determine it) why people in books are so extraordinarily different
from real people. You might imagine that the people in biographies at
least would be more or less like human beings--but they never are. A
man may say that the reason of this is that biography to-day is always
a sort of modern, pale, conventional, and hypocritical affair--that
the biographer dare not print nine-tenths of his material under our
modern tyranny of suppression, and that he has necessarily to make a
puppet of his man. But there are others besides modern biographies,
and it is true of them all that the people inside are not human. You
have biographies of politicians acting upon principle; biographies
of men who have accumulated vast fortunes without a hint of their
main passion; biographies of men of lineage in which you are given to
understand that their distinction was due to some individual worth and
force. Biographies of the frankest and most brutal periods, biographies
of men long dead, biographies written by enemies, all have this in
common, that the person inside the book does not go on like a human
being. Autobiographies give one a better chance, but even there,
though you get something much more vivid, you never get a real man. It
seems as though the writing of an autobiography or confession always
went with a twist, either morbid or megalomaniac. Take the very best
one of all, Rousseau's; it can be proved, and research has proved it,
that he is perpetually maligning himself. As for St. Augustine's (oh,
how dull!) he tells us so little, and his purpose is so far from being
autobiographical that it does not come under the same criticism; and as
for Borrow, those who have read him assure me that he is perpetually
performing marvellous feats of intelligence and courage to which
there is no witness at all but himself. Hagiographers are appalling.
They do not attempt to present a living figure, though I will make an
exception for one account of the death of St. Thomas of Canterbury; I
forget which, but it is full of realities. Your stock hagiographer, as,
for instance, he of the Carolingian period, postulates three things:
the noble birth of his hero, his boldly standing up to somebody else
(usually a layman), and his performing a number of actions precisely
similar to those which others of the type have performed; it is almost
mechanical; it is like the leader in a party newspaper describing a
party speech by a party man.
People in histories also are not human beings. The moment you try
to make them human in writing your history a demon enters and makes
you make a great quantity of little mistakes. For instance, you are
writing about a man with one eye, and you are determined to make him
human; you find out all you can about that eye, whether the other one
was of glass, or was just left screwed up in the old-fashioned style.
You get right about the date of the time when he lost his eye, the
effect which his one eye had on other people, and all the rest of
it. You make the man live again before you, and the moment you begin
writing about him you will make his left eye his right eye. It is the
knowledge of this, and the fear of the powerful Demon who works it,
that makes historians shun the human being and stuff their books full
of ghosts paler than any that wander by Acheron.
This is especially true of historians of war. The people they write
about occupy "strategic" points (a phrase which is blankly meaningless
to the writer as to the reader), they "grasp" the situation at a
glance, they "master detail," they are (when the author is against
them), "in spite of all their faults, not devoid of physical courage,"
or (if the author is in favour of them) "acting with that quiet
decision which is characteristic of them" (and of bad actors in problem
plays, too, by the way), but they never live.
Now and then you get flashes; the eyes glance, the tones take on
reality, there is a human voice and gesture, but it dies again. Perhaps
the most vivid and most fascinating of such histories in our tongue is
Napier's. You will continually find such flashes in it--but they are
not permanently connected. It is odd that the most living of histories
are the exceedingly simple and bald relations set down under primitive
conditions of society when a man merely desired to chronicle dates and
facts. How it is so no one can tell, but a plain statement of some
not very interesting thing with just a verb and a substantive will
do the trick. For instance, where Eginhard says of Charlemagne that
everything about him was virile "except his voice, which was high," or
again, where Fulcher of Chartres (I think it is) says of a spy on the
crusading march that he was "short in the nose and in every virtue."
But even the early historians build up no continuously living figure.
When it comes to novelists the matter is notorious. The people in
novels not only do not go on like real people, but they do things
sometimes physically, always morally, impossible to real people. I
have often wished to know a professional novelist in order to ask
him why his people went on like that. To take quite small points. A
lover and his lady in a novel will often hunt the fox. So far so good.
