B007TB5SP0 EBOK (51 page)

‘They’re reconciled again. And are gone to live at Birdingbury – quite near us – because it sounds Saxon …’

‘Really, Viola?’

Mrs Newhouse,
née
Neffal, nodded.

‘Anything
fair
!’ the Countess crooned. ‘Even a dancer.’

‘La Tasajara? I saw her one night. I believe it was at Astrea Fortri’s house in Pall Mall …’

‘Such a little starved-soul ghost-face. Like a little thin-pale-pinched St John,’ the Countess critically said.

‘In the end she became indispensable to Miss O’Brookomore,’ Miss Dawkins stated.

‘With Gerald?’

‘Oh, that woman.’ Mrs Collins shuddered.

‘They tell me she’s to chaperon an Eton boy straight to Tibet.’

Miss Dawkins became abstracted.

‘She evidently likes them young and fresh!’ she observed.

The Countess started.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘Come quickly!’ her sister said. ‘The child’s in her cups.’

‘Bianca is?’

‘What have you been giving her?’

‘It’s only the little hiccoughs …’

‘Remember you weren’t to come in till dessert.’

‘During the Stratford mulberries papa said I might. You’ve had them.’

‘Just look at her waist!’

‘Now I’m here, mayn’t I stop?’

‘If you like to display your natural gifts,’ Mr Collins murmured, ‘you may.’

‘You can’t do much on an empty stomach.’

‘You can recite, I suppose,’ the Countess said.

‘Recite? It’s always an effort for me to recite … I feel struck dumb in society.’

‘Remember Rome!’ the Countess warned. ‘We’ve no use for shyness there.’

‘On his tombstone in the grass,

Record of him he was an ass,

He stretched out his neck and he flicked up his ears

And bid farewell to this valley of tears.

He lay himself down on a bed to die,

Right in a flower-bed himself he lay,

He stiffened his back and he whisked round his tail

And bid farewell to this earthly vale.

– On his tombstone in the grass,

Record of him he was an
Ass
.’

‘Charming!’

‘How very, very, very, very vulgar!’ the Countess frowned.

‘Was it the devil, my dear?’

Mrs Collins rose.

‘Gentlemen,’ she murmured, ‘
à tout à l’heure
!’

‘Let’s all go into the garden, Mabsey.’

‘There’s no moon.’

‘There are stars.’

Miss Dawkins peered out.

‘It’s dark and like Gethsemane,’ she said.

‘Ronald Firbank’ (1936) by E. M. Forster
¹

To break a butterfly, or even a beetle, upon a wheel is a delicate task. Lovers of nature disapprove, moreover the victim is apt to reappear each time the wheel revolves, still alive, and with a reproachful expression upon its squashed face to address its tormentor in some such words as the following: ‘Critic! What do you? Neither my pleasure nor your knowledge has been increased. I was flying or crawling, and that is all that there was to be learnt about me. Impossible to anatomize and find what breeds about my heart. Dissect the higher animals if you like, such as the frog, the cow, or the goose – no doubt they are full of helpful secrets. By all means write articles on George Eliot. Review from every point of view Lord Morley of Borley’s autobiography. Estimate Addison.
²
But leave me in peace. I only exist in my surroundings, and become meaningless as soon as you stretch me on this rack.’

The insect plaint is unanswerable, and if critics had not their living to get they would seldom handle any literary fantasy. It makes them look so foolish. Their state of mind is the exact antithesis of that of the author whom they propose to interpret. With quiet eyes and cool fingers they pass from point to point, they define fantasy as ‘the unserious treatment of the unusual’ – an impeccable definition, the only objection being to it that it defines. A gulf between the critical and the creative states exists in all cases, but in the case of a fantastical creation it is so wide as to be grotesque. And in saying a few words about our butterflies and beetles we must not unmindful of the remarks which, if they felt it worth while, they might pass upon us.

