The Facts of Fiction

by Norman Collins

  There is a confounded hand in sight of me here, which has often bothered me before, and now it won’t let me fill my glass with a good will. … Since we sat down … I have been watching it—it fascinates my eyes—it never stops—page after page is finished and thrown on that heap of MS. and still it goes on unwearied—and so it will be till candles are brought in, and God knows how long after that.

  That hand was writing Waverley. It needed to be strong: it was also to write half the fiction of the next fifty years. This ferocious midday to midnight energy gained for Scott the reputation of being a machine: which in an idle world that respects industry is by no means a bad thing. But it also gained for Scott’s works the reputation of being machine-made: which, unfortunately, is simply and invariably the solvent of all art.

  There is a picture of Scott as the Celestial Coiner, assiduously minting money to pay off his partner’s business debts, that has been thickly painted over the Portrait of the Author of a Young Man. And the later painting obscures exactly half the truth.

  That Scott planned his life with the regularity of a tradesman has led many people to disregard all those qualities of mind that would not be appreciated behind a counter. And even when the other illusion of Scott as a Talking Tradesman has been dissolved, and he has been promoted in the imagination to the dignity of a study, there appears a rather suffocating set-piece showing Scott, prosperous and porcine, in a room littered with collie dogs and antiquarian armour, and bristling with bric-à-brac like Balzac’s. Byron’s vase is on the table, Montrose’s sword on the bookcase; an old Border bugle; James VII’s travelling-flask; Rob Roy’s sporran and long gun; Claverhouse’s pistol; a brace of Bonaparte’s; and over all a beatific and inscrutable bust of Shakespeare presiding like an immutable Oriental Buddha.

  It would be difficult to imagine anything lively taking place in such a room. One sees the ghosts of those qualities whose absence people deplore—the abstract, the passionate, the realistic—in retreat from an environment so overpowering. Yet the quality which was to be found in that museum of curios was that rare and obscure quality of common sense. Perhaps it was that Scott was thus constantly reminded that even the relics of the great had their price.

  German romantic fiction had been a parody of just those qualities in man—courage, love, faithfulness and so forth—that have given life its nobility. And the early years of the nineteenth century saw the return of a life of true nobility into fiction by the circuitous route of a parody of parody. Just as Northanger Abbey opened in the manner of a schoolboy’s going to Maskelyne’s with the memory of his own conjuring-set at home in his mind, so Waverley begins with a sneer at the conventions of romance, even though the sneer soon gives place to a full-throated cheer.

  Except for the humorous sanity of the interjections, the retrospective chapters of Waverley, that were written earlier than the rest, might be the opening chapters of any black-letter romance. There is the same Gothic Library; the Great Park with its mouldered Gothic monuments; the solitary island tower; an upper atmosphere crowded with griffins, moldwarps and wyverns; the grim uncle moping about the palace, like a family basilisk; and Youth, aloof, supercilious and not unlike a valetudinarian Byron, already distinguished by his habits of abstraction and love of solitude.

  Readers of Mrs. Radcliffe probably felt themselves perfectly at home in such surroundings; as they did later in The Bride of Lammermoor and Redgauntlet. That may even have been why so many of them went on with it.

  Yet it cannot have been that the capacity for doubt was entirely suspended in the public mind during the years of the black-letter. It has become customary to regard this period not as one of fancy, as it was, but as one of a kind of literary insanity. Probably nine-tenths of the novel readers of the day were only too thankful to the author who gave them the midnight delights of romance without calling upon them to surrender their daytime incredulity. For, with Scott, always through the mists of romantic material marched the facts of history— and usually of recent history—hard, indisputable, and in continuous connection with the real business of human life; like solid, tangible telegraph poles stretching across a mountain mist.

