Perseus and Andromeda by Richard Le Gallienne (1902)

 This is an odd one for Gallienne in terms of its publishing history. It was published by Robert Howard Russell in New York, and as far as I can tell, never in Britain. Its subtitle is The Story Retold, and Gallienne says in a short preface that he's taken most of it from Ovid with nods to Lucian and Hesiod. It is a relatively standard retelling, weaving together strands from these various sources. One interesting element is his echoing of the terms of Christianity at the beginning in his discussion of the promulgation of the worship of Dionysus: talk of it meeting with opposition, creating many martyrs, and seeing it literally as a "gospel". From there on it takes on the form of a typical quest of ancient myth - there are very few surprises, but enough pleasure. Russell seems to have been a slightly dodgy character, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Gallienne was unhappy with this production - there are a good number of fairly obvious typos, and the illustrations are listed randomly on their contents page, meaning an internet-researched guessing game about which is which. On the other hand it has a lovely cover. A footnote really, but an enjoyable enough one.

The Love Letters of the King by Richard Le Gallienne (1901)

This was called The Life Romantic in Britain - I read the American edition. It is the same old Gallienne to a strong extent, but I do notice a welcome change. It is a change hard to pin down in some ways, but best exemplified by saying that, though it has the same philosophical preoccupations as always, and the same high-falutin' over-delicacy about them, it does also show signs of increased gutsiness of appreciation of them. There is some iron in the skeleton of this which accrues weight to the proceedings. And then leads to quite strong plot-lines: Pagan Wasteneys, the main character, even gets to the point of wishing to become a 'holy killer' toward the end, which hasn't been on the cards in any of Gallienne's other tales of great love to date! It is the story of a young, but no longer very young, man in a crisis of love. The obsession which typifies it has detrimental effects! Wasteneys philosophises about the minutiae of the great emotion, trying to get to the bottom of his locked existence via various women who surround him - this trope is familiar right through his oeuvre, but particularly from his first novel The Quest of the Golden Girl. Some of his attitudes toward women will make modern readers twist and wriggle in their easy chairs; they're like artsy pontifical versions of extremely conservative ones of today. Interestingly, in the end, it is not any quality in one of the women which releases him from his misery. Instead it is a day out alone in nature which does the trick. This sounds hopelessly twee, but is in fact reasonably well put. One chilling thing about this narrative, as mentioned earlier, is the fact that Gallienne posits a certain near-climactic stage of this process as being one where Wasteneys decides to kill the woman of his obsession, in some sort of heightened consciousness of doing a greater good, once he has realised that they can never break the deadlock and be together. This is a frighteningly calmly put echo of the kind of process of thought that I'm pretty sure a lot of obsessed men of our time go through before they murder their partners. What a window, even if it is one with Gallienne's rose-tinted Edwardian high-cultural biases.

Commonplace Book

'"...It seems to me that there is a moment when the soul's beauty and the body's beauty are one. That moment is youth. All fresh and unused, the body is then as beautiful as the soul, but soon, alas! the body, being made of perishable stuff, begins to wear, and less and less resembles the soul within. The soul is growing more beautiful, perhaps, every day, but the body is dying. In vain it strives to answer to the soul within. I know you will say that some old faces are beautiful. They are, but it is a negative beauty, like the beauty of what we call skeleton leaves - the beauty of a clean decay..."'

from The Love Letters of the King by Richard Le Gallienne (Chapter XVIII)

Commonplace Book

'...impregnated as they were with that immediacy of impression which words, simple enough, written in an emotional present, are sometimes able to retain far into the future, when perhaps the opportunities of such emotion can occur no more. Such is the value of a journal, such is the value of all concrete expression. A journal of old feeling is like a telescope through which we see the past history of the heart, not as a mere hazy cloud of distant glory, but separate star by star, moment by moment. The old agonies, the old ecstasies, may thus be repeated for us, as by some diabolical marvel of physical science...'

from The Love Letters of the King by Richard Le Gallienne (Chapter XV)

Young Lives by Richard Le Gallienne (1899)

