convictions, has, in one of those pleasant papers, “At the Sign of the
Ship,” given utterance to a sentiment so shockingly at variance with
the prevalent theory of fiction, that the reader is divided between
admiration for his boldness and a vague surprise that a man should
speak such words and live. There is a cheerfulness, too, about Mr.
Lang’s heterodoxy, a smiling ignorance of his own transgression, that
warms our hearts and weakens our upbraiding. “The old simple scheme,”
he says, “in which you had a real unmitigated villain, a heroine as
pure as snow or flame, and a crowd of good ordinary people, gave us
more agreeable reading, and reading not, I think, more remote from
truth, than is to be found in Dr. Ibsen’s _Ghosts_ or in his _Pillars
of Society_.” Now to support such a statement would be unscrupulous; to
condemn it, dispiriting; but I wonder if the “real unmitigated villain”
is quite so simple a product as Mr. Lang appears to imagine. May not his
absence from literature be owing as much to the limitations as to the
disregard of modern realists? Is he, in truth, so easily drawn as to be
unworthy of their subtle and discriminating pens? Is Sir Giles Overreach
a mere child’s toy in comparison with Consul Bernick, and is Brian de
Bois-Guilbert unworthy to rank with Johann Tönnesen and Oswald Alving?
A villain must be a thing of power, handled with delicacy and grace. He
must be wicked enough to excite our aversion, strong enough to arouse our
fear, human enough to awaken some transient gleam of sympathy. We must
triumph in his downfall, yet not barbarously nor with contempt, and the
close of his career must be in harmony with all its previous development.
Mrs. Pennell has told us the story of some old Venetian witches, who
were converted from their dark ways, and taught the charms of peace and
godliness; but who would desire or credit the conversion of a witch? The
potency of evil lies within her to the end; and when, by a few muttered
words, she can raise a hell storm on the ocean; when her eye’s dim fire
can wither the strength of her enemy; or when, with a lock of hair and
a bit of wax, she can consume him with torturing pain, who will welcome
her neighborly advances? The proper and artistic end of a witch is at
the stake—blue flames curling up to heaven, and a handful of gray ashes
scattered to the wind; or, by the working of a stronger spell, she may
be stiffened into stone, and doomed to stand forever on some desolate
moor, where, underneath starless skies, her evil feet have strayed; or
perhaps that huge black cat, her sinister attendant, has completed his
ninth year of servitude to nine successive witches, and, by virtue of
the power granted him at their expiration, he may whisk her off bodily
on St. John’s Eve, to offer her a living holocaust to Satan. These are
possibilities in strict sympathy with her character and history, if not
with her inclinations; the last is in especial accordance with sound
Italian tradition, and all reveal what Heine calls “the melancholy
pleasurable awe, the dark sweet horror, of Mediæval ghost fancies.” But a
converted witch, walking demurely to vesper service, gossiping with good,
garrulous old women on the doorstep, or holding an innocent child within
her withered arms—the very thought repels us instinctively, and fires us
with a sharp mistrust. Have a care, you foolish young mother, and snatch
your baby to your breast; for even now he waxes paler and paler, as those
cold, malignant heart-throbs chill his breath, and wear his little life
away.
