It is said that young men of genius come to London with great poems and
dramas in their pockets and find every door closed against them.
Chatterton's death perpetuated this legend. But when I, Edward Dayne, came
to London in search of literary adventure, I found a ready welcome.
Possibly I should not have been accorded any welcome had I been anything
but an ordinary person. Let this be waived. I was as covered with "fads" as
a distinguished foreigner with stars. Naturalism I wore round my neck,
Romanticism was pinned over the heart, Symbolism I carried like a toy
revolver in my waistcoat pocket, to be used on an emergency. I do not judge
whether I was charlatan or genius, I merely state that I found all--actors,
managers, editors, publishers, docile and ready to listen to me. The world
may be wicked, cruel, and stupid, but it is patient; on this point I will
not be gainsaid, it is patient; I know what I am talking about; I maintain
that the world is patient. If it were not, what would have happened? I
should have been murdered by the editors of (I will suppress names), torn
in pieces by the sub-editors, and devoured by the office boys. There was no
wild theory which I did not assail them with, there was no strange plan for
the instant extermination of the Philistine, which I did not press upon
them, and (here I must whisper), with a fair amount of success, not
complete success I am glad to say--that would have meant for the editors a
change from their arm-chairs to the benches of the Union and the plank beds
of Holloway. The actress when she returned home from the theatre, suggested
I had an enemy, a vindictive enemy, who dogged my steps; but her stage
experience led her astray. I had no enemy except myself; or to put it
scientifically, no enemy except the logical consequences of my past life
and education, and these caused me a great and real inconvenience. French
wit was in my brain, French sentiment was in my heart; of the English soul
I knew nothing, and I could not remember old sympathies, it was like
seeking forgotten words, and if I were writing a short story, I had to
return in thought to Montmartre or the Champs Elysées for my characters.
That I should have forgotten so much in ten years seems incredible, and it
will be deemed impossible by many, but that is because few are aware of how
little they know of the details of life, even of their own, and are
incapable of appreciating the influence of their past upon their present.
The visible world is visible only to a few, the moral world is a closed
book to nearly all. I was full of France, and France had to be got rid of,
or pushed out of sight before I could understand England; I was like a
snake striving to slough its skin.
Handicapped as I was with dangerous ideas, and an impossible style, defeat
was inevitable. My English was rotten with French idiom; it was like an
ill-built wall overpowered by huge masses of ivy; the weak foundations had
given way beneath the weight of the parasite; and the ideas I sought to
give expression to were green, sour, and immature as apples in August.
Therefore before long the leading journal that had printed two poems and
some seven or eight critical articles, ceased to send me books for review,
and I fell back upon obscure society papers. Fortunately it was not
incumbent on me to live by my pen; so I talked, and watched, and waited
till I grew akin to those around me, and my thoughts blended with, and took
root in my environment. I wrote a play or two, I translated a French opera,
which had a run of six nights, I dramatized a novel, I wrote short stories,
and I read a good deal of contemporary fiction.
The first book that came under my hand was "A Portrait of a Lady," by Henry
James. Each scene is developed with complete foresight and certainty of
touch. What Mr. James wants to do he does. I will admit that an artist may
be great and limited; by one word he may light up an abyss of soul; but
there must be this one magical and unique word. Shakespeare gives us the
word, Balzac, sometimes, after pages of vain striving, gives us the word,
Tourgueneff gives it with miraculous certainty; but Henry James, no; a
hundred times he flutters about it; his whole book is one long flutter near
to the one magical and unique word, but the word is not spoken; and for
want of the word his characters are never resolved out of the haze of
nebulae. You are on a bowing acquaintance with them; they pass you in the
street, they stop and speak to you, you know how they are dressed, you
watch the colour of their eyes. When I think of "A Portrait of a Lady,"
with its marvellous crowd of well-dressed people, it comes back to me
precisely as an accurate memory of a fashionable soirée--the staircase with
its ascending figures, the hostess smiling, the host at a little distance
with his back turned; some one calls him. He turns; I can see his white kid
gloves; the air is as sugar with the odour of the gardenias; there is
brilliant light here; there is shadow in the further rooms; the women's
feet pass to and fro beneath the stiff skirts; I call for my hat and coat;
I light a cigar; I stroll up Piccadilly ... a very pleasant evening; I have
seen a good many people I knew; I have observed an attitude, and an
earnestness of manner that proved that a heart was beating.
Mr. James might say, "If I have done this, I have done a great deal," and I
would answer, "No doubt you are a man of great talent, great cultivation
and not at all of the common herd; I place you in the very front rank, not
only of novelists but of men of letters."
