The Facts of Fiction

by Norman Collins

  But though his actions may have changed from those of Adam in his simplicity to those of Casanova in his guile, outwardly he has remained immediately recognisable: “He was pretty tall. … His eyes were the most awful that could be seen, and very piercing. … His nose was rising and Roman.” So might a modern novelist sketch the elemental man. So, in point of fact, did Mrs. Aphra Behn sketch him in 1689 in Oroonoko. And with the exception of the point of morals, the only outstanding difference between Mrs. Behn’s hero and one of Miss Dell’s was that Mrs. Behn’s was suffering from the disability of the colour bar. The essential virility is the same.

  In such a typically modern piece of fiction as Miss Ethel Mannin’s Ragged Banners we see the return of the noble savage in his crudest form. The particular scene is so set that the reader’s laughter all but destroys its significance. A woman novelist is shown mooning over her boudoir balcony, while below her the jobbing gardener sweats primitively at his labour.

  When she made her breakfast tea she took a cup out to the man. He straightened himself as she approached, and when she stood beside him the pungent smell of his sweating body came to her, sharply, acrid, and she was aware of the dark mat of hair on his chest. That and something she could not define, but it was as though life burned in him like a slow fire and the warmth and glow of it communicating itself to her, so that she was not Mary Thane, the novelist, handing a cup of tea to a jobbing gardener she had hired, but primordial woman in the presence of primordial man listening with her blood to the surge of life in him. She had this sudden blood consciousness of him, and because of it a shyness swept her. …

  Disgusting and ridiculous ? But it is not intended disgustingly, of that I am sure. The scene is intended rather to show how shocking it is that women who could glow like ingots in the furnace of passion (or some such phrase) should be left as cold and shapeless as the original ore.

  It is the old story: The Savage showing the Civilised their defects. And the only difference is that our idea of the defects has changed.

  With those novels in which the seeds and flowers of revolution entered the country in disguise came a string of novels which even the most short-sighted policeman should have recognised for what they were. Yet somehow what slipped past the policeman contrived to enter the nursery.

  We find such a handbook of gentle Bolshevism as Sandford and Merton becoming the infants’ Bible. Thomas Day, in the ingratiating form of the parable, preached the exact spirit, if not the text, of Mr. Lloyd George’s Lime-house Speech. A reader of the flowing passage who could not see that Mr. Barlow must have been in the pay of Moscow has been misled by the gossiping charm of the style.

  The next morning Tommy was up almost as soon as it was light, and went to work in a corner of the garden, where he dug with great perseverance till breakfast: when he came in, he could not help telling Mr. Barlow what he had done, and asking him, whether he was not a very good boy, for working so hard to raise corn? “That,” said Mr. Barlow, “depends upon the use you intend to make of it when you have raised it. What is it that you intend doing with it? ““Why,” said Tommy, “I intend to send it to the mill that we saw, and have it ground into flour; and then I will get you to show me how to make bread of it; and then I will eat it, that I may tell my father that I have eaten bread out of corn of my own growing.” “That will be very well done,” said Mr. Barlow; “but where will be the great goodness, that you sow corn for your own eating? That is no more than all the people round continually do; and if they did not do it, they would be obliged to fast! ” “But then,” said Tommy, “they are not gentlemen, as I am.” “What then,” answered Mr. Barlow, “must not gentlemen eat as well as others, and therefore is it not for their interest to know how to procure food as well as other people?” “Yes, sir,” answered Tommy, “but they can have other people to raise it for them, so that they are not obliged to work themselves.” “How does that happen? “said Mr. Barlow. T. “Why, sir, they pay other people to work for them, or buy bread when it is made, as much as they want.” Mr. B. “Then they pay for it with money.” T. “Yes, sir.” Mr. B. “Then they must have money before they can buy corn.” T. “Certainly, sir.” Mr. B. “But have all gentlemen money? “Tommy hesitated some time at this question; at last he said, “I believe, not always, sir.” Mr. B. “Why then, if they have not money, they will find it rather difficult to procure corn, unless they raise it for themselves.” “Indeed,” said Tommy, “I believe they will; for perhaps they may not find anybody good-natured enough to give it them. …”

  All very much like a child’s manual of Communism, complete with leading questions and misleading answers.