  The modern sympathy in fiction is not so much with the spectacle of life as with the more delicate sensation of living. Indeed, the author as spectator was never less honoured than he is to-day. Scott’s “big bow-wow ” manner, and his habit of seeing life as a perpetual Military Tournament, jar on minds that know life only as a sort of Berkeleyan tree that does not exist except when someone is thinking about it. But when Scott was writing, English readers were slowly recovering from a surfeit of psychology. For Gothic romance, with its superficial encumbrance of physical ghostly gimcrackery was in reality a highly developed psychological literature, in which unfortunately all the major characters were a trifle mawkish, and all the minor characters a little mad. But, psychological it was; and the success or failure of such a novel depended on whether or not the shivering along the spine was strong enough to reach the brain.

  Scott lived to offer an escape from the psychological. John Murray, the publisher, in sending a copy of Waverley to his wife wrote, “It is excellent. No dark passages, no secret chambers, no wind howling in long galleries.” And from that remark it is to be inferred that there was a movement afoot among readers, if not yet among novelists, for the better illumination of the darker and more dangerous corners of Gothic architecture, the throwing open of monk’s holes, and the final exclusion of ghostly draughts.

  From the moment when Waverley appeared English prose fiction was divided into those novels that were by Scott and those that were not. Scott’s anonymity was merely a red-herring drawn along the trail. People followed it up with the nose of curiosity, and arrived one after another at—Walter Scott. When Maria Edgeworth received the three volumes of Waverley she replied promptly with a letter of thanks headed “Aut Scotus, aut Diabolus.”

  Why Scott chose to write anonymously is one of the minor mysteries of literary history. There is a hint in the Preface to Waverley when he explains that he was “too diffident” of his merit to place it in opposition to preconceived notions. And he goes on to refer to the “pages of inanity ” of the last half century.

  Scott, big, bland and a little awkward, was probably rather like an adult at a children’s party, not wanting to be seen there by anyone unless it was certain that he was a success.

  And he was a success. No other author, unless perhaps it was Dickens, has ever taken so much of the public’s time to himself. His success was such that it became just as much a part of the mental picture of him as Goldsmith’s poverty was of him.

  There is an entire gallery of pictures of Scott in the circumstances of success; the Prince Regent toasting him as the author of Waverley and, when Scott denied it, catching him on the toast of the author of Marmion; the Duke of Wellington receiving him in Paris; Blücher being polite to him; Byron limping in and out of time with him down Murray’s staircase in Albemarle Street.

  Carlyle in the long quarrel with the shade of Scott that appeared as a review of Lockhart’s Life, sickened at the sight of so great a measure of success. He searched the powder-magazine of his mind for suitable grenades, and slung out the remark that “Scott spent his life writing impromptu novels to buy farms with,” and added the little squib that “with respect to the literary character of the Waverley novels the great fact is that they were faster written and better paid for than any other books in the world.” The truth, of course, remains that such is not the great fact about them. It is no more than a conspicuous incidental, as Carlyle must have known.

  Carlyle’s real grievance against Scott was that he was a writer without a message. And Carlyle could not really appreciate a writer unless he behaved like a Parnassian postman. But Carlyle had a habit of talking sense even while in a temper. And in denying Scott the title of “great” (which he agrees is largely a matter of words) he gives us perhaps the best summary of essentials that can be made.

  He
was, if no great man, then something much pleasanter to be, a robust, thoroughly healthy and withal a very prosperous and victorious man. An eminently well-conditioned man, healthy in body, healthy in soul, we will call him one of the healthiest of men.

  Since Scott’s work itself contains no record of the transit of a soul, which is what Carlyle would have liked, it is more than ever necessary to see the Waverley novels against the background of “Waverley ” himself. For the novels are really the inessential part of Scott’s life. He was never the sublime, inevitable artist. He brought a mature mind to his first novel.

