| |
Among the galaxy of autumnal literary
friends and strangers spread over shelf and work-table
and floor of my sanctum for evening relaxation and the more sober
duties of the newspaper
reviewer none has SO deeply impressed me with the artistic significance
and the peculiar
beauty of our time as Professor Rattyscum’s lavishly illustrated
book of travel: “From Sewer
to Cathedral Spire.” The work opens as is fitting and fashionable
nowadays with a dedication
to Mrs. Rattyscum, to whom we are indebted for the generous profusion
of “quarter and
half-quarter tone” water-colours. It is not without reason
that I quote the Professor’s words in
their short entirety :-
“While I did write, thy busy fingers, dabbler,
Painted the page;
The verdant prattle of thy child-heart, babbler,
Sweet’ning the sage
Words of my virile tongue
As herbs are hung
In juicy breast of roasted farmyard gabbler!
Voila! (as our great-hearted Charles Dickens was so fond of exclaiming
after his journey to
Paris in the early seventies) there you have the man - the writing
hand, the tender eye, and
the sardonic, albeit wholesome, twist of the lip! There is something
of a divine swoop in the
Professor’s immediate grip of you; in the way he leads you
from the figure of Mrs.
Rattyscum painting, perhaps, some intimate corner of the Sahara,
to the dining-table, to the
roasted bird or the willow pattern dish set in a little mat of pale
yellow straw. Gleam of
silver, gloss of napery, ’hoarded splendour of the dust-covered
wine bottle, bloom of the fruit
in season. . . . “Both so equally beautiful,” we might
fancy him saying. “For the modern artist
refuses to find - nay, cannot find - one jot of difference between
the beauty of spiritual things
and the beauty of the earth, earthy. . . .”
Perhaps an even more forcible example of this modern vision is
found on page 176, “Street
Idyll in Wang-Thang.” He gives a detailed and extremely powerful
description of the beating
of a girl-child in the open roadway, who, finally escaping her persecutor,
leaves on the
pavement the handkerchief with which child has stilled her weeping.
A boy, who has
observed the whole scene “with infinite compassion,”
possesses himself of the “cambric
trifle” and thrusts it into his breast pocket. -. “Ah,
and why not? Surely the tear-stained
handkerchief of the little beloved on the paving-stone is as lovely
as the first rain-washed
flower in the milk-white meadows of Paradise.”
It is natural, in the reading of this volume, that the thoughts
should fly off to the tragic figure
of Heinrich Heine, and it is true that there is a resemblance; Heine
is the invalid brother of
the Rattyscum family. Small doubt that had he been blessed with
the Professor‘s physique
and the permanent pillow of a chaste’s wife’s lap the
fruits of his bitterness might have
temperately mellowed. It is difficult to imagine the laughing apostle
of Welt-Schmerz ”
rising to the primitive splendour of this conception. The Rattyscums,
on leaving London, are
unable to pass through Chancery Lane as the road is “up ”
,and thronged with labourers. Here
is the Professor’s note: “And I thought God Himself
was to be pitied in that He created the
world alone and could not remark the sturdy beauty of workmen in
His pay, nor rejoice in
their swinging poise, nor inhale through His Omnipotent nostrils
the good, rich smells of ....”
One is tempted to quote endlessly, but the book must be bought
and held to be appreciated.
In this restricted space I can give only the cup without the cold
water, the quiver without the
arrows. You must deepen over the pages until your very eyes seem
to fasten on to this vivid
colour, to shapen in it - until you fancy that the book might glow
in the dark - you might rise
from your bed and see it phosphorescent, luminous, afloat on your
table.
Permeating and penetrating every sewer, lighting upon and uplifted
by every Cathedral spire
of every country where such things are - and where such things are
not - finding their just
equivalent in intimate probing of the psychology of the cannibal
heart on the one hand, or
writing in rainbow prose the lonely loveliness of mountains at sunrise
on the other Professor
Rattyscum girdles the earth with his pen point for the reader’s
delight, stirring and keeping
ever in motion those twin well-springs of laughter and tears. For
who can help but laugh -
and we, ourselves are laughing as we write - at the Professor’s
encounter with a young,
recently converted and flannelette-clad cannibal girl in a mission
school in New Guinea, who
folded her hands, and raising her great black eyes exclaimed : “Me
lovee Jesus ;Jesus my
boy.” Yet hardly has one recovered before the Professor suggests
the ultimate truth of their
naive statement, i.e., the personal appeal of the carnate Christ
to the feminine temperament.
And, to finish with the taste of the Professor strong and sweet
in the mouth, I quote from
chapter 137, “Wallowings ” :-
“For the true realist must fain love the swine-the rough-silvered
back, the round, bright eyes,
like berries twinkling under the eyebrow hedge, the solemn monotone
of the snorting snout.
Gladly before them he scatters his pearls, laughing, fiery-bosomed
as Nature herself does not
hesitate to scatter over the meanest of her creatures dew from the
rose of morning.”
KATHERINE MANSFIELD
|
