Kabanata Kabanata 7 · The Mental Condition of Adam Wayne_

. The Mental Condition of Adam Wayne_

A little while after the King's accession a small book of poems

appeared, called "Hymns on the Hill." They were not good poems, nor

was the book successful, but it attracted a certain amount of

attention from one particular school of critics. The King himself, who

was a member of the school, reviewed it in his capacity of literary

critic to "Straight from the Stables," a sporting journal. They were

known as the Hammock School, because it had been calculated

malignantly by an enemy that no less than thirteen of their delicate

criticisms had begun with the words, "I read this book in a hammock:

half asleep in the sleepy sunlight, I ..."; after that there were

important differences. Under these conditions they liked everything,

but especially everything silly. "Next to authentic goodness in a

book," they said--"next to authentic goodness in a book (and that,

alas! we never find) we desire a rich badness." Thus it happened that

their praise (as indicating the presence of a rich badness) was not

universally sought after, and authors became a little disquieted when

they found the eye of the Hammock School fixed upon them with peculiar

favour.

The peculiarity of "Hymns on the Hill" was the celebration of the

poetry of London as distinct from the poetry of the country. This

sentiment or affectation was, of course, not uncommon in the twentieth

century, nor was it, although sometimes exaggerated, and sometimes

artificial, by any means without a great truth at its root, for there

is one respect in which a town must be more poetical than the country,

since it is closer to the spirit of man; for London, if it be not one

of the masterpieces of man, is at least one of his sins. A street is

really more poetical than a meadow, because a street has a secret. A

street is going somewhere, and a meadow nowhere. But, in the case of

the book called "Hymns on the Hill," there was another peculiarity,

which the King pointed out with great acumen in his review. He was

naturally interested in the matter, for he had himself published a

volume of lyrics about London under his pseudonym of "Daisy Daydream."

This difference, as the King pointed out, consisted in the fact that,

while mere artificers like "Daisy Daydream" (on whose elaborate style

the King, over his signature of "Thunderbolt," was perhaps somewhat

too severe) thought to praise London by comparing it to the

country--using nature, that is, as a background from which all

poetical images had to be drawn--the more robust author of "Hymns on

the Hill" praised the country, or nature, by comparing it to the town,

and used the town itself as a background. "Take," said the critic,

"the typically feminine lines, 'To the Inventor of The Hansom Cab'--

'Poet, whose cunning carved this amorous shell,

Where twain may dwell.'"

"Surely," wrote the King, "no one but a woman could have written those

lines. A woman has always a weakness for nature; with her art is only

beautiful as an echo or shadow of it. She is praising the hansom cab

by theme and theory, but her soul is still a child by the sea, picking

up shells. She can never be utterly of the town, as a man can; indeed,

do we not speak (with sacred propriety) of 'a man about town'? Who

ever spoke of a woman about town? However much, physically, 'about

town' a woman may be, she still models herself on nature; she tries to

carry nature with her; she bids grasses to grow on her head, and furry

beasts to bite her about the throat. In the heart of a dim city, she

models her hat on a flaring cottage garden of flowers. We, with our

nobler civic sentiment, model ours on a chimney pot; the ensign of

civilisation. And rather than be without birds, she will commit

massacre, that she may turn her head into a tree, with dead birds to

sing on it."

This kind of thing went on for several pages, and then the critic

remembered his subject, and returned to it.

"Poet, whose cunning carved this amorous shell,

Where twain may dwell."

"The peculiarity of these fine though feminine lines," continued

"Thunderbolt," "is, as we have said, that they praise the hansom cab

by comparing it to the shell, to a natural thing. Now, hear the author

of 'Hymns on the Hill,' and how he deals with the same subject. In his

fine nocturne, entitled 'The Last Omnibus' he relieves the rich and

poignant melancholy of the theme by a sudden sense of rushing at the

end--

'The wind round the old street corner

Swung sudden and quick as a cab.'

