IV

We must not fail of the point, however, that we have made these remarks

not at all with an eye to the question of whether “Chance” has been well

or ill inspired as to its particular choice of a way of really attending

to itself among all the possible alternatives, but only on the ground of

its having compared, selected and held on; since any alternative that

might have been preferred and that should have been effectively adopted

would point our moral as well—and this even if it is of profit none the

less to note the most striking of Mr. Conrad’s compositional

consequences. There is one of these that has had most to do with making

his pages differ in texture, and to our very first glance, from that

straggle of ungoverned verbiage which leads us up and down those of his

fellow fabulists in general on a vain hunt for some projected mass of

truth, some solidity of substance, as to which the deluge of “dialogue,”

the flooding report of things said, or at least of words pretendedly

spoken, shall have learned the art of being merely illustrational. What

first springs from any form of real attention, no matter which, we on a

comparison so made quickly perceive to be a practical challenge of the

preposterous pretension of this most fatuous of the luxuries of

looseness to acquit itself with authority of the structural and

compositional office. Infinitely valid and vivid as illustration, it

altogether depends for dignity and sense upon our state of possession of

its historic preliminaries, its promoting conditions, its supporting

ground; that is upon our waiting occupancy of the chamber it proposes to

light and which, when no other source of effect is more indicated, it

doubtless inimitably fills with life. Then its relation to what encloses

and confines and, in its sovereign interest, finely compresses it,

offering it constituted aspects, surfaces, presences, faces and figures

of the matter we are either generally or acutely concerned with to play

over and hang upon, then this relation gives it all its value: it has

flowered from the soil prepared and sheds back its richness into the

field of cultivation. It is interesting, in a word, only when nothing

else is equally so, carrying the vessel of the interest with least of a

stumble or a sacrifice; but it is of the essence that the sounds so set

in motion (it being as sound above all that they undertake to convey

sense,) should have something to proceed from, in their course, to

address themselves to and be affected by, with all the sensibility of

sounds. It is of the essence that they should live in a medium, and in a

medium only, since it takes a medium to give them an identity, the

intenser the better, and that the medium should subserve them by

enjoying in a like degree the luxury of an existence. We need of course

scarce expressly note that the play, as distinguished from the novel,

lives exclusively on the spoken word—not on the report of the thing

said but, directly and audibly, on that very thing; that it thrives by

its law on the exercise under which the novel hopelessly collapses when

the attempt is made disproportionately to impose it. There is no danger

for the play of the cart before the horse, no disaster involved in it;

that form being _all_ horse and the interest itself mounted and astride,

and not, as that of the novel, dependent in the first instance on

wheels. The order in which the drama simply says things gives it all its

form, while the story told and the picture painted, as the novel at the

pass we have brought it to embraces them, reports of an infinite

diversity of matters, gathers together and gives out again a hundred

sorts, and finds its order and its structure, its unity and its beauty,

in the alternation of parts and the adjustment of differences. It is no

less apparent that the novel may be fundamentally _organised_—such

things as “The Egoist” and “The Awkward Age” are there to prove it; but

in this case it adheres unconfusedly to that logic and has nothing to

say to any other. Were it not for a second exception, one at this season

rather pertinent, “Chance” then, to return to it a moment, would be as

happy an example as we might just now put our hand on of the automatic

working of a scheme unfavourable to that treatment of the colloquy by

endless dangling strings which makes the current “story” in general so

figure to us a porcupine of extravagant yet abnormally relaxed bristles.

The exception we speak of would be Mrs. Wharton’s “Custom of the

Country,” in which, as in this lady’s other fictions, we recognise the

happy fact of an abuse of no one of the resources it enjoys at the

expense of the others; the whole series offering as general an example

of dialogue flowering and not weeding, illustrational and not itself

starved of illustration, or starved of referability and association,

which is the same thing, as meets the eye in any glance that leaves Mr.

Wells at Mr. Wells’s best-inspired hour out of our own account. The

truth is, however, that Mrs. Wharton is herself here out of our account,

even as we have easily recognised Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Maurice Hewlett

to be; these three authors, with whatever differences between them,

remaining essentially votaries of selection and intention and being

embodiments thereby, in each case, of some state over and above that

simple state of possession of much evidence, that confused conception of

what the “slice” of life must consist of, which forms the text of our

remarks. Mrs. Wharton, _her_ conception of the “slice” so clarified and

cultivated, would herself of course form a text in quite another

connection, as Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Galsworthy would do each in his own,

which we abstain from specifying; but there are two or three grounds on

which the author of “Ethan Frome,” “The Valley of Decision” and “The

House of Mirth,” whom we brush by with reluctance, would point the moral

of the treasure of amusement sitting in the lap of method with a

felicity peculiarly her own. If one of these is that she too has clearly

a saturation—which it would be ever so interesting to determine and

appreciate—we have it from her not in the crude state but in the

extract, the extract that makes all the difference for our sense of an

artistic economy. If the extract, as would appear, is the result of an

artistic economy, as the latter is its logical motive, so we find it

associated in Mrs. Wharton with such appeals to our interest, for

instance, as the fact that, absolutely sole among our students of this

form, she suffers, she even encourages, her expression to flower into

some sharp image or figure of her thought when that will make the

thought more finely touch us. Her step, without straying, encounters the

living analogy, which she gathers, in passing, without awkwardness of

pause, and which the page then carries on its breast as a trophy plucked

by a happy adventurous dash, a token of spirit and temper as well as a

proof of vision. We note it as one of the _kinds_ of proof of vision

that most fail us in that comparative desert of the inselective where

our imagination has itself to hunt out or call down (often among strange

witnessed flounderings or sand-storms) such analogies as may mercifully

“put” the thing. Mrs. Wharton not only owes to her cultivated art of

putting it the distinction enjoyed when some ideal of expression has the

_whole_ of the case, the case once made its concern, in charge, but

might further act for us, were we to follow up her exhibition, as

lighting not a little that question of “tone,” the author’s own

intrinsic, as to which we have just seen Mr. Conrad’s late production

rather tend to darken counsel. “The Custom of the Country” is an eminent

instance of the sort of tonic value most opposed to that baffled

relation between the subject-matter and its emergence which we find

constituted by the circumvalations of “Chance.” Mrs. Wharton’s reaction

in presence of the aspects of life hitherto, it would seem, mainly

exposed to her is for the most part the ironic—to which we gather that

these particular aspects have so much ministered that, were we to pursue

the quest, we might recognise in them precisely the saturation as to

which we a moment ago reserved our judgment. “The Custom of the Country”

is at any rate consistently, almost scientifically satiric, as indeed

the satiric light was doubtless the only one in which the elements

engaged could at all be focussed together. But this happens directly to

the profit of something that, as we read, becomes more and more one with

the principle of authority at work; the light that gathers is a dry

light, of great intensity, and the effect, if not rather the very

essence, of its dryness is a particular fine asperity. The usual

“creative” conditions and associations, as we have elsewhere languished

among them, are thanks to this ever so sensibly altered; the general

authoritative relation attested becomes clear—we move in an air purged

at a stroke of the old sentimental and romantic values, the perversions

with the maximum of waste of perversions, and we shall not here attempt

to state what this makes for in the way of esthetic refreshment and

relief; the waste having kept us so dangling on the dark esthetic abyss.

A shade of asperity may be in such fashion a security against waste, and

in the dearth of displayed securities we should welcome it on that

ground alone. It helps at any rate to constitute for the talent manifest

in “The Custom” a rare identity, so far should we have to go to seek

another instance of the dry, or call it perhaps even the hard,

intellectual touch in the soft, or call it perhaps even the humid,

temperamental air; in other words of the masculine conclusion tending so

to crown the feminine observation.

If we mentioned Mr. Compton Mackenzie at the beginning of these

reflections only to leave him waiting for some further appreciation,

this is exactly because his case, to the most interesting effect, is no

simple one, like two or three of our others, but on the contrary

mystifying enough almost to stand by itself. What would be this striking

young writer’s state of acquaintance and possession, and should we find

it, on our recognition of it, to be all he is content to pitch forth,

without discriminations or determinants, without motives or lights? Do

“Carnival” and “Sinister Street” proceed from the theory of the slice or

from the conception of the extract, “the extract flasked and fine,” the

chemical process superseding the mechanical? Mr. Compton Mackenzie’s

literary aspect, though decidedly that of youth, or that of experience,

a great deal of young experience, in its freshness, offers the

attraction of a complexity defiant of the prompt conclusion, really

charms us by giving us something to wonder about. We literally find it

not easy to say if there may not lurk in “Carnival,” for example, a

selective sense more apprehensible, to a push of inquiry, than its

overflooded surface, a real invitation to wade and upon which everything

within the author’s ken appears poured out, would at first lead us to

suspect. The question comes up in like fashion as to the distinctly more

developed successor of that work, before which we in fact find questions

multiply to a positive quickening of critical pleasure. We ask ourselves

what “Sinister Street” may mean as a whole in spite of our sense of

being brushed from the first by a hundred subordinate purposes, the

succession and alternation of which seem to make after a fashion a plan,

and which, though full of occasional design, yet fail to gather

themselves for application or to converge to an idea. Any idea will

serve, ever, that has held up its candle to composition—and it is

perhaps because composition proposes itself under Mr. Compton

Mackenzie’s energy on a scale well-nigh of the most prodigious that we

must wait to see whither it tends. The question of what he may here mean

“on the whole,” as we just said, is doubtless admonished to stand back

till we be possessed of the whole. This interesting volume is but a

first, committed up to its eyes to continuity and with an announced

sequel to follow. The recital exhibits at the point we have reached the

intimate experience of a boy at school and in his holidays, the

amplification of which is to come with his terms and their breaks at a

university; and the record will probably form a more squared and

extended picture of life equally conditioned by the extremity of youth

than we shall know where else to look for. Youth clearly has been Mr.

