The Joy of Story-Telling: Constant Practice and Frequent Mistakes

by JOHN MASEFIELD

10

IT WAS in New York City, in the summer of when I suddenly found that the faculty of mental story-telling had returned to me. I was walking in an uptown part of the East Side when a story suddenly became bright in my mind, in the way that I had known of old. so that I could both tell it and enjoy it. In the glaring sun and roaring avenue I walked in the old joy, that again, as ever, made all other worries nothing.

This resurrection of my inner life was a gladness. New York City, in herself, was a gladness, that, romantic, beautiful exciting City, the Queen of all romantic Cities, with such sparkle in her air and in her people. Still, there remained the dire drawbacks, the want of talent for writing, that everyone was so sure of; the ignorance of how to acquire a talent, or, at least, a skill; as well as the frightful ignorance in myself of the things that other men seemed to know as a mat ter of course. I could not open a newspaper without finding a new ignorance in myself. I said, “Get rid of the ignorance. Find out from some paper what you ought to read and then read it.”Probably, this was the exhilarating New York working her miracle in me. Anyhow, I went into Mr. Pratt’s bookstore on Sixth Avenue, and bought the first volume of a Morte d’Arthur, then issued in the Camelot classics under the editorship of the late Ernest Rhys.

I was then just seventeen. That is a good age at which to begin Arthurian study. In childhood, I had tried some of Tennyson’s retellings of Malory, without any success: I was at once enchanted by Malory. I was too young and too ignorant to question what I read. I supposed that these old romances were all retellings of British history or traditions, and that all of them had been founded on fact. In the main, as I supposed, the events, or something like them, had happened, and the people, or somebody like them, had lived, in places that were sometimes known: Amesbury, Winchester, and others. All the story-telling instinct in me was thrilled as I read. This was a story that gave a great significance to many parts of England. This was (as I supposed) our contribution to epic, and a mine from which poets could take their fables forever. Certainly it was something about which my ignorance had to be lessened. I soon added to my books a complete Malory, and a copy of the Mabinogion.

Two at least of my later Masters thought that all Englishmen ought to reckon the Morte d’Arthur as a holy book. Englishmen have not followed them in this, any more than in other directions. Still, the book remains our nearest approach to a holy book, and to any story-maker the holy book should be the source of sources. Of course, most of Malory is translated from the French; but some of the French romance-writers used fables brought to Brittany by refugees from Britain. The foundation of part of the epic must be British. What a foundation it is, for the imagination to work upon, for the story-teller to invent upon, for the romantic dancer to make enchanting and the musician to bring into the heart. To myself, then, it was pure joy: it seemed a British tradition, that had passed into the imagination of the world. I will spare the reader an account of the wild Arthurian tales that were in my imagination for the next few months. As far as I can tell, the only interest that the modern reader has in Malory is in the suggestion that the man was without some of the virtues, in which of course the modern reader is richly endowed.

For rather more than a year, while living in or near New York City, I read great quantities of fiction: not only the then living novelists of America, France, Russia and these islands, but the shortstory writers of many American magazines. I came to know a very wide variety of method, much that was then counted excellent in method and matter, and some that I have seen survive through half a century of man’s madness.

It is fitting to give thanks to those American and English publishers who made so much fiction possible to the poorest students. A great range of English fiction could be had for fourpence halfpenny a volume. The Americans offered as great a range at five cents a volume (then twopence halfpenny in English money). A year or two later, English publishers issued poets at a penny a volume. Those were reading days.

In a little more than a year after my buying Malory, I gave up this prose reading for the study of poetry. I was soon a lover of three poets for their power of telling tales: Chaucer, for all his methods, Milton for the first and last books of Paradise Lost, and D. G. Rossetti for some unforgettable pieces of deep importance to me. Keats and Shelley won me by other qualities of thought and poetical feeling than those of story-telling.

Shortly after the celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, I returned to England and went to London. I had by this time a fair knowledge of the various schools of writers then using English, an intimate knowledge of the work of some of the best living novelists, and a perception that an influence of very great benefit was coming to us from France.

11

IT IS not possible to persuade the living that the late Victorian time was in all intellectual ways immeasurably ahead of any time that has succeeded. To those who had the happiness to be young in it, the time was one of peace, liberty, abundance, and overwhelming intellectual endeavor. Most of the intellectual endeavor was, of course, directed to setting right what was amiss in the society. Some was very rightly directed to the giving of delight, which, in the main, should be the artist’s task in all ages. That delight was then certainly being given, by painters, musicians, and writers. It would startle the young of today to know what enormous appetite for thought Victorian London showed; what dozens of papers fostered delight in writing, what pages of comment upon thought came daily, what fervor this or that movement caused, what excellence was being achieved.

Some great Victorians still survived. Swinburne could still be seen by his adorers, at Putney, or in the British Museum. Thomas Hardy making a great resolution, had just turned from prose to the writing of poetry. George Meredith, after long and cruel neglect, was at last being read. All the reactions seemed to be against the ruthless and the realist; and against the decadence that had lately flourished; (itself being a reaction).

