In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself
should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt
clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with
the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of
continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run
thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if
it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.
It was for this last pleasure that we read so closely, and loved our
books so dearly, in the bright, troubled period of boyhood. Eloquence
and thought, character and conversation, were but obstacles to brush
aside as we dug blithely after a certain sort of incident, like a pig for
truffles. For my part, I liked a story to begin with an old wayside inn
where, “towards the close of the year 17--,” several gentlemen in
three-cocked hats were playing bowls. A friend of mine preferred the
Malabar coast in a storm, with a ship beating to windward, and a scowling
fellow of Herculean proportions striding along the beach; he, to be sure,
was a pirate. This was further afield than my home-keeping fancy loved
to travel, and designed altogether for a larger canvas than the tales
that I affected. Give me a highwayman and I was full to the brim; a
Jacobite would do, but the highwayman was my favourite dish. I can still
hear that merry clatter of the hoofs along the moonlit lane; night and
the coming of day are still related in my mind with the doings of John
Rann or Jerry Abershaw; and the words “post-chaise,” the “great North
road,” “ostler,” and “nag” still sound in my ears like poetry. One and
all, at least, and each with his particular fancy, we read story-books in
childhood, not for eloquence or character or thought, but for some
quality of the brute incident. That quality was not mere bloodshed or
wonder. Although each of these was welcome in its place, the charm for
the sake of which we read depended on something different from either.
My elders used to read novels aloud; and I can still remember four
different passages which I heard, before I was ten, with the same keen
and lasting pleasure. One I discovered long afterwards to be the
admirable opening of _What will he Do with It_: it was no wonder I was
pleased with that. The other three still remain unidentified. One is a
little vague; it was about a dark, tall house at night, and people
groping on the stairs by the light that escaped from the open door of a
sickroom. In another, a lover left a ball, and went walking in a cool,
dewy park, whence he could watch the lighted windows and the figures of
the dancers as they moved. This was the most sentimental impression I
think I had yet received, for a child is somewhat deaf to the
sentimental. In the last, a poet, who had been tragically wrangling with
his wife, walked forth on the sea-beach on a tempestuous night and
witnessed the horrors of a wreck. {153} Different as they are, all these
early favourites have a common note—they have all a touch of the
romantic.
Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance. The
pleasure that we take in life is of two sorts—the active and the passive.
Now we are conscious of a great command over our destiny; anon we are
lifted up by circumstance, as by a breaking wave, and dashed we know not
how into the future. Now we are pleased by our conduct, anon merely
pleased by our surroundings. It would be hard to say which of these
modes of satisfaction is the more effective, but the latter is surely the
more constant. Conduct is three parts of life, they say; but I think
they put it high. There is a vast deal in life and letters both which is
not immoral, but simply a-moral; which either does not regard the human
will at all, or deals with it in obvious and healthy relations; where the
interest turns, not upon what a man shall choose to do, but on how he
manages to do it; not on the passionate slips and hesitations of the
conscience, but on the problems of the body and of the practical
intelligence, in clean, open-air adventure, the shock of arms or the
diplomacy of life. With such material as this it is impossible to build
a play, for the serious theatre exists solely on moral grounds, and is a
standing proof of the dissemination of the human conscience. But it is
possible to build, upon this ground, the most joyous of verses, and the
most lively, beautiful, and buoyant tales.
One thing in life calls for another; there is a fitness in events and
places. The sight of a pleasant arbour puts it in our mind to sit there.
One place suggests work, another idleness, a third early rising and long
rambles in the dew. The effect of night, of any flowing water, of
lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships, of the open ocean, calls up
in the mind an army of anonymous desires and pleasures. Something, we
feel, should happen; we know not what, yet we proceed in quest of it.
And many of the happiest hours of life fleet by us in this vain
attendance on the genius of the place and moment. It is thus that tracts
of young fir, and low rocks that reach into deep soundings, particularly
torture and delight me. Something must have happened in such places, and
perhaps ages back, to members of my race; and when I was a child I tried
in vain to invent appropriate games for them, as I still try, just as
vainly, to fit them with the proper story. Some places speak distinctly.
Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to
be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck. Other spots
again seem to abide their destiny, suggestive and impenetrable, “miching
mallecho.” The inn at Burford Bridge, with its arbours and green garden
and silent, eddying river—though it is known already as the place where
Keats wrote some of his _Endymion_ and Nelson parted from his Emma—still
seems to wait the coming of the appropriate legend. Within these ivied
walls, behind these old green shutters, some further business smoulders,
waiting for its hour. The old Hawes Inn at the Queen’s Ferry makes a
similar call upon my fancy. There it stands, apart from the town, beside
the pier, in a climate of its own, half inland, half marine—in front, the
ferry bubbling with the tide and the guardship swinging to her anchor;
behind, the old garden with the trees. Americans seek it already for the
sake of Lovel and Oldbuck, who dined there at the beginning of the
_Antiquary_. But you need not tell me—that is not all; there is some
story, unrecorded or not yet complete, which must express the meaning of
that inn more fully. So it is with names and faces; so it is with
incidents that are idle and inconclusive in themselves, and yet seem like
the beginning of some quaint romance, which the all-careless author
leaves untold. How many of these romances have we not seen determine at
their birth; how many people have met us with a look of meaning in their
eye, and sunk at once into trivial acquaintances; to how many places have
we not drawn near, with express intimations—“here my destiny awaits
me”—and we have but dined there and passed on! I have lived both at the
Hawes and Burford in a perpetual flutter, on the heels, as it seemed, of
some adventure that should justify the place; but though the feeling had
me to bed at night and called me again at morning in one unbroken round
of pleasure and suspense, nothing befell me in either worth remark. The
man or the hour had not yet come; but some day, I think, a boat shall put
off from the Queen’s Ferry, fraught with a dear cargo, and some frosty
night a horseman, on a tragic errand, rattle with his whip upon the green
shutters of the inn at Burford. {155}
Now, this is one of the natural appetites with which any lively
literature has to count. The desire for knowledge, I had almost added
the desire for meat, is not more deeply seated than this demand for fit
and striking incident. The dullest of clowns tells, or tries to tell,
himself a story, as the feeblest of children uses invention in his play;
and even as the imaginative grown person, joining in the game, at once
enriches it with many delightful circumstances, the great creative writer
shows us the realisation and the apotheosis of the day-dreams of common
men. His stories may be nourished with the realities of life, but their
true mark is to satisfy the nameless longings of the reader, and to obey
the ideal laws of the day-dream. The right kind of thing should fall out
in the right kind of place; the right kind of thing should follow; and
not only the characters talk aptly and think naturally, but all the
circumstances in a tale answer one to another like notes in music. The
threads of a story come from time to time together and make a picture in
the web; the characters fall from time to time into some attitude to each
other or to nature, which stamps the story home like an illustration.
Crusoe recoiling from the footprint, Achilles shouting over against the
Trojans, Ulysses bending the great bow, Christian running with his
fingers in his ears, these are each culminating moments in the legend,
and each has been printed on the mind’s eye for ever. Other things we
may forget; we may forget the words, although they are beautiful; we may
forget the author’s comment, although perhaps it was ingenious and true;
but these epoch-making scenes, which put the last mark of truth upon a
story and fill up, at one blow, our capacity for sympathetic pleasure, we
so adopt into the very bosom of our mind that neither time nor tide can
efface or weaken the impression. This, then, is the plastic part of
literature: to embody character, thought, or emotion in some act or
attitude that shall be remarkably striking to the mind’s eye. This is
the highest and hardest thing to do in words; the thing which, once
accomplished, equally delights the schoolboy and the sage, and makes, in
its own right, the quality of epics. Compared with this, all other
purposes in literature, except the purely lyrical or the purely
philosophic, are bastard in nature, facile of execution, and feeble in
result. It is one thing to write about the inn at Burford, or to
describe scenery with the word-painters; it is quite another to seize on
the heart of the suggestion and make a country famous with a legend. It
is one thing to remark and to dissect, with the most cutting logic, the
complications of life, and of the human spirit; it is quite another to
give them body and blood in the story of Ajax or of Hamlet. The first is
literature, but the second is something besides, for it is likewise art.
English people of the present day {157} are apt, I know not why, to look
somewhat down on incident, and reserve their admiration for the clink of
teaspoons and the accents of the curate. It is thought clever to write a
novel with no story at all, or at least with a very dull one. Reduced
even to the lowest terms, a certain interest can be communicated by the
art of narrative; a sense of human kinship stirred; and a kind of
monotonous fitness, comparable to the words and air of _Sandy’s Mull_,
preserved among the infinitesimal occurrences recorded. Some people
work, in this manner, with even a strong touch. Mr. Trollope’s
inimitable clergymen naturally arise to the mind in this connection. But
even Mr. Trollope does not confine himself to chronicling small beer.
