Seriously though, if Science were a little more modest and less dogmatic she would not expose her humble followers to such shocks as the above. We cannot all have Lord Rosse’s telescopes in our garrets and verify every observation for ourselves.89 If savants tell us that a point is settled, we forthwith absorb it into systems, and we feel ill-used when, in the course of a few years, we have to disgorge it again. We stand on a very narrow basis of ascertained fact, with vast untouched sciences looming upon us through the darkness. Look at electricity with its vast possibilities; magnetism an inexplicable phenomenon which dominates all nature and is as universal as gravity; mesmerism with its suggestions of a sixth sense which may be developing in the human race. In each of these subjects there is a field for tyro Newtons. What is light and what is heat? What is the subtle elastic medium which pervades all space and which conducts light without being itself illuminated? Are there many unknown elements, or are those which we acknowledge capable of being resolved into a very few, which form the original clay out of which Nature manufactured her bricks? When the human race has solved all these problems, they will still be only nibbling at the borders of knowledge.
Our accurate information about the intimate organisation of our own human bodies is pitifully small when one thinks of the immense amount of labour which has been expended over it. Physiology is a science which is richer in polysyllables than in facts. Our learned professors can tell us occasionally what an organ is made for, and even make some guess at how it acts, but what satisfaction can he give us as to the motive power? The most ordinary phenomena of life are sealed books to us, however much we may mask our ignorance by sonorous words and solemn countenances.
Did it ever strike you how calmly we acquiesce in the phenomenon of sleep and how completely ignorant we are of what the immediate cause of it may be? How strange that our scientists should spend their days in investigating all manner of morbid rarities, the beri-beri of India or the Lata of Sumatra, and should never attempt an explanation as to why the human race spends one third of its time in a profound trance! There is something amusing in our disregard for all that is familiar to us. The physician sits down at his study table with a rash upon his face and his stomach full of wind, and he writes a forty-page pamphlet on Addison’s disease of Ichthyosis, as well as the pains in his epigastrium will allow him. You would imagine that he would be inclined to look into this little complaint of his own which is rendering the lives of so many of his fellow mortals unhappy, but no, he is bound to go off in pursuit of some gaudy disease which appears about once a century, and is then so like some other disease that no one can tell them apart. Look over any weekly medical paper and you will find that nine paragraphs out of ten are devoted to complaints which no man of simple tastes would ever dream of contracting.
This question of sleep, however, always seems to me to be a glaring example of how very shallow our enquiries are. Why is it that I spend so much of my time in a state of insensibility? ‘It is because Nature must recruit herself – it is to act as a restorative to the system – it is because the brain is less vascular than during waking hours – it is because action and rest are inseparable terms.’ Quite so. In fact I go to sleep because I go. I might have struggled to that conclusion without any learned friend at my elbow.
Now I will tell you why you go to sleep. In moving or thinking or even in merely existing there is always a chemical change going on in our system, and the waste products are removed from the muscles or nerves by the blood. Now, among the many complex chemicals which exist among these waste products and which find their way into the circulation, there is one which is a narcotic poison. This is slowly evolved during the process of tissue change, but in from twelve to sixteen hours it accumulates to such an extent in the system that it produces its characteristic effects. Some agents, as opium, chloral and alcohol, favour the formation of this important substance while others such as green tea or black coffee neutralise its action. In sleep, as the system is in complete rest, very little of the narcotic-containing tissue-waste is formed and the constitution has an opportunity of shaking off all that has accumulated – through the skin and kidneys – hence the individual wakes refreshed. Have you never noticed the characteristic smell of a sleeping person? That comes from the fact that every pore of his skin is exhaling this subtle compound. There is a brand-new original theory for you! What’s that? Why should a narcotic send people to sleep? Why, of course – I’ll let you know some other time when I have a week or two to spare.
No signs of Dr Julep today which looks as if he does not take a very serious view of my case.90 I know that I am working the thing off, but still I should be more satisfied if I had it through what the newspapers call ‘the ordinary official channels.’ This little day-book of mine is a sufferer through his absence for, as you have seen, he is a chatty genial mortal and has generally something to say which is worth making a note of. With the exception of the sudden intrusion of the slavey’s head with an abrupt ‘Please, sir, Missus wants to know whether you’ll take parsnips or turnips?’, I have been abandoned entirely to myself. I console myself however by making spiritual excursions over the way and sliding down a sunbeam into that little chamber where the great art contract is being carried out. She has finished one, I perceive, and has made a good deal of progress with another. I am puzzled as to what I shall do with them when they come over. It would be hardly fair to hang them beside any William Blake, Doré and De Neuville.
