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would shake the hand as it was raised to strike, and cloud the eye as it
sought its prey, and make the tongue stammer as it declared its love. It was
the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality, so
that Orlando, to whom fortune had given every gift - plate, linen, houses,
men-servants, carpets, beds in profusion - had only to open a book for the
whole vast accumulation to turn to mist. The nine acres of stone which were
his house vanished; one hundred and fifty indoor servants disappeared; his
eighty riding horses became invisible; it would take too long to count the
carpets, sofas, trappings, china, plate, cruets, chafing dishes and other
movables often of beaten gold, which evaporated like so much sea mist under
the miasma. So it was, and Orlando would sit by himself, reading, a naked
man.
The disease gained rapidly upon him now in his solitude. He would read
often six hours into the night; and when they came to him for orders about
the slaughtering of cattle or the harvesting of wheat, he would push away
his folio and look as if he did not understand what was said to him. This
was bad enough and wrung the hearts of Hall, the falconer, of Giles, the
groom, of Mrs Grimsditch, the housekeeper, of Mr Dupper, the chaplain. A
fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave
books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For
once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens it so that
it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the inkpot and
festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. And while this is bad
enough in a poor man, whose only property is a chair and a table set beneath
a leaky roof - for he has not much to lose, after all - the plight of a rich
man, who has houses and cattle, maidservants, asses and linen, and yet
writes books, is pitiable in the extreme. The flavour of it all goes out of
him; he is riddled by hot irons; gnawed by vermin. He would give every penny
he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and
become famous; yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a
well-turned line. So he falls into consumption and sickness, blows his
brains out, turns his face to the wall. It matters not in what attitude they
find him. He has passed through the gates of Death and known the flames of
Hell.
Happily, Orlando was of a strong constitution and the disease (for
reasons presently to be given) never broke him down as it has broken many of
his peers. But he was deeply smitten with it, as the sequel shows. For when
he had read for an hour or so in Sir Thomas Browne, and the bark of the stag
and the call of the night watchman showed that it was the dead of night and
all safe asleep, he crossed the room, took a silver key from his pocket and
unlocked the doors of a great inlaid cabinet which stood in the corner.
Within were some fifty drawers of cedar wood and upon each was a paper
neatly written in Orlando's hand. He paused, as if hesitating which to open.
One was inscribed "The Death of Ajax", another "The Birth of Pyramus",
another "Iphigenia in Aulis", another "The Death of Hippolytus", another
"Meleager", another "The Return of Odysseus", - in fact there was scarcely a
single drawer that lacked the name of some mythological personage at a
crisis of his career. In each drawer lay a document of considerable size all
written over in Orlando's hand. The truth was that Orlando had been
afflicted thus for many years. Never had any boy begged apples as Orlando
begged paper; nor sweetmeats as he begged ink. Stealing away from talk and
games, he had hidden himself behind curtains, in priest's holes, or in the
cupboard behind his mother's bedroom which had a great hole in the floor and
smelt horribly of starling's dung, with an inkhorn in one hand, a pen in
another, and on his knee a roll of paper. Thus had been written, before he
was turned twenty-five, some forty-seven plays, histories, romances, poems;
some in prose, some in verse; some in French, some in Italian; all romantic,
and all long. One he had had printed by John Ball of the Feathers and
Coronet opposite St Paul's Cross, Cheapside; but though the sight of it gave
him extreme delight, he had never dared show it even to his mother, since to
write, much more to publish, was, he knew, for a nobleman an inexpiable
disgrace.
Now, however, that it was the dead of night and he was alone, he chose
from this repository one thick document called "Xenophila a Tragedy" or some
such title, and one thin one, called simply "The Oak Tree" (this was the
only monosyllabic title among the lot), and then he approached the inkhorn,
fingered the quill, and made other such passes as those addicted to this
vice begin their rites with. But he paused.
As this pause was of extreme significance in his history, more so,
indeed, than many acts which bring men to their knees and make rivers run
with blood, it behoves us to ask why he paused; and to reply, after due
reflection, that it was for some such reason as this. Nature, who has played
so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds,
of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often of the most
incongruous, for the poet has a butcher's face and the butcher a poet's;
nature, who delights in muddle and mystery, so that even now (the first of
November 1927) we know not why we go upstairs, or why we come down again,
our most daily movements are like the passage of a ship on an unknown sea,
and the sailors at the mast-head ask, pointing their glasses to the horizon;
Is there land or is there none? to which, if we are prophets, we make answer
"Yes"; if we are truthful we say "No"; nature, who has so much to answer for
besides the perhaps unwieldy length of this sentence, has further
complicated her task and added to our confusion by providing not only a
perfect rag-bag of odds and ends within us - a piece of a policeman's
trousers lying cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandra's wedding veil - but has
contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a
single thread. Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that.
Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know
not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement
in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand
towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright,
now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen
of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind. Instead of being a
single, downright, bluff piece of work of which no man need feel ashamed,
our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings,
a rising and falling of lights. Thus it was that Orlando, dipping his pen in
the ink, saw the mocking face of the lost Princess and asked himself a
million questions instantly which were as arrows dipped in gall. Where was
she; and why had she left him? Was the Ambassador her uncle or her lover?
Had they plotted? Was she forced? Was she married? Was she dead? - all of
which so drove their venom into him that, as if to vent his agony somewhere,
he plunged his quill so deep into the inkhorn that the ink spirted over the
table, which act, explain it how one may (and no explanation perhaps is
possible - Memory is inexplicable), at once substituted for the face of the
Princess a face of a very different sort. But whose was it, he asked
himself? And he had to wait, perhaps half a minute, looking at the new
picture which lay on top of the old, as one lantern slide is half seen
through the next, before he could say to himself, "This is the face of that
rather fat, shabby man who sat in Twitchett's room ever so many years ago
when old Queen Bess came here to dine; and I saw him," Orlando continued,
catching at another of those little coloured rags, "sitting at the table, as
I peeped in on my way downstairs, and he had the most amazing eyes," said
Orlando, "that ever were, but who the devil was he?" Orlando asked, for here
Memory added to the forehead and eyes, first, a coarse, grease-stained
ruffle, then a brown doublet, and finally a pair of thick boots such as
citizens wear in Cheapside. "Not a Nobleman; not one of us," said Orlando
(which he would not have said aloud, for he was the most courteous of
gentlemen; but it shows what an effect noble birth has upon the mind and
incidentally how difficult it is for a nobleman to be a writer), "a poet, I
dare say." By all the laws, Memory, having disturbed him sufficiently,
should now have blotted the whole thing out completely, or have fetched up
something so idiotic and out of keeping - like a dog chasing a cat or an old
woman blowing her nose into a red cotton handkerchief - that, in despair of
keeping pace with her vagaries, Orlando should have struck his pen in
earnest against his paper. (For we can, if we have the resolution, turn the
hussy, Memory, and all her ragtag and bobtail out of the house.) But Orlando
paused. Memory still held before him the image of a shabby man with big,
bright eyes. Still he looked, still he paused. It is these pauses that are
our undoing. It is then that sedition enters the fortress and our troops
rise in insurrection. Once before he had paused, and love with its horrid
rout, its shawms, its cymbals, and its heads with gory locks torn from the
shoulders had burst in. From love he had suffered the tortures of the
damned. Now, again, he paused, and into the breach thus made, leapt
Ambition, the harridan, and Poetry, the witch, and Desire of Fame, the
strumpet; all joined hands and made of his heart their dancing ground.
Standing upright in the solitude of his room, he vowed that he would be the
first poet of his race and bring immortal lustre upon his name. He said
(reciting the names and exploits of his ancestors) that Sir Boris had fought
and killed the Paynim; Sir Gawain, the Turk; Sir Miles, the Pole; Sir
Andrew, the Frank; Sir Richard, the Austrian; Sir Jordan, the Frenchman; and
Sir Herbert, the Spaniard. But of all that killing and campaigning, that
drinking and love-making, that spending and hunting and riding and eating,
what remained? A skull; a finger. Whereas, he said, turning to the page of
Sir Thomas Browne, which lay open upon the table - and again he paused. Like
an incantation rising from all parts of the room, from the night wind and
the moonlight, rolled the divine melody of those words which, lest they
should outstare this page, we will leave where they lie entombed, not dead,
embalmed rather, so fresh is their colour, so sound their breathing - and
Orlando, comparing that achievement with those of his ancestors, cried out
that they and their deeds were dust and ashes, but this man and his words
were immortal.
He soon perceived, however, that the battles which Sir Miles and the
rest had waged against armed knights to win a kingdom, were not half so
arduous as this which he now undertook to win immortality against the
English language. Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition
will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed
good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was
in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at
ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted
his people's parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now
laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic
and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the
fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest
genius or the greatest fool in the world.
