A thesist has yet to write an essay on The Tear in Prose Fiction. Chronologically, its chief moments will coincide with those of the Emancipation of Women. The spirit that dragooned the women of Great Britain into demanding a vote also abolished, when it abolished one of the ancestral freedoms of women, one of the most satisfying set-scenes of the novel—the heroine in tears and the hero on his knees beside her. And the tear cannot even be said now to be on the other cheek. For no hero can go wet-eyed in a world of dry-eyed women.
The Man of Feeling is very much the novel that Tristram Shandy might have been, had Sterne whispered its plot into the purifying ear of Samuel Richardson. It is Tristram Shandy, without just the cock-snooping impudence of mind that added such relish to the Yorkshire parson. Mackenzie in his Anecdotes remarked:
Sterne often lacks the dignity of wit. I do not speak of his licentiousness, but he is often on the very verge of buffoonery, which is the bathos of wit, and the fool’s coat is half upon him.
That is a clear, if obvious criticism: to say that Sterne lacks dignity is rather like announcing the discovery that Scott lacks conciseness. But at any rate the remark exactly explains the aims and prejudices of Mackenzie. And his aims and prejudices were truly at one with the public’s.
Mackenzie’s weeping, rambling, anonymous work with its Perennial Prose Prostitute episode, and the frequent references to “sweet sensibility ” and “sadness ” and “death,” was so popular that it preserves from the oblivion of decent ecclesiastical history a young clergyman, Mr. Eccles of Bath, who made a manuscript copy of The Man of Feeling, and declared himself to be the author. Mackenzie’s publishers were driven finally to expose Mr. Eccles. And the waters of the neighbouring Avon, appreciating the truly artistic nature of the century through which it was flowing, and its reeds possibly still whispering of a previous literary scandal on its banks, rose up and drowned the poor young man.
Scott admired Mackenzie, as well he might. For Mackenzie, who felt very much as Smollett did about Scottish scenery, was an inspired catalogue of the hills as well as of the pains of his native country. And Scott got a reputation for doing that kind of thing rather well himself at a later date.
Scott also got a reputation for his portraits; portraits of silver-headed age. They were Mackenzie’s too. Hitherto the best portraits in fiction had generally been only of the worst people.
Mackenzie’s contribution to literature indeed is considerable. The only flaw in it is that The Man of Feeling is nowadays unreadable to nine out of ten normally curious readers. The remark made by Christopher North in 1822 that “Henry Mackenzie will live as long as our tongue, or longer,” is at once a garland round an author’s head and a noose round a language’s neck.
The Major Minor Novelists
The years between 1751, when Fielding published Amelia and stopped writing fiction, and 1778, when Fanny Burney giggled over the popular mystery of the publication of Evelina, saw the production of the major minor fiction of English literature—Rasselas, The Vicar of Wakefield, and The Castle of Otranto. It was minor fiction because none of the authors—Johnson, Goldsmith and Walpole—was naturally a novelist. And it was major fiction of its kind because all three were men of genius.
Johnson was about as natural a novelist as Dean Inge. He was a moralist of rare serenity of conviction and rare severity of code; again like Dean Inge. He wrote his one novel Rasselas, as the Dean of Saint Paul’s writes his newspaper articles, with complete lack of regard for the prevailing form of such pieces of writing. The remarkably satisfying result in each case is due solely to the underlying intelligence.
It is one of the pieces of good fortune of literary history that we possess so exact an account of the fantastic events that lead to the publication of Rasselas. Towards the end of January, 1759, Johnson’s mother died, and Johnson, in his usual condition of urgent insolvency, had to pay the expenses of the funeral as well as other outstanding debts.
With the sublime competence which was his he wrote Rasselas. He sat down in his Gough Square garret and, in the evenings of one week, sent it to the press in portions as it was written, and did not take the trouble to read it until he revised it for a second edition. Dodsley paid him altogether £125 for it; enough to bury a whole family. It is in such episodes as the writing of Rasselas that the true greatness of Dr. Johnson can be measured.