  At the same time, works not only of revolutionary purpose but of open propaganda were appearing. There was, for instance, William Godwin’s Things as They Are; or the Adventures of Caleb Williams, a positively Tolstoyan tract on the “corrupt wilderness of human society.” Like Fielding’s Amelia, it was directed against the grosser injustices of this world. There is an over-emphasised human-itarianism about certain of the passages that set the reader, with his heavy ballast of modern authors in his head, in mind of Mr. John Galsworthy weeping for the sins of society. In short, it comprehends most of the modern sympathies because it is parent of them.

  There is, for example, the character of the felon committed for highway robbery.

  The character of the prisoner (“a common soldier ”) was such as has seldom been equalled. He had been ardent in the search of intellectual cultivation, and was accustomed to draw his favourite amusement from the works of Virgil and Horace. The humbleness of his situation, combined with his ardour for literature, only served to give an inexpensive heightening to the interestingness of his character. He was capable, when occasion demanded, of firmness, but, in his ordinary deportment, he seemed unarmed and unresisting, unsuspicious of guile in others, as he was totally free from guile himself. … His habits of thinking were strictly his own, full of justice, simplicity and wisdom. He from time to time earned money of his officers, by his peculiar excellence in furbishing arms; but he declined offers that had been made him to become a sergeant or corporal, saying that he did not want money, and that in a new situation he should have less leisure for study. He was equally constant in refusing presents that were offered him by persons who had been struck with his merit; not that he was under the influence of false delicacy and pride, but that he had no inclination to accept that, the want of which he did not feel to be an evil. This man died while I was in prison. I received his last breath.

  All this piling up of perfection is intended to move the reader into a rage against the blind cruelty of the law, just as in the masterly ironic sentence in Joseph Andrews, which describes how “a lad who hath since been transported for robbing a Hen-roost” was the only person to

  play the Good Samaritan to poor, naked, half-dead Joseph; and how while he stripped off his only garment he swore “a good Oath (for which he was rebuked by the Passengers) that he would rather ride in his Shirt all his Life, than suffer a Fellow-Creature to lie in so miserable a condition.”

  The Preface to the first edition of Caleb Williams contained the statement that the object of the work was to make “a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism by which man became the all destroyer of man.” Sheer anarchy: in other words, an attack on arbitrary government.

  But it would have been easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than so open a political libel through the bookshops. And the Preface was withdrawn from the original edition. When it was published, the author adds this sweet, brief note of explanation to it:

  “Caleb Williams ” made his first appearance in the world in the same month in which the sanguinary plot broke out against the liberties of Englishmen, which was happily terminated by the acquittal of its first intended victims in the close of that year. Terror was the order of the day: and it was feared that even a humble novelist might be shown to be constructively a traitor.

  Godwin, th
e indignant anarchist, existing towards the end of his life on eleemosynary titbits from a tainted table, the man of genius, whose work drew the word “masterpiece” from Hazlitt, extracts what life he still has in our minds not so much from his fame, won by this and his later novels, which has declined, as from the part he played in one of the by-comedies of literature.

  It was Godwin, after a lifetime spent in preaching against the institution of marriage, who flew into a passion when he heard that Shelley, applying Godwin’s principles, wanted to take Mary Godwin for his wife, while poor Harriet was still living.

  Godwin called Shelley “licentious,” while he meant merely “consistent,” stowed Mary away, told her disagreeable stepmother to sit on her, and drove Shelley from the house. It is a little scene that has greatly comforted the orthodox at heart, this episode of the anarchist turning into the Christian father.

  In the few years round the turn of the century, the novel began to throw out its arms, octopuswise, in some of the directions which are now familiar.