Mackenzie’s saturation, as it has been Mr. Hugh Walpole’s, but we see

this not as a subject (youth in itself is no specific subject, any more

than age is,) but as matter for a subject and as requiring a motive to

redeem it from the merely passive state of the slice. We are sure

throughout both “Sinister Street” and “Carnival” of breathing the air of

the extract, as we contentiously call it, only in certain of the rounded

episodes strung on the loose cord as so many vivid beads, each of its

chosen hue, and the series of which, even with differences of price

between them, we take for a lively gage of performance to come. These

episodes would be easy to cite; they are handsomely numerous and each

strikes us as giving in its turn great salience to its motive; besides

which each is in its turn “done” with an eminent sense and a remarkably

straight hand for doing. They may well be cited together as both

signally and finely symptomatic, for the literary gesture and the

_bravura_ breadth with which such frequent medallions as the adventure

on the boy’s part of the Catholic church at Bournemouth, as his

experiment of the Benedictine house in Wiltshire, as his period of

acquaintance with the esthetic _cénacle_ in London, as his relation with

his chosen school friend under the intensity of boyish choosing, are

ornamentally hung up, differ not so much in degree as in kind from any

play of presentation that we mostly see elsewhere offered us. To which

we might add other like matters that we lack space to enumerate, the

scene, the aspect, the figure in motion tending always, under touches

thick and strong, to emerge and flush, sound and strike, catch us in its

truth. We have read “tales of school life” in which the boys more or

less swarmed and sounded, but from which the masters have practically

been quite absent, to the great weakening of any picture of the boyish

consciousness, on which the magisterial fact is so heavily projected. If

that is less true for some boys than for others, the “point” of Michael

Fane is that for him it is truest. The types of masters have in

“Sinister Street” both number and salience, rendered though they be

mostly as grotesques—which effect we take as characterising the

particular turn of mind of the young observer and discoverer

commemorated.

That he _is_ a discoverer is of the essence of his interest, a

successful and resourceful young discoverer, even as the poor

ballet-girl in “Carnival” is a tragically baffled and helpless one; so

that what each of the works proposes to itself is a recital of the

things discovered. Those thus brought to our view in the boy’s case are

of much more interest, to our sense, than like matters in the other

connection, thanks to his remarkable and living capacity; the heroine of

“Carnival” is frankly too minute a vessel of experience for treatment on

the scale on which the author has honoured her—she is done assuredly,

but under multiplications of touch that become too much, in the narrow

field, monotonies; and she leaves us asking almost as much what she

exhibitionally means, what application resides in the accumulation of

facts concerning her, as if she too were after all but a slice, or at

the most but a slice _of_ a slice, and her history but one of the

aspects, on her author’s part, of the condition of repleteness against

the postulate of the entire adequacy of which we protest. So far as this

record does affect us as an achieved “extract,” to reiterate our term,

that result abides in its not losing its centre, which is its fidelity

to the one question of her dolefully embarrassed little measure of life.

We know to that extent with some intensity what her producer would be

at, yet an element of the arbitrary hangs for us about the particular

illustration—illustrations leaving us ever but half appreciative till

we catch that one bright light in which they give out all they contain.

This light is of course always for the author to set somewhere. Is it

set then so much as it should be in “Sinister Street,” and is our

impression of the promise of this recital one with a dawning divination

of the illustrative card that Mr. Mackenzie may still have up his sleeve

and that our after sense shall recognise as the last thing left on the

table? By no means, we can as yet easily say, for if a boy’s experience

has ever been given us for its face value simply, for what it is worth

in mere recovered intensity, it is so given us here. Of all the

saturations it can in fact scarce have helped being the most sufficient

in itself, for it is exactly, where it is best, from beginning to end

the remembered and reported thing, that thing alone, that thing existent

in the field of memory, though gaining value too from the applied

intelligence, or in other words from the lively talent, of the

memoriser. The memoriser helps, he contributes, he completes, and what

we have admired in him is that in the case of each of the pearls fished

up by his dive—though indeed these fruits of the rummage are not all

pearls—his mind has had a further iridescence to confer. It is the

fineness of the iridescence that on such an occasion matters, and this

appeal to our interest is again and again on Mr. Compton Mackenzie’s

page of the happiest and the brightest. It is never more so than when we

catch him, as we repeatedly do, in the act of positively caring for his

expression as expression, positively providing for his phrase as a

fondly foreseeing parent for a child, positively loving it in the light

of what it may do for him—meeting revelations, that is, in what it may

do, and appearing to recognise that the value of the offered thing, its

whole relation to us, is created by the breath of language, that on such

terms exclusively, for appropriation and enjoyment, we know it, and that

any claimed independence of “form” on its part is the most abject of

fallacies. Do these things mean that, moved by life, this interesting

young novelist is even now uncontrollably on the way to style? We might

cite had we space several symptoms, the very vividest, of that

possibility; though such an appearance in the field of our general

survey has against it presumptions enough to bring us surely back to our

original contention—the scant degree in which that field has ever had

to reckon with criticism.

DUMAS THE YOUNGER

1895

One of the things that most bring home his time of life to a man of

fifty is the increase of the rate at which he loses his friends. Some

one dies every week, some one dies every day, and if the rate be high

among his coevals it is higher still in the generation that, on awaking

to spectatorship, he found in possession of the stage. He begins to feel

his own world, the world of his most vivid impressions, gradually become

historical. He is present, and closely present, at the process by which

legend grows up. He sees the friends in question pictured as only death

can picture them—a master superior to the Rembrandts and Titians. They

have been of many sorts and many degrees, they have been private and

public, but they have had in common that they were the furniture of this

first fresh world, the world in which associations are formed. That one

by one they go is what makes the main difference in it. The landscape of

life, in foreground and distance, becomes, as the painters say, another

composition, another subject; and quite as much as the objects directly

under our eyes we miss the features that have educated for us our sense

of proportion.

Among such features for the author of these lines the younger Dumas, who

has just passed away, was in the public order long one of the most

conspicuous. Suffused as he is already with the quick historic haze,

fixed, for whatever term, in his ultimate value, he appeals to me, I

must begin by declaring, as a party to one of these associations that

have the savour of the prime. I knew him only in his work, but he is the

object of an old-time sentiment for the beginning of which I have to go

back absurdly far. He arrived early—he was so loudly introduced by his

name. I am tempted to say that I knew him when he was young, but what I

suppose I mean is that I knew him when I myself was. I knew him indeed

when we both were, for I recall that in Paris, in distant days and

undeveloped conditions, I was aware with perhaps undue and uncanny

precocity of his first successes. There emerges in my memory from the

night of time the image of a small boy walking in the Palais Royal with

innocent American girls who were his cousins and wistfully hearing them

relate how many times (they lived in Paris) they had seen Madame Doche

in “La Dame aux Camélias” and what floods of tears she had made them

weep. It was the first time I had heard of pockethandkerchiefs as a

provision for the play. I had no remotest idea of the social position of

the lady of the expensive flowers, and the artless objects of my envy

had, in spite of their repeated privilege, even less of one; but her

title had a strange beauty and her story a strange meaning—things that

ever after were to accompany the name of the author with a faint yet

rich echo. The younger Dumas, after all, was then not only relatively

but absolutely young; the American infants, privileged and unprivileged,

were only somewhat younger; the former going with their _bonne_, who

must have enjoyed the adventure, to the “upper boxes” of the old

Vaudeville of the Place de la Bourse, where later on I remember thinking

Madame Fargueil divine. He was quite as fortunate moreover in his own

designation as in that of his heroine; for it emphasised that bloom of

youth (I don’t say bloom of innocence—a very different matter) which

was the signal-note of the work destined, in the world at large, to

bring him nine-tenths of his celebrity.

Written at twenty-five “La Dame aux Camélias” remains in its combination

of freshness and form, of the feeling of the springtime of life and the

sense of the conditions of the theatre, a singular, an astonishing

production. The author has had no time to part with his illusions, but

has had full opportunity to master the most difficult of the arts.