Mr. Crawley’s collision with the Bishop’s wife, Mr. Melnotte dallying in
the deserted banquet-room, are typical incidents, epically conceived,
fitly embodying a crisis. Or again look at Thackeray. If Rawdon
Crawley’s blow were not delivered, _Vanity Fair_ would cease to be a work
of art. That scene is the chief ganglion of the tale; and the discharge
of energy from Rawdon’s fist is the reward and consolation of the reader.
The end of _Esmond_ is a yet wider excursion from the author’s customary
fields; the scene at Castlewood is pure Dumas; the great and wily English
borrower has here borrowed from the great, unblushing French thief; as
usual, he has borrowed admirably well, and the breaking of the sword
rounds off the best of all his books with a manly, martial note. But
perhaps nothing can more strongly illustrate the necessity for marking
incident than to compare the living fame of _Robinson Crusoe_ with the
discredit of _Clarissa Harlowe_. _Clarissa_ is a book of a far more
startling import, worked out, on a great canvas, with inimitable courage
and unflagging art. It contains wit, character, passion, plot,
conversations full of spirit and insight, letters sparkling with
unstrained humanity; and if the death of the heroine be somewhat frigid
and artificial, the last days of the hero strike the only note of what we
now call Byronism, between the Elizabethans and Byron himself. And yet a
little story of a shipwrecked sailor, with not a tenth part of the style
nor a thousandth part of the wisdom, exploring none of the arcana of
humanity and deprived of the perennial interest of love, goes on from
edition to edition, ever young, while _Clarissa_ lies upon the shelves
unread. A friend of mine, a Welsh blacksmith, was twenty-five years old
and could neither read nor write, when he heard a chapter of _Robinson_
read aloud in a farm kitchen. Up to that moment he had sat content,
huddled in his ignorance, but he left that farm another man. There were
day-dreams, it appeared, divine day-dreams, written and printed and
bound, and to be bought for money and enjoyed at pleasure. Down he sat
that day, painfully learned to read Welsh, and returned to borrow the
book. It had been lost, nor could he find another copy but one that was
in English. Down he sat once more, learned English, and at length, and
with entire delight, read _Robinson_. It is like the story of a
love-chase. If he had heard a letter from _Clarissa_, would he have been
fired with the same chivalrous ardour? I wonder. Yet _Clarissa_ has
every quality that can be shown in prose, one alone excepted—pictorial or
picture-making romance. While _Robinson_ depends, for the most part and
with the overwhelming majority of its readers, on the charm of
circumstance.
In the highest achievements of the art of words, the dramatic and the
pictorial, the moral and romantic interest, rise and fall together by a
common and organic law. Situation is animated with passion, passion
clothed upon with situation. Neither exists for itself, but each inheres
indissolubly with the other. This is high art; and not only the highest
art possible in words, but the highest art of all, since it combines the
greatest mass and diversity of the elements of truth and pleasure. Such
are epics, and the few prose tales that have the epic weight. But as
from a school of works, aping the creative, incident and romance are
ruthlessly discarded, so may character and drama be omitted or
subordinated to romance. There is one book, for example, more generally
loved than Shakespeare, that captivates in childhood, and still delights
in age—I mean the _Arabian Nights_—where you shall look in vain for moral
or for intellectual interest. No human face or voice greets us among
that wooden crowd of kings and genies, sorcerers and beggarmen.
Adventure, on the most naked terms, furnishes forth the entertainment and
is found enough. Dumas approaches perhaps nearest of any modern to these
Arabian authors in the purely material charm of some of his romances.
The early part of _Monte Cristo_, down to the finding of the treasure, is
a piece of perfect story-telling; the man never breathed who shared these
moving incidents without a tremor; and yet Faria is a thing of packthread
and Dantès little more than a name. The sequel is one long-drawn error,
gloomy, bloody, unnatural and dull; but as for these early chapters, I do
not believe there is another volume extant where you can breathe the same
unmingled atmosphere of romance. It is very thin and light to be sure,
as on a high mountain; but it is brisk and clear and sunny in proportion.
I saw the other day, with envy, an old and a very clever lady setting
forth on a second or third voyage into _Monte Cristo_. Here are stories
which powerfully affect the reader, which can be reperused at any age,
and where the characters are no more than puppets. The bony fist of the
showman visibly propels them; their springs are an open secret; their
faces are of wood, their bellies filled with bran; and yet we thrillingly
partake of their adventures. And the point may be illustrated still
further. The last interview between Lucy and Richard Feveril is pure
drama; more than that, it is the strongest scene, since Shakespeare, in
the English tongue. Their first meeting by the river, on the other hand,
is pure romance; it has nothing to do with character; it might happen to
any other boy or maiden, and be none the less delightful for the change.
