thinks so well of the prostitute that he marries her. On the other hand,
to be sure, he bitterly regrets it, which is not contemporary. I do not
mean that the hero's marrying her is especially in the literary
fashion, but his thinking well of her is. You will notice that in our
moral fever we do not leave the prostitute out of our novels--no,
indeed: she must be there to give spice, as of old. Only now, instead of
being entangled with her, the young gentleman preaches to her; and she
loves him for it. Perhaps this is what happens nowadays in real life. I
do not pretend to know; but I suspect it is true, for I fancy the only
kind of person who could invent the contemporary plot is the kind who
would live it. The wildest imaginings of the people who are made
differently would hardly stretch to it. And not only does the hero find
himself immensely touched by the tragedy of the disreputable
woman,--which is, after all, in certain cases plausible enough,--he
burns to introduce his fiancée to her. Now that, again, may be
life,--Mr. Winston Churchill, for example, should know better than
I,--but it is certainly a world with the sense of values gone wrong. And
when we have lost our sense of values, we shall presently lose the
values as well. The girl herself is often to blame: did not the fiancée
of Simon de Gex go of her own initiative to see the animal-tamer, and
come away to renounce him, convinced that the animal-tamer was the
nobler woman? Which, emphatically, she was not. But then, as we know
from long experience of Mr. Locke, he cannot keep his head with
circus-people about; and sawdust is incense to him. Let Mr. Locke have
his little foibles by all means; but even Mr. Locke should not have
made the spoiled darling of society marry the animal-tamer (one side of
her face having been nearly clawed off) and _then_ go with her into city
missionary work. Yet I do not believe it is really Mr. Locke's fault.
The public at present loves as a sister the woman with a past; and loves
city missionary work, if possible, more.
The fact is that with all our imitation of Meredith--and every one who
is not imitating Tolstoï is imitating Meredith--he has failed to save
us. We have taken all his prescriptions blindly--except one. We have
emancipated our women and emasculated our men; we have cast down the
mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree; we have learned
all the Radical shibboleths and say them for our morning prayers; and we
have faced the fact of sex so squarely that we can hardly see anything
else. But we have not learned his saving hatred of the sentimentalist.
Miss May Sinclair has admirably pointed out in her study of the _Three
Brontës_ that Charlotte Brontë was exceedingly modern in her detestation
of sentimentality. Modern she may have been--with Meredith; but not
modern with the present novelists, for they are almost too sentimental
to be endured. And there is the whole trouble. We think Thackeray an old
fool for being sentimental over Amelia Sedley; but how does it better
the case to be sentimental, instead, over the heroine of _The Promised
Land_? Amelia Sedley was all in all a much nicer person, if not half so
clever. She may have sniveled a good deal, but she was capable of loving
some one else better than herself.
Of course, I have cited only a few instances--those that happened to
come most easily to mind. But let any reader of fiction run over
mentally a group of contemporary heroes, and see if the substitutions I
have named have not pretty generally taken place. Has not pride given
way to humility, reticence to glibness, class-consciousness to a wild
democracy, the code of manners to an uncouth unworldliness, and honor in
the old sense to a burning passion for reform--'any old' reform? Do not
these men lead us into the heterogeneous company of the unclassed of
both sexes--and ask us to look upon them as saints in motley? Has not
the world of fiction changed in the last twenty years? The hero in old
days sometimes fell foul of the law by getting into debt. But we were
not supposed, therefore, to be on his side against the law. Now, the
hero does not, perhaps, get into legal difficulties himself, but he is
always passionately on the side of the people whom laws were devised to
protect the respectable from. The scientific tendency to consider that
aristocracy consists merely in freedom from certain physical taints has
permeated fiction. 'Is not one man as good as another?' asked the
demagogue. 'Of course he is, and a great deal better!' replied the
excited Irishman in the crowd. We are in the thick of a popular mania
for thinking all the undesirables 'a good deal better.' The modern hero
is, to my mind, in intention, if not in execution, an admirable figure;
and though one rather expects him any day to give his whole fortune for
a gross of green spectacles, one will not, for that, find him any less
likable. Some day he will rediscover the Dantesque hierarchy of souls
implicit in humanity. And then, perhaps, he will get back his charm.