This is a critical piece in my understanding of Gallienne. Up until now, I've been wondering about what his reasons were for writing as he did. His writing had always seemed to me a little bloodless, with the beefier exception of a novel from later in 1899 entitled The Worshipper of the Image, where ideas and execution married to the point of much greater wealth of impact. This one is a return, stylistically, to the novel before. It's the story of young people of the 1890s, just starting out in their lives. In that former novel, tragedy struck in the form of an interloper in a relationship. In this one there is no such challenge; the main characters, a Birkenhead (translated into 'Sidon', as against Liverpool's 'Tyre') brother and sister, have one main area of negativity in their lives: their father's conservative attitudes that won't allow them easily to pursue their modern ideals. A minor issue is also penury, but it is surprisingly quickly got over in their lives, and that of their partners; quick successes come easily to him, a writer, and her lover, an actor. Because Henry, the brother, is a writer, an excuse is given for Gallienne to outline, through a visit by him to London when he's just starting to be noticed, exactly what his lights are. I get the feeling, by the way, that this novel is largely autobiographical - Henry seems very likely to be following a good part of the author's own path. The idea he gets across, by having Henry meet some part of the avant garde of the London literary scene, is that both realism and aesthetic decadence, as they were seen at that time, were dead end reaches of the stream of literature, and that the place Henry occupied, and by association Gallienne himself, was much closer to the centre of the warm flow of literature's great river. He was "alive", they were "dead"; he was the true inheritor of the great novelists of yesterday, they were misguided. Although I can accept that this is simply what the author thinks, I have to say that I think he misunderstands a crucial issue. This is that it's not what authors' underlying notions were that determined their success, but something much more ground level and substantial, which comes down to a sense of believability in what's actually on the page and an idea of balance in verbal illustration which meant that their stories rang 'true'. It is precisely this which seems to be something which doesn't occupy Gallienne overly, meaning that his novels often feel sweet and light, like children's literature of the time, rewritten for adults with a few adult themes. He genuinely didn't think that his writing suffered by it, I think, and what I call 'sweetness' he would have called a terribly straightforward and necessary goodness, denied by dead late 19th century realism and aestheticism. Even though he is quite thin in impact as a result of espousing these angles, I can't say that it isn't interesting to read him, as it is anyone who doesn't 'fit the standard bill'. Now I need to read on, ballasted by new understanding, and see if the damage he was doing to the powerfulness of his fictions dawned on him at any further point of a very long career.

Commonplace Book

'...In an age of great biologists and electricians, he came upon children prettily talking about fairies and the philosopher's stone. In one of the greatest ages of English poetry, he came to London to find young English poets falling on their knees to the metrical mathematicians of France. In the great age of democracy, a fool had come and asked him if he were not a supporter of the house of Stuart, a Jacobite of charades.[...] and never once had he heard the voice of simple human feeling, nor heard one speak of beauty, simply, passionately, with his heart in his mouth; nor of love with his heart upon his sleeve. Much cleverness, much learning, much charm, there had been, but he had missed the generous human impulse. No one seemed to be doing anything because he must. These were pleasant eddies, dainty with lilies and curiously starred water-grasses, but the great warm stream of English literature was not flowing here.'

from Young Lives by Richard Le Gallienne (Chapter XXXIV)

Commonplace Book

'...And yet how much better it was to be as they were, than as most scions of aristocratic lineage, whose present was so often nothing and their past everything. How humiliating to be so pathetically inadequate an outcome of such long and elaborate preparation, - the mouse of a genealogical mountain! Yes, it was immeasurably more satisfactory to one's self-respect to be Something out of Nothing, than Nothing out of Everything. Here so little had made so much; here so much had made - hardly even a lord. It was better for your circumstances to be inadequate for you, than you to be inadequate for your circumstances.'

from Young Lives by Richard Le Gallienne (Chapter XIV)

Commonplace Book

'...these clerks, without so formulating it, merely exercised the right of all oppressed beings liberally to interpret to their own advantage, where possible, the terms of an unjust contract which grinding economic conditions had compelled them to make. They had been forced to promise too much in exchange for too little, and they equalised the disparity where they could.'