Consecrated as he was to this mastery he never afterwards showed greater

adroitness than he had then done in keeping his knowledge and his

_naïveté_ from spoiling each other. The play has been blown about the

world at a fearful rate, but it has never lost its happy juvenility, a

charm that nothing can vulgarise. It is all champagne and tears—fresh

perversity, fresh credulity, fresh passion, fresh pain. We have each

seen it both well done and ill done, and perhaps more particularly the

latter—in strange places, in barbarous tongues, with Marguerite Gautier

fat and Armand Duval old. I remember ages ago in Boston a version in

which this young lady and this young gentleman were represented as

“engaged”: that indeed for all I know may still be the form in which the

piece most enjoys favour with the Anglo-Saxon public. Nothing makes any

difference—it carries with it an April air: some tender young man and

some coughing young woman have only to speak the lines to give it a

great place among the love-stories of the world. I recollect coming out

of the Gymnase one night when Madame Pierson had been the

Marguerite—this was very long since—and giving myself up on the

boulevard to a fine critical sense of what in such a composition was

flimsy and what was false. Somehow, none the less, my fine critical

sense never prevented my embracing the next opportunity to expose it to

the same irritation; for I have been, I am happy to think to-day, a

playgoer who, whatever else he may have had on his conscience, has never

had the neglect of any chance to see this dramatist acted. Least of all,

within a much shorter period, has it undermined one’s kindness to have

had occasion to admire in connection with the piece such an artist for

instance as Eleonora Duse. We have seen Madame Duse this year or two in

her tattered translation, with few advantages, with meagre accessories

and with one side of the character of the heroine scarcely touched at

all—so little indeed that the Italian version joins hands with the

American and the relation of Marguerite and Armand seems to present

itself as a question of the consecrated even if not approved “union.”

For this interesting actress, however, the most beautiful thing is

always the great thing, and her performance—if seen on a fortunate

evening—lives in the mind as a fine vindication of the play. I am not

sure indeed that it is the very performance Dumas intended; but he lived

long enough to have forgotten perhaps what that performance was. He

might on some sides, I think, have accepted Madame Duse’s as a reminder.

If I have stopped to be myself so much reminded, it is because after and

outside of “La Dame aux Camélias” Dumas really never figured among us

all again—a circumstance full of illustration of one of the most

striking of our peculiarities, the capacity for granting a prodigious

ear to some one manifestation of an author’s talent and caring nothing

whatever for the others. It is solely the manifestation and never the

talent that interests us, and nothing is stranger than the fact that no

critic has ever explained on our behalf the system by which we hurl

ourselves on a writer to-day and stare at him to-morrow as if we had

never heard of him. It gives us the air of perpetually awaking from

mistakes, but it renders obscure all our canons of judgment. A great

force makes a great success, but a great force is furthermore no less a

great force on Friday than on Monday. Was the reader a sorry dupe on the

first day, or is the writer a wanton sacrifice on the second? That the

public is intelligent on both occasions is a claim it can scarcely make:

it can only choose between having its acuteness impugned or its manners

condemned. At any rate if we have in England and the United States only

the two alternatives of the roar of the market and the silence of the

tomb the situation is apt to be different in France, where the quality

that goes into a man’s work and gives it an identity is the source of

the attention excited. It happens that the interest in the play of the

genius is greater there than the “boom” of the particular hit, the

concern primarily for the author rather than the subject, instead of, as

among ourselves, primarily for the subject rather than the author. Is

this because the French have been acute enough to reflect that authors

comprehend subjects, but that subjects can unfortunately not be said to

comprehend authors? Literature would be a merry game if the business

were arranged in the latter fashion. However such a question may be

answered, Dumas was in his own country, to the end, the force that, save

in connection with his first play, he failed to become elsewhere; and if

he was there much the most original worker in his field one of the

incidental signs of his originality was that, despite our inveterate

practice, in theatrical matters, of helping ourselves from our

neighbour’s plate, he was inveterately not a convenience to us. We

picked our morsels from the plates of smaller people—we never found on

that of the author of “Le Fils Naturel” any we could swallow. He was not

to our poor purpose, and I cannot help thinking that this helps a little

to give his artistic measure. It would be a bad note for him now if we

had found him amenable to that graceless game of which we show signs

to-day of having grown ashamed, but which flourished for years in two

imperturbable communities as the art of theatrical adaptation. A Dumas

adaptable is a Dumas inconceivable; and in point of fact he was touched

by the purveyors of the English-speaking stage only to prove fatal to

them. If the history of so mean a traffic as the one here glanced at

were worth writing it would throw light on some odd conceptions of the

delicacy in the abused name of which it was carried on. It is all to the

honour of our author’s seriousness that he was, in such conditions, so

unmanageable; though one must of course hasten to add that this

seriousness was not the only reason of it. There were several others,

not undiscoverable, and the effect of the whole combination was, in view

of the brilliant fortune of his productions at home and the eager

foraging of English and American speculators, to place him on a footing

all his own. He was of active interest among us only to individual

observers—simply as one of the most devoted of whom I trace these few

pages of commemoration.

It takes some analysis, yet is not impossible, to explain why among the

men of his time to whom the creative gift had been granted his image,

for sundry such admirers, always presented him as somehow the happiest

consciousness. They were perhaps not always aware of it, but now that he

is gone they have a revelation of the place he occupied in the envious

mind. This envy flowed doubtless, to begin with, from the sense of his

extraordinarily firm grasp of his hard refractory art; the grasp that

had put him into possession of it without fumblings or gropings made him

canter away on the back of it the moment he had touched the stirrup. He

had the air through all his career of a man riding a dangerous horse

without ever being thrown. Every one else had a fall—he alone never

really quitted the saddle, never produced a play that was not to stay to

be revived and in the case of his comparative failures enjoy some sort

of revenge, even to that of travelling in the repertory of great

actresses round the globe. Such travels, moreover, much as they may

please his shade, are far from having been the only felicities of his

long career. The others strike me as so numerous that I scarcely indeed

know where to begin to reckon them. Greatly even if oddly auspicious for

instance was just his stark son-ship to his prodigious father, his

having been launched with that momentum into the particular world in

which he was to live. It was a privilege to make up for the legal

irregularity attaching to his birth; we think of it really almost to

wonder that it didn’t lift him on a still higher wave. His limitations,

which one encounters with a sort of violence, were not to be overlooked;

it expresses them in some degree to say that he was bricked up in his

hard Parisianism, but it is also incontestable that some of them were

much concerned in producing his firm and easy equilibrium. We

understand, however, the trap they set for him when we reflect that a

certain omniscience, a great breadth of horizon, may well have seemed to

him to be transmitted, in his blood, from such a boundless fountain of

life. What mattered to him the fact of a reach of reference that stopped

at the _banlieue_, when experience had sat at his cradle in the shape

not at all of a fairy godmother but of an immediate progenitor who was

at once fabulous and familiar? He had been encompassed by all history in

being held in such arms—it was an entrance into possession of more

matters than he could even guess what to do with. The profit was all the

greater as the son had the luxury of differing actively from the father,

as well as that of actively admiring and, in a splendid sense, on all

the becoming sides, those of stature, strength and health, vividly

reproducing him. He had in relation to his special gift, his mastery of

the dramatic form, a faculty of imagination as contracted as that of the

author of “Monte Cristo” was boundless, but his moral sense on the other

hand, as distinguished from that of his parent, was of the liveliest,

was indeed of the most special and curious kind. The moral sense of the

parent was to be found only in his good humour and his good health—the

moral sense of a musketeer in love. This lack of adventurous vision, of

the long flight and the joy of motion, was in the younger genius quite

one of the conditions of his strength and luck, of his fine assurance,

his sharp edge, his high emphasis, his state untroubled above all by

things not within his too irregularly conditioned ken. The things close

about him were the things he saw—there were alternatives, differences,

opposites, of which he lacked so much as the suspicion. Nothing

contributes more to the prompt fortune of an artist than some such

positive and exclusive temper, the courage of his convictions, as we

usually call it, the power to neglect something thoroughly, to abound

aggressively in his own sense and express without reserve his own

saturation. The saturation of the author of “Le Demi-Monde” was never

far to seek. He was as native to Paris as a nectarine to a south wall.

He would have fared ill if he had not had a great gift and Paris had not

been a great city.

