Free Told by an Idiot by Rose Macaulay Page A

one and the same time—it has been done, but it remains difficult. To love ardently such absurdities as infants, and yet to retain unmarred the sense of the absurdity of all life—this, too, has been done, but the best parents do not do it. Something has to go, as a sacrifice to the juggernaut Life, which rebels against being regarded as merely absurd (and rightly, for, in truth, it is not merely absurd, and this is one of the things which should always be remembered about it).
    The literary persons of the early nineties wanted Rome to join them in their pursuits.
    Why so, Rome questioned. Money? Very certainly I have not enough, but I should not have appreciably more if I wrote and published essays, or even books. Notoriety? It might well be of the wrong kind; and anyhow, does it add to one’s pleasure? Miss Rome Garden, the author of those clever critical essays. . . . Or perhaps of those dull critical essays. . . . Either way, what did one gain? Why write? Why this craze for transmitting ideas by means of marks on paper? Why not, if one must transmit ideas, use the tongue, that unruly member given us for the purpose? Better still, why not retain the ideas for one’s own private edification, untransmitted? Writing. There was this about writing—or rather about publishing—it showed that some one had thought it worth while to pay for having one’s ideas printed. For printers were paid, and binders, even if not oneself. So it conferred a kind of cachet. Most literary persons sorely needed such a cachet, for you would never guess from meeting them that any one would pay them for their ideas. On the other hand, publishing one’s folly gave it away;one was then known for a fool, whereas previously people might have only suspected it. . . . In brief and in fine, writing was not worth while. Wise men and women would derive such pleasure as they could from the writings of others, without putting themselves to the trouble of providing reading matter in their turn. Reading matter was not like dinners, concerning which there must be give and take.
    Thus the do-nothing Miss Rome Garden to the eager literary young men and women about her, who all thought that literature was having a new birth and that they were its brilliant midwives, as, indeed, it is not unusual to think. And possibly it was the case. Literature has so many new births; it is a hardy annual. The younger literary people of 1890 had a titillating feeling of standing a-tiptoe to welcome a new day. “A great creative period is at hand,” they said. The old and famous still brooded over the land like giant trees. Such a brooding, indeed, has scarcely since been known, for in these later days we allow no trees to become giants. But in their shadow the rebellious young shoots sprang up, sharp and green and alive. The mid-Victorians were passing; the Edwardians were in the schoolroom or the nursery, the Georgians in the cradle or not yet anywhere; here was a clear decade in which the late Victorian stars might dance. It was a period of experiment; new forms were being tried, new ideas would have been aired were any ideas ever new; new franknesses, so-called, were permitted, or anyhow practised—the mild beginnings of the returning tide which was to break against the reticence of fifty years.
    “I don’t,” said Mrs. Garden to Rome, “care about all these sex novels people have taken to writing now.”
    But Rome rejected the phrase.
    “Sex novels, mamma? What are they? Novelshave always been about sex, or rather sexes. There’s nothing new in that; it’s the oldest story in the world. People must have a sex in this life; it’s inevitable. Novels must be about people; that’s inevitable too. So novels must be partly about sex, and they’re nearly always about two sexes, and usually largely about the relations of the two sexes to one another. They always have been. . . .”
    All the same, mamma did
not
care about these sex novels that people had taken to