Margot Asquith, an Autobiography Part 28

I want an intelligent audience before I publish them. I want to "try them on" somebody's mind--like a dress--to see how they fit.

Only you must promise to write observations and, most killing remark of all, to say when the tedium of reading them begins to overweigh the profit of my philosophy.

I think you could help me.

After the publication he wrote:

I am sorry that the Essays I dedicated to you have been a failure --as I think they have been--to judge by the opinions of the Press. I wanted, when I wrote them, only to say the simple truth of what I thought and felt in the very simplest language I could find.

What the critics say is that I have uttered truisms in the baldest, least attractive diction.

Here I find myself to be judged, and not unjustly. In the pursuit of truth, I said what I had to say bluntly--and it seems I had nothing but commonplaces to give forth. In the search for sincerity of style, I reduced every proposition to its barest form of language. And that abnegation of rhetoric has revealed the nudity of my commonplaces.

I know that I have no wand, that I cannot conjure, that I cannot draw the ears of men to listen to my words.

So, when I finally withdraw from further appeals to the public, as I mean to do, I cannot pose as a Prospero who breaks his staff. I am only a somewhat st.u.r.dy, highly nervous varlet in the sphere of art, who has sought to wear the robe of the magician--and being now disrobed, takes his place quietly where G.o.d appointed him, and means to hold his tongue in future, since his proper function has been shown him.

Thus it is with me. And I should not, my dear friend, have inflicted so much of myself upon you, if I had not, unluckily, and in gross miscalculation of my powers, connected your name with the book which proves my incompetence.

Yes, the Master [Footnote: Dr. Jowett, Master of Balliol.] is right: make as much of your life as you can: use it to the best and n.o.blest purpose: do not, when you are old and broken like me, sit in the middle of the ruins of Carthage you have vainly conquered, as I am doing now.

Now good bye. Keep any of my letters which seem to you worth keeping. This will make me write better. I keep a great many of yours. You will never lose a warm corner in the centre of the heart of your friend

J. A. SYMONDS.

P.S. Live well. Live happy. Do not forget me. I like to think of you in plenitude of life and activity. I should not be sorry for you if you broke your neck in the hunting field. But, like the Master, I want you to make sure of the young, powerful life you have--before the inevitable, dolorous, long, dark night draws nigh.

Later on, a propos of his translation of the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, he wrote:

I am so glad that you like my Cellini. The book has been a success; and I am pleased, though I am not interested in its sale.

The publisher paid me L210 for my work, which I thought very good wages.

MY DEAR MARGOT,

I wrote to you in a great hurry yesterday, and with some bothering thoughts in the background of my head.

So I did not tell you how much I appreciated your critical insight into the points of my Introduction to Cellini. I do not rate that piece of writing quite as highly as you do. But you "spotted" the best thing in it--the syllogism describing Cellini's state of mind as to Bourbon's death.

It is true, I think, what you say: that I have been getting more nervous and less elaborate in style of late years. This is very natural. One starts in life with sensuous susceptibilities to beauty, with a strong feeling for colour and for melodious cadence, and also with an impulsive enthusiastic way of expressing oneself. This causes young work to seem decorated and laboured, whereas it very often is really spontaneous and hasty, more instructive and straightforward than the work of middle life. I write now with much more trouble and more slowly, and with much less interest in my subject than I used to do. This gives me more command over the vehicle, language, than I used to have. I write what pleases myself less, but what probably strikes other people more.

This is a long discourse; but not so much about myself as appears.

I was struck with your insight, and I wanted to tell you how I a.n.a.lyse the change of style which you point out, and which results, I think, from colder, more laborious, duller effort as one grows in years.

The artist ought never to be commanded by his subject, or his vehicle of expression. But until he ceases to love both with a blind pa.s.sion, he will probably be so commanded. And then his style will appear decorative, florid, mixed, unequal, laboured. It is the sobriety of a satiated or blunted enthusiasm which makes the literary artist. He ought to remember his dithyrambic moods, but not to be subject to them any longer, nor to yearn after them.

Do you know that I have only just now found the time, during my long days and nights in bed with influenza and bronchitis, to read Marie Bashkirtseff? (Did ever name so puzzling grow upon the Ygdrasil of even Russian life?)