from Young Lives by Richard Le Gallienne (Chapter X)

The Worshipper of the Image by Richard Le Gallienne (1899)

This is a fable about the tyranny of beauty. Antony is married to Beatrice and they have a little girl child, strangely named Wonder. Antony is a sensitive artist type, trying to write. On a day in London, at Covent Garden, he finds in a shopstall a fascinating death-mask which shocks him with its resemblance to Beatrice. The shopkeeper tells him that it's the mask of a young woman who threw herself into the Seine. Bringing it home to the country, to Beatrice and Wonder, he finds himself utterly entranced by its beauty, and installs it in a little chalet in a wood next to their cottage which he uses as a writing retreat, hoping to find a muse for his work. Beatrice is disturbed by it and won't have it in the cottage. Antony is gripped. His imagination fired on all fronts, he begins what can only be descibed as a relationship with the Image; he senses that it is communicating with him and sees moods pass across and through it. It says that it is Silencieux, a kind of eternal spirit of beauty and inveigling fascination, which has commandeered and controlled men all through the ages, many of whom have died for it, and conversely benefited from its power of inspiration. In his rejection of all else around him and total concentration on Silencieux, Antony is the next of these. His work does improve, but his formerly loving connection to Beatrice and Wonder is gone. He has Wonder unwillingly kiss Silencieux to appreciate her beauty; she sickens and dies. This shocks and shames Antony out of his dream state, and he and Beatrice for a short period get away from their cottage, recover some balance in their grief, and find peace. Antony is astonished by who he has become, and is aware of Silencieux's sinister import. When they return to their cottage near the wood, he is determined to smash the Image. But he finds he can't, and decides to bury her instead. Here begins the final chapter. Her power is too strong. He digs her up and reinstals her in her former position in the chalet. Beatrice realises, heartbroken, that all is lost, that she no longer has any purpose in the world, hears the spirit of Wonder calling to her in the night near a black pond in the wood, and casts herself in. Antony, completely owned by Silencieux, is only slightly saddened by her death, and ponders quietly to himself how beautiful she looks with pieces of lily in her wet hair. He returns to the chalet, and in a short volcanic last paragraph, sees that the Image has changed - its mouth is open, and a death's-head moth sits inside! This is the most affecting Gallienne I've read thus far - he was a really good ideas-man. My former concerns about him still ring true - there is ultimately a bloodless quality to his work. Fascinating to consider what Wilde or Beerbohm would have made of this notion - the result could well have been a lasting classic. But in Gallienne's hands it is still remarkable.

Commonplace Book

'...Was not God created of all pure overflows of the human soul, the kind light of human eyes that not all the suffering of the world can exhaust, the idealism of the human spirit that not all the infamies of natural law can dismay?'

from The Worshipper of the Image by Richard Le Gallienne (Chapter XVII)

Commonplace Book

'...All great natures are full of silence. Silence is the soil of all passion...'

from The Worshipper of the Image by Richard Le Gallienne (Chapter X)

Commonplace Book

'Evening was in the wood, still as the dreaming bracken, secretive, moving softly among the pines as a young witch gathering simples. She wore a hood of finely woven shadows, yet, though she drew it close, sunbeams trooping westward flashed strange lights across her haunted face.

The birds that lived in the wood had broken out into sudden singing as she stole in, hungry for silence, passionate to be alone; and at the foot of every tree she cried "Hush! Hush!" to the bed-time nests. When all but one were still, she slipped the hood from her face and listened to her own bird, the night-jar, toiling at his hopeless love from a bough on which already hung a little star.

