THE FLURRIED YEARS H

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2008 with funding from Microsoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/flurriedyearsOOhuntuoft /, THE FLURRIED YEARS h [Frontispitcs 7fffgrr 131 The Flurried Years :: :: By Violet Hunt :: :: WITH ifl ILLUSTRATIONS HURST & BLACKETT, LTD. PATERNOSTER HOUSE, E.C. 5 PR GO 1 U55Z52 Made and Printed in Great Britain by The Cameloi Press Limited, Southampton LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Facing Pagt FRONTISPIECE JOSEPH CONRAD AND HIS PROOF-SHEET • 32 MARY MARTINDALE • 50 JOSEPH LEOPOLD . 62 MY NIECE . 66 HENRY JAMES . 88 MY MOTHER . 112 AUNT EMMA'S HOUSE AT BOPPARD . 126 DAVID GARNETT AND JOSEPH LEOPOLD AT ASSMANS- HAUSEN • 132 GONERIL IN BED . 152 MY SISTER . 208 MISS REBECCA WEST AT HOME . 214 OUR COTTAGE AT SELSEY .... 218 THE GOOD SOLDIER . 260 WILLIAM HENRY HUDSON .... 268 PART I — — THE FLURRIED YEARS 1908 The Great Affair of All—"One word is too often profaned " Oliver Madox Brown and Joseph Conrad on Passion—Oscar before America— " " Hie sunt leones —/ go there—The New Argonauts—W. L. George on Genius—W. B. Yeats on the stoking of it—Mr. Chandler an important person—Mrs. Chandler ditto—Hermosa—The Impropriety of Thomas Hardy—Editors and Backers—The Pinker of Agents—With the Monds at Joyous Gard—Mr. Carlyon Bellairs and the British Navy—The German Professor—The Soul's Wireless—Conrad on Prestidiginous People—Perceval Gibbon—Arthur Marwood—Payment of Contribu- tors—Arnold Bennett—Cunninghame Graham—W. H. Hudson and the Cuckoo—His ideal Woman—The Association of Conrad and the Editor— Damon and Pythias—Agonies of Composition—The Pent Farm— S. S. McClure and Miss Willa Gather—Henry James as " Modeste " Mignon —H. G. and the Editor's Mead—Suffragettes at Mrs. Godfrey Benson's—Mr. Asquilh and the Dinner Napkin—Christmas Party at 84 The launch of the " English Review." Life is a succession of affairs, but there is always one affair for which the years, from birth, are a preparation, a hardening, a tempering, and a more or less serious erosion, possibly, of the sword of the fighter. And there comes, sooner or later, according to the sets and the entries and exits of the other actors, one's own supreme moment. One is on. And that entry, being but human, one may so easily muff. That moment, some will say, I did muff. Not, said a soldier to me, walking along the pier at Redcar in the days of the bitterness of the war—when words flowed from the mouths of deeply tried men, ebullitions of a deep and desperate cynicism that seemed to sour the sunlight—not, said he, till a person comes to lie on his deathbed and is faced with that five minutes' io The Flurried Years unrolling of the Book of Judgment—that feverish access of memory, including full clarity of vision, of which all who have been brought back from the gates of death have spoken and written—does a person know which is the affair of all. And not even then, perhaps, with which of the three prime passions that moment would come to be concerned—affair of the heart ? —affair of ambition ? —affair of revenge ? —these simple emotions that sway us indifferently still. Though nowadays Love stalks kingly in the forefront of motive, Elizabethan men were not ashamed to put either of the others first. Even Othello's great love was compound of the ambition to be master in his own house and husband of his own wife. " One word is too often profaned " So often that I will not. And because I think Love, in my exquisite sense, is too beautiful and too rare. Once in a blue moon ! The blossoming of an aloe ! I confess I should like to see the word and the particular emotion it describes, relegated to the categories of abnormality—used to signify some monstrous spiritual growth. For me the propa- ganda which makes the world go round—not on—is liking, not love, liking with a little " 1," not Love with a big one, jogging it all the time so as to carry on in a desultory manner the uncalled-for curse of existence by a series of small shocks—as one might say the progression of a motor-car. And what is Passion but a dangerous kind of cargo that one takes on board, contraband more often than not, and of absorbing interest to the mechanician since it implies danger, stress, and effort, and entails pains and penalties which may make a continuance of the journey impossible. The car run in the name of Love may be a good starter, and there is always the chance that it may subside into efficient and decorous easy-going, and so fare on