Collected Essays (15 page)

For the same reason that he failed as a political writer he succeeded as a religious one, for religion is simple, dogma is simple. Much of the difficulty of theology arises from the efforts of men who are not primarily writers to distinguish a quite simple idea with the utmost accuracy. He restated the original thought with the freshness, simplicity, and excitement of discovery. In fact, it was discovery: he unearthed the defined from beneath the definitions, and the reader wondered why the definitions had ever been thought necessary.
Orthodoxy. The Thing
and
The Everlasting Man
are among the great books of the age. Much else, of course, it will be disappointing if time does not preserve out of that weight of work:
The Ballad of the White Horse
, the satirical poems, such prose fantasies as
The Man Who Was Thursday
and
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
, the early critical books on Browning and Dickens; but in these three religious books, inspired by a cosmic optimism, the passionately held belief that ‘it is good to be here’, he contributed what another great religious writer closely akin to him in political ideas, and even in style, saw was most lacking in our age. Péguy put these lines on man into the mouth of his Creator:

1944

2

A man’s enemies are not always deserved. He has not chosen his in-laws. The most obvious feature of Mrs Cecil Chesterton’s book
*4
is the steady undercurrent of rather petty dislike: dislike of her sister-in-law, who took G. K. Chesterton away from London, from the convivial Fleet Street nights, to the quiet of Beaconsfield. Mrs Chesterton paints – from her personal angle – the picture of an unhappy man cut off from the companionship of his peers, his mind dulled and his work ruined. But it is possible to doubt whether in fact those noisy pub-crawling Fleet Street friends, Crosland and the rest, were his peers, and whether he ever wrote better books than
The Everlasting Man, The Thing
and the
Autobiography
– all completed at Beaconsfield. Dislike may produce a good book, but not when it is expressed so covertly as here – the sneer between the lines, from the first page, when we read that Chesterton ‘was a striking figure in those days’ (the days. Mrs Chesterton means, before his marriage, but when was he not a striking figure?) to almost the last, when she complains that there was not enough to eat and drink after G. K.’s funeral. On p. 26 we are introduced to Frances Chesterton: ‘She looked charming in blue or green, but she rarely wore those shades, and usually effected dim browns and greys’: on p. 70, ‘a tragedy fell on the Blogg family which hit Frances cruelly hard. She had an engrossing affection for her people; they were indeed the altar of sacrifice, both for her and her husband’; on p. 72, ‘She did not like food, except cakes, chocolate and similar flim-flams, and her appreciation of liquor stopped short at tea’; on p. 69, ‘Frances disliked the Press as such, and really only cared for small journals and parish magazines, to which she contributed her quite charming verse.’ So they go on, the little gibes against the dead woman who did not care for Fleet Street, harmless and silly enough if it were not for the culminating passage of staggering vulgarity which purports to describe – in the melodramatic and sensational terms of the novelettes the author used to write – Chesterton’s wedding night. Chesterton is supposed to have confided this to his brother, and one can only say that in that case he trusted someone who was not to be trusted. Mrs Cecil Chesterton may consider that this passage of her book disposes of Frances Chesterton once and for all; it disposes far more destructively of the author who is ready to print it.

It must be admitted that it is not only her enemies who suffer from Mrs Cecil Chesterton’s tastelessness. Her own honeymoon is thus described:

In honour of the occasion I wore a dress of green and gold – a favourite combination of Cecil’s. I was all ready when he emerged from his bedroom, astonishingly well groomed. He looked at me from the door, and his face lit up, almost ecstatically, as though he had glimpsed some sort of vision. ‘. . . For mine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, sweetheart,’ he said softly, and I wondered at the worship in his eyes.

One is reminded again and again of a song called ‘Literary Widows’ in one of Mr Farjeon’s early revues which had a refrain something like this:

One is left contrasting these badly-written, expansive, discretionless memoirs with the silence of Frances Chesterton, the wife of the greater brother, who will be remembered in her husband’s verse long after these spiteful anecdotes are forgotten.

1941

WALTER DE LA MARE’S SHORT STORIES

E
VERY
creative writer worth our consideration, every writer who can be called in the wide eighteenth-century use of the term a poet, is a victim: a man given over to an obsession. Was it not the obsessive fear of treachery which dictated not only James’s plots but also his elaborate conceits (behind the barbed network of his style he could feel really secure himself), and was it not another obsession, a terrible pity for human beings, which drove Hardy to write novels that are like desperate acts of rebellion in a lost cause? What obsession then do we find in Mr de la Mare – one of the few living writers who can survive in this company?

The obsession is perhaps most easily detected in the symbols an author uses, and it would not be far from the truth – odd as it may seem on the face of it – to say that the dominant symbol in Mr de la Mare’s short stories is the railway station or the railway journey: sometimes the small country railway station, all but deserted except by a couple of travellers chance met and an aged porter, at dusk or bathed in the quiet meditative light of a harvest afternoon: sometimes the waiting room of a great junction with its dving dusty fire and its garrulous occupant. But if not the dominant symbol at least this symbol – or rather group of symbols – occurs almost as frequently as do the ghosts of his poems – the ghosts that listen to the mother as she reads to her children, the lamenting ghosts that rattle the door like wind or moisten the glass like rain. Prose is a more intractable medium than verse. In prose we must be gently lured outside the boundaries of our experience. The symbol must in a favourable sense of the word be prosaic.