It was another element of the happy mixture that he came into the world

at the moment in all our time that was for a man of letters the most

amusing and beguiling—the moment exactly when he could see the end of

one era and the beginning of another and join hands luxuriously with

each. This was an advantage to which it would have taken a genius more

elastic to do full justice, but which must have made him feel himself

both greatly related and inspiringly free. He sprang straight from the

lap of full-grown romanticism; he was a boy, a privileged and initiated

youth, when his father, when Victor Hugo, when Lamartine and Musset and

Scribe and Michelet and Balzac and George Sand were at the high tide of

production. He saw them all, knew them all, lived with them and made of

them his profit, tasting just enough of the old concoction to understand

the proportions in which the new should be mixed. He had above all in

his father, for the purpose that was in him, a magnificent

springboard—a background to throw into relief, as a ruddy sunset seems

to make a young tree doubly bristle, a profile of another type. If it

was not indispensable it was at any rate quite poetic justice that the

successor to the name should be, in his conditions, the great casuist of

the theatre. He had seen the end of an age of imagination, he had seen

all that could be done and shown in the way of mere illustration of the

passions. That the passions are always with us is a fact he had not the

smallest pretension to shut his eyes to—they were to constitute the

almost exclusive subject of his study. But he was to study them not for

the pleasure, the picture, the poetry they offer; he was to study them

in the interest of something quite outside of them, about which the

author of “Antony” and “Kean,” about which Victor Hugo and Musset,

Scribe and Balzac and even George Sand had had almost nothing to say. He

was to study them from the point of view of the idea of the right and

the wrong, of duty and conduct, and he was to this end to spend his

artistic life with them and give a new turn to the theatre. He was in

short to become, on the basis of a determined observation of the manners

of his time and country, a professional moralist.

There can scarcely be a better illustration of differences of national

habit and attitude than the fact that while among his own people this is

the character, as an operative force, borne by the author of “Le

Demi-Monde” and “Les Idées de Madame Aubray,” so among a couple of

others, in the proportion in which his reputation there has emerged from

the vague, his most definite identity is that of a mere painter of

indecent people and indecent doings. There are, as I have hinted,

several reasons for the circumstance already noted, the failure of the

attempt to domesticate him on the English-speaking stage; but one states

the case fairly, I think, in saying that what accounts for half of it is

our passion, in the presence of a work of art, for confounding the

object, as the philosophers have it, with the subject, for losing sight

of the idea in the vehicle, of the intention in the fable. Dumas is a

dramatist as to whom nine playgoers out of ten would precipitately

exclaim: “Ah, but you know, isn’t he dreadfully immoral?” Such are the

lions in the path of reputation, such the fate, in an alien air, of a

master whose main reproach in his native clime is the importunity and

the rigour of his lesson. The real difference, I take it, is that

whereas we like to be good the French like to be better. We like to be

moral, they like to moralise. This helps us to understand the number of

our innocent writers—writers innocent even of reflection, a practice of

course essentially indelicate, inasmuch as it speedily brings us face to

face with scandal and even with evil. It accounts doubtless also for the

number of writers on the further side of the Channel who have made the

journey once for all and to whom, in the dangerous quarter they have

reached, it appears of the very nature of scandal and evil to be

inquired about. The whole undertaking of such a writer as Dumas is,

according to his light, to carry a particular, an esthetic form of

investigation as far as it will stretch—to study, and study thoroughly,

the bad cases. These bad cases were precisely what our managers and

adapters, our spectators and critics would have nothing to do with. It

defines indeed the separation that they should have been, in the light

in which he presented them, precisely what made them for his own public

exceptionally edifying. One of his great contentions is, for instance,

that seduced girls should under all circumstances be married—by

somebody or other, failing the seducer. This is a contention that, as we

feel, barely concerns us, shut up as we are in the antecedent conviction

that they should under no circumstances be seduced. He meets all the

cases that, as we see him, we feel to have been spread out before him;

meets them successively, systematically, at once with a great

earnestness and a great wit. He is exuberantly sincere: his good faith

sometimes obscures his humour, but nothing obscures his good faith. So

he gives us in their order the unworthy brides who must be denounced,

the prenuptial children who must be adopted, the natural sons who must

be avenged, the wavering ladies who must be saved, the credulous fiancés

who must be enlightened, the profligate wives who must be shot, the

merely blemished ones who must be forgiven, the too vindictive ones who

must be humoured, the venal young men who must be exposed, the

unfaithful husbands who must be frightened, the frivolous fathers who

must be pulled up and the earnest sons who must pull them. To enjoy his

manner of dealing with such material we must grant him in every

connection his full premise: that of the importunity of the phenomenon,

the ubiquity of the general plight, the plight in which people are left

by an insufficient control of their passions. We must grant him in fact

for his didactic and dramatic purpose a great many things. These things,

taken together and added to some others, constitute the luxurious terms

on which I have spoken of him as appearing to the alien admirer to have

practised his complicated art.

When we speak of the passions in general we really mean, for the most

part, the first of the number, the most imperious in its action and the

most interesting in its consequences, the passion that unites and

divides the sexes. It is the passion, at any rate, to which Dumas as

dramatist and pamphleteer mainly devoted himself: his plays, his

prefaces, his manifestos, his few tales roll exclusively on the special

relation of the man to the woman and the woman to the man, and on the

dangers of various sorts, even that of ridicule, with which this

relation surrounds each party. This element of danger is what I have

called the general plight, for when our author considers the sexes as

united and divided it is with the predominance of the division that he

is principally struck. It is not an unfair account of him to say that

life presented itself to him almost wholly as a fierce battle between

the woman and the man. He sides now with one and now with the other; the

former combatant, in her own country, however, was far from pronouncing

him sympathetic. His subject at all events is what we of English race

call the sexes and what they in France call the sex. To talk of love is

to talk, as we have it, of men and women; to talk of love is, as the

French have it, to _parler femmes_. From every play of our author’s we

receive the impression that to _parler femmes_ is its essential and

innermost purpose. It is not assuredly singular that a novelist, a

dramatist _should_ talk of love, or even should talk of nothing else:

what, in addition to his adroitness and his penetration, makes the

position special for Dumas is that he talks of it—and in the form of

address most associated with pure diversion—altogether from the anxious

point of view of the legislator and the citizen.

“Diane de Lys,” which immediately followed “La Dame aux Camélias,” is,

so far as I can recall it, a picture pure and simple, a pretty story, as

we say, sufficiently romantic and rather long-winded; but with “Le

Demi-Monde” began his rich argumentative series, concluding only the

other day with “Denise” and “Francillon,” the series in which every

theme is a proposition to be established and every proposition a form of

duty to be faced. The only variation that I can recollect in the list is

the disinterested portraiture of “Le Père Prodigue,” with its remarkable

presentation, in the figure of Albertine de la Borde, of vice

domesticated and thrifty, keeping early hours and books in double-entry,

and its remarkable illustration, I may further add, of all that was the

reverse of infallible in the author’s power to distinguish between

amiable infirmities and ugly ones. The idea on which “Le Père Prodigue”

rests belongs more distinctively to the world of comedy than almost any

other situation exhibited in the series; but what are we to say of the

selection, for comic effect, of a fable of which the principal feature

is a son’s not unfounded suspicion of the attitude of his own father to

his own wife? The father is the image of a nature profusely frivolous,

but we scent something more frivolous still in the way his frivolity is

disposed of. At the time the play was produced the spectator thought

himself warranted in recognising in this picture the personal character

(certainly not the personal genius) of the elder Dumas. If the spectator

_was_ so warranted, that only helps, I think, to make “Le Père Prodigue”

a stumbling-block for the critic—make it, I mean, an exhibition of the

author off his guard and a fact to be taken into account in an estimate

of his moral reach; a moral reach, for the rest, at all events, never

impugned by any obliquity in facing that conception of the duty imposed

which it is the main source of the writer’s interest in the figured

circumstances that they may be held to impose it, and which he was apt

to set forth more dogmatically, or at least more excitedly, in an

occasional and polemical pamphlet. These pamphlets, I may

parenthetically say, strike me as definitely compromising to his

character as artist. What shines in them most is the appetite for a

discussion, or rather the appetite for a conclusion, and the passion for

a simplified and vindictive justice. But I have never found it easy to

forgive a writer who, in possession of a form capable of all sorts of

splendid application, puts on this resource the slight of using

substitutes for it at will, as if it is good but for parts of the cause.

If it is good for anything it is good for the whole demonstration, and

if it is not good for the whole demonstration it is good for

nothing—nothing that _he_ is concerned with. If the picture of life

doesn’t cover the ground what in the world _can_ cover it? The fault can

only be the painter’s. Woe, in the esthetic line, to any example that

requires the escort of precept. It is like a guest arriving to dine

accompanied by constables. Our author’s prefaces and treatises show a

mistrust of disinterested art. He would have declared probably that his

art was not disinterested; to which our reply would be that it had then

no right to put us off the scent and prepare deceptions for us by coming

within an ace of being as good as if it were.

