The woman, with white staring eyeballs, wide nostrils, fallen jaw,
shrinks back against the monk in puling terror; and he, crazed utterly,
his eyes fixed on nothingness, shrieks with gaping mouth some horrid
incantation that drowns the gasping breathing of the witch. Theirs is
no physical fear of fire or sword or scourge: they have sinned, and
seen the face of God. Before me are a set of reproductions of Holbein's
'Dance of Death.' Death lies before the feet of the burgess in the
road, plucks unconcernedly at the robe of the abbot, viciously sticks
a spear through the middle of the knight, and snuffs the altar candles
in the nun's cell, where her young lover is playing on a guitar. But
the picture of Judgment at the end is no more than a careless grace
after meat. It is there with propriety but without conviction. Death is
a full stop, not a comma. What is it to me that the burgess may have
cheated, the abbot be a hypocrite, the knight a roysterer, and the
nun a wanton? Death is close at hand to put a stop to the doings of
them all. I do not know what was the sin of the monk or the witch, and
yet the mere memory of their spiritual terror moves me more than the
pictures before my eyes. Their peril is not of this world.
[The background of Hawthorne's tales.]
Hawthorne's finest stories are a Dance of Death, in which Death is
no mere end of a blind alley, but a dividing of the ways. Those dim
people he found in his own soul are important to us by their chances of
salvation or damnation. Their feet
'Are in the world as on a tight-rope slung
Over the gape and hunger of Hell.'[8]
The background to their actions is not happiness and misery, questions
of this world only, but righteousness and mortal sin. The fortunes
of Hawthorne's characters are shaping for Eternity. When Ethan Brand
flings himself into the furnace, what one of Hawthorne's readers ever
thought he died there?
Even this dignity of grave belief, combined with the charm of the
writer, would not excuse unskilful playing. But Hawthorne is as
dexterous on his chosen instrument as Poe on his, and as consciously
an artist as Stevenson, who indeed, in _Markheim_, plays, no more
skilfully than he, Hawthorne's peculiar tune. In the preface to _The
House of the Seven Gables_ there is a paragraph that, though long, it
is not impertinent to quote. It shows how carefully he had thought out
the possibilities, and how scrupulously he had defined the limits, of
his chosen art.
[Romance and Novel.]
'When a writer calls his work a Romance it need hardly be observed
that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion
and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to
assume had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latter form
of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not
merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course
of man's experience. The former--while, as a work of art, it must
subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as
it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart--has fairly
a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great
extent, of the writer's own choosing or creation. If he thinks
fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring
out or mellow the lights, and deepen and enrich the shadows of the
picture. He will be wise, no doubt, to make a very moderate use of
the privileges here stated, and especially to mingle the Marvellous
rather as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavour, than as any
portion of the actual substance of the dish offered to the public.
He can hardly be said, however, to commit a literary crime, even if
he disregard this caution.'
There is a hint here of the provincial pedant; 'dishes offered
to the public' are a little out of date; but the principles are
sound. Hawthorne could not give clear outlines to the results of
his 'burrowings in our common nature' unless he set them in an
atmospherical medium that made such outlines possible for things so
vague and so mysterious. Romance left him free to do so. He could
make a world to fit them, a patterned world, coloured to suggest
New England, Italy, or Nowhere. He was never forced to shock us by
introducing them into quite ordinary life. He never loses command over
his 'atmospherical medium,' and never weakens the importance of his
characters by letting them escape from the dominion of morals. And yet
his stories are not 'impaled on texts.' Moral feeling makes them alive,
but it is treated like the Marvellous--'mingled as a slight, delicate,
and evanescent flavour.' No artist had ever such tricky balances to
keep. No artist keeps his balance more successfully.
[Devices of craftsmanship.]
His artistry is as subtle in the details as in the design. It is hard
to examine his stories unmoved. But, if we quiet our consciences, and
still the throbbing of our hearts, and force ourselves to read them
paragraph by paragraph with scientific calm, we find there are few
tales from which we can learn more delicate devices of craftsmanship
in making afraid, and in giving reality to intangible and mysterious
things. Before such skill the most prosaic reader surrenders his reason
and shudders with the rest.
Notice, for example, in _Rappacini's Daughter_, Hawthorne's way of
making credible the marvellous. He states the miracle quite simply,
and by asking 'Was it really so?' lays, without making his intention
obvious, a double emphasis on every point. On every point he throws
a doubt, and stamps belief into the mind. When Giovanni wonders if
Beatrice is like the flowers in that rich garden of death, in breath
and body poisonous, 'to be touched only with a glove, nor to be
approached without a mask,' Hawthorne suggests that he had grown
morbid. We know at once that he had not. A beautiful insect flutters
about her and dies at her feet. 'Now here it could not be but that
Giovanni Guasconti's eyes deceived him.' We know that they did not.
As Beatrice goes into the house, Giovanni fancies that the flowers
he had given her were already withering in her grasp. 'It was an
idle thought,' says Hawthorne, 'there could be no possibility of
distinguishing a faded flower from a fresh one at so great a distance.'
We see the dead petals fall like leaves in autumn as she steps across
the threshold.
And then notice, in _The Scarlet Letter_, his use of simple actions
made significant by their contexts. When Hester Prynne has thrown
aside, as if for ever, the searing symbol of her outlawry, her child
refuses to recognise her, until she picks it miserably up, and pains
her bosom once again with the embroidered scarlet character. 'Now
thou art my mother, indeed!' cries the child, 'and I am thy little
Pearl!' And when Hester tells her that one day the minister will share
a fireside with them, and hold her on his knees, and teach her many
things, and love her dearly--'And will he always keep his hand over
his heart?' the child inquires. It is quite natural in her to notice a
peculiar habit, and to cling to a familiar piece of ornament; but her
words and actions assume the dignity of portents when we know what
they meant to that poor woman and that conscience-stricken man.
[The power of details.]
The imagination needs straws to make its bricks, and Hawthorne is
careful never to set it the impossible task. He knows how to squeeze
all the emotion in his material into one small fragment of pictorial
suggestion that can be confidently left to produce its effect in
concert with the reader's mind. Remember how Goodman Brown, at setting
out, looked back and saw 'the head of Faith still peeping after
him with a melancholy air in spite of her pink ribbons.' A trifle,
apparently, but one that is not to be wasted. After his talk with the
devil, he thought he heard his wife's voice above him in the air, as
an unseen multitude of saints and sinners were encouraging her to
that awful meeting in the forest. '"Faith!" he shouted in a voice of
agony and desperation, and the echoes of the forest mocked him, crying
"Faith! Faith!" as if bewildered wretches were seeking her all through
the wilderness. The cry of grief, rage, and terror was yet piercing the
night when the unhappy wretch held his breath for a response. There
was a scream, drowned immediately in a louder murmur of voices, fading
into far-off laughter, as the dark cloud swept away, leaving the dear
and silent sky above Goodman Brown. But something fluttered lightly
down through the air and caught on the branch of a tree. The young man
seized it, and beheld a pink ribbon.'--A pink ribbon, a merry little
thing that we can see and touch, is made a sudden, awful summary of
horror and despair.
He makes nature throb with his own mood, and by imperceptible art
weights the simplest words with the emotion of his tale. How are the
very tones of madness caught as the young man flourishes the devil's
stick and strides along the forest path. '"Ha! ha! ha!" roared Goodman
Brown when the wind laughed at him. "Let us hear which will laugh
loudest. Think not to frighten me with your deviltry. Come witch, come
wizard, come Indian powpow, come devil himself and here comes Goodman
Brown. You may as well fear him as he fear you."' That paragraph is the
work of a master.
[The character of his work.]
And yet, artist as he was, Hawthorne lived too near provincialism to
show no signs of its influence in his outlook and his work. He could
not enjoy statues without clothes. He was able to commit the enormity
of typifying a search for the absolute beautiful by the making of a
tiny toy butterfly that flapped its wings just like a real one. Nor
did he ever reach that conception of his art, of all art, that sets
prettiness in niches round rather than upon the altar of the temple.
He valued perhaps too highly the simple flowerlike embroidery that is
characteristic of his work. When, while he was in the Custom House,
this power of facile prettiness deserted him for a season, he produced
nothing, and feared that all his power was gone, for it was not in
him to conjure without a wand. He thought afterwards that he might
have written something with the pedestrian fidelity of the novel; but
that was the one thing he could never do. A man who is accustomed to
see his pages glimmer with opalescent colour, and to feel the touch
of elfin fingers on his brow, is oddly disconcerted in those moments
when the little people must be brushed aside like midges, and the
glimmering veil be torn by the elbows of a ruder reality. Such men are
not so common that we can complain of the _défauts de leurs qualités_.