Some one is probably bursting to observe that we have a school of
realists at hand; and that no one can accuse Mr. Wells and Mr. Bennett
of sentimentality--also that we have Mr. Shaw and Mr. Granville Barker
and Mr. Masefield as mounted auxiliaries in the field. I grant Mr.
Bennett; I am not so sure about Mr. Wells. But certainly Mr. Wells is
not sentimental as Mr. William de Morgan, Mr. Winston Churchill, Mr.
Meredith Nicholson, Mr. Theodore Dreiser, Mr. H. S. Harrison, and Miss
Ellen Glasgow are sentimental. If he is sentimental at all, it is rather
over ideas than people. (Mr. Masefield, I am inclined to think, is
simply catering to the special audience that Thomas Hardy, by his
silence, has left gaping and empty.) Let us look into the matter a
little. 'Sentimental' is one of the most difficult catchwords in the
world to define; and you can get a roomful of intelligent people
quarreling over it any time. Perhaps, for our purposes, it will serve
merely to say that the sentimentalist is always, in one way or another,
disloyal to facts. He cannot be trusted to give a straight account,
because his own sense of things is more valuable to him than the truth.
He has come in on the top of the pragmatic wave, and the sands of
Anglo-Saxondom are strewn thick with him. He serves, in Kipling's
phrase, the God of Things as They Ought to Be (according to his private
feeling). His own perversion may be æsthetic, or intellectual, or moral,
or sociological, but he is always recognizable by his tampering with
truth.
Now, Mr. Wells does tamper with truth. He did it, for example, in the
case of Ann Veronica. He wanted Ann Veronica to be a nice girl under
twenty, and he wanted her, even more, to be unduly awakened to certain
physical aspects of sex. It was sentimentality that made him draw her as
he did: determination to prove that the girl who loved as he wanted her
to love was just as conventional as any one else. You cannot have your
cake and eat it too; but the sentimentalist blindly refuses to accept
that. Accordingly, we get the unconvincing creature that Mr. Wells
wanted to believe existed. Mr. Wells's heroes may not seem to bear out
my argument so well as Mr. Galsworthy's. To be sure, Mr. Wells is not so
sentimental as Mr. Galsworthy, and he has not, like the author of _The
Man of Property_, and _Fraternity_, and _Justice_, one--just one--fixed
idea. Mr. Galsworthy always deals with a man who is in love with some
other man's wife; and his world is thereby narrowed. Mr. Wells is
interested in a good many things, and his politics are not purely
philanthropic as most of our novelists' politics are. But Mr. Wells's
heroes, even when they are fairly fortunate, are preoccupied with their
own notions of sociological duty, even more than they are preoccupied
with passion, though their passion is 'special' enough when it comes.
Would any one except a Wells hero take a trip to India and come away
having seen nothing but the sweat-shops of Bombay? Always the author's
sympathy is with the under dog; whether it is Kipps or Mr. Polly living
out his long foredoomed existence, or George Ponderevo analyzing
Bladesover with diabolic keenness and aching contempt. 'I'm a spiritual
guttersnipe in love with unimaginable goddesses,' says Ponderevo in a
burst of frankness. There you have the Wells hero to the life. And Mr.
Bennett's people are only spiritual guttersnipes who are _not_ in love
with unimaginable goddesses.
The point is that the guttersnipe is having his turn in fiction: if our
American heroes are not guttersnipes themselves, it is their sign of
grace to be supremely interested in guttersnipes. In one way or the
other, the guttersnipe must have his proper prominence. Of course, there
are differences and degrees: a few heroes get no nearer the lower
classes than a passionate desire for reform tickets and municipal
sanitation. But ordinarily they must go through Ernest Pontifex's state
of believing that poor people are not only more important, but in every
way nicer than rich people; and few of them go back utterly on that
belief, as Ernest did. Perhaps that, more than anything else, marks the
change of fashion in men. For gentlemen were always, in their way,
benevolent; but formerly they had not achieved the paradox that the
object of benevolence is _ex officio_ more interesting than the
bestower.
