a high hill and lived therein until death. But the hill was not so high
one might see from the windows back along thirty centuries--as one may
from a bungalow. In the castle there were no great volumes filled with
words and pictures of things dug up by man's relentless curiosity from
sand and soil in all comers of the world; there was a sentimental
half-belief in dragons, but no knowledge that once upon a time only
dragons had lived on the earth--that man's grandfather and grandmother
were dragons; there were no movies flickering like thoughts against a
white wall, no phonograph, no machinery with which to achieve the
sensation of speed; no diagrams of the fourth dimension, no contrasts in
life like that of Waterville, Minn., and Paris, France. In the castle
the light was weak and flickering, hallways were dark, rooms deeply
shadowed. The little outside world was full of shadow, and on the very
top of the mind of him who lived in the castle played a dim
light--underneath were shadows, fear, ignorance, will-to-ignorance. Most
of all, there was not in the castle on the hill the breathless sense of
imminent revelation--that today or surely tomorrow Man would at a stroke
double his power and change the world again.
The ancient tales of magic were the mumbling thoughts of a distant
shabby little world--so, at least, thought Flecker, offended. The tales
gave him no guidance. There was too much difference between his world
and theirs.
He wondered if he hadn't dismissed the wish for happiness rather
heedlessly? He seemed to get nowhere thinking about it. He was not wise
enough. In the old tales a wish for happiness was never made! He
wondered why.
He might chance it--just to see what would happen. The thought made him
tremble. He leaped from his bed and paced the red-tiled floor, rubbing
his hands together.
"I want to be happy for ever," he whispered, to hear the words, careful
not to touch the ring. "_Happy ... for ever_"--the two syllables of the
first word, like hard little pebbles, struck musically against the bell
of his imagination, but the second was a sigh. _For ever_--his spirit
sank under the soft heavy impact of it. Held in his thought the word
made a dreary music, fading. "_Happy for ever_"--NO!!
Thus again and again--the mark of the true fantasist--does Norman Matson
merge the kingdoms of magic and common sense by using words that apply
to both, and the mixture he has created comes alive. I will not tell the
end of the story. You will have guessed its essentials, but there are
always surprises in the working of a fresh mind, and to the end of time
good literature will be made round this notion of a wish.
To turn from this simple example of the supernatural to a more
complicated one--to a highly accomplished and superbly written book
whose spirit is farcical: _Zuleika Dobson_ by Max Beerbohm. You all know
Miss Dobson--not personally, or you would not be here now. She is that
damsel for love of whom all the undergraduates of Oxford except one
drowned themselves during Eights week, and he threw himself out of a
window.
A superb theme for a fantasy, but all will depend on the handling. It is
treated with a mixture of realism, wittiness, charm and mythology, and
the mythology is most important. Max has borrowed or created a number of
supernatural machines--to have entrusted Zuleika to one of them would be
inept; the fantasy would become heavy or thin. But we pass from the
sweating emperors to the black and pink pearls, the hooting owls, the
interference of the Muse Clio, the ghosts of Chopin and George Sand, of
Nellie O'Mora; just as one fails another starts, to uphold this gayest
and most exquisite of funeral palls.
Through the square, across the High, down Grove Street they
passed. The Duke looked up at the tower of Merton, _ώs oὔπoτ' αὗθιs
ἀλλὰ νῦν πανύστατoν_. Strange that tonight it would still be
standing here, in all its sober and solid beauty--still be
gazing, over the roofs and chimneys, at the tower of Magdalen, its
rightful bride. Through untold centuries of the future it would stand
thus, gaze thus. He winced. Oxford walls have a way of belittling us;
and the Duke was loth to regard his doom as trivial.
Aye, by all minerals we are mocked. Vegetables, yearly deciduous, are
far more sympathetic. The lilac and laburnum, making lovely now the
railed pathway to Christ Church meadow, were all a-swaying and nodding
to the Duke as he passed by. "Adieu, adieu, your Grace," they were
whispering. "We are very sorry for you, very sorry indeed. We never
dared suppose you would predecease us. We think your death a very great
tragedy. Adieu! Perhaps we shall meet in another world--that is, if the
members of the animal kingdom have immortal souls, as we have."
The Duke was little versed in their language; yet, as he passed between
these gently garrulous blooms, he caught at the least the drift of their
salutation, and smiled a vague but courteous acknowledgment, to the
right and the left alternately, creating a very favourable impression.