It was to settle this last question that he decided after many months
of such feverish labour, to break the solitude of years and communicate with
the outer world. He had a friend in London, one Giles Isham, of Norfolk,
who, though of gentle birth, was acquainted with writers and could doubtless
put him in touch with some member of that blessed, indeed sacred,
fraternity. For, to Orlando in the state he was now in, there was a glory
about a man who had written a book and had it printed, which outshone all
the glories of blood and state. To his imagination it seemed as if even the
bodies of those instinct with such divine thoughts must be transfigured.
They must have aureoles for hair, incense for breath, and roses must grow
between their lips - which was certainly not true either of himself or Mr
Dupper. He could think of no greater happiness than to be allowed to sit
behind a curtain and hear them talk. Even the imagination of that bold and
various discourse made the memory of what he and his courtier friends used
to talk about - a dog, a horse, a woman, a game of cards - seem brutish in
the extreme. He bethought him with pride that he had always been called a
scholar, and sneered at for his love of solitude and books. He had never
been apt at pretty phrases. He would stand stock still, blush, and stride
like a grenadier in a ladies' drawing-room. He had twice fallen, in sheer
abstraction, from his horse. He had broken Lady Winchilsea's fan once while
making a rhyme. Eagerly recalling these and other instances of his unfitness
for the life of society, an ineffable hope, that all the turbulence of his
youth, his clumsiness, his blushes, his long walks, and his love of the
country proved that he himself belonged to the sacred race rather than to
the noble - was by birth a writer, rather than an aristocrat - possessed
him. For the first time since the night of the great flood he was happy.
He now commissioned Mr Isham of Norfolk to deliver to Mr Nicholas
Greene of Clifford's Inn a document which set forth Orlando's admiration for
his works (for Nick Greene was a very famous writer at that time) and his
desire to make his acquaintance; which he scarcely dared ask; for he had
nothing to offer in return; but if Mr Nicholas Greene would condescend to
visit him, a coach and four would be at the corner of Fetter Lane at
whatever hour Mr Greene chose to appoint, and bring him safely to Orlando's
house. One may fill up the phrases which then followed; and figure Orlando's
delight when, in no long time, Mr Greene signified his acceptance of the
Noble Lord's invitation; took his place in the coach and was set down in the
hall to the south of the main building punctually at seven o'clock on
Monday, April the twenty-first.
Many Kings, Queens, and Ambassadors had been received there; Judges had
stood there in their ermine. The loveliest ladies of the land had come
there; and the sternest warriors. Banners hung there which had been at
Flodden and at Agincourt. There were displayed the painted coats of arms
with their lions and their leopards and their coronets. There were the long
tables where the gold and silver plate was stood; and there the vast
fireplaces of wrought Italian marble where nightly a whole oak tree, with
its million leaves and its nests of rook and wren, was burnt to ashes.
Nicholas Greene, the poet stood there now, plainly dressed in his slouched
hat and black doublet, carrying in one hand a small bag.
That Orlando as he hastened to greet him was slightly disappointed was
inevitable. The poet was not above middle height; was of a mean figure; was
lean and stooped somewhat, and, stumbling over the mastiff on entering, the
dog bit him. Moreover, Orlando for all his knowledge of mankind was puzzled
where to place him. There was something about him which belonged neither to
servant, squire, or noble. The head with its rounded forehead and beaked
nose was fine, but the chin receded. The eyes were brilliant, but the lips
hung loose and slobbered. It was the expression of the face - as a whole,
however, that was disquieting. There was none of that stately composure
which makes the faces of the nobility so pleasing to look at; nor had it
anything of the dignified servility of a well-trained domestic's face; it
was a face seamed, puckered, and drawn together. Poet though he was, it
seemed as if he were more used to scold than to flatter; to quarrel than to
coo; to scramble than to ride; to struggle than to rest; to hate than to
love. This, too, was shown by the quickness of his movements; and by
something fiery and suspicious in his glance. Orlando was somewhat taken
aback. But they went to dinner.
Here, Orlando, who usually took such things for granted, was, for the
first time, unaccountably ashamed of the number of his servants and of the
splendour of his table. Stranger still, he bethought him with pride - for
the thought was generally distasteful - of that great grandmother Moll who
had milked the cows. He was about somehow to allude to this humble woman and
her milk-pails, when the poet forestalled him by saying that it was odd,
seeing how common the name of Greene was, that the family had come over with
the Conqueror and was of the highest nobility in France. Unfortunately, they
had come down in the world and done little more than leave their name to the
royal borough of Greenwich. Further talk of the same sort, about lost
castles, coats of arms, cousins who were baronets in the north,
intermarriage with noble families in the west, how some Greens spelt the
name with an e at the end, and others without, lasted till the venison was
on the table. Then Orlando contrived to say something of Grandmother Moll
and her cows, and had eased his heart a little of its burden by the time the
wild fowl were before them. But it was not until the Malmsey was passing
freely that Orlando dared mention what he could not help thinking a more
important matter than the Greens or the cows; that is to say the sacred
subject of poetry. At the first mention of the word, the poet's eyes flashed
fire; he dropped the fine gentleman airs he had worn; thumped his glass on
the table, and launched into one of the longest, most intricate, most
passionate, and bitterest stories that Orlando had ever heard, save from the
lips of a jilted woman, about a play of his; another poet; and a critic. Of
the nature of poetry itself, Orlando only gathered that it was harder to
sell than prose, and though the lines were shorter took longer in the
writing. So the talk went on with ramifications interminable, until Orlando
ventured to hint that he had himself been so rash as to write - but here the
poet leapt from his chair. A mouse had squeaked in the wainscot, he said.
The truth was, he explained, that his nerves were in a state where a mouse's
squeak upset them for a fortnight. Doubtless the house was full of vermin,
but Orlando had not heard them. The poet then gave Orlando the full story of
his health for the past ten years or so. It had been so bad that one could
only marvel that he still lived. He had had the palsy, the gout, the ague,
the dropsy, and the three sorts of fever in succession; added to which he
had an enlarged heart, a great spleen, and a diseased liver. But, above all,
he had, he told Orlando, sensations in his spine which defied description.
There was one knob about the third from the top which burnt like fire;
another about second from the bottom which was cold as ice. Sometimes he
woke with a brain like lead; at others it was as if a thousand wax tapers
were alight and people were throwing fireworks inside him. He could feel a
rose leaf through his mattress, he said; and knew his way almost about
London by the feel of the cobbles. Altogether he was a piece of machinery so
finely made and curiously put together (here he raised his hand as if
unconsciously, and indeed it was of the finest shape imaginable) that it
confounded him to think that he had only sold five hundred copies of his
poem, but that of course was largely due to the conspiracy against him. All
he could say, he concluded, banging his fist upon the table, was that the
art of poetry was dead in England.
How that could be with Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Browne, Donne,
all now writing or just having written, Orlando, reeling off the names of
his favourite heroes, could not think.
Greene laughed sardonically. Shakespeare, he admitted, had written some
scenes that were well enough; but he had taken them chiefly from Marlowe.
Marlowe was a likely boy, but what could you say of a lad who died before he
was thirty? As for Browne, he was for writing poetry in prose, and people
soon got tired of such conceits as that. Donne was a mountebank who wrapped
up his lack of meaning in hard words. The gulls were taken in; but the style
would be out of fashion twelve months hence. As for Ben Jonson - Ben Jonson
was a friend of his and he never spoke ill of his friends.
No, he concluded, the great age of literature is past; the great age of
literature was the Greek; the Elizabethan age was inferior in every respect
to the Greek. In such ages men cherished a divine ambition which he might
call La Gloire (he pronounced it Glawr, so that Orlando did not at first
catch his meaning). Now all young writers were in the pay of the booksellers
and poured out any trash that would sell. Shakespeare was the chief offender
in this way and Shakespeare was already paying the penalty. Their own age,
he said, was marked by precious conceits and wild experiments - neither of
which the Greeks would have tolerated for a moment. Much though it hurt him
to say it - for he loved literature as he loved his life - he could see no
good in the present and had no hope for the future. Here he poured himself
out another glass of wine.
Orlando was shocked by these doctrines; yet could not help observing
that the critic himself seemed by no means downcast. On the contrary, the
more he denounced his own time, the more complacent he became. He could
remember, he said, a night at the Cock Tavern in Fleet Street when Kit
Marlowe was there and some others. Kit was in high feather, rather drunk,
which he easily became, and in a mood to say silly things. He could see him
now, brandishing his glass at the company and hiccoughing out, "Stap my
vitals, Bill" (this was to Shakespeare), "there's a great wave coming and
you're on the top of it," by which he meant, Greene explained, that they
were trembling on the verge of a great age in English literature, and that
Shakespeare was to be a poet of some importance. Happily for himself, he was
killed two nights later in a drunken brawl, and so did not live to see how
this prediction turned out. "Poor foolish fellow," said Greene, "to go and
say a thing like that. A great age, forsooth - the Elizabethan a great age!"
