Essays in Modernity: Criticisms and Dialogues/Some Recent Novels
SOME RECENT NOVELS
SOME RECENT NOVELS
In the domain of what is loosely called Literature, each decade has its special samples of a noisy popular success, or of a half-success only less noisy. They come and go—these plagues of time, as blissfully unaware of their predecessors as of their followers, large and small, poorly clad and richly clad, of every size and description, crowding to their doom. The same shouts of enthusiastic welcome which greeted the appearance of the chartered mud-gods of yesterday greet those of to-day, and will greet those of to-morrow. Is there nobody to say that all this has happened again and again, and will yet happen again and again, just because the average readers who do not think, and the average readers who think a little, all require momentary mouthpieces for the brains or want of brains that is in them?
Take first the noisy popular successes of the day, beginning with a lady. Mrs. Humphry Ward started with Robert Elsmere, and she has proceeded with David Grieve. Since Daniel Deronda, has the dreadful mind of woman succeeded in constructing such an appalling automaton of a female prig in black coat and breeches as Robert Elsmere? How abject is its failure as a creation, as a character, as a recognisable human being! How utterly tiresome and tenth-rate as an embodiment of any species of sublunary 'thought'! Whence, then, the astonishing success of the book? From the simplest causes. Here you have expressed for you the respectable religious liberalism of the hour. And it is absolutely and completely revised and amended up to date and not a day (not an hour) over—nothing inserted, nothing left out, which could shock or fail to attract the good masquerading Philistines and Philistinesses who work our woe. It is charitably to be added that some of the sub-characters, especially the women, are realised a little more adequately; and then there is a piquant platonic love intrigue, intensified by the base alloy of personal caricature. For, after all, it was Mrs. Ward's first actual book, and under all the intellectual flummery of her hapless 'theology' lay the gift of clever, partial, and spiteful observation which is the heritage of the everlasting daughter of Eve. In her second book she found her little personal store all but exhausted; she was urged on by the cheering coteries to a higher flight, and the results all round were disastrous. Was it, for example, indeed totally unconscious, the audacious paraphrase of Marie Bashkirtseff and her journal which constitutes the whole working material of the only passably interesting section of this wearisome compilation? But why should one ask? The whole book is nothing but a rifacimento of other and better books. Here it is Wuthering Heights, here it is George Eliot, here it is somebody else. To read it, is like drinking glass after glass of water stale and stained with the rinsings of many wines. In a few years the salt and turbid tide of British religious liberalism will have advanced a little, and then Robert Elsmere will be forgotten in the rapture of some other equally mediocre book which more or less expresses that little, and the general stupidity of existence will in no wise be diminished. Wuthering Heights, however, will still be to the good, and (though in a considerably lesser measure) so will Marie Bashkirtseff, and therein lies all the consolation possible to the disinterested friend of Literature, and his species.
Equally simple are the causes of the success of Mr. Hall Caine, whom we may take as another variant of the same species, and equally inevitable is his imminent doom. The spectacle is pathetic as well as absurd, because the unhappy man apparently looks upon himself and his work seriously He does not know that his vogue is the mere sum total of the appreciation of thousands of imbeciles at a given moment of their development, and that he has only got to live a few years to see that development pass into a new phase wherein he will have no place. Yet what a chance he had, in all that huge and untouched mass of local colour afforded by 'the little Manx nation'! One thinks of what Tolstoï has done, with regard to the old life of the Caucasus, with a fraction of the amount. And all, absolutely all that Mr. Caine could make of it was to produce dead characters moving in dead scenes, the ghastly old fictional types, tricked out with the apparatus of pseudo-'sagas,' pseudo-'prose-poems,' and heaven knows what not, with just enough pretension about the method to make countless shoals of silly people, tinged with the current claptrap culture of the hour, think they were indulging in something intellectually superior. With open mouths they read the author's thanks to Mr. Brown, member of the Manx Legislature, for valuable information concerning the amorous proclivities of the Manx cats; or saw how Rabbi Jones was dragged in to guarantee the burial customs of the sausage-sellers of the Sahara; or learned that Herr Robinson had courageously read all the proof-sheets of the New Saga and had escaped alive to tell the tale. But how, in this year of grace 1892, when we still have Mr. Gladstone and the critically poverty-stricken with us, this sort of thing still takes!
Let us have samples of Mr. Caine's actual work. Here is a glimpse of the heroine of a book which, as he declares, 'is less novel than romance and less romance than poem':
'After that night, Naomi's shyness of speech dropped away from her, and what was left was only a sweet, maidenly unconsciousness of all faults and failings, with a soft and playful lisp that ran in and out among the simple words that fell from her lips, like a young squirrel among the fallen leaves of autumn.'