Books have been written before now in the interest of reform. They tell
us that _Justice_ set the Home Secretary to thinking. Well: Marcus
Clarke actually caused the reform of the Australian penal settlements by
his now forgotten novel, _For the Term of His Natural Life_. The hero of
Marcus Clarke's book was innocent and unjustly condemned; the hero of
_Justice_ is guilty. Wanton cruelty is wicked whether the victim be a
bad man or a good one; but the difference between these two heroes is
not so purely accidental as, at first blush, it may seem. The author of
_His Natural Life_ starting out to capture sympathy, showed the brutal
system wreaking itself on an innocent man, of good family, condemned for
another's guilt. Mr. Galsworthy, equally eager to capture sympathy,
makes his protagonist guilty of the theft, having tried in vain to
incriminate an innocent person. Each writer depended, doubtless, on
public sentiment for his effect. In Marcus Clarke's time, public
sentiment--however unfortunate the fact may be--simply could not have
been aroused to such a pitch by the sufferings of a liar and a thief as
by the sufferings of an innocent man who is consciously paying another
person's penalty. The Humanitarian Hero had not come into fashion--nor
yet the guttersnipe. But Marcus Clarke's book did its work--proof that
even in the '50's we were not so callous as we seemed.
I said earlier that in life, as well as in literature, men had changed.
One's instances, obviously, must be from books, and not from one's
acquaintance; but I spoke truth. Philanthropy is the latest social
ladder, but it would not be so if the people on the top rung were not
interested in philanthropy. There has been, for whatever reason, a
tremendous spurt of interest in sociological questions. Our hard-headed
young men, of high ideals, find themselves fighting, of necessity, on a
different battlefield from any that strategists would have chosen thirty
years ago. Moreover, philanthropy being woman's way into politics, women
have been giving their calm, or hysterical, attention to problems which,
thirty years since, did not, as problems, exist for them. I said that
the change of taste in women would probably account for much of the
change of fashion in men. A schoolmate of mine, writing me some years
since of her engagement, said (in nearly these words), 'He is
tremendously interested in city missionary work; it wouldn't have been
quite perfect if we hadn't had that in common.' Both were spoiled
darlings of fortune, but the statement was quite sincere. Undoubtedly,
without that, it would not have been 'quite perfect' in the eyes of
either.
The mere conversation of the marriageable young has changed past belief.
'Social service' has usurped so many subjects! Have many people stopped
to realize, I wonder, how completely the psychological novel and the
'problem' play (in the old sense) have gone out of date? The psychology
of hero and heroine, their emotional attitudes to each other, are
largely worked out now in terms of their attitudes to impersonal
questions, their religious or their sociological 'principles.' The
individual personal reaction counts less and less. If they agree on the
same panacea for the social evils, the author can usually patch up a
passion sufficient for them to marry on. Gone, for the most part, are
the pages of intimate analysis. No intimate analysis is needed any
longer. As for the 'problem play,' we have it still with us, but in
another form. _The Doll's House_ and _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_ are
both antiquated: we do not call a drama a problem play now unless it
preaches a new kind of legislation. And as for sex,--in its finer
aspects it no longer interests us.
There was a great deal more sex, in its subtler manifestations, in the
old novels and plays, than in the new ones. Not so long ago, a novel was
a love story; and it was of supreme importance to a hero whether or not
he could make the heroine care for him. It was also of supreme
importance to the heroine. The romance was all founded on sex; and yet
sex was hardly mentioned. Our heroes and heroines still marry; but when
they consider sex at all, they are apt to consider it biologically, not
romantically. We, as a public, are more frankly interested in sex than
ever; but we think of it objectively, and a little brutally, in terms of
demand and supply. And so we get often the pathetic spectacle of the
hero and heroine having no time to make love to each other in the good
old-fashioned way, because they are so busy suppressing the red-light
district and compiling statistics of disease. Much of the frankness,
doubtless, is a good thing; but beyond a doubt, it has cheapened
passion. For passion among civilized people is a subtle thing: it is
wrapped about with dreams and imaginings; and can bring human beings to
salvation as well as to perdition. But when it is shown to us as the
mere province of courtesans, small wonder that we turn from it to the
hero who will have difficulty in feeling or inspiring it. Especially
since we are told, at the same time, that even the courtesan plies her
trade only from direst necessity.