"So, my dear Lord," he continued, settling himself comfortably in his
chair and rubbing the wine-glass between his fingers, "we must make the best
of it, cherish the past and honour those writers - there are still a few of
'em - who take antiquity for their model and write, not for pay but for
Glawr." (Orlando could have wished him a better accent.) "Glawr," said
Greene, "is the spur of noble minds. Had I a pension of three hundred pounds
a year paid quarterly, I would live for Glawr alone. I would lie in bed
every morning reading Cicero. I would imitate his style so that you couldn't
tell the difference between us. That's what I call fine writing," said
Greene; "that's what I call Glawr. But it's necessary to have a pension to
do it."
By this time Orlando had abandoned all hope of discussing his own work
with the poet; but this mattered the less as the talk now got upon the lives
and characters of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and the rest, all of whom Greene
had known intimately and about whom he had a thousand anecdotes of the most
amusing kind to tell. Orlando had never laughed so much in his life. These,
then, were his gods! Half were drunken and all were amorous. Most of them
quarrelled with their wives; not one of them was above a lie or an intrigue
of the most paltry kind. Their poetry was scribbled down on the backs of
washing bills held to the heads of printer's devils at the street door. Thus
Hamlet went to press; thus Lear; thus Othello. No wonder, as Greene said,
that these plays show the faults they do. The rest of the time was spent in
carousings and junketings in taverns and in beer gardens, when things were
said that passed belief for wit, and things were done that made the utmost
frolic of the courtiers seem pale in comparison. All this Greene told with a
spirit that roused Orlando to the highest pitch of delight. He had a power
of mimicry that brought the dead to life, and could say the finest things of
books provided they were written three hundred years ago.
So time passed, and Orlando felt for his guest a strange mixture of
liking and contempt, of admiration and pity, as well as something too
indefinite to be called by any one name, but had something of fear in it and
something of fascination. He talked incessantly about himself, yet was such
good company that one could listen to the story of his ague for ever. Then
he was so witty; then he was so irreverent; then he made so free with the
names of God and Woman; then he was so full of queer crafts and had such
strange lore in his head; could make salad in three hundred different ways;
knew all that could be known of the mixing of wines; played half-a-dozen
musical instruments, and was the first person, and perhaps the last, to
toast cheese in the great Italian fireplace. That he did not know a geranium
from a carnation, an oak from a birch tree, a mastiff from a greyhound, a
teg from a ewe, wheat from barley, plough land from fallow; was ignorant of
the rotation of the crops; thought oranges grew underground and turnips on
trees; preferred any townscape to any landscape, - all this and much more
amazed Orlando, who had never met anybody of his kind before. Even the
maids, who despised him, tittered at his jokes, and the men-servants, who
loathed him, hung about to hear his stories. Indeed, the house had never
been so lively as now that he was there - all of which gave Orlando a great
deal to think about, and caused him to compare this way of life with the
old. He recalled the sort of talk he had been used to about the King of
Spain's apoplexy or the mating of a bitch; he bethought him how the day
passed between the stables and the dressing closet; he remembered how the
Lords snored over their wine and hated anybody who woke them up. He
bethought him how active and valiant they were in body; how slothful and
timid in mind. Worried by these thoughts, and unable to strike a proper
balance, he came to the conclusion that he had admitted to his house a
plaguey spirit of unrest that would never suffer him to sleep sound again.
At the same moment, Nick Greene came to precisely the opposite
conclusion. Lying in bed of a morning on the softest pillows between the
smoothest sheets and looking out of his oriel window upon turf which for
centuries had known neither dandelion nor dock weed, he thought that unless
he could somehow make his escape, he should be smothered alive. Getting up
and hearing the pigeons coo, dressing and hearing the fountains fall, he
thought that unless he could hear the drays roar upon the cobbles of Fleet
Street, he would never write another line. If this goes on much longer, he
thought, hearing the footman mend the fire and spread the table with silver
dishes next door, I shall fall asleep and (here he gave a prodigious yawn)
sleeping die.
So he sought Orlando in his room, and explained that he had not been
able to sleep a wink all night because of the silence. (Indeed, the house
was surrounded by a park fifteen miles in circumference and a wall ten feet
high.) Silence, he said, was of all things the most oppressive to his
nerves. He would end his visit, by Orlando's leave, that very morning.
Orlando felt some relief at this, yet also a great reluctance to let him go.
The house, he thought, would seem very dull without him. On parting (for he
had never yet liked to mention the subject), he had the temerity to press
his play upon the Death of Hercules upon the poet and ask his opinion of it.
The poet took it; muttered something about Glawr and Cicero, which Orlando
cut short by promising to pay the pension quarterly; whereupon Greene, with
many protestations of affection, jumped into the coach and was gone.
The great hall had never seemed so large, so splendid, or so empty as
the chariot rolled away. Orlando knew that he would never have the heart to
make toasted cheese in the Italian fireplace again. He would never have the
wit to crack jokes about Italian pictures; never have the skill to mix punch
as it should be mixed; a thousand good quips and cranks would be lost to
him. Yet what a relief to be out of the sound of that querulous voice, what
a luxury to be alone once more, so he could not help reflecting, as he
unloosed the mastiff which had been tied up these six weeks because it never
saw the poet without biting him.
Nick Greene was set down at the corner of Fetter Lane that same
afternoon, and found things going on much as he had left them. Mrs Greene,
that is to say, was giving birth to a baby in one room; Tom Fletcher was
drinking gin in another. Books were tumbled all about the floor; dinner -
such as it was - was set on a dressing-table where the children had been
making mud pies. But this, Greene felt, was the atmosphere for writing, here
he could write, and write he did. The subject was made for him. A noble Lord
at home. A visit to a Nobleman in the country - his new poem was to have
some such title as that. Seizing the pen with which his little boy was
tickling the cat's ears, and dipping it in the egg-cup which served for
inkpot, Greene dashed off a very spirited satire there and then. It was so
done to a turn that no one could doubt that the young Lord who was roasted
was Orlando; his most private sayings and doings, his enthusiasms and
follies, down to the very colour of his hair and the foreign way he had of
rolling his r's, were there to the life. And if there had been any doubt
about it, Greene clinched the matter by introducing, with scarcely any
disguise, passages from that aristocratic tragedy, the Death of Hercules,
which he found as he expected, wordy and bombastic in the extreme.
The pamphlet, which ran at once into several editions, and paid the
expenses of Mrs Greene's tenth lying-in, was soon sent by friends who take
care of such matters to Orlando himself. When he had read it, which he did
with deadly composure from start to finish, he rang for the footman;
delivered the document to him at the end of a pair of tongs; bade him drop
it in the filthiest heart of the foulest midden on the estate. Then, when
the man was turning to go he stopped him, "Take the swiftest horse in the
stable," he said, "ride for dear life to Harwich. There embark upon a ship
which you will find bound for Norway. Buy for me from the King's own kennels
the finest elk-hounds of the Royal strain, male and female. Bring them back
without delay. For," he murmured, scarcely above his breath as he turned to
his books, "I have done with men."
The footman, who was perfectly trained in his duties, bowed and
disappeared. He fulfilled his task so efficiently that he was back that day
three weeks, leading in his hand a leash of the finest elk-hounds, one of
whom, a female, gave birth that very night under the dinner-table to a
litter of eight fine puppies. Orlando had them brought to his bedchamber.
"For," he said, "I have done with men."
Nevertheless, he paid the pension quarterly.
Thus, at the age of thirty, or thereabouts, this young Nobleman had not
only had every experience that life has to offer, but had seen the
worthlessness of them all. Love and ambition, women and poets were all
equally vain. Literature was a farce. The night after reading Greene's Visit
to a Nobleman in the Country, he burnt in a great conflagration fifty-seven
poetical works, only retaining "The Oak Tree", which was his boyish dream
and very short. Two things alone remained to him in which he now put any
trust: dogs and nature; an elk-hound and a rose bush. The world, in all its
variety, life in all its complexity, had shrunk to that. Dogs and a bush
were the whole of it. So feeling quit of a vast mountain of illusion, and
very naked in consequence, he called his hounds to him and strode through
the Park.
