an insulation which does not fit the sorer nerves. Instead, it rasps
them. They wince and keep on wincing more and more at the burden and
the pressure of mere existence. Lying so near the surface they suffer
from the proximity of other nerves in other people and nearly as much
from the proximity of other people without nerves. Men and women who
are so tender first feel irritation at minor imbecilities, then pain,
then anger, and may go on to madness. The contempt which familiarity
breeds is in them an active passion—not, as in the broad house, a
comfortable ease or even entertainment. Their memories are too long
and too alive for that. Each scratch leaves a scar and the scar smarts
for ever. Imagination sets in with the neurotic when he feels stifled
or begins to brood or grows bored or finds himself deep in thought.
It carries him, as the imagination can, beyond the actual occasion,
calling up future or conjectural irritations or injuries and bringing
them to wound the nerves, which are already twitching. Retreating from
the unendurable frontiers of his experience he lives tautly at the
centre, his scrutiny fixed inward. He may hate what he sees there or he
may love it.
Narcissus, the youth who loved himself until he died of his passion
and was transformed by the gods into a flower, is in some respects the
very symbol of the neurotic, whose fate it is to resemble a flower
in fragility if not always in beauty or in fragrance. With a happy
accuracy Evelyn Scott, who called her first novel _The Narrow House_,
calls her second one _Narcissus_. Her creative faculty has allowed
itself to seem submerged by the troubled flood of life which it chooses
to represent. It does not laugh, it is rarely ironical or pitiful, it
suggests no methods of escape. For the time being it is preoccupied
with the inhabitants of the narrow house and with their careers. It
accepts their own sense that the doors are locked and the windows
tight and that there is nothing to do but to run round and round in
the sticky atmosphere. By thus accepting her neurotics Mrs. Scott
intensifies her art: she brings her characters upon a cramped stage
under a glaring light; she crowds them into a cage which they think a
trap and there inspects their struggles. With the fewest reticences
she sets them forth, making stroke after stroke of the subtlest
penetration, shearing away disguises and subterfuges till she reaches
the red quick. What she finds in all of them is essentially narcism.
What further intensifies this biting art is that, narrowed to the
narrow house and concentrated upon self-love, it anatomizes and
subdivides self-love with minute analysis. The plight of practically
all the characters in _Narcissus_ has the complication that they are
in love and are therefore habitually on edge as they might not be in
calmer circumstances. But love does not liberate them. Julia turns from
her dullish husband first to one lover and then to another without any
genuine escape from the inversion of her desire. Her husband cannot
take her as seriously as she demands; he too is bound up in his own
hard self. Her first lover, Allen, has no passion more expansive than
a sort of sadistic cruelty; her second, Hurst, none more generous than
a sort of masochistic modesty. Paul, the adolescent tortured by the
longing to realize himself, flinches at the knowledge of his awkward
movements towards freedom. Each of them, looking for love as Narcissus
did in his pool, sees in lover or beloved something not entirely
expected: sees, that is, another face and not a mere reflection of
the looker’s. Here lies the particular ground of their irritations.
Whereas the lovers of the broad house reach eagerly out for qualities
unlike their own, the Narcissuses of the narrow house cannot endure
unlikeness. And as there are no absolute likenesses in nature, they
must be disappointed and must agonize.
One of the commonest devices in fiction is to show a narrow house with
its inhabitants invaded and purged by a large breath from the broad
house. Mrs. Scott denies herself this compromise. Her method, no less
than her reading of life, compels her. She marshals her characters in
a fugue of pain and exasperation. They have no career, in her novel,
besides that of their passions; they do not appear at work or at play
or in relaxed moments. When they try to speak lightly they speak
stiffly. She never forgets the tense business in hand. That business,
obviously, is not to make a general transcript of human existence, but
to fit certain materials into a certain pattern in order to make a
work of art. The pattern in this case does not equal the materials.
Though the novel has form and proportion, its whole is partly hidden
by the brilliance of its parts, which glitter with fiendish thrusts of
observation delivered in a style of cruel curtness and vividness. The
paths of the characters through the action seem tangled in a multitude
of sensations. It is the tone which gives unity: the tone of passionate
frustration sustained by art till the familiar sanities fade out of
sight and the narrow house has shut out the sun, the wind, the soil,
and the healing hands of time. Narcissus, heedless of the broad house,
strikes through the skin to the nerves; it finds fierce atavisms,
stubborn wilfulnesses, inexplicable perversities, rages, attacks,
retreats in the forest, in the morass, in the jungle of the mind.
