Christie Murray prior to a visit to America on a Lecturing
Tour.
Friday, 7th September.
My Dear Old Friend,—I am sending.... some letters for you
by this same post. They are to three splendid fellows, full
of power to help you, and certain to be eager to use it
If I could have seen you personally, I had it in mind to say
many things which don't lend themselves to pen and ink. Some
of them perhaps can be put down with a minimum of
awkwardness.
You are primarily, in the American mind, an eminent
novelist. They have read you (in printed cheap editions) by
the score of thousands. They think of you as a cousin of
Dickens, Thackeray, Reade and the rest. Now that is your
rôle marked out for you by God. Stick to it, wear reasonably
conventional clothes, cultivate an intelligently conventional
aspect, and do not for your life say anything about the
stage or the latter-day hard luck you have had, or anything
else which will not commend itself to a popular sense which,
although artistic on one side is implacably Philistine on
the other. They have a tremendous regard for Reade. Carry
yourself as if you were the undoubted inheritor of the Reade
traditions. Think how Reade himself would have borne
himself—then strike out from it all the bumptious and
aggressive parts—and be the rest.
Two things destroy a man in America. One is the
suggestion of personal eccentricity, Bohemianism, etc. The
other is a disposition for criticism and controversy on
their own subjects. The latter is the more dangerous of the
two. It is a people devoured by the newspaper habit, like
the Irish or the old Greeks of the Areopagus. They ask every
few minutes “What is the news?” Thousands of smart young men
are hustling about fifteen hours a day to answer that
ceaseless question. If it occurs to any one of them anywhere
to say: “Well, here is a cocky Englishman who is over here
to make some money, but who is unable to resist the
temptation to harangue us on our shortcomings”—just that
minute you are damned—irrevocably damned. That one sniff of
blood will suffice. The whole pack will be on your shoulders
within twenty-four hours.
Yet, don't mistake me. These same newspaper men are nice
fellows, kindly to a fault, if you avoid rubbing them the
wrong way. Swear to yourself that you will be genial and
affable with every human soul you meet, and that you will
never be betrayed into an argument—on any American
subject, mind—with any living being, from the bartender
up. It is not so hard a rule, old man, and observing it
vehemently day and night will make all the wide difference
to you between miserable failure and a fine and substantial
success.
You will meet two classes of men—scholarly men like my
friends, who will take you to clubs where writers, thinkers,
students, etc., congregate, and less scholarly but not
less likeable ordinary newspaper men. Live your life as
much as possible among these two classes. You will catch
swiftly enough the shades of difference between the two. It
is the difference between, say, the Athenaeum and the
Savage. Only there is next to no caste spirit, and points of
similarity or even community crop up there between the two
which couldn't be here. The golden key to both is unvarying
amiability.
You are better calculated than most men I know to charm and
captivate them all. They will delight in your conversation
and in you, and they will see to it that you have a perfect
time and coin money—if only you lay yourself out to be
uniformly nice to them, and watch carefully to see that you
seem to be doing about as they do.
A good many minor people—hotel baggagemen, clerks, etc.,
tram conductors, policemen and the like—will seem to you
to be monstrously rude and unobliging. You will be right;
they are undoubtedly God-damned uncivil brutes. That is one
of the unhappy conditions of our life there. Don't be
tempted even to wrangle with them or talk back to them. Pass
on, and keep still. If you try to do anything else, the
upshot will be your appearing somewhere in print as a damned
Britisher for whom American ways are not good enough. The
whole country is one vast sounding board, and it vibrates
with perilous susceptibility in response to an English
accent.
Don't mention the word Ireland. Perhaps that is most
important of all. You will hear lots of Americans—good men,
too—damning the Irish. Listen to this, and say nothing,
unless something amiable about the Irish occurs to you.
Because here is a mysterious paradox. The America always
damns the Irishman. It is his foible. But if an Englishman
joins in, instantly every American within earshot hates him
for it. I plead with you to avoid that pitfall. The bottom
of it is paved with the bones of your compatriots.
So I could go on indefinitely, but I have already taxed your
patience. Briefly then—
1. Express no opinions on American subjects, political,
social or racial-save in praise.