Most of the countless papers on sale upon the bookstalls contained work of quality. Books were in enormous abundance and very cheap. There were more bookshops then, than now, and far more places where, at certain times of the week, the booklover might examine bookstalls for treasure, and be pretty sure of finding some. The out-offashion is always cheap, and usually much better than the fashion has the wit to think.

In the fever and fervor, myself being ill and not expecting, nor expected to live long, I commenced author, with what hesitancy and uncertainty the young writer will know without my telling.

London is well-stored with museums and art galleries. I turned at once to these for qualities that might help story-telling. There were many bookillustrations, from illuminated manuscripts to the admirable designs in the books and magazines ot the day. In the pict uregalleries were the masterly presentations of scenes from stories, the scene alive in all essentials, exquisite in all detail, I perceived at once that these men were master story-tellers. They knew all the story and made all others feel the importance of their chosen incident. The perfection of the works made me despair, yet made me long to try. In so many of the greater paintings, I found a spirit long since gone from the world, of glory in the teller and welcome in the crowd. I knew that these painters of the early and full Renaissance must have been urged on by their world to do their utmost.

It was then being fatally and foolishly decided by critics that painters ought not to try to tell stories, or display scenes from stories; that is, that they were to abandon the power of doing their utmost with the fables that link life with the worlds of imagination and eternity. The shocking doctrine delighted the half-baked everywhere, and some of the results are now everywhere, on dirty bare walls in public buildings, and mental perversions of various kinds on private walls.

All that I saw in the picture galleries and in bookillustrations seemed to proceed from a mighty power of narrative, much of it most helpful to a writer, if it made him try to know how the painter had come to his decision, that this or that was the significant scene. Let any writer stand before a. painted masterpiece and ask himself “What should I have done, had I tried to paint this fable

I went, when I could, to hear music, knowing from the first, that the poet should work with the musician or, indeed, be himself a musician. Sometimes in an orchestral piece, or sonata, f would hear a strain that suggested a story or that would suit a story-teller. I would try to make tales in verse that would go to these strains; but the time was not ripe.

Sometimes (as those were the great days of the music-hall) I would hear at a music-hall a lively tale in verse admirably sung to a tune and enlivened by a chorus. The poetry was not always all that a lover of poetry could desire, but there was no doubt about the success of the method. I used to wonder, if the poet made the tune, or if the singer made both tune and fable. The collaboration, or solitary genius, delighted the time. Often, the song went all over the country, and round the world: some of those tales in verse are now revived, and are again going round the world.

Unfortunately, not being musical, I could not do that kind of thing. I listened, and wished that 1 could do it: yet knew that I must try something within my limited skills. I was slowly groping towards the kind of thing I could do: I wrote a little verse and a little prose, and read, with greedy fever, what youth then found to read.

12

MY MASTERS at that time, in poetry, were Swinburne and Meredith among the living, Rossetti. Matthew Arnold and Robert browning among the lately dead. To these I would add Edward FitzGerald, whose translation being hard to come by, I copied out for myself.

In prose, the masters were Stendhal, Flaubert, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Guy de Maupassant, Prosper Merimee and Walter Pater.

There was, then, what was called “A precious school,”whose prose was picked and filed, written and re-written, till the perfect epithet fitted the essential noun. Flaubert and Paler were the chiefs of this school: the phrases “tact of omission,”“tact of exclusion,” were much quoted. Much nonsense was of course written in various affected manners by some of the disciples of these masters; but those masters were extraordinary men, in revolt against the commonness of the commercial age. The young who followed them were also in rebellion: and like their masters, loved literature, and sought all ways of perfection. Every young writer must at some time perceive the grace of elegance and the beauty of refinement, and strive for those qualities, both so precious, so hard to win. The time spent in such striving is never wasted. The young writer either learns that he cannot reach such quality, or gathers such quality as he is fit for.

In the first year of my time in London, I began to read William Morris. I was by then fairly well informed about the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: I had seen the representative works of the Brothers and their followers; knew the writings of D. G. Rossetti almost by heart, and thought thal I perceived something of what he had been to Swinburne, Burne-Jones and Morris.

At that time, Rossetti was much talked of, and always with admiration or adoration. He was the inspirer of our immediate inspirers; tales about him went from mouth to mouth, and always the tales told were as generous as his nature. It is said not to be so now. In the old days men sought the skv for stars; now, too many rake the gutters for gossip. In my young days, Rossetti was only spoken of as a light that lightened his generation and ours, as a genius supreme in one art, eminent in another, noble in protest, glorious in all encouragement, and extraordinary for his knowledge, instinct, and understanding. He was said to have read everything, and to have discovered all the genius in it, months or years before anybody else. He knew, like no one of his time, the quality of the Middle Ages, and its worth to the unled or misled welter of a commercial century. Life in my youth, without Rossetti and his three great followers, would have been a sorry thing.

When men have had much influence, they will be decried and despised by a later set of men; that, being the way men have with their benefactors, is happening now. However, I will back the light against darkness any day, and while I can write at all. J will give thanks for those four men.

Rossetti was long since dead, but I could go to stare at his house in Chelsea. Morris was lately dead, and I could go to stare at his house in Hammersmith. Burne-Jones, so soon to die, was si ill living; often I went to the outside of his studio in Kensington to stare at the slit in the wall through which the pictures went out into the world. Swinburne, one of the early disciples, was as I have said, still active; by going to Putney on a lucky day one could see the wonderful head, so full of generosity and metrical power; see, in the flesh, one whom Rossetti had painted, one who had for a little time even lived with Rossetti. One was still linked to all old Romance.

