IV

George Borrow has always had a curious fascination for me: for this man,

half Cornish and half French, with his peculiar kind of genius--such as

one generally finds in mixed blood--is both creative and inventive,

normal and abnormal, perverse and unpassionate, obscure and grimly

humorous. I was very young when I read his masterpiece _Lavengro_ (1851)

in its original three volumes, from which I got my first taste for a

sort of gypsy element in literature. The reading of that book did many

things for me. It absorbed me from the first page with a curiously

personal appeal, as of some one akin to me: the appeal, I suppose, to

what was wild in my blood.

What Borrow really creates is a by no means undiscovered world: I mean

the world of the Gypsies; yet he is the first to discover their peculiar

characteristics, their savagery and uncivilization; he gives them life,

in their tents, on the road, along the hedges; he makes them speak, in

their pure and corrupted dialects, much as they always speak, but nearly

always with something of Borrow in them. They are imaginative: he gives

them part of his imagination. They are not subtle, nor is he; they are

not complex, he at times is complex; he paints their morality and

immorality almost as Hogarth might have done.

In regard to the sense of fear, you find it in Shakespeare, in Balzac,

everywhere; but never I think more intensely than in the chapters in

_Lavengro_ describing Borrow's paroxysm of fear in the dingle. There is

nothing of the kind, in any language, equal to those pages of Borrow;

they go deep down into some "obscure night of the soul;" they are

abnormal. It is "the screaming horror" that takes possession of him.

The evil one was upon me; the inscrutable horror which I had felt from

boyhood had once more taken possession of me. I uttered wild cries. I

sat down with my back against a thorn-bush; the thorns entered my flesh,

and when I felt them, I pressed harder against the bush: I thought the

pain of the flesh might in some degree counteract the mental agony;

presently I felt them no longer--the power of the mental horror was so

great that it was impossible, with that upon me, to feel my pain from

the thorns.

Borrow writes as if civilization did not exist, and he obtains, in his

indirect way, an extraordinary directness. Really the most artificial of

writers, he is always true to that "peculiar mind and system of nerves"

of which he was so well aware, and which drove him into all sorts of

cunning ways of telling the truth, and making it at once bewildering and

convincing.

I have often wondered why Robert Louis Stevenson was almost invariably

looked on as a man of genius. He had touches of it, certainly; and

therein lies part of the secret of his captivating the heart; why, quite

by himself, he ranks with writers like Thoreau and with Dumas (one for a

certain seductiveness of manner, the other for his extravagant passion

for miraculous adventures); and why he appeals to us, not only from his

curious charm as a literary vagrant--to some of us an irresistible

charm--and from the exhilaration of the blood which he causes in us, and

from the actual fever of his prose, and for his inhuman sense of life's

whimsical distresses, of its cruelties and maladies and confusions, but

from a certain gypsy and wayward grace, so like a woman's, that can

thrill to the blood often more instantly than in the presence of the

august perfection of classic beauty.

His style, as he admits, is never wholly original; a "sedulous ape," as

he once humorously named himself, that aped the styles of Baudelaire and

Hawthorne and Lamb and Hazlitt; and that never, except rarely and by

certain happy accidents in his rejection of words and using some of them

as if no one had ever used them before, attains the inevitable

perfection of Baudelaire's prose style, nor the quintessential and

exultant and tragic style of Lamb, which has, beyond any writer

preeminent for charm, salt and sting; nor Montaigne's malign trickery of

style, his roving imagination, his preoccupation with himself, who said

so splendidly: "I have no other end in writing but to discover myself,

who also shall peradventure be another thing to-morrow."

As in a tragic drama so in a tragic novel we must not forbid an artist

in fiction to set before us strange instances of inconsistency and

eccentricity in conduct as well as in action; but we require of him that

he should make us feel such aberrations to be as clearly inevitable as

they are certainly exceptional. Balzac has done that and Flaubert and

Goncourt and Maupassant and Conrad. All these, at their greatest, are

inevitable; only no novelist is ever consistently great. Reade's

Griffith Gaunt is not, as he ought to have been, inevitable; for what is

tragic and pathetic and eccentric in his character is flawed by the

writer's failure in showing what ought to have been the intolerable and

irresistible force of the temptation; his art is an act of envy,

therefore a base act, and has none of the grandeur of Othello's

jealousy, which makes one love him the more for that, more even because

he is unconscious of Iago's poisoned tongue. Leontes excites our

repulsion: he is a coward, selfish and deluded and ignoble.