  It would not in any way be attacking his granite tenacity of purpose to suggest that if Waverley had failed he would never have written another novel. He was already forty-three years of age, life was running out and creditors’ letters were pouring in. Waverley had more of urgent need in its publication than in its writing. It was a relief to the pocket rather than to the heart. Indeed there never was another man of substance whose diligent mind and industrious body were so at the mercy of his lavish manner. Whatever may be the natural economic standard of living for the author, Scott exceeded it. Unlike Fielding and Smollett, whose standard of life fluctuated with fortune, Scott insisted on conditions of grandeur, and raised an overdraft on his strength and talents, and ultimately on Time, to pay for it.

  The spectacle of Scott well dressed and white haired, sweating his way to solvency and immortality, is one which restores faith in the crude possibilities of human nature. There is but a solitary groan that escaped his lips during this time, and that was when he cried out to his partner in business, “For God’s sake treat me as a man and not a milch cow.” For the most part Scott suffered in silence on £10,000 a year; for ever simultaneously catching sight of a fresh fortune and another farm. Wealth and rank were essential to him. Maria Edgeworth summed the truth up very nicely when she wrote, “Dean Swift said that he had written his books that people might learn to treat him like a great lord. Sir Walter writes his in order that he may be able to treat his people as a great lord ought to do.”

  The closing years of Scott’s life and, indeed, the whole upward rush to senile decay and precipitate decline present a romantic spectacle which has aged, so far as many readers are concerned, much less rapidly than his literary romances have done. Scott’s earthly pilgrimage may be plotted in a graph that has Money—and all that goes with it, Power and Pleasure and Independence—for its upright axis, and the one undefeatable factor, Time, for its horizontal. And the line of the graph flattens out as it crosses the paper, to droop alarmingly as it approaches the year 1825.

  In that year Scott owed £10,000 worth of work to Constable and was proposing to borrow another £10,000 on his son’s marriage contract and so “dispense in a great measure with bank assistance and sleep in spite of thunder.” The trouble with Scott becomes evident here: it is not so much that he was in debt and proposing to wade in deeper, as that he had grown to think in units of a banker’s magnitude.

  There is an entry in his Journal for the 18th of December of that year that in its hopeless finality might be the last paragraph of an essay upon the vanity of human wishes:

  What a life mine has been! half educated, almost wholly neglected, or left to myself; stuffing my head with most nonsensical trash, and under-valued by most of my contemporaries for a time; getting forward, and held a bold clever fellow, contrary to the opinion of all who thought me a mere dreamer; broken-hearted for two years; my heart handsomely pieced again, but the crack will remain till my dying day. Rich and poor four or five times; once on the verge of ruin, yet opened a new source of wealth almost overflowing. Now to be broken in my pitch of pride.

  Yet the destructive fire of energy within him was still burning and consuming. He who had been the halest, sanest, healthiest author in Europe was reduced to childish imbecility. Of the old Scott only his energy remained. “I am not sure that I am quite myself in all things,” he said, “but I am sure that on one point there is no change, I mean that I foresee distinctly that if I come to be idle, I shall go mad.” And before the end, that came with the gentleness of a benediction, he had insisted on being carried on his bed to his desk, given a pen in his hand, and propped up in his chair, a monstrous and pathetic imitation of an author.

  There he was left until the unpleasant piece of comedy was over, and he had cried out, “Friends, don’t let me expose myself; get me to bed; that’s the only place.”

  That is the last appearance upon the stage of life of Sir Walter Scott the novelist. Two months later he died in bed at Abbotsford as peacefully as Queen Victoria in Lytton Strachey’s portrait; an old decayed man of sixty-one with the murmur of the Tweed, in place of the cawing of the rooks, in his ears.

  Thackeray And The New Snobbism

  In the middle years of the nineteenth century, the merchant prince, first of his line and good for a hundred thousand, and the English Radical, who worshipped Rousseau in translation and opposed the Corn Laws, grew up side by side. And the English Radical, looking at the merchant prince over the high wall of unequal income, saw, not a commercial suburban sultan but a snob. Immediately a snob-scare started. Everyone was recognised as a snob. Even those born to the Patrician purple were degraded in the public mind to the level of inflated tradesmen who, in some colossal way, had forgotten not only their place but their price. And, naturally enough, the effect on the snob-hunters was deplorable. A new race of snobs, with noses trained to catch the scent of a distant title or the thin whiff of a putative annuity, grew up and overran society. And to these came Thackeray, like Mahomet to the waiting Faithful.