GOOD NAMES
There are good names and good names. Seedsmen use them to catch young
gardeners; lovers woo with them; maps, full of them, become a sweet
adventure to the eye; men and women who always wear them please the
moralists. And since they play their part in life, they have a part in
novels. Consider the course of English fiction, from Defoe to Thomas
Hardy, with its many names and fashions of names.
Defoe, who lacked few other realistic arts, seldom named a character.
In his anonymous underworld brisk Moll Flanders knows even her husbands
better by their callings than by their names. Colonel Jacque speaks of
only his fourth wife as if she had been christened. Roxana’s Europe has
hardly more souls with names than Crusoe’s island. Some of the titles
seem to come from the stage, such as Count Cog, “an eminent gamester,”
Alderman Stiffrump, and Christallina the virgin; but Defoe was,
perhaps, too much a democrat to care much for names for their own sake.
So, it seems, was Richardson, though not in the same way; he named his
people, but nearly all in plain and simple terms, as became a blunt
tradesman: Andrews, Jones, Williams, Adams, Jenkins, Tomlinson. Pamela,
indeed, can tell her children the fates of Coquetilla, Prudiana,
Profusiana, Prudentia, yet the lady herself becomes Mrs. B—— without
a backward sigh. At times, however, Richardson grew less neutral and
wrote character neatly into proper nouns. Mrs. Jewkes could be only a
wicked conspirator, Polly Barlow a faithful maid, Dorcas Wykes full of
guile and arts, Sally Godfrey a woman of spirit. Could the Harlowes be
people of no breeding, or Miss Harriet Byron? And there are syllables
that breathe gentility: Lovelace, Grandison, Sir Rowland Meredith, Sir
Harry Beauchamp, Sir Hargrove Pollexfen, Bart.
Fielding, turned novelist, remembered the old comedies of his nonage
and christened half his younger children with a pun in his cheek.
This is not true of the most important persons, as a rule. Tom Jones,
Amelia Booth, Sophia Western, Joseph Andrews, Parson Adams are nearly
all as straight from life as Jonathan Wild himself, though Adams and
Andrews do come through Richardson. In the second rank fall Mr. Booby,
the importunate Slipslop, Heartfree and Allworthy, pictures of virtue,
Partridge, whose name has both a poaching and pastoral air, Blifil,
Thwackum, Square, and the unrelenting Mrs. Honour. And still further
from the centre of his stories belong those men and women whom Fielding
has too little time to portray at length but whom he dockets with names
very appropriate to them. One thinks of Peter Pounce, usurer-general,
the incompatible Tow-wouses, pig-keeping Trulliber, Tom Suckbribe
the venal tipstaff, Mrs. Grave-airs the curious prude, Varnish and
Scratch, painters, Arsenic and Dosewell, physicians, Fireblood,
Blueskin, Strongbow, rogues all, Betty Pippin and Tom Freckle, rustics
body and soul; and then one remembers that such names are less frequent
in _Tom Jones_ and _Amelia_, by Mr. Justice Fielding, than in _Joseph
Andrews_ and _Jonathan Wild_, written while the old Harry Fielding was
not so far away.
For Smollett, alliteration was almost a necessity when it came to
heroes: Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Ferdinand Fathom. In this
and other artifices he outdid his age in general, for he had high
spirits and he did not fret over little realisms. His sailors, Tom
Bowling, Oakum, Jack Rattlin, Tommy Clewline, Lieutenant Hatchway,
Pipes, and Commodore Hawser Trunnion, are sailors, that and nothing
more. Roger Potion is a druggist, Comfit Colocynth a doctor, Obadiah
Goosecap a Quaker, Captain Weazel a coward, Sir Giles Squirrel and Sir
Timothy Thicket country gentlemen, Timothy Crabshaw, Dolly Cowslip, and
Hodge Dolt, children of the greenest fields. Unsuccessful playwright
that he was, Smollett could call an actor Mr. Bellower and a manager
Mr. Vandal with a clear conscience and doubtless with some delight. He
named a gentleman commoner of Christ Church Mr. George Prankley and he
put the smack of Cambria in Cadwallader Crabtree, deaf and caustic.