The more one reads and reflects on this passage and on the hundred similar gems of description which can be found in any of his novels, the more wonderful and absolute appears his mastery over that unctuous, fatuous, idiotic, pseudo-poetic 'high-falutin' which is the despair of his rivals in popular bathetical pathos.
Now let us see how Mr. Caine's men and women live and move and have their being in the enchanted realms of his art. Almost any passage taken at random will do. Here is one:
'That same day the poor black boy bade farewell to Israel and Naomi. He was leaving them for ever, and he was broken-hearted. Israel was his father, Naomi was his sister, and never again should he set his eyes on either. But in the pride of his perilous mission he bore himself bravely.
'"Well, good night," he said, taking Naomi's hand, but not looking into her blind face.
'"Good night," she answered, and then, after a moment, she flung her arms about his neck, and kissed him.
'He laughed lightly, and turned to Israel.
'"Good night, father," he said, in a shrill voice.
'"A safe journey to you, my son," said Israel, "and may you do all my errands."
'"God burn my great-grandfather if I do not," said Ali stoutly.
'But with that word of his country his brave daring at length broke down, and drawing Israel aside, that Naomi might not hear, he whispered, sobbing and stammering, "When—when I am gone, don't—don't tell her that I was black."
'Then, in an instant, he fled away.
'"In peace!" cried Israel after him; "in peace! my brave boy, simple, noble, loyal heart."'
Comment seems impossible. All one can do is to read aloud, in a low and reverent tone, a passage like this from the pages of the Westminster Review:
Mr. Hall Caine's novels afford evidence of a pronounced individuality of genius, which is calculated to count as a potent factor. Mr. Caine is essentially a romanticist. His romance is the romance of reality. He combines moral sanity with imaginative fervour, truth of emotion with strength of passion, and thus succeeds in that combination of the familiar with the unfamiliar, that blending of the commonplace with the uncommon, which must ever remain the essence of romantic achievement.
Viewed in this light, what a gigantic coup is that phrase about the 'soft and playful lisp that ran in and out among the simple words that fell from her red lips, like a young squirrel among the fallen leaves of autumn'!
Of one of Mr. Caine's novels, however, The Deemster, it is impossible for me to speak otherwise than with gratitude. I have not yet read it all, but I carry it about with me from place to place in this sunny, dusty, rainy, draughty, malodorous Riviera, where the exiled invalids of England dissipate their pessimistical winters. The Deemster broke up one of the most persistent attacks of insomnia that I have ever experienced. Through it I enjoyed night after night of sound and refreshing slumber. I let my stock of sulphonal tablets run out with a reckless unconcern. What did it matter? I had The Deemster. But this, I am aware, is a merely personal view of the matter, and we must mournfully admit that to our disinterested friend of Literature, and his species, there is no consolation possible for the literary existence of Mr. Hall Caine.
Yet even when one passes from this merely factitious and transitional branch of English fiction to the exiguous domain of better and more serious work, one is met too often with the barrenest results. The noisy popular success stands usually as an aching minus quantity, but the only less noisy half-success gives us again and again little more than zero. Sadly we perceive that it really amounts to the same thing—to the same wearisome and obvious category of historical repetition. At the same time, no one who considers, side by side, the fiction of France and England, but must be struck with the fact that the waste of good average second-grade work is infinitely greater with us than with them. The French prose-writers of the lower line attain to results so incomparably more satisfactory than their English fellows. The reason is obvious: there need be no affectation of a search for it. The conditions under which the French writer works are in almost every respect more favourable. Firstly, he inherits the tradition of a genuine prose style. Matthew Arnold sneered at France as famed in all great arts but supreme in none; but does not prose count as a great art? Perhaps at the present moment there is none greater, and where shall we seek for prose to compare with that of France? At about the same period as the English poet was paraphrasing his own emaciate prose into his even more emaciate early sonnets, M. Renan was saying: 'La langue française est puritaine: on ne fait pas de conditions avec elle.' ('The French language is Puritanic: you cannot inflict conditions upon it.') Alas! in England the only thing that was not Puritanic was the English language, and it lay as helpless for any one to inflict conditions upon it in the nineteenth century as it had done in the sixteenth. Shakespeare worked it to his will, at times with a divine success, at times with deplorable failure. Carlyle did the same, only that the failure was the rule and the success was the exception, and many smaller men have gone and done likewise, each in his own fashion. For our literature still more or less (and how much more than less!) remains in the condition described in the Book of Judges, and each man does that which is right in his own eyes. 