In reading William Morris, I touched old Romance; his versions of it had profound effects upon me. It was through him, that I first came to know the Icelandic, sagas, and to find in them a reality touched with romance that seemed the perfection of story-telling. As far as I could learn, these sagas had been written down in the thirteenth century, perhaps after the tales had been in the minds and months of story-tellers for over two hundred years. They were written down in a simple age, that respected the tradition, in prose so plain that the events seemed to be happening before the readers’ eyes.

They were over-burdened with genealogies, that tended to delay the start of the story proper: these one quickly forgave. One saw that the descendants of those stocks of heroes were the listeners when the tales were told, and the guards of the tradition. What would one give for an Arthurian tradition, so vouched for, so guarded?

For some years, all modern story-telling seemed thin and unreal compared with the sagas. That leisurely setting out of the tale, the ebbing of the tide, and the quiet end, with nothing but the tidemarks left, all these things, put down in writing, yet based, so clearly, on the tales still told by word of mouth, seemed to me the perfection of the art. Good inventions had been added to the great traditions: there were prophetic utterances, dreams, and some appalling ghosts. Poetry was not omitted: there were poems in nearly all the sagas: and though the poetry was of a kind that made Victorian flesh creep, being a Gothic Gongorism, it interested the reader. It was so literary a poetry, so strange a product in a society so given to man-killings and piracies, it was a difficult poetry: it could never have been easy to follow, even to those accustomed to the method; yet quite clearly it had been followed. The poets had sung the songs to their society, and had been listened to with delight. Ihe society must have been much more full of joy in art than any society known to the Y ictorians. All those who listened to such songs with pleasure must have been used from childhood to all manner of delicate and interesting art, gold-work, smithery, shipbuilding, wood-working, carving, the making of tools, weapons, sails, clothing, buttons, studs, jewels, oars, buckets: all that life made necessary to them. We Victorians, who came to know the sagas more through William Morris than any other, understood why it was that Iceland meant so much to him.

The sagas with their simple power made the story-telling of the then living story-tellers almost absurd. What was Flaubert, with his labor and richness of language, what was Pater, with his learning and instinct for felicity, to the tellers of the Laxdale or Njala sagas? Flaubert and Pater could give great quality to scenes: but how would either fare, if told by word of mouth to a mixed audience?

That was the question then debated among the young men who read as I read. It was clear to us that “literature” (care for style, search for the right word, feeling for cadence,) might be one of the temptations, might obtrude, might even kill the effect of a story. How could a story-teller marshal his fable and attain the directness of telling that made the sagas so great? The Welsh Triad says, that the three foundations of genius are “Bold design: constant practice; and frequent mistakes.”In the practice, the young men began to feel the need of criticism; inspiring criticism, more guidance than judgment.

13

THE, Daily Chronicle, of London, under the editorship of the late H. W. Massingham, and the literary editorship of the late H. W. Nevinson, was possibly the very best of the literary papers of the world. This was no small distinction in that literary time when so many good brains were judging books, and to such good judges there came an output of work so varied and so generous. No lover of writing failed to take the Daily Chronicle on the days of its literary pages, for those were the events of the week.

On one such page I read a review by H. W. Nevinson of the Poems by the late W. B. Yeats. Phis review, and the book it praised, had much influence upon my life. Now that I fully perceive the influence, I find it hard to say how little I knew of Mr. Yeats’s work when the review appeared. I had read no book by him. I can have known hardly more than a few short poems, and of his prose, I knew only three short stories.

Mr. Yeats’s first collection of poems had been printed in 1889. In 1892, he had published the first printed version of The Countess Kathleen. In 1894, he published The Land of Heart’s Desire. In 1895, he published, with many revisions and omissions, these three books together, under the title Poems. It was a reprint of this volume which was reviewed by Nevinson. Yeats was then a little over thirty-four years of age.

Nevinson had an exquisite happy skill in quotation. He so quoted from Yeats’s book that I could not put the words from my mind. I wondered, too, what the cover could be: the most beautiful modern cover that the reviewer had ever seen. The lines quoted ran in my head: the thought of the cover possessed me.

Soon, I was at a bookshop, looking at the cover. Indeed it is a beautiful cover, dark blue, with a design in gold of a rose upon a cross spilling petals everywhere. Even now, after more than half a century, many copies still show those drifting golden rose-petals in all their glory and beauty.

Ah, when that gold was new, the cover alone seemed well worth the money. What divine poetry book has not seemed worth the money? What lover of poetry would hesitate one instant between daily bread and a book of undying delight ?

I have had a good many first, happy, memorable readings: the first finding of Chaucer, of Keats, of Rossetti, of William Morris, of George Du Maurier, of Marius the Epicurean, of the 21st and 24th Books of the Iliad, of the Second Part of Don Quixote, of parts of the Piirgatorio. This first reading of Yeats was to rank with these, and to be marked with a white stone in memory.