There is nothing impossible about that. When they have done running
after the animal they go home together, and their horses walk side
by side. How is that done? Except horses in cavalry regiments or in
circuses, or horses constrained and tied by leather thongs in front
of wheeled vehicles, when were two horses ever seen that walked the
same pace side by side? The novelist may say that it is necessary
to the convention of his novel. It would spoil a love scene if he
showed one of the two horses dragging further and further behind the
other (as one of them always does), and then having to canter or trot
every three minutes to catch up his neighbour, and it would also spoil
his love scene if he made one of the horses walking slowly and the
other dancing, which in real life is one of the ways in which people
attempt to keep two horses abreast. But there are many things in your
novel which have no such excuse, and which are equally out of Nature.
For instance, people sit down suddenly and write enormous cheques at
a moment's notice. Now even the richest man cannot do that. He has
his money invested, he does not waste it by letting it lie idle in
gigantic balances of a current account. Then again, the things they
do with their mouths. "'No,' she laughed." How on earth could that be
done? If you try to laugh and say "No" at the same time it sounds like
neighing--yet people are perpetually doing it in novels. If they did
it in real life they would be locked up. Another thing that people do
in novels on all sides is to make immensely long speeches. Sometimes
the whole of the author's views upon some big matter, like the fate of
the soul for instance, comes pouring out in a solid page and a half of
spoken stuff. In real life the only people who do this are politicians,
and even they only do it on stated and ritual occasions; they do not do
it in private houses. Sometimes they try, but they are interrupted.
Yet again, consider the vast number of titles which people have in
novels. I cannot call to mind one single novel without a title--I mean
no novel of the modern kind. Of course there must be such, but they
are certainly rare. Now in real life things are not thus. All the
ordinary people of this country go about day after day without meeting
lords and ladies, but in novels something like half the characters
come in quite casually with titles, and I have been told that it is a
matter of professional pride with some novelists to be able to get the
complicated system of English titles exactly right, and that they will
even fabricate difficult problems for the pleasure of solving them, as
do men who play chess. They will take the younger son of an earl, make
him a Colonial Cabinet Minister, and then triumphantly settle for you
which of the two "honourables" he is; or again, they will marry the
heiress of a marquisate inheritable in the female line to the eldest
son of a man who comes into a barony later on in the book--and get it
absolute. But people in real life do not care much about these things.
Conversely, a very large number of things that _do_ happen in real
life and are interesting never seem to get into novels. For instance,
repetitions. Your hero will fall off a horse and break something, but
he does not do it twenty times as he would if he were a living being.
A man comes late to dinner, but he is not always coming late to dinner
as he would if he were human: and, what is worse, a score of highly
interesting real types never get between covers at all.
Take, for instance, that immoderately common type, among the most
common of God's creatures, which I will call "the Silent Fool,"
the man who hardly ever talks, and when he does says something so
overwhelmingly silly that one remembers it all one's life. I can
recollect but one Silent Fool in modern letters, but he comes in a
book which is one of the half-dozen immortal achievements of our
time, a book like a decisive battle, or like the statue of John the
Baptist at South Kensington, a glory for us all. I mean _The Diary of a
Nobody_. In that you will find the silent Mr. Padge, who says "That's
right"--and nothing more.
