The youth was drowned in the deepest sea — an atom bombarded, ignorant of all defence in a tumultuous world. The shell of custom, the easy thoughtless life which had sucked pleasure from the world about, these four years past, crumbled like caked mud. He was nothing, nobody — there was no heart or bravery left in him; he was conscious of unfathomable ignorance — the beginning, as Socrates suggested, of wisdom — he was lost.
He had wanted to cut a figure in the world — he had simply never imagined the number of people that were in it. And like most people who hug loneliness to them like a lover, the need of occasional companionship, for ever tender and for ever true, which might be summoned or dismissed at will, cut through him like a sword.
There was, of course, among the members of the play-writing class an energetic and calculated sociability. The supposed advantages of discussion with one another, the interplay of wit, and so on, above all what was called “the exchange of ideas,” but what most often was merely the exchange of other people’s ideas — all these were mentioned often; they were held in the highest esteem as one of the chief benefits to be derived from the course.
Manifestly, one could write anywhere. But where else could one write with around one the constant stimulus of other people who also wrote? Where could one learn one’s faults so well as before a critical and serious congress of artists? They were content with it — they got what they wanted. But the lack of warmth, the absence of inner radial heat which, not being fundamental in the structure of their lives, had never been wanted, filled him with horror and impotent fury.
The critical sense had stirred in him hardly at all, the idea of questioning authority and position had not occurred to him.
He was facing one of the oldest — what, for the creative mind, must be one of the most painful — problems of the spirit — the search for a standard of taste. He had, at seventeen, as a sophomore, triumphantly denied God, but he was unable now to deny Robert Browning. It had never occurred to him that there was a single authoritatively beautiful thing in the world that might not be agreed on, by a community of all the enlightened spirits of the universe, as beautiful. EVERYONE, of course, KNEW that King Lear was one of the greatest plays that had ever been written. Only, he was beginning to find everyone didn’t.
And now for the first time he began to worry about being “modern.” He had the great fear young people have that they will not be a part of the most advanced literary and artistic movements of the time. Several of the young men he knew had contributed stories, poems, and criticisms to little reviews, published by and for small groups of literary adepts. They disposed of most of the established figures with a few well-chosen words of contempt, and they replaced these figures with obscure names of their own who, they assured him, were the important people of the future.
For the first time, he heard the word “Mid–Victorian” applied as a term of opprobrium. What its implications were he had no idea. Stevenson, too, to him hardly more than a writer of books for boys, books that he had read as a child with interest and delight, was a symbol of some vague but monstrously pernicious influence.
But he discovered at once that to voice any of these questionings was to brand oneself in the esteem of the group; intuitively he saw that their jargon formed a pattern by which they might be placed and recognized; that, to young men most of all, to be placed in a previous discarded pattern was unendurable disgrace. It represented to them the mark of intellectual development, just as in a sophomore’s philosophy the belief that God is an old man with a long beard brings ridicule and odium upon the believer but the belief that God is an ocean without limit, or an all-pervasive and inclusive substance, or some other equally na?ve and extraordinary idea, is regarded as a certain sign of bold enlightenment. Thus it often happens, when one thinks he has extended the limits of his life, broken the bonds, and liberated himself in the wider ether, he has done no more than to exchange a new superstition for an old one, to forsake a beautiful myth for an ugly one.
The young men in Professor Hatcher’s class were sorry for many things and many people.
“Barrie?” began Mr. Scoville, an elegant and wealthy young dawdler from Philadelphia, who, by his own confession, had spent most of his life in France, “Barrie?” he continued regretfully, in answer to a question. For a moment, he drew deeply on his cigarette, then raised sad, languid eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said gently, with a slight regretful movement of his head —“I can’t read him. I’ve tried it — but it simply can’t be done.” They laughed, greatly pleased.
“But it is a pity, you know, a GREAT pity,” Francis Starwick remarked languidly, using effectively his trick of giving a tired emphasis to certain words which conveyed a kind of sad finality, a weary earnestness to what he said. He turned to go.
“But — but — but — how — how — how very interesting! Why IS it, Frank?” Hugh Dodd demanded with his earnest stammering eagerness. He was profoundly respectful of Starwick’s critical ability.
“Why is what?” said Starwick in his curiously mannered voice, his air of languid weariness.
“Why is it a great pity about Barrie?” knitting his bushy brows together, and scowling with an air of intense concentration over his words as he spoke. “Because,” said the appraiser of Values, as he prepared to depart, arranging with feminine luxuriousness the voluptuous folds of his blue silk scarf, “the man really had something one time. He really did. Something strange and haunting — the genius of the Celt.” Swinging his cane slowly, acutely and painfully conscious that he was being watched, with the agonizing stiffness that was at the bottom of his character, he strolled off across the Yard, stark and lovely with the harsh white snow and wintry branches of bleak winter.
“You know — you know — you know — that’s very interesting,” said Dodd, intent upon his words. “I’d — I’d — I’d never thought of it in JUST that way.”
“Barrie,” drawled Wood, the maker of epigrams, “is a stick of taffy, floating upon a sea of molasses.”
There was laughter.
He was for ever making these epigrams; his face had a somewhat saturnine cast, his lips twisted ironically, his eyes shot splintered promises of satiric wisdom. He looked like a very caustically humorous person; but unhappily he had no humour. But they thought he had. No one with a face like that could be less than keen.
So he had something to say for every occasion. He had discovered that the manner counted for wit. If the talk was of Shaw’s deficiencies as a dramatist, he might say:
“But, after all, if one is going in for all that sort of thing, why not have lantern slides and a course of lectures?”
Thus he was known, not merely as a subtle-souled and elusive psychologist but also as a biting wit.
“Galsworthy wrote something that looked like a play once,” someone remarked. “There were parts of Justice that weren’t bad.”
“Yes. Yes,” said Dodd, peering intently at his language. “Justice — there were some interesting things in that. It’s — it’s — it’s rather a PITY about him, isn’t it?” And as he said these words he frowned earnestly and intently. There was genuine pity in his voice, for the man’s spirit had great charity and sweetness in it.
As they dispersed, someone remarked that Shaw might have made a dramatist if he had ever known anything about writing a play.
“But he DATES so — how he DATES!” Scoville remarked.
“Those earlier plays —”
“Yes, I agree”— thus Wood again. “Almost Mid–Victorian. Shaw:— a prophet with his face turned backwards.” Then they went away in small groups.