My fondness for stories made me turn to the stories, to the chief story, The Wanderings of Oisin, about the poet who was had “away" into Fairyland, with the pearl-pale Niamh. The first book gave me delight, the second, rapture: then, suddenly, I turned the page into the third, to the rousing new wonderful measure that I had longed for but had never known. I cannot tell the magical effects of that new measure and the inventions it told; the riding of the water, the sleeping chiefs, the bellbranch, the long sleep, the coming back of the horse, and the tragical return. These inventions may have been in the Irish imagination and in popular tales. Yeats had made them a part of poetry, with all their matchless beauty of phrase and simile, while still only a lad of eighteen or nineteen. Such force and grace of narrative and such power of beauty have seldom come to one so young.

That first reading of The Wanderings of Oisin made me Yeats’s disciple. The next day I was seeking out all the books that he had published.

It is possible that many places in Scotland and Ireland are shown as the grave of Oisin (formerly written Ossian) or the scene of his disputes with Saint Patrick (latterly written Patraic or Padhraic). I have seen and known only one of these.

Two miles up an Irish glen, below a strange crooked lonely hill, in sight of the sea, and near a rushing salmon-si ream, there is a flat of grass in w hich is a ring of gray, standing stones. The stones mark the site of the burial chamber of a barrow, that has long since been washed away by t he soul herly gales, that blow in there from the sea. They are pointed out as marking the burial-place of Ossian. Men told me that he lived near them, when he came back after being three hundred years “away”; they showed me a place, nearer the sea, where he disputed with Saint Patrick.

Those who told me these things were old men (Gaelic speakers) who had lived in the glen throughout their lives and remembered the Famine. It is possible that they kept the old tradition. I often visited those standing stones. I used to gaze with awe at the space within the stones where the body or its ashes must have lain, and hope that the hero was “away” once more with Niamh, or back with the Fenians, hunting the stag, “with Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair.”

14

A FEW days after my reading of The Wanderings of Oisin I was familiar with much of the published work of W. B. Yeats: certainly, with all his books; and these remained, for years, my favorite reading, my ideals and my despair. In a few months, I was privileged to meet him, and marvel (like the rest of us) at the glory of his young maturity. John Synge once said to me, of Yeats, “No one in Ireland knows how big he is.” This could never have been strictly true, even when Synge was in England; it was the rough general statement of conversation. Those who knew Yeats at that time may not have known his exact measure, but of the greatness of his glory none could have doubted.

Yeats was a pioneer in the revival of poetical drama; he had both produced and inspired poetical plays in Dublin. Like most poets of the time, he disliked many of the usual methods of speaking verse, and sought for something much nearer to the (Poetical) heart’s desire. Latterly, I have wondered how the method that he made public was devised by him. I know that he was frequently in the presence of William Morris. I know that on some occasion, when the talk had turned upon t he speaking of verse in theatres, Morris had said that “the verse ought to be chanted.” It has lately seemed probable to me that Yeats had heard William Morris read verse, and had been very deeply impressed by Morris’s method.

As I came to the scene too late to have the privilege of hearing Morris read, and being curious to know whether that great man and writer had moved Yeats in this direction, I wrote to Sir Sydney Cockerell, to ask how Morris had read poetry, whether he had chanted it. Sir Sydney wrote to me on the 27th February, 1950, as follows:

“I heard Morris read on many occasions, Swinburne only once. They both chanted their verse, but they did not go to such lengths as Yeats, who when ‘cantillating’ with Florence Farr seemed to me to emphasize the rhythm at the expense of the meaning. Morris’s reading was very impressive, and so was Swinburne’s. Morris was a fine reader of prose also. He did not chant it.”

Morris and Swinburne, then, were both chanters of their verse; they were the two most eminent poets likely to have influenced Yeats in his young manhood. The weight of their influence, if any, I do not know.

I cannot now remember whether Yeats knew Swinburne; he must, I suppose, have met him at odd times. I know that early in our acquaintance, he called at The Pines to consult Mr. Watts-Dunton about some matter. While there, he asked WattsDunton, how Mr. Swinburne was. He was told, “Very well. He is now composing a poem. If you open the door, you will hear him.”

Yeats opened the door, and heard as it were the murmur of many bees on a hot summer day. This was Mr. Swinburne trying over his measures in a musical chant.

I often heard Yeats’s method. It is not easy to describe; it would not be easy to imitate; probably it influenced all who heard it either for or against. It put great (many thought too great) yet always a subtle insistence upon the rhythm; it dwelt upon the vowels and the beats. In Lyric, it tended ever towards what seemed like Indian singing; in other measures, towards an almost fierce recitativo. When reading or reciting verse to a friend, he was frequently dissatisfied with the rendering of a line. He would then say, “No No,” and would repeat the faulty line with a more delicate rhythm, helping it to perfection with the gestures of his (most strangely beautiful) hands.

He had brought verse-plays of unusual quality to a theatre un-used to the speaking of verse, and almost ignorant of modern verse. He disliked the method then so frequent, of speaking the verse as if it were prose, of ignoring all the quality put with such difficulty into the lines, and destroying every rhythm for the sake of some action, or what used to be called “business.” He felt that the time had come to protest against some of the methods then in use, and try one or two other methods more likely to suit poetry when spoken.

