INTRODUCTION
(1923)
The other day found me in a part of London once familiar, now rarely visited. This is Notting Hill Gate or, as I believe it now prefers to be called, Holland Park. You get to it by taking an omnibus running westward along Oxford Street; you pass the big dressmakers' and milliners' shops, you pass by Marble Arch, noting, if your eyes are keen, a small brass triangle let into the middle of the roadway, marking the site of Hadley Newgreen or Tyburn Tree, you have the Park and afterwards Kensington Gardens on your left and a prosperous residential quarter on your right, and so you come at length to Notting Hill Gate, named, no doubt, after the toll gate that once stood there. It is not a very characteristic neighbourhood; shops and taverns mostly of the 'fifties and 'sixties of the last century, dingy and undistinguished enough; here and there a couple of houses of Queen Anne's day, pleasant in their mellow brick; streets of a dim and shadowy but yet leafy sort stretching northward, streets once well known by my weary feet; and so on till the main road sweeps down the hill in a broad, steep descent on its way to Shepherds Bush and Acton, Gold Hawk Road and Hammersmith. For London, a fine street enough; well-planted with planes, one side of it bounded by the walls and the gardens of the big white houses in Holland Park. And on the right hand side, about half way down the hill, Clarendon Road goes northward. On this day that I speak of I had no business on earth in Clarendon Road, but my spirit had business there and I turned down it and walked slowly along till I came opposite to Number 23. And then I stopped and looked very hard at that respectable, though quite unremarkable three-storied house, and especially at a window on the top floor. I was glad, I think, to see that the house front was being repainted; for what remained of the old face seemed to show that no fresh paint had touched Number 23 since I had occupied the small narrow room behind that window on the highest story, in the year 1885—and thought of "The Chronicle of Clemendy."
Not many months ago I was talking to a man of letters about those early days of mine. He had been reading my book, "Far Off Things," which attempts to relate the story of this adventurous time.
"I wouldn't have stood it," said my author. "I wouldn't have borne the loneliness that you describe. I would have rushed off to Wimbledon and lain in wait for Swinburne and insisted on knowing him whether he liked it or not."
And I am sure that my friend would have been as good as his word. He would have hailed Swinburne on Wimbledon Common, he would have insisted on knowing him, and I daresay that Swinburne would have liked him very much. And, somehow, I perceive by this example what helpless, bound creatures we all are; bound and imprisoned not so much by circumstance but by the chains of our several natures, constraining us. I have no doubt, I say, that poor Guy Thorne—he is dead not long ago—would have followed the course he preached with the utmost success. I could never so much as have dreamed of it; if I could have followed it, it would not have comforted me at all. I had gone down into the glouring gloom of the furnace house, and there I must stay till the fires had done their work on me. Nothing from without could be of any help. When I first began to descend the steps that led to the dark and fiery place, one of my few friends, noticing the cloud upon me, said:
"What you want is a night at the theatre: meet me at the Lyceum on Thursday."
I went duly, and I am sure that Henry Irving and Ellen Terry were at their very best in "Much Ado About Nothing"; but the play did me no good. My relief must come from within, not from without.
This must have been in the autumn of 1882. All through 1883 and for six months of '84 I lived behind that window in the small room in Clarendon Road; utterly lonely, utterly poor, striving for some literary utterance and finding my only relief in the adventure of letters, though oppressed and tormented by all manner of discouragements. Not from without; again I say that I have never cared two straws for publishers' refusals or for any such merely external hindrances. Just as the play did me no good, just as the companionship of the distinguished would have done me no good if I had possessed it; so, on the other side, external obstacles and failures never did me any harm. The fire that scorched me was in my own judgement of my gross incapacity and demerit: that was the flame that burned and blackened, that was the anguish that made mere existence almost intolerable. In '83, after horrible struggles, I had written a queer, futile book called "The Anatomy of Tobacco" and had obtained some relief. Then, I had a year's rest in my old home, finding solace and refreshment in the sight of old, homely, friendly faces, in the warmth of hearths that have long ago grown cold and grey. Now, I was back in Clarendon Road, alone again, picking up a small and precarious living for a while, again at once urged and tormented by the mysterious impulse of letters which, to my mind, is in itself satisfactory proof of the essentially spiritual nature of man. For, on the one hand, in 999 cases out of a thousand, there is no resultant material profit: on the contrary, mental and material miseries without end are the inevitable reward of the lettered man. Whatever pretences may be on the lips of the general, in their hearts they despise such an one unless he be extremely wealthy; an engineer's apprentice or a young draper's assistant is held in more honour than he. Yet, there is no denying the existence of this literary impulse; it is impossible to overlook its amazing strength and persistence in the face of every discouragement: poverty and hunger, sneers and jeers without; capital sentences of judgement within—and yet the man of letters, though he die daily, yet lives and renews his endeavour. And so in 1885, in that dim and leafy and languid Clarendon Road, as I munched my dry bread and drank my tea and smoked my frequent pipe, it came upon me that a book was to be written. And here I stay for a moment. For it has just been borne in on me as I write that I have rewritten, in other terms, the "Epistle Dedicatory" to "The Chronicle of Clemendy," which I wrote thirty-eight years ago in languid Clarendon Road. Thus, in the "Epistle Dedicatory," in the grand manner:
How many a scholar, I say, hath passed away the best years of his life, the flower of his age, in some mean cock-loft, with scarce enough air, (let alone meat and drink) for his sustenance: the which lack of air being by itself well recognised for a sufficient cause of melancholy. And when we consider the other misfortunes which are rather to be esteemed essential than accidental to such a life: the slow decay of hope, the loneliness of days and weeks and years, the scorn of others, and (often) the contempt of one's very self, it will readily be received that whosoever doth aught to mitigate the hardships of this estate is most worthy of praise, thankofferings, and lowly service.
