difficulties in her path. It is comforting to know that Godfrey himself
comes to grief, a little later, with _The Bard_, and that even the wise
and irreproachable Laura confesses to have been baffled by the lines,
“If aught of oaten stop or pastoral song
May hope, chaste eve, to soothe thy modest ear.”
“Oaten stop” was a mystery, and “eve” she thought—and was none the worse
for thinking it—meant our first great erring mother.
No such wholesome blunders—pleasant to recall in later, weary,
well-instructed days—would be possible for Miss Edgeworth’s little
people if they lived in our age of pitiless enlightenment, when even a
book framed for their especial joy, like _The Children’s Treasury of
English Song_, bristles with marginal notes. Here Rosamond would have
found an explanation of no less than forty-eight words in the _Elegy_,
and would probably have understood it a great deal better, and loved
it a great deal less. It is healthy and natural for a child to be
forcibly attracted by what she does not wholly comprehend; the music of
words appeals very sweetly to childish ears, and their meaning comes
later—comes often after the first keen unconscious pleasure is past.
I once knew a tiny boy who so delighted in Byron’s description of the
dying gladiator that he made me read it to him over, and over, and over
again. He did not know—and I never told him—what a gladiator was. He did
not know that it was a statue, and not a real man, described. He had
not the faintest notion of what was meant by the Danube, or the “Dacian
mother,” or “a Roman holiday.” Historically and geographically, the boy’s
mind was a happy blank. There was nothing intelligent or sagacious in
his enjoyment; only a blissful stirring of the heartstrings by reason of
strong words, and swinging verse, and his own tangle of groping thoughts.
But what child who reads Cowper’s pretty remonstrance to his spaniel,
and the spaniel’s neat reply, wants to be told in a succession of dismal
notes that “allures” means “tempts,” that “remedy” means “cure,” that
“killing time” means “wasting time,” that “destined” means “meant for,”
and that “behest” means “command”? Cowper is one of the simplest of
writers, and the little boys and girls who cannot be trusted unarmed
in his company had better confine their reading to _Robinson Crusoe in
Words of One Syllable_, or to the veracious pages of _Mother Goose_.
But perhaps the day is not far distant when even _Mother Goose_ will
afford food for instruction and a fresh industry for authors, and when
the hapless children of the dawning century will be confronted with a
dozen highly abbreviated and unintelligible notes referring them to some
Icelandic Saga or remote Indian epic for the bloody history of the _Three
Blind Mice_.
CONVERSATION IN NOVELS
A great many years ago, when I was a little girl, I used to know a dear,
placid, sunny-tempered old lady who was stone-deaf and an insatiable
novel-reader. She always came to our house bearing a black bag which held
her jointed ear-trumpet, and she always left it with a borrowed novel
under her arm. As she had reached that comfortable period of life when
a book is as easily forgotten as read, our slender library supplied all
her demands, on the same principle of timely reappearance which makes an
imposing stage army out of two dozen elusive supernumeraries. She had a
theory of selection all her own, and to which she implicitly trusted.
She glanced over a story very rapidly, and if it had too many solid,
page-long paragraphs—reflections, descriptions, etc.—she put it sadly
but steadfastly aside. If, on the contrary, it was well broken up into
conversations, which always impart an air of sprightliness to a book, she
said she was sure she would like it, and carried it off in triumph.
Those were not days, be it remembered, when people wrote fiction for the
sake of introducing discussions. There still lingered in the novelist’s
mind the time-worn heresy that he had a story to tell, and that his
people must act as well as talk. The plot—delightful and obsolete
word!—was then in good repute, and conversation was mainly useful in
helping on the tale, in providing copious love scenes, and, with really
good novelists, in illustrating and developing character. Thomas Love
Peacock’s inimitable dialogues had indeed been long given to the world;
but quiet people of restricted cultivation knew nothing of them, and
would have found it difficult to realize their loss. I can hardly fancy
our dear old friend reading and enjoying the delicious war of words in
_Crotchet Castle_, and I should be grieved to think of her suddenly
confronted with those scraps of sententious wisdom, in which its author
took a truly impish and reprehensible delight. Such a sentiment as “Men
have been found very easily permutable into ites and onians, avians and
arians,” might have sorely puzzled her benign and tranquil soul.
