“Senlis”

The Observer, 25 November 1917, page 4, 1,770 words

Senlis. By Cicely Hamilton. (Collins, 3s 5d. net.)

(Reviewed by George Moore.}

The sum has been done, and, if we are to believe the figures, it would seem that an industrious reader, reading from dusk to dusk for a hundred years, would still leave behind a great many books unread. It is true that arithmeticians have been known to make mistakes in their sums, but since life is impossible if we have not faith, I accepted the multiplications, divisions, and subtractions as correct, and, being without hope that I should outlive the hundred years of life that we moderns are beginning to look upon as our allotted span, I vowed never to look into a war book, saying to myself, “I will limit my reading to the best newspapers and to the weekly reviews.” “Why should we not believe the men who write about our literature?” I asked myself. “We believe those who write about our wars; and it is surely not more difficult to distinguish between good English and bad than it is to divine the enemy's strategy.” But the best theory is very often overturned by a simple fact, and the day before yesterday I was kept waiting in a publisher’s office, on the table by which I waited a book lay, and on the cover of this book I caught sight of the single word “Senlis.” I know of the town, having read of it in the works of Gerard de Nerval, a writer that I hold in very especial esteem and affection. “I may not look into that book,” I said to myself, “for I’ve vowed not to look into a war book. Only to see,” I said to myself, “if the town I have so often dreamed of visiting for the sake of two beautiful names, its own and Gerard de Nerval, be utterly destroyed.”

As the publisher whom I had come to see continued to keep me waiting, I opened the book, saying to myself, “If anything remain of the town I will go thither immediately, I shall learn from this book if the reviewers in whom I have put so much faith are as good judges of literature as the war correspondents are of war.”

“I never saw Senlis before the coming of the Germans; he had ravaged and left it full three months when I first tramped into the mutilated city on a dripping day in December in the year the war began.”

“An admirable sentence,” I cried, “for it leaves no doubt in my mind that the narrator completed her narrative in her mind before she began to put any part of it on paper,” and, holding the book between finger and thumb, I continued to read, convinced I had fallen in with a writer that I might address as chère maître — a grammatical license, it is true, but justified by Flaubert’s use of it in his letters to George Sand.

“Six miles we had trudged on the broad highway that leads to Crell, lying deep in its hollow, by uplands and woodlands to Senlis; six drizzling, straightforward, most lonely miles, with forest and field to the right and left and with hardly a soul on the road.”

“The second sentence is as good as the first,” I muttered, “so good that not one of the great descriptive writers, neither Pater, Sevenson, Fromentin, Gautier, nor Hawthorne, would have disdained these two sentences as an approach. I will read this book at home,” I continued, by the fire under the lamp. Any further reading in this office would be unwise, for the publisher may come in at any moment.”

I put the book into my pocket, and fell to thinking of the reviewers who had praised all the war books, and, remembering that the first I took up I found to be admirable, said: “I may conclude the others are as good, and that we are, therefore, in the midst of a great literary period.” A pleasant thought indeed this is, and I began to wonder how the critics had praised this book. “They must have praised it,” I said, “more than the others. But how did they praise it?” And devoured with literary curiosity, my eyes strayed over the table laden with literary journals. “I have only to look into these,” I said, “to learn more about these admirable men,” and I turned over the pages expecting to read subtle appreciations of Miss Cicely Hamilton’s book, and found two scrappy little notes, paragraphs in small print, stating that Mr. Cecily Hamilton had written “a pleasant guide book.” It is by such a misuse of words that a writer betrays the fact that he belongs to the scribbling class, for every book describing a country or a city is in a sense a guide book. Fromentin’s “Un été dans le Sahara,” Gautier’s “Voyage en Espagne,” and Hawthorne's sight-seeing in the Lake district and in London, all his beautiful descriptions of St. Paul’s, would be set down as guide books by these critics. Loti’s barley sugar is not much to my taste, but I should not write him down as a compiler of guide books, and I should be still more unwilling to describe “Senlis” as a guide book. If it be not as good as Hawthorne, it is away better than Loti. How, then, had this mistake, this very grave mistake, fallen out in journals of unquestionable literary respectability? And in my great perplexity I began to ask myself if the critics had read “Senlis” or only glanced into it. “However cursive the glance,” I said, “they could not have missed seeing the beautiful paragraphs in the description of the town and cathedral, though they might have missed the first sentence. But could they?”

