For what, in short, is the story of _Les Frères Zemganno_? Two
brothers, Gianni and Nello, tumblers in a show that travels round the
village fairs and small country towns of France, are seized with an
ambition to excel in their calling. They make their way to England,
where they spend some years clowning in various circuses. Then they
return to make their _debut_ in Paris. Gianni has invented at length a
trick act, a feat that will make the brothers famous. They are
performing it for the first time in public, when a circus girl, who
has a spite against Nello, causes him to fall and break both his legs.
He can perform no more: and henceforward, as he watches his brother
performing, a strange jealousy awakes and grows in him, causing him
agony whenever Gianni touches a trapèze. Gianni discovers this and
renounces his art.
Now here in the first place it is to be noted that the whole story
depends upon the circus profession, and the brothers' love for it and
desire to excel in it. The catastrophe; Nello's jealousy; Gianni's
self-sacrifice; are inseparable from the atmosphere of the book. The
catastrophe is a professional catastrophe; the jealousy a professional
jealousy; the sacrifice a sacrifice of a profession. And in the second
place we know, even if we had not his own word for it, that M. de
Goncourt--contrary to his habit--deliberately etherealized the
atmosphere of the circus-ring and idealized the surroundings. He calls
his tale an essay in poetic realism, "Je me suis trouvé dans une de
ces heures de la vie, vieillissantes, maladives, lâches devant le
travail poignant et angoisseux de mes autres livres, en un état de
l'âme où la vérité trop vraie m'était antipathique à moi aussi!--et
j'ai fait cette fois de l'imagination dans du rêve mêlé à du
souvenir." We know from the Goncourt Journals exactly what is meant by
"du souvenir." We know that M. Edmond de Goncourt is but translating
into the language of the circus-ring and symbolizing in the story of
Gianni and Nello the story of his own literary collaboration with his
brother Jules--a collaboration of quite singular intimacy, that ceased
only with Jules's death in 1870. Possibly, as M. Zola once suggested,
M. Edmond de Goncourt did at first intend to depict the circus-life,
after his wont, in true "naturalistic" manner, softening and
extenuating nothing: but "par une délicatesse qui s'explique, il a
reculé devant le milieu brutal de cirques, devant certaines laideurs
et certaines monstruosités des personnages qu'il choisis-sait." The
two facts remain that in _Les Frères Zemganno_ M. de Goncourt (1) made
professional life in a circus the very blood and tissue of his story;
and (2) that he softened the details of that life, and to a certain
degree idealized it.
Turning to Mrs. Woods's book and taking these two points in reverse
order, we find to begin with that she idealizes nothing and softens
next to nothing. Where she does soften, she softens only for literary
effect--to give a word its due force, or a picture its proper values.
She does not, for instance, accurately report the oaths and
blasphemies:--
"The tents and booths of the show were disappearing rapidly like
stage scenery. The red-faced Manager, Joe, and several others in
authority, ran hither and thither shouting their orders to a
crowd of workmen in jackets and fustian trousers, who were piling
rolls of canvas, and heavy chests, and mountains of planks and
long vibrating poles, on the great waggons. Others were
harnessing the big powerful horses to the carts, horses that were
mostly white, and wore large red collars. The scene was so busy,
so full of movement, that it would have been exhilarating had not
the fresh morning air been full of senseless blasphemies and
other deformities of speech, uttered casually and constantly,
without any apparent consciousness on the part of the speakers
that they were using strong language. Probably the lady who
dropped toads and vipers from her lips whenever she opened them
came in process of time to consider them the usual accompaniments
of conversation."
There are a great many reasons against copious profanity of speech.
Here you have the artistic reason, and, by implication, that which
forbids its use in literature--namely, its ineffectiveness. But though
she selects, Mrs. Woods does not refine. She exhibits the life of the
travelling show in its habitual squalor as well as in its occasional
brightness. How she has managed it passes my understanding: but her
book leaves the impression of confident familiarity with this kind of
life, of knowledge not merely accumulated, but assimilated. Knowing as
we do that Mrs. Woods was not brought up in a circus, we infer that
she must have spent much labor in research: but, taken by itself, her
book permits no such inference. The truth is that in the case of a
genuine artist no line can be drawn between knowledge and imagination.
Probably--almost certainly--Mrs. Woods has to a remarkable degree that
gift which Mr. Henry James describes as "the faculty which when you
give it an inch takes an ell, and which for an artist is a much
greater source of strength than any accident of residence or of place
in the social scale ... the power to guess the unseen from the seen,
to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the
pattern; the condition of feeling life in general so completely that
you are well on your way to knowing a particular corner of it." Be
this as it may, Mrs. Woods has written a novel which, for mastery of
an unfamiliar _milieu_, is almost fit to stand beside _Esther Waters_.
I say "almost": for, although Mrs. Woods's mastery is easier and less
conscious than Mr. Moore's, it neither goes so deep to the springs of
action nor bears so intimately on the conduct of the story. But of
this later.