And indeed, in his more solemn stories, instinct with the spiritual
terror of Goya's miniature, the grace that never leaves him adds to
the effect. A rapier seems never more cruel than in a hand elaborately
gloved. What kind of man is that, we ask, who, balancing souls between
Heaven and Hell, can never quite forget his friendship with the
fairies?
MÉRIMÉE AND CONVERSATIONAL STORY-TELLING
MÉRIMÉE AND CONVERSATIONAL STORY-TELLING
[Mérimée's attitude towards writing.]
THERE is a lean athletic air about the tales of Prosper Mérimée. Their
author is like a man who throws balls at the cocoa-nuts in the fair--to
bring them down, and not for the pleasure of throwing. His writing was
something quite outside himself, undertaken for the satisfaction of
feeling himself able to do it. He was in the habit of setting himself
tasks. 'I will blacken some paper,' he writes, 'in 1829,' and he keeps
his word. He was not an author, in the modern professional sense,
but a man, one of whose activities was authorship. There is a real
difference between writers of these classes, the amateurs existing
outside their work, the professionals breathing only through it.
Gautier, full-blooded, brutal, splendid creature, is almost invisible
but in his books. Mérimée, irreproachably dressed, stands beside his,
looking in another direction. I am reminded of the sporting gentlemen
of Hazlitt's day who now and again would step into the ring and show
that they too had a pretty way with the gloves. Late in his life, when
one of his juvenile theatrical pieces was to be played for the first
time, Mérimée went to the performance, and heard a hostile noise in the
house. 'Is it me they are hissing?' he asked, 'I am going to hiss with
the rest.' I think of Congreve asking Voltaire to consider him as a
plain gentleman, not as an author.
[Illustration: PROSPER MÉRIMÉE]
Writing was only one of the interests of Mérimée's life; only one
of the innumerable tasks he set himself. He learnt half a dozen
languages without being a mere linguist. He travelled in half a dozen
countries without being a traveller. He was extremely erudite, but
never a bookish scholar. He fulfilled with enthusiasm his duties as
Inspector of Ancient Monuments without lapsing into a dusty-handed
antiquary. He saw much of the fashionable life of Paris without being
a man of the world. He was a courtier without being nothing but a
courtier, and could accomplish a state mission without turning into a
diplomatist. He studied 'la théologie, la tactique, la poliorcétique,
l'architecture, l'épigraphie, la numismatique, la magie et la cuisine,'
without being solely a theologian, a tactician, a specialist in
sieges, an architect, a decipherer of inscriptions, a coin collector,
a wizard, or an undiluted cook. No more was he a writer, as Dumas,
Hazlitt, Hawthorne, and Keats were writers. On no shore did he burn
his boats. His character was as various as his activities. He was
sensualist and sentimentalist, dandy and Bohemian. Evenings begun in
the salon of Mme. de Boigne or at the Hôtel Castellane were, his
biographer tells us, finished behind the scenes at the Opera. He wrote
delightful love-letters, but whole series of his letters to his friends
are unfitted for print by consistent indecency. He read his tales to
his Empress, and told them in the gipsy tongue by the camp-fires of
Andalusian muleteers. His experiments in literature were analogous
to his experiments in cooking. Both were expressions of an intense
curiosity about life and the methods of life, and a thirst for personal
practical efficiency in them all. Never had man more facets in which to
see the world. It is important in this essay, that considers only one
of them, not to forget that there were others.
[The imaginary author of his tales.]
It is indeed not easy to see more than one facet of a man's personality
at once, and difficult not to assume that this one facet is the whole.
The _curés_ of the old churches in France who saw Mérimée busied in
protecting the ancient buildings from ruin and restoration would
have been amazed by the witty dandy of the dinners in the Café de
la Rotonde, or by the author of _Colomba_. Each one of such a man's
expressions suggests a complete portrait, but only the composite
picture tells the truth. It is difficult not to reason from his work
and build up an imaginary author--a discreet, slightly ironical person,
who smiles only with the corners of his mouth, never laughs, never
weeps, modestly disclaims any very personal connection with his tales,
and is careful to seem as little moved as may be by the terrible or
mysterious things he sets before us. This imaginary polite person,
who represented Mérimée in conversation as well as in books, is not
Mérimée, but, just now, as I see him quietly smiling in the air before
me, I know who he is. He is the conventional raconteur, whose manner
every Englishman assumes in the telling of anecdote or ghost story.
[Printed and spoken stories.]
Perhaps each nation has its own. Perhaps each nation adopts an attitude
for anecdote peculiar to its own genius. The French at any rate is
very different from the English. The Frenchman will gesticulate in
his tale, suit the expression of his face to its emotions, and try,
ingratiatingly, to win our indulgence for his story, that becomes,
as he tells it, part of himself. The Englishman, more tenacious of
his dignity, less willing to hazard it for an effect, throws all
responsibility upon the thing itself. In England, the distinction
between printed story-telling and story-telling by word of mouth is
more marked than elsewhere. The object of both is to interest and
move us, but, while the literary artist makes no bones about it, and
takes every advantage possible, giving the setting of his tale, its
colour scheme, its scent, its atmosphere, the plain Englishman shrinks
from all assumption of craftsmanship, sets out his facts bare, rough
like uncut stones, and repudiates by a purposely disordered language,
perhaps by a few words of slang, any desire of competition with the
professional.[9] And we, the audience, allow ourselves to be moved
more readily by an amateur than by a man who avows his intention of
moving us. The avowed intention provokes a kind of hostility; it is a
declaration of war, an open announcement of a plan to usurp the throne
of our own mind, and to order the sensations we like to think we can
control. We are more lenient with the amateur; we wish to save his
face; politeness and good-fellowship are traitors in our citadel, and
we conspire with the enemy to compass our own yielding.
[Mérimée's adoption of the conventions of anecdote.]
Mérimée gives his tales no more background than an Englishman could
put without immodesty into an after-dinner conversation. He does not
decorate them with words, nor try to suggest atmosphere by rhythm or
any other of the subtler uses of language. He does not laugh at his
jokes, nor, in moments of pathos, show any mist in his eyes. The only
openly personal touches in his stories are those sentences of irony as
poignant as those of another great conversationalist, whose _Modest
Proposal_ for the eating of little children is scarcely more cruel
than _Mateo Falcone_. His style is without felicities. It has none of
the Oriental pomp of Gautier's prose, none of the torrential eloquence
of Hugo's; but its limitations are its virtues. Pomp is the ruin of a
plain fact as of a plain man, and rhetoric rolls facts along too fast
to do anything but smooth them. This style, that seems to disclaim any
pretension to be a style at all, leaves facts unencumbered, with their
corners unpolished. It emphasises Mérimée's continual suggestion that
he is not a story-teller, and so helps to betray us into his power.
But I cannot understand those critics who find it a style of clear
glass that shows us facts through no personality whatever. Always, in
reading a Mérimée, I have an impression of listening to a man who has
seen the world, and was young once upon a time, who loves Brantôme, and
who in another century would have been a friend of Anthony Hamilton,
and perhaps have written or had a minor part in memoirs like those
of the Count Grammont. And this man is the imaginary mouthpiece of
English anecdote, the mask handed from speaker to speaker at an English
dinner-table.
[Mérimée's _anglomanie_.]
Mérimée himself had something of the appearance of an Englishman;
everything except the smile, according to Taine. No Frenchman can write
of him without referring to his _anglomanie_. His mother had English
relatives, and Hazlitt, Holcroft, and Hazlitt's worshipped Northcote
were among his father's friends. He was not baptized in the Catholic
religion. He seems to have grown up in an atmosphere not unlike that of
many English intellectual families, and very early made friends across
the Channel for himself. This Englishness perhaps partly accounts for
the peculiar attitude he took as a story-teller, and also made possible
that curious reconciliation between the virtues of rival schools that
the attitude demanded; made possible, that is to say, the apparent
paradox of a man whose subjects were Romantic, whose style was almost
Classical, and whose stories were yet a prophecy of the Realists. It
is not a French characteristic to recognise virtues in more than one
type at once, and to combine them. 'Le Roi est mort; vive le Roi.' The
French invented that saying. They do not recognise compromises, but are
exclusive in their judgments, and regulate their opinions by general
rules. A Romantic hates all Classicists, a Realist finds his worst term
of opprobrium in the word Romantic. An Englishman, on the other hand,
does not think of regulating his affections or actions by a theory. If
he has principles, he locks them up with his black clothes for use on
special occasions. He keeps a sturdy affection for Oliver Cromwell,
without letting his love for the Commonwealth abate in the least his
loyalty to the King. Mérimée seems extraordinarily English in being
able to own Romantic ideals, without using Romantic method.