And yet I think he would be a bold man who should choose between these
passages. Thus, in the same book, we may have two scenes, each capital
in its order: in the one, human passion, deep calling unto deep, shall
utter its genuine voice; in the second, according circumstances, like
instruments in tune, shall build up a trivial but desirable incident,
such as we love to prefigure for ourselves; and in the end, in spite of
the critics, we may hesitate to give the preference to either. The one
may ask more genius—I do not say it does; but at least the other dwells
as clearly in the memory.
True romantic art, again, makes a romance of all things. It reaches into
the highest abstraction of the ideal; it does not refuse the most
pedestrian realism. _Robinson Crusoe_ is as realistic as it is romantic;
both qualities are pushed to an extreme, and neither suffers. Nor does
romance depend upon the material importance of the incidents. To deal
with strong and deadly elements, banditti, pirates, war and murder, is to
conjure with great names, and, in the event of failure, to double the
disgrace. The arrival of Haydn and Consuelo at the Canon’s villa is a
very trifling incident; yet we may read a dozen boisterous stories from
beginning to end, and not receive so fresh and stirring an impression of
adventure. It was the scene of Crusoe at the wreck, if I remember
rightly, that so bewitched my blacksmith. Nor is the fact surprising.
Every single article the castaway recovers from the hulk is “a joy for
ever” to the man who reads of them. They are the things that should be
found, and the bare enumeration stirs the blood. I found a glimmer of
the same interest the other day in a new book, _The Sailor’s Sweetheart_,
by Mr. Clark Russell. The whole business of the brig _Morning Star_ is
very rightly felt and spiritedly written; but the clothes, the books and
the money satisfy the reader’s mind like things to eat. We are dealing
here with the old cut-and-dry, legitimate interest of treasure trove.
But even treasure trove can be made dull. There are few people who have
not groaned under the plethora of goods that fell to the lot of the
_Swiss Family Robinson_, that dreary family. They found article after
article, creature after creature, from milk kine to pieces of ordnance, a
whole consignment; but no informing taste had presided over the
selection, there was no smack or relish in the invoice; and these riches
left the fancy cold. The box of goods in Verne’s _Mysterious Island_ is
another case in point: there was no gusto and no glamour about that; it
might have come from a shop. But the two hundred and seventy-eight
Australian sovereigns on board the _Morning Star_ fell upon me like a
surprise that I had expected; whole vistas of secondary stories, besides
the one in hand, radiated forth from that discovery, as they radiate from
a striking particular in life; and I was made for the moment as happy as
a reader has the right to be.
To come at all at the nature of this quality of romance, we must bear in
mind the peculiarity of our attitude to any art. No art produces
illusion; in the theatre we never forget that we are in the theatre; and
while we read a story, we sit wavering between two minds, now merely
clapping our hands at the merit of the performance, now condescending to
take an active part in fancy with the characters. This last is the
triumph of romantic story-telling: when the reader consciously plays at
being the hero, the scene is a good scene. Now in character-studies the
pleasure that we take is critical; we watch, we approve, we smile at
incongruities, we are moved to sudden heats of sympathy with courage,
suffering or virtue. But the characters are still themselves, they are
not us; the more clearly they are depicted, the more widely do they stand
away from us, the more imperiously do they thrust us back into our place
as a spectator. I cannot identify myself with Rawdon Crawley or with
Eugène de Rastignac, for I have scarce a hope or fear in common with
them. It is not character but incident that woos us out of our reserve.
Something happens as we desire to have it happen to ourselves; some
situation, that we have long dallied with in fancy, is realised in the
story with enticing and appropriate details. Then we forget the
characters; then we push the hero aside; then we plunge into the tale in
our own person and bathe in fresh experience; and then, and then only, do
we say we have been reading a romance. It is not only pleasurable things
that we imagine in our day-dreams; there are lights in which we are
willing to contemplate even the idea of our own death; ways in which it
seems as if it would amuse us to be cheated, wounded or calumniated. It
is thus possible to construct a story, even of tragic import, in which
every incident, detail and trick of circumstance shall be welcome to the
reader’s thoughts. Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the
child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life;
and when the game so chimes with his fancy that he can join in it with
all his heart, when it pleases him with every turn, when he loves to
recall it and dwells upon its recollection with entire delight, fiction
is called romance.