"Here the distinction is obvious. 'Daisy Daydream' thinks it a great

compliment to a hansom cab to be compared to one of the spiral

chambers of the sea. And the author of 'Hymns on the Hill' thinks it a

great compliment to the immortal whirlwind to be compared to a hackney

coach. He surely is the real admirer of London. We have no space to

speak of all his perfect applications of the idea; of the poem in

which, for instance, a lady's eyes are compared, not to stars, but to

two perfect street-lamps guiding the wanderer. We have no space to

speak of the fine lyric, recalling the Elizabethan spirit, in which

the poet, instead of saying that the rose and the lily contend in her

complexion, says, with a purer modernism, that the red omnibus of

Hammersmith and the white omnibus of Fulham fight there for the

mastery. How perfect the image of two contending omnibuses!"

Here, somewhat abruptly, the review concluded, probably because the

King had to send off his copy at that moment, as he was in some want

of money. But the King was a very good critic, whatever he may have

been as King, and he had, to a considerable extent, hit the right nail

on the head. "Hymns on the Hill" was not at all like the poems

originally published in praise of the poetry of London. And the

reason was that it was really written by a man who had seen nothing

else but London, and who regarded it, therefore, as the universe. It

was written by a raw, red-headed lad of seventeen, named Adam Wayne,

who had been born in Notting Hill. An accident in his seventh year

prevented his being taken away to the seaside, and thus his whole life

had been passed in his own Pump Street, and in its neighbourhood. And

the consequence was, that he saw the street-lamps as things quite as

eternal as the stars; the two fires were mingled. He saw the houses as

things enduring, like the mountains, and so he wrote about them as one

would write about mountains. Nature puts on a disguise when she speaks

to every man; to this man she put on the disguise of Notting Hill.

Nature would mean to a poet born in the Cumberland hills, a stormy

sky-line and sudden rocks. Nature would mean to a poet born in the

Essex flats, a waste of splendid waters and splendid sunsets. So

nature meant to this man Wayne a line of violet roofs and lemon lamps,

the chiaroscuro of the town. He did not think it clever or funny to

praise the shadows and colours of the town; he had seen no other

shadows or colours, and so he praised them--because they were shadows

and colours. He saw all this because he was a poet, though in practice

a bad poet. It is too often forgotten that just as a bad man is

nevertheless a man, so a bad poet is nevertheless a poet.

Mr. Wayne's little volume of verse was a complete failure; and he

submitted to the decision of fate with a quite rational humility, went

back to his work, which was that of a draper's assistant, and wrote no

more. He still retained his feeling about the town of Notting Hill,

because he could not possibly have any other feeling, because it was

the back and base of his brain. But he does not seem to have made any

particular attempt to express it or insist upon it.

He was a genuine natural mystic, one of those who live on the border

of fairyland. But he was perhaps the first to realise how often the

boundary of fairyland runs through a crowded city. Twenty feet from

him (for he was very short-sighted) the red and white and yellow suns

of the gas-lights thronged and melted into each other like an orchard

of fiery trees, the beginning of the woods of elf-land.

But, oddly enough, it was because he was a small poet that he came to

his strange and isolated triumph. It was because he was a failure in

literature that he became a portent in English history. He was one of

those to whom nature has given the desire without the power of

artistic expression. He had been a dumb poet from his cradle. He might

have been so to his grave, and carried unuttered into the darkness a

treasure of new and sensational song. But he was born under the lucky

star of a single coincidence. He happened to be at the head of his

dingy municipality at the time of the King's jest, at the time when

all municipalities were suddenly commanded to break out into banners

and flowers. Out of the long procession of the silent poets, who have

been passing since the beginning of the world, this one man found

himself in the midst of an heraldic vision, in which he could act and

speak and live lyrically. While the author and the victims alike

treated the whole matter as a silly public charade, this one man, by

taking it seriously, sprang suddenly into a throne of artistic

omnipotence. Armour, music, standards, watch-fires, the noise of

drums, all the theatrical properties were thrown before him. This one

poor rhymster, having burnt his own rhymes, began to live that life of

open air and acted poetry of which all the poets of the earth have

dreamed in vain; the life for which the Iliad is only a cheap

substitute.

Upwards from his abstracted childhood, Adam Wayne had grown strongly

and silently in a certain quality or capacity which is in modern

cities almost entirely artificial, but which can be natural, and was

primarily almost brutally natural in him, the quality or capacity of

patriotism. It exists, like other virtues and vices, in a certain

undiluted reality. It is not confused with all kinds of other things.

