A Communication to My Friends, Chapter 11

London: Nonesuch Press, 13 June 1933, pages 84-86, 673 words

XI

I returned to London rejoicing, with two new subjects for books in my head. The first, the figure of a conscience-stricken priest wandering by a lake, for he had denounced from his altar his school-mistress who had had an illegitimate child. Nobody knew where she had gone, and he felt he would never see the face of a happy hour again if she had drowned herself in the lake. The book was praised in the English, and even in the Irish press, and found many readers. I confess myself attached to the book for the sake of the proportion, the balance, the incidents skilfully contrived and introduced without interrupting the narrative, more than for the actual text. I had occasion to read the book the other day and it seemed to me a little common in style, inferior to the Brook Kerith. This was my first great advance in the writing of our dear English language, and the advancement continued, though perhaps not so marked, in Héloise and Abélard. But it is neither to the Brook Kerith nor to Héloise and Abélard that my thoughts turn most often, but to Daphnis and Chloe. One of the most ingenious miracles is how a work of art comes into being; at first it is a morass, and then something happens, and the picture and the book and the cantata sing of themselves. All that goes down on the canvas and the paper comes from within, unconsciously. Shelley did well to speak of the unpremeditated song of the lark — his own songs were unpremeditated; he could hardly have been aware of his poetry while it was being written, and afterwards, when he studied it, he must have wondered how it had come into being.

I came down one morning with a letter in my hand reminding me that my agreement with a certain publisher contained a clause that I was to translate Daphnis and Chloe. I came down trembling, frightened, unable to believe that I could ever accomplish such a thing. I read many translations of this story, and all were absurd, and now I was going to produce still one more absurdity. But instead of an absurdity, it seemed to me that I was writing more musical prose than I had ever written before. Even the "Proemial," that had floored so many translators, rolled itself out, to use an ordinary simile, like silk off a reel, and when I came to write the first sentence, I wrote the best sentence that I have ever written in my life, and here it is: "The sea flows round Mitylene, a fair city of Lesbos, and channels filled by the sea and adorned by bridges of polished white stone divide it so frequently that the beholder, viewing it from a distance, would perceive a group of small islands rather than a city." How beautiful, I said to myself, but this city of Lesbos would have acquired new beauties under Gooden's graver. A great artist truly — the greatest among living artists, no one to compare him with except Dürer himself. And looking at a proof of a drawing he had done for Peronnik the Fool, a fierce, blustering cock, screaming, perched on a key drawn in perspective, no doubt the key of the secret castle where the sorceress kept the knights she had lured into her service, how he screams! a raucous scream, as if nobody knew except himself that day was near. What intensity in that eye, I continued, what life there is. Look again at his bony legs covered with a hard skin — how wonderfully drawn is the skin. Will my luck give me a publisher when I am among the gone who will ask Gooden to do four, five or six pictures for my Daphnis and Chloe? Should such a thing happen, I doubt not that God will open my ears to hear the crowing of the cock.

Title page by Stephen Gooden of A Communication to My Friends