The merits of the play—that is of the picture, in these hands—are

sometimes singularly independent of the lesson conveyed. The merits of

the lesson conveyed are in other cases much more incontestable than

those of the picture, than the production of the air of life or the

happiest observance of the conditions of the drama. The conclusion, the

prescription, of “Denise” strikes me (to give an instance) as singularly

fine, but the subject belongs none the less to the hapless order of

those that fail to profit by the dramatic form though they have

sacrificed the highest advantages of the literary. A play—even the

best—pays so tremendously by what it essentially can not do for the

comparatively little it practically can, that a mistake in the

arithmetic of this positive side speedily produces a wide deviation. In

other words the spectator, and still more the reader, sees such a theme

as that of “Denise,” which may be described as the evolution of a view,

presented most in accordance with its nature when the attempt is not

made to present it in accordance with the nature of the theatre. It is

the nature of the theatre to give its victims, in exchange for

melancholy concessions, a vision of the immediate not to be enjoyed in

any other way; and consequently when the material offered it to deal

with is not the immediate, but the contingent, the derived, the

hypothetic, our melancholy concessions have been made in vain and the

inadequacy of the form comes out. In “Francillon,” partly perhaps

because the thing has nothing to do with anybody’s duty—least of all

with the heroine’s, which would be surely to keep off the streets—the

form happens to be remarkably adequate. The question is of the liberty

of the protagonist, the right of a wronged and indignant wife to work

out her husband’s chastisement in the same material as his sin, work it

out moreover on the spot, as a blow is repaid by a blow, exacting an eye

for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The play has all the kinds of life

that the theatre can achieve, because in the first place Dumas, though

acting as the wife’s advocate, has had the intelligence to give us a

solution which is only a scenic sequence and not a real, still less a

“philosophic,” one; and because in the second it deals with emotions and

impulses, which can be shown by the short measure, and not with

reflections and aspirations, which can be shown but by the long.

I am not pretending to take things in turn, but a critic with a generous

memory of the spell of Dumas should not, however pressed, neglect to

strain a point for “Le Demi-Monde.” I doubt my competence, however, to

consider that admirable work scientifically—I find myself too condemned

to consider it sentimentally. A critic is lost, as a critic, from the

moment his feeling about the worse parts of the matter he investigates

fails to differ materially from his feeling about the better. That is an

attitude even less enlightened than being unconscious of the blemishes;

all the same it must serve me for the present case. I am perfectly aware

that Olivier de Jalin is a man of no true delicacy; in spite of which I

take when I see them represented the liveliest interest in his

proceedings. I am perfectly aware that Madame d’Ange, with her _calme

infernal_, as George Sand calls it, is tainted and tortuous; in spite of

which my imagination quite warms to Madame d’Ange. Perhaps I should

indeed rather say that this interest and this sympathy have for their

object the great total of the play. It is the member of the series in

which Dumas first took up the scales in one hand and the sword in the

other, and it is a wonderful piece of work, wonderful in kind of

maturity, for a man of thirty. It has all the easy amplitude we call

authority. I won’t pretend to say what I think, here, of the author’s

justice, and if I happen to think ill of it I won’t pretend to care. I

see the thing through too many old memories, old echoes, old charms. In

the light of the admirable acting of ancient days, of the faded image of

the exquisite Desclée, of a dim recollection even of the prehistoric

Rose Chéri and of Mademoiselle Delaporte, it represents too many of the

reasons why I saw him always ideally triumphant. To practise an art

which for its full, its rich effect depended on interpretation, and to

be able to do one’s work with an eye on interpretation of that

quality—this had in common with supreme bliss the element at any rate

of being attainable only by the elect. It partook of a peace the world

cannot give. To be a moralist with the aid of Croizette, a philosopher

with the aid of Delaunay, an Academician, even, with the aid of

Bartet—such things suggested an almost equivocal union of virtue and

success. One had never seen virtue so agreeable to one’s self, nor

success so useful to others. One had never seen a play that was a model

so alive in spite of it. Models in the theatre were apt to be dead and

vivacities vulgar. One had never above all seen on the stage a picture

so conformable to deep pictorial art, a drama so liberally, gradually,

scientifically flushed with its action. Beautiful in “Le Demi-Monde” is

the way the subject quietly, steadily, strongly expands from within.

It was always the coercive force that his tone gave one the strongest

sense of life, and it remains the interesting thing that this element in

Dumas abounds in spite of not being fed from the source that we usually

assume to be the richest. It was not fed from the imagination, for his

imagination, by no means of the great plastic sort, has left us a

comparatively small heritage of typical figures. His characters are all

pointed by observation, they are clear notes in the concert, but not one

of them has known the little invisible push that, even when shyly and

awkwardly administered, makes the puppet, in spite of the string, walk

off by himself and quite “cut,” if the mood take him, that distant

relation his creator. They are always formal with this personage and

thoroughly conscious and proud of him; there is a charm of mystery and

poetry and oddity, a glory of unexpectedness, that they consistently

lack. Their life, and that, in each case, of the whole story (quite the

most wonderful part of this) is simply the author’s own life, his high

vitality, his very presence and temperament and voice. They do more for

him even than they do for the subject, and he himself is at last

accordingly the most vivid thing in every situation. He keeps it at

arm’s length because he has the instinct of the dramatist and the

conscience of the artist, but we feel all the while that his face is

bigger than his mask. Nothing about his work is more extraordinary than

this manner in which his personality pervades without spoiling it the

most detached and most impersonal of literary forms. The reasons for

such an impunity are first that his precautions, the result of a great

intelligence, were so effective, and second that his personality, the

result of a great affiliation, was so robust. It may be said that the

precautions were not effective if the man himself was what one most

enjoyed in the play. The only answer to that can be that I speak merely

for myself and for the fresher sensibility of the happy time. Other

admirers found certainly other things; what I found most was a tall

figure in muscular motion and the sense of a character that had made

admirably free with life. If it was mainly as an unabashed observer that

he had made free, and if the life supplied was much of it uncommonly

queer, that never diminished the action of his hard masculinity and his

fine intellectual brutality. There was an easy competence in it all, and

a masterful experience, and a kind of vicarious courage. In particular

there was a real genius for putting all persons—especially all bad

ones—very much in their place. Then it was all, for another bribe, so

copious and so close, so sustained and so quiet, with such fascinating

unities and complex simplicities and natural solutions. It was the

breath of the world and the development of an art.

All the good, however, that I recollect thinking of Dumas only reminds

me how little I desired that my remarks in general should lead me into

vain discriminations. There are some indeed that are not vain—at least

they help us to understand. He has a noble strain of force, a fulness of

blood that has permitted him to be tapped without shrinking. We must

speak of him in the present tense, as we always speak of the masters.

The theatre of his time, wherever it has been serious, has on the ground

of general method lived on him; wherever it has not done so it has not

lived at all. To pretend to be too shocked to profit by him was a way of

covering up its levity, but there was no escaping its fate. He was the

kind of artistic influence that is as inevitable as a medical specific:

you may decline it from black bottle to-day—you will take it from a

green bottle to-morrow. The energy that went forth blooming as Dumas has

come back grizzled as Ibsen, and would under the latter form, I am sure,

very freely acknowledge its debt. A critic whose words meet my eyes as I

write very justly says that: “Just as we have the novel before Balzac

and the novel after Balzac, the poetry that preceded Victor Hugo and the

poetry that followed him, so we have the drama before Alexandre Dumas

and the drama after him.” He has left his strong hand upon it; he

remodelled it as a vehicle, he refreshed it as an art. His passion for

it was obviously great, but there would be a high injustice to him in

not immediately adding that his interest in the material it dealt with,

in his subject, his question, his problem, was greater still than this

joy of the craftsman. That might well be, but there are celebrated cases

in which it has not been. The largest quality in Dumas was his immense

concern about life—his sense of human character and human fate as

commanding and controllable things. To do something on their behalf was

paramount for him, and _what_ to do in his own case clear: what else but

act upon the conscience as violently as he could, and with the

remarkable weapons that Providence had placed within his grasp and for

which he was to show his gratitude by a perfectly intrepid application?

These weapons were three: a hard rare wit, not lambent like a flame, but

stiff and straight like an arrow from a crossbow; a perception not less

rare of some of the realities of the particular human tendency about

which most falsities have clustered; and lastly that native instinct for

the conditions of dramatic presentation without which any attempt to

meet them is a helpless groping.

It must always be remembered of him that he was the observer of a

special order of things, the moralist of a particular relation as the

umpire of a yacht-race is the legislator of a particular sport. His

vision and his talent, as I have said, were all for the immediate, for

the manners and the practices he himself was drenched with: he had none

of the faculty that scents from afar, that wings away and dips beyond

the horizon. There are moments when a reader not of his own race feels

that he simplifies almost absurdly. There are too many things he didn’t

after all guess, too many cases he didn’t after all provide for. He has

a certain odour of bad company that almost imperils his distinction.

This was doubtless the deepest of the reasons why among ourselves he

flourished so scantly: we felt ourselves to be of a world in which the

elements were differently mixed, the proportions differently marked, so

that the tables of our law would have to be differently graven. His very

earnestness was only a hindrance—he might have had more to say to us if

he had consented to have less application. This produced the curious

dryness, the obtrusive economy of his drama—the hammered sharpness of

every outline, the metallic ring of every sound. His terrible knowledge

suggested a kind of uniform—gilt buttons, a feathered hat and a little

official book; it was almost like an irruption of the police. The most

general masters are the poets, with all the things they blessedly don’t

hold for so very certain and all the things they blessedly and

preferably invent. It is true that Dumas was splendid, in his way,

exactly because he was not vague: his concentration, all confidence and

doctrine and epigram, is the explanation of his extraordinary force.