A child speaking of his country or his village may make every mistake

in Mandeville or tell every lie in Munchausen, but in his statement

there will be no psychological lies any more than there can be in a

good song. Adam Wayne, as a boy, had for his dull streets in Notting

Hill the ultimate and ancient sentiment that went out to Athens or

Jerusalem. He knew the secret of the passion, those secrets which make

real old national songs sound so strange to our civilisation. He knew

that real patriotism tends to sing about sorrows and forlorn hopes

much more than about victory. He knew that in proper names themselves

is half the poetry of all national poems. Above all, he knew the

supreme psychological fact about patriotism, as certain in connection

with it as that a fine shame comes to all lovers, the fact that the

patriot never under any circumstances boasts of the largeness of his

country, but always, and of necessity, boasts of the smallness of it.

All this he knew, not because he was a philosopher or a genius, but

because he was a child. Any one who cares to walk up a side slum like

Pump Street, can see a little Adam claiming to be king of a

paving-stone. And he will always be proudest if the stone is almost

too narrow for him to keep his feet inside it.

It was while he was in such a dream of defensive battle, marking out

some strip of street or fortress of steps as the limit of his haughty

claim, that the King had met him, and, with a few words flung in

mockery, ratified for ever the strange boundaries of his soul.

Thenceforward the fanciful idea of the defence of Notting Hill in war

became to him a thing as solid as eating or drinking or lighting a

pipe. He disposed his meals for it, altered his plans for it, lay

awake in the night and went over it again. Two or three shops were to

him an arsenal; an area was to him a moat; corners of balconies and

turns of stone steps were points for the location of a culverin or an

archer. It is almost impossible to convey to any ordinary imagination

the degree to which he had transmitted the leaden London landscape to

a romantic gold. The process began almost in babyhood, and became

habitual like a literal madness. It was felt most keenly at night,

when London is really herself, when her lights shine in the dark like

the eyes of innumerable cats, and the outline of the dark houses has

the bold simplicity of blue hills. But for him the night revealed

instead of concealing, and he read all the blank hours of morning and

afternoon, by a contradictory phrase, in the light of that darkness.

To this man, at any rate, the inconceivable had happened. The

artificial city had become to him nature, and he felt the curbstones

and gas-lamps as things as ancient as the sky.

One instance may suffice. Walking along Pump Street with a friend, he

said, as he gazed dreamily at the iron fence of a little front garden,

"How those railings stir one's blood!"

His friend, who was also a great intellectual admirer, looked at them

painfully, but without any particular emotion. He was so troubled

about it that he went back quite a large number of times on quiet

evenings and stared at the railings, waiting for something to happen

to his blood, but without success. At last he took refuge in asking

Wayne himself. He discovered that the ecstacy lay in the one point he

had never noticed about the railings even after his six visits--the

fact that they were, like the great majority of others--in London,

shaped at the top after the manner of a spear. As a child, Wayne had

half unconsciously compared them with the spears in pictures of

Lancelot and St. George, and had grown up under the shadow of the

graphic association. Now, whenever he looked at them, they were simply

the serried weapons that made a hedge of steel round the sacred homes

of Notting Hill. He could not have cleansed his mind of that meaning

even if he tried. It was not a fanciful comparison, or anything like

it. It would not have been true to say that the familiar railings

reminded him of spears; it would have been far truer to say that the

familiar spears occasionally reminded him of railings.

A couple of days after his interview with the King, Adam Wayne was

pacing like a caged lion in front of five shops that occupied the

upper end of the disputed street. They were a grocer's, a chemist's, a

barber's, an old curiosity shop and a toy-shop that sold also

newspapers. It was these five shops which his childish fastidiousness

had first selected as the essentials of the Notting Hill campaign, the

citadel of the city. If Notting Hill was the heart of the universe,

and Pump Street was the heart of Notting Hill, this was the heart of

Pump Street. The fact that they were all small and side by side

realised that feeling for a formidable comfort and compactness which,

as we have said, was the heart of his patriotism, and of all

patriotism. The grocer (who had a wine and spirit licence) was

included because he could provision the garrison; the old curiosity

shop because it contained enough swords, pistols, partisans,

cross-bows, and blunderbusses to arm a whole irregular regiment; the

toy and paper shop because Wayne thought a free press an essential

centre for the soul of Pump Street; the chemist's to cope with

outbreaks of disease among the besieged; and the barber's because it

was in the middle of all the rest, and the barber's son was an

intimate friend and spiritual affinity.