The final disposition of a mere earthly villain should likewise be a
matter of artistic necessity, not a harsh trampling of arrogant virtue
upon prostrate vice. There is no mistake so fatal as that of injustice
to the evil element of a novel or a play. We all know how, when Portia
pushes her triumphant casuistry a step too far, our sympathies veer
obstinately around to Shylock’s side, and refuse to be readjusted before
the curtain falls. Perhaps Shakespeare intended this,—who knows?—and
threw in Gratiano’s last jeers to madden, not the usurer, but the
audience. Or perhaps in Elizabeth’s day, as in King John’s, people had
not grown so finical about the feelings of a Jew, and it is only the
chilly tolerance of our enlightened age which prevents our enjoying
as we should the devout prejudices of our ancestors. But when, in a
modern novel, guiltless of all this picturesque superstition, we see the
sinner treated with a narrow, nagging sort of severity, our unregenerate
nature rebels stoutly against such a manifest lack of balance. Not long
ago, I chanced to read a story which actually dared to have a villain
for a hero, and I promised myself much pleasure from so original and
venturesome a step. But how did the very popular authoress treat her
own creation? In the first place, when rescued from a truly feminine
haze of hints, and dark whispers, and unsubstantiated innuendoes, the
hapless man is proven guilty of but three offences: he takes opium, he
ejects his tenants, and he tries, not very successfully, to mesmerize his
wife. Now, opium-eating is a vice, the punishment for which is borne by
the offender, and which merits as much pity as contempt; rack-renting is
an unpardonable, but not at all a thrilling misdemeanor; and, in these
days of psychological research, there are many excellent men who would
not shrink from making hypnotic experiments on their grandmothers. In
consequence, however, of such feeble atrocities, the hero-villain is
subjected to a species of outlawry at the hands of all the good people in
the book. His virtuous cousin makes open and highly honorable love to his
virtuous wife, who responds with hearty alacrity. His virtuous cousin’s
still more virtuous brother comes within an ace of murdering him in cold
blood, through motives of the purest philanthropy. Finally, one of these
virtuous young men lets loose on him his family ghost, deliberately
unsealing the spectral abiding-place; and, while the virtuous wife clings
around the virtuous cousin’s neck, and forbids him tenderly to go to the
rescue, the accommodating spirit—who seems to have no sort of loyalty
to the connection—slays the villain at his own doorstep, and leaves
the coast free for a second marriage service. Practically, the device
is an admirable one, because, when the ghost retires once more to his
seclusion, nobody can well be convicted of manslaughter, and a great deal
of scandal is saved. But, artistically, there is something repellent in
this open and shameless persecution; in three persons and a hobgoblin
conspiring against one poor man. Our sentiment is diverted from its
proper channel, our emotions are manifestly incorrect.
“How are you to get up the sympathies of the audience in a legitimate
manner,” asks Mr. Vincent Crummles, “if there isn’t a little man
contending against a big one?—unless there’s at least five to one, and
we haven’t hands enough for that business in our company.” What would
the noble-hearted Mr. Crummles have thought of reversing this natural
order of things, and declaring victory for the multitude? How would
human nature, in the provinces, have supported so novel and hazardous an
innovation? Why should human nature, out of the provinces, be assumed
to have outgrown its simple, chivalrous instincts? A good, strong,
designing, despicable villain, or even villainess, a fair start, a stout
fight, an artistic overthrow, and triumphant Virtue smiling modestly
beneath her orange blossoms—shall we ever be too old and world-worn to
love these old and world-worn things?
A BY-WAY IN FICTION
Now and then the wearied and worn novel-reader, sick unto death of books
about people’s beliefs and disbeliefs, their conscientious scruples and
prejudices, their unique aspirations and misgivings, their cumbersome
vices and virtues, is recompensed for much suffering by an hour of placid
but genuine enjoyment. He picks up rather dubiously a little, unknown
volume, and, behold! the writer thereof takes him gently by the hand, and
leads him straightway into a fair country, where the sun is shining, and
men and women smile kindly on him, and nobody talks unorthodox theology,
and everybody seems disposed to allow everybody else the privilege of
being nappy in his own way. When to these admirable qualities are added
humor and an atmosphere of appreciative cultivation, the novel-reader
feels indeed that his lines have been cast in pleasant places, and he is
disposed to linger along in a very contented and uncritical frame of mind.
There has come to us recently a new and beautiful edition of such
a little book, published in America, but born of Italian soil and
sunshine. It has for a title _The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani, together
with Frequent Allusions to the Prorege of Arcopia_, which, is rather an
unmerciful string of words to describe so gay and easy-going a narrative.