So long had he been secluded, writing and reading, that he had half
forgotten the amenities of nature, which in June can be great. When he
reached that high mound whence on fine days half of England with a slice of
Wales and Scotland thrown in can be seen, he flung himself under his
favourite oak tree and felt that if he need never speak to another man or
woman so long as he lived; if his dogs did not develop the faculty of
speech; if he never met a poet or a Princess again, he might make out what
years remained to him in tolerable content.
Here he came then, day after day, week after week, month after month,
year after year. He saw the beech trees turn golden and the young ferns
unfurl; he saw the moon sickle and then circular; he saw - but probably the
reader can imagine the passage which should follow and how every tree and
plant in the neighbourhood is described first green, then golden; how moons
rise and suns set; how spring follows winter and autumn summer; how night
succeeds day and day night; how there is first a storm and then fine
weather; how things remain much as they are for two or three hundred years
or so, except for a little dust and a few cobwebs which one old woman can
sweep up in half an hour; a conclusion which, one cannot help feeling, might
have been reached more quickly by the simple statement that "Time passed"
(here the exact amount could be indicated in brackets) and nothing whatever
happened.
But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom
and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind
of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the
body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human
spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on
the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of
the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the
clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves
fuller investigation. But the biographer, whose interests are, as we have
said, highly restricted, must confine himself to one simple statement: when
a man has reached the age of thirty, as Orlando now had, time when he is
thinking becomes inordinately long; time when he is doing becomes
inordinately short. Thus Orlando gave his orders and did the business of his
vast estates in a flash; but directly he was alone on the mound under the
oak tree, the seconds began to round and fill until it seemed as if they
would never fall. They filled themselves, moreover, with the strangest
variety of objects. For not only did he find himself confronted by problems
which have puzzled the wisest of men, such as What is love? What friendship?
What truth? but directly he came to think about them, his whole past, which
seemed to him of extreme length and variety, rushed into the falling second,
swelled it a dozen times its natural size, coloured it a thousand tints, and
filled it with all the odds and ends in the universe.
In such thinking (or by whatever name it should be called) he spent
months and years of his life. It would be no exaggeration to say that he
would go out after breakfast a man of thirty and come home to dinner a man
of fifty-five at least. Some weeks added a century to his age, others no
more than three seconds at most. Altogether, the task of estimating the
length of human life (of the animals' we presume not to speak) is beyond our
capacity, for directly we say that it is ages long, we are reminded that it
is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground. Of the two forces
which alternately, and what is more confusing still, at the same moment,
dominate our unfortunate numbskulls - brevity and diuturnity - Orlando was
sometimes under the influence of the elephant-footed deity, then of the
gnat-winged fly. Life seemed to him of prodigious length. Yet even so, it
went like a flash. But even when it stretched longest and the moments
swelled biggest and he seemed to wander alone in deserts of vast eternity,
there was no time for the smoothing out and deciphering of those scored
parchments which thirty years among men and women had rolled tight in his
heart and brain. Long before he had done thinking about Love (the oak tree
had put forth its leaves and shaken them to the ground a dozen times in the
process) Ambition would jostle it off the field, to be replaced by
Friendship or Literature. And as the first question had not been settled -
What is Love? - back it would come at the least provocation or none, and
hustle Books or Metaphors of What one lives for into the margin, there to
wait till they saw their chance to rush into the field again. What made the
process still longer was that it was profusely illustrated, not only with
pictures, as that of old Queen Elizabeth, laid on her tapestry couch in
rose-coloured brocade with an ivory snuff-box in her hand and a gold-hilted
sword by her side, but with scents - she was strongly perfumed - and with
sounds; the stags were barking in Richmond Park that winter's day. And so,
the thought of love would be all ambered over with snow and winter; with log
fires burning; with Russian women, gold swords, and the bark of stags; with
old King James' slobbering and fireworks and sacks of treasure in the holds
of Elizabethan sailing ships. Every single thing, once he tried to dislodge
it from its place in his mind, he found thus cumbered with other matter like
the lump of glass which, after a year at the bottom of the sea, is grown
about with bones and dragon-flies, and coins and the tresses of drowned
women.
"Another metaphor by Jupiter!" he would exclaim as he said this (which
will show the disorderly and circuitous way in which his mind worked and
explain why the oak tree flowered and faded so often before he came to any
conclusion about Love). "And what's the point of it?" he would ask himself.
"Why not say simply in so many words?" and then he would try to think for
half an hour, - or was it two years and a half? - how to say simply in so
many words what love is. "A figure like that is manifestly untruthful," he
argued, "for no dragon-fly, unless under very exceptional circumstances,
could live at the bottom of the sea. And if literature is not the Bride and
Bedfellow of Truth, what is she? Confound it all," he cried, "why say
Bedfellow when one's already said Bride? Why not simply say what one means
and leave it?"
So then he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue and so
to propitiate the austere spirit of poetry whom still, though at a great
distance, he could not help reverencing. "The sky is blue," he said, "the
grass is green." Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like
the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the
grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of
hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. "Upon my word," he said (for he had
fallen into the bad habit of speaking aloud), "I don't see that one's more
true than another. Both are utterly false." And he despaired of being able
to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is and fell into a
deep dejection.
And here we may profit by a pause in his soliloquy to reflect how odd
it was to see Orlando stretched there on his elbow on a June day and to
reflect that this fine fellow with all his faculties about him and a healthy
body, witness cheeks and limbs - a man who never thought twice about heading
a charge or fighting a duel - should be so subject to the lethargy of
thought, and rendered so susceptible by it, that when it came to a question
of poetry, or his own competence in it, he was as shy as a little girl
behind her mother's cottage door. In our belief, Greene's ridicule of his
tragedy hurt him as much as the Princess' ridicule of his love. But to
return:
Orlando went on thinking. He kept looking at the grass and at the sky
and trying to bethink him what a true poet, who has his verses published in
London, would say about them. Memory meanwhile (whose habits have already
been described) kept steady before his eyes the face of Nicholas Greene, as
if that sardonic loose-lipped man, treacherous as he had proved himself,
were the Muse in person, and it was to him that Orlando must do homage. So
Orlando, that summer morning, offered him a variety of phrases, some plain,
others figured, and Nick Greene kept shaking his head and sneering and
muttering something about Glawr and Cicero and the death of poetry in our
time. At length, starting to his feet (it was now winter and very cold)
Orlando swore one of the most remarkable oaths of his lifetime, for it bound
him to a servitude than which none is stricter. "I'll be blasted," he said,
"if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Nick
Greene or the Muse. Bad, good, or indifferent, I'll write, from this day
forward, to please myself"; and here he made as if he were tearing a whole
budget of papers across and tossing them in the face of that sneering
loose-lipped man. Upon which, as a cur ducks if you stoop to shy a stone at
him, Memory ducked her effigy of Nick Greene out of sight; and substituted
for it - nothing whatever.
But Orlando, all the same, went on thinking. He had indeed much to
think of. For when he tore the parchment across, he tore, in one rending,
the scrolloping, emblazoned scroll which he had made out in his own favour
in the solitude of his room appointing himself, as the King appoints
Ambassadors, the first poet of his race, the first writer of his age,
conferring eternal immortality upon his soul and granting his body a grave
among laurels and the intangible banners of a people's reverence
perpetually. Eloquent as this all was, he now tore it up and threw it in the
dustbin. "Fame," he said. "is like" (and since there was no Nick Greene to
stop him, he went on to revel in images of which we will choose only one or
two of the quietest) "a braided coat which hampers the limbs; a jacket of
silver which curbs the heart; a painted shield which covers a scarecrow,"
etc. etc. The pith of his phrases was that while fame impedes and
constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark,
ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the
obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where
he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he
alone is truthful; he alone is at peace. And so he sank into a quiet mood,
under the oak tree, the hardness of whose roots, exposed above the ground,
seemed to him rather comfortable than otherwise.
Sunk for a long time in profound thoughts as to the value of obscurity,
and the delight of having no name, but being like a wave which returns to
the deep body of the sea; thinking how obscurity rids the mind of the irk of
envy and spite; how it sets running in the veins the free waters of
generosity and magnanimity; and allows giving and taking without thanks
offered or praise given; which must have been the way of all great poets, he
supposed (though his knowledge of Greek was not enough to bear him out),
for, he thought, Shakespeare must have written like that, and the church
builders built like that, anonymously, needing no thanking or naming, but
only their work in the daytime and a little ale perhaps at night? "What an
admirable life this is," he thought, stretching his limbs out under the oak
tree. "And why not enjoy it this very moment?" The thought struck him like a
bullet. Ambition dropped like a plummet. Rid of the heart-burn of rejected
love, and of vanity rebuked, and all the other stings and pricks which the
nettle-bed of life had burnt upon him when ambitious of fame, but could no
sought its prey, and make the tongue stammer as it declared its love. It was
the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality, so
that Orlando, to whom fortune had given every gift - plate, linen, houses,
men-servants, carpets, beds in profusion - had only to open a book for the
whole vast accumulation to turn to mist. The nine acres of stone which were
his house vanished; one hundred and fifty indoor servants disappeared; his
eighty riding horses became invisible; it would take too long to count the
carpets, sofas, trappings, china, plate, cruets, chafing dishes and other
movables often of beaten gold, which evaporated like so much sea mist under
the miasma. So it was, and Orlando would sit by himself, reading, a naked
man.