2. Be polite and ready to talk affably wit everybody;
men who speak to you in a railway train, or the bar
tender or the bootblack, quite as much as the rest.
3. Avoid like poison eccentricities of dress and all
contact with actors an theatrical people.
4. Rebuff no interviewer. Be invariably affable
and reserved with him talk literature to him, and
reminicences of Reade, Matthew Arnold, Dean Stanley,
anybody you like especially mention things in America
which you like, and shut-up about what you don't like.
5. Keep appointments to a minute. No one else
will, but they respect immensely in others.
6. Bear in mind always that people think of you as a
big novelist, and will be only too glad to treat you at
your own valuation, gently exhibited or rather
suggested by courteous reserve. There is nothing they
won't do for you, if only you impress them as liking
them, and appreciating their kindliness, and being
studious of their sensibilities.
Take this all, my dear Christie, as from one who sincerely
wishes you well, and believes that you can and should do
well. It lies absolutely in your own hands to make a fine
personal and professional reputation in America, and to come
back with a solid bank account and a good, clear, fresh
start. You have lots of years before you; lots of important
work; lots of honest happiness. You were started once fair
on the road to the top of the tree. Here is the chance to
get back again on to that road. I am so fearfully anxious
that you should not miss it, that I take large liberties in
talking to you as I find I have done. Write to me at
Attridge's Hotel, Schull, County Cork, where I shall be from
14th to 20th September, to tell me that you are not
offended. Or if you are offended, still write to me. And I
should prize highly the chance of hearing from you from the
other side, after you have started in.
And so God be with you.
My Dear Christie Murray,—I have been in Egypt and have only
just got back and received your note. Poor Holmes is dead
and damned. I couldn't revive him if I would (at least not
for years), for I have had such an overdose of him that I
feel towards him as I do towards pâté de foie gras, of
which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a
sickly feeling to this day. Any old Holmes story you are, of
course, most welcome to use.
I am house-hunting in the country, which means continual
sallies and alarms, but I should much like to meet you
before I go away, to talk over our American experiences. I
do hope you are not going to allow lecturing to get in the
way of your writing. We have too few born story-tellers.—
With all kind regards. Yours very truly,
(Sgd.) A. Conan Doyle.
My Dear Sir,—I think that your idea of a statue to
Washington to be erected by public subscription in London is
an admirable one. The future of the world belongs to the
Anglo-Celtic races if they can but work in unison, and
everything which works for that end makes for the highest. I
believe that the great stream which bifurcated a century ago
may have re-united before many more centuries have passed,
and that we shall all have learned by then that patriotism
is not to be limited by flags or systems, but that it should
embrace all of the same race and blood and speech. It would
be a great thing—one of the most noble and magnanimous
things in the history of the world—if a proud people should
consent to adorn their capital with the statue of one who
bore arms against them. I wish you every success in your
idea, and shall be happy to contribute ten guineas towards
its realisation.—Yours very truly,
(Sgd.) A. Conan Doyle.
Dear Sir,—I have to acknowledge with thanks the receipt of
your letter of May 1st I thoroughly appreciate the spirit of
your suggestion, but am inclined to doubt its wisdom at the
present time. I do not see how any human being on either
side of the Atlantic can dispute the good-feeling already
entertained towards the United States by every class of the
population here. I am afraid, however, that it is not
generally reciprocated, and the Americans are apt to
misunderstand some of our efforts to conciliate them, and to
attribute them to less worthy motives. I have heard several
distinguished Americans protest against the “gush,” as they
call it, in which we indulge. Under these circumstances, I
think the project of a statue to George Washington should
be, for the present, postponed,—I am, yours truly,
(Sgd.) Joseph Chamberlain.
1897.
29 Delamere Terrace, Westbourne Sq., W.
My Dear Sir,—May a delighted reader of your articles in the
Sun presume on a very slight acquaintance with their
author to say how greatly he admires them? The paper on
Dickens seemed to me to dissolve that writer's peculiar
charm with a truer alchemy than any criticism I had ever
read. And now that with such splendid courage you tilt
against the painted bladder-babies of the neo-Scottish
school,—with so much real moderation too, with such a
dignified statement of the reasons for such a judgment,—I
cannot rest, I must say “Bravo.” The distinction between the
false North Britons (mere phantoms) and the true Stevenson
and Barrie (real creatures of the imagination, if sometimes,
in their detail, a little whimsical, even a little
diminutive) is put so admirably as I had not yet seen it
put.