Walter Scott is out and away the king of the romantics. _The Lady of the
Lake_ has no indisputable claim to be a poem beyond the inherent fitness
and desirability of the tale. It is just such a story as a man would
make up for himself, walking, in the best health and temper, through just
such scenes as it is laid in. Hence it is that a charm dwells
undefinable among these slovenly verses, as the unseen cuckoo fills the
mountains with his note; hence, even after we have flung the book aside,
the scenery and adventures remain present to the mind, a new and green
possession, not unworthy of that beautiful name, _The Lady of the Lake_,
or that direct, romantic opening—one of the most spirited and poetical in
literature—“The stag at eve had drunk his fill.” The same strength and
the same weaknesses adorn and disfigure the novels. In that ill-written,
ragged book, _The Pirate_, the figure of Cleveland—cast up by the sea on
the resounding foreland of Dunrossness—moving, with the blood on his
hands and the Spanish words on his tongue, among the simple
islanders—singing a serenade under the window of his Shetland mistress—is
conceived in the very highest manner of romantic invention. The words of
his song, “Through groves of palm,” sung in such a scene and by such a
lover, clench, as in a nutshell, the emphatic contrast upon which the
tale is built. In _Guy Mannering_, again, every incident is delightful
to the imagination; and the scene when Harry Bertram lands at Ellangowan
is a model instance of romantic method.
“‘I remember the tune well,’ he says, ‘though I cannot guess what should
at present so strongly recall it to my memory.” He took his flageolet
from his pocket and played a simple melody. Apparently the tune awoke
the corresponding associations of a damsel. She immediately took up the
song—
“‘Are these the links of Forth, she said;
Or are they the crooks of Dee,
Or the bonny woods of Warroch Head
That I so fain would see?’
“‘By heaven!’ said Bertram, ‘it is the very ballad.’”
On this quotation two remarks fall to be made. First, as an instance of
modern feeling for romance, this famous touch of the flageolet and the
old song is selected by Miss Braddon for omission. Miss Braddon’s idea
of a story, like Mrs. Todgers’s idea of a wooden leg, were something
strange to have expounded. As a matter of personal experience, Meg’s
appearance to old Mr. Bertram on the road, the ruins of Derncleugh, the
scene of the flageolet, and the Dominie’s recognition of Harry, are the
four strong notes that continue to ring in the mind after the book is
laid aside. The second point is still more curious. The reader will
observe a mark of excision in the passage as quoted by me. Well, here is
how it runs in the original: “a damsel, who, close behind a fine spring
about half-way down the descent, and which had once supplied the castle
with water, was engaged in bleaching linen.” A man who gave in such copy
would be discharged from the staff of a daily paper. Scott has forgotten
to prepare the reader for the presence of the “damsel”; he has forgotten
to mention the spring and its relation to the ruin; and now, face to face
with his omission, instead of trying back and starting fair, crams all
this matter, tail foremost, into a single shambling sentence. It is not
merely bad English, or bad style; it is abominably bad narrative besides.
Certainly the contrast is remarkable; and it is one that throws a strong
light upon the subject of this paper. For here we have a man of the
finest creative instinct touching with perfect certainty and charm the
romantic junctures of his story; and we find him utterly careless,
almost, it would seem, incapable, in the technical matter of style, and
not only frequently weak, but frequently wrong in points of drama. In
character parts, indeed, and particularly in the Scotch, he was delicate,
strong and truthful; but the trite, obliterated features of too many of
his heroes have already wearied two generations of readers. At times his
characters will speak with something far beyond propriety with a true
heroic note; but on the next page they will be wading wearily forward
with an ungrammatical and undramatic rigmarole of words. The man who
could conceive and write the character of Elspeth of the Craigburnfoot,
as Scott has conceived and written it, had not only splendid romantic,
but splendid tragic gifts. How comes it, then, that he could so often
fob us off with languid, inarticulate twaddle?
It seems to me that the explanation is to be found in the very quality of
his surprising merits. As his books are play to the reader, so were they
play to him. He conjured up the romantic with delight, but he had hardly
patience to describe it. He was a great day-dreamer, a seer of fit and
beautiful and humorous visions, but hardly a great artist; hardly, in the
manful sense, an artist at all. He pleased himself, and so he pleases
us. Of the pleasures of his art he tasted fully; but of its toils and
vigils and distresses never man knew less. A great romantic—an idle
child.