The disease gained rapidly upon him now in his solitude. He would read
often six hours into the night; and when they came to him for orders about
the slaughtering of cattle or the harvesting of wheat, he would push away
his folio and look as if he did not understand what was said to him. This
was bad enough and wrung the hearts of Hall, the falconer, of Giles, the
groom, of Mrs Grimsditch, the housekeeper, of Mr Dupper, the chaplain. A
fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave
books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For
once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens it so that
it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the inkpot and
festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. And while this is bad
enough in a poor man, whose only property is a chair and a table set beneath
a leaky roof - for he has not much to lose, after all - the plight of a rich
man, who has houses and cattle, maidservants, asses and linen, and yet
writes books, is pitiable in the extreme. The flavour of it all goes out of
him; he is riddled by hot irons; gnawed by vermin. He would give every penny
he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and
become famous; yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a
well-turned line. So he falls into consumption and sickness, blows his
brains out, turns his face to the wall. It matters not in what attitude they
find him. He has passed through the gates of Death and known the flames of
Hell.
Happily, Orlando was of a strong constitution and the disease (for
reasons presently to be given) never broke him down as it has broken many of
his peers. But he was deeply smitten with it, as the sequel shows. For when
he had read for an hour or so in Sir Thomas Browne, and the bark of the stag
and the call of the night watchman showed that it was the dead of night and
all safe asleep, he crossed the room, took a silver key from his pocket and
unlocked the doors of a great inlaid cabinet which stood in the corner.
Within were some fifty drawers of cedar wood and upon each was a paper
neatly written in Orlando's hand. He paused, as if hesitating which to open.
One was inscribed "The Death of Ajax", another "The Birth of Pyramus",
another "Iphigenia in Aulis", another "The Death of Hippolytus", another
"Meleager", another "The Return of Odysseus", - in fact there was scarcely a
single drawer that lacked the name of some mythological personage at a
crisis of his career. In each drawer lay a document of considerable size all
written over in Orlando's hand. The truth was that Orlando had been
afflicted thus for many years. Never had any boy begged apples as Orlando
begged paper; nor sweetmeats as he begged ink. Stealing away from talk and
games, he had hidden himself behind curtains, in priest's holes, or in the
cupboard behind his mother's bedroom which had a great hole in the floor and
smelt horribly of starling's dung, with an inkhorn in one hand, a pen in
another, and on his knee a roll of paper. Thus had been written, before he
was turned twenty-five, some forty-seven plays, histories, romances, poems;
some in prose, some in verse; some in French, some in Italian; all romantic,
and all long. One he had had printed by John Ball of the Feathers and
Coronet opposite St Paul's Cross, Cheapside; but though the sight of it gave
him extreme delight, he had never dared show it even to his mother, since to
write, much more to publish, was, he knew, for a nobleman an inexpiable
disgrace.
Now, however, that it was the dead of night and he was alone, he chose
from this repository one thick document called "Xenophila a Tragedy" or some
such title, and one thin one, called simply "The Oak Tree" (this was the
only monosyllabic title among the lot), and then he approached the inkhorn,
fingered the quill, and made other such passes as those addicted to this
vice begin their rites with. But he paused.
As this pause was of extreme significance in his history, more so,
indeed, than many acts which bring men to their knees and make rivers run
with blood, it behoves us to ask why he paused; and to reply, after due
reflection, that it was for some such reason as this. Nature, who has played
so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds,
of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often of the most
incongruous, for the poet has a butcher's face and the butcher a poet's;
nature, who delights in muddle and mystery, so that even now (the first of
November 1927) we know not why we go upstairs, or why we come down again,
our most daily movements are like the passage of a ship on an unknown sea,
and the sailors at the mast-head ask, pointing their glasses to the horizon;
Is there land or is there none? to which, if we are prophets, we make answer
"Yes"; if we are truthful we say "No"; nature, who has so much to answer for
besides the perhaps unwieldy length of this sentence, has further
complicated her task and added to our confusion by providing not only a
perfect rag-bag of odds and ends within us - a piece of a policeman's
trousers lying cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandra's wedding veil - but has
contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a
single thread. Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that.
Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know
not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement
in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand
towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright,
now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen
of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind. Instead of being a
single, downright, bluff piece of work of which no man need feel ashamed,
our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings,
a rising and falling of lights. Thus it was that Orlando, dipping his pen in
the ink, saw the mocking face of the lost Princess and asked himself a
million questions instantly which were as arrows dipped in gall. Where was
she; and why had she left him? Was the Ambassador her uncle or her lover?
Had they plotted? Was she forced? Was she married? Was she dead? - all of
which so drove their venom into him that, as if to vent his agony somewhere,
he plunged his quill so deep into the inkhorn that the ink spirted over the
table, which act, explain it how one may (and no explanation perhaps is
possible - Memory is inexplicable), at once substituted for the face of the
Princess a face of a very different sort. But whose was it, he asked
himself? And he had to wait, perhaps half a minute, looking at the new
picture which lay on top of the old, as one lantern slide is half seen
through the next, before he could say to himself, "This is the face of that
rather fat, shabby man who sat in Twitchett's room ever so many years ago
when old Queen Bess came here to dine; and I saw him," Orlando continued,
catching at another of those little coloured rags, "sitting at the table, as
I peeped in on my way downstairs, and he had the most amazing eyes," said
Orlando, "that ever were, but who the devil was he?" Orlando asked, for here
Memory added to the forehead and eyes, first, a coarse, grease-stained
ruffle, then a brown doublet, and finally a pair of thick boots such as
citizens wear in Cheapside. "Not a Nobleman; not one of us," said Orlando
(which he would not have said aloud, for he was the most courteous of
gentlemen; but it shows what an effect noble birth has upon the mind and
incidentally how difficult it is for a nobleman to be a writer), "a poet, I
dare say." By all the laws, Memory, having disturbed him sufficiently,
should now have blotted the whole thing out completely, or have fetched up
something so idiotic and out of keeping - like a dog chasing a cat or an old
woman blowing her nose into a red cotton handkerchief - that, in despair of
keeping pace with her vagaries, Orlando should have struck his pen in
earnest against his paper. (For we can, if we have the resolution, turn the
hussy, Memory, and all her ragtag and bobtail out of the house.) But Orlando
paused. Memory still held before him the image of a shabby man with big,
bright eyes. Still he looked, still he paused. It is these pauses that are
our undoing. It is then that sedition enters the fortress and our troops
rise in insurrection. Once before he had paused, and love with its horrid
rout, its shawms, its cymbals, and its heads with gory locks torn from the
shoulders had burst in. From love he had suffered the tortures of the
damned. Now, again, he paused, and into the breach thus made, leapt
Ambition, the harridan, and Poetry, the witch, and Desire of Fame, the
strumpet; all joined hands and made of his heart their dancing ground.
Standing upright in the solitude of his room, he vowed that he would be the
first poet of his race and bring immortal lustre upon his name. He said
(reciting the names and exploits of his ancestors) that Sir Boris had fought
and killed the Paynim; Sir Gawain, the Turk; Sir Miles, the Pole; Sir
Andrew, the Frank; Sir Richard, the Austrian; Sir Jordan, the Frenchman; and
Sir Herbert, the Spaniard. But of all that killing and campaigning, that
drinking and love-making, that spending and hunting and riding and eating,
what remained? A skull; a finger. Whereas, he said, turning to the page of
Sir Thomas Browne, which lay open upon the table - and again he paused. Like
an incantation rising from all parts of the room, from the night wind and
the moonlight, rolled the divine melody of those words which, lest they
should outstare this page, we will leave where they lie entombed, not dead,
embalmed rather, so fresh is their colour, so sound their breathing - and
Orlando, comparing that achievement with those of his ancestors, cried out
that they and their deeds were dust and ashes, but this man and his words
were immortal.
He soon perceived, however, that the battles which Sir Miles and the
rest had waged against armed knights to win a kingdom, were not half so
arduous as this which he now undertook to win immortality against the
English language. Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition
will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed
good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was
in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at
ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted
his people's parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now
laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic
and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the
fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest
genius or the greatest fool in the world.