After Smollett, whom Sterne called Smelfungus, there were many to
practise the punning trick, which lasted, even after Jane Austen,
whose names are nature itself, into Scott, who is a world of many
natures. History kept him close to fact with a large part of his
characters, but he could invent names, when he liked, as rich and
varied as his plots. He was most fantastic, perhaps, with his
clergymen: witness John Halftext the curate, canny Peter Poundtext,
and the Episcopalian Mr. Cuffcushion; witness the two Presbyterian
Nehemiahs, surnamed Solsgrace and Holdenough; witness martyred Richard
Rumbleberry, covenanting Gabriel Kettledrummle, and the most violent
Habakkuk Mucklewrath. Pedants, too, are broadly named in Scott, even
to the extent of Jonathan Oldbuck, Jedidiah Cleishbotham, Cuthbert
Clutterbuck, Chrystal Croftangry, and Dryasdust, who has fathered a
tribe. With some others, besides parsons, the calling gives the titles,
as in Tom Alibi the lawyer, Raredrench the druggist, Saddletree, who
sells harness, and Timothy Thimblewaite, tailor. Such names are for
the sake of comedy, and comedy, with Scott, generally plays with
humble life. But he had names for the virtuous poor as well: Caleb
Balderstone, David Deans, Dandy Dinmont, and on through the alphabet.
Where Scott was best, however, seems to have been at naming those
gentlemen and ladies who bring chivalry to his books. What certain
signs of birth in the bare surnames Waverley, Redgauntlet, Glendenning,
Mannering, Osbaldistone! Could Diana Vernon have changed names with
Alice Lambskin, or Lucy Ashton with Meg Dods, or Rose Bradwardine with
devoted Phoebe Mayflower even? Cosmo Conyne Bradwardine has not the
same savour as Saunders Broadfoot; Quentin Durward is not of a rank
with Giles Gosling. Scott could and did devise fit syllables for every
order and station of life.
Dickens had no such pretty courtliness, but spoke brusquely of Lady
Coldveal and Lady Jemima Bilberry and Lady Scadgers, Lord Snigsworth,
Sir Mulberry Hawk, Sir Morbury Dedlock, Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle. But
so he spoke of all the world, making names for every creature like a
new comic Adam in a new topsy-turvy paradise. All the power of Smollett
passed into him to be enlarged to quite new proportions. Smollett
could call a bumpkin Hodge Dolt, but only Dickens could invent the
gigantic titles of Nicodemus Boffin, Luke Honeythunder the unlaughing
philanthropist, the Pardiggles, rapaciously benevolent, or Chevy Slyme.
Smollett, indeed, might have called an undertaker Mould, as Dickens
did, a visiting nobleman Count Smorltork, a schoolmaster Bradley
Headstone, a canting preacher Melchisedech Howler; might even have
named Nicholas Nickleby, Betsy Prig, Sally Brass, Miss Mowcher, Mr.
Pugstyles, or Zephaniah Scadder; but Smollett could never have attained
to Gradgrind, the Cheerybles, Mrs. Kidgerbury the oldest charwoman in
Kentish town, Uriah Heep, Septimus Crisparkle, Daniel Quilp, Pecksniff,
Podsnap, or the firm of Chicksey, Veneering, and Stobbles. It is a
quality and glory of Dickens that he could caricature words as he did
people. Micawber and Skimpole and Pickwick are caricatures no more
than the syllables which name them. Humorous hybrids of language, they
sometimes seem to suggest parent words, as if Scrooge were the child
of _screw_ and _gouge_, and Wardle of _warden_ and _waddle_, but they
commonly elude analysis and seem new words for new persons.
Thackeray took certain advantages, not only in the linguistic
gargoyles of his burlesques but in the wild words he coined from
Germany and Ireland. In English, however, he was rather nearer nature
and directories. He has his Lord Bishop of Bullocksmithy and the
Archbishop of Mealypotatoes, indeed, as well as their humbler brethren
of the black cloth, Charles Honeyman the unctuous, Silas Hornblower,
missionary, Thomas Tufton Hunt, tufthunter, Felix Rabbits the curate
with fourteen daughters, dull Thomas Tusher, and Lemuel Whey, “full of
the milk and water of human kindness.” The Earl of Bagwig can, without
leaving the Thackerayan world, consort with the Earl of Bareacres, Lord
Trampleton, who walks on his dancing partners, Lord Tapeworm, Lord
Brandyball, Lord Castlemouldy, Lord Deuceace, or with Sir Huddlestone
Fuddlestone and Sir Giles Beanfield. Jack Snaffle keeps a livery
stable, the Hawbucks are parvenus, George Marrowfat, snob, eats peas
with his knife, Poseidon Hicks is a drysalter with a turn for classical
poetry, Tom Eaves gossips, Clarence Bulbul has travelled in the Orient,
Squire Ballance holds the scales of justice. But these are fun and
ornament. Foreigners aside, Thackeray chose to be more real than
Dickens, in this matter, though not commonplace. He leaned a little
towards distinction and genteel dignity in his families: the Gaunts,
Warringtons, Sedleys, Newcomes, Osbornes, Kews, Amorys, Claverings,
Crawleys, Esmonds. The Kickleburys, after all, are snobs, and the
Hoggartys are Irish.