I am eager for next Sunday's article, and as long as these
papers continue I shall read them with avidity. I detect in
every paragraph that genuine passion for literature which is
so rare, and which is the only thing worth living the life
of letters for.
Pardon my intrusion, and accept my thanks once more.—
Believe me to be, faithfully yours,
(Sgd.) Edmund Gosse.
Undershaw, Hindhead, Haslemere
My Dear Murray,—I shall be delighted and honoured to have a
first glance at the ms. I never read anything of yours which
I did not like, so I am sure I shall like it, but there are
degrees of liking, and I will tell you frankly which degree
I register.
Now you will bear that visit in mind and write to me when
you are ready and your work done.—With all kind regards,
yours very truly,
(Sgd.) A. Conan Doyle.
Undershaw, Hindhead, Haslemere.
My Dear Murray,—I have just finished your critical book and
think it most excellent and useful. I couldn't help writing
to you to say so. It is really fine—so well-balanced and
clear-sighted and judicial. For kind words about myself many
thanks. I don't think we are suffering from critical
kindness so much as indiscriminate critical kindness. No
one has said enough, as it seems to me, about Barrie or
Kipling. I think they are fit—young as they are—to rank
with the highest, and that some of Barrie's work, Margaret
Ogilvy and A Window in Thrums, will endear him as Robert
Burns is endeared to the hearts of the future Scottish race.
I have just settled down here and we are getting the
furniture in and all in order. In a week or so it will be
quite right. If ever you should be at a loose end at a week-
end, or any other time, I wish you would run down. I believe
we could make you happy for a few days. Name your date and
the room will be ready. Only from the 16th to the 26th it is
pre-empted.—With all kind remembrances, yours very truly,
(Sgd.) A. Conan Doyle
148 Todmorden Road, Burnley, Lanes.
My Dear Sir,—Will you kindly excuse the liberty I take in
writing? I have just bought and read your new book My
Contemporaries in Fiction. and feel that I must thank you.
The task you assumed was, I think, necessary, and your
estimate of the various writers just, and on the whole
generous. I know my opinion is of little value, but I have
long felt that several of our modern novelists were
appraised miles beyond their merits, and I have often wished
that some man of position, one who could speak candidly
without fear of being accused of being envious, would give
to the world a fair and fearless criticism of the works of
novelists about whom some so-called critics rave. Thousands
will be glad that you have done this, and I hope your book
will have the success it deserves.
It will be a matter for thankfulness, too, that you have
tried to do justice to George Macdonald, and to give him the
place he deserves. To read the fulsome stuff which is so
often written about Crockett, and then to think that
Macdonald is quietly shelved, is enough to make one sick at
heart Certainly, I shall do all that lies in my power to
make your work known.
I do wish, however that you had devoted a few pages to one
who, a few years ago, loomed large in the literary horizon.
I mean Robert Buchanan. I know that during these last few
years he has poured out a great deal of drivel, but I cannot
forget books like The New Abelard, and especially, God
and the Man. It is a matter of surprise and regret that one
of Buchanan's undoubted powers should have thrown himself
away as he has done. All the same, the man who wrote God
and the Man and The Shadow of the Sword, hysterical as
the latter may be, deserves a place in such a book as yours,
and an honest criticism, such as I am sure you could give,
might lead him, even yet, to give us a work worthy of the
promise of years ago.
I am afraid you will regard this letter as presumptuous,
nevertheless, I am prompted by sincere admiration. Years ago
I read Joseph's Coat and Aunt Rachel, and still think
the latter to be one of the tenderest and most beautiful
things in fiction. I also remember the simple scene which
gave the title to the book called A Bit of Human Nature,
and shall never cease to admire what seems to me a flash of
real genius. Consequently, when I stood close by you at a
“Vagabond's” dinner, on the ladies' night some months ago, I
was strongly impelled to ask for an introduction, but lacked
the necessary audacity to carry out my one time
determination.