  Considering the essentially mean nature of the prevailing public sentiment, the public did remarkably well to get Thackeray to be the author who was to make it articulate. He was, at least, a full-sized man. And he could spot snobs by looking at them from above—which is really a kind of heavenly rebuke; and not by spying on them from below—which is often a pretty open kind of earthly envy. His Anglo-Indian origin left its mark on him, and he remained throughout his life the blond British Raj genially ruling in Pall Mall; a member of the sacred oligarchy of democratic intolerance. Thackeray, indeed, is that singularly intractable beast, the Whig, with the isolated dignity of manner of the Tory.

  It has been suggested that Thackeray was a child of the eighteenth century living a waif’s existence in the nineteenth. The pattern of his life was certainly of the eighteenth century. He squandered a fortune in youth, and spent the rest of his life in putting himself right with God and the bankers.

  His aim as a novelist was much the same as Fielding’s: to laugh at affectation. Both writers used the bludgeon of burlesque. But Fielding came before the discovery of the tear in fiction; and Thackeray came after. Thackeray, therefore, wrote with his hand on his handkerchief. There infects his scenes a lachrymose gentleness that is as remote from the eighteenth century as it is from our own. And such a character as Colonel Newcome is indisputably a figure of the century that was to produce Albert the Good, and not of the century that gave birth to Tom Jones.

  Thackeray has often been blamed for his habit of dragging in characters out of one pair of covers, or even out of life itself, where they have earned fame and repose, and thrusting them between another pair. And it is not merely in the minor matter of one novel and another, but in the major matter of all his novels in relation to his Book of Snobs that this occurs. For, from this early catalogue of social exhibits came the hints of characters from Major Pendennis and Colonel Newcome to Lord Steyne and Miss Quigley, extending in infinite vigour and variety through his pages.

  It has been suggested that Thackeray’s soul, in the days when he contributed The Snob Papers to Punch, was being consumed by the worms of pride and envy. The hour now awaits the man who will explain Thackeray in terms of an inferiority complex. Only, unfortunately, when he does so, he will be wrong. For Thackeray was only about as acutely aware of his inferiority as the Lord Mayor on a Show day. The important fact about him was not tha
t he was below, but that he was alone.

  There never was a writer more sensitive to levels in society than Thackeray. He was inflexibly the gentleman, but a gentleman whose head was just a little too large to satisfy the fashion-plate ideal of a gentleman. It was Thackeray who first saw the whole chart of society spread out before him; though, unfortunately, it was spread out in the club reading-room. And there is always a picture in the reader’s mind of Thackeray, plump and urbane, crossing to the window to see if common folk were really as he imagined them, and if his map were properly orientated with Westminster in the south-west.

  Since Fielding there had not been an author who could see so much of the spectacle of mankind through one glance of his wide open eyes as Thackeray saw. Jane Austen with her microscope and Scott with his telescope, saw far less. And so it was that the novel that had Society for its hero came into being. Vanity Fair was even called by the hero’s name. This method of writing, however, has the almost insuperable disadvantage of growing more and more vaguely uniform as it proceeds. And it was to give the novel the variety that usually comes from individual human character closely observed that Thackeray had to bring out the comic noses and big moustaches of caricature.

  One of the clues to Thackeray’s genius, in fact, is to be found in those grotesque little boxes which he designed himself to decorate the uncials of his chapters. The frames are filled with gnomish little grotesques with noses that overhang their chests like bananas, or stick out in front like the superb and stately nose of the narwhal. They are the sort of drawings that would be punished if they appeared within the covers of a school exercise book. But Thackeray escaped punishment and even contrived to get paid for them.