That force is his abiding quality: one feels that he was magnificently a

man—that he stands up high and sees straight and speaks loud. It is his

great temperament, undiminished by what it lacks, that endears him to

his admirers. It made him still of the greater race and played well its

part in its time—so well that one thinks of him finally as perhaps not,

when all is said, of the very happiest group, the group of those for

whom in the general affection there is yet more to come. He had an

immense reverberation—he practised the art that makes up for being the

most difficult by being the most acclaimed. There is no postponed poetic

justice for those who have had everything. He was seconded in a manner

that must have made success a double delight. There are indications that

the dramatist of the future will be less and less elated. He may well

become so if he is to see himself less and less interpreted.

THE NOVEL IN “THE RING AND THE BOOK”[8]

1912

If on such an occasion as this—even with our natural impulse to shake

ourselves free of reserves—some sharp choice between the dozen

different aspects of one of the most copious of our poets becomes a

prime necessity, though remaining at the same time a great difficulty,

so in respect to the most voluminous of his works the admirer is

promptly held up, as we have come to call it; finds himself almost

baffled by alternatives. “The Ring and the Book” is so vast and so

essentially gothic a structure, spreading and soaring and branching at

such a rate, covering such ground, putting forth such pinnacles and

towers and brave excrescences, planting its transepts and chapels and

porticos, its clustered hugeness or inordinate muchness, that with any

first approach we but walk vaguely and slowly, rather bewilderedly,

round and round it, wondering at what point we had best attempt such

entrance as will save our steps and light our uncertainty, most enable

us to reach our personal chair, our indicated chapel or shrine, when

once within. For it is to be granted that to this inner view the

likeness of the literary monument to one of the great religious gives

way a little, sustains itself less than in the first, the affronting

mass; unless we simply figure ourselves, under the great roof, looking

about us through a splendid thickness and dimness of air, an

accumulation of spiritual presences or unprofaned mysteries, that makes

our impression heavily general—general only—and leaves us helpless for

reporting on particulars. The particulars for our purpose have thus

their identity much rather in certain features of the twenty

faces—either of one or of another of these—that the structure turns to

the outer day and that we can, as it were, sit down before and consider

at our comparative ease. I say comparative advisedly, for I cling to the

dear old tradition that Browning is “difficult”—which we were all

brought up on and which I think we should, especially on a rich

retrospective day like this, with the atmosphere of his great career

settling upon us as much as possible, feel it a shock to see break down

in too many places at once. Selecting my ground, by your kind

invitation, for sticking in and planting before you, to flourish so far

as it shall, my little sprig of bay, I have of course tried to measure

the quantity of ease with which our material may on that noted spot

allow itself to be treated. There are innumerable things in “The Ring

and the Book”—as the comprehensive image I began with makes it needless

I should say; and I have been above all appealed to by the possibility

that one of these, pursued for a while through the labyrinth, but at

last overtaken and then more or less confessing its identity, might have

yielded up its best essence as a grateful theme under some fine strong

economy of _prose_ treatment. So here you have me talking at once of

prose and seeking that connection to help out my case.

From far back, from my first reading of these volumes, which took place

at the time of their disclosure to the world, when I was a fairly young

person, the sense, almost the pang, of the novel they might have

constituted sprang sharply from them; so that I was to go on through the

years almost irreverently, all but quite profanely if you will, thinking

of the great loose and uncontrolled composition, the great heavy-hanging

cluster of related but unreconciled parts, as a fiction of the so-called

historic type, that is as a suggested study of the manners and

conditions from which our own have more or less traceably issued, just

tragically spoiled—or as a work of art, in other words, smothered in

the producing. To which I hasten to add my consciousness of the scant

degree in which such a fresh start from our author’s documents, such a

reprojection of them, wonderful documents as they can only have been,

may claim a critical basis. Conceive me as simply astride of my

different fancy, my other dream, of the matter—which bolted with me, as

I have said, at the first alarm.

Browning worked in this connection literally _upon_ documents; no page

of his long story is more vivid and splendid than that of his find of

the Book in the litter of a market-stall in Florence and the swoop of

practised perception with which he caught up in it a treasure. Here was

a subject stated to the last ounce of its weight, a living and breathing

record of facts pitiful and terrible, a mass of matter bristling with

revelations and yet at the same time wrapped over with layer upon layer

of contemporary appreciation; which appreciation, in its turn, was a

part of the wealth to be appreciated. What our great master saw was his

situation founded, seated there in positively packed and congested

significance, though by just so much as it was charged with meanings and

values were those things undeveloped and unexpressed. They looked up at

him, even in that first flush and from their market-stall, and said to

him, in their compressed compass, as with the muffled rumble of a

slow-coming earthquake, “Express us, express us, immortalise us as we’ll

immortalise _you_!”—so that the terms of the understanding were so far

cogent and clear. It was an understanding, on their side, with the poet;

and since that poet had produced “Men and Women,” “Dramatic Lyrics,”

“Dramatis Personæ” and sundry plays—we needn’t even foist on him

“Sordello”—he could but understand in his own way. That way would have

had to be quite some other, we fully see, had he been by habit and

profession not just the lyric, epic, dramatic commentator, the

extractor, to whatever essential potency and redundancy, of the moral of

the fable, but the very fabulist himself, the inventor and projector,

layer down of the postulate and digger of the foundation. I doubt if we

have a precedent for this energy of appropriation of a deposit of

_stated_ matter, a block of sense already in position and requiring not

to be shaped and squared and caused any further to solidify, but rather

to suffer disintegration, be pulled apart, melted down, hammered, by the

most characteristic of the poet’s processes, to powder—dust of gold and

silver, let us say. He was to apply to it his favourite system—that of

looking at his subject from the point of view of a curiosity almost

sublime in its freedom, yet almost homely in its method, and of

smuggling as many more points of view together into that one as the

fancy might take him to smuggle, on a scale on which even he had never

before applied it; this with a courage and a confidence that, in

presence of all the conditions, conditions many of them arduous and arid

and thankless even to defiance, we can only pronounce splendid, and of

which the issue was to be of a proportioned monstrous magnificence.

The one definite forecast for this product would have been that it

should figure for its producer as a poem—as if he had simply said, “I

embark at any rate for the Golden Isles”; everything else was of the

pure incalculable, the frank voyage of adventure. To what extent the

Golden Isles were in fact to be reached is a matter we needn’t pretend,

I think, absolutely to determine; let us feel for ourselves and as we

will about it—either see our adventurer, disembarked bag and baggage

and in possession, plant his flag on the highest eminence within his

circle of sea, or, on the other hand, but watch him approach and beat

back a little, tack and turn and stand off, always fairly in sight of

land, catching rare glimpses and meeting strange airs, but not quite

achieving the final _coup_ that annexes the group. He returns to us

under either view all scented and salted with his measure of contact,

and that for the moment is enough for us—more than enough for me at any

rate, engaged for your beguilement in this practical relation of

snuffing up what he brings. He brings, however one puts it, a detailed

report, which is but another word for a story; and it is with his story,

his offered, not his borrowed one—a very different matter—that I am

concerned. We are probably most of us so aware of its general content

that if I sum this up I may do so briefly. The Book of the Florentine

rubbish-heap is the full account (as full accounts were conceived in

those days) of the trial before the Roman courts, with inquiries and

judgments by the Tuscan authorities intermixed, of a certain Count Guido

Franceschini of Arezzo, decapitated, in company with four

confederates—these latter hanged—on February 22, 1698, for the murder

of his young wife Pompilia Comparini and her ostensible parents, Pietro

and Violante of that ilk.

The circumstances leading to this climax were primarily his marriage to

Pompilia, some years before, in Rome—she being then but in her

thirteenth year—under the impression, fostered in him by the elder

pair, that she was their own child and on this head heiress to moneys

settled on them from of old in the event of their having a child. They

had in fact had none, and had, in substitution, invented, so to speak,

Pompilia, the luckless base-born baby of a woman of lamentable character

easily induced to part with her for cash. They bring up the hapless

creature as their daughter, and as their daughter they marry her, in

Rome, to the middle-aged and impecunious Count Guido, a rapacious and

unscrupulous fortune-seeker by whose superior social position, as we

say, dreadfully _decaduto_ though he be, they are dazzled out of all

circumspection. The girl, innocent, ignorant, bewildered, scared and

purely passive, is taken home by her husband to Arezzo, where she is at

first attended by Pietro and Violante and where the direst

disappointment await the three. Count Guido proves the basest of men and

his home a place of terror and of torture, from which at the age of

seventeen, and shortly prior to her giving birth to an heir to the

house, such as it is, she is rescued by a pitying witness of her misery,

Canon Caponsacchi, a man of the world and adorning it, yet in holy

orders, as men of the world in Italy might then be, who clandestinely

helps her, at peril of both their lives, back to Rome, and of whom it is

attested that he has had no other relation with her but this of

distinguished and all-disinterested friend in need. The pretended

parents have at an early stage thrown up their benighted game, fleeing

from the rigour of their dupe’s domestic rule, disclosing to him

vindictively the part they have played and the consequent failure of any

profit to him through his wife, and leaving him in turn to wreak his

spite, which has become infernal, on the wretched Pompilia. He pursues

her to Rome, on her eventual flight, and overtakes her, with her

companion, just outside the gates; but having, by the aid of the local

powers, reachieved possession of her, he contents himself for the time

with procuring her sequestration in a convent, from which, however, she

is presently allowed to emerge in view of the near birth of her child.