Yet no one can accuse Peacock of writing his novels in order to express
his own personal convictions. The fact is that, after reading them, we
are often very much in the dark as to what his convictions were. We know
he loved old things better than new ones, and wine better than water; and
that is about as far as we can follow him with security. “The intimate
friends of Mr. Peacock may have understood his political sentiments,”
says Lord Houghton disconsolately, “but it is extremely difficult to
discover them from his work.” His people simply talk in character,
sometimes tiresomely, sometimes with unapproachable keenness and humor,
and the scope of his stories hardly permits any near approach to the
fine gradations, the endless variety, of life. Mr. Chainmail never opens
his lips save in praise of feudalism. Mr. Mac Quedy discusses political
economy only. Even the witty Dr. Folliott, “a fellow of infinite jest,”
seldom gets beyond the dual delights of Greek and dining. It is all
vastly piquant and entertaining, but it is leagues away from the casual
conversation, the little leisurely, veracious gossip in which Jane Austen
reveals to us with merciless distinctness the secret springs that move
a human heart. She has scant need to describe her characters, and she
seldom takes that trouble. They betray themselves at every word, and
stand convicted on their own evidence. We are not warned in advance
against Isabella Thorpe. We meet her precisely as Catherine meets her
in the Pump-room at Bath, where the young lady speedily opens her lips,
and acquaints us in the most vivacious manner with her own callous
folly and selfishness. Every syllable uttered by Mrs. Norris is a new
and luminous revelation; we know her just that much better than we did
before she spoke. Even _Sense and Sensibility_, by no means the best of
Miss Austen’s novels, starts with that admirable discussion between Mr.
John Dashwood and his wife on the subject of his mother’s and sisters’
maintenance. It is a short chapter, the second in the book, and at its
close we are masters of the whole situation. We have sounded the feeble
egotism of Mr. Dashwood, and the adroit meanness of his spouse. We know
precisely what degree of assistance Elinor and Marianne are likely to
receive from them. We foresee the relation these characters will bear to
each other during the progress of the story, and we have been shown with
delicious humor how easy and pleasant is the task of self-deception. That
a girl of nineteen should have been capable of such keenly artistic work
is simply one of the miracles of literature; and the more we think about
it, the more miraculous it grows. The best we can do is to bow our heads,
and pay unqualified homage at its shrine.
Some portion of Jane Austen’s ability for portraying character in
conversation is discernible in at least one of her too numerous
successors in the craft. The authoress of _Mademoiselle Ixe_ and
of _Cecilia de Noël_ has already proven to the world how deft and
skilful is her manipulation of that difficult medium, drawing-room
gossip. It would be unjust and absurd to compare her stories, slight
and unsubstantial as pencil sketches, with the finished masterpieces
of English fiction; but there are touches in these modern tales which
convince even a casual reader of splendid possibilities ahead. The
setting of _Mademoiselle Ixe_ is so fine, the lightly drawn English
people who surround the mysterious governess and her still more
mysterious victim are so real, that we cease to ask ourselves obtrusive
questions concerning the purpose and utility of the crime. Better still
are some of the scenes in _Cecilia de Noël_, where Lady Atherley’s serene
and imperturbable good sense tempers the atmosphere, and gives exactly
the proper effect to her husband’s rather long-winded eloquence, to Mrs.
Mostyn’s amiable and cruel evangelism, and to Mrs. Molyneux’s amusing
eccentricities. All these characters have individuality of their own,
and all reveal themselves through the intricacies of conversation, while
occasionally there is a felicitous touch worthy of Jane Austen’s hand;
as when Lady Atherley listens tranquilly to Mrs. Mostyn’s tirade against
the ritualistic curate, and evolves from it the one judicious conclusion
that he is evidently an Austyn of Temple Leigh, and that it would be
desirable to ask him to dinner.