Has not a passage like this--with its freedom of invocation--a beauty
unattainable by serious literature? It is so funny and charming, so
iridescent yet so profound. Criticisms of human nature fly through the
book, not like arrows but upon the wings of sylphs. Towards the
end--that dreadful end often so fatal to fiction--the book rather flags:
the suicide of all the undergraduates of Oxford is not as delightful as
it ought to be when viewed at close quarters, and the defenestration of
Noaks almost nasty. Still it is a great work--the most consistent
achievement of fantasy in our time, and the closing scene in Zuleika's
bedroom with its menace of further disasters is impeccable.
And now with pent breath and fast-beating heart, she stared at the lady
of the mirror, without seeing her; and now she wheeled round and swiftly
glided to that little table on which stood her two books. She snatched
Bradshaw.
We always intervene between Bradshaw and any one whom we see consulting
him. "Mademoiselle will permit me to find that which she seeks?" asked
Melisande.
"Be quiet," said Zuleika. We always repulse, at first, any one who
intervenes between us and Bradshaw.
We always end by accepting the intervention. "See if it is possible to
go direct from here to Cambridge," said Zuleika, handing the book on.
"If it isn't, then--well, see how one _does_ get there."
We never have any confidence in the intervener. Nor is the intervener,
when it comes to the point, sanguine. With mistrust mounting to
exasperation Zuleika sat watching the faint and frantic researches of
her maid.
"Stop!" she said suddenly. "I have a much better idea. Go down very
early to the station. See the stationmaster. Order me a special train.
For ten o'clock, say."
Rising, she stretched her arms above her head. Her lips parted in a
yawn, met in a smile. With both hands she pushed back her hair from her
shoulders, and twisted it into a loose knot. Very lightly she slipped up
into bed, and very soon she was asleep.
So Zuleika ought to have come on to this place. She does not seem ever
to have arrived and we can only suppose that through the intervention of
the gods her special train failed to start, or, more likely, is still in
a siding at Bletchley.
Among the devices in my list I mentioned "parody" or "adaptation" and
would now examine this further. The fantasist here adopts for his
mythology some earlier work and uses it as a framework or quarry for his
own purposes. There is an aborted example of this in _Joseph Andrews_.
Fielding set out to use _Pamela_ as a comic mythology. He thought it
would be fun to invent a brother to Pamela, a pure-minded footman, who
should repulse Lady Booby's attentions just as Pamela had repulsed Mr.
B.'s, and he made Lady Booby Mr. B.'s aunt. Thus he would be able to
laugh at Richardson, and incidentally express his own views of life.
Fielding's view of life however was of the sort that only rests content
with the creation of solid round characters, and with the growth of
Parson Adams and Mrs. Slipslop the fantasy ceases, and we get an
independent work. _Joseph Andrews_ (which is also important
historically) is interesting to us as an example of a false start. Its
author begins by playing the fool in a Richardsonian world, and ends by
being serious in a world of his own--the world of Tom Jones and Amelia.
Parody or adaptation have enormous advantages to certain novelists,
particularly to those who may have a great deal to say and plenty of
literary genius, but who do not see the world in terms of individual men
and women--who do not, in other words, take easily to creating
characters. How are such men to start writing? An already existing book
or literary tradition may inspire them--they may find high up in its
cornices a pattern that will serve as a beginning, they may swing about
in its rafters and gain strength. That fantasy of Lowes Dickinson, _The
Magic Flute_, seems to be created thus: it has taken as its mythology
the world of Mozart. Tamino, Sarastro, and the Queen of the Night stand
in their enchanted kingdom ready for the author's thoughts, and when
these are poured in they become alive and a new and exquisite work is
born. And the same is true of another fantasy, anything but
exquisite--James Joyce's _Ulysses_[6] That remarkable affair--perhaps
the most interesting literary experiment of our day--could not have been
achieved unless Joyce had had, as his guide and butt, the world of the
_Odyssey_.
I am only touching on one aspect of _Ulysses_: it is of course more than
a fantasy--it is a dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, it is
an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crossness and dirt succeed
where sweetness and light failed, a simplification of the human
character in the interests of Hell. All simplifications are fascinating,
all lead us away from the truth (which lies far nearer the muddle of
_Tristram Shandy_), and _Ulysses_ must not detain us on the ground that
it contains a morality--otherwise we shall also have to discuss Mrs.
