A quarter sessions chairman abler none.
All that he was, and perhaps shared with Sir Walter another characteristic which Tennyson does not mention. He was, we cannot help suspecting, something of a bore. Or what is this quality, or absence of quality, which checks our sympathy? It is partly that he was better than his neighbours; partly that, though he deplored the vices of his age, he could never keep away from the centre of them. The ‘luxurious dallying and profaneness’ of the Court, the sight of ‘Mrs. Nelly’ looking over her garden wall and holding ‘very familiar discourse’ with King Charles on the green walk below, caused him acute disgust; but he could never make up his mind to break with the Court and retire to ‘my poor, but quiet villa’, which was, of course, one of the show places of England. Then, though he loved his daughter Mary, his grief at her death did not prevent him from counting the number of empty coaches drawn by six horses apiece that attended her funeral. His women friends combined virtue with beauty to such an extent that we can hardly credit them with wit into the bargain. Poor Mrs. Godolphin, at least, whom he celebrated in a sincere and touching biography, ‘loved to be at funerals’ and chose habitually the ‘dryest and leanest morsels of meat’, which may be the habits of an angel but do not present her friendship with Evelyn in an alluring light. The whole of our case against Evelyn, however, is summed up in the account of a visit which Pepys paid him on November 6, 1665. First Evelyn showed him some ‘painting in little: then in distemper, in Indian ink, water-colour, graving and, above all, the whole secret of mezzo-tint and the manner of it’. He then read his discourse ‘about gardenage, which will be a most pleasant piece’. Then a play or two of his making, ‘very good, but not as he conceits them I think to be’; then he displayed his Hortus Hyemalis; and finally read aloud, ‘though with too much gusto, some little poems of his own that were not transcendent … among others, one of a lady looking in at a gate and being pecked at by an eagle that was there’. ‘In line’, Pepys concluded at the end of the long morning’s entertainment, ‘a most excellent person he is, and must be allowed a little for a little conceitedness; but he may well be so, being a man so much above others.’
Evelyn, as we are bound to remark after dipping into Pepys, was no genius. His writing is opaque rather than transparent. We see no depths through it, nor any very secret movements of mind and heart. He can neither make us hate a regicide nor love Mrs. Godolphin beyond reason. But even as we drowse, somehow or other the bygone gentleman sets up, through three centuries, a perceptible tingle of communication, so that without laying stress upon anything in particular we are taking notice all the time. His hypocritical modesty about his own garden is no less evident than his acidity about the gardens of others. The hens at Sayes Court, we may be sure, laid the best eggs in England. When the Tsar drove a wheelbarrow through his holly hedge his cry is that of a man in agony. Editors who wonder at the non-appearance of Mrs. Evelyn should reflect that she was chiefly occupied in dusting china and cleaning ink stains from the carpets. He was constantly asked to act as trustee; discharged his duties punctiliously, and yet grumbled at the waste of his time. Still he had a heart. Though a formal he was a very affectionate man. If paternal egotism probably hastened the death of the little prodigy Richard, he carried the memory of him throughout his life, and sighed deeply, not effusively – for the man with the long-drawn sensitive face was never effusive – when, ‘after evening prayers was my child buried near the rest of his brothers – my very dear children’. He was not an artist, perhaps; yet as an artistic method this of going on with the day’s story circumstantially, bringing in people who will never be mentioned again, leading up to crises which never take place, has an undoubted merit. On one page we are agog to hear that Evelyn has a mind to visit Sir Thomas Browne. The journey to Norwich in the flying chariot with six horses is precisely described, with the talk by the way. But when at length Evelyn meets Sir Thomas all he has to say of him is that he owns many curiosities; thinks Norfolk a good county for birds; and states that the people of Norwich have lost the art of squaring flints, which, of course, sets Evelyn off upon buildings and flower gardens and Sir Thomas Browne is never mentioned again.