Then it was that a young man, with a face shining with sorrow, vaulted lightly over the mossed fence and dipped down the green path, among the shadows and the toadstools and the silence."

from The Worshipper of the Image by Richard Le Gallienne (Chapter I)

The Romance of Zion Chapel by Richard le Gallienne (1898)

I'm torn by this book, as I am in general by Gallienne's style. His contradiction is built around appearing quite erudite and rich on the page and yet incurring an overwhelming feeling of thinness and insubstantiality in the memory. This novel ostensibly covers the irruption into a depressed neighbourhood of a charismatic young preacher at its local chapel, his falling in love with a sweet and humble local girl, and his being subsequently overcome romantically by a visiting reciter. He and the reciter realise that their love is of the deepest kind, but decide, through their mutual love and respect for the local girl, that their ways will part. Theophilus the preacher and Isabel the reciter embrace in the chapel before her last performance as a last goodbye, but unfortunately they are seen by the girl, Jenny. Isabel leaves, Theophilus is none the wiser, but Jenny begins to decline. Eventually she tells him what she saw. The last third of the book is concerned with death. Jenny's first, with all its implications of guilt. Then Theophilus himself starts to droop. In his last hours he calls out to his great love, Isabel. She rushes to him, and we hear for the first time of their pact of dying together, which duly comes to pass with a mutual suicide. All this is finely written, and its classical tones are heightened discursively and given Aesthetic period richness. So why does Gallienne feel so thin in retrospect? The answer is in fullness of prose, rather than rounding out of character. No wonder, then, that his reputation is far stronger as an essayist.

Commonplace Book

'She knew nothing of books, this quaint old woman, and had a very antiquated taste in wall-papers; yet there would seem to be other ways of being wise, and it may indeed be held that books act too much as insulators between us and the earth, to the mysterious currents of which gnarled shapes of unlettered old men and women may be the more sensitive as lying closer to the Mother.

At all events, old Mrs Talbot did seem to have won certain confidences from life and death refused to more consciously alert ears. Hers had been that hearing beyond listening to which secrets are sometimes revealed.'

from The Romance of Zion Chapel by Richard le Gallienne (Chapter XXVIII)

Commonplace Book

'There are excuses that we owe to ourselves, and we have a right to expect justice even from our own consciences. A sentimental conscience is the most tiresome of all altruists, and wilfully to indulge in remorse that we have not justly incurred is to blunt our consciences for real offences. The best repentance for our sins is a clear-eyed recognition of their nature, and the temptation in some flurry of feeling to take on our shoulders the mistakes of destiny with which we chance to have been involuntarily associated, is one to be resisted in the interests of that self-knowledge which is the beginning of self-development. Before we take the scourge in hand for our own shoulders let us be quite sure that we have sinned.'

from The Romance of Zion Chapel by Richard le Gallienne (Chapter XXVII)

Commonplace Book

'...Happiness is such a materialist, a creature of coarse tastes and literal pleasures, a bourgeois who has not yet attained the rank of a soul. The influence of sorrow on the individual is much what the influence of Christianity has been upon the world. Christianity, no doubt, has robbed us of much - but then it has given us sorrow; it has taken away the sun, but it has brought us the stars. It is only in the starlight of sorrow that we become conscious of other worlds. The sun flatters our own little world with the illusion of a transitory importance; the stars show it its place in the universe, and teach it a nobler meaning for itself.'

from The Romance of Zion Chapel by Richard le Gallienne (Chapter XXVI)

Commonplace Book

'When two have lost each other in a crowd, it is best that one should stand still and await the other. Perhaps it were best for him to stand still here in life. Jenny would know where to seek him then - and maybe the dead had mysterious ways of bringing news to the living. He could wait a little while and see. For a little he could live - and listen.'

from The Romance of Zion Chapel by Richard le Gallienne (Chapter XXII)

Commonplace Book

'Only twenty-one years - she thought of those who would perhaps some day stand and read those words and think "What a sad little life!" - and yet all that mattered of life had been lived in those short years, aye, in two of them, and the violet breath of young love would come up to those who read from her young grave, as it would never breathe from the earth of long-wed, late-dying lovers.'

from The Romance of Zion Chapel by Richard le Gallienne (Chapter XXI)

Commonplace Book

'If you would safely renounce a joy, you had best enjoy something of it first. Renunciation must have something to live on. You can "take up the whole of love and utter it," and then "say adieu for ever," but not before.'

from The Romance of Zion Chapel by Richard le Gallienne (Chapter XVIII)

Commonplace Book

'...Doubt is too terrible a toy for true love to play with...'

from The Romance of Zion Chapel by Richard le Gallienne (Chapter XIII)