  Thomas Holcroft, who was always the second-best man in whatever company he was in, played second-best to Godwin. Holcroft, whose novels Anna St. Ives and Hugh Trevor were simply the old didactic stories of the nursery, the good-boy-and-the-bad-boy sort of thing promoted into terms of political economy, has since been swallowed by his pupil.

  Sir Walter Scott

  Booby critics have always loved taking a shy at Sir Walter Scott. Because he is by so much the biggest figure that had appeared in the whole field of fiction up to his time, he presents so huge a butt that all except the very wildest arrows of criticism are sure to hit.

  Thus Carlyle fired a load of bolts at him in the famous review of the first six volumes of Lockhart’s biography. Carlyle tried Scott on the serious charge of not having wanted to write like Carlyle. And he convicted him. It was Carlyle who said: “Your Shakespeare fashions his characters from the heart outward. Your Scott fashions them from the skin inwards, never getting near the heart of them.” And we have to admit that at least as regards the principal characters it is something like the truth.

  Scott is not even exciting to modern minds. To the historian he is a source of annoyance because he is disdainful of dates, and a thousand ages in his sight are like a moment gone. Judged by the standards of current psychological fiction he is so superficial as to appear silly. He is often too Scottish for the English reader. He was too romantic for Borrow; and many readers used to the browns and greys of this century unhesitatingly reject the purples and scarlets of his.

  Scott’s heroines also are poverty-stricken creations: they are the mannequins of fiction, magnificent creatures that never come near to being the female of Man. Amy Robsart stands out among her sisters, a mournful mannequin.

  Perhaps, however, we are suffering from one of the temporary tyrannies of prejudice in imagining that because Scott’s women are too uniformly handsome and virtuous they must therefore be a race of glowing cretins. In the romantic conception beauty did not come unprotected by brains.

  Scott’s heroes again, are often too much like handsome scout-masters to be entirely agreeable. All his characters, indeed, are conceived in the simple terms in which a child understands men and women. Scott knew passion only in its respectable form romantic love, and that so respectably that he has often been accused of not knowing it all. In St. Ronan’s Well he wrote of incest but drained the passion of all its poison by making it simply a mistake of ignorance. Altogether his mind was a solid unemotional mind: it never soared and it never delved. To expect him to speak rapturously and convincingly of love would be like asking a delicate catlike modern novelist to describe a Border battle.

  Scott’s faults and short-comings are revealed every time an iconoclastic critic gets busy on him. Even Scott’s prose, the mainstay of the narrative novelist, can be shown to be awkward, stubborn stuff judged by Southern standards. And a great deal that he wrote seems rather less than adult in its appeal:

  To snatch a mace from the pavement, on which it lay beside one whose dying grasp had just relinquished it—to rush on the Templar’s band, and to strike in quick succession to the right and left, levelling a warrior at each blow, was for Athelstane’s great strength, now animated with unusual fury, but the work of a single moment; he was soon within two yards of Bois-Guilbert, whom he defied in his loudest tone.

  “Turn false-hearted Templar! let go her whom thou art unworthy to touch—turn, limb of a band of murdering and hypocritical robbers! “

  “Dog! ” said the Templar grinding his teeth, “I will teach thee to blaspheme the holy Order of the Temple of Zion ”; and with these words, half-wheeling his steed, he made a demi-courbette towards the Saxon, and rising in the stirrups, so as to take full advantage of the descent of the horse, he discharged a fearful blow upon the head of Athelstane.

  This then in short was the Titanic incompetent who in 1814 made the first successful invasion of England from the North. This victorious crusade was the more remarkable since 1814 and 1815 saw the purple close of one of the most alarming cataclysms of European history. For anything to attempt to compete in the mind of an ordinarily intelligent man with the downfall of Napoleon must have seemed as patently absurd as presenting a debtor’s letter at the Derby.

  Book-selling, indeed, had a poor time in those years when Fact was leading Fiction by a length. But what were the books? Mansfield Park, Wordsworth’s poems, Southey’s Don Roderick; obviously none of them books to snatch up in the spirit of victory. The only author whose pulse was habitually above the normal was Byron; and his Lara and The Corsair beat level with the public’s heart.