Never to mention people again is a piece of advice that psychological novelists might well lay to heart. All through Evelyn’s pages people are coming into the room and going out. The greater number we scarcely notice; the door shuts upon them and they disappear. But now and then the sight of a vanishing coat tail suggests more than a whole figure sitting still in a full light. Perhaps it is that we catch them unawares. Little they think that for three hundred years and more they will be looked at in the act of jumping a gate or observing, like the old Marquis of Argyle, that the turtle doves in the aviary are owls. There is a certain hot-tempered Captain Wray, for instance, upon whom we linger with unsatisfied affection. We are only told that he was choleric; that he had a dog who killed a goat; that he was for shooting the goat’s owner; that when his horse fell down a precipice he was for shooting the horse; and, finally, that coming to Geneva, he ‘fell so mightily in love with one of Monsieur Saladine’s daughters that, with much persuasion, he could not be prevailed on to think on his journey into France, the season now coming on extremely hot’. ‘Yet’, says Evelyn, ‘the ladies of Geneva are not beautiful.’ They have ‘something full throats’. That is all there is about Captain Wray, but it is enough to start us upon speculations too numerous and too little authentic to be given here. And though the dusk has long closed upon Captain Wray and his bride – who, since the captain was choleric, the season hot, and the goitre prevalent, may never have become his bride after all – we are still curious, as is not usual at the end of psychological novels, to know what became of them. Mr. Maynard Smith, had he reached that point, might have told us. For his commentary upon the early life and education of John Evelyn is the very book that an idle reader, reading as much with his eye off the page as on, must rejoice in not only because so much of its information is necessary but because so much of it is superfluous. The reason why Evelyn’s father refused a knighthood is illuminating; but it is difficult to see in what respect our knowledge of Evelyn’s father’s beard is improved by knowing that the Tudors wore beards, that Shakespeare mentioned them, and that the Puritans slept with theirs enclosed in cardboard boxes.
Indeed, had we to give an excuse for wasting our time first over Evelyn, then over Mr. Smith’s commentary upon Evelyn, which promises and will, we hope, fulfil its promise of exceeding Evelyn himself in length, we could only vaguely and falteringly explain that, whether alive or dead, good or bad, human beings have a hold upon our sympathies. That Evelyn had his faults is true; that we could not have spent an hour in his company without grave disagreement is also probable – though to have been shown over Wotton by the master in his old age when his gardens were flourishing, his grandson doing him credit, his sorrows smoothed out, and the Latin quotations falling pat from his lips, would have been a thing to stick in the memory; but, faults and limitations notwithstanding, he lived for 84 years and kept a record of 55 of them. That is enough for us. For without saying in the old language that he has taught us a lesson or provided an example, we cannot deny that the spectacle of human life on such a scale is full of delight. First we have the oddity of it; then the difference; then as the years go by the sense of coming to know the man better and better. When that is established, the circle in which he moves becomes plain; we see his friends and their doings; so that by degrees it is not one person but a whole society of people whom we watch at their concerns. Fate shepherded them all very straitly. There was no getting out of death or age; nor, though Evelyn protested, could he escape burial in the stone chancel of a church instead of lying in earth with flowers growing over him. All this provokes thought – idle thought, it is true, but of the kind that fills the mind with Evelyn’s presence and brings him back, in the sunshine, to walk among the trees.
On Re-reading Novels
So there are to be n
ew editions of Jane Austen and the Brontës and George Meredith. Left in trains, forgotten in lodging-houses, thumbed and tattered to destruction, the old ones have served their day, and for the newcomers in their new houses there are to be new editions and new readings and new friends. It speaks very well for the Georgians. It is still more to the credit of the Victorians. In spite of the mischief-makers, the grandchildren, it seems, get along very nicely with the grandparents; and the sight of their concord points inevitably to the later breach between the generations, a breach more complete than the other, and perhaps more momentous. The failure of the Edwardians, comparative yet disastrous – that is a question which waits to be discussed. How the year 1860 was a year of empty cradles; how the reign of Edward the Seventh was barren of poet, novelist, or critic; how it followed that the Georgians read Russian novels in translations; how they benefited and suffered; how different a story we might have told today had there been living heroes to worship and destroy – all this we find significant in view of the new editions of the old books. The Georgians, it seems, are in the odd predicament of turning for solace and guidance not to their parents who are alive, but to their grandparents who are dead. And so, as likely as not, we shall be faced one of these days by a young man reading Meredith for the first time.