'On est libre,' continued M. Renan, 'de ne pas l'écrire [la langue française]; mais dès qu'on entreprend cette tâche difficile, il faut passer les mains liées sous les fourches caudines du dictionnaire autorisé et de la grammaire que l'usage a consacrée.' ('You need not write it if you do not wish; but from the moment that you undertake this difficult task, it is necessary to pass with bound hands under the Caudine forks of the authorised vocabulary and of the grammar sanctioned by custom.') And this holds as good to-day, four decades later, as it did then, despite the scornful rejection of style by the extremists who gather round the dusty and tattered banner still held desperately aloft by M. Zola. Thus, then, do we start handicapped beside the third-rate, yea, and the tenth-rate, of our fellows in France. But this is only the first of their advantages. They have others all but as great and as precious. They have known how to keep the Philistines and the Philistinesses in their place—the shopkeepers and the women! And what an unspeakable liberation lies there! To leave to all these good imbeciles their Hector Malots and their George Ohnets et hoc genus omne, and never to hear of them except in Gaza and Ascalon and Joppa and the other demesnes of Dagon, where no sensible person ever goes! No eternal babble from the housetops of Jerusalem about the high art of Mr. Caine, or the dialectic power of Mrs. Humphry Ward, or the wonderful plots of some other heaven-sent genius; no hopeless bewilderment of every young writer of ability by the ubiquitous bellowing of a criticism that is beneath contempt! Imagine what this would mean to us here in England!
Let us take two examples of our story-tellers of ability—prose writers of the inferior class—men who, under the better circumstances of a more critical audience, would have in all probability achieved something complete and durable. At the present moment 'everybody' is reading either The Little Minister or Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Mr. Hardy has been before the public for a not inconsiderable period, and has doubtless reached the weary stage of a hopeless fatality in such matters; but Mr. Barrie is still young at the work, and it is not pleasant to think that he has yet given us his best. For it is at once to be admitted that in A Window in Thrums he not only broke new ground, but wrote a book portions of which can fitly be considered as literature. Of the twenty-two episodes, each in its particular chapter, which compose this picture of a township of poverty-stricken Scotch weavers, quite half are done excellently; one or two are little masterpieces. There is nothing great about his way of doing it. The secret of showing the reflection of the stars in the puddles, in Dostoieffsky's fine phrase, is hidden from him. The moment he tries to bring in Nature, the parent of the vast inanimate forces which, whether we know it or not, influence us all so profoundly in our moods, our humours, our very temperaments, he fails completely. If Pierre Loti gives us a picture of the Breton fisher-folk, he makes us feel and understand how they are all as much the growth of the place, the climate, the seasons, as the animals and birds, the flowers and grasses. All this escapes Mr. Barrie. He has only seen, and can only render, what is directly obvious to the myopic gaze of everyday love. He gives all the soulless pettiness, the ravenous snobbery, of these poor people. He gives also their sombre, inarticulate passions of affection and endurance, but nothing more. They remain isolated, baseless, suspended in mid-air, so to say. To him, men and women are merely 'pilgrims and strangers' of the earth—not children, not organic products of it. His limitations, therefore, are severe, but their very severity gives him at his best a pungent force that enables us to see with our proper eyes some of his men and women, not, indeed, as they really are, but as they appear to him, and, in a manner, to themselves. Jess and Hendry, Jamie and Leeby—these actually live for him, and he has succeeded in making them live for us. Some of the others are failures. Haggart, the humourist, for example, is a dreadful failure. He ends with becoming intolerable, not because humourists are not frequently intolerable (and especially Scotch humourists), but because Mr. Barrie has not in the least succeeded in realising the character he would fain portray. The three chapters assigned to this conventional puppet are utterly below the level of the others in every way. So far for his first book. After the Window in Thrums, with such admirable work in it in different styles as 'Dead this Twenty Years' (chapter vi.), 'A Cloak with Beads' (chapter viii.), and 'Leeby and Jamie' (chapter xviii.), which gave something very like a harmonious totality of impression, Mr. Barrie, like the rest of them, was apparently smitten with 'the last infirmity of noble mind,' as that infirmity takes shape before the lower type of literary purveyor, and decided to write a full-blown novel. The Little Minister is that full-blown novel, and it is an effort over which any true friend of Mr. Barrie's should weep. What a perfect, what a grotesque mishap it is! The book is an irremediable failure because it is utterly wrong as a whole. What a mere circus caricature is the central personage, that inhuman 'Egyptian woman'! Has Mr. Barrie indeed never read Carmen? Or did it happen that, in some dripping and dingy Scotch town, a bedraggled company of strolling singers played some mournful malversion of the opera of Louis Bizet? And was Mr. Barrie there, and did it strike him that he could take the glancing figure of the Spanish gipsy girl and put her to better local use with an Auld Licht ministerial prig and a mass of local colour? Surely he could not have read Prosper Mérimée's novel and dared to exploit, and ruin in the exploitation, its delicious heroine? The book is absurd because its main feature is absurd. All that it contains of any value whatever is to be found in the touches of the Thrums life in the style of the Window. To all appearance Mr. Barrie's vein of ore is a thin one—a very thin one; and can he congratulate himself on the compensating fact that it is passably pure?