It is the first full-fledged literary venture of its author, Mr. Henry
Fuller, also known as Stanton Page, whose New England grandfather was
a cousin of Margaret Fuller’s. The story, which is not really a story
at all, but a series of detached episodes, rambles backward and forward
in such a bewildering fashion that the chapters might be all rearranged
without materially disturbing its slender thread of continuity. It is
equally guiltless of plot or purpose, of dramatic incidents or realistic
details. The Chevalier may be found now in Pisa, now in Venice, now in
Ostia or Ravenna, never driven by the vulgar spur of necessity, always
wandering of his own free and idle will. He is accompanied sometimes
by his friend Hors-Concours, an Italianized Frenchman from Savoy, and
sometimes by the Prorege of Arcopia, the delightful Prorege, who gives
to the book its best and most distinctive flavor. At once dignified
and urbane, conscious of his exalted position, and convinced that he
fills it with equal grace and correctness, this superb official moves
through the tale in an atmosphere of autocratic reserve, tempered with
the most delicate courtesy. His ministerial views are as unalterable as
the rocks, and as sound; but he listens to the democratic ravings of his
young American _protégé_, Occident, with the good-humored indulgence one
accords to a beloved and precocious child. It must be confessed that
Occident fails to make his arguments very convincing, or to impress his
own personality with any degree of clearness upon the reader’s mind.
He is at best only a convenient listener to the Prorege’s delicious
theories; he is of real value only because the Prorege condescends to
talk to him. When he ventures upon a truly American remark about trying
“to find the time” for something, his august friend reminds him, with
dignity, that “the only man to be envied was the man whose time was in
some degree his own, and the most pitiable object that civilization could
offer was the rich man a slave to his chronometer. Too much had been
said about the dignity of labor, and not enough about the preciousness
of leisure. Civilization in its last outcome was heavily in the debt
of leisure, and the success of any society worth considering was to be
estimated largely by the use to which its _fortunati_ had put their spare
moments. He wrung from Occident the confession that, in the great land
of which Shelby County may be called the centre, activity, considered of
itself and quite apart from its objects and its results, was regarded as
a very meritorious thing; and he learned that the bare figure of leisure,
when exposed to the public gaze, was expected to be decorously draped
in the garment of strenuous endeavor. People were supposed to appear
busy, even if they were not. This gave the Prorege a text for a little
disquisition on the difference between leisure and idleness.”
In fact, a beautiful, cultivated, polished, unmarred, well-spent
inactivity is the keynote of this serene little book; and to understand
its charm and meaning we have but to follow the Chevalier, in the second
chapter, to Pisa—to Pisa the restful, where “life is not strongly
accentuated by positive happenings, where incident is unusual, and drama
quite unknown.” The Chevalier’s windows, we are told, faced the north,
and he sat and looked out of them rather more than active persons would
deem pleasant or profitable. It even happened that the Prorege remarked
this comfortable habit, and demanded of his friend what it was he looked
at, inasmuch as there seemed to be no appreciable change from day to
day. To which the Chevalier, in whom “Quietism was pretty successfully
secularized; who knew how to sit still, and occasionally enjoyed doing
so,” replied with great acumen that what _had_ gone on was quite as
interesting to him as what was going on, and that nothing was more
gratifying, from his point of view, than that very absence of change
which had taken his Excellency’s attention—since any change would be a
change for the worse.
He is destined, as it chances, to prove the truth of his own theories,
for it is in Pisa, of all places, that he is tempted to throw aside
for once his _rôle_ of contemplative philosopher, and to assume that
of an active philanthropist, with very disastrous results. There is an
admirable satire in the description of the two friends, Pensieri-Vani
and Hors-Concours, gravely plotting to insure the success of an operatic
_débutante_, to bring her out in the sunshine of their generous
patronage, and with the direct approval of the Prorege himself, who
kindly consents to sit in the front of a middle box, and to wear a round
half-dozen of his most esteemed decorations. Unhappily, an Italian
audience does not like to have its enthusiasm expressed for it, even
by such noble and consummate critics. As each well-arranged device of
flowers or love-birds in a gilded cage is handed decorously forward, the
house grows colder and more quizzical, until the _débutante_ sees herself
on the extreme verge of failure, and, putting forth all her powers in one
appealing effort, she triumphs by dint of sheer pluck and ability over
the fatal kindness of her friends. The poor Chevalier, who has in the
meantime left the theatre with many bitter self-communings, receives his
lesson in a spirit of touching humility, recognizing at once his manifest
limitations. “He perceived that he was less fitted to play the part of
special providence than he had previously supposed; and he brought from
this experience the immeasurable consolation that comes from knowing that
very frequently in this sadly twisted world, things, if only left to
their own courses, have a way of coming out right in the end.”