Humphry Ward. We are concerned with it because, through a mythology,
Joyce has been able to create the peculiar stage and characters he
required.
The action of those 400,000 words occupies a single day, the scene is
Dublin, the theme is a journey--the modern man's journey from morn to
midnight, from bed to the squalid tasks of mediocrity, to a funeral,
newspaper office, library, pub, lavatory, lying-in hospital, a saunter
by the beach, brothel, coffee stall, and so back to bed. And it coheres
because it depends from the journey of a hero through the seas of
Greece, like a bat hanging to a cornice.
Ulysses himself is Mr. Leopold Bloom--a converted Jew--greedy,
lascivious, timid, undignified, desultory, superficial, kindly and
always at his lowest when he pretends to aspire. He tries to explore
life through the body. Penelope is Mrs. Marion Bloom, an overblown
soprano, by no means harsh to her suitors. The third character is young
Stephen Dedalus, whom Bloom recognizes as his spiritual son much as
Ulysses recognizes Telemachus as his actual son. Stephen tries to
explore life through the intellect--we have met him before in _The
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_, and now he is worked into this
epic of grubbiness and disillusion. He and Bloom meet half way through
in Night Town (which corresponds partly to Homer's Palace of Circe,
partly to his Descent into Hell) and in its supernatural and filthy
alleys they strike up their slight but genuine friendship. This is the
crisis of the book, and here--and indeed throughout--smaller mythologies
swarm and pullulate, like vermin between the scales of a poisonous
snake. Heaven and earth fill with infernal life, personalities melt,
sexes interchange, until the whole universe, including poor,
pleasure-loving Mr. Bloom, is involved in one joyless orgy.
Does it come off? No, not quite. Indignation in literature never quite
comes off either in Juvenal or Swift or Joyce; there is something in
words that is alien to its simplicity. The Night Town scene does not
come off except as a superfetation of fantasies, a monstrous coupling of
reminiscences. Such satisfaction as can be attained in this direction is
attained, and all through the bode we have similar experiments--the aim
of which is to degrade all things and more particularly civilization and
art, by turning them inside out and upside down. Some enthusiasts may
think that _Ulysses_ ought to be mentioned not here but later on, under
the heading of prophecy, and I understand this criticism. But I prefer
to mention it today with _Tristram Shandy_, _Flecker's Magic_, _Zuleika
Dobson_, and _The Magic Flute_, because the raging of Joyce, like the
happier or calmer moods of the other writers, seems essentially
fantastic, and lacks the note for which we shall be listening soon.
We must pursue this notion of mythology further, and more circumspectly.
[Footnote 6: _Ulysses_ (Shakespeare & Co., Paris) is not at present
obtainable in England. America, more enlightened, has produced a
mutilated version without the author's permission and without
paying him a cent.]
VII
PROPHECY
WITH prophecy in the narrow sense of foretelling the future we have no
concern, and we have not much concern with it as an appeal for
righteousness. What will interest us today--what we must respond to, for
interest now becomes an inappropriate word--is an accent in the
novelist's voice, an accent for which the flutes and saxophones of
fantasy may have prepared us. His theme is the universe, or something
universal, but he is not necessarily going to "say" anything about the
universe; he proposes to sing, and the strangeness of song arising in
the halls of fiction is bound to give us a shock. How will song combine
with the furniture of common sense? we shall ask ourselves, and shall
have to answer "not too well": the singer does not always have room for
his gestures, the tables and chairs get broken, and the novel through
which bardic influence has passed often has a wrecked air, like a
drawing-room after an earthquake or a children's party. Readers of D. H.
Lawrence will understand what I mean.
Prophecy--in our sense--is a tone of voice. It may imply any of the
faiths that have haunted humanity--Christianity, Buddhism, dualism,
Satanism, or the mere raising of human love and hatred to such a power
that their normal receptacles no longer contain them: but what
particular view of the universe is recommended--with that we are not
directly concerned. It is the implication that signifies and will filter
into the turns of the novelist's phrase, and in this lecture, which
promises to be so vague and grandiose, we may come nearer than elsewhere
to the minutiae of style. We shall have to attend to the novelist's
state of mind and to the actual words he uses; we shall neglect as far
as we can the problems of common sense. As far as we can: for all novels
contain tables and chairs, and most readers of fiction look for them
first. Before we condemn him for affectation and distortion we must
realize his view point. He is not looking at the tables and chairs at
all, and that is why they are out of focus. We only see what he does not
focus--not what he does--and in our blindness we laugh at him.