Yeats was always a practical reformer; he suggested improvements by showing other methods. So far as I know, his first public attempt to show what might be tried in verse-speaking was at a Lecture in a Hall at Clifford’s Inn, in London, in mid-February, 1901. In this Lecture, he said that most modern speakers of verse neglected, or ruined, the poet’s rhythms, and that singers of verse often changed the rhythms and made the words unintelligible. All this was put with much charm and fun.

By that Lecture, a great change was wrought in the methods of speaking verse. What Yeats had said about the poet’s wishes went home to certain clever heads. He had said, that a poet cares intensely for rhythms, and wishes his rhythms to be stressed. A great school was to remember this, and to use rhythms with lovely power. He had said that a poet chooses words with great care, and cares intensely for the exact understanding of words so chosen. A great school of speech was to remember this. Before many years had passed, I was to be made truly thankful, that I had heard the beginning of a movement that was to mean very much to me.

It is now nearly half a century since the Lecture and its demonstrations were given. In that time, Poetry has returned to the theatre, almost as an inmate and an equal. More than that, listening to poetry has become a daily delight to millions. It may be hard for the people of today to understand either how little poetry was then heard, or how much it was read. Until Yeats spoke, it was very little heard; so little, that many critics condemned the use of words that were spelled as though they did not rhyme. Writers using such words were told that they were using “cockney rhymes” or “earrhymes.” They would be trounced for rhyming “guest” with “best”; and would have been flayed for rhyming (had they ever dared) “blood” with “mud.” But for Pope’s proverbial couplet, “guest” would have fared badly. “Blood” however blue, had to rhyme with such words as “good ” or “wood” or “hood.” It was forbidden to rhyme it with “could” or “would” or “should”; as this was judged to look ill upon the page.

I have mentioned this matter, because, since poetry became more frequently heard in public, owing to improvements in speech, and the return of the habit of listening, due to the improvements, and to the spread of broadcasting, critics (themselves much scarcer) have raised fewer objections to “earrhymes.” When Yeats first spoke, they raised many.

15

IT FELL that I was given the chance of helping to borrow and arrange an exhibition of pictures and drawings, mostly by English painters. The design was to give unusual space to the work of what was then the New English Art Club. This work took me from London to many parts of the country: reduced my reading to the few books easily carried with me, and gave me an incentive the more, to try to write, both prose and verse. Among the books that I took were The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes, the Letters of Flaubert, George Borrow’s Lavengro, Coleridge’s Table Talk, Paul Verlaine’s Choix de Poesies. The writing that I attempted at that time was so much difficulty faced, and a very little of it solved or overcome. It reminded me of trying to get through a bog, with no known track, no sound footing, nothing but engulfing mud. The effort was continual, the trial never ceased; what I could do easily was done, what I could do with difficulty was attempted; some of what I wrote was printed.

In this task of borrowing and arranging works of art, I met many artists, who had useful advice for a beginning writer. One of the most useful promptings given to me (by three or four men) was, to attempt some considerable work that needed, first, careful planning, into parts, episodes, suspenses, surprises, and so forth, and then, a resolute will, constant, perhaps, for months together, to bring the work to an end. This excellent advice was not fully taken at the time: I had not then the power, nor the will: it was however remembered and often thought of. There came into my head, from dreams or daydreams, the theme of a foreign conspiracy to overset a tyranny. I worked at this, mentally, for many weeks, whenever I was alone, in train or on the road. At odd times, I have worked at it ever since, but have written little of it, so far. When I found that I could not bring it to an end, I was still sure that the advice had been right. Fully half of all composition must be the act of will. I had taken to reading the novels of Balzac, and had read enough of the great comedy to understand the majesty of its scope.

As it happened, I was, for a long time then, in the daily presence of Rodin’s famous bronze head of Balzac. I compared my mental frailty and feeble purpose with that fierce head’s vitality and determination. I used to say to myself: “Yet even that man was once such a beginner as another. Years must have passed before even that man designed The Human Comedy. But, then, what will, what power, to carry the design, volume by volume, wonder by wonder, through the convulsions of two generations.”

“Bold design,” indeed, as the Triad urged. I was impressed, too, by something that an actor said to me. I had met him at some gathering in London, He had said “I expect that writers are like actors: They find it better to leave nothing to chance; and work out every least little detail. This had surprised me at the time. I had supposed that the faculty of inspiration counted for most in the work of actors and writers alike. “Yes,”he said, “and very righlly: but suppose the inspiration is not there, and the actor is on the stage before his audience? He has to fall back on the planned, remembered little detail.”

This seemed sound sense. I saw that a most careful planning, spread over a considerable time, so that various moods might correct and improve, was a part of right composition: a very difficult, and therefore very helpful part.

Still, like most of the young, I found the lengthy work beyond my powers: I could do nothing longer than the short story, either in verse or prose.

In wandering much about the country, I came to know some of the remains of Roman Britain, and from ihese drew certain useful lessons, all of which sent me back to the Triad. To the Roman the first essential of the City, as of any other work of art, had plainly been Bold Design. The City was planned: its ways made straight: its walls made splendid: its public buildings noble: its baths delightful.

how different from myself, who could only write a tale of three thousand words at most.