Butterflies and beetles are not always identical, and are
sometimes dragon-flies, etc., too. For instance, in the paragraph above, when the phrase ‘Lord Morley of Borley’ slipped in, a beetle was speaking. No butterfly would probe so far. And when a Mrs Shamefoot says, in one of Ronald Firbank’s novels, ‘The world is disgracefully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain’, she, again, is a beetle. But when she says ‘I adore the end of summer, when a new haystack appears on every hill’, she has hovered from wittiness to charm. And: ‘Nearer, hither and thither, appeared a few sleepy spires of churches, too sensible to compete with the Cathedral, but possibly more personal, like the minor characters in repertoire that support the star’ – well here we get both, the coloured glint, the naughty tweak. And when a gentleman who is married to a fox dreams all night of public schools for the children, and cannot think why Eton will not quite do, nor Harrow, nor Winchester, nor even Rugby, and then wakes up and thinks ‘Ah! A private tutor is the solution’, yet still feels dissatisfied, and finally remembers, and bursts into tears – here, again, we get something different, something downy and mothlike brushing the cheek, something at once countrified and sophisticated which pervades all the work of another fantast, Mr David Garnett.
³
It is indeed impossible to decide where one insect stops and another starts; they are metamorphosed behind a rafter or in full flight, or in the calyx of a single flower, even on the very wheel of criticism, and there is only one quality that they all share in common: the absence of a soul.

With the soul we reach solid ground. As soon as it enters literature, whether in full radiance or behind a cloud, two great side-scenes accompany it, the mountains of Right and Wrong, and we get a complete change of
décor
, adapted for writers who likewise treat the unusual, but who treat it mystically or humanistically. Butterflies and beetles may survive the soul’s arrival, but they serve another purpose: they bear some relationship to Salvation. Think of all they go through in
Water Babies
or Sir James Barrie!
⁴
Even the Three Mulla Mulgars
⁵
are not completely on their own. Whereas in the creatures considered to-day there is nothing to be saved or damned, their modish ecclesiasticism and rural magic bear no relation to
philosophic truth, the miracles that transform them, the earthquakes that shatter, have no deeper implication than a conjuring trick. As soon as we realize that we cannot save them we shall enjoy them. But it is not easy for an Anglo-Saxon to realize so little. He requires a book to be serious unless it is comic, and when it is neither is apt to ring for the police.

In his masterly introduction to Firbank’s collected works, Mr Arthur Waley
⁶
put us on the proper track. He remarked of Firbank that he ‘seems as though endowed with a kind of inverted X-ray, which enabled him, not to penetrate the unseen, but, on the contrary, continually to hover, as it were, an inch or two above the surface of things.’ The remark applies to this literature generally, which omits not merely the soul but many material actualities, and, if taken in large quantities, is unsatisfying. The writer who hovers two inches off everything may fascinate for a time, but finally he gives one the fidgets, and the reader will both be kind and wise to imitate him, and to repair to some other book at the first hint of boredom. So, like a swarm of summer insects, feeling perfectly free and disclaiming any vested interests in the soul, let us continue to flit …

Ronald Firbank died a few years ago, still young. But there is nothing up-to-date in him. He is
fin de siècle
, as it used to be called; he belongs to the nineties and the
Yellow Book
; his mind inherits the furniture and his prose the cadences of Aubrey Beardsley’s
Under the Hill
.
⁷
To the historian he is an interesting example of literary conservatism; to his fellow insects a radiance and a joy. Is he affected? Yes, always. Is he self-conscious? No, he wants to mop and mow, and put on birettas and stays,
⁸
and he does it as naturally as healthy Englishmen light their pipes. Is he himself healthy? Perish the thought! Is he passionate, compassionate, dispassionate? Next question! Is he intelligent? Not particularly, if we compare him with another writer whom he occasionally resembles – Max.
⁹
Has he genius? Yes, in his flit-about fashion he has, but genius is a critic’s word, and one insect should not fasten it wantonly upon another. What charms us in him is his taste, his choice of words, the rhythm both of his narrative and of his conversations, his wit, and – in his later work – an opulence as of gathered fruit and enamelled skies. His very
monsignorishness is acceptable. It is
chic
, it is
risqué
, to titter in sacristies and peep through grilles at ecclesiastical Thesmophoriazusae,
¹⁰
and if he becomes petulant, and lets a convent or a pipkin crash, it does not signify, for likely enough we have thrown down the book ourselves a page before. Yes, he has genius, for we are certain to take up the book again, and to come across Reggie, whose voice was rather like cheap scent, or Cardinal Pirelli baptizing a dog, or Miss Sinquier, daughter to a dean, who gave up all for the drama, and was killed by a mouse-trap, or Mrs Cresswell, who would have been canonized but for her unfortunate mot: ‘If we are all a part of God, then God must, indeed, be horrible’, or Princess Elsie of England, or St Laura of Nazianzi her rival, or the Mouth family leaving their negro nakedness for the lures of Cuna-Cuna, or a hundred other sentences or people (the two classes are not separable) which have been evoked by his gaiety and exoticism. It is tempting to conclude the catalogue with the words ‘He was a perfect artist’; tempting but unwise, for the words have something of the heavenly extinguisher about them, and we may discover that after all he was a glow-worm, and that now we cannot see him any more.