I have said that each aspect of the novel demands a different quality in
the reader. Well, the prophetic aspect demands two qualities: humility
and the suspension of the sense of humour. Humility is a quality for
which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a
great mistake and degenerates into defensiveness or hypocrisy. But
humility is in place just now. Without its help we shall not hear the
voice of the prophet, and our eyes will behold a figure of fun instead
of his glory. And the sense of humour--that is out of place: that
estimable adjunct of the educated man must be laid aside. Like the
schoolchildren in the Bible, one cannot help laughing at a prophet--his
bald head is so absurd--but one can discount the laughter and realize
that it has no critical value and is merely food for bears.
Let us distinguish between the prophet and the non-prophet.
There were two novelists, who were both brought up in Christianity. They
speculated and broke away, yet they neither left nor did they want to
leave the Christian spirit which they interpreted as a loving spirit.
They both held that sin is always punished, and punishment a purgation,
and they saw this process not with the detachment of an ancient Greek or
a modern Hindu, but with tears in their eyes. Pity, they felt, is the
atmosphere in which morality exercises its logic, a logic which
otherwise is crude and meaningless. What is the use of a sinner being
punished and cured if there is not an addition in the cure, a heavenly
bonus? And where does the addition come from? Not out of the machinery,
but out of the atmosphere in which the process occurs, out of the love
and pity which (they believed) are attributes of God.
How similar these two novelists must have been! Yet one of them was
George Eliot and the other Dostoevsky.
It will be said that Dostoevsky had vision. Still, so had George Eliot.
To classify them apart--and they must be parted--is not so easy. But the
difference between them will define itself at once exactly if I read two
passages from their works. To the classifier the passages will seem
similar: to any one who has an ear for song they come out of different
worlds.
I will begin with a passage--fifty years ago it was a very famous
passage--out of _Adam Bede_. Hetty is in prison, condemned to die for
the murder of her illegitimate child. She will not confess, she is hard
and impenitent. Dinah, the Methodist, comes to visit her and tries to
touch her heart.
Dinah began to doubt whether Hetty was conscious who it was that sat
beside her. But she felt the Divine presence more and more--nay, as if
she herself were a part of it, and it was the Divine pity that was
beating in her heart, and was willing the rescue of this helpless one.
At last she was prompted to speak, and find out how far Hetty was
conscious of the present.
"Hetty," she said gently, "do you know who it is that sits by your
side?"
"Yes," Hetty answered slowly, "it's Dinah." Then, after a pause, she
added, "But you can do nothing for me. You can't make 'em do anything.
They'll hang me o' Monday--it's Friday now."
"But, Hetty, there is some one else in this cell besides me, some one
close to you."
Hetty said, in a frightened whisper, "Who?"
"Some one who has been with you through all your hours of sin and
trouble--who has known every thought you have had--has seen where you
went, where you lay down and rose up again, and all the deeds you have
tried to hide in darkness. And on Monday, when I can't follow you, when
my arms can't reach you, when death has parted us, He who is
with you now and knows all, will be with you then. It makes no
difference--whether we live or die we are in the presence of God."
"Oh, Dinah, won't nobody do anything for me? _Will_ they hang me for
certain? ... I wouldn't mind if they'd let me live ... help me.... I
can't feel anything like you ... my heart is hard."
Dinah held the clinging hand, and all her soul went forth in her voice:
"... Come, mighty Saviour! let the dead hear Thy voice; let the eyes of
the blind be opened: let her see that God encompasses her; let her
tremble at nothing but the sin that cuts her off from Him. Melt the hard
heart; unseal the closed lips: make her cry with her whole soul,
'Father, I have sinned.'"
"Dinah," Hetty sobbed out, throwing her arms round Dinah's neck, "I will
speak ... I will tell ... I won't hide it any more. I did do it,
Dinah ... I buried in the wood ... the little baby ... and it cried ... I
heard it cry ... ever such a way off ... all night ... and I went back
because it cried."
She paused and then spoke hurriedly in a louder pleading tone.