I have read nothing of Henry James's that did suggest the manner of a
scholar; but why should a scholar limit himself to empty and endless
sentimentalities? I will not taunt him with any of the old taunts--why does
he not write complicated stories? Why does he not complete his stories? Let
all this be waived. I will ask him only why he always avoids decisive
action? Why does a woman never say "I will"? Why does a woman never leave
the house with her lover? Why does a man never kill a man? Why does a man
never kill himself? Why is nothing ever accomplished? In real life murder,
adultery, and suicide are of common occurrence; but Mr. James's people live
in a calm, sad, and very polite twilight of volition. Suicide or adultery
has happened before the story begins, suicide or adultery happens some
years hence, when the characters have left the stage, but bang in front of
the reader nothing happens. The suppression or maintenance of story in a
novel is a matter of personal taste; some prefer character-drawing to
adventures, some adventures to character-drawing; that you cannot have both
at once I take to be a self-evident proposition; so when Mr. Lang says, "I
like adventures," I say, "Oh, do you?" as I might to a man who says "I like
sherry," and no doubt when I say I like character-drawing, Mr. Lang says,
"Oh, do you?" as he might to a man who says, "I like port." But Mr. James
and I are agreed on essentials, we prefer character-drawing to adventures.
One, two, or even three determining actions are not antagonistic to
character-drawing, the practice of Balzac, and Flaubert, and Thackeray
prove that. Is Mr. James of the same mind as the poet Verlaine--
"La nuance, pas la couleur,
Seulement la nuance,
. . . .
Tout le reste est littérature."
In connection with Henry James I had often heard the name of W.D. Howells.
I bought some three or four of his novels. I found them pretty, very
pretty, but nothing more,--a sort of Ashby Sterry done into very neat
prose. He is vulgar, is refined as Henry James; he is more domestic; girls
with white dresses and virginal looks, languid mammas, mild witticisms,
here, there, and everywhere; a couple of young men, one a little cynical,
the other a little over-shadowed by his love, a strong, bearded man of
fifty in the background; in a word, a Tom Robertson comedy faintly spiced
with American. Henry James went to France and read Tourgueneff. W.D.
Howells stayed at home and read Henry James. Henry James's mind is of a
higher cast and temper; I have no doubt at one time of his life Henry James
said, I will write the moral history of America, as Tourgueneff wrote the
moral history of Russia--he borrowed at first hand, understanding what he
was borrowing. W.D. Howells borrowed at second hand, and without
understanding what he was borrowing. Altogether Mr. James's instincts are
more scholarly. Although his reserve irritates me, and I often regret his
concessions to the prudery of the age,--no, not of the age but of
librarians,--I cannot but feel that his concessions, for I suppose I must
call them concessions, are to a certain extent self-imposed, regretfully,
perhaps ... somewhat in this fashion--"True, that I live in an age not very
favourable to artistic production, but the art of an age is the spirit of
that age; if I violate the prejudices of the age I shall miss its spirit,
and an art that is not redolent of the spirit of its age is an artificial
flower, perfumeless, or perfumed with the scent of flowers that bloomed
three hundred years ago." Plausible, ingenious, quite in the spirit of Mr.
James's mind; I can almost hear him reason so; nor does the argument
displease me, for it is conceived in a scholarly spirit. Now my conception
of W.D. Howells is quite different--I see him the happy father of a
numerous family; the sun is shining, the girls and boys are playing on the
lawn, they come trooping in to a high tea, and there is dancing in the
evening.
My fat landlady lent me a novel by George Meredith,--"Tragic Comedians"; I
was glad to receive it, for my admiration of his poetry, with which I was
slightly acquainted, was very genuine indeed. "Love in a Valley" is a
beautiful poem, and the "Nuptials of Attila," I read it in the _New
Quarterly Review_ years ago, is very present in my mind, and it is a
pleasure to recall its chanting rhythm, and lordly and sombre
refrain--"Make the bed for Attila." I expected, therefore, one of my old
passionate delights from his novels. I was disappointed, painfully
disappointed. But before I say more concerning Mr. Meredith, I will admit
at once frankly and fearlessly, that I am not a competent critic, because
emotionally I do not understand him, and all except an emotional
understanding is worthless in art. I do not make this admission because I
am intimidated by the weight and height of the critical authority with
which I am overshadowed, but from a certain sense, of which I am as
distinctly conscious, viz., that the author is, how shall I put it? the
French would say "quelqu'un," that expresses what I would say in English. I
remember, too, that although a man may be able to understand anything, that
there must be some modes of thoughts and attitudes of mind which we are so
naturally antagonistic to, so entirely out of sympathy with, that we are in
no true sense critics of them. Such are the thoughts that come to me when I
read Mr. George Meredith. I try to console myself with such reflections,
and then I break forth, and crying passionately:--jerks, wire splintered
wood. In Balzac, which I know by heart, in Shakespeare, which I have just
begun to love, I find words deeply impregnated with the savour of life; but
in George Meredith there is nothing but crackjaw sentences, empty and
unpleasant in the mouth as sterile nuts. I could select hundreds of phrases
which Mr. Meredith would probably call epigrams, and I would defy anyone to
say they were wise, graceful or witty. I do not know any book more tedious
than "Tragic Comedians," more pretentious, more blatant; it struts and
screams, stupid in all its gaud and absurdity as a cockatoo. More than
fifty pages I could not read.