Ten days after the funeral, Johnson, who must in reality have been pricked at a thousand points by the little devils of debt and doubt, wrote: “My mother’s debts, dear Mother, I suppose I may pay with very little difficulty.” Three months later Rasselas was published, Dr. Johnson was temporarily solvent again, and the cruel system that puts genius to the tread-mill was once more vindicated.
Rasselas, indeed, is one of the best answers to the “Pensions-for-Poets” kind of talk that not infrequently breaks out. A mind like Dr. Johnson’s is rare, but sloth such as Dr. Johnson’s is common. And Johnson was an author who worked with zest only when the bailiffs of Fate were greedily pressing for an early settlement of account.
The spectacle of Dr. Johnson telling a story is rather like that of an elephant herding sheep: something much smaller could do it far better. In Rasselas he simply drove his characters into the Happy Valley, denied them the normal pleasures of a life of fiction, and set them all talking in epigrams. Had anyone of them found himself temporarily at a loss for a wise saw, any of the others or even “the solemn elephant” in the first chapter could easily have filled the gap. For living as they did in such unnatural association, their style of conversation became very much like each other’s—and like Johnson’s; just as St. Joan and Tanner and Major Barbara and King Magnus all speak at times very much like Mr. Shaw.
Thus, in Rasselas Imlac would remark that, “Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed,” and Nekayah would say that, “Those who marry late are best pleased in their children, and those who marry early in their partners.” And so they continue this intellectual competition—very stimulating to the reader—with Imlac scoring four to the princess’s one.
Some of Imlac’s remarks are notably good. For instance: “Man cannot so far know the connexion of causes and events as that he may venture to do wrong in order to do right ”; and “How comfortless is the sorrow of him, who feels at once the pangs of guilt and the vexation of calamity which guilt has brought upon him ”; and “To hear complaints is wearisome alike to the wretched and the happy ”; and “That you have been deprived of one pleasure is no very good reason for rejection of the rest.”
Rasselas indeed might be described as the most ambitious of the Rambler essays. It was an essay written by a philosophic mind in sadness; which is probably the very saddest kind of mind. There are some who can see no beauty in Johnsonian prose—and admittedly, parts of Rasselas do read as though Johnson had recently been studying Dr. Johnson too closely—just as there are those who find no elevation in the thoughts which do sometimes give a rather captive-balloon effect of striving to rise. But Johnson proved to conviction that the new and adaptable form of prose fiction could suit the philosopher and the moralist as well as the mischievous man of the world and the mountebank.
In short, Johnson in 1759, taught the English novel to be intellectual; a lesson that for natural reasons has rarely been applied since.
* * *
In 1764 Walpole taught the novel the fascination of mystery; a lesson that, like scripture in a church-school, has all but swamped the whole syllabus of fiction.
Walpole’s Castle of Otranto is the sort of work that a contemplative devil, with his back against one tombstone and his feet upon another, might have scribbled while waiting for the dawn-cock to crow. It is astonishing that Walpole ever wrote anything that resembled a novel at all: it was the most nearly vulgar lapse in his life.
He was, of course, quite unfitted to write a novel in the great tradition. Walpole embraced mankind with the affectionate intimacy of a man handling a bargepole. All
those qualities of polished, even French-polished, wit, supercilious elegance and a pretty fancy, which make Walpole’s letters the first in the language, are the very qualities to pursue with a pitchfork in fiction.
As well expect Mr. Max Beerbohm to write a novel in the manner of The Good Companions, or Mr. Lytton Strachey to write the “official ” biography of Mr. Henry Ford as to expect Walpole to write an English novel. His upbringing was against him. He never knew what it was to be poor, as Fielding and Smollett before him did, and so was denied the commonest of the profound experiences of mankind.
