The Collected Works of John Buchan (Illustrated). Buchan John
“Well?” said the poet.
“There’s a lot of fine things here, but—but the lines don’t just seem to scan very well.”
Mr. Heritage laughed. “Now I can place you exactly. You like the meek rhyme and the conventional epithet. Well, I don’t. The world has passed beyond that prettiness. You want the moon described as a Huntress or a gold disc or a flower—I say it’s oftener like a beer barrel or a cheese. You want a wealth of jolly words and real things ruled out as unfit for poetry. I say there’s nothing unfit for poetry. Nothing, Dogson! Poetry’s everywhere, and the real thing is commoner among drabs and pot-houses and rubbish-heaps than in your Sunday parlours. The poet’s business is to distil it out of rottenness, and show that it is all one spirit, the thing that keeps the stars in their place. I wanted to call my book Drains, for drains are sheer poetry carrying off the excess and discards of human life to make the fields green and the corn ripen. But the publishers kicked. So I called it Whorls, to express my view of the exquisite involution of all things. Poetry is the fourth dimension of the soul. Well, let’s hear about your taste in prose.”
Mr. McCunn was much bewildered, and a little inclined to be cross. He disliked being called Dogson, which seemed to him an abuse of his etymological confidences. But his habit of politeness held.
He explained rather haltingly his preferences in prose.
Mr. Heritage listened with wrinkled brows.
“You’re even deeper in the mud than I thought,” he remarked. “You live in a world of painted laths and shadows. All this passion for the picturesque! Trash, my dear man, like a schoolgirl’s novelette heroes. You make up romances about gipsies and sailors, and the blackguards they call pioneers, but you know nothing about them. If you did, you would find they had none of the gilt and gloss you imagine. But the great things they have got in common with all humanity you ignore. It’s like—it’s like sentimentalising about a pancake because it looked like a buttercup, and all the while not knowing that it was good to eat.”
At that moment the Australian entered the room to get a light for his pipe. He wore a motor-cyclist’s overalls and appeared to be about to take the road. He bade them good night, and it seemed to Dickson that his face, seen in the glow of the fire, was drawn and anxious, unlike that of the agreeable companion at dinner.
“There,” said Mr. Heritage, nodding after the departing figure. “I dare say you have been telling yourself stories about that chap—life in the bush, stockriding and the rest of it. But probably he’s a bank-clerk from Melbourne. Your romanticism is one vast self-delusion, and it blinds your eye to the real thing. We have got to clear it out, and with it all the damnable humbug of the Kelt.”
Mr. McCunn, who spelt the word with a soft “C,” was puzzled. “I thought a kelt was a kind of a no-weel fish,” he interposed.
But the other, in the flood-tide of his argument, ignored the interruption. “That’s the value of the war,” he went on. “It has burst up all the old conventions, and we’ve got to finish the destruction before we can build. It is the same with literature and religion, and society and politics. At them with the axe, say I. I have no use for priests and pedants. I’ve no use for upper classes and middle classes. There’s only one class that matters, the plain man, the workers, who live close to life.”
“The place for you,” said Dickson dryly, “is in Russia among the Bolsheviks.”
Mr. Heritage approved. “They are doing a great work in their own fashion. We needn’t imitate all their methods—they’re a trifle crude and have too many Jews among them—but they’ve got hold of the right end of the stick. They seek truth and reality.”
Mr. McCunn was slowly being roused.
“What brings you wandering hereaways?” he asked.
“Exercise,” was the answer. “I’ve been kept pretty closely tied up all winter. And I want leisure and quiet to think over things.”
“Well, there’s one subject you might turn your attention to. You’ll have been educated like a gentleman?”
“Nine wasted years—five at Harrow, four at Cambridge.”
“See here, then. You’re daft about the working-class and have no use for any other. But what in the name of goodness do you know about working-men? I come out of them myself, and have lived next door to them all my days. Take them one way and another, they’re a decent sort, good and bad like the rest of us. But there’s a wheen daft folk that would set them up as models— close to truth and reality, says you. It’s sheer ignorance, for you’re about as well acquaint with the working-man as with King Solomon. You say I make up fine stories about tinklers and sailor-men because I know nothing about them. That’s maybe true. But you’re at the same job yourself. You ideelise the working man, you and your kind, because you’re ignorant. You say that he’s seeking for truth, when he’s only looking for a drink and a rise in wages. You tell me he’s near reality, but I tell you that his notion of reality is often just a short working day and looking on at a footba’-match on Saturday. And when you run down what you call the middle-classes that do three-quarters of the world’s work and keep the machine going and the working-man in a job, then I tell you you’re talking havers. Havers!”
Mr. McCunn, having delivered his defence of the bourgeoisie, rose abruptly and went to bed. He felt jarred and irritated. His innocent little private domain had been badly trampled by this stray bull of a poet. But as he lay in bed, before blowing out his candle, he had recourse to Walton, and found a passage on which, as on a pillow, he went peacefully to sleep:
“As I left this place, and entered into the next field, a second pleasure entertained me; ‘twas a handsome milkmaid, that had not yet attained so much age and wisdom as to load her mind with any fears of many things that will never be, as too many men too often do; but she cast away all care, and sang like a nightingale; her voice was good, and the ditty fitted for it; it was the smooth song that was made by Kit Marlow now at least fifty years ago. And the milkmaid’s mother sung an answer to it, which was made by Sir Walter Raleigh in his younger days. They were old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good; I think much better than the strong lines that are now in fashion in this critical age.”
CHAPTER 3
HOW CHILDE ROLAND AND ANOTHER CAME TO THE DARK TOWER
Dickson woke with a vague sense of irritation. As his recollections took form they produced a very unpleasant picture of Mr. John Heritage. The poet had loosened all his placid idols, so that they shook and rattled in the niches where they had been erstwhile so secure. Mr. McCunn had a mind of a singular candour, and was prepared most honestly at all times to revise his views. But by this iconoclast he had been only irritated and in no way convinced. “Sich poetry!” he muttered to himself as he shivered in his bath (a daily cold tub instead of his customary hot one on Saturday night being part of the discipline of his holiday). “And yon blethers about the working-man!” he ingeminated as he shaved. He breakfasted alone, having outstripped even the fishermen, and as he ate he arrived at conclusions. He had a great respect for youth, but a line must be drawn somewhere. “The man’s a child,” he decided, “and not like to grow up. The way he’s besotted on everything daftlike, if it’s only new. And he’s no rightly young either—speaks like an auld dominie, whiles. And he’s rather impident,” he concluded, with memories of “Dogson.” He was very clear that he never wanted to see him again; that was the reason of his early breakfast. Having clarified his mind by definitions, Dickson felt comforted. He paid his bill, took an affectionate farewell of the landlord, and at 7.30 precisely stepped out into the gleaming morning.
It was such a day as only a Scots April can show. The cobbled streets of Kirkmichael still shone with the night’s rain, but the storm clouds had fled before a mild south wind, and the whole circumference of the sky was a delicate translucent