One might go on for ever piling up instances of this divorce between
the supposed pictures of our modern life and the truths of it. I will
end with what is to me, perhaps, the most glaring of all: the attitude
of fiction towards what is called "success." No matter who the author
is, no matter what his knowledge of the world, he simply cannot draw
"successful men" as they are, that is, in a diversity as great as any
to be discovered in the human race. Men who have "got on," that is, who
are at once well to do and well known, are as different as men with the
toothache or as men with warts on their chins. Some are kind, some
brutal, some clever, some stupid, some got their money by luck, some
by inheritance, some by theft, some few by being able to make or do
something better than their fellows, but at any rate in real life, when
you are about to meet someone who is known to you as "successful," you
never have the slightest idea what you are going to meet, your last
experience of the sort is no guide to the next, and the "successful"
chap may turn out to be anything at all. But in novels your wealthy and
well-known man is invariably powerful in character. It never fails. He
may be good or bad, English or foreign, young or old, but he always
has in him something of what you see in a very good sergeant-major at
a few shillings a week, an experienced head master at a few hundreds a
year, or a capable engineer on a passenger ship. He displays qualities
which have no more to do with what is called "success" now-a-days than
red hair or brown boots have. In a word, your successful man is a type
in the novel. In real life he is not a type at all--he is any one. And
another thing you never get in a novel is a well-mannered man or a
bad-mannered man. I cannot recollect one character who interrupts at
the top of his voice, nor one who joins the conversation of others in
an easy way.... But suppose one filled a novel with real people, what
escape would there be from daily life?
ON THE EFFECT OF TIME
Of all contrasts the most ironical and the most profound is the
contrast between the Tag and the Truth of the Tag. A couple of lines
are chosen by humanity from the work of a great poet, and are usually
so chosen not only because they are beautiful, but because they are
true. When they have been repeated a certain number of times they
become a tag. A proverb or a mere popular statement puts into the
shortest possible form some extremely simple, and perhaps extremely
obvious, at any rate (this is quite certain) some extremely important,
truth. Every one sees it is a truth, everybody repeats it, and it
becomes a tag.
Now note the next phase in the life of the said tag. It is criticised
and it is ridiculed; it becomes a solid butt for the archery of human
wit. That phase lasts, perhaps, the lifetime of a man.
Now note the third phase, for it will teach you the most that can be
learnt about mankind, and it is endless. It is the consummation of the
tag and the test of humanity afforded by the tag. The tag is now taken
for granted and is eternal, and the following things happen to it:
children are taught it like the alphabet; they are compelled to learn
it. Hobbledehoys, great wits, and leaders of thought avoid it because
it is commonplace. They can be seen waggling from one side of the road
to the other in their grotesque efforts to avoid the tag. The whole
world knows that the tag is there. Lastly--most wonderful of all!--the
tag ceases to bite: it ceases to affect men; men are saturated with
it. Men are acclimatised to it. They are vaccinated with it; and the
tag has now arrived at the exercise of its eternal function, which
is to wake in individuals, here in one man, there in another, an
overwhelming sense of its truth (or beauty). It begins its career of
converting individual men. Let it be mentioned where three are gathered
together, and it will be fled from as an out-used thing, but two can
make confidences each to the other about it, and one can feel it like a
thorn or like a gem in his heart.
"Who goes a-borrowing goes a-sorrowing" has gone through all these
phases; so has "Waste not want not." So has "For who to dull
forgetfulness a prey," etc. So has "Felix qui potuit," etc. And so have
the three or four thousand others that are the stock of a proper mind.
All these set me thinking of yet another tag, and as it is that which
most sharply tests humility and, through humility, intelligence, and
as, therefore, in this not very humble and not intelligent time it is
grossly neglected, there is a pleasure in dwelling upon it. It is to
this effect: "The future is veiled from man."
Good Lord! To read the Press and to hear the speeches! Why, one would
think that the future had a map to it! One can hardly hear one's self
think for prophecies; and, what is perhaps the most terrible thing of
all, as a symptom of our modern state of mind, the prophecies have a
dogmatic quality (using the word "dogmatic" as it is popularly used of
transcendental affirmations), for men prophesy in great herds and all
together, and to question their prophecies, simply to say that possibly
"the future is veiled from man," creates something now-a-days of the
astonishment, ridicule, or anger which the denial of a religious dogma
does in a society with a fixed religion. Thus, men in England to-day
confidently regard the future of the earth for, let us say, the next
hundred years in a certain light. Certain countries (especially new
countries) are to increase in a regular manner in value and population
and property. Certain other countries are to continue their decline.
