CHAPTER 2

   Such was the scene of my life in the summer of the year 1885. By my odd jobs; a little “reading,” a little compiling and a good deal of catalogue making, I just managed to live, earning perhaps as much as a pound a week, one week with another. I do not remember exactly the precise terms on which I worked, but I know that I had a good deal of time on my hands. Part of this time I spent in trying to learn shorthand. I can’t think why, for at this period of my life I had no newspaper or secretarial employment in view. I am inclined to think that trying to learn shorthand had become a mechanical habit with me. Then, I resumed my old mooning walks out of London, going westward usually or always, sometimes Acton way and sometimes through Brentford—that curious, dirty, and most fascinating place—to Osterley Park, where in those days you could walk and wander anywhere you pleased, so long, I suppose, as you did not glue your nose to the windows of that mansion. And then I fell to writing again.

   Now here is a mystery. It is held, and very properly, that people should keep their mouths shut unless they have something to say; similarly that a man has no business to write unless he has something in his heart which, he feels, cries out to be expressed. But here was I not knowing in the least what I wanted to say, but resolved, even at the cost of much pain and misery, to say it; that is, to write it. There are, of course, people who are said to talk for talking’s sake; and so, I suppose, I was suffering from the analogous vice of writing for writing’s sake, otherwise known as the cacoethes scribendi. I fancy a volume of Hazlitt had fallen into my hands; it had strayed, very likely, into the Catherine Street library, and at first I began to try to write essays, more or less in imitation of this inimitable author. I need scarcely say that I made sad work of it; and happily, no scrap of manuscript survives. And then I fell on Rabelais and on Balzac’s “Contes Drolatiques,” and wondered and admired hugely and studied both deeply in my long night watches under the gas-jet in the little room in Clarendon Road. I would dine sumptuously on half a loaf of dry bread, green tea made as I liked it, without milk or sugar, with plenty of tobacco by way of dessert; and then to my books and to my wonder. It was not a bad life on the whole, sweetened as it was by the enthusiasm for letters; but the loneliness was an oppression and sometimes a horror. Weeks passed without any human converse beyond brief business dialogue; still, since then I have known far worse days. Poverty and loneliness; these are doubtless evils hard to bear; but they are light indeed; nay, they have their dignity, and the gas-jet of Clarendon Road is not altogether without a halo—when I weigh all this and set it in the balances beside the intolerable degradation of the service of Carmelite House. I often thought in those latter and most hideous days that my case was somewhat that of a man who had been captured by a malignant tribe of anthropoid apes or Yahoos and was by them tormented and unspeakably degraded; and there was this additional shame and horror: that my degradation and misery were witnessed by rational creatures like myself. I remember how in my last year in the employment of “The Evening News,” I was out on some idiotic errand which led me up Wellington Street, past York Street, where George Redway, the publisher of “The Anatomy of Tobacco” and of “The Literature of Occultism and Archæology,” had his place of business. In a line, pretty well, with York Street I could see that new street which runs over the site of old Vizetelly’s office where the famous fusty garret was. The streets—Wellington Street, Bow Street, York Street—are not much changed in the last forty years, and the gap formed by the new street made me see myself a cloudy young man of twenty-two up in the air labouring amongst the dusty ancient books; all this and all the recollections of the days of dry bread, tea, tobacco and the hopeless but not dishonourable endeavour of literature; all this contrasted with the shameful circumstances of my life as a weary old man of fifty-eight, a man who had known struggles and sorrows and losses; all this, I say, overwhelmed me suddenly. It was almost more than I could endure.

But we go too fast. We are still in the days of the cloudy young man, who is clear that fine literature is an infinitely noble thing, but is not clear upon any other subject whatever. I had my queer books in the mornings and my long lonely walks in the afternoons, and my great books in the evening and far into the night. I remember reading Dante in Longfellow’s translation, from beginning to end, and though I could not by any manner of means lift up my heart and mind to the mountain-peak of the Paradise, I divined the majesty I could not comprehend. Don Quixote was always with me, and good company and meat and drink and lights and fire always to me; and so I pass along the dim London streets revolving all these mighty works, a ghostly man amidst the hurrying multitude of the living, and go far afield under dim trees in the West, or sit solitary on a bench near the river in Kew Gardens, looking towards Syon; all the while in a lonely but not an unhappy dream.