She rejoins Pietro and Violante, devoted to her, oddly enough, through

all their folly and fatuity; and under their roof, in a lonely Roman

suburb, her child comes into the world. Her husband meanwhile, hearing

of her release, gives way afresh to the fury that had not at the climax

of his former pursuit taken full effect; he recruits a band of four of

his young tenants or farm-labourers and makes his way, armed, like his

companions, with knives, to the door behind which three of the parties

to all the wrong done him, as he holds, then lurk. He pronounces, after

knocking and waiting, the name of Caponsacchi; upon which, as the door

opens, Violante presents herself. He stabs her to death on the spot with

repeated blows—like her companions she is off her guard; and he throws

himself on each of these with equal murderous effect. Pietro, crying for

mercy, falls second beneath him; after which he attacks his wife, whom

he literally hacks to death. She survives, by a miracle, long enough, in

spite of all her wounds, to testify; which testimony, as may be

imagined, is not the least precious part of the case. Justice is on the

whole, though deprecated and delayed, what we call satisfactory; the

last word is for the Pope in person, Innocent XII. Pignatelli, at whose

deliberation, lone and supreme, on Browning’s page, we splendidly

assist; and Count Guido and his accomplices, bloodless as to the act

though these appear to have been, meet their discriminated doom.

That is the bundle of facts, accompanied with the bundle of proceedings,

legal, ecclesiastical, diplomatic and other, _on_ the facts, that our

author, of a summer’s day, made prize of; but our general temptation, as

I say—out of which springs this question of the other values of

character and effect, the other completeness of picture and drama, that

the confused whole might have had for us—is a distinctly different

thing. The difference consists, you see, to begin with, in the very

breath of our poet’s genius, already, and so inordinately, at play on

them from the first of our knowing them. And it consists in the second

place of such an extracted sense of the whole, which becomes, after the

most extraordinary fashion, bigger by the extraction, immeasurably

bigger than even the most cumulative weight of the mere crude evidence,

that our choice of how to take it all is in a manner determined for us:

we can only take it as tremendously interesting, interesting not only in

itself but with the great added interest, the dignity and authority and

beauty, of Browning’s general perception of it. We can’t not accept

this, and little enough on the whole do we want not to: it sees us, with

its tremendous push, that of its poetic, esthetic, historic, psychologic

shoulder (one scarce knows how to name it), so far on our way. Yet all

the while we are in presence not at all of an achieved form, but of a

mere preparation for one, though on the hugest scale; so that, you see,

we are no more than decently attentive with our question: “Which of them

all, of the various methods of casting the wondrously mixed metal, is

he, as he goes, preparing?” Well, as he keeps giving and giving, in

immeasurable plenty, it is in our selection from it all and our picking

it over that we seek, and to whatever various and unequal effect find,

our account. He works over his vast material, and we then work _him_

over, though not availing ourselves, to this end, of a grain he himself

doesn’t somehow give us; and there we are.

I admit that my faith in my particular contention would be a degree

firmer and fonder if there didn’t glimmer through our poet’s splendid

hocus-pocus just the hint of one of those flaws that sometimes deform

the fair face of a subject otherwise generally appealing or

promising—of such a subject in especial as may have been submitted to

us, possibly even with the pretension to impose it, in too complete a

shape. The idea but half hinted—when it is a very good one—is apt to

contain the germ of happier fruit than the freight of the whole branch,

waved at us or dropped into our lap, very often proves. This happens

when we take over, as the phrase is, established data, take them over

from existing records and under some involved obligation to take them as

they stand. That drawback rests heavily for instance on the so-called

historic fiction—so beautiful a case it is of a muddlement of

terms—and is just one of the eminent reasons why the embarrassed Muse

of that form, pulled up again and again, and the more often the fine

intelligence invokes her, by the need of a superior harmony which shall

be after all but a superior truth, catches up her flurried skirts and

makes her saving dash for some gap in the hedge of romance. Now the flaw

on this so intensely expressive face, that of the general _donnée_ of

the fate of Pompilia, is that amid the variety of forces at play about

her the unity of the situation isn’t, by one of those large straight

ideal gestures on the part of the Muse, handed to us at a stroke. The

question of the whereabouts of the unity of a group of data subject to

be wrought together into a thing of art, the question in other words of

the point at which the various implications of interest, no matter how

many, _most_ converge and interfuse, becomes always, by my sense of the

affair, quite the first to be answered; for according to the answer

shapes and fills itself the very vessel of that beauty—the beauty,

exactly, _of_ interest, of maximum interest, which is the ultimate

extract of any collocation of facts, any picture of life, and the finest

aspect of any artistic work. Call a novel a picture of life as much as

we will; call it, according to one of our recent fashions, a slice, or

even a chunk, even a “bloody” chunk, of life, a rough excision from that

substance as superficially cut and as summarily served as possible, it

still fails to escape this exposure to appreciation, or in other words

to criticism, that it has had to be selected, selected under some sense

for something; and the unity of the exhibition should meet us, does meet

us if the work be done, at the point at which that sense is most patent.

If the slice or the chunk, or whatever we call it, if _it_ isn’t “done,”

as we say—and as it so often declines to be—the work itself of course

isn’t likely to be; and there we may dismiss it.

The first thing we do is to cast about for some centre in our field;

seeing that, for such a purpose as ours, the subject might very nearly

go a-begging with none more definite than the author has provided for

it. I find that centre in the embracing consciousness of Caponsacchi,

which, coming to the rescue of our question of treatment, of our search

for a point of control, practically saves everything, and shows itself

moreover the only thing that _can_ save. The more we ask of any other

part of our picture that it shall exercise a comprehensive function, the

more we see that particular part inadequate; as inadequate even in the

extraordinarily magnified range of spirit and reach of intelligence of

the atrocious Franceschini as in the sublime passivity and plasticity of

the childish Pompilia, educated to the last point though she be indeed

by suffering, but otherwise so untaught that she can neither read nor

write. The magnified state is in this work still more than elsewhere the

note of the intelligence, of any and every faculty of thought, imputed

by our poet to his creatures; and it takes a great mind, one of the

greatest, we may at once say, to make these persons express and confess

themselves to such an effect of intellectual splendour. He resorts

primarily to _their_ sense, their sense of themselves and of everything

else they know, to exhibit them, and has for this purpose to keep them,

and to keep them persistently and inexhaustibly, under the fixed lens of

his prodigious vision. He this makes out in them boundless treasures of

truth—truth even when it happens to be, as in the case of Count Guido,

but a shining wealth of constitutional falsity. Of the extent to which

he may after this fashion unlimitedly draw upon them his exposure of

Count Guido, which goes on and on, though partly, I admit, by repeating

itself, is a wondrous example. It is not too much to say of

Pompilia—Pompilia pierced with twenty wounds, Pompilia on her

death-bed, Pompilia but seventeen years old and but a fortnight a

mother—that she _acquires_ an intellectual splendour just by the fact

of the vast covering charity of imagination with which her recording,

our commemorated, avenger, never so as in this case an avenger of the

wronged beautiful things in life, hangs over and breathes upon her. We

see her come out to him, and the extremely remarkable thing is that we

see it, on the whole, without doubting that it might just have been.