By this time you must be quite tired of hearing from your friends how much Marie Bashkirtseff reminds them of you.

I cannot help it. I must say it once again. I am such a fossil that I permit myself the most antediluvian remarks--if I think they have a grain of truth in them. Of course, the dissimilarities are quite as striking as the likenesses. No two leaves on one linden are really the same. But you and she, detached from the forest of life, seem to me like leaves plucked from the same sort of tree.

It is a very wonderful book. If only messieurs les romanciers could photograph experience in their fiction as she has done in some of her pages! The episode of Pachay, short as that is, is masterly--above the reach of Balzac; how far above the laborious, beetle--flight of Henry James! Above even George Meredith. It is what James would give his right hand to do once. The episode of Antonelli is very good, too, but not so exquisite as the other.

There is something pathetic about both "Asolando" and "Demeter,"

those shrivelled blossoms from the stout old laurels touched with frost of winter and old age. But I find little to dwell upon in either of them. Browning has more sap of life--Tennyson more ripe and mellow mastery. Each is here in the main reproducing his mannerism.

I am writing to you, you see, just as if I had not been silent for so long. I take you at your word, and expect Margot to be always the same to a comrade.

If you were only here! Keats said that "heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter." How false!

Yes, thus it is: somewhere by me Unheard, by me unfelt, unknown, The laughing, rippling notes of thee Are sounding still; while I alone Am left to sit and sigh and say-- Music unheard is sweet as they.

This is no momentary mood, and no light bubble-breath of improvisatory verse. It expresses what I often feel when, after a long night's work, I light my candle and take a look before I go to bed at your portrait in the corner of my stove.

I have been labouring intensely at my autobiography. It is blocked out, and certain parts of it are written for good. But a thing of this sort ought to be a master's final piece of work--and it is very exhausting to produce.

AM HOF, DAVOS PLATZ, SWITZERLAND, Sept. 27th, 1891.

MY DEAR MARGOT,

I am sending you back your two typewritten records. They are both very interesting, the one as autobiographical and a study of your family, the other as a vivid and, I think, justly critical picture of Gladstone. It will have a great literary value sometime. I do not quite feel with Jowett, who told you, did he not? that you had made him UNDERSTAND Gladstone. But I feel that you have offered an extremely powerful and brilliant conception, which is impressive and convincing because of your obvious sincerity and breadth of view. The purely biographical and literary value of this bit of work seems to me very great, and makes me keenly wish that you would record all your interesting experiences, and your first-hand studies of exceptional personalities in the same way.

Gradually, by doing this, you would acc.u.mulate material of real importance; much better than novels or stories, and more valuable than the pa.s.sionate utterances of personal emotion.

Did I ever show you the record I privately printed of an evening pa.s.sed by me at Woolner, the sculptor's, when Gladstone met Tennyson for the first time? If I had been able to enjoy more of such incidents, I should also have made doc.u.ments. But my opportunities have been limited. For future historians, the illuminative value of such writing will be incomparable.

I suppose I must send the two pieces back to Glen. Which I will do, together with this letter. Let me see what you write. I think you have a very penetrative glimpse into character, which comes from perfect disengagement and sympathy controlled by a critical sense. The absence of egotism is a great point.

When Symonds died I lost my best intellectual tutor as well as one of my dearest friends. I wish I had taken his advice and seriously tried to write years ago, but, except for a few magazine sketches, I have never written a line for publication in my life. I have only kept a careful and accurate diary, [Footnote: Out of all my diaries I have hardly been able to quote fifty pages, for on re- reading them I find they are not only full of Cabinet secrets but jerky, disjointed and dangerously frank.] and here, in the interests of my publishers and at the risk of being thought egotistical, it is not inappropriate that I should publish the following letters in connection with these diaries and my writing:

21 CARLYLE MANSIONS, CHEYNE WALK, S.W.

April 9th, 1915.