He has bought Harry Richmond and he is in the middle of it, and he is obviously annoyed when they come and ask him for his ticket. Is he not enviable? And what is it like, reading Harry Richmond for the first time? Let us try to remember. The book begins with a statue who turns out to be a man, and there is a preposterous adventurer, somehow descended from the Royal family, and there is a scene at a dinner-party, and a fire, and a dashing, impetuous girl, and a handsome manly boy, and England in June at night, and stars and rivers and love-making and gallantry. In short, the young man ought to be enjoying himself, and one of these days we will read Harry Richmond again. But there are difficulties to be faced. We do not mean that Meredith is said (perhaps not so truly) to be under a cloud. In our climate that is inevitable. But we mean that to read a novel for the second time is far more of an undertaking than to read it for the first. To rush it breathlessly through does very well for a beginning. But that is not the way to read finally; and somehow or other these fat Victorian volumes, these Vanity Fairs, Copperfields, Richmonds, and Adam Bedes must be read finally, if we are to do them justice – must be read as one reads Hamlet, as a whole. But, then, one reads Hamlet in the four hours between dinner and bedtime. It is not beyond human endurance to read it from first to last, in and out, and, so far as our faculties permit, as a whole. Hamlet may change; we know, indeed, that Hamlet will change; but tonight Hamlet is ours. And for that reason, too, we hesitate before reading Harry Richmond again. Tonight Harry Richmond will not be ours. We shall have broken off a tantalizing fragment: days may pass before we can add to it. Meanwhile the plan is lost; the book pours to waste; we blame ourselves; we abuse the author; nothing is more exasperating and dispiriting. Better leave the Victorian novelist to crumble on the shelves and be bolted whole by schoolboys. Let us confine ourselves to apt quotations from Mrs. Gamp, and find Hartfield on the map. Let us call Jane Austen ‘Jane’, and debate for ever which curate Emily Brontë loved. But the business of reading novels is beyond us, and there is nothing more melancholy than the sight of so many fine brains irrevocably expressed in the one form which makes them for ever inaccessible. So, instead of reading Harry Richmond, we will envy the young man opposite and wish Defoe and Fanny Burney at the bottom of the sea. They were the parents of the modern novel and their burden is heavy.
Some such mood of exasperation and bewilderment, of violence, yet of remorse, is abroad at present among those common readers whom Dr. Johnson respected, for it is by them, he said, that ‘must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours’. It bodes ill for fiction if the commons of letters vote against it, so let us lay bare our dilemma without caring overmuch if we say some foolish things and many vague ones. To begin with, we have obviously got it into our heads that there is a right way to read, and that is to read straight through and grasp the book entire. The national habit has been formed by the drama, and the drama has always recognized the fact that human beings cannot sit for more than five hours at a stretch in front of a stage. And on top of that we are by temperament and tradition poetic. There still lingers among us the belief that poetry is the senior branch of the service. If we have an hour to spend we feel that we lay it out to better advantage with Keats than with Macaulay. And so perhaps we come to novels neither knowing the right way to read them nor very much caring to acquire it. We ask one thing and they give us another. They are so long, so dull, so badly written: and, after all, one has life enough on one’s hands already without living it all over again between dinner and bedtime in prose. Such are the stock complaints, and they lose nothing of their acrimony if with the same breath we have to admit that we owe more to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Hardy than we can measure; that if we wish to recall our happier hours they would be those Conrad has given us and Henry James; and that to have seen a young man bolting Meredith whole recalls the pleasure of so many first readings that we are even ready to venture a second. Only with these contrary impulses at work it will be a hazardous affair. Not again shall we be floated over on the tide of careless rapture. The pleasure we shall now look for will lie not so obviously on the surface; and we shall find ourselves hard pressed to make out what is the lasting quality, if such there be, which justifies these long books about modern life in prose. The collective reading of generations which has set us at the right angle for reading plays has not yet shaped our attitude to fiction. That Hamlet is a work of art goes without saying; but that Harry Richmond is a work of art has to be said for the first time.