It was to settle this last question that he decided after many months
of such feverish labour, to break the solitude of years and communicate with
the outer world. He had a friend in London, one Giles Isham, of Norfolk,
who, though of gentle birth, was acquainted with writers and could doubtless
put him in touch with some member of that blessed, indeed sacred,
fraternity. For, to Orlando in the state he was now in, there was a glory
about a man who had written a book and had it printed, which outshone all
the glories of blood and state. To his imagination it seemed as if even the
bodies of those instinct with such divine thoughts must be transfigured.
They must have aureoles for hair, incense for breath, and roses must grow
between their lips - which was certainly not true either of himself or Mr
Dupper. He could think of no greater happiness than to be allowed to sit
behind a curtain and hear them talk. Even the imagination of that bold and
various discourse made the memory of what he and his courtier friends used
to talk about - a dog, a horse, a woman, a game of cards - seem brutish in
the extreme. He bethought him with pride that he had always been called a
scholar, and sneered at for his love of solitude and books. He had never
been apt at pretty phrases. He would stand stock still, blush, and stride
like a grenadier in a ladies' drawing-room. He had twice fallen, in sheer
abstraction, from his horse. He had broken Lady Winchilsea's fan once while
making a rhyme. Eagerly recalling these and other instances of his unfitness
for the life of society, an ineffable hope, that all the turbulence of his
youth, his clumsiness, his blushes, his long walks, and his love of the
country proved that he himself belonged to the sacred race rather than to
the noble - was by birth a writer, rather than an aristocrat - possessed
him. For the first time since the night of the great flood he was happy.
He now commissioned Mr Isham of Norfolk to deliver to Mr Nicholas
Greene of Clifford's Inn a document which set forth Orlando's admiration for
his works (for Nick Greene was a very famous writer at that time) and his
desire to make his acquaintance; which he scarcely dared ask; for he had
nothing to offer in return; but if Mr Nicholas Greene would condescend to
visit him, a coach and four would be at the corner of Fetter Lane at
whatever hour Mr Greene chose to appoint, and bring him safely to Orlando's
house. One may fill up the phrases which then followed; and figure Orlando's
delight when, in no long time, Mr Greene signified his acceptance of the
Noble Lord's invitation; took his place in the coach and was set down in the
hall to the south of the main building punctually at seven o'clock on
Monday, April the twenty-first.
Many Kings, Queens, and Ambassadors had been received there; Judges had
stood there in their ermine. The loveliest ladies of the land had come
there; and the sternest warriors. Banners hung there which had been at
Flodden and at Agincourt. There were displayed the painted coats of arms
with their lions and their leopards and their coronets. There were the long
tables where the gold and silver plate was stood; and there the vast
fireplaces of wrought Italian marble where nightly a whole oak tree, with
its million leaves and its nests of rook and wren, was burnt to ashes.
Nicholas Greene, the poet stood there now, plainly dressed in his slouched
hat and black doublet, carrying in one hand a small bag.
That Orlando as he hastened to greet him was slightly disappointed was
inevitable. The poet was not above middle height; was of a mean figure; was
lean and stooped somewhat, and, stumbling over the mastiff on entering, the
dog bit him. Moreover, Orlando for all his knowledge of mankind was puzzled
where to place him. There was something about him which belonged neither to
servant, squire, or noble. The head with its rounded forehead and beaked
nose was fine, but the chin receded. The eyes were brilliant, but the lips
hung loose and slobbered. It was the expression of the face - as a whole,
however, that was disquieting. There was none of that stately composure
which makes the faces of the nobility so pleasing to look at; nor had it
anything of the dignified servility of a well-trained domestic's face; it
was a face seamed, puckered, and drawn together. Poet though he was, it
seemed as if he were more used to scold than to flatter; to quarrel than to
coo; to scramble than to ride; to struggle than to rest; to hate than to
love. This, too, was shown by the quickness of his movements; and by
something fiery and suspicious in his glance. Orlando was somewhat taken
aback. But they went to dinner.
Here, Orlando, who usually took such things for granted, was, for the
first time, unaccountably ashamed of the number of his servants and of the
splendour of his table. Stranger still, he bethought him with pride - for
the thought was generally distasteful - of that great grandmother Moll who
had milked the cows. He was about somehow to allude to this humble woman and
her milk-pails, when the poet forestalled him by saying that it was odd,
seeing how common the name of Greene was, that the family had come over with
the Conqueror and was of the highest nobility in France. Unfortunately, they
had come down in the world and done little more than leave their name to the
royal borough of Greenwich. Further talk of the same sort, about lost
castles, coats of arms, cousins who were baronets in the north,
intermarriage with noble families in the west, how some Greens spelt the
name with an e at the end, and others without, lasted till the venison was
on the table. Then Orlando contrived to say something of Grandmother Moll
and her cows, and had eased his heart a little of its burden by the time the
wild fowl were before them. But it was not until the Malmsey was passing
freely that Orlando dared mention what he could not help thinking a more
important matter than the Greens or the cows; that is to say the sacred
subject of poetry. At the first mention of the word, the poet's eyes flashed
fire; he dropped the fine gentleman airs he had worn; thumped his glass on
the table, and launched into one of the longest, most intricate, most
passionate, and bitterest stories that Orlando had ever heard, save from the
lips of a jilted woman, about a play of his; another poet; and a critic. Of
the nature of poetry itself, Orlando only gathered that it was harder to
sell than prose, and though the lines were shorter took longer in the
writing. So the talk went on with ramifications interminable, until Orlando
ventured to hint that he had himself been so rash as to write - but here the
poet leapt from his chair. A mouse had squeaked in the wainscot, he said.
The truth was, he explained, that his nerves were in a state where a mouse's
squeak upset them for a fortnight. Doubtless the house was full of vermin,
but Orlando had not heard them. The poet then gave Orlando the full story of
his health for the past ten years or so. It had been so bad that one could
only marvel that he still lived. He had had the palsy, the gout, the ague,
the dropsy, and the three sorts of fever in succession; added to which he
had an enlarged heart, a great spleen, and a diseased liver. But, above all,
he had, he told Orlando, sensations in his spine which defied description.
There was one knob about the third from the top which burnt like fire;
another about second from the bottom which was cold as ice. Sometimes he
woke with a brain like lead; at others it was as if a thousand wax tapers
were alight and people were throwing fireworks inside him. He could feel a
rose leaf through his mattress, he said; and knew his way almost about
London by the feel of the cobbles. Altogether he was a piece of machinery so
finely made and curiously put together (here he raised his hand as if
unconsciously, and indeed it was of the finest shape imaginable) that it
confounded him to think that he had only sold five hundred copies of his
poem, but that of course was largely due to the conspiracy against him. All
he could say, he concluded, banging his fist upon the table, was that the
art of poetry was dead in England.
How that could be with Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Browne, Donne,
all now writing or just having written, Orlando, reeling off the names of
his favourite heroes, could not think.
Greene laughed sardonically. Shakespeare, he admitted, had written some
scenes that were well enough; but he had taken them chiefly from Marlowe.
Marlowe was a likely boy, but what could you say of a lad who died before he
was thirty? As for Browne, he was for writing poetry in prose, and people
soon got tired of such conceits as that. Donne was a mountebank who wrapped
up his lack of meaning in hard words. The gulls were taken in; but the style
would be out of fashion twelve months hence. As for Ben Jonson - Ben Jonson
was a friend of his and he never spoke ill of his friends.
No, he concluded, the great age of literature is past; the great age of
literature was the Greek; the Elizabethan age was inferior in every respect
to the Greek. In such ages men cherished a divine ambition which he might
call La Gloire (he pronounced it Glawr, so that Orlando did not at first
catch his meaning). Now all young writers were in the pay of the booksellers
and poured out any trash that would sell. Shakespeare was the chief offender
in this way and Shakespeare was already paying the penalty. Their own age,
he said, was marked by precious conceits and wild experiments - neither of
which the Greeks would have tolerated for a moment. Much though it hurt him
to say it - for he loved literature as he loved his life - he could see no
good in the present and had no hope for the future. Here he poured himself
out another glass of wine.
Orlando was shocked by these doctrines; yet could not help observing
that the critic himself seemed by no means downcast. On the contrary, the
more he denounced his own time, the more complacent he became. He could
remember, he said, a night at the Cock Tavern in Fleet Street when Kit
Marlowe was there and some others. Kit was in high feather, rather drunk,
which he easily became, and in a mood to say silly things. He could see him
now, brandishing his glass at the company and hiccoughing out, "Stap my
vitals, Bill" (this was to Shakespeare), "there's a great wave coming and
you're on the top of it," by which he meant, Greene explained, that they
were trembling on the verge of a great age in English literature, and that
Shakespeare was to be a poet of some importance. Happily for himself, he was
killed two nights later in a drunken brawl, and so did not live to see how
this prediction turned out. "Poor foolish fellow," said Greene, "to go and
say a thing like that. A great age, forsooth - the Elizabethan a great age!"