Certain forms of mechanical perfection are to increase, certain
speculations as to the nature of the soul are to decline in interest.
But more than any particular set of opinions, there is a general colour
stamped upon the future in the modern mind, and how securely it is
stamped one can best prove by the amusement or surprise that is caused
if one suggests (but does not affirm) that there may be (not that there
must be) some totally new philosophy, new religion, or new development
within three generations.
A book recently published suggests to me the permanent and ironical
value of that old tag "The future is veiled from man." It is a study of
two somewhat obscure individuals who were members of the Revolutionary
Tribunal. It is a very detailed study in which one feels in every page
the things that were taken for granted in that place and time--in the
Paris of the Revolution. What of all that has come to pass? What of
all the fixed certitudes as to the future--nay, the fixed certitudes
upon the very nature of man from which, as of necessity, the future was
deduced, has remained? The author has done all the better in his study
of Vilate and Trinchard from the fact that his position in the Archives
has permitted him to look into the ultimate details of the period. But
not so much the high historical value of the work as its permanent
human lesson strikes me as I read.
Vilate was twenty-four when the great war of the Revolution against the
Kings was within a month of breaking out, and when he set out for Paris
from the lovely rocky pasturage of his province, up beyond Limoges. And
this was what he had in his mind: that the revolutionary movement, to
use his own words, "must give to the whole world a spur of insurrection
against the oppressors of men." This pathetic certitude was nothing
peculiar to the very commonplace young fellow who was leaving his
professorship in the Indre for Paris. To him they then seemed as much
a commonplace as would seem to some young fellow in a similar position
to-day in Birmingham some phase about the development of the West of
Canada, or some certain prophecy that nations would enrich themselves
in proportion to the amount of coal and iron discovered upon their
territories.
When Vilate hears a speech in the Revolutionary Parliament he says:
"Truth has now appeared and is fixed for ever. It can now call to its
tribunal every abuse, every vice, and every crime." Has truth done
that in the last hundred years? Yet to Vilate the prophecy of what
the Revolution was about to do seemed--and not only to him, but to
millions of his contemporaries--as simple as some prophecy of ours
about the future of communications; and he was as easily persuaded
that what he said was true as we are that the North temperate climate
(and especially that part of Europe which is insular and lies between
parallels 50 and 60) is the natural climatic seat of human energy.
Consider again this, which is not from Vilate's own pen, but which
occurs in the study before me and is of the first interest: Vilate
was in the jury on that day. It was the 9th of February, 1794. Seven
Carmelite nuns had refused to take the civic oath to the Republic. The
judge made a very commonplace and, as it seemed then, a very sensible
speech, pointing out that they were perfectly free to observe the vows
they had taken, that nothing had disappeared in their lives except the
particular convent with which they were associated; that none of their
prejudices would be offended. And he pointed out that in the society in
which he believed they would have the sense to live, all men would now
be permanently free. The nuns refused; they refused because the oath
would involve them in schism. How many men at that time surrounding
Vilate had the slightest conception of what the renascence of religion
was to be in the city of Paris? These women, members or servants of
the little reactionary aristocratic clique into which the monastic
institution had declined, seemed mere fanatics not only to Vilate but
to the whole of his society. Could you suddenly have shown Vilate how
Europe would still be raging upon those ultimate questions of religion
more than three generations later; could you have presented him with
the sight of a whole society divided upon so simple and, as it was
then thought, so irrational a point--what would he have thought? I can
tell you what he would have thought. No matter what your credentials
as a prophet, he would have thought your prophecy mad. Though you
should have carried him into our very time and given every proof of the
reality of his vision, he would have woken up to believe it an illusion
and a silly dream.