How, I asked myself, could the man who wrote the "Nuptials of Attila" write
this? but my soul returned no answer, and I listened as one in a hollow
mountain side. My opinion of George Meredith never ceases to puzzle me. He
is of the north, I am of the south. Carlyle, Mr. Robert Browning, and
George Meredith are the three essentially northern writers; in them there
is nothing of Latin sensuality and subtlety.
I took up "Rhoda Fleming." I found some exquisite bits of description in
it, but I heartily wished them in verse, they were motives for poems; and
there was some wit. I remember a passage very racy indeed, of middle-class
England. Antony, I think is the man's name, describes how he is interrupted
at his tea; a paragraph of seven or ten lines with "I am having my tea, I
am at my tea," running through it for refrain. Then a description of a
lodging-house dinner: "a block of bread on a lonely plate, and potatoes
that looked as if they had committed suicide in their own steam." A little
ponderous and stilted, but undoubtedly witty. I read on until I came to a
young man who fell from his horse, or had been thrown from his horse, I
never knew which, nor did I feel enough interest in the matter to make
research; the young man was put to bed by his mother, and once in bed he
began to talk!... four, five, six, ten pages of talk, and such talk! I can
offer no opinion why Mr. George Meredith committed them to paper; it is not
narrative, it is not witty, nor is it sentimental, nor is it profound. I
read it once; my mind astonished at receiving no sensation cried out like a
child at a milkless breast. I read the pages again ... did I understand?
Yes, I understood every sentence, but they conveyed no idea, they awoke no
emotion in me; it was like sand, arid and uncomfortable. The story is
surprisingly commonplace--the people in it are as lacking in subtlety as
those of a Drury Lane melodrama.
"Diana of the Crossways" I liked better, and had I had absolutely nothing
to do I might have read it to the end. I remember a scene with a rustic--a
rustic who could eat hog a solid hour--that amused me. I remember the
sloppy road in the Weald, and the vague outlines of the South Downs seen in
starlight and mist. But to come to the great question, the test by which
Time will judge us all--the creation of a human being, of a live thing that
we have met with in life before, and meet for the first time in print, and
who abides with us ever after. Into what shadow has not Diana floated?
Where are the magical glimpses of the soul? Do you remember in "Pères et
Enfants," when Tourgueneff is unveiling the woman's, shall I say,
affection, for Bazaroff, or the interest she feels in him? and exposing at
the same time the reasons why she will never marry him.... I wish I had the
book by me, I have not seen it for ten years.
After striving through many pages to put Lucien, whom you would have loved,
whom I would have loved, that divine representation of all that is young
and desirable in man, before the reader, Balzac puts these words in his
mouth in reply to an impatient question by Vautrin, who asks him what he
wants, what he is sighing for, "_D'être célèbre et d'être
aimé_,"--these are soul-waking words, these are Shakespeare words.
Where in "Diana of the Crossways" do we find soul-evoking words like these?
With tiresome repetition we are told that she is beautiful, divine; but I
see her not at all, I don't know if she is dark, tall, or fair; with
tiresome reiteration we are told that she is brilliant, that her
conversation is like a display of fireworks, that the company is dazzled
and overcome; but when she speaks the utterances are grotesque, and I say
that if any one spoke to me in real life as she does in the novel, I should
not doubt for an instant that I was in the company of a lunatic. The
epigrams are never good, they never come within measurable distance of La
Rochefoucauld, Balzac, or even Goncourt. The admirers of Mr. Meredith
constantly deplore their existence, admitting that they destroy all
illusion of life. "When we have translated half of Mr. Meredith's
utterances into possible human speech, then we can enjoy him," says the
_Pall Mall Gazette_. We take our pleasures differently; mine are
spontaneous, and I know nothing about translating the rank smell of a
nettle into the fragrance of a rose, and then enjoying it.