The Pisan episode, the delicious journey of the Prorege and Pensieri-Vani
in search of the “Madonna Incognita,” a mysterious and illusive
Perugino which turns out, after all, to be a Sodoma, and the memorable
excursion to Ostia, are the finest and best-told incidents in the book.
The story of the Iron Pot is too broadly farcical, too Pickwickian in
its character, to be in harmony with the rest of the narrative; the
Contessa’s fête at Tusculum is so lightly sketched as to be absolutely
tantalizing; and the practical jokes which that lady and the Prorege
delight in playing upon one another are hardly as subtle and acute as
we would like to find them. Indeed, the Prorege’s conduct on board his
own yacht is so deeply objectionable that I, for one, positively refuse
to believe he was ever guilty of such raw rudeness. It is not kind or
right in Mr. Fuller to wickedly calumniate this charming and high-bred
gentleman whom he has given us for a friend. Neither is the battle of
the Aldines as thrilling as might be expected, probably because it is
impossible to accept the Duke of Avon and Severn upon any terms whatever.
Occident, the American, is misty and ill-defined; but he does not lack
proportion, only vitality. The English duke is a mistake throughout, a
false note that disturbs the atmosphere of serene good temper which is
the principal attraction of the book; an effort on the author’s part to
be severe and cynical, just when we were congratulating ourselves that
severity and cynicism were things far, far remote from his tolerant and
kindly spirit.
The excursion to Ostia, however, is enough to redeem the whole volume
from any charge of ill-nature; for if the Contessa does seize this
opportunity to play one of her dubious tricks upon the Prorege, it is
not until the little group of friends have proved themselves gentle, and
sympathetic, and full of fine and generous instincts. It is a delicious
bit of description throughout. La Nullaniuna has been crowned the day
before at her Tusculum fête as “the new Corinne,” and naturally feels
that her proper cue is that of “genius-blasted fragility,” overpowered
and shattered by her own impassioned burst of song. With her is the
widowed Princess Altissimi, her cherished friend and foil, a sombre
beauty of a grave and chastened demeanor, against whose dark background
the Contessa, “who was fully as flighty, and capricious, and _théâtrale_
as a woman of semi-genius usually finds it necessary to be, posed and
fidgeted to her heart’s content.” The Prorege, sublimely affable as
ever, Pensieri-Vani, and young Occident, eager and radiant, make up the
party; and after the little inn has furnished them with a noonday meal
of unusual profusion and elegance, they visit the adjoining church at
the instigation of the Princess Altissimi, who is anxious to see what
this solitary and humble temple is like. All that follows is so exquisite
that I must quote it as it stands, in proof of the author’s faculty for
delicate and sympathetic delineation:
“They were met on the threshold by the single priest in charge, a dark
and sallow young man of peasant extraction, whose lonely battle with
midsummer malaria had left him wholly gaunt and enervate. He saluted them
with the deference which the Church sometimes shows to the World, though
he was too true an Italian to be awed, or even embarrassed by their rank;
and he brightened up into something almost like eagerness as he offered
to do the honors of his charge. The Prorege indulgently praised the
wretched frescoes which he exhibited so proudly, and the Contessa called
up a flickering smile of pleasure in his emaciated face as she feigned an
enthusiasm for the paltry fripperies of the high altar. This appreciative
interest emboldened him to suggest their ascent to the gallery, where,
from his manner, the great treasure of the church was to be revealed.
