The Patron and the Crocus (1925)
Young men and women beginning to write are generally given the plausible
but utterly impracticable advice to write what they have to write as
shortly as possible, as clearly as possible, and without other thought
in their minds except to say exactly what is in them. Nobody ever adds
on these occasions the one thing needful: “And be sure you choose your
patron wisely”, though that is the gist of the whole matter. For a book
is always written for somebody to read, and, since the patron is not
merely the paymaster, but also in a very subtle and insidious way the
instigator and inspirer of what is written, it is of the utmost
importance that he should be a desirable man.
But who, then, is the desirable man—the patron who will cajole the best
out of the writer’s brain and bring to birth the most varied and
vigorous progeny of which he is capable? Different ages have answered
the question differently. The Elizabethans, to speak roughly,
chose the aristocracy to write for and the playhouse public. The
eighteenth-century patron was a combination of coffee-house wit and Grub
Street bookseller. In the nineteenth-century the great writers wrote for
the half-crown magazines and the leisured classes. And looking back and
applauding the splendid results of these different alliances, it all
seems enviably simple, and plain as a pikestaff compared with our own
predicament—for whom should we write? For the present supply of patrons
is of unexampled and bewildering variety. There is the daily Press, the
weekly Press, the monthly Press; the English public and the American
public; the best-seller public and the worst-seller public; the
high-brow public and the red-blood public; all now organised
self-conscious entities capable through their various mouthpieces of
making their needs known and their approval or displeasure felt. Thus
the writer who has been moved by the sight of the first crocus in
Kensington Gardens has, before he sets pen to paper, to choose from a
crowd of competitors the particular patron who suits him best. It is
futile to say, “Dismiss them all; think only of your crocus”, because
writing is a method of communication; and the crocus is an imperfect
crocus until it has been shared. The first man or the last may write for
himself alone, but he is an exception and an unenviable one at that, and
the gulls are welcome to his works if the gulls can read them.
Granted, then, that every writer has some public or other at the end of
his pen, the high-minded will say that it should be a submissive public,
accepting obediently whatever he likes to give it. Plausible as the
theory sounds, great risks are attached to it. For in that case the
writer remains conscious of his public, yet is superior to it—an
uncomfortable and unfortunate combination, as the works of Samuel
Butler, George Meredith, and Henry James may be taken to prove. Each
despised the public; each desired a public; each failed to attain a
public; and each wreaked his failure upon the public by a succession,
gradually increasing in intensity, of angularities, obscurities, and
affectations which no writer whose patron was his equal and friend would
have thought it necessary to inflict. Their crocuses in consequence are
tortured plants, beautiful and bright, but with something wry-necked
about them, malformed, shrivelled on the one side, overblown on the
other. A touch of the sun would have done them a world of good. Shall we
then rush to the opposite extreme and accept (if in fancy alone) the
flattering proposals which the editors of the _Times_ and the _Daily
News_ may be supposed to make us—“Twenty pounds down for your crocus in
precisely fifteen hundred words, which shall blossom upon every
breakfast table from John o’ Groats to the Land’s End before nine
o’clock to-morrow morning with the writer’s name attached”?
But will one crocus be enough, and must it not be a very brilliant
yellow to shine so far, to cost so much, and to have one’s name attached
to it? The Press is undoubtedly a great multiplier of crocuses. But if
we look at some of these plants, we shall find that they are only very
distantly related to the original little yellow or purple flower which
pokes up through the grass in Kensington Gardens about this time of
year. The newspaper crocus is amazing but still a very different plant.
It fills precisely the space allotted to it. It radiates a golden glow.
It is genial, affable, warm-hearted. It is beautifully finished, too,
for let nobody think that the art of “our dramatic critic” of the
_Times_ or of Mr. Lynd of the _Daily News_ is an easy one. It is no
despicable feat to start a million brains running at nine o’clock in the
morning, to give two million eyes something bright and brisk and amusing
to look at. But the night comes and these flowers fade. So little bits
of glass lose their lustre if you take them out of the sea; great prima
donnas howl like hyenas if you shut them up in telephone boxes; and the
most brilliant of articles when removed from its element is dust and
sand and the husks of straw. Journalism embalmed in a book is
unreadable.
The patron we want, then, is one who will help us to preserve our
flowers from decay. But as his qualities change from age to age, and it
needs considerable integrity and conviction not to be dazzled by the
pretensions or bamboozled by the persuasions of the competing crowd,
this business of patron-finding is one of the tests and trials of
authorship. To know whom to write for is to know how to write. Some of
the modern patron’s qualities are, however, fairly plain. The writer
will require at this moment, it is obvious, a patron with the
book-reading habit rather than the play-going habit. Nowadays, too, he
must be instructed in the literature of other times and races. But there
are other qualities which our special weaknesses and tendencies demand
in him. There is the question of indecency, for instance, which plagues
us and puzzles us much more than it did the Elizabethans. The
twentieth-century patron must be immune from shock. He must distinguish
infallibly between the little clod of manure which sticks to the crocus
of necessity, and that which is plastered to it out of bravado. He must
be a judge, too, of those social influences which inevitably play so
large a part in modern literature, and able to say which matures and
fortifies, which inhibits and makes sterile. Further, there is emotion
for him to pronounce on, and in no department can he do more useful work
than in bracing a writer against sentimentality on the one hand and a
craven fear of expressing his feeling on the other. It is worse, he will
say, and perhaps more common, to be afraid of feeling than to feel too
much. He will add, perhaps, something about language, and point out how
many words Shakespeare used and how much grammar Shakespeare violated,
while we, though we keep our fingers so demurely to the black notes on
the piano, have not appreciably improved upon _Antony and Cleopatra_.
And if you can forget your sex altogether, he will say, so much the
better; a writer has none. But all this is by the way—elementary and
disputable. The patron’s prime quality is something different, only to
be expressed perhaps by the use of that convenient word which cloaks so
much—atmosphere. It is necessary that the patron should shed and
envelop the crocus in an atmosphere which makes it appear a plant of the
very highest importance, so that to misrepresent it is the one outrage
not to be forgiven this side of the grave. He must make us feel that a
single crocus, if it be a real crocus, is enough for him; that he does
not want to be lectured, elevated, instructed, or improved; that he is
sorry that he bullied Carlyle into vociferation, Tennyson into idyllics,
and Ruskin into insanity; that he is now ready to efface himself or
assert himself as his writers require; that he is bound to them by a
more than maternal tie; that they are twins indeed, one dying if the
other dies, one flourishing if the other flourishes; that the fate of
literature depends upon their happy alliance—all of which proves, as we
began by saying, that the choice of a patron is of the highest
importance. But how to choose rightly? How to write well? Those are the
questions.