Mr. Meredith's conception of life is crooked, ill-balanced, and out of
tune. What remains?--a certain lustiness. You have seen a big man with
square shoulders and a small head, pushing about in a crowd, he shouts and
works his arms, he seems to be doing a great deal, in reality he is doing
nothing; so Mr. Meredith appears to me, and yet I can only think of him as
an artist; his habit is not slatternly, like those of such literary hodmen
as Mr. David Christie Murray, Mr. Besant, Mr. Buchanan. There is no trace
of the crowd about him. I do not question his right of place, I am out of
sympathy with him, that is all; and I regret that it should be so, for he
is one whose love of art is pure and untainted with commercialism, and if I
may praise it for nought else, I can praise it for this.
I have noticed that if I buy a book because I am advised, or because I
think I ought, my reading is sure to prove sterile. _Il faut que cela,
vient de moi_, as a woman once said to me, speaking of her caprices; a
quotation, a chance word heard in an unexpected quarter. Mr. Hardy and Mr.
Blackmore I read because I had heard that they were distinguished
novelists; neither touched me, I might just as well have bought a daily
paper; neither like nor dislike, a shrug of the shoulders--that is all.
Hardy seems to me to bear about the same relation to George Eliot as Jules
Breton does to Millet--a vulgarisation never offensive, and executed with
ability. The story of an art is always the same,... a succession of
abortive but ever strengthening efforts, a moment of supreme concentration,
a succession of efforts weakening the final extinction. George Eliot
gathered up all previous attempts, and created the English peasant; and
following her peasants there came an endless crowd from Devon, Yorkshire,
and the Midland Counties, and, as they came, they faded into the palest
shadows until at last they appeared in red stockings, high heels and were
lost in the chorus of opera. Mr. Hardy was the first step down. His work is
what dramatic critics would call good, honest, straightforward work. It is
unillumined by a ray of genius, it is slow and somewhat sodden. It reminds
me of an excellent family coach--one of the old sort hung on C springs--a
fat coachman on the box and a footman whose livery was made for his
predecessor. In criticising Mr. Meredith I was out of sympathy with my
author, ill at ease, angry, puzzled; but with Mr. Hardy I am on quite
different terms, I am as familiar with him as with the old pair of trousers
I put on when I sit down to write; I know all about his aims, his methods;
I know what has been done in that line, and what can be done.
I have heard that Mr. Hardy is country bred, but I should not have
discovered this from his writings. They read to me more like a report, yes,
a report,--a conscientious, well-done report, executed by a thoroughly
efficient writer sent down by one of the daily papers. Nowhere do I find
selection, everything is reported, dialogues and descriptions. Take for
instance the long evening talk between the farm people when Oak is seeking
employment. It is not the absolute and literal transcript from nature after
the manner of Henri Monier; for that it is a little too diluted with Mr.
Hardy's brains, the edges are a little sharpened and pointed, I can see
where the author has been at work filing; on the other hand, it is not
synthesized--the magical word which reveals the past, and through which we
divine the future--is not seized and set triumphantly as it is in "Silas
Marner." The descriptions do not flow out of and form part of the
narrative, but are wedged in, and often awkwardly. We are invited to assist
at a sheep-shearing scene, or at a harvest supper, because these scenes are
not to be found in the works of George Eliot, because the reader is
supposed to be interested in such things, because Mr. Hardy is anxious to
show how jolly country he is.
Collegians, when they attempt character-drawing, create monstrosities, but
a practised writer should be able to create men and women capable of moving
through a certain series of situations without shocking in any violent way
the most generally applicable principles of common sense. I say that a
practised writer should be able to do this; that they sometimes do not is a
matter which I will not now go into, suffice it for my purpose if I admit
that Mr. Hardy can do this. In farmer Oak there is nothing to object to;
the conception is logical, the execution is trustworthy; he has legs, arms,
and a heart; but the vital spark that should make him of our flesh and of
our soul is wanting, it is dead water that the sunlight never touches. The
heroine is still more dim, she is stuffy, she is like tow; the rich farmer
is a figure out of any melodrama, Sergeant Troy nearly quickens to life;
now and then the clouds are liquescent, but a real ray of light never
falls.
The story-tellers are no doubt right when they insist on the difficulty of
telling a story. A sequence of events--it does not matter how simple or how
complicated--working up to a logical close, or, shall I say, a close in
which there is a sense of rhythm and inevitableness is always indicative of
genius. Shakespeare affords some magnificent examples, likewise Balzac,
likewise George Eliot, likewise Tourgueneff; the "Oedipus" is, of course,
the crowning and final achievement in the music of sequence and the massy
harmonies of fate. But in contemporary English fiction I marvel, and I am
repeatedly struck by the inability of writers, even of the first-class, to
make an organic whole of their stories. Here, I say, the course is clear,
the way is obvious, but no sooner do we enter on the last chapters than the
story begins to show incipient shiftiness, and soon it doubles back and
turns, growing with every turn weaker like a hare before the hounds. From a
certain directness of construction, from the simple means by which Oak's
ruin is accomplished in the opening chapters, I did not expect that the
story would run hare-hearted in its close, but the moment Troy told his
wife that he never cared for her, I suspected something was wrong; when he
went down to bathe and was carried out by the current I knew the game was
up, and was prepared for anything, even for the final shooting by the rich
farmer, and the marriage with Oak, a conclusion which of course does not
come within the range of literary criticism.