I saw the ruins of Roman Britain with awe; for they had been the only cities, their ways the only roads, their baths the only baths, in all this land, for how long? Had they an art of story-telling at all comparable with their art of walling? Life must have gone on graciously in those ciiies until the destroyer came. How little we know, even now, of their centuries of life, and of the darkness that devoured them. The sight of them made me long for great national determination to come to know all that can still be learned of all those centuries of our story, so that our citizens might have something sure in their minds of a past well worth the memory. A nation’s past is the poet’s pasture.

It happened that I was present when John Synge’s two early plays, The Shadow of the Glen, and aiders to the Sea, were read aloud to a little company. I knew that Synge had heard the fables of these plays in lonely places in or near Ireland. There was something fresh and new about them: they came out of life; and this could not he said of the plays then most in demand. The Irish were writing this sort of play. I had already seen two or three little plays, less lively than Synge’s, done by amateur Irish companies in London. They had been plays about Irish country life and legend, alike unknown to me, and having a newness and a grace, not then to be had in any theatre.

Listening to Synge’s plays (both so poignant with his peculiar genius) made me feel what a wealth of fable lav still in the lonely places in England. No one had touched this wealth, so far as I knew. We had not become alive to its presence: we were dead to it: and much of the theatre of that time was dead in consequence. I had already perceived that Ireland was awake to her own wealth: she was all bright with fervor: hardly a village but saw the light and knew the gladness. The thought occurred to some of us younger Englishmen, that some of us might find, in the English country, subjects as moving. fables as lively: possibly, also, amateur actors as talented. The thought had occurred to others, outside our clique: there was a perceptible stir: but as yel (so far as I know) nothing like the fervor presently shown. I do believe that Yeats, Synge and the Irish were the beginners of the movement t hat follow ed.

16

AT THAT time had no inclination whatever towards attempting to write a play. I was busy with other matters quite difficult enough to any beginning writer. I had known an out of the way part of England, had perceived its great, passionate, almost savage secret life, and knew that this was as yet unwritten. I said to myself, “Someone ought to do something over here”: but my own instincts were all for the old method of the story .

I knew almost nothing about the theatre, except that I disliked prose plays. I had seen performances of a few of Shakespeare’s plays, and had disliked, or detested, the methods mostly used in them, though there were exceptions of genius, that were soon to

“Scatter the rear of darkness thin.”

The bold and wonderful productions of the late William Poel, that pioneer and bringer of blessing, had already given joy.

I had been to some few musical comedies, and thought that these, with their use of song and dance, were the most poetical (and therefore to me the most attractive) works that the modern theatre offered. Still, I might say, that apart from William Poel’s work, nothing in the theatre of the day attracted me deeply.

Having been much in the country throughout one year, I felt acutely the want of a living theatre in the many little towns that had once built and supported one. What theatres existed were. showing recent London successes played by touring companies. Most little towns had no theatres whatever, and, what was worse, seemed to feel no need for any. All the life seemed to have gone into the City and our general feeling was that the City was dead (or dead to what we wanted).

Going into a district strange with story, famous for some of its building, and for the memory of its Festival (long since abolished as a nuisance) I had the good fortune to see the late Charles Ashbee produce Ben Jonson’s The New Inn with the members of the Guild of Handicraft.

It was the first Ben Jonson play that I had seen. There were few Elizabethan revivals in those days. I knew the play, and something of its history, how its first performance in London had come to grief, and how Jonson and his critics had raged at each other. Perhaps no one had revived it since then: nor was it easy to see how it could be revived, but with abundant cutting of what could never have been made alive, and with much grace of acting and speaking in the four chief parts, it came to life with the Guild: some scenes of it I cannot forget.

It occurred to me, then, that little groups like the Guild of Handicraft might well begin such a rekindling of the nation’s imagination as was now burning brightly in Ireland. T hey had talented, eager players, a lively direction, and all about them the scenes of remembered deeds, strange, terrible and romantic. Why should not these deeds become the fables of plays; why should not this feeling for poetry presently create and act those plays, and the little group make the place famous again as a scene of festival?

Not very many months after The New Inn performance, the Irish Players made their first memorable visit to London, where they made a stir. Their freshness and fervor made much professional acting seem unreal. They impressed myself deeply: but I was still not interested in the theatre. I was writing short stories, and even slowly groping my way towards a somewhat roomier form.

After a year or two of experiment, I forced myself to try to write longer stories, even full-sized novels, (80,000 words or more) and during these attempts gave up the making of verses almost altogether. The attempt to write upon an ampler scale taught me much of the craft that can be only learned by trial, and gave me an opportunity for doing the things that I most liked in writing, at that time in my life. From my first interest in reading, I had admired the delicate and vivid effects of description put into a few words by a master, sometimes by the simple dodge of making a noun into an adjective, (a Shakespearean way), or giving to the noun of the object the adjective of scene or season, (a Miltonic way). Someone had quoted to me a remark of William Morris: “Chaucer and Keats are my Masters: they make pictures.” Morris had given me dozens of examples of pictures of the kind; Stevenson, Walt Whitman, and certain old memoir writers, had given me others. Often, I tried to do something of the sort; often the attempt was delightful to myself at the moment.