If one thing more than another convinces me that Mrs. Woods has
thoroughly realized these queer characters of hers, it is that she
makes them so much like other people. Whatever our profession may be,
we are generally silent upon the instincts that led us to adopt
it--unless, indeed, we happen to be writers and make a living out of
self-analysis. So these strollers are silent upon the attractiveness
of their calling. But they crave as openly as any of us for
distinction, and they worship "respectability" as heartily and
outspokenly as any of the country-folk for whose amusement they tumble
and pull faces. It is no small merit in this book that it reveals how
much and yet how very little divides the performers in the ring from
the audience in the sixpenny seats. I wish I had space to quote a
particularly fine passage--you will find it on pp. 72-74--in which
Mrs. Woods describes the progress of these motley characters through
Midland lanes on a fresh spring morning; the shambling white horses
with their red collars, the painted vans, the cages "where bears paced
uneasily and strange birds thrust uncouth heads out into the
sunshine," the two elephants and the camel padding through the dust
and brushing the dew off English hedges, the hermetically sealed
omnibus in which the artistes bumped and dozed, while the
wardrobe-woman, Mrs. Thompson, held forth undeterred on "those
advantages of birth, house-rent, and furniture, which made her
discomforts of real importance, whatever those of the other ladies in
the show might be."
But in bringing her Vagabonds into relation with ordinary English
life, Mrs. Woods loses all, or nearly all, of that esoteric
professional interest which, at first sight, would seem the chief
reason for choosing circus people to write about. The story of _Les
Frères Zemganno_ has, as I have said, this esoteric professional
interest. The story of _The Vagabonds_ is the story of a husband and
of a young wife who does not love him, but discovers that she loves
another man--a story as old as the hills and common to every rank and
every calling. Mrs. Woods has made the husband a middle-aged clown,
the wife a girl with strict notions about respectability, and the
lover, Fritz, a handsome young German gymnast. But there was no
fundamental reason for this choice of professions. The tale might be
every bit as true of a grocer, and a grocer's wife, and a grocer's
assistant. Once or twice, indeed, in the earlier chapters we have
promise of a more peculiar story when we read of Mrs. Morris's
objection to seeing her husband play the clown. "No woman," she says,
"that hadn't been brought up to the business would like to see her
husband look like that." And of Joe Morris we read that he took an
artistic pride in his clowning. But there follows no serious struggle
between love and art--no such struggle, for instance, as Zola has
worked out to tragic issues in his _L'Œuvre_. Mrs. Morris's shame at
her husband's ridiculous appearance merely heightens the contrast in
her eyes between him and the handsome young gymnast.
But though the circus-business is not essential, Mrs. Woods makes most
effective use of it. I will select one notable illustration of this.
When Mrs. Morris at length makes her confession--it is in the wagon,
and at night--the unhappy husband wraps her up carefully in her bed
and creeps away with his grief to the barn where Chang, a ferocious
elephant amenable only to him, has been stabled:--
"He opened the door; the barn was pitch dark, but as he entered
he could hear the noise of the chain which had been fastened to
the elephant's legs being suddenly dragged. He spoke to Chang,
and the noise ceased. Then running up a short ladder which was
close to the door, he threw himself down on the straw and stared
up into the darkness, which to his aching eyes seemed spangled
with many colours. Presently he was startled by something warm
touching him on the face.
"'Who's there?' he called out.
"There was no answer, but the soft thing, something like a hand,
felt him cautiously and caressingly all over.
"'Oh, it's you, Chang, my boy, is it?' said Joe. 'What! are you
glad to have me, old chappie? No humbug about yer, are yer sure?
No lies?'"
The circus-business is employed again in the catastrophe: but, to my
mind, far less happily. In spite of very admirable writing, there
remains something ridiculous in the spectacle of an injured husband,
armed with a Winchester rifle and mounted on a frantic elephant,
pursuing his wife's lover by moonlight across an English common and
finally "treeing" him up a sign-post. Mrs. Woods, indeed, means it to
be grotesque: but I think it is something more.
The problem of the story is the commonest in fiction. And when I add
that the injured husband has been married before and that his first
wife, honestly supposed to be dead, returns to threaten his happiness,
you will see that Mrs. Woods sets forth upon a path trodden by many
hundreds of thousands of incompetent feet. To start with such a
situation almost suggests bravado. If it be bravado, it is entirely
justified as the tale proceeds: for amid the crowd of failures Mrs.
Woods's solution wears the singular distinction of truth. That the
book is written in restrained and beautiful English goes without
saying: but the best tribute one can pay to the writing of it is to
say that its style and its truthfulness are at one. If complaint must
be made, it is the vulgar complaint against truth--that it leaves one
a trifle cold. A less perfect story might have aroused more emotion.
Yet I for one would not barter the pages that tell of Joe Morris's
final surrender of his wife--with their justness of imagination and
sobriety of speech--for any amount of pity and terror.
A word on the few merely descriptive passages in the book. Mrs.
Woods's scene-painting has all a Frenchman's accomplishment with the
addition of that open-air feeling and intimate knowledge of the
phenomena of "out-of-doors" which a Frenchman seldom or never attains
to. Though not, perhaps, her strongest gift, it is the one by which
she stands most conspicuously above her contemporaries. The more
credit, then, that she uses it so temperately.