Again thanking you for a book which has afforded me a
genuine pleasure to read, besides giving me much mental
stimulus,—I am, dear sir, yours very truly,
(Sgd.) Joseph Hocking.
Dear Murray,—I am getting so weary of controversy that I
must decline to take part, directly or indirectly, in any
more. Possibly, in the heat of annoyance, I may have said
harsh things about Mr Scott, but if so, I have forgotten
them, and I think all harsh things are better forgotten. I
am sorry, therefore, to hear that you are on the war-path,
and wish I could persuade you to turn back to the paths of
peace. You are too valuable to be wasted in this sort of
warfare. I daresay you will smile at such advice from me,
of all men, but believe me, I speak from sad experience.
I was sorry to hear about the fate of your play, but 'tis
the fortune of war, and I hope it will only stir you to
another effort which may possess, not more merit, possibly,
but better luck, which now-a-days counts more than merit.
—With all good wishes, I am, yours truly,
(Sgd.) Robert Buchanan.
“Merliland,” 25 Maresfield Gardens, South Hampstead, N.W.
Dear Christie Murray,—I thank you for your kind breath of
encouragement, and am very glad that my Outcast contains
anything to awaken a response in so fine a nature as your
own. It was very good of you to think of writing to me on
the subject at all.
I can't help thinking that men who still hold to the old
traditions should stick together and form some kind of a
phalanx. I was not sorry, therefore, to hear that you had
expressed yourself freely about the craze of a noisy
minority for formlessness and ugliness in realistic
literature. Ibsen's style, regarded merely as style, bears
the same relation to good writing that the Star newspaper
does to a Greek statue. I don't myself much mind what morals
a man teaches, so long as he preserves the morality of
beautiful form, but at the rate we are now going,
literature seems likely to become a series of causes
célèbres chronicled in the language of the penny-a-liner.
And over and above this is the dirty habit, growing upon
many able men, of examining their secretions, always an
evident sign of hypochondria.
I am awaiting with much interest your further steps on the
plane dramatic. Meantime, I hope I shall see more of you and
yours. With kind regards.—Truly yours,
(Sgd.) Robert Buchanan.
1905.
75 Cambridge Terrace, W.
Dear Sir,—I trust you will forgive my writing you, but I
cannot make use of another man's brains without some
acknowledgment. For years I have been a reader of the
Referee, and of late years nothing has interested me more
than the articles above the name of Merlin on the front
page. This week you have put the real issue so clearly and
so freely, that I am going to avail myself of it tonight in
my speech at Blandford, and I hope I have your permission so
to do. If only a few more men would grasp difficult subjects
as boldly and broadly as you do, we should be a better and a
happier people.—Yours very faithfully,
(Sgd.) E. Marshall Hall.
CHAPTER XVII
Yesterday I attained my sixtieth birthday. It is not yet old age, but the posting-stations between old age and myself grow fewer with what looks like a bewildering rapidity. The years are shorter than they used to be. What a length lay between the anniversaries of childhood and even those of young manhood! How little tedious was the road! And now how brief and tiresome has the journey from one point to another grown to seem! One turns and glances back on the traversed road, “looking over Time's crupper and over his tail,” as the elder Hood put it, and it looks like a ribboned path through a cemetery. The little child-wife and the baby lie yonder far away. Nearer, and yet afar off, the grey old father is asleep. There, between them, is the lad with whom I shared all my early joy in books. Oh! the raptured miles we walked, seeing each other home by turns, till long after midnight, each exposing to the other's view the jewels gathered in the past few days. The memorial stones are everywhere, and they grow thicker as the road winds on. And saddest of all are the places where one sees the tokens, not of lost friends but of dead ideals. Here a faith laid itself down, tired out, and went to sleep for good and all. A cypress marks the place, to my fancy, Here a hope made up its mind that it was not worth while to hope any longer, and foundered in its tracks. There is an ambition, unburied, to be sure, but as dead as Cheops. “Old wishes, ghosts of broken plans, and phantom hopes.”