17

WHAT young writers need most is a fellowship or group, in Paris, where Café life is frequent and delightful, the groups form easily, and usually hold together long enough to publish some statement of aim or theory, often stimulating and interesting, with examples. The groups meet at particular Cafés, for the endless discussions of art: if a writer should feel that one group lack the truth, the group next door may have it. In the London of my day, Café life was less frequent, though I saw something of what there was in half a dozen Cafés. The kindling thing to me, in my youth, was the Irish Literary Movement. I often met some of the members of that movement; their work was familiar to me. From studying their dramatic work, it slowly dawned upon me that no writer can neglect any great form of writing: he must practice it, acquire some skill in it, or fail, to some extent, as an artist. All ways of writing are a part of his technique; this difficult way, of the theatre, was, surely, a most precious way, to any young writer, since it offered to him that criticism of the living audience, so sure, so salutary, so swift. I determined to try to learn something of the technique, though I had no instinct for it, and almost no knowledge of it. I was a story-teller, fond of reading old poetical plays, and convinced that only William Poel knew how to produce them.

I learned at once, and with indignation, that all my love of language, fondness for effects of style, worship of the right word, all the old dear tricks, must be cut from my attempts. It was rubbed into me, by those from whom I sought instruction, that a good mime needs no words, and that a good playwright can do without them. What a blow to a youth delighting in words, worshipping the cunning use of words, to find that, on the stage, dumb-show may be more telling than eloquence. Still, the blow told: I began to understand thrift and condensation: the merits of the method shone forth. An actor bade me prepare my framework as a succession of actions and situations without one spoken word. This was wise advice, whatever it may have seemed at the time.

Another actor gave me a still more effective lesson. He said: “Most actors would agree that a playwright has not done his work if the actor leaves the stage unexhausted, in body, mind, and soul.” This remark gave me light upon some Shakespearean problems. Asking why certain plays of the Elizabethans, offering wonderful parts for men, were not revived, I was told that these parts needed “FifthAct Actors,” that these men were always rare, and tended to prefer (of course) the work of their own time. The Fifth-Act Actor, my friend explained, is one who can be charming, attractive, startling and surprising through the fortunes of four acts, and yet be shattering and triumphant in the fifth. The powers necessary for this are rare; even the physical strength for it is, and must be, unusual. I began to ponder on the men who created the great Shakespearean parts. I determined to try to learn rather more of the theatre, that I might the better understand the miracle of Shakespeare, and the still unsolved uncomprehended miracle of the theatre of his time.

I made myself a model stage, for which I painted stage-settings: I produced plays upon it with little dolls fixed to stands. In spite of the difficulty, I wanted to try something longer than a one-act play, something that would give me room to show various sides in my chief characters, while keeping to the unities, those helps to the playwright, the only helps the ignorant beginner has. This was tried in due course, in the intervals of much other work, and the writing of many stories, short and long.

Occasional performances of what I had done confirmed my knowledge that I had no skill in the theatre, that I was, in the main, a story-teller: but I had now been made aware of the extraordinary power and effect of the Messenger Speeches in Greek plays. These marvels of story make a part of the fabric of most good Greek plays, and come with supreme glory at critical moments.

All theatre-goers now must have watched for the entrance of the breathless Messenger, who knows the result, who has the news, yet cannot at once tell, cannot, in fact, gratify any suspense till it has been made almost unbearable. Now, those Messengers are known: then, they were only beginning to be known, through the performances of the translat ions of Professor Gilbert Murray. For the first year or so, some actors were afraid of them: they were “story-telling on the stage.” They soon learned what opportunities a Messenger Speech gave to anyone who had any sense. Each Messenger at once has all the attention that has been artfully prepared for him, during the preceding hour or so. He enters upon a stilled house, in which few even dare to cough. He finds a sort of malleable mind in front of him that he can play with as he will. A very few years after the first of these Greek plays in London, an actor said to me “No one has ever known a Greek Messenger Speech to fail: they are always wild successes.”

I made my Messenger Speeches in due time, and learned from them still more of my defects, not only as playwright but as story-teller. The defects were made more than clear, they were made painful. Still, I was not made to feel that my time had been wasted. I learned a little from each failure.

I was under no illusion about the mistakes. I knew that I had not any instinct for that kind of writing; but in the press of almost every other kind of writing, these attempts at plays were rests and amusements. I could pull out my model stage with the little dolls and work at a scene, as if it were not really work at all, but a play. In some of my imagined scenes I had not dolls enough, and had to use chess-men as supers. Sometimes in my zeal I “produced” a Shakespeare, or Corneille or Racine scene upon this model. I began the useful habit of reading plays with an imaginary performance, sets, actors and appropriate business, in my head. In this way I began to grope into an understanding of the Elizabethan theatrical method, and thereby to become less and less satisfied with prose plays of any kind.

I had seen the Christmas Mummers, with their Saint George and Dr. Vinney, in my very early childhood. The chance view of some Sword Dances suddenly poignantly recalled these to me; indeed, they did more, they made all the art of the early twentieth century seem tame and dead. I wondered as I watched them, whether I were looking at what had once thrilled thousands in the Rings at Avebury or on the great downland near the White Horse. The Mummers’ Play and the Sword Dances seemed to come from the childhood of man, from races with beliefs now lost, that had once been passionate joy.