It was a cloudless October evening settling down through purple into

pure silver around the roofs and chimneys of the steep little street,

which looked black and sharp and dramatic. In the deep shadows the

gas-lit shop fronts gleamed like five fires in a row, and before them,

darkly outlined like a ghost against some purgatorial furnaces, passed

to and fro the tall bird-like figure and eagle nose of Adam Wayne.

He swung his stick restlessly, and seemed fitfully talking to himself.

"There are, after all, enigmas," he said "even to the man who has

faith. There are doubts that remain even after the true philosophy is

completed in every rung and rivet. And here is one of them. Is the

normal human need, the normal human condition, higher or lower than

those special states of the soul which call out a doubtful and

dangerous glory? those special powers of knowledge or sacrifice which

are made possible only by the existence of evil? Which should come

first to our affections, the enduring sanities of peace or the

half-maniacal virtues of battle? Which should come first, the man

great in the daily round or the man great in emergency? Which should

come first, to return to the enigma before me, the grocer or the

chemist? Which is more certainly the stay of the city, the swift

chivalrous chemist or the benignant all-providing grocer? In such

ultimate spiritual doubts it is only possible to choose a side by the

higher instincts, and to abide the issue. In any case, I have made my

choice. May I be pardoned if I choose wrongly, but I choose the

grocer."

"Good morning, sir," said the grocer, who was a middle-aged man,

partially bald, with harsh red whiskers and beard, and forehead lined

with all the cares of the small tradesman. "What can I do for you,

sir?"

Wayne removed his hat on entering the shop, with a ceremonious

gesture, which, slight as it was, made the tradesman eye him with the

beginnings of wonder.

"I come, sir," he said soberly, "to appeal to your patriotism."

"Why, sir," said the grocer, "that sounds like the times when I was a

boy and we used to have elections."

"You will have them again," said Wayne, firmly, "and far greater

things. Listen, Mr. Mead. I know the temptations which a grocer has to

a too cosmopolitan philosophy. I can imagine what it must be to sit

all day as you do surrounded with wares from all the ends of the

earth, from strange seas that we have never sailed and strange forests

that we could not even picture. No Eastern king ever had such

argosies or such cargoes coming from the sunrise and the sunset, and

Solomon in all his glory was not enriched like one of you. India is at

your elbow," he cried, lifting his voice and pointing his stick at a

drawer of rice, the grocer making a movement of some alarm, "China is

before you, Demerara is behind you, America is above your head, and at

this very moment, like some old Spanish admiral, you hold Tunis in

your hands."

Mr. Mead dropped the box of dates which he was just lifting, and then

picked it up again vaguely.

Wayne went on with a heightened colour, but a lowered voice,

"I know, I say, the temptations of so international, so universal a

vision of wealth. I know that it must be your danger not to fall like

many tradesmen into too dusty and mechanical a narrowness, but rather

to be too broad, to be too general, too liberal. If a narrow

nationalism be the danger of the pastry-cook, who makes his own wares

under his own heavens, no less is cosmopolitanism the danger of the

grocer. But I come to you in the name of that patriotism which no

wanderings or enlightenments should ever wholly extinguish, and I ask

you to remember Notting Hill. For, after all, in this cosmopolitan

magnificence, she has played no small part. Your dates may come from

the tall palms of Barbary, your sugar from the strange islands of the

tropics, your tea from the secret villages of the Empire of the

Dragon. That this room might be furnished, forests may have been

spoiled under the Southern Cross, and leviathans speared under the

Polar Star. But you yourself--surely no inconsiderable treasure--you

yourself, the brain that wields these vast interests--you yourself, at

least, have grown to strength and wisdom between these grey houses and

under this rainy sky. This city which made you, and thus made your

fortunes, is threatened with war. Come forth and tell to the ends of

the earth this lesson. Oil is from the North and fruits from the

South; rices are from India and spices from Ceylon; sheep are from New

Zealand and men from Notting Hill."

The grocer sat for some little while, with dim eyes and his mouth

open, looking rather like a fish. Then he scratched the back of his

head, and said nothing. Then he said--

"Anything out of the shop, sir?"

