The Horse’s Mouth

318 Pages·2014·1.43 MB·English

by  Joyce Carey

JOYCE CARY
The Horse’s Mouth

With a Prefatory
Essay by the Author
TO
HENEAGE OGILVIE
Table of Contents

Title Page
Dedication
Prefatory Essay
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
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31
32
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35
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44
About the Author
Copyright
Prefatory Essay

T
HIS book, third and last of a set of three, is the story of an artist, and his
adventures both in art and life, told by himself. It has been described as a
comedy, and some readers have complained that it is facetious. This is a fair
judgment. But Jimson has a reason for being facetious.
Anyone who has served in a war knows the man who is suddenly full of jokes
on the night before an attack, even just before going over the top.
Jimson, as an original artist, is always going over the top into No Man’s Land,
and knows that he will probably get nothing for his pains and enterprise but a
bee-swarm of bullets, death in frustration, and an unmarked grave. He makes a
joke of life because he dare not take it seriously. He is afraid that if he does not
laugh he will lose either his nerves or his temper, that he will want to run away
from his duty, or demand with rage ‘what is the sense of anything in a world at
war,’ and either shoot the nearest officer or himself.
He is himself a creator, and has lived in creation all his life, and so he
understands and continually reminds himself that in a world of everlasting
creation there is no justice. The original artist who counts on understanding and
reward is a fool. He may have the luck to be found out by some wind of chance
which blows a sympathetic critical talent in his direction; he may be admired and
rewarded for what he does not do, but for the very reason that he is original, he
will, in the ordinary course of things, wait a long time to be understood. For he
has to create not only his work but his public.
And the difficulty here is that the public consists also of creative artists. Every
living soul creates his own world, and must do so. The human child brings with
it very little instinctive equipment for life. It does not even know by instinct that
fire burns, or that if it steps out of the window it will fall. It does not know how
to communicate, to feed itself, or even what is good to eat. It is a solitary mind
from the beginning. It feels love, it feels sympathy, but it does its thinking by
itself. It has to create a three-dimensional universe for itself in its own
imagination; it has to learn that cups are hollow, balls are round, that the garden
wall has another side, and that its two sides are never seen together. And all
external objects, even before the child can speak, are full of significance for its
feelings. Mother and father, brothers and sisters are each a unique experience, to
be seized upon by the imagination and built into a general conception of life.
Everything that a boy encounters as he grows up, he ranges for himself in the
order of his ideas, his taste, his ambitions, his will. As a grown man he will love
like a poet creating a beauty for the soul. When he creates a home, the furniture
he buys will seem like no other furniture. He will fiercely resent any attempt to
take his home from him or destroy his property, because they are property in the
deepest sense, unique to him. He has made them as a whole, and committed
himself to them. They are a great, often the chief part, of the world which he has
long and painfully constructed for his own pleasure. Now suppose this world
includes some art. Suppose he has formed for himself a taste in pictures, poetry
and music. Suppose he has given appreciation to (say) Watts, Tennyson and
Mendelssohn (or Cézanne, Mallarmé, and Debussy), then these artists are part of
his created world. He owns them, he is fond of them, he feels with them, he
reveres them as great artists and in that reverence he knows that he too has a
share of greatness; his imagination, in front of Watt’s Hope, is suddenly
enlarged; he reads Maud and is moved out of a narrow workaday existence into a
romantic and exciting world. For this he will probably be despised by most of
the next generation who, eager to make a new world for themselves will get their
thrills from Cézanne and Mallarmé.
The academy painter who abuses modern art is apt to be a joke. He is looked
upon as hopelessly narrow-minded. This may be true, but he is not stupid. He
realizes that any new art is a danger to his own; if it become the fashion, he may
not be able to sell a picture. The history of art shows that tragedy over and over
again, and what makes it more pitiful is that very good artists have often been
ruined in their lifetime by a change of fashion; and then long after their death,
appreciated again. For though fashions in art are unstable like all fashions, there
is an underlying reality which will always inform the final judgment. We see that
in women’s clothes the final judgment, which separates good periods of dress
from bad, is based on the nature of womanhood, her special beauty, and dignity,
and power. So great art is always an expression of a fundamental character in
things, the simple and powerful emotions which have always dominated and
perplexed life. And they are as easily recognized in the arts of ancient India or
China as in Cimabue, Renoir or Picasso.
But this does not mean that they will be recognized in an artist’s lifetime; or
that an artist will be saved from that revolution of boredom or hatred which has
destroyed every school of art as a living force, within a generation. Gulley’s old
father in this book is taken from life and I, as a boy playing with paint in school
holidays, remember very well the feelings of pity and surprise with which I
looked at a gilt-framed canvas which he had brought out to show me, and
propped against an apple tree among the weeds and cabbage stalks of a
Normandy farm garden. I have an idea that it had just come back to him, rejected
by the Academy which ten years before had been glad to hang his works. I
remember my discomfort, as I realized that this man of fifty or so was appealing
for sympathy from me, a boy of sixteen; that there were tears in his eyes as he
begged me to look at his beautiful work (‘the best thing I ever did’) and asked
me what had happened to the world which had ceased to admire such real ‘true’
art, and allowed itself to be cheated by ‘daubers’ who could neither draw nor
glaze; who dared not attempt ‘finish.’
I was myself in 1905 a devoted Impressionist, one of the ‘daubers.’ I thought
that Impressionism was the only great and true art. I thought that the poor ruined
broken-hearted man weeping before me in the sunlight of that squalid vegetable
patch, was a pitiable failure, whose tragedy was very easily understood—he had
no eye for colour, no respect for pigment, no talent, no right whatever to the
name of artist.
I don’t know even now what that man’s work was worth. I suspect from
recollection that in these days it would be once more highly appreciated. For
several schools have intervened, and having worked through Impressionism and
Post Impressionism, the Fauves and the Cubists, we can look upon the late
Victorians with a fresh eye and judge them, outside the passing fashion, for what
they really were. But that man died long ago in misery, and God knows what
happened to his wife and children.
J. C.
1