The state of mind of Trinchard is even more impressive, because
Trinchard was an even smaller, more commonplace, and therefore more
typical, man. He sat side by side with Vilate in the jury of the
Revolutionary Tribunal. Trinchard was a carpenter. He was somewhat
over thirty years of age at the period of the Revolution. His brother
was a gunner, fighting against the Vendéans, just at that moment when
Valenciennes had fallen, and when all seemed over with the Republic;
and his brother used to write from the armies, signing "Your brother, a
true Republican." Two months later he was judging Marie Antoinette. He
wrote to his brother a letter immediately after the trial. M. Dunoyer
publishes in his book (_Deux Jurés du Tribunal Révolutionnaire_) a
facsimile of that letter, and wonderful reading it makes. One might
put its bad spelling and street language into modern English something
like this: "I'm learning you, brother, that I was one of them jurymen
as judged the wilbeast what was wolfing a gurt part of the empire." And
so forth. But the man is doing nothing exceptional. He no more thinks
of himself as exceptional than does any leader-writer to-day writing
upon the virtues or vices of a contemporary politician in more moderate
language. And note you, as a hundred years can make men more temperate,
so they can make men more violent, and our modern absence of emphasis
may astound our great-grandchildren quite as much as that revolutionary
violence astounds us.
A friend writes to him in that spring of 1794 (when Danton died, and
when every man was occupied in the defence or in the destruction
of the Republic). He is a very ordinary friend, his name is Ploton,
a Southerner, as Trinchard was. He corresponds more or less in that
society to, let us say, a young village shopkeeper in our own, full of
a simple patriotism, and especially full of what the Press tells him.
And he heads his letter thus: "Second of Germinal, the second year of
the Republic--which is as imperishable as the world." What rhetoric!
Nay, to us reading such stuff to-day, what lunacy! But do not be too
sure. Go to the British Museum when you can find an idle afternoon and
look up your newspapers of September, 1899, and you will read some
amusing phrases.
The truth is that men pass under strong influences of time that fill
them more than with wine, rather with an entirety of life. The time in
which a man lives may be an exalted time or a weary one, but it fills
him altogether, whether it is on fire or drowned. He can conceive, as
a rule, nothing in the future different from the temper of his time,
though there is all the past to teach him his folly. If he makes a
picture of the future, that picture is a mere extension of his own tiny
and ephemeral experience, and the more confidently certain he is of
that future the more rigidly is it seen by the critical onlooker to be
a puppet dressed up in the clothes of the present.
All these things Dunoyer's careful book upon two men of the
Revolutionary Tribunal, a monograph characteristic of that ceaseless
and immense research which dignifies the modern French School of
History, has suggested to my mind.
Now, whenever I read of the Revolution, in general or in particular,
while that lesson of the folly of prophecy perpetually returns to me,
yet something else rises from the page. In a certain sense, almost in
a mystical sense, the periods of profound faith in a particular future
were right. Not because the picture that they saw was true, but because
those things outside time upon which they relied were and are true. And
even to-day in the sheer anarchy and welter of the time we suffer there
is a method of thought which has anchoring ground in the permanent fate
of mankind. But what that method may be there is no space to discuss
here.
ON A POET
The days in which Swinburne died, it was remarked by all, were days
peculiar to the air and to the landscape which had inspired his verse.
One riding in those days upon the high ridges of the New Forest saw
before him in the distant hills of Dorset and of Wilts, in the very
clear line of the Island, in the belt of sea, and in the great billows
of oak woods and of beech that lift up from the hollows, in the clear
wind and the new large clouds of spring before it, everything which
his poetry meant to those who were of one tongue with him, and all
that part of it which, though not incommunicable to foreigners, made
him the least translatable of modern writers. Nowhere was it easier
to understand what influences had made, or rather driven, his form of
expression than on those heights looking towards those hills, and under
such a sky, feeling that wind come right from off the English sea.
For it is the chief characteristic of Swinburne's work, and the one
which will be noted of him throughout whatever changes the future may
bring to our taste, that his motive (if one may use this metaphor)
was the landscape and the air of England--especially of South England
and of that very roll of land from the chalk to the chalk, from the
northern Avon of Wiltshire to the cliffs of the Island which a man
surveys from the ridges of which I speak.