At his finest I find in Charles Reade certain adventures almost worthy

of Dumas; only he never had that overflowing negro-like genius of the

French novelist; who can be tedious at times, and can write very badly

when he likes, for he never had much of a style. Yet, with all his

suspense and the suddenness of his vivid action and of the living

conversation of furiously living creatures, he does really carry us

along in an amazing way; equally in the tragic figure Edmund Dantès as

in those of d'Artagnan and Aramis and Porthos. Among Reade's many faults

is the inability to blot when he ought to have blotted, to abstain, as

he too often did not, from ostentation and self-praise, by the fact that

he can not always get far enough away from what to him was the

pernicious atmosphere of the stage.

_The Picture of Dorian Gray_ (1891) is partly made out of Wilde himself,

partly out of two other men, both of whom are alive. Not being creative

he was cruel enough to mix his somewhat poisonous color after the

fashion of an impressionistic painter, and so to give a treble

reflection of three different temperaments instead of giving one. In any

case, as Pater wrote: "Dorian himself, though a quite unsuccessful

experiment in Epicureanism, in life as a fine art, is (till his inward

spoiling takes visible effect suddenly, and in a moment, at the end of

his story) a beautiful creature."

His peculiar kind of beauty might be imaged by a strangely colored

Eastern vessel, and hidden within it, a few delicate young serpents. For

he has something of the coiled up life of the serpents, in his poisonous

sins; sins he communicates to others, ruining their youthful lives with

no deliberate malice, but simply because he can not help it. He has no

sense of shame, even in his most ignoble nights. Sin is a thing that

writes itself across a man's face; but secret vices can not be

concealed; one sees them in the mere ironical curl of sinister lips, or

in the enigmatical lifting of an eyelid. He has made the devil's

bargain, but not in the sense in which Faustus sells his soul to Satan;

yet he is always entangled in the painted sins, the more and more

hideous aspects, of his intolerably accusing portrait, taken, certainly,

in Wilde's usual manner, from _La Peau de Chagrin_ of Balzac; only, and

therein lies the immense difference, the man's life never shrinks, but

the very lines and colors of his painted image shrivel, until the thing

itself--the thing he has come to hate as one hates hell--has its

revenge.

A passion for caprice, a whimsical Irish temperament, a love of art for

art's sake--it is in such qualities as these that I find the origin of

the beautiful force of estheticism, the exquisite echoes of the poems,

the subtle decadence of _Dorian Gray_, and the paradoxical truths, the

perverted common sense of the _Intentions._ Certainly, as Pater

realized, Wilde, with his hatred of the bourgeois seriousness of dull

people, has always taken refuge from commonplace in irony. Life, to him,

even when he is most frivolous, ought not to be realism, but a following

after art: a provoking enough phrase for those who are lost to the sense

of suggestiveness. He is conscious of the charm of grateful echoes, and

is always original in his quotations.

In Wilde we see a great spectacular intellect, to which, at last, pity

and terror have come in their own person, and no longer as puppets in a

play. In its sight, human life has always been something created on the

stage; a comedy in which it is the wise man's part to sit aside and

laugh, but in which he may also disdainfully take part, as in a

carnival, under any mask. The unbiased, scornful intellect, to which

humanity has never been a burden, comes now to be unable to sit aside

and laugh, and it has worn and looked behind so many masks that there is

nothing left desirable in illusion. Having seen, as the artist sees,

further than morality, but with so partial an eyesight as to have

overlooked it on the way, it has come at length to discover morality, in

the only way left possible, for itself. And, like most of those who have

"thought themselves weary," have made the adventure of putting thought

into action, it has had to discover it sorrowfully, at its own

inevitable expense. And now, having so newly become acquainted with what

is pitiful, and what seems most unjust, in the arrangements of mortal

affairs, it has gone, not unnaturally, to an extreme, and taken on the

one hand, humanitarianism, on the other realism, at more than their just

valuation in matters of art. It is that old instinct of the intellect;

the necessity to carry things to their farthest point of development, to

be more logical than either art or life, two very wayward and illogical

things, in which conclusions do not always follow from premises.