That was in 1885, when I was twenty-two. Now, having come to the age of sixty, I can no longer write in the grand manner. Age grows too stiff and too weary for these noble antics. But it is all of it true: what I said then I say now; merely in different phrases.
Well, then, it came upon me in this summer of 1885 that a book must be written; but for the life of me I could not think what it was to be about. I could not even discern the vaguest image of the form and shape of it, and here I leave to the occult philosophers—I can make no guess at a solution myself—this astounding problem of the young man who vehemently desires to write but has no notion as to the matter which he wants to write about. There is the fact, but like many other facts, such as Time and Space, it seems to defy the "subtlest" enquiries of the human mind. In a later book, "Things Near and Far," I have hazarded the explanation that the actualities of life are so intolerable that men will do anything and suffer anything to escape from them: some climbing Alps, some drinking methylated spirit and some writing books in their fierce effort to escape from the routine of ordinary existence. This may be the answer to the question: I do not know.
At all events, here was I, wandering about these dim streets and wondering what this famous book was to be. I learned one night. I was lying awake in my bed, and all suddenly there came upon me a magic and ecstatic glow and light and radiance; as I must think, even now, after all the long and heavy years, a faint glimpse and savour of real life and true being. But realities must have their earthly shapes and substance, as Paradise must be a garden, and so this gleam of the things that truly are took the shape, inevitable to me, of the book that was to be written. It was to be called—I have only just remembered the title after a long forgetfulness—"The Glory of Gwent"; it was to be, somehow, all about that beloved country in the west from which I was an exile; it was to be a Great Romance, a noble dream, a revelation of things hidden. Thus do I put myself in the pillory, not waiting for the just vengeance of the reader, who will listen to all this fine talk and then go on to the actuality, the thing that came of this vision in the night, this present "Chronicle of Clemendy"—and then lifted a bewildered brow, and if he be a kind man, weep for the burning desires and the sorry impotence of youth. "That is what he longed to do: this is what he has done: miserrimus."
But on this night of '85 I fell asleep happy and woke happy in the morning and bought pens and paper—I looked the other day for the stationer's shop, Murley's I think it was called, but I could not find it. I was quite clear that a vision had been vouchsafed me, but then, as often happens with the dreams of the night, the sharp outlines began to fade in daylight, the things that had been so shining and distinct became dim and obscure, the distant images, radiant and glowing, grew phantasmal, uncertain. For many months I wandered in an obscure wood, having lost the path, wondering often enough if there ever had been a path. I racked my brain to find a medium, a vehicle for the vision, trying now one form, now another, and meeting with no success at all, but stubbornly persisting nevertheless.
The book that had these beginnings in dim, languid Clarendon Road was continued and ended in a very different scene. In the autumn of 1885, having had a narrow escape from starvation, I returned to my old home, Llanddewi—you pronounce, "Llanthowy"—Rectory in Gwent, or Monmouthshire. The Rectory is almost at the summit of a long hill that winds by deep lanes up the four miles from Caerlem-on-Uske. Its front windows look out over deep orchards, over deep narrow valleys and wooded hills, over sparse white farms shining in the sun, even to the wall of Wentwood, the remnant, still considerable, of the great and ancient forest of Gwent. It was here, in this old and good world, that I finished and brought to an end the best I could make of my dreams; the fairy gold that had turned into dry leaves. I wrote late at night when all the house was asleep, and the snow was on the ground. Later, with the new year and the coming of summer I wrote till the sky grew red over Wentwood. I have a pleasant memory of working at my book of a warm and sunny morning in the June of '86. The elder blossom was sweet in the air, and I had taken out my pen and ink and paper to one of the orchards below the Rectory. Here was a contrivance which had once been the stand for a beehive: the hive was gone, and there you had a very excellent table.
So it was ended at last: this book into which I put all my dreams and my desires, such vision as had been given me, such craftsmanship as I could attain, such hints of another world (that is not very far off but very near) as any words and phrases that I knew could convey. Here it is, "The Chronicle of Clemendy": alas!