"But I thought perhaps it wouldn't die--there might somebody find it. I
didn't kill it--I didn't kill it myself. I put it down there and covered
it up, and when I came back it was gone.... I don't know what I felt
until I found that the baby was gone. And when I put it there, I thought
I should like somebody to find it and save it from dying, but when I saw
it was gone, I was struck like a stone, with fear. I never thought o'
stirring, I felt so weak. I knew I couldn't run away, and everybody as
saw me 'ud know about the baby. My heart went like stone; I couldn't
wish or try for anything; it seemed like as if I should stay there for
ever, and nothing 'ud ever change. But they came and took me away."
Hetty was silent, but she shuddered again, as if there was still
something behind: and Dinah waited, for her heart was so full that tears
must come before words. At last Hetty burst out with a sob.
"Dinah, do you think God will take away that crying and the place in the
wood, now I've told everything?"
"Let us pray, poor sinner: let us fall on our knees again, and pray to
the God of all mercy."
I have not done justice to this scene, because I have had to cut it, and
it is on her massiveness that George Eliot depends--she has no nicety of
style. The scene is sincere, solid, pathetic, and penetrated with
Christianity. The god whom Dinah summons is a living force to the
authoress also: he is not brought in to work up the reader's feelings;
he is the natural accompaniment of human error and suffering.
Now contrast with it the following scene from _The Brothers Karamazov_
(Mitya is being accused of the murder of his father, of which he is
indeed spiritually though not technically guilty).
They proceeded to a final revision of the protocol. Mitya got up, moved
from his chair to the corner by the curtain, lay down on a large chest
covered by a rug, and instantly fell asleep.
He had a strange dream, utterly out of keeping with the place and the
time.
He was driving somewhere in the steppes, where he had been stationed
long ago, and a peasant was driving him in a cart with a pair of horses,
through snow and sleet. Not far off was a village; he could see the
black huts, and half the huts were burned down, there were only the
charred beams sticking up. And as they drove in, there were peasant
women drawn up along the road, a lot of women, a whole row, all thin and
wan, with their faces a sort of brownish colour, especially one at the
edge, a tall bony woman, who looked forty, but might have been only
twenty, with a long thin face. And in her arms was a little baby crying.
And her breasts seemed so dried up that there was not a drop of milk in
them. And the child cried and cried, and held out its little bare arms,
with its little fists blue from cold.
"Why are they crying? Why are they crying?" Mitya asked as they dashed
gaily by.
"It's the babe," answered the driver. "The babe weeping."
And Mitya was struck by his saying, in his peasant way, "the babe," and
he liked the peasant calling it "the babe." There seemed more pity in
it.
"But why is it weeping?" Mitya persisted stupidly. "Why are its little
arms bare? Why don't they wrap it up?"
"Why, they're poor people, burnt out. They've no bread. They're begging
because they've been burnt out."
"No, no," Mitya, as it were, still did not understand. "Tell me, why is
it those poor mothers stand there? Why are people poor? Why is the babe
poor? Why is the steppe barren? Why don't they hug each other and kiss?
Why don't they sing songs of joy? Why are they so dark from black
misery? Why don't they feed the babe?"
And he felt that, though his questions were unreasonable and senseless,
yet he wanted to ask just that, and he had to ask it just in that way.
And he felt that a passion of pity, such as he had never known before,
was rising in his heart, that he wanted to cry, that he wanted to do
something for them all, so that the babe should weep no more, so that
the dark-faced dried-up mother should not weep, that no one should shed
tears again from that moment, and he wanted to do it at once, at once,
regardless of all obstacles, with all the recklessness of the
Karamazovs.... And his heart glowed, and he struggled forward towards
the light, and he longed to live, to go on and on, towards the new
beckoning light, and to hasten, hasten, now, at once!
"What! Where?" he exclaimed, opening his eyes, and sitting up on the
chest, as though he had revived from a swoon, smiling brightly. Nikolay
Parfenovitch was standing over him, suggesting that he should hear the
protocol read aloud and sign it. Mitya guessed that he had been asleep
an hour or more, but he did not hear Nikolay Parfenovitch. He was
suddenly struck by the fact that there was a pillow under his head,
which hadn't been there when he leant back exhausted, on the chest.
"Who put that pillow under my head? Who was so kind?" he cried, with a
sort of ecstatic gratitude, and tears in his voice, as though some great
kindness had been shown him.
He never found out who this kind man was, perhaps one of the peasant
witnesses, or Nikolay Parfenovitch's little secretary had
compassionately thought to put a pillow under his head, but his whole
soul was quivering with tears. He went to the table and said he would
sign whatever they liked.