"Lorna Doone" struck me as childishly garrulous, stupidly prolix, swollen
with comments not interesting in themselves and leading to nothing. Mr.
Hardy possesses the power of being able to shape events; he can mould them
to a certain form; that he cannot breathe into them the spirit of life I
have already said, but "Lorna Doone" reminds me of a third-rate Italian
opera, _La Fille du Régiment_, or _Ernani_; it is corrupt with
all the vices of the school, and it does not contain a single passage of
real fervour or force to make us forget the inherent defects of the art of
which it is a poor specimen. Wagner made the discovery, not a very
wonderful one after all when we think, that an opera had much better be
melody from end to end. The realistic school following on Wagner's
footsteps discovered that a novel had much better be all narrative--an
uninterrupted flow of narrative. Description is narrative, analysis of
character is narrative, dialogue is narrative; the form is ceaselessly
changing, but the melody of narration is never interrupted.
But the reading of "Lorna Doone" calls to my mind, and very vividly, an
original artistic principle of which English romance writers are either
strangely ignorant or neglectful, viz., that the sublimation of the
_dramatis personae_ and the deeds in which they are involved must
correspond, and their relationship should remain unimpaired. Turner's
"Carthage" is nature transposed and wonderfully modified. Some of the
passages of light and shade there--those of the balustrade--are fugues, and
there his art is allied to Bach in sonority and beautiful combination.
Turner knew that a branch hung across the sun looked at separately was
black, but he painted it light to maintain the equipoise of atmosphere. In
the novel the characters are the voice, the deeds are the orchestra. But
the English novelist takes 'Arry and 'Arriet, and without question allows
them to achieve deeds; nor does he hesitate to pass them into the realms of
the supernatural. Such violation of the first principles of narration is
never to be met with in the elder writers. Achilles stands as tall as Troy,
Merlin is as old and as wise as the world. Rhythm and poetical expression
are essential attributes of dramatic genius, but the original sign of race
and mission is an instinctive modulation of man with the deeds he attempts
or achieves. The man and the deed must be cognate and equal, and the
melodic balance and blending are what first separate Homer and Hugo from
the fabricators of singular adventures. In Scott leather jerkins, swords,
horses, mountains, and castles harmonise completely and fully with food,
fighting, words, and vision of life; the chords are simple as Handel's, but
they are as perfect. Lytton's work, although as vulgar as Verdi's is, in
much the same fashion, sustained by a natural sense of formal harmony; but
all that follows is decadent,--an admixture of romance and realism, the
exaggerations of Hugo and the homeliness of Trollope; a litter of ancient
elements in a state of decomposition.
The spiritual analysis of Balzac equals the triumphant imagination of
Shakespeare, and by different roads they reach the same height of tragic
awe, but when improbability, which in these days does duty for imagination,
is mixed with the familiar aspects of life, the result is inchoate and
rhythmless folly, I mean the regular and inevitable alternation and
combination of pa and ma, and dear Annie who lives at Clapham, with the
Mountains of the Moon, and the secret of eternal life; this violation of
the first principles of art--that is to say, of the rhythm of feeling and
proportion, is not possible in France. I ask the reader to recall what was
said on the subject of the Club, Tavern, and Villa. We have a surplus
population of more than two million women, the tradition that chastity is
woman's only virtue still survives, the Tavern and its adjunct Bohemianism
have been suppressed, and the Villa is omnipotent and omnipresent;
tennis-playing, church on Sundays, and suburban hops engender a craving for
excitement for the far away, for the unknown; but the Villa with its
tennis-playing, church on Sundays, and suburban hops will not surrender its
own existence, it must take a part in the heroic deeds that happen in the
Mountains of the Moon; it will have heroism in its own pint pot. Achilles
and Merlin must be replaced by Uncle Jim and an undergraduate; and so the
Villa is the author of "Rider Haggard," "Hugh Conway," "Robert Buchanan,"
and the author of "The House on the Marsh."
I read two books by Mr. Christie Murray, "Joseph's Coat" and "Rainbow
Gold," and one by Messrs. Besant and Rice,--"The Seamy Side." It is
difficult to criticise such work, there is absolutely nothing to say but
that it is as suited to the mental needs of the Villa as the baker's loaves
and the butcher's rounds of beef are to the physical. I do not think that
any such literature is found in any other country. In France some three or
four men produce works of art, the rest of the fiction of the country is
unknown to men of letters. But "Rainbow Gold," I take the best of the
three, is not bad as a second-rate French novel is bad; it is excellent as
all that is straightforward is excellent; and it is surprising to find that
work can be so good, and at the same time so devoid of artistic charm. That
such a thing should be is one of the miracles of the Villa.