I was walking by the Thames. Half-past morning on an autumn day. Sun in a
mist. Like an orange in a fried fish shop. All bright below. Low tide, dusty water
and a crooked bar of straw, chicken-boxes, dirt and oil from mud to mud. Like a
viper swimming in skim milk. The old serpent, symbol of nature and love.
Five windows light the caverned man; through one he breathes the air
Through one hears music of the spheres; through one can look
And see small portions of the eternal world.

Such as Thames mud turned into a bank of nine carat gold rough from the fire.
They say a chap just out of prison runs into the nearest cover; into some dark
little room, like a rabbit put up by a stoat. The sky feels too big for him. But I
liked it. I swam in it. I couldn’t take my eyes off the clouds, the water, the mud.
And I must have been hopping up and down Greenbank Hard for half an hour
grinning like a gargoyle, until the wind began to get up my trousers and down
my back, and to bring me to myself, as they say. Meaning my liver and lights.
And I perceived that I hadn’t time to waste on pleasure. A man of my age has
to get on with the job.
I had two and six left from my prison money. I reckoned that five pounds
would set me up with bed, board and working capital. That left four pounds
seventeen and six to be won. From friends. But when I went over my friends, I
seemed to owe them more than that; more than they could afford.
The sun had crackled into flames at the top; the mist was getting thin in
places, you could see crooked lines of grey, like old cracks under spring ice.
Tide on the turn. Snake broken up. Emeralds and sapphires. Water like varnish
with bits of gold leaf floating thick and heavy. Gold is the metal of intellect. And
all at once the sun burned through in a new place, at the side, and shot out a ray
that hit the Eagle and Child, next the motor boat factory, right on the new
signboard.
A sign, I thought. I’ll try my old friend Coker. Must start somewhere. Coker,
so I heard, was in trouble. But I was in trouble and people in trouble, they say,
are more likely to give help to each other, than those who aren’t. After all, it’s
not surprising for people who help other people in trouble are likely soon to be