Some months ago Mr. Percy Lubbock applied himself to answer some of these questions in The Craft of Fiction (Jonathan Cape. 9s. net), a book which is likely to have much influence upon readers, and may perhaps eventually reach the critics and writers. To say that it is the best book on the subject is probably true; but it is more to the point to say that it is the only one. He has attempted a task which has never been properly attempted, and has tentatively explored a field of inquiry which it is astonishing to find almost untilled. The subject is vast and the book short, but it will be our fault, not Mr. Lubbock’s, if we talk as vaguely about novels in the future as we have done in the past. For example, do we say that we cannot read Harry Richmond twice? We are led by Mr. Lubbock to suspect that it was our first reading that was to blame. A strong but vague emotion, two or three characters, half a dozen scattered scenes – if that is all that Harry Richmond means to us, the fault lies, perhaps, not with Meredith, but with ourselves. Did we read the book as he meant it to be read, or did we not reduce it to chaos through our own incompetency? Novels, above all other books, we are reminded, bristle with temptations. We identify ourselves with this person or with that. We fasten upon the character or scene which is congenial. We swing our imaginations capriciously from spot to spot. We compare the world of fiction with the real world and judge it by the same standards. Undoubtedly we do all this, and easily find excuses for so doing. ‘But meanwhile the book, the thing he made, lies imprisoned in the volume, and our glimpse of it was too fleeting, it seems, to leave us with a lasting knowledge of its form.’ That is the point. There is something lasting that we can lay hands on. There is, Mr. Lubbock argues, such a thing as the book itself. We should read at arm’s length from the distractions we have named. We must receive impressions, but we must relate them to each other as the author intended; and we can only do his bidding by making ourselves acquainted with his method. When we have shaped our impressions, as the author would have us, we are then in a position to perceive the form itself, and it is this which endures, however mood or fashion may change. In Mr. Lubbock’s own words:
But with the book in this condition of a defined shape, firm of outline, its form shows for what it is indeed – not an attribute, one of many
and possibly not the most important, but the book itself, as the form of the statue is the statue itself.
Now as Mr. Lubbock laments, the criticism of fiction is in its infancy, and its language, though not all of one syllable, is baby language. This word ‘form’, of course, comes from the visual arts, and for our part we wish that he could have seen his way to do without it. It is confusing. The form of the novel differs from the dramatic form – that is true; we can, if we choose, say that we see the difference in our mind’s eyes. But can we see that the form of The Egoist differs from the form of Vanity Fair? We do not raise the question in order to stickle for accuracy where most words are provisional, many metaphorical, and some on trial for the first time. The question is not one of words only. It goes deeper than that, into the very process of reading itself. Here we have Mr. Lubbock telling us that the book itself is equivalent to its form, and seeking with admirable subtlety and lucidity to trace out those methods by which novelists build up the final and enduring structure of their books. The very patness with which the image comes to the pen makes us suspect that it fits a little loosely. And in these circumstances it is best to shake oneself free from images and start afresh with a definite subject to work upon. Let us read a story and set down our impressions as we go along, and so perhaps discover what it is that bothers us in Mr. Lubbock’s use of the word form. For this purpose there is no more appropriate author than Flaubert; and not to strain our space, let us choose a short story, ‘Un Cœur Simple’, for example, for, as it happens, it is one that we have practically forgotten.
The title gives us our bearings, and the first words direct our attention to Madame Aubain’s faithful servant Félicité. And now the impressions begin to arrive. Madame’s character; the look of her house; Félicité’s appearance; her love affair with Théodore; Madame’s children; her visitors; the angry bull. We accept them, but we do not use them. We lay them aside in reserve. Our attention flickers this way and that, from one to another. Still the impressions accumulate, and still, almost ignoring their individual quality, we read on, noting the pity, the irony, hastily observing certain relations and contrasts, but stressing nothing; always awaiting the final signal. Suddenly we have it. The mistress and the maid are turning over the dead child’s clothes. ‘Et des papillons s’envolèrent de l’armoire.’ The mistress kisses the servant for the first time. ‘Félicité lui en fut reconnaissante comme d’un bienfait, et désormais la chérit avec un dévouement bestial et une vénération religieuse.’ A sudden intensity of phrase, something which for good reasons or for bad we feel to be emphatic, startles us into a flash of understanding. We see now why the story was written. Later in the same way we are roused by a sentence with a very different intention: ‘Et Félicité priait en regardant l’image, mais de temps à autre se tournait un peu vers l’oiseau’. Again we have the same conviction that we know why the story was written. And then it is finished. All the observations which we have put aside now come out and range themselves according to the directions we have received. Some are relevant; others we can find no place for. On a second reading we are able to use our observations from the start, and they are much more precise; but they are still controlled by these moments of understanding.
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