Meredith the iridescent does not flaunt such colour in his names
as one might expect. He has his puns, or nearly: persuasive Lady
Blandish, Farmer Broadmead, Squire Uploft of Fallowfield, Mr. Parsley
the curate, Isabella Current, prim and kindly and not young virgin,
Mabel Sweetwinter, too fair to be always a shepherdess, Sir Willoughby
Patterne the world’s model, the swooping Lord Mountfalcon, the blazing
Countess of Cressett, Gower Woodseer the poet studied from R. L. S.
Meredith has his plain souls: Tobias Winch, of course a green grocer,
the immemorial Mrs. Berry, Farmer Blaize, Jonathan Eccles, and Anthony
Hackbut. He has his fantastics: Sir Meeson Corby, Lord Pitscrew, Lord
Lockrace, Lady Denewdney. But for the most part it is not comedy which
names Meredith’s characters, but gentility. Lucy Desborough, Dahlia
Fleming, Letitia Dale, Clara Middleton, are dewy and fragrant, as are
Carinthia Jane Kirby, Clara Forey, Janet Ilchester, Rose Jocelyn, Diana
Antonia Merion. And the gentlemen mount from Evan Harrington, son of
a tailor, and Blackburn Tuckham, through Nevil Beauchamp, Normanton
Hipperdon, naturally a tory, and the Hon. Everard Romfrey to those
superb fathers Sir Austin Absworthy Bearne Feverel, Bart., and Mr.
Augustus Fitz-George Frederick William Richmond Guelph Roy, who made
princes laugh.
Gentlemen and ladies are not the special care of Thomas Hardy, and
yet he has done well by them: witness Elfride Swancourt, passionate,
thwarted Eustacia Vye, the Earl of Uplandtowers, Barbara Grebe, who
married him, Swithin St. Cleeve, merely a curate’s son, and Lady
Viviette Constantine, who loved him. One of Hardy’s tricks is to
match with stout Saxon words others that come from Greece or Rome or
Judea, as Cytherea Aldclyffe, Damon Wildeve, Aeneas Manston, Bathsheba
Everdene. The effect is like that of the ruins of Roman Britain which
always stand behind the scene to lend it depth and tragic atmosphere.
And the Saxon words have hints in them. Caroline Aspent is a trembling,
uncertain creature, like Thomas Leaf; Donald Farfrae is a wanderer from
his own heath; Gabriel Oak will not bend; Sue Bridehead carries into
middle age the shock and fear of the bride. Philology, ready servant of
art, makes the difference between Smollett’s stolid rustics and such
as Anne Garland, Fancy Day, Tabitha Lark, Phyllis Grove, Diggory Venn,
Giles Winterbourne, and Thomasin Yeobright. Philology, too, makes the
comedy more subtle in comic names which Shakespeare could not better:
Laban Tall, Joseph Poorgrass, Cain Ball, whose mother had misheard the
scripture, Anthony Cripplestraw, the distressed lovers Suke Damson
and Tim Tangs, Tony Kytes, who wooed too many, and Unity Sallet, who
declined him. Not even to speak of his dialect and place names, which
are unspeakably rich, Thomas Hardy’s well-christened children are
enough to show that his knowledge goes to the roots of the language.
Of all these, smaller novelists being left out for brevity, which have
been conscious of the full savour and perfume of their syllables?
What traits come out in the choice? What had the age of each of them
to do with it? Who saw the sober hues in Defoe and Richardson, the
candid puns of Fielding and Smollett, the large fecundity of Scott,
the hugeness and exuberance of Dickens, the polyglot mockeries of
Thackeray, the flash and fragrance of Meredith, the deep, native colour
of Thomas Hardy? Words, words, words!
PICTURES OF THE PAST
When we read or think about the past, what images actually form in
our minds? Take the average American, for instance. He probably has
two sets of such images and no more. One is of bunchy persons in
preposterous garments—something between a toga and a burnoose—moving
over the garish landscape of a Sunday-school card. The other is of
heroic gentlemen in the blue-and-buff of the American Revolution, with
powdered wigs and elaborate manners, either engaging in battle or else
dancing minuets with the furbelowed dames who, like their gallants,
abound in the illustrations of the old-fashioned history books. As the
blue-and-buff habiliments represent actually a very brief period of
history, and those of the Sunday-school pictures none at all, this is
but a scanty wardrobe for the imagination. And in matters not quite
so sartorial, things are little better. There are probably only a few
persons alive anywhere who can sit down and assemble anything like an
accurate mental picture of a street in Athens or Rome or Florence or
Paris or London or Weimar or Philadelphia, even in the days which mean
most and are consequently most studied in the history of those cities.