Wayne looked round in a dazed way. Seeing a pile of tins of pine-apple

chunks, he waved his stick generally towards them.

"Yes," he said; "I'll take those."

"All those, sir?" said the grocer, with greatly increased interest.

"Yes, yes; all those," replied Wayne, still a little bewildered, like

a man splashed with cold water.

"Very good, sir; thank you, sir," said the grocer with animation. "You

may count upon my patriotism, sir."

"I count upon it already," said Wayne, and passed out into the

gathering night.

The grocer put the box of dates back in its place.

"What a nice fellow he is!" he said. "It's odd how often they are

nice. Much nicer than those as are all right."

Meanwhile Adam Wayne stood outside the glowing chemist's shop,

unmistakably wavering.

"What a weakness it is!" he muttered. "I have never got rid of it from

childhood--the fear of this magic shop. The grocer is rich, he is

romantic, he is poetical in the truest sense, but he is not--no, he is

not supernatural. But the chemist! All the other shops stand in

Notting Hill, but this stands in Elf-land. Look at those great burning

bowls of colour. It must be from them that God paints the sunsets. It

is superhuman, and the superhuman is all the more uncanny when it is

beneficent. That is the root of the fear of God. I am afraid. But I

must be a man and enter."

He was a man, and entered. A short, dark young man was behind the

counter with spectacles, and greeted him with a bright but entirely

business-like smile.

"A fine evening, sir," he said.

"Fine indeed, strange Father," said Adam, stretching his hands

somewhat forward. "It is on such clear and mellow nights that your

shop is most itself. Then they appear most perfect, those moons of

green and gold and crimson, which from afar oft guide the pilgrim of

pain and sickness to this house of merciful witchcraft."

"Can I get you anything?" asked the chemist.

"Let me see," said Wayne, in a friendly but vague manner. "Let me have

some sal volatile."

"Eightpence, tenpence, or one and sixpence a bottle?" said the young

man, genially.

"One and six--one and six," replied Wayne, with a wild submissiveness.

"I come to ask you, Mr. Bowles, a terrible question."

He paused and collected himself.

"It is necessary," he muttered--"it is necessary to be tactful, and to

suit the appeal to each profession in turn."

"I come," he resumed aloud, "to ask you a question which goes to the

roots of your miraculous toils. Mr. Bowles, shall all this witchery

cease?" And he waved his stick around the shop.

Meeting with no answer, he continued with animation--

"In Notting Hill we have felt to its core the elfish mystery of your

profession. And now Notting Hill itself is threatened."

"Anything more, sir?" asked the chemist.

"Oh," said Wayne, somewhat disturbed--"oh, what is it chemists sell?

Quinine, I think. Thank you. Shall it be destroyed? I have met these

men of Bayswater and North Kensington--Mr. Bowles, they are

materialists. They see no witchery in your work, even when it is

wrought within their own borders. They think the chemist is

commonplace. They think him human."

The chemist appeared to pause, only a moment, to take in the insult,

and immediately said--

"And the next article, please?"

"Alum," said the Provost, wildly. "I resume. It is in this sacred

town alone that your priesthood is reverenced. Therefore, when you

fight for us you fight not only for yourself, but for everything you

typify. You fight not only for Notting Hill, but for Fairyland, for as

surely as Buck and Barker and such men hold sway, the sense of

Fairyland in some strange manner diminishes."

"Anything more, sir?" asked Mr. Bowles, with unbroken cheerfulness.

"Oh yes, jujubes--Gregory powder--magnesia. The danger is imminent. In

all this matter I have felt that I fought not merely for my own city

(though to that I owe all my blood), but for all places in which these

great ideas could prevail. I am fighting not merely for Notting Hill,

but for Bayswater itself; for North Kensington itself. For if the

gold-hunters prevail, these also will lose all their ancient

sentiments and all the mystery of their national soul. I know I can

count upon you."

"Oh yes, sir," said the chemist, with great animation; "we are always

glad to oblige a good customer."

Adam Wayne went out of the shop with a deep sense of fulfilment of

soul.

"It is so fortunate," he said, "to have tact, to be able to play upon

the peculiar talents and specialities, the cosmopolitanism of the

grocer and the world-old necromancy of the chemist. Where should I be

without tact?"