For nearly a year I worked upon a theme that would show forth these beliefs suddenly returning here. It seemed that the beliefs were eternal, born into men, but sometimes hidden by later customs. Might not that old elemental joy be revealed again, and man be happy in his arts, while exulting in his strength? Alas, joy was soon to be banished from the world, the arts killed or misused by politicians, and the strength of nations wasted in wars.

18

DURING the study of the theatre, which made my amusement for some years, I ceased to care so much as formerly for the French story-writers. I began to read Spanish story-writers, more especially the historian of the Conquest of Mexico (Bernal Díaz del Castillo), the old poetical romances, the works of Bécquer and a good little collection of Spanish poetry. I then began to read Don Quixote, that until then had seemed meaningless. For the next few years this was my favorite book: I carried it with me wherever I went: it was the one triumph (so I thought) of Renaissance story-telling, and the one consolation in a very real blackness of despair.

On a Sunday morning in that blackness of despair I set out upon a memorable walk in a late April, after a winter of much ill-health and disappointment. Being alone in the country for the week-end I went away through some woodland, in parts that I had never before seen, and have never seen since. It was a sad walk, for my work was not what I had hoped, and on my way into the country a fact had come to my knowledge that filled my mind with bitterness. The prospect before mo seemed black.

Seeing a likely ash-plant in a pile of hedgetrimmings, I took it, and trimmed some five feet of it, with a knife, to be my walking-staff. The day was sunny and fine, but it had been a cold and snowy April. On my walk. I came to a hollow on the northern side of a hedge (it was more than a ditch: it looked like an overgrown shallow quarry), it was still full of dirty unmelted snow-drift, for no sun could reach it and rain had not fallen since the snow. I probed the snow with my staff, and found it to be, roughly, three feet four inches deep; not a bad record for late April; not a cheerful sight, but one well according with my mood.

Presently, on my return journey, being then on the southern side of that hedge, I found the bank starred with primroses. They were the firsi that I had seen for a year, and in any case would have given me delight; but as I looked at them a voice within me, that I did not know (a man’s voice) said clearly “The Spring is beginning.”

I walked home, finding that the difficulties that beset me in what I was then trying to write would now clear away. I had no doubt of this: a message of hope had been given to me.

However, the difficulties did not clear away, the work seemed in a tangle, and not to be cleared by any effort of mine. I took it with me into another part of the country, where I stayed alone, working and worrying for a few days, finding no light upon it, yet sure that the promised light would come.

In an evening in May, having written myself weary, I went out for a walk through woodland, then in all the beauty of young leaf and life. I was in a state of great inner joy from a sight that 1 had seen that morning. I came home uphill through a wood, feeling that the incredible and the impossible were on each side of me. At the wood’s edge there was a sort of fence to shut it from the common beyond. The fence was something to step oxer with the feet, and easily to push through with the body. As I went over and through this division, I said to myself “Now I will make a poem about a blackguard who becomes converted.” Instantly the poem appeared to me in its complete form, with every detail distinct; the opening lines poured out upon the page as fast as I could write them down. I had written between 14 and 20 lines before I reached home. I then lit the lamp and sat down to write, till I had done some 60 odd lines more.

I was alone in the bouse. It was not a very lonely bouse: there were two other little houses one about thirty, the other sixty yards away. However, it was deep country, nearly midnight, and everybody near me must have been abed and asleep.

Suddenly, as I wrote, the floor of the room in which I wrote flung itself noisily wide open.

Do not think that I was scared: no, no; I was terrified, almost out of my wits.

Why the door had opened in that way, I do not know. It had never opened like that before, and never did again. The hint was not lost upon me: I packed up my writing and went to bed.

In three weeks and three days I had finished my talc in verse of the blackguard who was converted. I then joined some friends in the North, and went with them to Capel Curig, where they were hoping to fish. They angled, with what seemed to me much skill and unusual patience for a day or two, without getting a bite. It then began to rain, in the gentle south-easterly drizzle that foretells a deep depression. After a time the drizzle changed and deepened; rain poured down in a steady veil, it was impossible to go out in such rain without getting wet through in thirty yards. The fishermen went to the lounge: I went to my room, looked at the rain falling, heard the glad noise of many waters, and sol about some writing.

I said to myself that I had written about a violent man who had been made happy for no apparent reason; but that that was only half of the picture: the opposite ease must also be stated; I must show a quiet woman made heart-broken for no apparent reason. Instantly, as before, the fable came into my mind, complete, distinct in all its details: I had only to pull it down, as it were, from where it stood, onto the paper. Beginning thus during the downpour at Capel Curig, and continuing and ending in the sun elsewhere, I wrote this tale in three works and three days.

The voice that had said “The Spring is beginning” had told the truth: the Spring had come. The work in which I had been floundering, unable to see my way, was given up. I made a slight use of some of it about ten years later; the rest either moulders, or is burned.

Since then, I have known that by instinct and aptitude I am a story-teller, though now and then, even after all this, I have tried a dramatic scene or two (or three), as a change of method, or as an experiment.

(The End)