[The contrast between his manner and his material.]
The conversational story-telling depends for its success, not on the
wit or charm of the talker, but on the plots of his stories. No more
exigent test of the intrinsic power of a tale can be applied than
this, of telling it badly in conversation. A good story will sometimes
gain by the naked recital of its facts; a bad one is immediately
betrayed. Bad stories, in this sense, are those that resemble the
women of whom Lyly wrote:--'Take from them their periwigges, their
paintings, their Jewells, their rowles, their boulstrings, and thou
shalt soone perceive that a woman is the least part of hir selfe.'
How many times, in repeating to a friend the story of a book, you
have become suddenly aware it was an empty, worthless thing that, in
clothes more gorgeous than it had a right to wear, had made you its
dupe for a moment. Mérimée was compelled by his method to tell good
stories or none. His material, to be sufficiently strong to stand
without support, to be built with rigid economy, and to make its
effects out of its construction, to be told as if with a desire of
making no impression, and to make an impression all the stronger for
such telling, could not be of a light or delicate nature. His events
had to be striking, visible, conclusive. He had to choose stories in
which something happened. There is death in almost every one of his
tales. Hence comes the amazing contrast between his work and that of
the Romantics. The large gesture, the simple violent passions are his
as well as theirs, because he needed them, but, while they matched
their subjects in their temperaments, and wrote of hot blood with
pulsing veins, everything in Mérimée's stories is vivid and passionate
except the author. The atmosphere of his tales is not warm or moist,
but extraordinarily rarified. In that clear air his colours seem almost
white. If they were not so brilliant we should not perceive them at
all. Even his women are chosen for the attitude. The women a man loves
are usually reflected in his work. But Mérimée's women are the women
of Romance, dying for love or for hate, ready at any moment to throw
their emotions into dramatic action, while the women he loved were
capricious, whimsical, tender seldom, _outrées_ never. The writer
needed picturesque women as clear as facts. The man loved women who
never betrayed themselves, but were sufficiently elusive to give him an
Epicurean pleasure in pursuing them.
[An art of construction.]
The art of Mérimée's tales is one of expository construction. He was
compelled by his self-denials to be as conscious an artist as Poe. He
is like a good chess-player who surrenders many pieces, and is forced
to make most wonderful play with the few that remain. His effects are
got from the material of his tales, not superimposed on the vital stuff
like the front of a Venetian palace on the plain wall. He takes his
dramatic material, and sets it before us in his undecorated style,
so that no morsel of its vitality is wasted, smothering no wild
gesture in elaborate drapery, but cutting it out so nakedly that every
quivering sinew can be seen. His art has been compared to drawing, but
it is more like sculpture. His stories are so cleanly carved out of
existence that they are 'without deception.' We can examine them from
above and from below, in a dozen different lights. There is no point of
view from which the artist begs us to refrain. Behind a drawing there
is a bare sheet. Behind a story of Mérimée's there is the other side.
[Pointillism in facts.]
His art is more like painting in those few tales of the marvellous
that are his ghost stories, as the others are his anecdotes. Mérimée
had the archæologist's hatred of the mysterious, and the artist's
delight in creating it. He reconciled the two by producing mysterious
effects by statements of the utmost clarity, the very clarity of the
statements throwing the reader off his guard so that he does not
perceive the purposeful skill with which they are chosen and put
together. There is a school of painting in France, whose followers
call themselves Pointillists; they get their effects by laying spots
of simple colours side by side, each one separate, each one though in
the right position with regard to other spots of other colours placed
in its neighbourhood. At a sufficient distance they merge luminously
into the less simple colours of the picture. Mérimée's treatment of
the marvellous was not unlike this. The vague mystery of _La Vénus
d'Ille_ is not reflected by any vagueness or mystery in the telling
of the tale. It is impossible to point to the single sentence, the
single paragraph that makes the mystery mysterious. You cannot find
them because they do not exist. Instead, there are a hundred morsels of
fact. Not one of them is incredible; not one is without a reasonable
explanation if an explanation is necessary. And yet all these concrete,
simple facts combine imperceptibly in producing the extraordinary
supernatural feeling of the tale. Compare this negative manner of
treating a miracle with the frank, positive fairy-tale of Gautier's
_Arria Marcella_. The effects of both tales are perfectly achieved,
but Arria Marcella belongs to written story-telling. We believe in her
because Gautier wishes us to believe, and uses every means of colour
and rhythm and sensual suggestion to compel his readers to subject
their imaginations to his own. The Venus belongs to story-telling
by word of mouth. Hers is a ghost story whose shudder we covet, and
experience, in spite of ourselves, in spite of the half-incredulous
story-teller, by virtue of those simple facts so cunningly put together.
[Strength or charm.]
But to write analytically of such stories is to write with compass and
rule, dully, awkwardly, technically, badly. It is impossible to express
the excellence of a bridge except by showing how perfectly its curves
represent the principles of its design, and to talk like an architect
of the method of its building. And that is so very inadequate. It is
easy to write of warmth, of delicacy, of sweetness; there is nothing
harder in the world than to write of the icy strength that is shown
not in action but in construction. And although there is a real charm
about the shy, active, intellectual man who made them, a charm that is
shown in his love-letters, yet there is no charm at all about Mérimée's
stories. The difference between them and such tales as Nathaniel
Hawthorne's is that between the little Grecian lady in baked clay, who
stands upon my mantelpiece, still removing with what grace of curved
body and neck and delicate arm the thorn that pricked her tiny foot
some thousand years ago, and the copy of an Egyptian god, standing
upright, one straight leg advanced, his jackal head set square upon
his shoulders, his arms stiff at his sides, his legs like pillars, so
strong in the restraint of every line that to look at him is a bracing
of the muscles. There is no charm in him, no grace, no delicacy, and
he needs neither delicacy, grace, nor charm. Erect in his own economy
of strength he has an implacable, strenuous power that any added
tenderness would weaken and perhaps destroy.
FLAUBERT
FLAUBERT
'I AM the last of the fathers of the church,' said Flaubert, and on
this text his niece remarks that 'with his long chestnut coat, and
little black silk skull-cap, he had something the air of one of the
Port-Royal solitaries.' The metaphor is accurately chosen. Flaubert
lived in an atmosphere of monastic devotion to his art, and the
solitaries of Port-Royal were not more constant than he to their
intellectual preoccupations. A man of excessive openness to sensation,
he fled it and was fascinated by it. He would take ever so little of
the world and torture himself with its examination because it hurt
him to look at it. Life, and especially that life whose sensitiveness
was so slight as, in comparison with his own, to have no existence,
brought him continual pain. 'La bêtise entre mes pores.' Stupidity
touching him anywhere made him shrink like a snail touched with a
feather. He had _recoquillements_, shrinkings up, when with his dearest
friends, and it was pain to him to be recalled to ordinary existence.
He escaped from modernity in dreams of the Orient, but was continually
drawn back by memory of the unhappiness that was waiting for him, to
the contemplation of those ordinary people whose slightest act, as he
imagined it, struck such a grating discord with himself. An exuberant
life like Gautier's was impossible to such a man. He could not be so
gregarious a recluse as Balzac. He had to fashion a peculiar retreat,
a room with two windows, from one of which he could see the stars,
and from the other watch and listen to the people whom he hated and
found so efficient as the instruments of his self torture. He found
the seclusion he desired in a most absolute devotion to the art of
literature, which was in his hands the art of making beauty out of
pain. Pain, self-inflicted, was at the starting-point of all his works,
and in most of them went with him step by step throughout.
[Illustration: GUSTAVE FLAUBERT]
[Flaubert and the bourgeois.]
An analysis of the pain that Flaubert suffered in examining
Philistines, that white light of suffering which throws up so clearly
the bourgeois figures on which he let it play, supplies the key
not only to the matter of much of his work, but to its manner, and
particularly to that wonderful prose of his, whose scrupulosity has
been and is so frequently misunderstood. Flaubert was not pained by a
bourgeois because he felt differently from himself. He was pained by
a bourgeois because a bourgeois did not know that he felt differently
from himself, because a bourgeois never knew how he felt at all.