One hasty glance around him showed that he was the sole traveller to alight on the frosted timbers of the obscure little station. A faint rosiness in the west foretold the decline of the still wintry day. The firs that flanked the dreary passenger-shed of the platform stood burdened already with the blackness of coming night. (
The Tree
)

When murky winter dusk begins to settle over the railway station at Crewe its first-class waiting-room grows steadily more stagnant. Particularly if one is alone in it. The long grimed windows do little more than sift the failing light that slopes in on them from the glass roof outside and is too feeble to penetrate into the recesses beyond. And the grained massive black-leathered furniture becomes less and less inviting. It appears to have been made for a scene of extreme and diabolical violence that one may hope will never occur. One can hardly at any rate imagine it to have been designed by a really
good
man! (
Crewe
)

 . . . at this instant the sad neutral winter landscape, already scarcely perceptible beneath a thin grey skin of frozen snow and a steadily descending veil of tiny flakes from the heavens above it, was suddenly blotted out. The train lights had come on, and the small cabin in which the two of them sat together had become a cage of radiance. How Lavinia hated too much light. (
A Froward Child
)

She was standing at the open window [of the train], looking out, but not as if she had ever entirely desisted from looking in – an oval face with highish cheekbones, and eyes and mouth from which a remote smile was now vanishing as softly and secretly as a bird enters and vanishes into its nest. (
A Nest of Singing Birds
)

The noonday express with a wildly soaring crescendo of lamentation came sweeping in sheer magnificence of onset round the curve, soared through the little green empty station – its windows a long broken faceless glint of sunlit glass – and that too vanished. Vanished! A swirl of dust and an unutterable stillness followed after it. The skin of a banana on the platform was the only proof that it had come and gone. Its shattering clamour had left for contrast an almost helpless sense of peace. ‘Yes, yes!’ we all seemed to be whispering – from the Cedar of Lebanon to the little hyssop in the wall – ‘here we all are; and still, thank heaven, safe.
Safe!’ (Ding Dong Bell
)

It is surely impossible not to feel ourselves in the presence of an obsession – the same obsession that haunts the melancholy subtle cadences of Mr de la Mare’s poetry. Such trite phrases as ‘ships that pass’, ‘travellers through life’, ‘journey’s end’ are the way in which for centuries the common man has taken a sidelong glance at the common fate (to be here, and there, and gone) – and looked away again. But every once in a while, perhaps only once or twice in a century, a man finds he cannot so easily dismiss with a regulation phrase what meets his eyes: the eyes linger: the obsession is born – in an Emily Brontë. a Beddoes, a James Thomson, in Mr de la Mare.

‘
Mors.
And what does
Mors
mean?’ enquired that oddly indolent voice in the quiet. ‘Was it his name, or his initials, or is it a charm?’ ‘It means – well, sleep,’ I said, ‘Or nightmare, or dawn, or nothing, or – it might mean everything.’ I confess, though, that to my ear it had the sound at that moment of an enormous breaker, bursting on the shore of some unspeakably remote island and we two marooned. (
Ding Dong Bell
)

One thing, it will be noticed in all these stories.
Mors
does not mean; it does not mean Hell – or Heaven. That obsession with death that fills Mr de la Mare’s poetry with the whisper of ghosts, that expresses itself over and over again in the short story in the form of
revenants
, has never led him to accept – or even to speculate on – the Christian answer. Christianity when it figures in these stories is like a dead religion of which we see only the enormous stone memorials. Churches do occur – in
All Hallows, The Trumpet, Strangers and Pilgrims
, but they are empty haunted buildings.

At this moment of the afternoon the great church almost cheated one into the belief that it was possessed of a life of its own. It lay, as I say, couched in its natural hollow, basking under the dark dome of the heavens like some half-fossilized monster that might at any moment stir and awaken out of the swoon to which the wand of the enchanter had committed it. (
All Hallows
)

What an odd world, to those of us with traditional Christian beliefs, is this world of Mr de la Mare’s: the world where the terrible Seaton’s Aunt absorbs the living as a spider does and remains alive herself in the company of the dead. ‘I don’t look to flesh and blood for my company. When you’ve got to be my age. Mr Smithers (which God forbid), you’ll find life a very different affair from what you seem to think it is now. You won’t seek company then, I’ll be bound. It’s thrust on you’; the world of the recluse Mr Bloom, that spiritualist who had pressed on too far ignoring the advice that the poet would have given him.

How wrong, however, it would be to give the impression that Mr de la Mare is just another, however accomplished, writer of ghost stories, yet what is it that divides this world of Mr Kempe and Mr Bloom and Seaton’s Aunt, the dubious fellow-passenger with Lavinia in the train, the stranger in Crewe waiting room from the world of the late M. R. James’s creation – told by the antiquary? M. R. James with admirable skill invented ghosts to make the flesh creep; astutely he used the image which would best convey horror; he was concerned with truth only in the sense that his stories must ring true – while they were being read. But Mr de la Mare is concerned, like his own Mr Bloom, to find out: his stories are true in the sense that the author believes – and conveys his belief – that this is the real world, but only in so far as he has yet discovered it. They are tentative. His use of prose reminds us frequently of a blind man trying to describe an object from the touch only – ‘this thing is circular, or nearly circular, oddly dinted, too hard to be a ball: it might be, yes it might be, a human skull’. At any moment we expect a complete discovery, but the discovery is delayed. We, as well as the author, are this side of Lethe. When I was a child I used to be horrified by Carroll’s poem
The Hunting of the Snark
. The danger that the snark might prove to be a boojum haunted me from the first page, and sometimes reading Mr de la Mare’s stories, I fear that the author in his strange fumbling at the invisible curtain may suddenly come on the inescapable boojum truth, and just as quickly vanish away.

For how they continually seek their snark, his characters – in railway trains, in deserted churches, even in the bars of village inns. Listen to them speaking, and see how all the time they ignore what is at least a fact – that an answer to their question has been proposed: how intent they are to find an alternative, personal explanation: how they hover and debate and touch and withdraw, while the boojum waits.