After all, the only safe person to fall in love with nowadays _is_ a
reformer: socially, financially, and sentimentally. And most women, at
least, could (if they would) say with the Princesse Mathilde, 'Je n'aime
que les romans dont je voudrais être l'héroïne.' Certainly, unless for
some special reason, no novel of which one would not like to be the
heroine--in love with the hero--will reach the hundred thousand mark. If
there are any of us left who regret the gentlemen of old--who still
prefer our Darcy or even our Plantagenet Palliser--we must write our own
novels, and divine our own heroes under the protective coloring of their
conventional breeding. For they are not being 'featured,' at present,
either in life or in literature.
A Confession in Prose
By Walter Prichard Eaton
Unlike M. Jourdain, who had been speaking prose all his life without
knowing it, I have been writing it nearly all of mine, quite
consciously, and earning my living thereby since I was twenty-one years
old. I am now thirty-four. I have been a professional writer of prose,
then, for thirteen years--or shall I say a writer of professional prose?
Much of this writing has been done for various American magazines; still
more has been done to fill the ravenous columns of American newspapers;
some, even, has been immured between covers. I have tried never to write
sloppily, though I have of necessity often written hastily. I can
honestly say, too, that I have tried at times to write beautifully, by
which I mean rhythmically, with a conscious adjustment of sound and
melody to the sense, with the charm of word-chiming further to heighten
heightened thought. But I can also as honestly say that in this latter
effort I have never been encouraged by a newspaper editor, and I have
been not infrequently discouraged by magazine editors. Not all
magazines compel you to chop up your prose into a maximum paragraph
length of ten lines, as does a certain one of large circulation. Not all
newspapers compel you to be 'smart,' as did one for which I worked
compel us all. But the impression among editors is prevalent, none the
less, that a conversational downrightness and sentence and paragraph
brevity are the be-all and end-all of prose style, or at least of so
much of prose style as can be grasped by the populace who read their
publications; and that beautiful writing must be 'fine writing,' and
therefore never too much to be avoided. So I started out from the
classroom of Professor Lewis E. Gates, one of the keenest and most
inspiring analysts of prose beauties this country has produced, to be a
professional writer of prose, and dreamed, as youth will, of wrapping my
singing robes about me and ravishing the world. I was soon enough told
to doff my singing robes for the overalls of journalism, and I have
become a writer of professional prose instead.
These remarks have been inspired by a long and wistful evening just
spent in perusing Professor Saintsbury's new book, called _The History
of English Prose Rhythm_. I shall hold no brief for the good professor's
method of scansion. It matters little to me, indeed, how he chooses to
scan prose. What does matter to me is that he has chosen to scan it at
all, that he has brought forward the finest examples in the stately
procession of English literature, and demonstrated with all the weight
of his learning, his authority, his fine enthusiasm, that this prose is
no less consciously wrought to pleasing numbers than is verse. We who
studied under Professor Gates knew much of this before, if not in so
detailed and would-be methodical a fashion. Charles Lamb knew it when he
wrote, 'Even ourself, in these our humbler lucubrations, tune our best
measured cadences (prose has her cadences) not unfrequently to the charm
of the drowsier watchman, "blessing the doors"; or the wild sweep of
winds at midnight.' Sir Thomas Browne was not exactly unaware of it as
he prepared his _Urn Burial_ for the printer; nor the authors of the
King James Version of the Bible when they translated--or if you prefer,
paraphrased--the rhapsodic chapters of Isaiah. But it is pleasant, and
not unimportant, to be once more reminded, in a generation when written
speech has sunk to the conversational level of the man in the street,
that 'prose has her cadences'; and to me, at least, it is melancholy,
also. For I would strive to write such prose, in my stumbling fashion,
were I permitted.
