Nature, which is far more resourceful than logic, has found a way out
of the contradiction between the human need for expression and the
British distaste for personal outbursts. This way is rambling fiction.
When out of shyness, or because they have shocked each other, the
inner man and the outer man are not on speaking terms, loud language
and vehement gestures are incompatible with depth of feeling. What
lies deep must in such a case remain unexpressed, and will seem
inexpressible. A man's heart will be revealed, even to himself, only
in long stretches of constant endeavour and faithful habit: towards
the end of his life he may begin to discern his ruling motives. In
the meantime, however, his fancy may have played at self-revelation;
he may have indulged in day-dreams and romantic transformations of
himself, as boys do; and without pledging his real person too much he
may have made trial of candour, or, if need be, of extravagance, in
imaginary substitutes for himself, thus trying the paces of his inner
man without cheapening his secret feelings or publishing them in common
and second-hand terms. Such a man will talk little about himself; his
opinions and preferences will not be very explicit, but he will privily
nurse and develop them by endless variations played upon them in fancy,
as he reads or perhaps writes a book of fiction by his chimney corner.
He will dream of what Queen Mab makes other people dream.
Romantic fiction is a bypath of expression; it meanders through fields
of possible experience that stretch harmlessly between the highroads of
actual lives, far from the precipices of private and public passions.
The labyrinth is infinite, but the path chosen in it is always
traceable by a sort of Ariadne's thread spun out of the poet's heart.
He means to forget himself and to feign some charming monster in some
picturesque landscape, the more exotic the better; but in doing so he
obeys the dream-impulses of his own soul, and recasts or corrects the
images supplied by his experience. His very extravagances and hectic
concentration of fancy betray him; they manifest his impatience, his
affections, his potentialities; for he paints what he can conceive and
what fascinates him in conceiving it. That which he might have been,
and was not, comforts him. Such a form of self-expression, indirect,
bashful, and profoundly humorous, being play rather than art, is
alone congenial to the British temperament; it is the soul of English
literature. Like English politics and religion, it breathes tolerance,
plasticity, waywardness, infinitude; it is tender and tentative,
shapeless and guileless. Its straggling march forms a vast national
soliloquy, rich in casual touches, in alternatives, in contrasts, in
suspended themes; the plot grows out of the episodes, it is always
being remodelled and always to be continued. The facts, though much
talked of in detail, are never faced as a whole, nor is the soul ever
gathered together to pronounce upon them; the whole procedure is a
subterfuge, and may be easily disparaged by people with other gifts
and aspirations. Intelligence certainly does not dominate it; its
conclusions, when it reaches conclusions, are false, and its methods
cumbrous; and foreigners who adopt them are catching only the vices of
their model. But its virtues are transcendent; if the mind of England
is wrapped in mists, it is touched with ethereal colours; and who shall
measure the benign influences, the lights, the manliness, the comforts,
the moral sanity that have spread from it through the world? Its very
incapacities are full of promise; it closes no doors; it is the one
fountain of kindly liberty on earth. The Englishman's prejudices are so
obviously prejudices as to be almost innocent, and even amiable; his
consecrated formulas (for of course he has them) are frankly inadequate
and half humorous; he would not have you suppose he has said his
all, nor his last word. He is jealous of preserving, far from public
observation or censure, the free play of his potential sentiments;
from thence he will occasionally fetch some scrap of a word, or let
slip some hint of emotion; he will only murmur or suggest or smile his
loves. Everybody dislikes a caricature of himself; and the Englishman
feels (I think justly) that any figure a man can cut in other people's
eyes is a caricature. Therefore, if there is anything in him, he fears
to betray it; and if there is nothing in him, he fears to betray that;
and in either case he is condemned to diffidence and shyness. He wishes
you to let him alone; perhaps if you do he may presently tell you,
about quite another imaginary person, some vivid and tender story.
