With the soul we reach solid ground. As soon as it enters literature, whether in full radiance or behind a cloud, two great side-scenes accompany it, the mountains of Right and Wrong, and we get a complete change of décor, adapted for writers who likewise treat the unusual, but who treat it mystically or humanistically. Butterflies and beetles may survive the soul’s arrival, but they serve another purpose: they bear some relationship to Salvation. Think of all they go through in Water Babies or Sir James Barrie!4 Even the Three Mulla Mulgars5 are not completely on their own. Whereas in the creatures considered to-day there is nothing to be saved or damned, their modish ecclesiasticism and rural magic bear no relation to philosophic truth, the miracles that transform them, the earthquakes that shatter, have no deeper implication than a conjuring trick. As soon as we realize that we cannot save them we shall enjoy them. But it is not easy for an Anglo-Saxon to realize so little. He requires a book to be serious unless it is comic, and when it is neither is apt to ring for the police.
In his masterly introduction to Firbank’s collected works, Mr Arthur Waley6 put us on the proper track. He remarked of Firbank that he ‘seems as though endowed with a kind of inverted X-ray, which enabled him, not to penetrate the unseen, but, on the contrary, continually to hover, as it were, an inch or two above the surface of things.’ The remark applies to this literature generally, which omits not merely the soul but many material actualities, and, if taken in large quantities, is unsatisfying. The writer who hovers two inches off everything may fascinate for a time, but finally he gives one the fidgets, and the reader will both be kind and wise to imitate him, and to repair to some other book at the first hint of boredom. So, like a swarm of summer insects, feeling perfectly free and disclaiming any vested interests in the soul, let us continue to flit …
Ronald Firbank died a few years ago, still young. But there is nothing up-to-date in him. He is fin de siècle, as it used to be called; he belongs to the nineties and the Yellow Book; his mind inherits the furniture and his prose the cadences of Aubrey Beardsley’s Under the Hill.7 To the historian he is an interesting example of literary conservatism; to his fellow insects a radiance and a joy. Is he affected? Yes, always. Is he self-conscious? No, he wants to mop and mow, and put on birettas and stays,8 and he does it as naturally as healthy Englishmen light their pipes. Is he himself healthy? Perish the thought! Is he passionate, compassionate, dispassionate? Next question! Is he intelligent? Not particularly, if we compare him with another writer whom he occasionally resembles – Max.9 Has he genius? Yes, in his flit-about fashion he has, but genius is a critic’s word, and one insect should not fasten it wantonly upon another. What charms us in him is his taste, his choice of words, the rhythm both of his narrative and of his conversations, his wit, and – in his later work – an opulence as of gathered fruit and enamelled skies. His very monsignorishness is acceptable. It is chic, it is risqué, to titter in sacristies and peep through grilles at ecclesiastical Thesmophoriazusae,10 and if he becomes petulant, and lets a convent or a pipkin crash, it does not signify, for likely enough we have thrown down the book ourselves a page before. Yes, he has genius, for we are certain to take up the book again, and to come across Reggie, whose voice was rather like cheap scent, or Cardinal Pirelli baptizing a dog, or Miss Sinquier, daughter to a dean, who gave up all for the drama, and was killed by a mouse-trap, or Mrs Cresswell, who would have been canonized but for her unfortunate mot: ‘If we are all a part of God, then God must, indeed, be horrible’, or Princess Elsie of England, or St Laura of Nazianzi her rival, or the Mouth family leaving their negro nakedness for the lures of Cuna-Cuna, or a hundred other sentences or people (the two classes are not separable) which have been evoked by his gaiety and exoticism. It is tempting to conclude the catalogue with the words ‘He was a perfect artist’; tempting but unwise, for the words have something of the heavenly extinguisher about them, and we may discover that after all he was a glow-worm, and that now we cannot see him any more.
Vainglory is a good example of his earlier manner, and Prancing Nigger (first called Sorrow in Sunlight) of his later. Vainglory is all tweaks and skips. It professes to describe the attempts of Mrs Shamefoot to insert herself into Ashringford Cathedral in the form of a stained-glass window. Bishop Pantry is reluctant. Meanwhile she runs a florist’s shop; indeed, Meanwhile would do admirably as a sub-title for the book. On we read, confusing the characters with the incidents and neglecting the outcome, but tickled by the images and the turns of the talk. It is frivolous stuff, and how rare, how precious is frivolity! How few writers can prostitute all their powers! They are always implying ‘I am capable of higher things.’ Firbank is completely absorbed in his own nonsense; he has nothing to hide, he is not showing off, he is not (or is very seldom) polemical. When he attempts satire, or wistfulness (as in Santal), he fails at once, he was incapable of totting up life. But there are no attempts in Vainglory, it is an untainted series of absurdities, and most delightful although Mrs Shamefoot’s efforts have not even a comic coherency.