His next volume will probably be the decisive one of his work. No one would wish to limit its scope. If he can fill a larger canvas, a more animated scene, than the Window, then he should do it; but let him pause and realise critically what such a departure means. Is he properly equipped for it? He cannot afford—no writer can afford—to be in the dark about himself to the extent he was, and probably is, concerning the Minister. Ah, if only he could be forbidden to write anything more for several years, and set upon a course of study of the best modern French fiction! He might learn his limitations. He might even learn to make the failures of his past the successes of his future. What a revelation such a book as the Pêcheur d'lslande should be to any one who wished to handle such a subject as that of which Mr. Barrie had an exiguous conception in the Minister! What an explanation of his own catastrophe! what a course of instruction as to the true lines on which the last infirmity of noble mind should lead (if lead it must) the author of A Window in Thrums!
It is quite different with Mr. Hardy and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. The central conception of the book, the main feature, seems right enough, but it has not been seized strongly, and the story, like all Mr. Hardy's stories, alternately hurries or flags. Parts are good enough as renderings of human and natural life to make one more than astonished at the not unfrequent lapses into the cheapest conventional style of the average popular novelist. What can one make of a piece of writing like this, where the most flagrant puppets for the time-being usurp the parts of what he has taught us to feel as something like human characters?
(The Durbeyfield family is discussing a recent visit of Mr. D'Urberville.)
'Her mother hastened to explain, smiles breaking from every inch of her person. . . .
'"Mr. D'Urberville says you must be a good girl, if you are at all as you appear; he knows you must be worth your weight in gold. He is very much interested in 'ee—truth to tell.". . .
'"It is very good of him to think that," she murmured; "and if I was quite sure how it would be living there, I would go in a moment."
'"He is a mighty handsome man!"
'"I don't think so," said Tess coldly.
'"Well, there's your chance, whether or no; and I'm sure he wears a beautiful diamond ring."
'"Yes," said little Abraham brightly, from the window-bench; "and I seed it! And it did twinkle when he put his hand up to his mistarshers. Mother, why did our noble relation keep on putting his hand up to his mistarshers?"'
And so on, in the same vile and detestable fashion.
But his dramatic aberrations lead him into blunders more serious still. To say nothing of the improbability of four milkmaids, all sleeping in one room, and all hopelessly in love with one blameless prig of an amateur gentleman farmer, what a shocking want of the sense of both humour and variety does he show in creating such a situation! It is scarcely to be wondered at that these imaginary dairymaids soon begin to talk as never dairymaids talked on earth. One of them has caught another kissing the shade of the prig's mouth against the wall, and as the three are standing that night 'in a group, in their night-gowns, bare-footed at the window,' amorously regarding the beloved one below, Miss Retty Priddle candidly states the fact.
'A rosy spot came into the middle of Izz Huelt's cheek.
'"Well, there's no harm in it," she declared, with attempted coolness. "And if I be in love with him, so is Retty too; and so be you, Marian, come to that."
'Marian's full face could not blush past its chronic pinkness.
'"I?" she said; "what a tale! Ah, there he is again! Dear eyes—dear face—dear Mr. Clare!"
'"There—you've owned it !"
'"So have you—so have we all," said Marian. . . . "I would just marry him to-morrow."
'"So would I—and more," murmured Izz Huett.
'"And I too," whispered the more timid Retty.'
'At this,' observes Mr. Hardy ingenuously, 'the listener [Miss Tess Durbeyfield] grew warm'; and although she is also in her night-gown, though not at the window, it is no wonder.
'"We can't all marry him," said Izz.
'"We shan't, either of us; which is worse still," said the eldest. "There he is again!"
'And all three blew him a silent kiss.'
Nothing more fatuous than this has been done by any writer of anything approaching ability in our time, and it is as false in characterisation as it is absurd in conception. Even Mr. Hall Caine rarely sinks lower. The same weakness drives Mr. Hardy to mar the evanescent reality of Tess herself. He will make her talk sometimes as the author of Far from the Madding Crowd or The Woodlanders is often wont to write. Her lover presses upon her a course of study in history; but she refuses.
'Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row only—finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part? making me sad, that's all. The best is not to remember that your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands and thousands, and that your coming life and doings'll be like thousands and thousands. . . . I shouldn't mind learning why the sun shines on the just and the unjust alike, but that is what books will not tell me.'
Tess, it is true, as Mr. Hardy continually remarks, had passed her sixth standard; but even agricultural girls of the sixth standard are scarcely yet credible with a 'criticism of life' of this calibre. It is terrible to see a story-teller so unaware of what constitutes the one possible charm of his chief figure. Imagine Goethe making Marguerite talk like that! And it is not that Mr. Hardy is not at times able to render character. D'Urberville, for instance, in the first two parts is recognisably drawn from the life; but that does not prevent a shadowy masquerade of this vicious brute appearing for a short period later on as a ranting preacher. It is not that vicious brutes may not become ranting preachers—they may, and do; but that this particular vicious brute of Mr. Hardy's, thanks to the want of energy in his realisation, does nothing of the kind.
One artistic gift Mr. Hardy has which rarely seems to desert him, and that is what Henri Beyle calls so aptly l'originalité de lieu. His people are at one with his places, a single harmonious growth of spiritual and natural circumstance; and this, the true artistic 'charity,' covers, or helps to cover, a multitude of sins. Here it is permitted us to praise him fully and almost unreservedly. The best examples of his landscape reach high—indeed, as high as anything of the kind now done among us. Let us even go further, and say that no one has rendered certain aspects of English scenery with such soft, clear perfection of touch as he has—that no one has produced anything approaching it for years. What else but this extraordinary gift renders credible and even poignantly real the final wanderings of the two lovers world-weary and doomed? (The murder, of course, like most of his would-be dramatic work, is absurd.) The love-nest in the empty, furnished home of strangers, an incident superficially so improbable, is made only less actual than the weird journey to Stonehenge, and Tess's sacrificial sleep on the altar-stone. After all, the book has in it the sob of the earth's suffering, 'the sense of tears in mortal things,' the vain struggle of the human heart against unjust fatality; and of how many books, not to say of how many novels, that appear in this England in a generation can one say so much?—in this England where the novel has become the helpless prey of the Philistine and the Philistiness—where the only variation possible on the banalities of an ignorant and abject conventionality seems to be fantastic revels in the English tongue, and the literary woe and abomination alluded to by more than one of the prophets.
Yet one cannot for a moment hesitate in one's recognition of the fact that Mr. Hardy's novel is not a success—is a failure. It is too faulty to pass. The gaps that represent bad work are too large and too frequent. One has no desire to come back to it. A second reading leaves a lower estimate of it than the first, and a third is not possible. There is the immense pity of it! The artistic blemishes which were in Mr. Hardy's early books might, and in all probability would, have been eradicated if from the beginning he had had to face anything like genuine criticism, anything like a genuinely critical public. But, as it was, he was praised for his bad work and blamed for his good, until the faculty of distinction in him became hopelessly blurred and bewildered. The grotesque worthlessness of the criticism which he, like all the rest of us, received and receives in the ravenous and whirling columns of the Press, he must soon have learned to rate at its true value for a serious writer. But the critical effort (and that comes to mean the effort in what may be called comparative culture) which still alone can prove the salvation of such an one among ourselves, this, alas, he has not made. The result is that his most ambitious work—work which should have proved a masterpiece and which contains the elements of a masterpiece—has absolutely missed its aim and falls away. 'This sort cometh not out save by prayer and fasting.'
Yes, truly there are moments in which one does not realise how supremely rare anything really admirable is. At such moments one is prone to regret that the man who had painted a pig perfectly had not expended his energy on the painting of a man, as if perfectly painted pigs were so common! Why, it is just the reverse, and the producer of such is not to be worried by our bootless desires that he should be something else than what he is. Many are called, few are chosen, and, like Peter, we must not dub common or unclean any really fine sample of anything that lives. Art also is justified of all her children, and if only one can produce something which proves one's parentage, there is no more to say. For the masterpieces, of each and every size and description, alone of human things baffle for any space the vain shadow in which we walk and disquiet ourselves in vain, seeing that they confer something which is a permanent pleasure and enrichment of our lives.