We have generally but the vaguest notions of the physiognomy of the
ancients, or even of the remoter moderns. We cannot actually visualize
them at their meals, at their work, at their relaxations.
If this is the case now, when we possess libraries of archaeology to
draw upon if we care to, what was the case before illustrated books had
become common? To judge by the paintings of the Middle Ages, the past
then was visualized as merely like the present in its outward details.
On the Elizabethan stage the Greeks and Romans were set forth pretty
much after the fashions contemporary with the audiences. And even far
down through the eighteenth century this custom prevailed. Garrick
acted Lear in breeches and wig and nobody minded. It is certain that,
while many in his audience would have known better if they had been
questioned, they did not experience the shock that we should feel.
Lear belonged to an age about which the eighteenth century readers
knew little. They were, however, hardly more exact in their images of
the Greek and Roman past. Examine, for instance, the illustrations of
Pope’s Homer, completed a little over two hundred years ago. It was
issued in a magnificent folio with elaborate plates. The frontispiece
to the second volume, “Troja cum Locis pertingentibus,” aims to
exhibit the plains of Troy, with the sea in the foreground and at the
back the city itself. It is true that the ships have slightly Grecian
prows, and the warriors on the plains fight with bows and spears and
shields and chariots. But the citadel towers above the surrounding
houses suspiciously as does St. Paul’s above the City of London. The
landscape rolls across the page with the soft curves of England. Here
and there are English hedgerows, and the brooks and mountains, so far
as they have any vraisemblance at all, are of English make. Quaint and
incredible! But what chance, after all, had the illustrator for knowing
better? Not for a generation did the excavations begin at Herculaneum
and Pompeii or Winckelmann begin the great career which taught the
world to think of the ancients very much in their true proportions,
though not in their true colours or movements. The fact of the matter
is that the Renaissance and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
spiritual great-grandchildren of Greece and Rome and worshippers of
their ancestors, did not really know what their ancestors looked like.
Yet in those ages a great and truthful art grew out of that worship.
The moral seems to be that we lean very little upon definite images
in our imagination of the past. The vaguest images will do for most
people. Even when we deal with more recent periods and have striking
illustrations to help us out, such as Hogarth’s for his age, or those
of Phiz for Dickens and Ainsworth, or those of the too-much-neglected
F. O. C. Darley for the old American frontier, we probably depend less
upon them than we think. We create our favoured personages from history
or fiction in our own image. Let any reader of an historical novel,
even of so incomparably vivid a series of pictures as _Salammbô_,
examine himself as he reads, and the chances are he will find that,
having seized upon a few mental or moral traits of the characters,
he follows them by this scent and hardly notices their outward
appearances again, any more than he carefully visualizes the landscape,
much pleasure as he may take from its presence in the action. Such
an examination is likely to show, on simple psychological grounds,
that Lessing has not been wholly superseded in his doctrine of the
true provinces of poetry and art. It is likely also to make us ask
whether the Imagists, exquisite lyrics and vivid episodes as they have
produced, can ever by images alone build up any great or sustained
illusion of events really transacted in something like a real world.
THE GREAT LABORATORY
Modern poets can never praise Greek poetry too much; modern
philosophers, Greek philosophy; modern orators, Greek oratory. But
the shift away from ancient studies as the basis of all education has
tended to leave such employments in the hands of the conservative, or
at least of those whose imaginations live largely on the past, and
has thus contributed to the notion that practical affairs—economy
and polity—are not properly to be studied in Greek literature. To
the extent that knowledge has been multiplied since Aristotle’s
day, this is, of course, true. We cannot look to the Greeks for
information which they did not have, and it would be most un-Greek to
neglect superior sources of knowledge merely on the ground that other
sources were better established in an old tradition. Undoubtedly this
alienation of men of affairs from ancient studies has been due less
to the deficiencies of the Greeks than to the deficiencies of the
teachers of Greek, who, so long holding a vested interest in education
everywhere, permitted themselves, like other vested interests, to fall
into sluggish routine and tyranny, a pitiless round of grammar without
sense and of words without life. The reaction against their monopoly
has been, like most reactions so forced, excessive. In our discovery
that we had overvalued the scanty amount of grammar and prosody
which unwilling students actually carried away from their compulsory
struggles with Greek, with the mere letter of its language without any
deeper spirit or meaning, many have come to undervalue the Greek world
as a laboratory in which, better than anywhere else in history, we may
study human beings vividly and rationally engaged in the conduct of
human life.