MY DEAR MARGOT ASQUITH,

By what felicity of divination were you inspired to send me a few days ago that wonderful diary under its lock and key?--feeling so rightly certain, I mean, of the peculiar degree and particular PANG of interest that I should find in it? I don't wonder, indeed, at your general presumption to that effect, but the mood, the moment, and the resolution itself conspired together for me, and I have absorbed every word of every page with the liveliest appreciation, and I think I may say intelligence. I have read the thing intimately, and I take off my hat to you as to the very Balzac of diarists. It is full of life and force and colour, of a remarkable instinct for getting close to your people and things and for squeezing, in the case of the resolute portraits of certain of your eminent characters, especially the last drop of truth and sense out of them--at least as the originals affected YOUR singularly searching vision. Happy, then, those who had, of this essence, the fewest secrets or crooked lives to yield up to you--for the more complicated and unimaginable some of them appear, the more you seem to me to have caught and mastered them.

Then I have found myself hanging on your impression in each case with the liveliest suspense and wonder, so thrillingly does the expression keep abreast of it and really translate it. This and your extraordinary fullness of opportunity, make of the record a most valuable English doc.u.ment, a rare revelation of the human inwardness of political life in this country, and a picture of manners and personal characters as "creditable" on the whole (to the country) as it is frank and acute. The beauty is that you write with such authority, that you've seen so much and lived and moved so much, and that having so the chance to observe and feel and discriminate in the light of so much high pressure, you haven't been in the least afraid, but have faced and a.s.similated and represented for all you're worth.

I have lived, you see, wholly out of the inner circle of political life, and yet more or less in wondering sight, for years, of many of its outer appearances, and in superficial contact--though this, indeed, pretty anciently now--with various actors and figures, standing off from them on my quite different ground and neither able nor wanting to be of the craft of mystery (preferring, so to speak, my own poor, private ones, such as they have been) and yet with all sorts of unsatisfied curiosities and yearnings and imaginings in your general, your fearful direction. Well, you take me by the hand and lead me back and in, and still in, and make things beautifully up to me--ALL my losses and misses and exclusions and privation--and do it by having taken all the right notes, apprehended all the right values and enjoyed all the right reactions--meaning by the right ones, those that must have ministered most to interest and emotion; those that I dimly made you out as getting while I flattened my nose against the shop window and you were there within, eating the tarts, shall I say, or handing them over the counter? It's to-day as if you had taken all the trouble for me and left me at last all the unearned increment or fine psychological gain! I have hovered about two or three of your distinguished persons a bit longingly (in the past); but you open up the abysses, or such like, that I really missed, and the torch you play over them is often luridly illuminating. I find my experience, therefore, the experience of simply reading you (you having had all t'other) veritably romantic. But I want so to go on that I deplore your apparent arrest--Saint Simon is in forty volumes--why should Margot be put in one? Your own portrait is an extraordinarily patient and detached and touch-upon-touch thing; but the book itself really const.i.tutes an image of you by its strength of feeling and living individual tone. An admirable portrait of a lady, with no end of finish and style, is thereby projected, and if I don't stop now, I shall be calling it a regular masterpiece. Please believe how truly touched I am by your confidence in your faithful, though old, friend,

HENRY JAMES.

My dear and distinguished friend Lord Morley sent me the following letter of the 15th of September, 1919, and it was in consequence of this letter that, two months afterwards, on November the 11th, 1919, I began to write this book:

FLOWERMEAD, PRINCES ROAD, WIMBLEDON PARK, S.W., SEPTEMBER 15TH, 1919.

DEAR MRS. ASQUITH,

Your kindest of letters gave me uncommon pleasure, both personal and literary. Personal, because I like to know that we are still affectionate friends, as we have been for such long, important and trying years. Literary--because it is a brilliant example of that character-writing in which the French so indisputably beat us. If you like, you can be as keen and brilliant and penetrating as Madame de Sevigne or the best of them, and if I were a publisher, I would tempt you by high emoluments and certainty of fame. You ask me to leave you a book when I depart this life. If I were your generous well-wisher, I should not leave, but give you, my rather full collection of French Memoirs now while I am alive. Well, I am in very truth your best well-wisher, but incline to bequeath my modern library to a public body of female ladies, if you pardon that odd and inelegant expression. I have nothing good or interesting to tell you of myself. My strength will stand no tax upon it.