Whole wolves hate a lame one. It has never been stated with what
inveterate hatred a lame one regards whole wolves. And Flaubert was
less fitted for life than an ordinary man. He was given to know when
he was honest or dishonest to himself. In so far was he, on their own
ground, weaker than those others, who never know whether they tell the
truth or a lie. He was born as it were with no skin over his heart.
He had no need to make guesses at his feelings. What more terrible
nightmare could be imagined for such a man than to hear men and women,
educated, as the bourgeois are, into a horrible facility of speech,
using the language of knowledge and emotion, unchecked by any doubts as
to their possible inaccuracy. In all bourgeois life, where language and
action have larger scales than are necessary, there is a discrepancy
between expression and the thing for which expression is sought. For
Flaubert, sensitive to this discrepancy as the ordinary man is not, it
was a perpetual pain. And just as a man who has a nerve exposed in one
of his teeth, touches it again and again, in spite of himself, for the
exquisite twinge that reminds him it is there, so Flaubert in more than
one half of his books is occupied in hurting himself by the delicate
and infinitely varied search for this particular discord.
[Flaubert's prose.]
Flaubert's prose is due, like his unhappiness, to his inhuman trueness
of feeling. He realised that flexible as language is, there are almost
insuperable difficulties in the way of any one who wishes to put an
idea accurately into words. He went to the bottom of all writing and
announced that literature is founded on the word; and that unless you
have the right word you have the wrong literature. He was a little
puzzled at the survival of the mighty improvisations of older times,
although he loved them; but there was no doubt in his mind that his
own way was not 'a primrose path to the everlasting bonfire' of bad
books. Whatever he wrote, he would have it in words chosen one by
one, scrupulously matched in scent, colour, and atmosphere to the
ideas or emotions he wished to express. His whole creed was to tell
the truth. What exactly did he feel? These were the letters that were
always flaming before him. It is vivid discomfort to a labourer to be
cross-questioned, and forced to find words for his unrealised meanings.
With increased facility of speech we grow callous, and, compromising
with our words, write approximations to the thoughts that, not having
accurately described, we can scarcely be said to possess. Flaubert, in
disgust at such inexactitudes, forced on his own highly educated brain
the discomfort of the cross-questioned labourer. Knowing the truth, he
would say it or nothing, and rejected phrase after phrase in his search
for precision. It was gain and loss to him; gain in texture, loss in
scope. 'What a scope Balzac had,' he cried, and then: 'What a writer
he would have been if only he had been able to write.' The work of such
men is loosely knit in comparison with his, because built in a less
resisting material. 'Oui,' says Gautier--
'Oui, l'œuvre sort plus belle
D'une forme au travail
Rebelle,
Vers, marbre, onyx, émail.'
Flaubert's attitude made prose a medium as hard, as challenging as
these.
It is difficult to believe that the older writers bought their
excellence so dearly. Their thoughts cannot have been so biassed, for
it is the expression of every bias, of the background, of the smell, of
the feel of an idea that makes circumspicuity of writing so difficult.
Montaigne, for example, sitting peaceably in his tower, asking himself
with lively interest what were his opinions, was not at all like the
almost terrible figure of Flaubert, striding to and fro in his chamber,
wringing phrases from his nerves, asking passionately, ferociously,
what he meant, and almost throttling himself for an accurate answer. Is
it harder than it was to produce a masterpiece?
[Romanticism and realism.]
Flaubert, who held Chateaubriand a master, was the friend of Gautier,
and the director in his art of Guy de Maupassant, who wrote with one
hand _Madame Bovary_ and with the other _Salammbo_, who put in the same
book _St. Julien l'Hospitalier_ and _Un Cœur Simple_, is, on a far
grander scale than Mérimée, an illustration as well as a reason of the
development of romanticism into realism. Flaubert's passionate care
for the truth, would, if he had lived before the Romantic movement,
have confined itself to the elaboration of a very scrupulous prose. But
after the discovery of local colour, after the surprising discovery
of the variety that exists in things, as great as the variety that
exists in words and in their combinations, it was sure to apply itself
not only to the writing but also to those external things that had
suggested the ideas the writing was to embody. It would try to make
the sentences true to their author; it would also try to make them
true to the life they were to represent. It was Flaubert who said to
De Maupassant as they passed a cabstand, 'Young man, describe that
horse in one sentence so as to distinguish him from every other horse
in the world, and I shall begin to believe that you have possibilities
as a writer.' This demand for accurate portraiture turned the romantic
realism of Balzac's _Comédie Humaine_ into the other realism of _Madame
Bovary_. [_Madame Bovary._] Balzac had his models, yes, as hints in the
back of his head, but he made his characters alive with his own energy
and his own brain. As I have already pointed out, they are all too
alive to be true. But Flaubert, true to himself in his manner, wished
to be true to life in his matter. Madame Bovary, that second-rate,
ordinary, foolish, weak, little provincial wife, has no atmosphere
about her but her own. She has not been inoculated with the blood of
Flaubert, as all the veins of all the characters of Balzac have been
scorched with fire from those of that 'joyful wild boar.' When Flaubert
wrote that everything in the book was outside himself, he was saying
no more than the truth. He was as honest towards her and her life as
he was towards his own ideas. She talks like herself. Now the older
writers, like Fielding and Smollett, are content to let their people
talk as men and women should talk to be fit for good literature. Even
the characters of men like Balzac or Hugo say what they think, as
nearly as their creators are themselves able to express it. Flaubert
is infinitely more scrupulous. The Bovary never says what she thinks.
Flaubert knew well enough what she was thinking, but sought out exactly
those phrases and sentences beneath which she would have hidden her
thought, those horrible bourgeois inaccuracies that it was torture for
him to hear.
A life so wholly concerned with intangible things seems too
intellectual for humanity. I am glad to turn aside from it for a moment
to remember the Flaubert who was loved by those who spent their days
with him; the uncle who taught her letters to his little niece, and
who would, as she says, have done anything imaginable to enliven her
when sad or ill. 'One of his greatest pleasures was the amusement of
those about him,' although he never saw a woman without thinking of
her skeleton, a child without remembering that it would one day be
old, or a cradle without finding in it the promise of a grave. He was
one of the men who love their friends the dearer for their dislike of
mankind in general. He never shaved without laughing at 'the intrinsic
absurdity of human life,' and yet he lived out his own share in it
with steadfast purpose, 'yoking himself to his work like an ox to the
plough.'
The result of his incessant labour divides itself into four kinds;
novels of the bourgeoisie, a novel of the East, three short stories,
and two other books that are, as it were, twin keys to the whole.
[_Salammbo._]
_Madame Bovary_ and _L'Éducation Sentimentale_ are the novels of the
bourgeoisie, novels with an entirely new quality of vision, due to
the sustained contrast between his own articulate habit of mind and
the unconsciously inarticulate minds of his characters; these are the
books commonly described as his contributions to Realism by men too
ready to set him on their own level. Opposed to these two books there
is _Salammbo_, an Oriental and ancient romance, a reposeful dream for
him, in which move characters whose feelings and expressions are no
more blurred than his own. All these books offer more delight at each
re-reading, although the last, considered as an example of narrative,
is almost a failure. The Romantics too often miss the trees for the
wood. Flaubert's method makes it rather easy to miss the wood for the
trees. But his trees are of such interest and beauty that we are ready
to examine them singly. In writing _Madame Bovary_, his subject was
close within his reach. Madame was too near to allow him to cover her
up with a library of knowledge about his own times. But in _Salammbo_
he was so anxious to be true to the life that he did not know, that he
read until he knew too much. The book is made of perfect sentences,
perfect descriptions, while the story itself is buried beneath a
dust-heap of antiquity. Cartloads after cartloads of gorgeous things
are emptied on the top of each other, until the whole is a glittering
mass with here and there some splendid detail shining so brilliantly
among the rest that we would like to remove it for a museum. The mass
stirs: there are movements within it; but they are too heavily laden to
shake themselves free and become visible and intelligible.