The real drawback to Lanoe Falconer’s art is, not the brevity of
her work, but the fact that her people cannot develop on purely
natural lines, because they are hampered by the terrible necessity of
illustrating a moral; and even in their most unguarded moments the task
assigned them is never wholly laid aside. It is seldom that a good tract
is a good story too, and all the novelist’s skill is powerless to impart
a vivid semblance of truth to characters who have to “talk up” to a given
subject, and teach a given lesson. The inartistic treatment of material
results, curiously enough, in weakening our sense of reality; yet if the
authoress of _Cecilia de Noël_ would consent, for a few short years,
to abandon social and spiritual problems, to concern herself as little
with Nihilism as with eternal punishment, but to be content, as Jane
Austen was content, with telling a story, perhaps that story might be
no unworthy successor of those matchless tales which are our refuge and
solace in these dark days of ethical and unorthodox fiction.
There is a great deal of charming conversation, which is not as well
known as it should be, in the best novels of Anthony Trollope. He gives
his characters plenty of time and opportunity to talk, without forcing
them into arbitrary channels; and occasionally, as with Mrs. Proudie
and Archdeacon Grantly, and Lady Glencora, he persuades them to let us
know exactly what kind of people they are. Above all, there is such
an air of veracity about his causeries that the most skeptical reader
listens to them without a shadow of doubt. Who can ever forget Bertie
Stanhope intimating to Bishop Proudie that he had once thought of being
a prelate himself, or Lady Glencora’s midnight confidences to Alice, or
that crucial contest between Dr. Tempest and Mrs. Proudie! What pleasant
wrangling goes on in Mrs. Dobbs Broughton’s room over the memorable
picture of Jael, when Dalrymple desires his model to lean forward,
throwing her weight on the nail, and Miss Van Siever not unnaturally
suggests that such an action would probably have awakened Sisera before
the murder was done! It all seems idle enough—this careless, lively
talk—but is by no means purposeless. Life is built up of such moments,
and if we are to live with the people in books, it must be through little
confidences on their parts and sympathy on ours; it must be through
unconscious confidences on their parts and unrestricted sympathy on ours.
Now, if a novelist permits his characters to talk at us, the charm of
unconsciousness is gone. If we feel for a moment they are uttering
his sentiments for our approval or conversion, we cease to sympathize
because we cease to believe. There is a clever and suspiciously opportune
conversation in _David Grieve_ between that sorely tried hero and
an intelligent workingwoman in the Champs Elysées upon the relative
merits of l’Union Légale and l’Union Libre. It is, of course, a highly
dispassionate discussion, intended as an appeal to reason and not to
conscience; therefore the old-fashioned arguments of right and wrong, God
and the Church, are carefully omitted. It fits in neatly with David’s
experiences, and places the whole matter in a singularly lucid light
before the reader’s eyes. Its one serious drawback is that we can never
persuade ourselves to believe that it ever took place. The Frenchwoman is
brought so suddenly up to the mark; she says so plainly that which Mrs.
Humphry Ward thinks she ought to say; she is so charmingly unprejudiced
and convincing, that we lose all faith in her before she has spoken a
dozen words. The correctness of her views counts for nothing. “When we
leave out what we don’t like, we can demonstrate most things,” says the
late Rector of Lincoln; and it is at least doubtful whether men and women
ever live virtuous lives on the strength of an argument. Lady Bertram, of
_Mansfield Park_, remarking placidly from her sofa, “Do not act anything
improper, my dears; Sir Thomas would not like it,” may not exert a
powerful influence for good; but who has any shadow of doubt that those
are her very words? They are spoken—as they should be—to her daughters,
and not to us. They are spoken—as they should be—by Lady Bertram, and not
by Jane Austen. Therefore we listen with content, and take comfort in the
thought that, whatever severities may be inflicted on us by the novelists
of the future, it is not in the power of progress to deprive us of the
past.
