Literary Combat
By Enwrbr Morn.
SOwn time ago Miss Benson found a frail old gentleman in a hotpital in-Hong Kong. He informed her that he was Count Nioolas de Toulouse Lautree -de Savine, a Russian nobleman. of French extraction, that- he had wandered all over the world, been the friend of Russian Grand Dukes and crowned heads, a financier in America, Tsar of Bulgaria (for a few hours), a Don Juan, a feminist, a nihilist, and various other things. He was full of stories and had written some of them down ; and occasionally he would hand one to his visitor, saying " I give you here a story ; you can pleaSe give me ten. dollars." Miss Benson was much taken with these stories, and particularly with the style in which they were written, and decided to give a, selection of them to the world along with a commentary, partly descriptive, partly explanatory, partly argumentative, of her own. This delightful book* is the result of the ensuing, literary combat, in which Miss Benson chivalrously resigned the part of baker to her col- laborator, reserving for herself that of devil. She is a very ingenious, witty and indulgent devil, and the Count has been lucky to fall into such hands. One feels, nevertheless, that he deserved it.
The Count's part of the book consists of stories illustrative of his life. These are, to use his own words, full of " hyg romance," he himself is invariably the hero, and he frequently causes, once more in his own words, " grand sensation." There is a degree of vanity and romancing where these qualities seem to become entirely disinterested, no longer asking for even the flattering homage of credence, or serving any petty selfish end ; and the Count de Toulouse Lautrec de Saving seems to have reached that happy and almost ideal condition. He rouses neither envy nor disbelief in us, but merely sympathetic interest., when he starts off : " The story of my long and stormy life is very interesting, full of sensations and struggles for life." And when he says : " Without any doubts, Kerensky have dun a great mistake, not have taken my advice—to hung Lenin and Trotsky to 1 " we are not outraged, but merely accept it as the sort of thing he would say. His Loving Stories (which are all about himself and not always edifying) are just as inoffensive, partly because they reflect a vanity which is so disinterested that it might almost be called unselfish, but partly also because of their style and spelling, which give all the events in them something of an " Alice in Wonderland " innocence and lightness. Their spelling, indeed, most of all ; for there is an infinite difference between a " Noty Geri " (the Count devotes a whole story to one) and a girl who is naughty. Again, to steal a collection of " holly icons " (as the Count did) is obviously quite a different thing from church violation ; and this unconscious bowdlerisation by spelling goes on continuously throughout his memoirs, giving a quaint other-worldly turn to even his least admirable actions. Sometimes he hits upon a really happy invention : " beastial gendarme " has a regal and heraldic ring, recalling the half-world of centaurs, even faintly reminding one of the ambiguous figure of Nebuchad- nezzar. "" Sweetheart," a term with which great play is made, has an evocative power of quite a different kind ; and Miss Benson's favourite sentence goes with a curiously light and ethereal movement : " The most ones of our officers had sweethearts, but I was to yang and to inconstant to bound me with a gerl ; prefair to flay from one to a other, as * Pull Devil, Pull Baker. By Count NicOlas de Toulouse Lantree de and Stella Benson. (Macmillan. • 7s, W.). a butterflay who flay from one flower to a other one." Reading this book, one often regrets that the ideal of correctness has triumphed so completely in English spelling ; it is easy to be correct, difficult to be original. The Count's mere spelling is capable of animating a platitude, as when, writing of mothers (for whom he has a great -enthusiasm) he says that they "give to us our birth and put us on our Sets, and before it, form us in their suffering, the blood of their blood, the boneses of their women's bones—maternity, who take their beauty, their helth, and some times their fifes." Or it may give added liveliness to a narrative : " The vanquiched-by-me gerl—this dompted tigress—change in a lovly sweetheart. Her sikness was cure with my love, and our mutual life came to be as a beautiful dreem—Paradise on erd. The sow [saw] broc on the stone Angelina belong to me I " Or it may lend real solidity to a description : " It was a large, with-tree-window, room, -full of rich stilish fournitures and objects of arts—look more as a bric-a-brac store. What was not there 1 Pianos, walnut-tre sculptured desks, incrustated Bul dressers, guilted chairs, turquish divans eovred with persian carpets, large trumeaux looking-glasses with rococo guilden frams, a garniture of maho- gany wood with bronze—stile Jacob—, costly oils and aquarels pictures and marmor statues of hyg value, made by good- known masters, and on large tabels, and on the rose marmot eheminee, stay and lay costly objects—bronze guilted does . . . porcelain . . ." How much more flimsy all those arti- cles of furniture would become with a different spelling, and how crammed that room is. What a difference there is betweeen mothers giving their " lifes " instead of their mere life. The sacrifice is multiplied by an infinite plural, and an accuracy of statement achieved that is beyond the reach of mere grammar. The Count lightly brings off again and again effects which Mr. James Joyce achieves only by laborious effort.
Miss Benson's justification for the publication of these memoirs is rightly based on their style. " I truly think that the style has great individuality and ingenuity—much more of both than the material itself." The material, indeed, is often commonplace and even dull, or would be if the style did not transmute it. Miss Benson's own contribution to the book, which takes up roughly half of it, is both penetrating and deliciously witty. Certain chapters consist of variations played by her on themes set by her collaborator, and as exercises these are extraordinarily brilliant. They are not convincing, it is true ; in the nature of things they could not be, for she gives away the secret before she starts ; but they are extremely interesting, and probably unique as laboratory demonstra- tions. Yet best of all, perhaps, is her analysis of the process by which an actual character (if one can talk of such an entity, and after reading her one begins to doubt it) becomes an invented one. Nevertheless her diagnosis makes one uneasy, for it verges on the iconoclasm where one would be forced to question the reality even of imaginary characters. If I were to describe you, says Miss $enson, " the result of my efforts would not be you ; it would only be you-plus-me---an invented thing. It is the statement of this equation—you- plus-me—the definition of this arbitrary invention in the most plausible way possible—that is the novelist's study." One cannot help wishing to add that, though the you and me must be present, something else must also be present before the invented character can become a real one that other people will recognize. But the questions it raises only add to the fascina- tion-of this very entertaining and instructive-book:
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