[_Trois Contes._]
No such criticism can be urged against the three short stories,
the _Trois Contes_, in which Flaubert proves himself not only one
of the greatest writers of all time, but also one of the greatest
story-tellers. This little book is a fit pendant to the novels, since
it represents both the Flaubert of _Madame Bovary_ and the Flaubert of
_Salammbo_. _Un Cœur Simple_, the first of the three, is the story
of a servant woman and her parrot, a subject that de Maupassant might
have chosen. So completely is it weaned from himself, that no one
would suspect that Flaubert wrote it after his mother's death, for the
pleasure, in describing the provincial household, of remembering his
own childhood. It and the two stories, _St. Julien l'Hospitalier_ and
_Hérodias_, which are purely romantic in subject and treatment, and
more scrupulous in technique than the finest of Gautier, are among the
most beautiful tales that the nineteenth century produced. All three
answer the supreme test of a dozen readings as admirably as those old
improvisations from whose spirit they are so utterly alien.
[_La Tentation de Saint Antoine_ and _Bouvard et Pécuchet_.]
That is the sum of Flaubert's work in pure narrative. There are beside
it two books, one a _Tentation de Saint Antoine_, that he spent his
whole life in bringing to perfection, and the other, _Bouvard et
Pécuchet_, that he left unfinished at his death. They are among the
most wonderful philosophic books of the world. In an Oriental dream,
a dialogue form with stage directions so explicit and descriptive as
to do the work of narrative, and in a story whose form might have been
dictated by Voltaire, whose material was the same as that used in the
novels, he expressed man in the presence of Religion, and man in the
presence of Knowledge. The legend of St. Anthony is treated by the
Flaubert who loved the East, the story of Bouvard and Pécuchet by
the Flaubert who tortured himself with observation of the bourgeois.
St. Anthony is tempted of love and of all the religions; at last, not
triumphing, but shaken and very weary, he kneels again, and Flaubert
leaves him. Bouvard and Pécuchet, the two clerks given by the accident
of a legacy the aloofness and the opportunity for development that was
Anthony's, are tempted of love and of all the knowledges; at last made
very miserable they return to their desks; that is where Flaubert would
have left them if he had lived. To discuss the settings of these two
great expositions is to ask the question that was asked by a disciple
at the end of Voltaire's _Dream of Plato_. 'And then, I suppose, you
awoke?' It is only permissible after recognising the grandeur of the
underlying idea.
[The statue of _Le Penseur_.]
There have been two men with such a conception of thought. Rodin carved
what Flaubert had written. The statue of _Le Penseur_, that stands
in front of the Panthéon in Paris, is the statue of a man tormented
like St. Anthony, baffled like Bouvard and Pécuchet. This statue does
not represent man's dream of the power of thought, of the dominion of
thought. That head is no clear mechanism, faultless and frictionless;
that attitude is not one of placid contemplation. The head is in
torture, the whole body grips itself in the agony of articulation. The
statue is not that of _a_ thinker, but of _the_ thinker; man before
the Universe, man unable to wrest the words out of himself. Flaubert
had such a vision as that when he wrote the _Tentation_ and _Bouvard et
Pécuchet_. He hated mankind because they could not share it with him.
They did not know as he knew, or see as he saw, but knelt or worked,
and were happy. This one stupendous conception of the true relation
between man and thought is that on which all Flaubert's work is
founded. Expressed in these two books, it is implied in all the others
(even in _Salammbo_, which is almost an attempt to escape from it). It
is not a message; it does not say anything; it is as dumb as Rodin's
statue; it simply _is_--like _Paradise Lost_ or the _Mona Lisa_ or a
religion. 'I am the last of the Fathers of the Church.'
A NOTE ON DE MAUPASSANT
DE MAUPASSANT for seven years submitted all he wrote to Flaubert's
criticism. If we add to the preceding essay some sentences from
Flaubert's correspondence, it will be easy to imagine the lines
that criticism must have taken, and interesting to compare them
with the resulting craftsman.
'I love above all the nervous phrase, substantial, clear, with
strong muscles and browned skin. I love masculine phrases not
feminine.
'What dull stupidity it is always to praise the lie, and to say
that poetry lives on illusion: as if disillusion were not a hundred
times more poetic.
'Find out what is really your nature, and be in harmony with it.
_Sibi constat_ said Horace. All is there.
'Work, above all think, condense your thought; you know that
beautiful fragments are worthless; unity, unity is everything.
'The author in his work ought to be like God in the Universe,
present everywhere and visible nowhere.
'Fine subjects make mediocre works.'
These sentences might well be taken as de Maupassant's inspiration.
De Maupassant, a man of powerful mind, with Flaubert's example
before him, makes each of his tales a rounded unity, and a thing
outside himself, and yet a thing that no one else could have
written. He shunned fine subjects. His stories are like sections
of life prepared for examination, and in looking at them we are
flattered into thinking that we have clearer eyes than usual. He
chooses some quite ordinary incident, and by working up selected
details of it, turns it into a story as exciting to the curiosity
as a detective puzzle. He allows no abstract feminine-phrased
discourses on the psychology of his characters: he does not take
advantage of their confessions. Their psychology is manifested in
things said and in things done. The works, as in life, are hidden
in the fourth dimension, where we cannot see them.
_La Rendezvous_, a tiny story of seven pages, will illustrate his
methods. The chosen incident is that of a woman going to see her
lover, meeting some one else on the way, and going off with him
instead. That is all. Let us see how de Maupassant works it out.
Here is his first paragraph:
'Her hat on her head, her cloak on her back, a black veil across
her face, another in her pocket, which she would put on over the
first as soon as she was in the guilty cab, she was tapping the
point of her boot with the end of her umbrella, and stayed sitting
in her room, unable to make up her mind to go out to keep the
appointment.'
The whole of her indecision is expressed before it is explained.
Then there is a paragraph that lets us know that she had been
keeping the appointment regularly for two years, and we sympathise
with her a little. A description of her room follows, made by
mention of a clock ticking the seconds, a half-read book on a
rosewood desk, and a perfume. The clock strikes and she goes out,
lying to the servant. We watch her, loitering on the way, telling
herself that the Vicomte awaiting her would be opening the window,
listening at the door, sitting down, getting up, and, since she
had forbidden him to smoke on the days of her visits, throwing
desperate glances at the cigarette-box. De Maupassant's characters
think in pictures of physical action. People do so in real life.
The heroine sits in a square watching children, and reflects,
always in the concrete, how much the Vicomte is going to bore
her, and on the terrible danger of rendezvous, and so on, making
pictures all the time. At last, when she is three-quarters of an
hour late, she gets up and sets out for his rooms. She has not gone
ten steps before she meets a diplomatic baron, of whose character
in her eyes de Maupassant has been careful to let us have a hint
beforehand. He asks her, after the usual politenesses, to come and
see his Japanese collections. He is an adroit person this baron.
He does not make love to her. He laughs at her. He ends, after a
delightful little dialogue, in half hurrying, half frightening her
into a cab. They have scarcely started when she cries out that
she has forgotten that she had promised her husband to invite the
Vicomte to dinner. They stop at a post office. The baron goes
in and gets her a telegram card. She writes on it in pencil--it
would be vandalism to spoil the message by translating it from the
French--she writes:
'Mon cher ami, je suis très souffrante; j'ai une névralgie
atroce qui me tient au lit. Impossible sortir. Venez diner
demain soir pour que je me fasse pardonner.
JEANNE.'
She licks the edge, closes it carefully, writes the Vicomte's
address, and then, handing it to the baron, 'Now, will you be so
good as to drop this in the box for telegrams.'
There de Maupassant ends, without comment of any kind. His stories
have always 'the look of a gentleman,' and know how to move, when
to stop, what to put in and what to leave out. They are impersonal,
but not more impersonal than Mérimée's. There is a man behind them,
and in contradistinction to the school of writers with whom he has
been confounded, he does not blink the fact, but obeys Flaubert's
maxim, allowing his presence to be felt but keeping himself
invisible. De Maupassant, the pupil of Flaubert, makes even clearer
than his master the intimate connection between those apparently
hostile things, Romanticism and Realism. Lesser and coarser minds
may have needed the stimulus of a revolt when none was; but the
great men on the heights knew that the suns of dawn and sunset were
the same.
De Maupassant's position in this book is commensurate neither with
his genius nor with what I should like to say of him, and hope
to write in another place. I had wished my book to end with the
Romantic Movement, and so with Flaubert, who seems to me to mark
its ultimate development without a change of name. De Maupassant is
here only to show how direct is the descent of the least exuberant
of modern story-telling from the Romanticism that made possible
the work of Chateaubriand, Hugo, or Balzac. His true position is
in a book that should begin with Flaubert and end with some great
writer of to-morrow, whose work should show by what alchemy the
story-telling of to-day will be changed into that of the future.