Vainglory
is a good example of his earlier manner, and
Prancing Nigger
(first called
Sorrow in Sunlight
) of his later.
Vainglory
is all tweaks and skips. It professes to describe the attempts of Mrs Shamefoot to insert herself into Ashringford Cathedral in the form of a stained-glass window. Bishop Pantry is reluctant. Meanwhile she runs a florist’s shop; indeed,
Meanwhile
would do admirably as a sub-title for the book. On we read, confusing the characters with the incidents and neglecting the outcome, but tickled by the images and the turns of the talk. It is frivolous stuff, and how rare, how precious is frivolity! How few writers can prostitute all their powers! They are always implying ‘I am capable of higher things.’ Firbank is completely absorbed in his own nonsense; he has nothing to hide, he is not showing off, he is not (or is very seldom) polemical. When he attempts satire, or wistfulness (as in
Santal
), he fails at once, he was incapable of totting up life. But there are no attempts in
Vainglory
, it is an untainted series of absurdities,
and most delightful although Mrs Shamefoot’s efforts have not even a comic coherency.

It is strange that such a writer should have developed, but
Prancing Nigger
offers quite another pair of wings. The butterfly has come out, and has demanded, with such severity as it can master, a temperature and even a cage. The temperature is tropical; we are on an exquisite island which travesties Haiti.
¹¹
The cage is the fortunes of the Mouth family; we are bounded by them, and it is the first time we have been bounded by anything, we are approaching the semblance of a novel. Is colour, after a certain point, only to be increased by a judicious mixture of human interest? Perhaps the question presented itself to him. Certainly one comes nearer to ‘minding’ about Edna Miami and Charlie than about any of his previous characters – Charlie, the glorified symbol of the writer himself, the happy black boy, passing through the customs at Cuna-Cuna with a butterfly net and nothing to declare.

The English novel, to Mr Waley’s distress, is at present cluttered up with realistic lumber, and he draws a comparison between it and English painting. Fiction is mostly ‘still in the Chantry Bequest stage’, and Firbank was an Impressionist, who broke away from academic naturalism by the method of selection and choice. Another reaction besides the Impressionistic is possible, namely the pre-Raphaelite, where the writer or painter throws himself into a state of mind more simple than his own, and thus raises his work from the anecdotic to the lyrical. This, Mr Waley points out, is the reaction of Mr David Garnett, who is deliberately naïve; and has found in fantasy a serviceable ally rather than a fairy queen. Unlike Firbank, he wants to do something, he wants to write a story, and we are here in the presence of a much more sophisticated mind, a sophistication all the greater because it is so carefully controlled, and always kept out of doors. His art is a hybrid. It blends in a new relationship the stocks of fantasy and common sense. It is a successful experiment – unlike the art of Firbank, which contains no experiments at all. All that the two share in common is an omission: they do not introduce the soul nor its attendant scenery of Right and Wrong, they are fundamentally unserious. This disconcerts
the Anglo-Saxon reader, who approves of playfulness, but likes it to have a holiday air. In the absence of regular office hours ‘to sport would be as tedious as to work’,
¹²
says Prince Henry the prig, and the butterflies and their kindred neither contradict him nor agree – they merely go away, and allow him to ruin Falstaff and save England. Play is their business. If for an instant they swerve from it they are swept into the nets of allegory. They may or may not possess will-power, may or may not desire to hover over a certain hedge, but the will is a trifle in the realm of the lower air which they inhabit and invite us to share.