“It's a sair sicht,” as Carlyle said, looking up at the skies on a starry night; and one asks, in a mood of some despondency, what one has got to show for it all?—the loss, the pain, the disappointment, the disillusion. But, come now, let us look the thing fairly and squarely in the face. Is not Despondency disposed to state her case somewhat too emphatically? Am I, or am I not, flatly exaggerating in this summary of losses? Would I have the little child-wife back again if I could? Can her loss after this lapse of well nigh two score years have left anything, at most, but a humanising tenderness in my memory? She is a pretty and engaging recollection, and has been no more at any time for whole decades, and to pretend that she is a grief is frankly to import humbug into sentiment. And what had I but a sense of pious thanksgiving when my grey old father laid down the weary burden of many years and the crushing pains of hernia, and the breathless agonies of a dreadful asthma? If I pretend that I would willingly have stretched him out longer on the rack of this tough world, I am no better than a sentimental liar to myself. I know in my heart of hearts that I was glad to let him go. And the lost faith? I believe with all my soul that I have found a better. And the lost ambitions? What were they but a baby's crying for the moon? There was a time when I could say with Will Waterproof, in the Lyrical Monologue made at the Cock:
To prove myself a poet:
But while I plan and plan, my hair
Is grey before I know it”
But to one's own plain commonsense it is the poorest kind of business at the present time of life to sit down and grizzle because one proved in the long run not to be a poet. I will not deny a certain inevitable melancholy in the retrospect, taking it all round. Yet even whilst I feel this, there is an inward protest. The loss is not all loss. The game of life is one in which we gain by losing, and lose by gaining. In The Ghost's Bargain with the Haunted Man it was a part of the agreement that the man should forget all the sorrows he had ever known. In that atrophy of the heart which followed in that frozen seal which bound down every rill of human sympathy and pity, I know that there is the presentment of a great and lasting truth. No man's nature is ripened until he has known many griefs and losses, nor will it ripen until they have bitten into him as frost bites into the fallow earth to fertilise it, and opens it to the uses of sun and air and rain.
There are, of course, things quite apart from loss and the destruction of old ideals which encumber the path of coming of age with troubles of one sort or another. The air is thick with the shadows of regret. It is seventeen years since I shot my first wild boar, and more than fifteen since the last deer; a stag of twelve tines, as I am a christened man, fell to my gun. It is thirteen years since I rode into the central pah of the King's Country in New Zealand, and I have never crossed a horse since then. It is a quarter of a century since I saw the heights of Tashkesen, and heard the Turkish and Russian guns roaring defiance at each other; and the sporting days, and the exploring days, and the fighting days are all over. I shall never again stand knee-deep in snow through the patient hours waiting for the forest quarry to break cover. Think of the ensuing lumbago! I shall hear the thrilling boom of the big guns no more. I shall never again penetrate into the freshness of a virgin land. I shall see no more the hammer of the midday sun beat its great splashes of light from the snow-clad summits of the Rockies and the Selkirks. The long and the short of it is that I am transformed from my old estate of globe-trotter and observer of events and nature into the land of suburban old fogeydom, and the point to touch, so far as I am personally engaged, is whether really and truly I do very much and deeply regret the change. Not very deeply, after all, I am disposed to think. His workshop bounds all to the old fogey who has lived out a great many of his friendships, but within its limits what sights may he not see? Calais, first seen of Continental towns, is still a possession of my own. The Paris of 1872 is mine, the Rhine and the Rhine fall, Vienna, Berlin, the Alps—the Austrian Alps, the Australian and New Zealand Alps—they are all mine. Kicking Horse River is mine, and the steely whirl of the lower rapids of Niagara before they reach the fall. And, in clear view of the ideals which would shake me from my seat, I have but one answer to offer them. My shabby study armchair is the seat from which I look compassion on a struggling world, as a man fairly drowned and accepting his fate might look on fellow mariners yet only in process of drowning. Fill the mind with memories of things whole-heartedly attempted! You have failed or half-failed. Everybody has failed or half-failed who ever tried to do anything worth doing. You are not more unblest than the average of your kind.