This story may be a fairy tale or it may be a piece of realistic
fiction, in which the experiences of sundry characters, as different
as possible from oneself and from one another, are imagined and lived
through. The author may fairly say that these creations are not masks
for his own person; it is expressly not his own feelings that he is
evoking and developing. He is fancying other feelings; and yet, as
this fancy and the magic life it constitutes are necessarily his own,
his mind is being secretly agitated and relieved by these fictions;
and his sensibility, instead of being sublimated into some ultimate
tragic passion, is diffused over a thousand picturesque figures and
adventures with which he acknowledges no moral kinship, save such as
is requisite for a lively interest in them and a minute portrayed. It
is only by accident that any of his poetic offspring may resemble their
parent. What cares he what curious eye may note their deformity? _He_
need not blush for them. He may even be bent on unmasking and fiercely
condemning them, as a scrupulous penitent is bent on ferreting out
and denouncing his real or fancied sins. In the most searching truth
of fiction there is accordingly no indiscretion; the author's inmost
and least avowable feelings may be uttered through it without reserve.
Like a modest showman behind the curtain of his booth, he manipulates
his marionettes and speaks for them in a feigned voice, by a sort of
ventriloquy. Here is no religious tragedy, no distilled philosophy, no
overarching cosmic myth. The scale is pleasantly small and the tone
familiar, though the sum of the parts may fade into the infinite. We
do not find in this complicated dream any life greater than our own
or less accidental. We do not need to outgrow ourselves in order to
understand it; no one summons us to pause, to recant, to renounce any
part of our being. On the contrary, we simply unwind our own reel; we
play endlessly at living, and in this second visionary life we survive
all catastrophes, and we exchange one character for another without
carrying over any load of memory or habit or fate. We seem still to
undergo the vicissitudes of a moral world, but without responsibility.
Queen Mab is a naughty sprite, full of idle curiosity and impartial
laughter. When she flutters over the roofs of cities, she is no
angel with a mission, coming to sow there some chosen passion or
purpose of her own; nor does she gather from those snoring mortals
any collective sentiment or aspiration, such as a classic muse might
render articulate, or such as religion or war or some consecrated
school of art might embody. She steals wilily like a stray moonbeam
into every crack and dark old corner of the earth. Her deft touch, as
she pretends, sets all men dreaming, each after his own heart; but
like other magicians, she is a fraud. Those garden fancies about her
fairy equipage are all a joke to amuse the children; her wings are,
in reality, far finer than gossamer, and the Equivocation she rides
on is nimbler than any grasshopper. All she professes to spy out or
provoke is her own merry invention. Her wand really works no miracle
and sets no sleeper dreaming; on the contrary, it is rather an electric
spark from the lover's brain or the parson's nose, as she tickles it,
that quickens her own fancy, and hatches there an interminable brood
of exquisite oddities, each little goblin perfectly ridiculous, each
quite serious and proud of its little self, each battling bravely for
its little happiness. Queen Mab is the genius proper to the art of a
nation whose sensibility is tender, but whose personal life is drab and
pale. To report, however poetically, the events and feelings they have
actually experienced would be dull, as dull as life; their imagination
craves entertainment with something richer, more wayward, more
exciting. Every one is weary of his own society; the lifelong company
of so meagre and warped a creature has become insufferable. We see that
the passions of Mercutio are potentially deep and vivid; but they have
been crossed by fortune, and on fortune his kindly humour mockingly
takes its revenge, by feigning no end of parodies and escapades for
the ineffable bright mischiefs lurking in his bosom. Queen Mab is the
frail mothlike emanation of such a generous but disappointed mind;
her magic lies in the ironical visions which, like the dust of the
poppy, she can call forth there. A Cinderella at home, she becomes a
seer in her midnight travels. Hence Table Rounds and Ivanhoes; hence
three-volume novels about Becky Sharps and David Copperfields. These
imagined characters are often alive, not only because the scene in
which they move may be well indicated, with romantic absorption in the
picturesque aspects of human existence, but also because their minds
are the author's mind dreaming; they skirt the truth of his inner man;
in their fancifulness or their realism they retain a secret reference
to the deepest impulses in himself.
English lovers, I believe, seldom practise what in Spain is called
conjugating the verb; they do not spend hours ringing the changes on I
love, you love, we love. This, in their opinion, would be to protest
too much. They prefer the method of Paolo and Francesca: they will
sit reading out of the same book, and when they come to the kissing,
she will say, "How nice that is!" and he will reply, "Isn't it?" and
the story will supply the vicarious eloquence of their love. Fiction
and poetry, in some supposititious instance, report for the Englishman
the bashful truth about himself; and what English life thereby misses
in vivacity, English literature gains in wealth, in tenderness, in a
rambling veracity, and in preciousness to the people's heart.
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