I have heard that Mr. Besant is an artist in the "Chaplain of the Fleet"
and other novels, but this is not possible. The artist shows what he is
going to do the moment he puts pen to paper, or brush to canvas; he
improves on his first attempts, that is all; and I found "The Seamy Side"
so very common, that I cannot believe for a moment that its author or
authors could write a line that would interest me.
Mr. Robert Buchanan is a type of artist that every age produces
unfailingly: Catulle Mendès is his counterpart in France,--but the pallid
Portuguese Jew with his Christ-like face, and his fascinating fervour is
more interesting than the spectacled Scotchman. Both began with volumes of
excellent but characterless verse, and loud outcries about the dignity of
art, and both have--well ... Mr. Robert Buchanan has collaborated with Gus
Harris, and written the programme poetry for the Vaudeville Theatre; he has
written a novel, the less said about which the better--he has attacked men
whose shoestrings he is not fit to tie, and having failed to injure them,
he retracted all he said, and launched forth into slimy benedictions. He
took Fielding's masterpiece, degraded it, and debased it; he wrote to the
papers that Fielding was a genius in spite of his coarseness, thereby
inferring that he was a much greater genius since he had sojourned in this
Scotch house of literary ill-fame. Clarville, the author of "Madame Angot,"
transformed Madame Marneff into a virtuous woman; but he did not write to
the papers to say that Balzac owed him a debt of gratitude on that account.
The star of Miss Braddon has finally set in the obscure regions of
servantgalism; Ouida and Rhoda Broughton continue to rewrite the books they
wrote ten years ago; Mrs. Lynn Linton I have not read. The "Story of an
African Farm" was pressed upon me. I found it sincere and youthful,
disjointed but well-written; descriptions of sand-hills and ostriches
sandwiched with doubts concerning a future state, and convictions regarding
the moral and physical superiority of women: but of art nothing; that is to
say, art as I understand it,--rhythmical sequence of events described with
rhythmical sequence of phrase.
I read the "Story of Elizabeth" by Miss Thackeray. It came upon me with all
the fresh and fair naturalness of a garden full of lilacs and blue sky, and
I thought of Hardy, Blackmore, Murray, and Besant as of great warehouses
where everything might be had, and even if the article required were not in
stock it could be supplied in a few days at latest. The exquisite little
descriptions, full of air, colour, lightness, grace; the French life seen
with such sweet English eyes; the sweet little descriptions all so gently
evocative. "What a tranquil little kitchen it was, with a glimpse of the
courtyard outside, and the cocks and hens, and the poplar trees waving in
the sunshine, and the old woman sitting in her white cap busy at her homely
work." Into many wearisome pages these simple lines have since been
expanded, without affecting the beauty of the original. "Will Dampier
turned his broad back and looked out of the window. There was a moment's
silence. They could hear the tinkling of bells, the whistling of the sea,
the voices of the men calling to each other in the port, the sunshine
streamed in; Elly was standing in it, and seemed gilt with a golden
background. She ought to have held a palm in her hand, poor little martyr!"
There is sweet wisdom in this book, wisdom that is eternal, being simple;
and near may not come the ugliness of positivism, nor the horror of
pessimism, nor the profound greyness of Hegelism, but merely the genial
love and reverence of a beautiful-minded woman.
Such charms as these necessitate certain defects, I should say limitations.
Vital creation of character is not possible to Miss Thackeray, but I do not
rail against beautiful water-colour indications of balconies, vases,
gardens, fields, and harvesters because they have not the fervid glow and
passionate force of Titian's Ariadne; Miss Thackeray cannot give us a
Maggie Tulliver, and all the many profound modulations of that
Beethoven-like countryside: the pine wood and the cripple; this aunt's
linen presses, and that one's economies; the boy going forth to conquer the
world, the girl remaining at home to conquer herself; the mighty river
holding the fate of all, playing and dallying with it for a while, and
bearing it on at last to final and magnificent extinction. That sense of
the inevitable which had the Greek dramatists wholly, which had George
Eliot sufficiently, that rhythmical progression of events, rhythm and
inevitableness (two words for one and the same thing) is not there. Elly's
golden head, the back-ground of austere French Protestants, is sketched
with a flowing water-colour brush, I do not know if it is true, but true or
false in reality, it is true in art. But the jarring dissonance of her
marriage is inadmissible; it cannot be led up to by chords no matter how
ingenious, the passage, the attempts from one key to the other, is
impossible; the true end is the ruin, by death or lingering life, of Elly
and the remorse of the mother.
