THE STALLS FROM THE GALLERY.
I AM, as my friends (or- at any irate, those who are not slightly deaf) have heard, on the point of writing a volume of short stories. They are to revive the forgotten British tradition of simplicity, jollity, and no d—d intellectual interest or French subtlety. I am singularly well fitted for this task, as I have explained to more than one publisher. They have invariably replied, "Certainly, Mr. Hopkins. By all means. Go straight away—and start." And yesterday evening I started, and this is how I did it ! "Sir Colney Hatch (K.B.E.) was one of those who, in directing the War, had cried, 'Business as usual—or rather more so.' His peculiar service was to prevent capital from going abroad, and he had succeeded in this to the figure of a million or two. Perhaps it was too much to say of him that he was the man who had won the War, but, at any rate, he, per- sonally, had not lost it. Nor was he vindictive, when the War was over. Indeed he had been heard to say (among friends) that, provided the Germans abolished Super Tax and Income Tax by paying off the National Debt, he, for his part, was willing to let bygones be bygones." I wrote this, as I say, with laborious British honesty, last night, and I have just read it through with a shiver of horror and disgust. What can have happened to me, what evil fairy took the pencil out of my solid fingers and wrote like that ? Suddenly I remembered. "Philip Guedalla ! " I muttered disconsolately. "That comes of reading these modems. Why didn't I stick to Gilbert Frankau and Ethel M. Dell ? " However, the mischief was done, and the only remedy that I could conceive was to work it out of my system by taking a culture, and inoculating myself. The simplest and best method would be to attempt a review of A Gallery, hoping that by the end of it I should descend from dillying and Guedallaing with ideas and phrases to my own plain blunt stuff—and here goes.
• Mr. Guedalla's critics may be divided into two schools. There are first those who are angry with him for not being Mr. Lytton Strachey, and then there are those who forgive him for this, recognizing that it is not his fault. (For the origin qf this phrase compare the following from the essay on G. K. Chesterton entitled "Mr. Ramsay MacDonald " : "There is a shrewd saying somewhere in the scattered wisdom of Mr. G. K. Chesterton that the greatest historical event of the nineteenth century was the English Revolution which omitted to take place between the years 1829 and 1832. One may add, without discourtesy, that his greatest historical work is the one which he omitted to write about it." Or _better still : "At an open competition in the somewhat negative exercise of not being Mr. Lloyd George that was held in November, 1922, Mr. Bonar Law was found to be more indubitably not Mr. Lloyd George than any of the other competitors.")
Let me accordingly examine Mr. Guedalla's skill in the exercise of not being Mr. Lytton Strachey. It may perhaps be said, in the first place, that when Mr. Strachey commits an epigram it is the result of what he has written. In Mr. Guedalla's case it is the cause of what he is going to write. At the end of his vivisection of Cardinal Manning Mr. Strachey writes : "And he who descends into the crypt of that Cathedral . . . will observe . . . that the dust lies thick on the strange, the incongruous, the almost impossible object which, with its elaboration of dependent tassels, hangs down from the dim vault like some forlorn and forgotten trophy—the Hat." While the first sentence of the same effort states with equal truth and brevity : "Henry Manning was born in 1807 and died in 1892." Mr. Guedalla, on the other hand, begins his essay on Mr. Bernard Shaw by observing : "Mr. Shaw, like Tithonus, has discovered the secret of eternal age."
Mr. Strachey's epigram is a complete summary of the facts (as he arranged them) of Cardinal Manning's life and aspirations. All his life long, Mr. Strachey urges, Manning plotted for the power that is symbolized in the Cardinal's Hat, and all his life he never realized how strange, how incongruous, how impossible, and ultimately how dusty and mortal an object of spiritual search the Hat was. Mr. Guedalla's epigram, on the other hand, sets the pace
for the rest of his essay on Mr. Shaw. He must prove, or appear to prove, that Shaw is essentially old, or at any rate essentially pretends to be. My own view on this matter is that Shaw is essentially young, and that when he advocated getting back to Methuselah, he was advocating eternal youth and not eternal age. But that is of no importance. It is possible that Mr. Strachey's estimate of Manning is equally wrong (or right). What does matter is that in Mr. Strachey's case you are, as a point of art, inevitably compelled to accept the epigram. In Mr. Guedalla's you gasp at its cleverness, and begin to doubt from the first line the possibility of anything so clever (or so witty) being true.
There is next the question of style as between the two. Mr. Strachey has recaptured the first fine careful rapture, of Addison and Steele. He gives the impression of infinite leisure, of perukes and gillyflowers. The reader is lulled into the belief that Time with Mr. Strachey is an affair of the sundial, and then, with no warning, out whistles a rapier, and ping !--someone or something has been struck to the heart. Mr. Guedalla, on the other hand, is restless to the last degree. His is the atmosphere of Chelsea, where there is such a rattle of epigram and paradox that, in the succeeding silence, you can hear a platitude drop, like the pin of a grenade. Or, to put it in another way, if Mr. Strachey gracefully drops his occasional pearls before swine, Mr. Guedalla seems to be throwing his in a hurry before the swine have a chance of throwing them back.
Finally, in the matter of their subjects, heroes and villains come alike to Mr. Strachey, though, like a good modern, he prefers a good villain. But Mr. Guedalla is only really happy in dispraise. Nobody could read his " Rudyard Kipling," "Austen Chamberlain" or "Winston Churchill " without equal amusement and astonishment. On the other hand, the "Mr. Asquith," "Lord Grey" and "The Lords Robert and Hugh Cecil, M.P.," are a little heavy in the hand. If on the one hand it were true to say of Mr. Strachey that he writes "de mortuis nil nisi malum," it would be still truer to say of Mr. Guedalla that his vein is "de bonis nil fin mortuum."
And if you do not like that phrase, Mr. Guedalla, why on earth did you teach me how to write it ?
HUMBERT WOLFE.
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