It is strange that such a writer should have developed, but Prancing Nigger offers quite another pair of wings. The butterfly has come out, and has demanded, with such severity as it can master, a temperature and even a cage. The temperature is tropical; we are on an exquisite island which travesties Haiti.11 The cage is the fortunes of the Mouth family; we are bounded by them, and it is the first time we have been bounded by anything, we are approaching the semblance of a novel. Is colour, after a certain point, only to be increased by a judicious mixture of human interest? Perhaps the question presented itself to him. Certainly one comes nearer to ‘minding’ about Edna Miami and Charlie than about any of his previous characters – Charlie, the glorified symbol of the writer himself, the happy black boy, passing through the customs at Cuna-Cuna with a butterfly net and nothing to declare.
The English novel, to Mr Waley’s distress, is at present cluttered up with realistic lumber, and he draws a comparison between it and English painting. Fiction is mostly ‘still in the Chantry Bequest stage’, and Firbank was an Impressionist, who broke away from academic naturalism by the method of selection and choice. Another reaction besides the Impressionistic is possible, namely the pre-Raphaelite, where the writer or painter throws himself into a state of mind more simple than his own, and thus raises his work from the anecdotic to the lyrical. This, Mr Waley points out, is the reaction of Mr David Garnett, who is deliberately naïve; and has found in fantasy a serviceable ally rather than a fairy queen. Unlike Firbank, he wants to do something, he wants to write a story, and we are here in the presence of a much more sophisticated mind, a sophistication all the greater because it is so carefully controlled, and always kept out of doors. His art is a hybrid. It blends in a new relationship the stocks of fantasy and common sense. It is a successful experiment – unlike the art of Firbank, which contains no experiments at all. All that the two share in common is an omission: they do not introduce the soul nor its attendant scenery of Right and Wrong, they are fundamentally unserious. This disconcerts the Anglo-Saxon reader, who approves of playfulness, but likes it to have a holiday air. In the absence of regular office hours ‘to sport would be as tedious as to work’,12 says Prince Henry the prig, and the butterflies and their kindred neither contradict him nor agree – they merely go away, and allow him to ruin Falstaff and save England. Play is their business. If for an instant they swerve from it they are swept into the nets of allegory. They may or may not possess will-power, may or may not desire to hover over a certain hedge, but the will is a trifle in the realm of the lower air which they inhabit and invite us to share.
NOTES
1. This piece was originally published in a different form as ‘Our Butterflies and Beetles’, New York Herald Tribune, 5 May 1929; it first appeared in its current form in Abinger Harvest (London: Edward Arnold, 1936), pp. 115–21.
2. Joseph Addison (1672–1719): poet, playwright, politician and co-founder of the Spectator journal.
3
. David Garnett (1892–1981): prolific author and bisexual member of the Bloomsbury circle, whose 1922 fantasy novel Lady into Fox describes how Sylvia Tebrick, the 24-year-old heroine, suddenly turns into a fox while walking in the woods with her husband.
4. The Water Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby (1863): a popular children’s novel by Charles Kingsley (1819–75); J. M. Barrie (1860–1937): children’s author, whose play Peter Pan; or, The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (1904) and novel Peter and Wendy (1911) achieved global renown.
5. The Three Mulla-Mulgars (1910): animal fantasy tale for children by Walter de la Mare (1873–1956).
6. Arthur Waley’s introduction – which first appeared in Duckworth’s 1929 edition of The Works of Ronald Firbank – is reproduced in Meryvn Horder (ed.), Ronald Firbank: Memoirs and Critiques (London: Duckworth, 1977), pp. 166–74.
7. Yellow Book (1894–7): literary quarterly edited by Henry Harland, specializing in decadent and aesthetic writings; Under the Hill: unfinished novel by Aubrey Beardsley (1872–98) with illustrations by the author, first published in the Savoy (1896) and as a book by John Lane (1904).
8. The biretta is a four-cornered square liturgical cap, topped by a tassel; stays are a type of corset.
9. Max Beerbohm (1872–1956): essayist, parodist, novelist and illustrator who had known Oscar Wilde, and is best known today for his 1911 Oxford campus novel Zuleika Dobson.
10. Thesmophoriazusae or The Women Celebrating the Thesmophoria (411 BC) is a comedy by Aristophanes (c.448–380 BC).
11. This was widely supposed, since Firbank had reported plans to travel to Haiti. But he never went, and drew instead on his time in Cuba and Jamaica for the content of Sorrow in Sunlight. Forster refers to the book here by its then customary title.
12. William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part One, Act I, Scene ii.
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PENGUIN CLASSICS
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Vainglory first published 1915; revised edition published 1925
Inclinations first published 1916; reissued with a revised Part II, Chapter IV, 1929
Caprice first published 1917
This collected edition (using the 1925 edition of Vainglory and 1929 edition of Inclinations) first published in Penguin Classics 2012
Introduction and editorial matter copyright © Richard Canning, 2012
Appendix 3: ‘Ronald Firbank’ (1936) copyright 1936 by E. M. Forster
Cover: Detail from illustrated book In the bottom of my garden by Andy Warhol, lithograph, 1955 © The Andy Warhol Foundation/Corbis
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author of the introduction and editorial material has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-14-196717-2
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