"So, my dear Lord," he continued, settling himself comfortably in his
chair and rubbing the wine-glass between his fingers, "we must make the best
of it, cherish the past and honour those writers - there are still a few of
'em - who take antiquity for their model and write, not for pay but for
Glawr." (Orlando could have wished him a better accent.) "Glawr," said
Greene, "is the spur of noble minds. Had I a pension of three hundred pounds
a year paid quarterly, I would live for Glawr alone. I would lie in bed
every morning reading Cicero. I would imitate his style so that you couldn't
tell the difference between us. That's what I call fine writing," said
Greene; "that's what I call Glawr. But it's necessary to have a pension to
do it."
By this time Orlando had abandoned all hope of discussing his own work
with the poet; but this mattered the less as the talk now got upon the lives
and characters of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and the rest, all of whom Greene
had known intimately and about whom he had a thousand anecdotes of the most
amusing kind to tell. Orlando had never laughed so much in his life. These,
then, were his gods! Half were drunken and all were amorous. Most of them
quarrelled with their wives; not one of them was above a lie or an intrigue
of the most paltry kind. Their poetry was scribbled down on the backs of
washing bills held to the heads of printer's devils at the street door. Thus
Hamlet went to press; thus Lear; thus Othello. No wonder, as Greene said,
that these plays show the faults they do. The rest of the time was spent in
carousings and junketings in taverns and in beer gardens, when things were
said that passed belief for wit, and things were done that made the utmost
frolic of the courtiers seem pale in comparison. All this Greene told with a
spirit that roused Orlando to the highest pitch of delight. He had a power
of mimicry that brought the dead to life, and could say the finest things of
books provided they were written three hundred years ago.
So time passed, and Orlando felt for his guest a strange mixture of
liking and contempt, of admiration and pity, as well as something too
indefinite to be called by any one name, but had something of fear in it and
something of fascination. He talked incessantly about himself, yet was such
good company that one could listen to the story of his ague for ever. Then
he was so witty; then he was so irreverent; then he made so free with the
names of God and Woman; then he was so full of queer crafts and had such
strange lore in his head; could make salad in three hundred different ways;
knew all that could be known of the mixing of wines; played half-a-dozen
musical instruments, and was the first person, and perhaps the last, to
toast cheese in the great Italian fireplace. That he did not know a geranium
from a carnation, an oak from a birch tree, a mastiff from a greyhound, a
teg from a ewe, wheat from barley, plough land from fallow; was ignorant of
the rotation of the crops; thought oranges grew underground and turnips on
trees; preferred any townscape to any landscape, - all this and much more
amazed Orlando, who had never met anybody of his kind before. Even the
maids, who despised him, tittered at his jokes, and the men-servants, who
loathed him, hung about to hear his stories. Indeed, the house had never
been so lively as now that he was there - all of which gave Orlando a great
deal to think about, and caused him to compare this way of life with the
old. He recalled the sort of talk he had been used to about the King of
Spain's apoplexy or the mating of a bitch; he bethought him how the day
passed between the stables and the dressing closet; he remembered how the
Lords snored over their wine and hated anybody who woke them up. He
bethought him how active and valiant they were in body; how slothful and
timid in mind. Worried by these thoughts, and unable to strike a proper
balance, he came to the conclusion that he had admitted to his house a
plaguey spirit of unrest that would never suffer him to sleep sound again.
At the same moment, Nick Greene came to precisely the opposite
conclusion. Lying in bed of a morning on the softest pillows between the
smoothest sheets and looking out of his oriel window upon turf which for
centuries had known neither dandelion nor dock weed, he thought that unless
he could somehow make his escape, he should be smothered alive. Getting up
and hearing the pigeons coo, dressing and hearing the fountains fall, he
thought that unless he could hear the drays roar upon the cobbles of Fleet
Street, he would never write another line. If this goes on much longer, he
thought, hearing the footman mend the fire and spread the table with silver
dishes next door, I shall fall asleep and (here he gave a prodigious yawn)
sleeping die.
So he sought Orlando in his room, and explained that he had not been
able to sleep a wink all night because of the silence. (Indeed, the house
was surrounded by a park fifteen miles in circumference and a wall ten feet
high.) Silence, he said, was of all things the most oppressive to his
nerves. He would end his visit, by Orlando's leave, that very morning.
Orlando felt some relief at this, yet also a great reluctance to let him go.
The house, he thought, would seem very dull without him. On parting (for he
had never yet liked to mention the subject), he had the temerity to press
his play upon the Death of Hercules upon the poet and ask his opinion of it.
The poet took it; muttered something about Glawr and Cicero, which Orlando
cut short by promising to pay the pension quarterly; whereupon Greene, with
many protestations of affection, jumped into the coach and was gone.
The great hall had never seemed so large, so splendid, or so empty as
the chariot rolled away. Orlando knew that he would never have the heart to
make toasted cheese in the Italian fireplace again. He would never have the
wit to crack jokes about Italian pictures; never have the skill to mix punch
as it should be mixed; a thousand good quips and cranks would be lost to
him. Yet what a relief to be out of the sound of that querulous voice, what
a luxury to be alone once more, so he could not help reflecting, as he
unloosed the mastiff which had been tied up these six weeks because it never
saw the poet without biting him.
Nick Greene was set down at the corner of Fetter Lane that same
afternoon, and found things going on much as he had left them. Mrs Greene,
that is to say, was giving birth to a baby in one room; Tom Fletcher was
drinking gin in another. Books were tumbled all about the floor; dinner -
such as it was - was set on a dressing-table where the children had been
making mud pies. But this, Greene felt, was the atmosphere for writing, here
he could write, and write he did. The subject was made for him. A noble Lord
at home. A visit to a Nobleman in the country - his new poem was to have
some such title as that. Seizing the pen with which his little boy was
tickling the cat's ears, and dipping it in the egg-cup which served for
inkpot, Greene dashed off a very spirited satire there and then. It was so
done to a turn that no one could doubt that the young Lord who was roasted
was Orlando; his most private sayings and doings, his enthusiasms and
follies, down to the very colour of his hair and the foreign way he had of
rolling his r's, were there to the life. And if there had been any doubt
about it, Greene clinched the matter by introducing, with scarcely any
disguise, passages from that aristocratic tragedy, the Death of Hercules,
which he found as he expected, wordy and bombastic in the extreme.
The pamphlet, which ran at once into several editions, and paid the
expenses of Mrs Greene's tenth lying-in, was soon sent by friends who take
care of such matters to Orlando himself. When he had read it, which he did
with deadly composure from start to finish, he rang for the footman;
delivered the document to him at the end of a pair of tongs; bade him drop
it in the filthiest heart of the foulest midden on the estate. Then, when
the man was turning to go he stopped him, "Take the swiftest horse in the
stable," he said, "ride for dear life to Harwich. There embark upon a ship
which you will find bound for Norway. Buy for me from the King's own kennels
the finest elk-hounds of the Royal strain, male and female. Bring them back
without delay. For," he murmured, scarcely above his breath as he turned to
his books, "I have done with men."
The footman, who was perfectly trained in his duties, bowed and
disappeared. He fulfilled his task so efficiently that he was back that day
three weeks, leading in his hand a leash of the finest elk-hounds, one of
whom, a female, gave birth that very night under the dinner-table to a
litter of eight fine puppies. Orlando had them brought to his bedchamber.
"For," he said, "I have done with men."
Nevertheless, he paid the pension quarterly.
Thus, at the age of thirty, or thereabouts, this young Nobleman had not
only had every experience that life has to offer, but had seen the
worthlessness of them all. Love and ambition, women and poets were all
equally vain. Literature was a farce. The night after reading Greene's Visit
to a Nobleman in the Country, he burnt in a great conflagration fifty-seven
poetical works, only retaining "The Oak Tree", which was his boyish dream
and very short. Two things alone remained to him in which he now put any
trust: dogs and nature; an elk-hound and a rose bush. The world, in all its
variety, life in all its complexity, had shrunk to that. Dogs and a bush
were the whole of it. So feeling quit of a vast mountain of illusion, and
very naked in consequence, he called his hounds to him and strode through
the Park.
So long had he been secluded, writing and reading, that he had half
forgotten the amenities of nature, which in June can be great. When he
reached that high mound whence on fine days half of England with a slice of
Wales and Scotland thrown in can be seen, he flung himself under his
favourite oak tree and felt that if he need never speak to another man or
woman so long as he lived; if his dogs did not develop the faculty of
speech; if he never met a poet or a Princess again, he might make out what
years remained to him in tolerable content.
Here he came then, day after day, week after week, month after month,
year after year. He saw the beech trees turn golden and the young ferns
unfurl; he saw the moon sickle and then circular; he saw - but probably the
reader can imagine the passage which should follow and how every tree and
plant in the neighbourhood is described first green, then golden; how moons
rise and suns set; how spring follows winter and autumn summer; how night
succeeds day and day night; how there is first a storm and then fine
weather; how things remain much as they are for two or three hundred years
or so, except for a little dust and a few cobwebs which one old woman can
sweep up in half an hour; a conclusion which, one cannot help feeling, might
have been reached more quickly by the simple statement that "Time passed"
(here the exact amount could be indicated in brackets) and nothing whatever
happened.
But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom
and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind
of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the
body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human
spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on
the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of
the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the
clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves
fuller investigation. But the biographer, whose interests are, as we have
said, highly restricted, must confine himself to one simple statement: when
a man has reached the age of thirty, as Orlando now had, time when he is
thinking becomes inordinately long; time when he is doing becomes
inordinately short. Thus Orlando gave his orders and did the business of his
vast estates in a flash; but directly he was alone on the mound under the
oak tree, the seconds began to round and fill until it seemed as if they
would never fall. They filled themselves, moreover, with the strangest
variety of objects. For not only did he find himself confronted by problems
which have puzzled the wisest of men, such as What is love? What friendship?
What truth? but directly he came to think about them, his whole past, which
seemed to him of extreme length and variety, rushed into the falling second,
swelled it a dozen times its natural size, coloured it a thousand tints, and
filled it with all the odds and ends in the universe.
In such thinking (or by whatever name it should be called) he spent
months and years of his life. It would be no exaggeration to say that he
would go out after breakfast a man of thirty and come home to dinner a man
of fifty-five at least. Some weeks added a century to his age, others no
more than three seconds at most. Altogether, the task of estimating the
length of human life (of the animals' we presume not to speak) is beyond our
capacity, for directly we say that it is ages long, we are reminded that it
is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground. Of the two forces
which alternately, and what is more confusing still, at the same moment,
dominate our unfortunate numbskulls - brevity and diuturnity - Orlando was
sometimes under the influence of the elephant-footed deity, then of the
gnat-winged fly. Life seemed to him of prodigious length. Yet even so, it
went like a flash. But even when it stretched longest and the moments
swelled biggest and he seemed to wander alone in deserts of vast eternity,
there was no time for the smoothing out and deciphering of those scored
parchments which thirty years among men and women had rolled tight in his
heart and brain. Long before he had done thinking about Love (the oak tree
had put forth its leaves and shaken them to the ground a dozen times in the
process) Ambition would jostle it off the field, to be replaced by
Friendship or Literature. And as the first question had not been settled -
What is Love? - back it would come at the least provocation or none, and
hustle Books or Metaphors of What one lives for into the margin, there to
wait till they saw their chance to rush into the field again. What made the
process still longer was that it was profusely illustrated, not only with
pictures, as that of old Queen Elizabeth, laid on her tapestry couch in
rose-coloured brocade with an ivory snuff-box in her hand and a gold-hilted
sword by her side, but with scents - she was strongly perfumed - and with
sounds; the stags were barking in Richmond Park that winter's day. And so,
the thought of love would be all ambered over with snow and winter; with log
fires burning; with Russian women, gold swords, and the bark of stags; with
old King James' slobbering and fireworks and sacks of treasure in the holds
of Elizabethan sailing ships. Every single thing, once he tried to dislodge
it from its place in his mind, he found thus cumbered with other matter like
the lump of glass which, after a year at the bottom of the sea, is grown
about with bones and dragon-flies, and coins and the tresses of drowned
women.
"Another metaphor by Jupiter!" he would exclaim as he said this (which
will show the disorderly and circuitous way in which his mind worked and
explain why the oak tree flowered and faded so often before he came to any
conclusion about Love). "And what's the point of it?" he would ask himself.
"Why not say simply in so many words?" and then he would try to think for
half an hour, - or was it two years and a half? - how to say simply in so
many words what love is. "A figure like that is manifestly untruthful," he
argued, "for no dragon-fly, unless under very exceptional circumstances,
could live at the bottom of the sea. And if literature is not the Bride and
Bedfellow of Truth, what is she? Confound it all," he cried, "why say
Bedfellow when one's already said Bride? Why not simply say what one means
and leave it?"
So then he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue and so
to propitiate the austere spirit of poetry whom still, though at a great
distance, he could not help reverencing. "The sky is blue," he said, "the
grass is green." Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like
the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the
grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of
hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. "Upon my word," he said (for he had
fallen into the bad habit of speaking aloud), "I don't see that one's more
true than another. Both are utterly false." And he despaired of being able
to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is and fell into a
deep dejection.
And here we may profit by a pause in his soliloquy to reflect how odd
it was to see Orlando stretched there on his elbow on a June day and to
reflect that this fine fellow with all his faculties about him and a healthy
body, witness cheeks and limbs - a man who never thought twice about heading
a charge or fighting a duel - should be so subject to the lethargy of
thought, and rendered so susceptible by it, that when it came to a question
of poetry, or his own competence in it, he was as shy as a little girl
behind her mother's cottage door. In our belief, Greene's ridicule of his
tragedy hurt him as much as the Princess' ridicule of his love. But to
return:
Orlando went on thinking. He kept looking at the grass and at the sky
and trying to bethink him what a true poet, who has his verses published in
London, would say about them. Memory meanwhile (whose habits have already
been described) kept steady before his eyes the face of Nicholas Greene, as
if that sardonic loose-lipped man, treacherous as he had proved himself,
were the Muse in person, and it was to him that Orlando must do homage. So
Orlando, that summer morning, offered him a variety of phrases, some plain,
others figured, and Nick Greene kept shaking his head and sneering and
muttering something about Glawr and Cicero and the death of poetry in our
time. At length, starting to his feet (it was now winter and very cold)
Orlando swore one of the most remarkable oaths of his lifetime, for it bound
him to a servitude than which none is stricter. "I'll be blasted," he said,
"if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Nick
Greene or the Muse. Bad, good, or indifferent, I'll write, from this day
forward, to please myself"; and here he made as if he were tearing a whole
budget of papers across and tossing them in the face of that sneering
loose-lipped man. Upon which, as a cur ducks if you stoop to shy a stone at
him, Memory ducked her effigy of Nick Greene out of sight; and substituted
for it - nothing whatever.
But Orlando, all the same, went on thinking. He had indeed much to
think of. For when he tore the parchment across, he tore, in one rending,
the scrolloping, emblazoned scroll which he had made out in his own favour
in the solitude of his room appointing himself, as the King appoints
Ambassadors, the first poet of his race, the first writer of his age,
conferring eternal immortality upon his soul and granting his body a grave
among laurels and the intangible banners of a people's reverence
perpetually. Eloquent as this all was, he now tore it up and threw it in the
dustbin. "Fame," he said. "is like" (and since there was no Nick Greene to
stop him, he went on to revel in images of which we will choose only one or
two of the quietest) "a braided coat which hampers the limbs; a jacket of
silver which curbs the heart; a painted shield which covers a scarecrow,"
etc. etc. The pith of his phrases was that while fame impedes and
constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark,
ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the
obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where
he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he
alone is truthful; he alone is at peace. And so he sank into a quiet mood,
under the oak tree, the hardness of whose roots, exposed above the ground,
seemed to him rather comfortable than otherwise.
Sunk for a long time in profound thoughts as to the value of obscurity,
and the delight of having no name, but being like a wave which returns to
the deep body of the sea; thinking how obscurity rids the mind of the irk of
envy and spite; how it sets running in the veins the free waters of
generosity and magnanimity; and allows giving and taking without thanks
offered or praise given; which must have been the way of all great poets, he
supposed (though his knowledge of Greek was not enough to bear him out),
for, he thought, Shakespeare must have written like that, and the church
builders built like that, anonymously, needing no thanking or naming, but
only their work in the daytime and a little ale perhaps at night? "What an
admirable life this is," he thought, stretching his limbs out under the oak
tree. "And why not enjoy it this very moment?" The thought struck him like a
bullet. Ambition dropped like a plummet. Rid of the heart-burn of rejected
love, and of vanity rebuked, and all the other stings and pricks which the
nettle-bed of life had burnt upon him when ambitious of fame, but could no