One of the few writers of fiction who seems to me to possess an ear for the
music of events is Miss Margaret Veley. Her first novel, "For Percival,"
although diffuse, although it occasionally flowed into by-channels and
lingered in stagnating pools, was informed and held together, even at ends
the most twisted and broken, by that sense of rhythmic progression which is
so dear to me, and which was afterwards so splendidly developed in
"Damocles." Pale, painted with grey and opaline tints of morning passes the
grand figure of Rachel Conway, a victim chosen for her beauty, and crowned
with flowers of sacrifice. She has not forgotten the face of the maniac,
and it comes back to her in its awful lines and lights when she finds
herself rich and loved by the man whom she loves. The catastrophe is a
double one. Now she knows she is accursed, and that her duty is to trample
out her love. Unborn generations cry to her. The wrath and the lamentation
of the chorus of the Greek singer, the intoning voices of the next-of-kin,
the pathetic responses of voices far in the depths of ante-natal night,
these the modern novelist, playing on an inferior instrument, may suggest,
but cannot give: but here the suggestion is so perfect that we cease to
yearn for the real music, as, reading from a score, we are satisfied with
the flute and bassoons that play so faultlessly in soundless dots.
There is neither hesitation nor doubt. Rachel Conway puts her dreams away,
she will henceforth walk in a sad and shady path; her interests are centred
in the child of the man she loves, and as she looks for a last time on the
cloud of trees, glorious and waving green in the sunset that encircles her
home, her sorrow swells once again to passion, and, we know, for the last
time.
The mechanical construction of M. Scribe I had learnt from M. Duval; the
naturalistic school had taught me to scorn tricks, and to rely on the
action of the sentiments rather than on extraneous aid for the bringing
about of a _dénouement_; and I thought of all this as I read
"Disenchantment" by Miss Mabel Robinson, and it occurred to me that my
knowledge would prove valuable when my turn came to write a novel, for the
_mise en place_, the setting forth of this story, seemed to me so
loose, that much of its strength had dribbled away before it had rightly
begun. But the figure of the Irish politician I accept without reserve. It
seems to me grand and mighty in its sorrowfulness. The tall, dark-eyed,
beautiful Celt, attainted in blood and brain by generations of famine and
drink, alternating with the fervid sensuousness of the girl, her Saxon
sense of right alternating with the Celt's hereditary sense of revenge, his
dreamy patriotism, his facile platitudes, his acceptance of literature as a
sort of bread basket, his knowledge that he is not great nor strong, and
can do nothing in the world but love his country; and as he passes his
thirtieth year the waxing strong of the disease, nervous disease complex
and torturous; to him drink is at once life and death; an article is bread,
and to calm him and collect what remains of weak, scattered thought, he
must drink. The woman cannot understand that caste and race separate them;
and the damp air of spent desire, and the grey and falling leaves of her
illusions fill her life's sky. Nor is there any hope for her until the
husband unties the awful knot by suicide.
I will state frankly that Mr. R.L. Stevenson never wrote a line that failed
to delight me; but he never wrote a book. You arrive at a strangely just
estimate of a writer's worth by the mere question: "What is he the author
of?" for every writer whose work is destined to live is the author of one
book that outshines the other, and, in popular imagination, epitomises his
talent and position. What is Shakespeare the author of? What is Milton the
author of? What is Fielding the author of? What is Byron the author of?
What is Carlyle the author of? What is Thackeray the author of? What is
Zola the author of? What is Mr. Swinburne the author of? Mr. Stevenson is
the author of shall I say, "Treasure Island," or what?
I think of Mr. Stevenson as a consumptive youth weaving garlands of sad
flowers with pale, weak hands, or leaning to a large plate-glass window,
and scratching thereon exquisite profiles with a diamond pencil.
I do not care to speak of great ideas, for I am unable to see how an idea
can exist, at all events can be great out of language; an allusion to Mr.
Stevenson's verbal expression will perhaps make my meaning clear. His
periods are fresh and bright, rhythmical in sound, and perfect realizations
of their sense; in reading you often think that never before was such
definiteness united to such poetry of expression; every page and every
sentence rings of its individuality. Mr. Stevenson's style is over smart,
well-dressed, shall I say, like a young man walking in the Burlington
Arcade? Yes, I will say so, but, I will add, the most gentlemanly young man
that ever walked in the Burlington. Mr. Stevenson is competent to
understand any thought that might be presented to him, but if he were to
use it, it would instantly become neat, sharp, ornamental, light, and
graceful; and it would lose all its original richness and harmony. It is
not Mr. Stevenson's brain that prevents him from being a thinker, but his
style.