A SHORT DEFENCE OF VILLAINS
Amid the universal grayness that has settled mistily down upon English
fiction, amid the delicate drab-colored shadings and half-lights which
require, we are told, so fine a skill in handling, the old-fashioned
reader misses, now and then, the vivid coloring of his youth. He misses
the slow unfolding of quite impossible plots, the thrilling incidents
that were wont pleasantly to arouse his apprehension, and, most of all,
two characters once deemed essential to every novel—the hero and the
villain. The heroine is left us still, and her functions are far more
complicated than in the simple days of yore, when little was required of
her save to be beautiful as the stars. She faces now the most intricate
problems of life; and she faces them with conscious self-importance,
a dismal power of analysis, and a robust candor in discussing their
equivocal aspects that would have sent her buried sister blushing to
the wall. There was sometimes a lamentable lack of solid virtue in this
fair dead sister, a pitiful human weakness that led to her undoing;
but she never talked so glibly about sin. As for the hero, he owes his
banishment to the riotous manner in which his masters handled him. Bulwer
strained our endurance and our credulity to the utmost; Disraeli took a
step further, and Lothair, the last of his race, perished amid the cruel
laughter of mankind.
But the villain! Remember what we owe to him in the past. Think how dear
he has become to every rightly constituted mind. And now we are told,
soberly and coldly, by the thin-blooded novelists of the day, that his
absence is one of the crowning triumphs of modern genius, that we have
all grown too discriminating to tolerate in fiction a character who we
feel does not exist in life. Man, we are reminded, is complex, subtle,
unfathomable, made up of good and evil so dexterously intermingled that
no one element predominates coarsely over the rest. He is to be studied
warily and with misgivings, not classified with brutal ease into the
virtuous and bad. It is useless to explain to these analysts that the
pleasure we take in meeting a character in a book does not always depend
on our having known him in the family circle, or encountered him in our
morning paper; though, judged even by this stringent law, the villain
holds his own. Accept Balzac’s rule, and exclude from fiction not only
all which might not really happen, but all which has not really happened
in truth, and we would still have studies enough in total depravity to
darken all the novels in Christendom.
What murder of romance was ever so wanton, so tragic, and so sombre as
that which gave to the Edinburgh highway the name of Gabriel’s Road?
There, in the sweet summer afternoon, fresh with the breath of primroses
and cowslips, the young tutor cut the throats of his two little pupils,
in a mad, inexplicable revenge for their childish tale-bearing. Taken
red-handed in the deed, he met with swift retribution from the furious
populace; and the same hour which witnessed the crime saw his pinioned
corpse dangling from the nearest tree, with the bloody knife hung in
awful mockery around its neck. Thus the murder and its punishment
conspired to make the lonely road a haunted path, ghost-ridden, terrible;
where women shivered and hurried on, and little boys, creepy with fear,
scampered by, breathless, in the dusk; seeing before them always, on
the ragged turf, two small, piteous, blood-smeared bodies, and hearing
ever, overhead, the rattle of the rusty knife against the felon’s bones.
The highway, with its unholy associations discreetly perpetuated in its
name, became an education to the good people of Edinburgh, and taught
them the value of emotions. They must have indistinctly felt what Mr.
Louis Stevenson has so well described, the subtle harmony that unites an
evil deed to its location. “Some places,” he says, “speak distinctly.
Certain dark 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.” And
is all this fine and delicate sentiment, all this skillful playing
with horror and fear, to be lost to fiction, merely because, as De
Quincey reluctantly admits, “the majority of murderers are incorrect
characters”? May we not forgive their general incorrectness for the sake
of their literary and artistic value? Shall Charles Lamb’s testimony
count for nothing, when we remember his comfortable allusion to “kind,
light-hearted Wainwright”? And what shall we think of Edward Fitzgerald,
the gentlest and least hurtful of Englishmen, abandoning himself, in the
clear and genial weather, to the delights of Tacitus, “full of pleasant
atrocity”?
