reduced to living on the first floor of the Carlton Hotel. The villain is a Russian Prince. The Baronet of a simpler age has been unable, poor fellow, to keep pace with the times. What self-respecting heroine would abandon her husband and children for sin and a paltry five thousand a year? To the heroine of the past – to the clergyman’s daughter or the lady artist – he was dangerous. The modern heroine misbehaves herself with nothing below Cabinet rank.
I turn to something less pretentious, a weekly periodical that my wife tells me is the best authority she has come across on blouses. I find in it what once upon a time would have been called a farce. It is now a “drawing-room comedietta. All rights reserved.” The dramatis personæ consist of the Earl of Danbury, the Marquis of Rottenborough (with a past), and an American heiress – a character that nowadays takes with lovers of the simple the place formerly occupied by “Rose, the miller’s daughter.”
I sometimes wonder, is it such teaching as that of Carlyle and Tennyson that is responsible for this present tendency of literature? Carlyle impressed upon us that the only history worth consideration was the life of great men and women, and Tennyson that we “needs must love the highest.” So literature, striving ever upward, ignores plain Romola for the Lady Ponsonby de Tompkins; the provincialisms of a Charlotte Brontë for what a certain critic, born before his time, would have called the “doin’s of the hupper succles.”
The British Drama has advanced by even greater bounds. It takes place now exclusively within castle walls, and – what Messrs. Lumley & Co.’s circular would describe as – “desirable town mansions, suitable for gentlemen of means.” A living dramatist, who should know, tells us that drama does not occur in the back parlour. Dramatists have, it has been argued, occasionally found it there, but such may have been dramatists with eyes capable of seeing through clothes.
I once wrote a play which I read to a distinguished Manager. He said it was a most interesting play: they always say that. I waited, wondering to what other manager he would recommend me to take it. To my surprise he told me he would like it for himself – but with alterations.
“The whole thing wants lifting up,” was his opinion. “Your hero is a barrister: my public take no interest in plain barristers. Make him the Solicitor General.”
“But he’s got to be amusing,” I argued. “A Solicitor General is never amusing.”
My Manager pondered for a moment. “Let him be Solicitor General for Ireland,” he suggested.
I made a note of it.
“Your heroine,” he continued, “is the daughter of a seaside lodging-house keeper. My public do not recognize seaside lodgings. Why not the daughter of an hotel proprietor? Even that will be risky, but we might venture it.” An inspiration came to him. “Or better still, let the old man be the Managing Director of an hotel Trust: that would account for her clothes.”
Unfortunately I put the thing aside for a few months, and when I was ready again the public taste had still further advanced. The doors of the British Drama were closed for the time being on all but members of the aristocracy, and I did not see my comic old man as a Marquis, which was the lowest title that just then one dared to offer to a low comedian.
Now how are we middle-class novelists and dramatists to continue to live? I am aware of the obvious retort, but to us it absolutely is necessary. We know only parlours: we call them drawing-rooms. At the bottom of our middle-class hearts we regard them fondly: the folding-doors thrown back, they make rather a fine apartment. The only drama that we know takes place in such rooms: the hero sitting in the gentleman’s easy chair, of green repp: the heroine in the lady’s ditto, without arms – the chair, I mean. The scornful glances, the bitter words of our middle-class world are hurled across these three-legged loo-tables, the wedding-cake ornament under its glass case playing the part of white ghost.
In these days, when “Imperial cement” is at a premium, who would dare suggest that the emotions of a parlour can by any possibility be the same as those exhibited in a salon furnished in the style of Louis Quatorze; that the tears of Bayswater can possibly be compared for saltness with the lachrymal fluid distilled from South Audley Street glands; that the laughter of Clapham can be as catching as the cultured cackle of Curzon Street? But we, whose best clothes are exhibited only in parlours, what are we to do? How can we lay bare the souls of Duchesses, explain the heart-throbs of peers of the realm? Some of my friends who, being Conservative, attend Primrose “tourneys” (or is it “Courts of love”? I speak as an outsider. Something mediæval, I know it is) do, it is true, occasionally converse with titled ladies. But the period for conversation is always limited owing to the impatience of the man behind; and I doubt if the interview is ever of much practical use to them, as conveying knowledge of the workings of the aristocratic mind. Those of us who are not Primrose Knights miss even this poor glimpse into the world above us. We know nothing, simply nothing, concerning the deeper feelings of the upper ten. Personally, I once received a letter from an Earl, but that was in connection with a dairy company of which his lordship was chairman, and spoke only of his lordship’s views concerning milk and the advantages of the cash system. Of what I really wished to know – his lordship’s passions, yearnings and general attitude to life – the circular said nothing.
Year by year I find myself more and more in a minority. One by one my literary friends enter into this charmed aristocratic circle; after which one hears no more from them regarding the middle-classes. At once they set to work to describe the mental sufferings of Grooms of the Bed-chamber, the hidden emotions of Ladies in their own right, the religious doubts of Marquises. I want to know how they do it – “how the devil they get there.” They refuse to tell me.
Meanwhile, I see nothing before me but the workhouse. Year by year the public grows more impatient of literature dealing merely with the middle-classes. I know nothing about any other class. What am I to do?
Commonplace people – friends of mine without conscience, counsel me in flippant phrase to “have a shot at it.”
“I expect, old fellow, you know just as much about it as these other Johnnies do.” (I am not defending their conversation either as regards style or matter: I am merely quoting.) “And even if you don’t, what does it matter? The average reader knows less. How is he to find you out?”
But, as I explain to them, it is the law of literature never to write except about what you really know. I want to mix with the aristocracy, study them, understand them; so that I may earn my living in the only way a literary man nowadays can earn his living, namely, by writing about the upper circles.
I want to know how to get there.
CHAPTER IV
There is one thing that the Anglo-Saxon does better than the “French, or Turk, or Rooshian,” to which add the German or the Belgian. When the Anglo-Saxon appoints an official, he appoints a servant: when the others put a man in uniform, they add to their long list of masters. If among your acquaintances you can discover an American, or Englishman, unfamiliar with the continental official, it is worth your while to accompany him, the first time he goes out to post a letter, say. He advances towards the post-office a breezy, self-confident gentleman, borne up by pride of race. While mounting the steps he talks airily of “just getting this letter off his mind, and then picking up Jobson and going on to Durand’s for lunch.”
He talks as if he had the whole day before him. At the top of the steps he attempts to push open the door. It will not move. He looks about him, and discovers that is the door of egress, not of ingress. It does not seem to him worth while redescending the twenty steps and climbing another twenty. So far as he is concerned he is willing to pull the door, instead of pushing it. But a stern official bars his way, and haughtily indicates the proper entrance. “Oh, bother,” he says, and down he trots