[Illustration: GUY DE MAUPASSANT]
CONCLUSION
CONCLUSION
MY table is covered with a green cloth, and on it, under the lamplight,
are two bowls of roses. One is full of the rich garden flowers, whose
hundred folded petals hold in their depths the shadows of their
colourings--cream, crimson, and the rose and orange of an autumn
sunset. In the other are three or four wild roses from the hedge on the
far side of the lane. I scarcely know which give me greater pleasure.
In comparing them I seem to be setting _Aucassin and Nicolete_ by the
side of _La Morte Amoureuse_. How many flowers must represent the
gradual growth of one into the other. How large a collection would be
necessary to illustrate every stage of the transformation of the simple
beauty of the wild blossoms into the luxuriant loveliness, majesty, and
variety of the roses in the opposite bowl. I have attempted such a task
in this book; not the impossible one of collecting every flower in any
way different from those that had opened before it, but of bringing
together a score or so to make the difference between first and last a
little less tantalising and obscure.
[Genius a stationary quality.]
I had thought I was tracing a progress of the art itself; but I no
longer think so. Century after century has laid its gift before the
story-teller, its gift of a form, an unworked vein, a point of view. He
has learnt to hold us with an episode, and also, evening after evening,
to keep us interested in the lives of a dozen different people whose
adventures in the pages of a book he makes no less actual than our
own. In this last century of the art we have seen men looking back to
all the ages before them, and bringing into modern story-telling the
finest qualities of the most ancient, recreating it, and winning for
it the universal acknowledgment that is given to painting, poetry, or
music. Much seems to have been done, and yet, who would dare assign to
a modern story-teller, however excellent a craftsman, a place above
Boccaccio? Who says that his digressions make old Dan Chaucer out of
date? Art does not progress but in consciousness of its technique and
in breadth of power. Genius is a stationary quality. Techniques and the
conditions of production, qualified the one by the other, and modified
by genius, move past it side by side, like an endless procession before
a seated king. The works they carry between them are not to be judged
by their place in the cavalcade, but by the spirit before whom they
pass, who wakes from time to time to give them life and meaning.
None the less, there is a kind of imperfect contemporariness in the
art that lets the finest works of all times remain side by side to
be imitated or compared. And this power of survival that belongs to
works of genius accounts for two phenomena, which give genius itself a
spurious air of progress. The one is an ever clearer consciousness of
technique, the other an ever wider range of possibilities, both due to
the increasing number of works of art that are ready for comparison or
imitation.
[The dissociation of forms.]
In the latter half of my book, and particularly in the chapters on
Poe, Mérimée, Hawthorne, and Flaubert, we have been partly busied in
remarking the later stages of self-conscious craftsmanship. There
remains to be discussed the dissociation of one form from another
that naturally accompanied this more observant technique. I want to
distinguish here between the short story, the _nouvelle_, and the
novel, which are not short, middle-sized, and lengthy specimens of the
same thing, but forms whose beauties are individual and distinct. They
demand quite different skills, and few men have excelled in more than
one of them. Before proceeding to closer definition, let me name an
example of each, to keep in our minds for purposes of reference while
considering their several moulds. Balzac's _Père Goriot_ is a novel;
Gautier's _La Morte Amoureuse_ is a _nouvelle_; de Maupassant's _La
Petite Ficelle_ is a short story.
[The novel.]
The novel was the first form to be used by men with a clear knowledge
of what it allowed them to do, and what it expected of them in return.
Smollett's is its simplest definition. 'A novel,' he says, 'is a large
diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life, disposed in
different groups and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purpose
of a uniform plan and general occurrence, to which every individual
figure is subservient.' It is, as near as may be, a piece of life,
and one of its similarities to ordinary existence is perhaps the
characteristic that best marks its difference from the _nouvelle_. The
novel contains at least one counterplot, the _nouvelle_ none. Life has
as many counterplots as it has actors, as many heroes and heroines as
play any part in it at all. No man is a hero to his valet, because in
that particular plot the valet happens to be a hero to himself. The
novelist does not attempt so equable a characterisation, but by telling
the adventures of more than one group of people, and by threading
their tales in and out through each other, he contrives to give a
conventional semblance of the intricate story-telling of life.[10]
[The _nouvelle_.]
The _nouvelle_ is a novel without a counterplot, and on a smaller
scale.[11] The latter quality is dependent on the former, since it
combats the difficulty of sustained attention, that the novel avoids
by continual change from one to another of its parallel stories. The
_nouvelle_ was with Boccaccio little more than a plot made actual by
the more important sentences of dialogue, and by concise sketching
of its principal scenes. It has now grown to be a most delicate and
delightful form, without breathlessness and without compression, its
aim of pure story being implicit in the manner of its telling. It is
differentiated from the short story, the advantage of whose brevity it
shares in a lesser degree, by the separate importance of its scenes,
which are not bound to be subjected so absolutely to its conclusion.
For example, the splendid cathedral scene in _La Morte Amoureuse_,
where, at the moment of ordination, a young priest is stricken with
passion for a courtesan, would be unjustifiable in a short story unless
it ended in the climax of the tale. The priest would have to die on
the steps of the altar, or the woman to kill herself at his feet as he
passed, a vowed celebate, down the cathedral aisle. The short story
must be a single melody ending with itself; the _nouvelle_ a piece of
music, the motive of whose opening bars, recurring again and again
throughout, is finally repeated with the increase in meaning that is
given it by the whole performance.
[The short story.]
The short story proper is in narrative prose what the short lyric is
in poetry. It is an episode, an event, a scene, a sentence, whose
importance is such that it allows nothing in the story that is not
directly concerned with its realisation. This is true of many specimens
of the _nouvelle_, but it is the essential rule of the short story.
Look at the end of _La Petite Ficelle_, or of any other of the _Contes_
of de Maupassant. 'Une 'tite ficelle ... une 'tite ficelle ... t'nez
la, voila, m'sieu le Maire.' 'A little bit of string ... a little bit
of string ... look, there it is, M. le Maire.' That sentence, repeated
by the dying man in his delirium, needs for the full pathos of its
effect every word of the story. From the first paragraph about an
ordinary market day, the accident of the old man picking up a piece of
string in a place where a purse had been lost, the false accusation,
and his guilt-seeming protestation of innocence, every detail in the
story is worked just so far as to make the reader's mind as ready and
sensitive as possible for the final infliction of those few words.
Keats once coated the inside of his mouth with cayenne pepper to feel
as keenly as he could 'the delicious coolness of claret.' The art
of the short story is just such a making ready for such a momentary
sensation.
[The possibilities of narrative.]
Just as Time, with the clearer consciousness of technique, has made the
moulds of the art more markedly distinct, so it has given the artist
an infinite choice of amalgams with which to fill them. Although some
of the most delightful examples of narrative are still produced with
the old and worthy object of telling a tale to pass the time, although
there are still men who lay their mats upon the ground, squat down on
them, and keep their audiences happy by stories that demand no more
intellectual attention than the buzz of bees in the magnolia flowers;
yet, if we consider only those artists who have been discussed in
the preceding chapters, we perceive at once how many are the other
possibilities of narrative, and, if we examine the story-telling
of our own day, we shall find that most of them are illustrated in
contemporary practice.
Story-telling has grown into a means of expression with a gamut as
wide as that of poetry, which is as wide as that of humanity. 'It is
literature,' says Wilde, 'that shows us the body in its swiftness and
the soul in its unrest'; and the same art that helps us to laze away
a summer afternoon is a key that lets us into the hearts of men we
have never seen, and not infrequently opens our own to us, when, in
the bustle of existence, we have gone out and found ourselves unable
to return. It is a Gyges' ring with which, upon our finger, we can go
about the world and mingle in the business of men to whom we would not
bow, or who would not bow to us. It breaks the gold or iron collars of
our classes and sets each man free as a man to understand all other men
soever. It opens our eyes like Shelley's to see that life--
'like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity.'
We become conscious of that radiance when, by this art made free of
time, we can dream the dreams of the Pharaohs, pray with the hermits
in the Thebaid, and send our hazardous guesses like seeking dogs into
the dim forests of futurity. Our eyes may fitly shine, and we become
as little children in brief resting-hours out of the grown-up world,
when this art makes those tints ours that we never knew, and sends us,
divested of our monotones, to choose among all the glittering colours
of mankind.