I began this article with an admission that I had not read all the war books, but believed without reading, having great faith in the reviewers. “Are we then,” I asked myself, “amid false prophets? Or is the fault mine? Did I imagine the praise bestowed on the war book? Did I overlook some censure?” I searched my memory for a review disparaging a war book, but could not recall one. All had been praised but “Senlis,” and then the doubt rose up in my mind that if I had read them I might not have cared for them. “It would seem, I said, “that we look upon literature from different sides,” and the more I thought about the case of “Senlis” the greater became my perplexity, till at last, worn out with thinking, I dozed away and dreamed that the critics had one and all spoken of “Senlis” as a guide book because Miss Cicely Hamilton is an actress. Actresses are notorious travellers, it is true. But that is not the reason why the critics described “Senlis” as a guide book. I will be just to the critics. They concluded that Miss Cicely Hamilton could not write well because no actress before her ever put pen to paper without expressing her witlessness. The readers of The Observer are well-versed in literature, especially modern literature, and will remember the many volumes of memoirs that the stage casts up from time to time; silly recollections of the absence of a sofa, scene iii., act i., and how Mr. So-and-So inadvertently clapped on his pantomime wig instead of the wig that he was to wear in the drama that succeeded the pantomime. Actors and actresses never weary of recording such tidings, but I am not aware that the class has ever contributed to serious literature. This, of course, brings up the almighty question — Who wrote Shakespeare?

We have heard it alleged that the master was a bad actor, and that his claim to the authorship of “Hamlet” may be defended on the ground of his bad acting. If he had been a good actor the Baconians would have a better case. Myself is the only critic I know of, who has never been led away by this specious argument, and, truth to tell, I find myself after reading “Senlis” less able to accept it than ever, for, in my opinion, Miss Cicely Hamilton is the greatest actress I have ever seen. Jean de Reszke as Tristan, Forbes Roberston as Hamlet, and Miss Cicely Hamilton in a play which need not be mentioned here, are among my most enduring memories of the stage. I do not think that those who have seen Miss Cicely Hamilton on the stage will deem me guilty of exaggeration; all who have seen her will acknowledge her to be the greatest living actress in her own style. I repeat the words “in her own style,” though the repetition is almost unnecessary, for surely nobody thinks that an actress can play any parts except those that are suited to her. Miss Cicely Hamilton cannot, for instance, do what Sarah Bernhardt does, and I am very glad that she cannot. It is enough that one woman in the world shall be able to walk through two acts without attracting attention, and then rage like a lioness in the third act. Sarah Bernhardt can do this or could do this. Miss Cicely Hamilton never could and never will be able to do it, and, even if she could, I feel sure that she would refrain from doing it, her aim being much higher than Sarah Bernhardt’s. She is one of the rare interpreters of the spiritual life, which, after all, is the real life. And I doubt very much if any woman has expressed the spiritual life on the stage as poignantly as Miss Cicely Hamilton. For me, at least, she has succeeded in her very noble ambition, and I think I decry in her writing a great deal of the charm that it has been my good fortune to perceive in her acting. She seems to foresee her subject when she opens a door and passes on the stage, just as she seems to foresee her subject when she takes up her pen to write; and to be always well within the subject, however various the subject may be, is the gift that divides the artist and the amateur. Miss Cicely Hamilton is always within her subject in both arts, and it is perhaps because she expresses herself in two mediums that criticism looks askance. If it does not altogether close its eyes to her great talents. “Criticism does not look favourably on those who practise two arts,” Ludovic Halévy said to me one day, speaking of Fromentin.