its pulpy democratic head. “It is not without reason that we ascribe the facilitee of believing and easiness of perswasion unto . . . ignorance." As the Odcombian Legstretcher, Thomas Coryat, remarks with solemn sententiousness in his dedicatory epistle to his "Crudities":"Methinks we want rather readers for bookes than bookes for readers." For all that the public is not so much to blame as those who cater for it. I had a striking example of this only last year. A famous and most capable novelist wrote a romance which it fell to my lot to review. I said that, relying upon an earlier and excellent work which had sharpened the public appetite, he had repeated himself ever since, ad deleteriam, so to speak. The novelist wrote to me, and to my complete prostration agreed with me. Having the misfortune to inflate his publisher's receipts by that earlier romance, he had been practically compelled by him to perpetuate the type, year in and year out, to such an extent that the process had become practically mechanical. The author writes in fact not what his public, but what his publisher wants. And physical sensation rather than mental activity making the greatest appeal to the greatest number, too many publishers (there are, happily, a few exceptions), to swell their sales, contract for the one rather than the other. Yes, I know what you will be thinking about this letter. Such are the penalties of an explorer only sighting the frontiers. of his subject. Not that people read less than they did. I believe that the average citizen who sits in a London Tube, the flies of his mind wheeling and settling over the tasty ink of newspaper columns, has pilgrimaged over an immensely greater acreage of print than Dr. Donne, whose sermons contain citations from so many learned and untraceable works, than Thomas Fuller, whose aphoristic zest pillages as many anecdotes from dusty authors as the naturalist Bates collected specimens from the Amazons-the average citizen who is reproduced in hundreds of thousands of editions. To my mind the newspaper habit (newspapers being what they are) has enervated the national psychology more than all the other alchemies which have transmuted us from England into Britain. Granted its obvious advantages-diffusion of news, intercommunication of human interests, contraction of the world from continents to columns, dispersion of social and political knowledge, and so forth-it has, alas! changed us from individuals with various heads and bodies into one small head with a myriad bodies. The old conception of a daily newspaper as a convenient digest of news (if it ever existed in fact) has been long superseded. For the news |