And if we are not listeners only, but have ourselves something to
fit with wings and to send out to find those men who will know the
whispering sound of its flight and take it to themselves, how much do
we not owe to this most manifold art of story-telling?
There is nothing that its pinions will not bear.
INDEX
ABERCROMBIE, Lascelles, 263.
Addison, Joseph, 110, 113 _et seq._
_Ali Baba_, 89.
_Amadis of Gaul_, 52, 97.
_Anatomy of Melancholy, The_, 125.
Apuleius, 125.
_Arabian Nights, The_, 46, 100, 101, 231.
_Arcadia_, The Duchess of Pembroke's, 78, 83 _et seq._, 196.
_Arria Marcella_, 283.
_Astrée, l'_, 85.
_Atala_, 179 _et seq._
_Aucassin and Nicolete_, 11, 14, 15, 249, 305.
BACON, Sir Francis, 112.
Balzac, Honoré de, 188, 192, 206, 212, 217 _et seq._, 238, 288, 290,
292, 293, 301, 307.
Barye, Antoine Louis, 180, 202.
Baudelaire, Charles, 239.
Beardsley Aubrey, 88.
Behn, Mrs. Aphra, 70, 139.
Beowulf, 9.
_Bergers d'Arcadie, Les_, 87.
Bible, The, 128.
_Bickerstaff, Mr._, 19, 113 _et seq._
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 19, 20 _et seq._, 56, 82, 85, 125, 155, 225, 306,
309.
Boigne, Mme. de, 275.
Boileau, Nicolas B.-Despreaux, 62.
Borrow, George, 59.
Botticelli, 25.
_Bouvard et Pécuchet_, 296, 297, 298.
Brantôme, 278.
Browne, Sir Thomas, 252.
Bunyan, John, 126 _et seq._, 140, 155, 257.
Burleigh, Lord, 74.
Burney, Fanny, 107, 112, 115, 119, 147 _et seq._
Burns, Robert, 193.
Burton, Robert, 125, 132, 134.
Byron, Lord, 176, 202.
_Caleb Williams_, 244, 245.
_Canterbury Tales, The_, 37 _et seq._
_Captain Singleton_, 58.
_Caractères_, La Bruyère's, 110.
_Castle of Otranto, The_, 189.
Cellini, Benvenuto, 157.
_Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, Les_, 46.
Cervantes, Miguel de C. Saavedra, 32, 60, 61, 78, 82, 85, 86, 93 _et
seq._, 126, 158, 162, 192, 257.
_Characters_, Sir Thomas Overbury's, 107 _et seq._
Charlemagne, 8, 9, 32, 52.
Chateaubriand, François René de, 175 _et seq._, 202, 208, 291, 301.
Chatterton, Thomas, 190.
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 19, 20, 21, 31 _et seq._, 107, 155, 156, 218, 306.
_Cinderella_, 89.
_Citizen of the World, The_, 148, 231.
_Clarissa Harlowe_, 140 _et seq._
Clopinel, Jean, 21 _et seq._
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 42.
_Colomba_, 275.
_Comédie Humaine, La_, 217 _et seq._, 292.
Congreve, William, 274.
_Contes Drôlatiques, Les_, 222.
Corelli, Miss, 25.
_Cranford_, 118, 168.
Cromwell, Oliver, 126.
_Cromwell_, 206.
_Dance of Death, The_, 262.
Dante, 155, 202.
_Decameron, The_, 19, 37 _et seq._, 156.
Defoe, Daniel, 114, 132 _et seq._, 140, 155.
Delacroix, Eugène, 202.
De Quincey, Thomas, 120.
Desvergnes, 26.
_Diana_, 85.
Dickens, Charles, 58.
_Don Quixote_, 10, 60, 82, 96 _et seq._, 158, 161, 257.
_Dream Children_, 120.
Dumas, Alexandre, 177, 188, 193, 201, 205, 206, 210 _et seq._, 261, 274.
EARLE, John, 109, 110, 111.
Edgeworth, Maria, 192, 217.
_Éducation Sentimentale, l'_, 294.
Edward III., 39.
_Elia_, 258.
Ellis, F. S., 22.
_Émaux et Camées_, 238.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 259.
_Emma_, 151.
_Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, An_, 244.
_Ethan Brand_, 263.
Euclid, 144, 146, 253.
_Eugénie Grandet_, 222, 225, 228.
_Euphues_, 67, 70 _et seq._, 139.
_Evelina_, 147 _et seq._, 168.
_Exemplary Novels, The_, 46, 94, 99, 101, 102, 126.
_Facino Cane_, 227.
_Faërie Queene, The_, 126, 128, 132.
_Femme au Collier de Velours, La_, 201.
_Ferdinand Count, Fathom_, 165.
Fiametta, 85.
Fielding, Henry, 71, 96, 107, 119, 147, 150, 152, 156 _et seq._, 187,
227, 235, 257, 293.
_Figaro, Le_, 238.
Flaubert, Gustave, 46, 133, 184, 195, 226, 287 _et seq._, 307.
Froissart, 191.
_Galatea_, 62, 78, 85, 94, 95, 98, 103.
Gautier, Théophile, 88, 177, 195, 202, 203, 205, 206, 208, 217, 221,
231 _et seq._, 251, 273, 277, 283, 288, 291, 307.
Gavin, Miss J., 102.
Gay, John, 42.
_Génie du Christianisme, Le_, 182.
_Gesta Romanorum, The_, 20, 34 _et seq._, 45, 128.
_Gil Blas_, 61, 62, 63, 161.
Godwin, William, 244 _et seq._
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 175, 232.
Goldsmith, Oliver, 42, 118 _et seq._, 148, 231.
Goya, Francisco Jose de G. y Lucientes, 262, 269.
_Grace Abounding_, 130.
Graham, R. B. Cunninghame, 121.
_Grammont Memoirs, The_, 278.
Greene, Robert, 67, 74, 126, 140.
_Griselda_, 46.
_Guardian, The_, 112.
Guest, Lady Charlotte, 13.
HAMILTON, Anthony, 278.
_Hardyknute, The Ballad of_, 191.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 134, 245, 257 _et seq._, 274, 283, 307, 308.
Hazlitt, William, 84, 111, 128, 193, 244, 245, 258, 273, 274, 278.
_Heptameron, The_, 51.
_Hernani_, 201, 205.
_Hérodias_, 296.
_Histoire mes de Bêtes, l'_, 193.
Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Wilhelm, 201, 225.
Hogarth, William, 156, 168.
Holbein, Hans, 262.
Holcroft, Thomas, 278.
Homer, 208.
Hosea, 128.
_House of the Seven Gables, The_, 263.
Hugo, Victor, 177, 183, 201, 203 _et seq._, 277, 295, 301.
_Humphry Clinker_, 51, 117, 147, 166 _et seq._
Hunt, Leigh, 119.
_Ivanhoe_, 196, 211.
_Jack Wilton_, or _The Unfortunate Traveller_, 60, 76.
_John Arnolfini and his Wife_, 41.
Johnson, Samuel, 118, 144, 175.
_Jonathan Wild_, 163 _et seq._
Jonson, Ben, 109.
_Joseph Andrews_, 156 _et seq._
_Journal of the Plague Year, A_, 134.
_Julie_, or _La Nouvelle Héloïse_, 147, 177.
KEATS, John, 42, 274, 310.
_King Lear_, 228.
Kit Kats, The, 115.
LA BRUYÈRE, Jean de, 63, 110, 111.
Lafontaine, Jean de, 42.
Lamb, Charles, 120, 133, 258, 260.
Lancret, Nicolas, 86.
_Lavengro_, 58, 59.
_Lazarillo de Tormes_, 51 _et seq._
_Lenore_, 251.
Leonardo da Vinci, 243, 248.
Le Sage, Alain René, 61 _et seq._, 160.
Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 166.
Lockhart, John Gibson, 101.
Lodge, Thomas, 73 _et seq._, 126.
Lorris, Guillaume de, 23.
_Love for Love_, 149.
Luna, H. de, 56.
Lyly, John, 70 _et seq._, 90, 139, 280.
MABBE, James, 126.
_Mabinogion, The_, 9, 11 _et seq._, 51, 73, 240.
Macpherson, James, 191.
_Madame Bovary_, 291 _et seq._
_Mademoiselle de Maupin_, 237.
Mahomet, 240.
Malory, Sir Thomas, 11, 61, 88.
_Manon Lescaut_, 147.
Margaret, Queen of Navarre, 51.