Writing about a fine art, as I am so often called upon to do, I would
endeavor with what might lay in me to write about it finely. Suppose
that art chances to be the drama. Why, when some compact, weighty, and
worthily performed example comes to our stage, should I be expected to
toss off a description of it in a style less compact and weighty and
worthily conducted? On the rare occasions when a new play chances to be
poetic, am I not justified in writing of it in poetic prose? How else,
indeed, can I truly render back to my readers the subtler aspects of its
charm? But for such writing there is little room in our hurrying and
'conversational' press, though now and then a despised dramatic editor
is found who understands. Even the drama itself strives to be
'conversational' at all costs, under the banner of 'realism,' and
profanity flourishes on our stage in what we must infer to be a most
life-like manner, while we have almost forgotten that the spoken word
can be melodious or imaginative. Criticism cries at its heels, and helps
with flippant jest and broken syntax and cacophonous combinations of our
poorest vernacular, in the general debasement. Do not tell me that men
do not exist who could write differently of the stage, as men exist who
can, and do, write differently for it. Every worthy dramatist can be
paralleled by at least one worthy critic, and more probably by three or
four, since the true creative instinct in drama is perhaps the rarest of
human attributes, save only charity. But the editors appear to have
determined that the public does not want such critics--and perhaps the
editors are right. At least, the public does not often get them.
We are speaking now of prose, not of opinions, and we may safely
introduce the name of a living critic, William Winter. For nearly half a
century Mr. Winter has written prose about the theatre, and although
that prose was produced for a morning newspaper it was carefully and
consistently balanced and welded, and, when the subject demanded it,
rose, according to its creator's ideas of beauty, into the heightened
eloquence of sentence rhythm and syllabic harmony. Leisure may improve,
but haste cannot prevent the rhythm of prose, provided the instinct for
it resides in the writer, and the opportunity exists for practice and
expression. Two examples of Mr. Winter's use of rhythm come to my
memory, and I quote only phrases, not whole sentences, merely because I
am sure of no more. Writing one morning of a new and very 'modern' play,
presented the previous evening by a well-known actress, he said: 'Sarah
Bernhardt at least made her sexual monsters interesting, wielding the
lethal hatpin or the deadly hatchet with Gallic grace and sweet
celerity.' Again, in reviewing Pinero's _Iris_, he took up two of Henry
Arthur Jones's phrases, recently made current in a lecture, and played
with them, ending with mellifluous scorn, 'Such are "the great realities
of modern life," flowers of disease and blight that fringe the charnel
house of the "serious drama."'
These are certainly examples of rhythmic, or cadenced prose, and they
are examples taken from journalistic reviews. They admirably express the
writer's point of view toward his subject matter, but they also reveal
his care for the manner of expression, they satisfy the ear; and
therefore to one at all sensitive to literature they are doubly
satisfying. The arrow of irony is ever more delightful when it sings on
its flight. The trick, then, can be done. Mr. Winter, too often perhaps
for modern ears, performed it by recourse to the Johnsonian balance of
period and almost uniform, swelling roll. But that is neither here nor
there. The point is that he performed it--and that it is no longer
performed by the new generation, either in newspaper columns, or, we
will add at once, anywhere else. Rhythmic prose, prose cadenced to charm
the ear and by its melodies and harmonies properly adjusted to heighten,
as with an under-song, the emotional appeal of the ideas expressed, is
no longer written. It appears to be no longer wanted. We are fallen upon
harsh and colloquial times.
No one with any ear at all would deny Emerson a style, even if his
rhythms are often broken into the cross-chop of Carlyle. No one would
deny Irving a style, or Poe,--certainly Poe at his best,--or, indeed, to
hark far back, Cotton Mather in many passages of the _Magnalia_, where
to a quaint iambic simplicity he added a Biblical fervor which redeems
and melodizes the monotony. Mather suggests Milton, Irving suggests
Addison, Emerson suggests Carlyle, Poe, shall we say, is often the too
conscious workman typified by De Quincey. But thereafter, in this
country, we descend rapidly into second-hand imitations, into rhythm
become, in truth, mere 'fine writing,' until its death within recent
memory. Yet we do not find even to-day the true cadenced prose either
uninteresting or out of date. Emerson is as modern as the morning paper.
Newman's description of the ideal site for a university, in the clear
air of Attica beside the blue Ægean, charms us still with its perfect
blend of sound and sense, its clear intellectual idea borne on a
cadenced undersong, as of distant surf upon the shore; and the exquisite
epilogue to the _Apologia_, with its chime of proper names, still brings
a moisture to our eyes. The triumphant tramp of Gibbon, the headlong
imagery and Biblical fervor of Ruskin, the languid music of Walter
Pater, each holds its separate charm, and the charm is not archaic.