to the terminus, delivering its crew in very nearly as good — The Flurried Years n condition as that in which they set out. Yet no man " magnanimous and tender," no woman " passionate " and true —I quote the great male summing up of these special sex characteristics perpetrated by F. M. W. Myers in his Poems long ago—would venture to talk of Love in connection with its progress. But I think that the expression Miss Austen uses to describe the strongest emotion of which her worthier characters are capable Marianne Dashwood is out of court—might be used to denote the slab-compound of sentiments and feelings that enables a husband and wife to get on after several years of union—Attachment. " Love me little—love me long," is the proverb in- vented for careful starters in matrimony, or the railway- man's " White for right, and red for wrong, and green for gently go along." Love me little—that is, like me a great deal ; and liking can last. Of course there are " Moments struck from " midnights ! as the sober, burgomaster Browning says, but the continuous cinematograph ends certainly in boredom, and may end in tragedy. As Browning, too, said of Professor Milsand of Avignon—a dull darling—I knew him : I have a friend over the sea. I like him, but he loves me. Half a tragedy, at any rate, there ! Poor little Milsand was devoted. He was invited to stay every year, but he was not happy. And then we have Swinburne's many loves that are good to see—very good to see if the avoid- ance of stress is any object. For one love is the devil since it implies the obstination of sex. The love-liking is, can be, everywhere ; love of lovers—of parents—of brothers—of friends. And, partaking of our animal nature, most surely combined with neglect and cruelty. Each man and woman, too, is apt to kill the thing ; 12 The Flurried Years he or she loves, and, being human, does not turn a hair but being, peradventure, an author, writes about it. Joseph Conrad, dealing masterly with these shifting values, of which he was quietly cognisant, would seem in his books to have selected one virtue for a master key to open all locks in the House of emotional conjecture. He chose that his world should rest on Fidelity. His Love was a concentration on one particular object, of steadfastness, honour, courage, pity, and generosity " Old abstractions," Mr. Squire says, " to which he held firm." With Conrad it represented a crime for a man to question courage and honour, to stifle decent traditions and conscience. Splendid, useless fidelity, like that of the dog watching by its master's body, licking the hand that will never stroke it again, perhaps never did, perhaps struck it instead of caressing it. Or the silly boy on the burning deck, with whose story our romantic yet common- sensible childhood was fed. But when you get older you find you can't better it. When nothing holds, when the very scaffolding of one's ideals, honour, love, and the rest, totters and crumbles, some absurd fetish of endurance, some catch-word, like the noble slogan of the Grants going into battle and shouting to the hills that " ' look down on them : Stand fast, Craigellachie ! must serve our turn and steady our nerves. We don't fight for King Charlie, but we go—or don't go—on, bearing the world's annoy " with a sigh that is not quite a sob, a smile that is not a grin." Of once sown seed, who knoweth what the crop is ? Alas, ray love. Love's eyes are very blind. What would they have us do ? Sunflowers and poppies Stoop to the wind. So sang, artlessly, for he was only nineteen, Oliver Madox Brown, who died so young and broke the heart of his father. One does not know what he would have — The Flurried Years 13 done when his time came ? Bowed to the wind perhaps—adopted the laisser faire attitude of the artist like others of his race. But one thing is certain, artist or no, man and woman always, the crop belongs equally to the associate sowers who have devoted their patch to the raising of it. Con- rad's deification of the sense of responsibility in emotional affairs is to me the high-water mark of civilisation. Wilde, of course, put the case for crude animalism. Not to kill " the thing he loves," according to the dictates of the sadic brute that, willy-nilly, does reside in Man, but to cherish it, maybe in boredom, is the real crux of decency—to dig one's emotional crop in the sweat of one's brow ; with conscientiousness to reap the harvest of tares—or even of dragons' teeth.

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