The great treasure was a small cabinet organ, and Occident—triumphing
in the ubiquity of the Western genius, yet somewhat taken back by this
new illustration of the incongruities it sometimes precipitated—read
upon it a name familiar to his earliest years. The priest, who evidently
conceived it an impossibility for his beloved instrument to be guilty
of a discord of any kind whatever, pleaded with a mute but unmistakable
pathos that its long silence might now be ended; and the Princess,
motioning Pensieri-Vani to the keyboard, sang this poor solitary a
churchly little air, with such a noble seriousness and such a gracious
simplicity as to move, not only him, but all the others too. Occident, in
particular, who kept within him quite unimpaired his full share of that
fund of sensibility which is one of the best products of Shelby County,
and who would have given half his millions just then to have been able to
sit down and play the simplest tune, implored Pensieri-Vani in looks, if
not in words, to do for him what he himself was so powerless to compass;
and the Cavaliere, who, like a good and true musician, preferred support
from the lowest quarter to indifference in the highest, kept his place
until their poor host, charmed, warmed through and through, attached
again to the great body of humanity, could scarcely trust himself to
voice his thanks. But the Princess whispered in the Cavaliere’s ear, as
his series of plain and simple little tunes came to an end, that he had
not lost since she last heard him.”
There is nothing finer in the story than this, perhaps nothing quite so
good, though all of Pensieri-Vani’s journeys are fruitful in minute
incidents of a pleasant and picturesque quality. It is curious, too, to
see how the Chevalier, who, except for that catlike scratching about the
Aldines, is the gentlest and least hurtful of men, manifests at times
a positive impatience of his own refined and peaceful civilization, a
breathless envy of sterner races and of stormier days. When he discovers
the tomb of the old Etrurian warrior, he is abashed and humbled at the
thought of that fierce spirit summoned from thirty centuries of darkness
to see the light of this invertebrate and sentimental age; requested to
forget his deep draughts of blood and iron, and to contentedly “munch
the dipped toast of a flabby humanitarianism, and sip the weak tea of
brotherly love.” When he stands in the dim cathedral of Anagni, and
contemplates the tombs of the illustrious Gaetani family, and the mosaics
which blazon forth their former splendors, he shrinks with sudden shame
from the contrast between his feeble, forceless will and the rough daring
of that mighty clan. “The stippling technique of his own day seemed
immeasurably poor and paltry compared with the broad, free, sketchy
touch with which these men dashed off their stirring lives; and he stood
confounded before that fiery and robust intensity which, so gloriously
indifferent to the subtilties of the grammarian, the niceties of the
manicure, and the torments of the supersensitive self-analyst, could fix
its intent upon some definite desire, and move forward unswervingly to
its attainment. Poor moderns! he sighed, who with all our wishing never
reach our end, and with all our thinking never know what we really think.”
These unprofitable musings of the Chevalier’s seem to reflect some
recurring discontent, some restless, unchastened yearnings on the part
of the author himself; but they find no echo in the serene breast of the
Prorege. He at least is as remote from envying the hostilities of the
past as he is innocent of aspiring to the progressiveness of the future.
He is fully alive to the merits of his own thrice-favored land, where
the evil devices of a wrong-headed generation have never been suffered
to penetrate: “Arcopia, the gods be praised, was exempt from the
modern curse of bigness. One chimney was not offensive; but a million
made a London. One refuse-heap could be tolerated; but accumulated
thousands produced a New York. A hundred weavers in their own cottages
meant peaceful industry and home content; a hundred hundred, massed in
one great factory, meant vice and squalor and disorder. Society had
never courted failure or bid for misery more ardently than when it had
accepted an urban industrialism for a basis.... Happily the Arcopian
population, except a fraction that followed the arts and another fraction
that followed the sea, was largely agricultural, and exhibited in high
union the chief virtue and the chief grace of civilized society—order
and picturesqueness. The disturbing and ungracious catch-word,
‘Égalité,’ had never crossed the Arcopian sea; if the Prorege had not
been tolerably sure that his mild sway was to be undisturbed by the
clangor of cantankerous boiler-makers and the bickerings of a bumptious,
shopkeeping _bourgeoisie_, he would never have undertaken the task at
all. He regarded himself as a just, humane, and sympathetic ruler, but
he believed that every man should have his own proper place and fill it.”