His father, Sir Robert Walpole, has come down through history as one of the most generous and ungrudging of parents who ever benefited their children at someone else’s expense. And Horace, the sickly infant, went through the world on a row of sinecures like stepping-stones, never meeting in the flesh the great democracy of fiction, and quarrelling with the aristocracy who happened to share the stepping-stones with him.
It would be a rash thing to say, as has often been said, that Walpole was serious, with other than the simple and sublime seriousness of the story-teller, when he wrote his little novel of a beautiful virgin and a distraught Italian nobleman who spends his time crying to the heavens for an heir: of monstrous armour and Plutonic plumes: of melancholy spectres and everlasting underground passages.
It would be as rash as to conclude that the novelist of the twentieth century is really a nervous, logical creature, obsessed by the fear of sudden and violent and cluestrewn death.
We see Walpole as a pale prancing maypole, sidling through the circumambient Gothic gloom. But the gloom was purely local. It was even a local industry. Strawberry Hill was a factory of the fantastic, where His Serenity, the Landgrave of Strawberry, could gaze on more than Gothic grotesques in considerably more than Gothic comfort. And if Walpole chose Strawberry Hill for a toy merely to indulge an idle whim, it is not too much to suppose that The Castle of Otranto was no more than another personal indulgence: and not the prayer uttered to Heaven for which it has sometimes been taken.
Walpole describes how he came to start his novel:
I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle, (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost banister of a great staircase, I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate. The work grew on my hands, and I grew fond of it. Add, that I was very glad to think of anything rather than politics. In short, I was so engrossed with my tale, which I completed in less than two months, that one evening I wrote from the time I had drank my tea, about six o’clock, till half an hour after one in the morning when my hands and fingers were so weary that I could not hold the pen to finish the sentence, but left Matilda and Isabella talking in the middle of a paragraph.
A dream is an old excuse for letting imagination into the mind. From Jacob to Coleridge it has been an excuse that has been accepted whenever the mind behaves more extravagantly than its owner feels that he can safely afford.
When The Castle of Otranto was first published, Walpole could not even bring himself to confess that his sleeping mind was so prodigal and profuse in its disorders. The first edition bore a preface with place, date and fake written all over it. In it is described how Walpole came upon the work in the original Black Letter Italian “in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England,” and how he is convinced that even the story itself “is founded on truth.”
And Walpole would never have confessed had not the leg he was pulling suddenly come clean away in his hand, and he been forced to explain how it came to be in his possession. He confessed with just that disarming obliqueness of the moral sense that was his. Like a bogus company promoter, he explained that he had intended all the time to come forward if the scheme succeeded, and to remain in decent obscurity if it fell flat. And he went on to explain that the story was an attempt to blend ancient with modern romance, to build a nest, even though it were a mare’s nest, of imagination, in the tree of nature.
One canon of composition he enunciates is so thoroughly the product of a wakeful, rational mind, and the whole story is so obedient to the canon, that we see the dream and the excuse dissolving before our eyes.
Walpole remarked that he had observed that “in all inspired writings, the personages under the dispensation of miracles, and witnesses of the most stupendous phenomena, never lose sight of their human character; whereas in the productions of romantic story, an improbable event never fails to be attended by an absurd dialogue. The actors seem to lose their senses the moment the laws of nature are suspended.”
Thus Walpole suspended the laws of nature, establishing romantic lore in their place, and gave to the characters an eighth sense, a sense of their momentous responsibilities in behaving exactly like a party of tourists—observant but scarcely surprised—on a conducted tour through the suburbs of Hades. So we get such a typical passage as this:
“I tell you,” said Manfred imperiously, “Hippolita is no longer my wife; I divorce her from this hour. Too long has she cursed me by her unfruitfulness. My fate depends upon having sons, and this night I trust will give a new date to my hopes.”