It came suddenly to me one night. I was lying awake in my bed; and then it came to me that I would write a Great Romance. A Great Romance! I know it is funny; but it is sorry too. I didn’t in the least know what the said Great Romance was to be about; save this, that Rabelais was to have something to do with it, and that my own county, beloved Gwent, was to have much more to do with it. That does not sound very definite; but I believe it is more definite than the actual vision which appeared to me, for this was rather a warm and golden and wonderful glow and radiance than any scheme for a book. I know I lay happy and trembling for a long time and fell asleep happy and awoke happy in the morning, and went out forthwith to buy pens and paper. I had both already, but I felt that the occasion was more than a special one and called for very special purchases. So, at the stationer’s shop, near the Holland Park end of Clarendon Road, I got ruled quarto paper, and “Viaduct” pens, and two penholders, and I am pleased that I am writing all this with a surviving penholder of those two; a poor old thing chewed to a stump and battered grievously in its metallic parts. So here was paper, here was pens and penholders; and of course the rest was easy.

There was only this little difficulty. The golden and glowing vision of the night, the announcing of the Great Romance, declined to be more specific. It had no hints to give, it seemed, as to plot; it still veiled the subject of this wonderful book in the dimmest, most religious obscurity. The paper and the pens were ready; but how to begin writing the first line? I had not the faintest notion, so I proceeded to write Prologues and Epilogues, with commentaries on the magnum opus which was not even begun. Two of these oddities survive, the Dedication to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, as the Patron of men of letters; a dreadful quip founded on the old saying about “dining with Duke Humphrey,” which meant that you had not had any dinner. This was worked out with all elaboration and with an attempt at the great manner of Bacon in his most magistral mood. It ran in this vein:

Truly, then, do we poor folk (men of letters) owe what service we are able to pay Your Grace, who in spite of mean dress and poverty (justly accounted by Mr. Hobbes for shame and dishonour) is pleased to entertain us at that board, where so great a multitude of our brotherhood has feasted before. For your illustrious line hath now for many generations made it a peculiar glory to supply the needs of lettered men; and as we sit at meat it seems (methinks) as if these mighty men of old did sit beside us and taste with us once more the mingled cup we drink. The ingenious author of Don Quixote de la Mancha must, I suppose, have often dined with the Duke of his age, Mr. Peter Corneille and Mr. Otway, Senhor Camoens, Rare Old Ben, Signori Tasso and Ariosto not seldom: while young Mr. Chatterton the poet did not only dine, but break his fast, take his morning draught, and sup with Your Grace’s great-grandfather, till at last he died of a mere repletion.

There! Very solemn and portentous fun, indeed; but what is so solemn as a youngster of twenty-two? Canterbury Cathedral and Westminster Abbey seem gay and light and airy by comparison. I like it still, to be sure; but then I am prejudiced, and indeed, there is one sentence that still affects me; that phrase about “the mighty men of old” who seem “to sit beside us and taste with us once more the mingled cup we drink.” For in that sentence I see something of the spirit which sustained me, the cloudy young man, the dreamy and obscure and inarticulate young man, of those long-ago days, all through the fire and the darkness of poverty and loneliness and weariness and disillusion. Let us still, if you please, ride the high horse and be as magnificent as we can: I saw myself and, to be frank, I still see myself, as the youngest novice in a great and noble monastic house. The novice is by no means a promising member of the congregation, the Abbot and the Prior and the Master of the Novices have the gravest doubts as to his vocation: the other novices are inclined to indulge in remarks of a jocular and contemptuous kind. But the little, obscure and despised candidate for the triple cord sits in his low place at the board and looks at the pictures on the walls: on the faces where torment and exultation shine with twin fires: on Blessed Bernardus a Baculo, who was beaten to death by the Danes in the ninth century, on the Venerable Servant of God, Marcellinus, who was impaled by the Turk, on St. Eugenius de Compostella, who was shut by the Moors in a horrible dungeon of filth for forty years and at last his visage shone and gave light to the tormentors when they came to end him, on Venerable Raymondus Anglus, who was slowly sliced into little pieces in Cathay, on Blessed Gregory Perrot, whom the ministers of the Virgin Queen attended to at Tyburn in 1590: on all these brilliant successes of the convent does the little novice gaze with admiring wonder. Well he knows that his picture will never hang on the wall; still, and after all, he is a member of the congregation to which these, the lucky and happy, belonged; in a faint sort they are his brothers; they are commensales, cohæredes, et sodales.

Very fine, indeed; but in the meantime I am scratching with a somewhat hopeless pen under Clarendon Road gaslight, taking difficulties for solution to lonely places such as Perivale, to the unfrequented parts of Hampton Court; or else, by contrast, to the long black High Street of Brentford, with its creeks and backwaters of the river, where grass and flowers grow on the decks of derelict barges. I find no oracles to help me in any of these promising quarters; there are some very sad nights in the little room over the dry bread, tea and tobacco and the helpless pen. Finally, in a kind of despair, I begin something of which the first scene is to be laid in Gwent, which, later, is to have a voyage in it—there is a great voyage in Rabelais to the Oracle of the Holy Bottle. I read the first chapter. It is quite hopeless; and yet I do not give up hope; I resolve to try again.

But all this time, while the Great Romance refused to move, my worldly affairs were moving fast, and decidedly in the way of destruction. I suppose, having finished the Catalogue, I had done all that the publisher wanted of me. At all events, the stream of employment, never auriferous to any great extent, dwindled and dried up. I had a little, a very little money in hand, I could not possibly call on those poor people at home for help; my landlady in Clarendon Road had a hard struggle of it, I fancy, and I would not cadge on her kindness, even though my board and lodging were far from being luxurious. It seemed to me that at the end of the week I must just walk out of 23 Clarendon Road and go on walking towards the West till I couldn’t walk any longer. I admit that the plan was vague, as vague as the plot of the Great Romance, but I could think of no other. And in the meantime—I had three or four days before me—I would write the Epilogue for my book: which was not yet begun.

I set about this task with the utmost relish and enjoyment. For once, I knew what to write about; that was my own position; not in a plain and literal manner, but after the fashion of a decorated fantasy. It would never do to say: “Here am I, a stupid lad who is not worth twopence to anybody, who thinks he can write and can hardly get half a dozen words to stagger on the paper; here am I going out to die in a ditch or to live in a ward of the workhouse”: that would never have served. I agree with Mr. Sampson Brass in holding that the truth is often highly unpleasant and inconvenient. Hence the Epilogue to the unwritten book, which survives in the written book, “The Chronicle of Clemendy,” a work which is neither great nor a romance, but which answers the description admirably in all other respects. And as the Dedication was made to Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, so the Epilogue is concerned with the same nobleman. So here we are:

A few days ago His Grace did take me aside into his cabinet, and looking kindly upon me (though some call him a stern and awful noble) said: “Why, Master Leolinus, you look but sickly, poor gentleman, poor gentleman, I protest you’re but a shadow, do not your Abbreviatures bring you in a goodly revenue?” (Note the elegant reference to my mysterious shorthand.) “Not so, Your Grace,” answered I, “to the present time I have abbreviated all in vain, and were it not for the hospitality of your table, I know not how I should win through.” “How goes it then with your Silurian Histories?” (The Great Romance.) ... “With them, may it please Your Grace, it fares excellently well, and this morning I have made an end of writing the First Journey, containing many agreeable histories and choice discourses.” “I believe indeed it will be a rare book, fit to read to the monks of Tintern while they dine. But yet I will have you lay it aside a little, since I have a good piece of preferment for you, an office (or I mistake you) altogether to your taste. What say you, Master Scholar, to the Lordship of an Island and no less an Island than Farre Joyaunce in the Western Seas? How stand you thitherwards? Will you take ship presently?” At hearing this, I was, as you may guess, half bewildered with sudden joy, that is apt to bring tears into the eyes of them that have toiled in many a weary struggle with adversity: I could but kneel and kiss His Grace’s hand, and say “My Lord.”

Of course, the allusions to “First Journeys” and “Silurian Histories” were put in months later, when I had at length found out what my book was about; at the time, October, 1885, I had not written one word of it. So the Epilogue went on its mellifluous way, and thus ended:

But here is my Paumier, with his parchments, to advise with me concerning a grant of Water Baylage to the Abbey of St. Michael, and also concerning the ceremonies observed in the island at Christmastide. He tells me that the voyage will surely be a rough and tempestuous one, but with the captain of the Salutation there need be no fear. And so farewell, till the anchor be dropped in the Sure Haven of Farre Joyaunce.

And indeed, as I was writing the last page of the Epilogue, a letter came for me. I had written to Mr. Quaritch, stating my experience in cataloguing, and asking for employment. Mr. Quaritch wrote very civilly stating that he did not want any cataloguers, but people who knew how to sell books. And I wrote on to my final flourish, with all the more relish. “Ceremonies observed in the island at Christmastide,” indeed! Ceremonies observed at Reading Workhouse, more likely!

But the next morning came a letter from Aunt Maria, that Maria who had walked with Anne to meet John on the white Caerleon road. My mother was dying; and they sent me the money for the fare, that I might come home.