Nothing could thus be more interesting, however it may at moments and in

places puzzle us, than the impunity, on our poet’s part, of most of

these overstretchings of proportion, these violations of the immediate

appearance. Browning is deep down below the immediate with the first

step of his approach; he has vaulted over the gate, is already far

afield and never, so long as we watch him, has occasion to fall back. We

wonder, for, after all, the real is his quest, the very ideal of the

real, the real most finely mixed with life, which _is_ in the last

analysis the ideal; and we know, with our dimmer vision, no such reality

as a Franceschini fighting for his life, fighting for the vindication of

his baseness, embodying his squalor, with an audacity of wit, an

intensity of colour, a variety of speculation and illustration, that

represent well-nigh the maximum play of the human mind. It is in like

sort scarce too much to say of the exquisite Pompilia that on her part

intelligence and expression are disengaged to a point at which the

angels may well begin to envy her; and all again without our once

wincing so far as our consistently liking to see and hear and believe is

concerned. Caponsacchi regales us, of course, with the rarest fruit of a

great character, a great culture and a great case; but Caponsacchi is

acceptedly and naturally, needfully and illustratively, splendid. He

_is_ the soul of man at its finest—having passed through the smoky

fires of life and emerging clear and high. Greatest of all the spirits

exhibited, however, is that of the more than octogenarian Pope, at whose

brooding, pondering, solitary vigil, by the end of a hard grey winter

day in the great bleak waiting Vatican—“in the plain closet where he

does such work”—we assist as intimately as at every other step of the

case, and on whose grand meditation we heavily hang. But the Pope

strikes us at first—though indeed perhaps only at first—as too high

above the whole connection functionally and historically for us to place

him within it dramatically. Our novel faces provisionally the question

of dispensing with him, as it dispenses with the amazing, bristling, all

too indulgently presented Roman advocates on either side of the case,

who combine to put together the most formidable monument we possess to

Browning’s active curiosity and the liveliest proof of his almost

unlimited power to give on his readers’ nerves without giving on his

own.

What remains with us all this time, none the less, is the effect of

magnification, the exposure of each of these figures, in its degree, to

that iridescent wash of personality, of temper and faculty, that our

author ladles out to them, as the copious share of each, from his own

great reservoir of spiritual health, and which makes us, as I have

noted, seek the reason of a perpetual anomaly. Why, bristling so with

references to _him_ rather than with references to each other or to any

accompanying set of circumstances, do they still establish more truth

and beauty than they sacrifice, do they still, according to their

chance, help to make “The Ring and the Book” a great living thing, a

great objective mass? I brushed by the answer a moment ago, I think, in

speaking of the development in Pompilia of the resource of expression,

which brings us round, it seems to me, to the justification of

Browning’s method. To express his inner self—his outward was a

different affair!—and to express it utterly, even if no matter how, was

clearly, for his own measure and consciousness of that inner self, to

_be_ poetic; and the solution of all the deviations and disparities or,

speaking critically, monstrosities, in the mingled tissue of this work,

is the fact that whether or no by such convulsions of soul and sense

life got delivered for him, the garment of life (which for him was

poetry and poetry alone) got disposed in its due and adequate

multitudinous folds. We move with him but in images and references and

vast and far correspondences; we eat but of strange compounds and drink

but of rare distillations; and very soon, after a course of this, we

feel ourselves, however much or however little to our advantage we may

on occasion pronounce it, in the world of Expression at any cost. That,

essentially, _is_ the world of poetry—which in the cases known to our

experience where it seems to us to differ from Browning’s world does so

but through this latter’s having been, by the vigour and violence, the

bold familiarity, of his grasp and pull at it, moved several degrees

nearer us, so to speak, than any other of the same general sort with

which we are acquainted; so that, intellectually, we back away from it a

little, back down before it, again and again, as we try to get off from

a picture or a group or a view which is too much _upon_ us and thereby

out of focus. Browning is “upon” us, straighter upon us always, somehow,

than anyone else of his race; and we thus recoil, we push our chair

back, from the table he so tremendously spreads, just to see a little

better what is on it. This makes a relation with him that it is

difficult to express; as if he came up against us, each time, on the

same side of the street and not on the other side, across the way, where

we mostly see the poets elegantly walk, and where we greet them without

danger of concussion. It is on this same side, as I call it, on _our_

side, on the other hand, that I rather see our encounter with the

novelists taking place; we being, as it were, more mixed with them, or

they at least, by their desire and necessity, more mixed with us, and

our brush of them, in their minor frenzy, a comparatively muffled

encounter.

We have in the whole thing, at any rate, the element of action which is

at the same time constant picture, and the element of picture which is

at the same time constant action; and with a fusion, as the mass moves,

that is none the less effective, none the less thick and complete, from

our not owing it in the least to an artful economy. Another force pushes

its way through the waste and rules the scene, making wrong things right

and right things a hundred times more so—that breath of Browning’s own

particular matchless Italy which takes us full in the face and remains

from the first the felt rich coloured air in which we live. The quantity

of that atmosphere that he had to give out is like nothing else in

English poetry, any more than in English prose, that I recall; and since

I am taking these liberties with him, let me take one too, a little,

with the fruit of another genius shining at us here in association—with

that great placed and timed prose fiction which we owe to George Eliot

and in which _her_ projection of the stage and scenery is so different a

matter. Curious enough this difference where so many things make for

identity—the quantity of talent, the quantity of knowledge, the high

equality (or almost) of culture and curiosity, not to say of “spiritual

life.” Each writer drags along a far-sweeping train, though indeed

Browning’s spreads so considerably furthest; but his stirs up, to my

vision, a perfect cloud of gold-dust, while hers, in “Romola,” by

contrast, leaves the air about as clear, about as white, and withal

about as cold, as before she had benevolently entered it. This straight

saturation of our author’s, this prime assimilation of the elements for

which the name of Italy stands, is a single splendid case, however; I

can think of no second one that is not below it—if we take it as

supremely expressed in those of his lyrics and shorter dramatic

monologues that it has most helped to inspire. The Rome and Tuscany of

the early ’fifties had become for him so at once a medium, a bath of the

senses and perceptions, into which he could sink, in which he could

unlimitedly soak, that wherever he might be touched afterwards he gave

out some effect of that immersion. This places him to my mind quite

apart, makes the rest of our poetic record of a similar experience

comparatively pale and abstract. Shelley and Swinburne—to name only his

compeers—are, I know, a part of the record; but the author of “Men and

Women,” of “Pippa Passes,” of certain of the Dramatic Lyrics and other

scattered felicities, not only expresses and reflects the matter; he

fairly, he heatedly, if I may use such a term, exudes and perspires it.

Shelley, let us say in the connection, is a light and Swinburne, let us

say, a sound; Browning alone of them all is a temperature. We feel it,

we are in it at a plunge, with the very first pages of the thing before

us; to which, I confess, we surrender with a momentum drawn from fifty

of their predecessors, pages not less sovereign, elsewhere.

The old Florence of the late spring closes round us; the hand of Italy

is at once, with the recital of the old-world litter of Piazza San

Lorenzo, with that of the great glare and of the great shadow-masses,

heavy upon us, heavy with that strange weight, that mixed pressure,

which is somehow, to the imagination, at once a caress and a menace. Our

poet kicks up on the spot and at short notice what I have called his

cloud of gold-dust. I can but speak for myself at least—something that

I want to feel both as historic and esthetic truth, both as pictorial

and moral interest, something that will repay my fancy tenfold if I can

but feel it, hovers before me, and I say to myself that, whether or no a

great poem is to come off, I will be hanged if one of the vividest of

all stories and one of the sharpest of all impressions doesn’t. I beckon

these things on, I follow them up, I so desire and need them that I of

course, by my imaginative collaboration, contribute to them—from the

moment, that is, of my finding myself really in relation to the great

points. On the other hand, as certainly, it has taken the author of the

first volume, and of the two admirable chapters of the same—since I

can’t call them cantos—entitled respectively “Half-Rome” and “The Other

Half-Rome,” to put me in relation; where it is that he keeps me more and

more, letting the closeness of my state, it must be owned, occasionally

drop, letting the finer call on me even, for bad quarters-of-an-hour,

considerably languish, but starting up before me again in vivid

authority if I really presume to droop or stray. He takes his wilful way

with me, but I make it my own, picking over and over as I have said,

like some lingering talking pedlar’s client, his great unloosed pack;

and thus it is that by the time I am settled with Pompilia at Arezzo I

have lived into all the conditions. They press upon me close, those

wonderful dreadful beautiful particulars of the Italy of the eve of the

eighteenth century—Browning himself moving about, darting hither and

thither in them, at his mighty ease: beautiful, I say, because of the

quantity of romantic and esthetic tradition from a more romantic and

esthetic age still visibly, palpably, in solution there; and wonderful

and dreadful through something of a similar tissue of matchless and

ruthless consistencies and immoralities. I make to my hand, as this

infatuated reader, _my_ Italy of the eve of the eighteenth century—a

vast painted and gilded rococo shell roofing over a scenic, an amazingly

figured and furnished earth, but shutting out almost the whole of our

own dearly-bought, rudely-recovered spiritual sky. You see I have this

right, all the while, if I recognise my suggested material, which keeps

coming and coming in the measure of my need, and my duty to which _is_

to recognise it, and as handsomely and actively as possible. The great

thing is that I have such a group of figures moving across so

constituted a scene—figures so typical, so salient, so reeking with the

old-world character, so impressed all over with its manners and its

morals, and so predestined, we see, to this particular horrid little

drama. And let me not be charged with giving it away, the idea of the

latent prose fiction, by calling it little and horrid; let me not—for

with my contention I can’t possibly afford to—appear to agree with

those who speak of the Franceschini-Comparini case as a mere vulgar

criminal anecdote.