At those words he seized the cold hand of Isabella who was half dead with fright and horror. She shrieked and started from him. Manfred rose to pursue her, when the moon, which was now up and gleamed in at the opposite casement, presented to his sight the fatal helmet, which rose to the height of the windows, waving backwards and forwards in a tempestuous manner, and accompanied with a hollow and rustling sound. Isabella, who gathered courage from her situation, and who dreaded nothing so much as Manfred’s pursuit of his declaration, cried:
“Look, my lord, ‘ see, Heaven itself declares against your impious intentions.’ ”
“Heaven nor Hell shall impede my designs,” said Manfred, advancing again to seize the princess. At that instant the portrait of his grandfather, which hung over the bench where they had been sitting, uttered a deep sigh, and heaved its breast. Isabella, whose back was turned to the picture, saw not the motion nor whence the sound came, but started and said:
“Hark, my lord, what sound was that? ” and at the same time made towards the door. Manfred, distracted between the flight of Isabella, who had now reached the stairs, and yet unable to keep his eyes from the picture, which began to move, had, however, advanced some steps after her, still looking backwards on the portrait, when he saw it quit its panel, and descend on the floor with a grave and melancholy air.
“Do I dream? ” cried Manfred, returning, “or are the devils themselves in league against me? Speak, infernal spectre! or, if thou art my grandsire, why dost thou, too, conspire against thy wretched descendant, who too dearly pays for”—ere he could finish the sentence, the vision sighed again, and made a sign to Manfred to follow him.
“Lead on! ” cried Manfred; “I will follow thee to the gulf of perdition.” The spectre marched sedately, but dejected, to the end of the gallery, and turned into a chamber on the right hand.
Manfred, it might be objected, speaks a little too much in the grand manner, at least to modern ears. But it should be pointed out that he was a foreigner and a Catholic, and so naturally excitable and not altogether responsible for his actions. And few of us know exactly how we should behave if we had just arranged to rape a girl, and our dead grandfather, sedate and dejected, were to get down from a canvas on the wall and go and shut himself up in another room. Considering the enormity of the old gentleman’s behaviour, Manfred kept his nerve, to say nothing of his temper, remarkably well. He was apparently less anxious than most men are who are called on merely to assist a conjurer on a concert hall stage.
Scott spoke of the “wild interest ” of the story of The Castle of Otranto; and I believe that if we had not all of us been brought up with the criticism that it is “creak
y ” already in our minds, we should find it infinitely more exciting than most of our modern “thrillers.” At least we should until within a page or two of the story’s close.
For it is one of the incidental enslavements of the rational mind that only those miracles which are no more than ingenious illusions shall be admitted; and even then the last chapter must contain a full confession by the Almighty as how he contrived to appear miraculous.
Thus it is that the modern mind is apt finally to feel more than a trifle cheated when God (or the Devil) remains obstinately silent about his means, and ostentatiously showy about his manifestations. But at the actual moment of reading, the mind is feverishly fascinated.
It is not an accident that a whole saga of the supernatural came to be written towards the end of the eighteenth century. The supernatural trespasses into the rational world in two distinct states in the evolution of the human mind. The first is when unaccountable and unearthly beings are found everywhere among men, as unnecessary as poppies in a cornfield. That is the superstitious period. The second is when unpredictable messengers appear with calamitous warnings, or tremendous tidings, or helpful and sometimes purely temporary advice. That is the religious period. For the first and last test of a Christian miracle is not whether it is wonderful but whether it is useful.
Obviously then, there is no riot of bizarre amusement to be had from the religious miracle. Once miracles are accepted and put into literary form the phantasy becomes merely that grosser thing—religious propaganda. The miraculous events in The Castle of Otranto are all palpably miracles of superstition, and not of religion. And they are not the products of the uneasy belief that is to be found in the childhood of the race, before superstition has had time to crystallise itself into religion, but the uneasiness that flourishes again in the decay of religion.
The Facts of Fiction Page 7