_Markheim_, 263.
Marot, Clément, 21, 156.
Masefield, John, 61.
_Masque of the Red Death, The_, 247.
_Mateo Falcone_, 277.
Maupassant, Guy de, 226, 235, 247, 291, 292, 298 _et seq._, 307.
Mérimée, Prosper, 46, 195, 203, 205, 206, 273 _et seq._, 292, 301, 307.
_Messe de l'Athée, La_, 225.
Meung, Jean de, 21 _et seq._, 31.
_Microcosmography, A_, 111.
Milton, John, 42.
_Misérables, Les_, 207.
_Modest Proposal, A_, 277.
Molière, Jean Baptiste Poquelin de, 61.
_Monk and Witch_, 262.
_Mona Lisa_, 249, 298.
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem Sieur de, 73, 112, 120, 208.
Montemôr, Jorge de, 85.
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de, 208.
_Morte Amoureuse, La_, 305, 307, 309.
_Morte Darthur, The_, 8, 11, 32, 37, 51, 61, 240.
_Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist_, 120.
_Murders in the Rue Morgue, The_, 248.
_Mystery of Marie Roget, The_, 248.
NAPLES, Queen Joan of, 47.
Nash, Thomas, 60, 76.
Nevinson, H. W., 88.
_Newgate Calendar, The_, 132.
_New Testament, The_, 144.
_Northanger Abbey_, 189.
Northcote, James, 278.
_Notre Dame de Paris_, 204, 207.
_Nouvelle Héloïse, La_, or _Julie_, 147, 177.
ODIN, 8.
_Old Gentleman, The_, 119.
_Old Lady, The_, 120.
_Oliver Twist_, 58.
_Ossian_, 178, 179, 191.
_Oval Portrait, The_, 250.
Overbury, Sir Thomas, 108, 109, 110, 111.
_Pamela_, 140 _et seq._, 157.
_Pandosto_, 75, 76.
_Paradise Lost_, 298.
Pascal, 208.
Pater, Walter, 121.
_Paynter's Pallace_, 68.
Peacock, Thomas Love, 196.
_Penseur, Le_, 297.
Pepys, Samuel, 129.
_Percy and Duglas_, 84.
Percy, Bishop, 191.
_Père Goriot_, 228, 307.
_Petite Ficelle, La_, 307, 310.
_Petite Pallace of Petite his Pleasure, A_, 68 _et seq._
Petrarch, 38.
Pettie, George, 68, 69, 126.
_Philosophy of Composition, The_, 244, 246.
_Pilgrim's Progress_, 126 _et seq._, 257.
Pindar, 84.
Pippin, 8.
Pisan, Christine de, 25.
_Plea of Pan, The_, 88.
Poe, Edgar Allan, 46, 165, 195, 220, 243 _et seq._, 258, 259, 263, 281,
307.
Poussin, Nicolas, 86, 87.
_Presse, La_, 238.
Prévost, l'Abbé, 147.
_Punch and Judy_, 96.
_Purloined Letter, The_, 248.
_Quentin Durward_, 208.
RABELAIS, François, 25, 96, 170, 208.
Radcliffe, Mrs., 166.
_Rappacini's Daughter_, 265.
_Raven, The_, 244, 253.
_Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, The_, 191, 218.
_Rendezvous, Le_, 299.
_René_, 179.
_Reynard the Fox_, 9, 54.
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 243.
Richardson, Samuel, 71; 139 _et seq._, 155, 156, 157, 158, 167, 235.
_Robert the Devil, The Life of_, 19.
_Robinson Crusoe_, 114, 132.
_Rob Roy_, 192.
_Roderick Random_, 58, 160 _et seq._
Rodin, Auguste, 297.
_Romance of the Rose, The_, 19 _et seq._, 132.
_Roman Comique, Le_, 158.
_Roman de la Momie, Le_, 236.
_Romany Rye, The_, 59.
Ronsard, Pierre de, 21, 155, 158.
_Rosalynde_, 73, 75, 77, 78.
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 42, 44.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 147, 175, 177, 178, 179, 180.
SAINTE-BEUVE, Charles Augustin de, 208.
_St. Julien l'Hospitalier_, 291, 296.
_Salammbo_, 291, 294, 295, 298.
Santayana, George, 239.
Scarlatti, Alessandro, 196.
_Scarlet Letter, The_, 258, 266.
Scarron, Paul, 86, 170.
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 25.
Scott, Sir Walter, 42, 101, 187 _et seq._, 206, 208, 210, 211, 212,
217, 218, 219, 251.
Selkirk, Alexander, 134.
_Sense and Sensibility_, 150.
Shakespeare, William, 78, 96, 126, 155, 202.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 311.
Sidney, Sir Philip, 78, 83 _et seq._, 95, 140, 175, 191, 233.
_Sir Charles Grandison_, 140.
_Sir Roger de Coverley_, 117 _et seq._
Smollett, Tobias, 58, 71, 107, 119, 147, 150, 152, 156 _et seq._, 187,
261, 293, 308.
Somerset, The Countess of, 108.
Somerset, The Earl of, 108.
_Song of Roland, The_, 37.
_Spectator, The_, 112, 116, 117, 142, 148, 168.
Spenser, Edmund, 42, 126, 128.
Steele, Sir Richard, 113 _et seq._, 142, 148.
Stendhal, Henri Beyle who wrote as, 131, 261.
Sterne, Laurence, 169, 170.
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 243, 250.
_Summer is icumen in_, 15.
Swift, Dean, 113.
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 71.
_Table Talk_, 258.
Taine, Hippolyte, 23, 278.
_Tatler, The_, 112, 113, 142, 148, 168.
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 42.
_Tentation de Saint Antoine, La_, 296, 297, 298.
Theocritus, 81.
Theophrastus, 63, 107, 110, 111.
Thomson, Hugh, 118.
Thoreau, Henry David, 258.
Tolstoy, Leo, Count, 261.
_Tom Jones_, 51, 58, 89, 144, 166, 257.
_Tristram Shandy_, 169, 170.
_Troilus and Criseyd_, 38, 47.
_Trois Contes_, 295.
_Trois Mousquetaires, Les_, 211, 212.
_Tulipe Noire, La_, 211.
_Un Cœur Simple_, 291, 295.
Urfé, Honoré d', 85.
VAN EYCK, Jan and Hubert, 41, 42.
_Vathek_, 231.
_Venus d'Ille, La_, 283.
_Vicar of Wakefield, The_, 86, 118, 119.
_Vingt Ans Après_, 212.
Virgil, 81, 86.
_Volsunga Saga, The_, 11, 240.
Voltaire, 202, 231, 274, 296, 297.
WAGNER, Wilhelm Richard, 196.
Walpole, Horace, 189.
Watteau Antoine, 61, 86.
_Waverley Novels, The_, 42, 187 _et seq._, 209.
Wilde, Oscar, 311.
_William Wilson_, 250.
Wordsworth, William, 42.
YEATS, William Butler, 236.
_Young Goodman Brown_, 267, 268.
ZOLA, Emile, 226.
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty at the
Edinburgh University Press
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Translation by Lady Charlotte Guest, 1838.
[2] The quotations in this chapter are from the translation by Mr. F.
S. Ellis.
[3] It would be possible to trace an interesting history of narrative
in verse from Chaucer to our own day. But although the names of
Spenser, Milton, Lafontaine, Gay, Goldsmith, Keats, Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Tennyson, Rossetti, which with many others come instantly
to mind, show how various and suggestive such an essay might be, yet
the purpose of this book would hardly be served by its inclusion. It
would be more nearly concerned with the history of poetry than with
that of story-telling.
[4] By H. de Luna, 1620. The earliest known edition of _Lazarillo_ was
published in 1553.
[5] From a poem by John Masefield.
[6] There is another picture of the same name and subject in the Duke
of Devonshire's collection.
[7] It is worth noticing as an additional proof of the close connection
between the story in letters and the feminine novel that _Sense and
Sensibility_ was built out of an older tale that she actually wrote in
epistolary form.
[8] From a poem by Lascelles Abercrombie.
[9] This is repeated with a new purpose from the chapter on Origins.
[10] The distinction between novel and romance made in the chapter on
Hawthorne is one of material rather than of form. It is possible to use
the material of romance in the form of either novel, _nouvelle_, or
short story.
[11] The novelette is not the same as the _nouvelle_, but simply a
short novel as its name implies.
End of Project Gutenberg's A History of Story-telling, by Arthur Ransome