  Then in this exhilarating and military world along came an author who had wanted to be a soldier. And the public heart found itself keeping time to a fresh and more pounding rhythm.

  It is wrong to think of Scott as one of nature’s novelists turning up to fill one of nature’s vacuums. He was not a novelist in an age of poets, but a poet in an age of novelists. He had refused the Laureateship before Waverley had appeared.

  In fiction, true, unlike poetry, it was the Golden Age of the Great Forgotten. Figures like “Monk ” Lewis, Mrs. Radcliffe and Mrs. A. M. Bennett (who sold ten thousand copies of her six-volume novel Vicissitudes Abroad; or The Ghost of My Father, at 36s., on the day of publication) appear, and fade away again immediately like figures in a fog. The novel had spread with the popularity of the cross-word and the variety of human conversation. A critic in the Edinburgh Review remarked:

  This is truly a novel-writing age! … Persons of all ranks and professions, who feel that they can wield a pen successfully, now strive to embody the fruits of their observations in a work of fiction. … It has been discovered that the novel is a very flexible and comprehensive form of composition, applicable to many purposes. There is scarcely any subject, not either repulsive or of a very abstruse nature, which must be of necessity excluded from it.

  It was an age in which moralists were already growing alarmed at the amount of time that the fashion of novel reading consumed. And remembering the novels we may unhesitatingly place ourselves on the side of the moralists.

  The commonest character in early nineteenth century fiction was the ghost, just as the commonest character in early twentieth century fiction is the corpse. But whereas detective fiction has never become quite the whole of fiction, the supernatural romance was the whole of fiction then. Scott rescued it. Among the orchestra of squeaks and shrieks and whistles and groans that comprised the contemporary novel Scott sounds like an entire organ in full blast with everything from the sixty-four-foot stop to the vox humana.

  Scott himself was educated in the horrific ecstasy of German phantasy. It affected his heart, and all but affected his head. There is a record of young Scott, a child of his age, intoxicated with the vapours of hobgoblinry, staring into the fire and suddenly exclaiming, “I wish to Heaven I could get a skull and two cross-bones.”

  But Scott had a measure and a half of ordinary common sens
e. And though his romances were bright with the afterglow of the supernatural, he was never at the mercy of his own apparitions as most of his contemporaries were.

  Scott indeed was at the mercy of nothing save his inexhaustible and consuming energy. He went through life as if he had hitched his wagon to a shooting-star. His strength even in his idle moments was always fully concentrated. When he walked out across the countryside for pleasure his appetite for fatigue was not satisfied until he had covered thirty miles. As a young man when he needed money he made it by copying legal documents at the rate of 3d. a folio, and could write one hundred and twenty folios without a break for food or rest.

  The same driving restlessness within him drove him from bed by 5 o’clock, and Lockhart, on whose nerves the habit must have told, writes that:

  He rose by five o’clock, lit his own fire when the season required one, and shaved and dressed with great deliberation, for he was a very martinet as to all but the mere coxcombries of the toilet, not abhorring effiminate dandyism itself so cordially as the slightest approach to personal slovenliness, or even those “bedgown and slipper tricks,” as he called them, in which literary men are so apt to indulge. Arrayed in his shooting jacket or whatever dress he meant to use till dinner time, he was seated at his desk by six o’clock, all his papers arranged before him in the most accurate order, and his books of reference marshalled around him on the floor, while at least one favourite dog lay watching his eye, just beyond the line of circumvallation. Thus by the time the family assembled for breakfast between nine and ten, he had done enough (in his own language) “to break the neck of the day’s work.”

  So it was that in those mornings, with night unregretfully forgotten, and day a revel of exercise eagerly anticipated, the novels were written, profuse with disorders that a lesser mind would have remembered and corrected. Scott’s capacity for work is less described by saying that it was superhuman than by saying that it was inhuman. There is a glimpse of its inhumanity in the episode of a neighbour who looked into Scott’s rooms and complained: