第7章

In every social circle exist great souls with yearnings towards higher things.Even among the labouring classes one meets with naturally refined natures, gentlemanly persons to whom the loom and the plough will always appear low, whose natural desire is towards the dignities and graces of the servants' hall.So in Grub Street we can always reckon upon the superior writer whose temperament will prompt him to make respectful study of his betters.A reasonable supply of high-class novels might always have been depended upon; the trouble is that the public now demands that all stories must be of the upper ten thousand.Auld Robin Grey must be Sir Robert Grey, South African millionaire; and Jamie, the youngest son of the old Earl, otherwise a cultured public can take no interest in the ballad.

A modern nursery rhymester to succeed would have to write of Little Lord Jack and Lady Jill ascending one of the many beautiful eminences belonging to the ancestral estates of their parents, bearing between them, on a silver rod, an exquisitely painted Sevres vase filled with ottar of roses.

I take up my fourpenny-halfpenny magazine.The heroine is a youthful Duchess; her husband gambles with thousand-pound notes, with the result that they are 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 personae 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 Bronte 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.