Repentant villains, I must confess, are not greatly to my mind. They
sacrifice their artistic to their ethical value, and must be handled
with consummate skill to escape a suspicious flavor of Sunday-school
romance. The hardened criminal, disarmed and converted by the innocent
attractions of childhood, is a favorite device of poets and story-writers
who cater to the sentiments of maternity; but it is wiser to lay no
stress upon the permanency of such conversions. That swift and sudden
yielding to a gentle emotion or a noble aspiration, which is one of the
undying traits of humanity, attracts us often by the very force of its
evanescence, by the limitations which prove its truth. But the slow,
stern process of regeneration is not an emotional matter, and cannot be
convincingly portrayed with a few facile touches in the last chapter of
a novel. Thackeray knew better than this, when he showed us Becky Sharp
touched and softened by her good little sister-in-law; heartsick now and
then of her own troublesome schemes, yet sinking inevitably lower and
lower through the weight of overmastering instincts and desires. She can
aspire intermittingly to a cleaner life, but she can never hope to reach
it. The simple literature of the past is curiously rich in these pathetic
transient glimpses into fallen nature’s brighter side. Where can we see
depicted with more tenderness and truth the fitful relenting of man’s
brutality, after it has wrought the ruin it devised, than in the fine old
ballad of _Edom O’Gordon_? The young daughter of the house of Rodes is
lowered from the walls of the burning castle, and the cruel Gordon spears
transfix her as she falls. She lies dead, in her budding girlhood, at the
feet of her father’s foe, and his heart is strangely stirred and troubled
when he looks at her childish face.
“O bonnie, bonnie was hir mouth,
And cherry were hir cheiks,
And clear, clear was hir yellow hair,
Whereon the reid bluid dreips.
“Then wi’ his spear he turned hir owre,
O gin hir face was wan!
He sayd, ‘You are the first that eir
I wisht alive again.’
“He turned hir owre and owre again,
O gin hir skin was whyte!
‘I might hae spared that bonnie face
To hae been sum man’s delyte.’”
It is pleasant to know that the ruthless butcher was promptly pursued
and slain for his crime, but it is finer still to realize that brief
moment of bitterness and shame. I have sometimes thought that Rossetti’s
Sister Helen would have gained in artistic beauty if, after those three
days of awful watching were over, after the glowing fragment of wax had
melted in the flames, and her lover’s soul had passed her, sighing on the
wind, there had come to the stricken girl a pang of supreme regret, an
impulse of mad desire to undo the horror she had wrought. The conscience
of a sinner, to use a striking phrase of Mr. Brownell’s, “is doubtless
readjusted rather than repudiated altogether,” and there is an absolute
truthfulness in these sudden relapses into grace.
For this reason, doubtless, I find Mr. Blackmore’s villains, with all
their fascination and power, a shade too heavily, or at least too
monotonously darkened. Parson Chowne is a veritable devil, and it is only
his occasional humor—manifested grimly in deeds, not words—which enables
us to bear the weight of his insupportable wickedness. The introduction
of the naked savages as an outrage to village propriety; the summons to
church, when he has a mind to fire the ricks of his parishioners,—these
are the life-giving touches which mellow down this overwrought figure,
this black and scowling thunderbolt of humanity. Perhaps, also, Mr.
Blackmore, in his laudable desire for picturesqueness, lays too much
stress on the malignant aspect, the appropriate physical condition of
his sinners. From Parson Chowne’s “wondrous unfathomable face,” which
chills every heart with terror, to the “red glare” in Donovan Bulrag’s
eyes, there is always something exceptional about these worthies, to
indicate to all beholders what manner of men they are. One is reminded
of Charles II. protesting, not unnaturally, against the perpetual
swarthiness of stage villains. “We never see a rogue in a play but we
clap on him a black periwig,” complained the dark-skinned monarch,
with a sense of personal grievance in this forced association between
complexion and crime. It was the same subtle inspiration which prompted
Kean to play Shylock in a red wig that suggested to Wilkie Collins Count
Fosco’s admirable size. The passion for embroidered waistcoats and fruit
tarts, the petted white mice, the sympathetic gift of pastry to the
organ-grinder’s monkey, all the little touches which go to build up
this colossal, tender-hearted, remorseless, irresistible scoundrel are
of interest and value to the portrait, but his fat is as essential as
his knavery. It is one of those master strokes of genius which breaks
away from all accepted traditions to build up a new type, perfect and
unapproachable. We can no more imagine a thin Fosco than a melancholy
Dick Swiveller, or a light-hearted Ravenswood.