Another thing that strikes me in thinking of Stevenson (I pass over his
direct indebtedness to Edgar Poe, and his constant appropriation of his
methods), is the unsuitableness of the special characteristics of his
talent to the age he lives in. He wastes in his limitations, and his talent
is vented in prettinesses of style. In speaking of Mr. Henry James, I said
that, although he had conceded much to the foolish, false, and hypocritical
taste of the time, the concessions he made had in little or nothing
impaired his talent. The very opposite seems to me the case with Mr.
Stevenson. For if any man living in this end of the century needed freedom
of expression for the distinct development of his genius, that man is R.L.
Stevenson. He who runs may read, and he with any knowledge of literature
will, before I have written the words, have imagined Mr. Stevenson writing
in the age of Elizabeth or Anne.
Turn your platitudes prettily, but write no word that could offend the
chaste mind of the young girl who has spent her morning reading the Colin
Campbell divorce case; so says the age we live in. The penny paper that may
be bought everywhere, that is allowed to lie on every table, prints seven
or eight columns of filth, for no reason except that the public likes to
read filth; the poet and novelist must emasculate and destroy their work
because.... Who shall come forward and make answer? Oh, vile, filthy, and
hypocritical century, I at least scorn you.
But this is not a course of literature but the story of the artistic
development of me, Edward Dayne; so I will tarry no longer with mere
criticism, but go direct to the book to which I owe the last temple in my
soul--"Marius the Epicurean." Well I remember when I read the opening
lines, and how they came upon me sweetly as the flowing breath of a bright
spring. I knew that I was awakened a fourth time, that a fourth vision of
life was to be given to me. Shelley had revealed to me the unimagined skies
where the spirit sings of light and grace; Gautier had shown me how
extravagantly beautiful is the visible world and how divine is the rage of
the flesh; and with Balzac I had descended circle by circle into the nether
world of the soul, and watched its afflictions. Then there were minor
awakenings. Zola had enchanted me with decoration and inebriated me with
theory; Flaubert had astonished with the wonderful delicacy and subtlety of
his workmanship; Goncourt's brilliant adjectival effects had captivated me
for a time, but all these impulses were crumbling into dust, these
aspirations were etiolated, sickly as faces grown old in gaslight.
I had not thought of the simple and unaffected joy of the heart of natural
things; the colour of the open air, the many forms of the country, the
birds flying,--that one making for the sea; the abandoned boat, the dwarf
roses and the wild lavender; nor had I thought of the beauty of mildness in
life, and how by a certain avoidance of the wilfully passionate, and the
surely ugly, we may secure an aspect of temporal life which is abiding and
soul-sufficing. A new dawn was in my brain, fresh and fair, full of wide
temples and studious hours, and the lurking fragrance of incense; that such
a vision of life was possible I had no suspicion, and it came upon me
almost with the same strength, almost as intensely, as that divine song of
the flesh,--Mademoiselle de Maupin.
Certainly, in my mind, these books will be always intimately associated;
and when a few adventitious points of difference be forgotten, it is
interesting to note how firm is the alliance, and how cognate and co-equal
the sympathies on which it is based; the same glad worship of the visible
world, and the same incurable belief that the beauty of material things is
sufficient for all the needs of life. Mr. Pater can join hands with Gautier
in saying--_je trouve la terre aussi belle que le ciel, et je pense que
la correction de la forme est la vertu_. And I too join issue; I too
love the great pagan world, its bloodshed, its slaves, its injustice, its
loathing of all that is feeble.
But "Marius the Epicurean" was more to me than a mere emotional influence,
precious and rare though that may be, for this book was the first in
English prose I had come across that procured for me any genuine pleasure
in the language itself, in the combination of words for silver or gold
chime, and unconventional cadence, and for all those lurking half-meanings,
and that evanescent suggestion, like the odour of dead roses, that words
retain to the last of other times and elder usage. Until I read "Marius"
the English language (English prose) was to me what French must be to the
majority of English readers. I read for the sense and that was all; the
language itself seemed to me coarse and plain, and awoke in me neither
aesthetic emotion nor even interest. "Marius" was the stepping-stone that
carried me across the channel into the genius of my own tongue. The
translation was not too abrupt; I found a constant and careful invocation
of meaning that was a little aside of the common comprehension, and also a
sweet depravity of ear for unexpected falls of phrase, and of eye for the
less observed depths of colours, which although new was a sort of sequel to
the education I had chosen, and a continuance of it in foreign, but not
wholly unfamiliar medium, and having saturated myself with Pater, the
passage to De Quincey was easy. He, too, was a Latin in manner and in
temper of mind; but he was truly English, and through him I passed to the
study of the Elizabethan dramatists, the real literature of my race, and
washed myself clean.