Swinburne's _Love's Cross Currents_ appeared originally under what is

now its sub-title _A Year's Letters_, in a weekly periodical, long since

extinct, called _The Tattler_, from August 25th to December 29th, 1877.

It was written under the pseudonym of Mrs. Horace Manners, and was

preceded by a letter "To the Author," supposed to come from some unnamed

publisher or literary adviser, who returns her manuscript to the lady

with much faultfinding on the ground of morality. The letter ends:

I recommend you, therefore, to suppress, or even to destroy, this book,

for two reasons: It is a false picture of domestic life in England,

because it suggests as possible the chance that a married lady may

prefer some chance stranger to her husband, which is palpably and

demonstrably absurd. It is also, as far as I can see, deficient in

purpose and significance. Morality, I need not add, is the soul of art;

a picture, poem, or story must be judged by the lesson it conveys. If it

strengthens our hold upon fact, if it heightens our love of truth, if it

rekindles our ardour for the right, it is admissible as good; if not,

what shall we say of it?

The two final sentences of the first chapter, now omitted, are amusing

enough to seem characteristic: "For the worldling's sneer may silence

religion, but philanthropy is a tough fox and dies hard. The pietist may

subside on attack into actual sermonising, and thence into a dumb agony

of appeal against what he hears--the impotence of sincere disgust; but

infinite coarse chaff will not shut up the natural lecturer; he snuffs

sharply at all implied objection, and comes up to time again, gasping,

verbose and resolute." But is there not a certain needless loss in the

omission of two or three of the piquant passages in French? One is on

the woman of sixty who "_seule sait mettre du fard moral sans jurer

avec._" There is another passage in French which comes out of page 220;

it is not clear why, for it is sprightly enough, as this is also, which

drops out of page 175: "_Ce sang répandu, voyez-vous, mon enfant,

c'était la monnaie de sa vertu._" I said I should have preferred it

without the small change. "'_Mais, avec de la grosse monnaie on

n'achète jamais rien qui vaille,' she said placidly._" Then follows, as

we now have it: "_C'était décidément une femme forte._" Such, so

slight, and at times so uncalled for, are the changes in this

"disinterment" of "so early an attempt in the great art of fiction or

creation."

In defending the form of his story in letters, Swinburne invokes the

names of Richardson and Laclos and "the giant genius of Balzac." But the

_Mémoires des deux jeunes Mariées_ is full of firm reality, _Pamela_

is full of patient analysis, and _Les Liaisons dangereuses_ is full of

reality, analysis, and a hard brilliant genius for psychology. Swinburne

may have found in Laclos a little of his cynicism, though for that he

need have gone no further than Stendhal, who is referred to in these

pages, significantly. Some one says of some one: "I'd as soon read the

_Chartreuse de Parme_ as listen to her talk long; it is Stendhal diluted

and transmuted." But neither in Laclos nor in Stendhal did he find that

great novelist's gift which both have: that passion for life, and for

the unraveling of the threads of life. His people and their doings are

spectral, lunar; all the more so because their names are "Redgie,"

Frank, and only rarely Amicia; and because they talk schoolboy slang as

schoolboys and French drawing-room slang as elderly people. They are

presented by brilliant descriptive or satiric touches; they say the

cleverest things of one another; they have a ghostly likeness to real

people which one would be surprised that Swinburne should ever have

tried to get, had he not repeated the same hopeless experiment in his

modern play _The Sisters_, which sacrifices every possible charm of

poetry or deep feeling to such a semblance; to so mere a mimicry of

every-day speech and manners. There is more reality in any mere Félise

or Fragoletta than in the plausible polite letter-writers. It is

impossible to care what they are doing or have done; not easy indeed,

without close reading, to find out; and, while there is hardly a

sentence which we can not read with pleasure for its literary savor, its

prim ironic elegance, there is not a page which we turn with the

faintest thrill of curiosity. A novel which lacks interest may have

every formal merit of writing, but it can not have merit as a novel. The

novel professes to show us men and women, alive and in action: the one

thing vitally interesting to men and women.