In the intervals between jotting down these rambling notes I have picked up a couple of novels from the circulating library, but they are not very absorbing reading. They are both of the good old crusted order, where the conventional heroine, having lost her heart to the conventional hero, is prevented by a number of conventional events from recovering that organ until the conclusion of the third volume. There is an atmosphere of curl-papers and kid gloves about them, but where is the warm human life, with its frail impulses and its curious way of saying and doing exactly what you least expect? Now, I’ll wager that if I were to take the two gentlemen who wrote these books into any drawing room and there bring them into contact with people who talked exactly as they represent their characters as talking, they would set them down as the most intolerable prigs they ever met. Let us take an example haphazard from these two text books. ‘Ah, Miss Mortimer,’ exclaimed George Stephen, raising his Tam o’Shanter cap. ‘Your eyes are the sun and your smile the warmth which revives everyone around you.’ Even in print that has rather a solid sound, but if you try to say it to a young lady you will find that no ordinary girl could bear up against it. ‘My dear friend,’ said the Colonel as he filled his glass, ‘let us throw aside all gloomy anticipations and form a fixed resolution to stand by each other whatever the future may bring forth—’ A very sonorous Colonel, but not a very natural one.
It is very seldom in real conversation that you hear a long sentence, or a sentence containing a parenthesis. The average man has no great command of language and would no more dream of interlarding his talk with neat similes and happy allusions than he would of dancing into a room instead of walking into it. In most dialogues each sentence consists of a very few words, and when the speaker wishes to amplify, he does it by fresh sentences and not by bloating a single one out with conjunctions until it is like one of these Chinese boxes, which contains a dozen more inside it, each within the other. Now here’s an interview between an old country squire and his promising son, as described by a novelist and as reported by a shorthand reporter. You will observe that the real conversation is a good deal crisper and more spirited than are the carefully rounded periods of the story-teller:
The old man glanced sternly at his son as he entered the room, and began:
‘Your conduct, John, has given great pain both to your mother and myself. On the last occasion when I paid your college debts, I told you that you need never look to me for aid again – and I am determined to adhere to that resolution. What have you to say in extenuation of your c
onduct?’
‘Well, sir,’ said the young man, ‘when a man has the misfortune to back the wrong horse in the St Leger, the Derby and the Oaks, he can hardly expect to have a balance on the right side. Everyone said that Zebra was a certain winner.’
‘I can’t conceive, John, where you get these low tastes from, and your judgement too is far from good. Are you not aware that Zebra comes on the mother’s side from Bountiful, who always broke down at a crisis? I ought to know, for I lost two hundred pounds over the brute. Now who could look at the Racing Calendar and doubt that Carydon, who won, was a very dangerous horse. His granddam won the Cambridgeshire. Horse-racing is a degrading taste, however, and you must break yourself of it. What else have you spent your money on? There is a woman in the case, no doubt?’
‘I am bound to confess, sir, that there is one young person to whom I have shown some attention.’
‘Upon my word, I am astonished at your assurance. You appear to have no regard for the good name of the family. Who is this individual?’
‘Fanny Davis is her name, sir, daughter of Old Molly Davis who keeps the tobacconist’s shop.’
‘What, you young rascal, you have taken up with the daughter of my old flame Molly! And how is she looking? Upon my word, I have half a mind to look in upon her when I come down to Cambridge to settle these debts of yours.’
Shorthand verbatim report:
‘Too bad, John, too bad! Your mother thinks so as well as I. I said last time I’d never help you again. I won’t either. What the devil have you to say for yourself? Hey?’
‘Bad luck, sir.’ (Pause) ‘When a chap makes a mistake over the Leger, the Derby and the Oaks, he’s bound to be hard hit. Zebra was reckoned a certainty.’
‘These low tastes of yours, John. Can’t imagine where you get ’em. No judgement either. Zebra’s from Bountiful on the mother’s side. She was always a faint-hearted one. I ought to know. Lost two hundred on the brute. Look at Carydon now! The Racing Calendar would tell you that she was dangerous. Granddam won the Cambridge. It’s a degrading taste, horse-racing. You must drop it. What else have you been at? Some woman in tow, no doubt?’
‘One little girl, sir.’
‘Damn your impudence! You’re a disgrace to your family. Who is she? Hey?’
‘Fanny Davis. (Pause) Daughter of Old Molly at the Cigar shop.’
‘What, you dog, Old Molly Davis’ daughter! And how is Molly, hey? Gad, I’ll look her up when I run down to settle your bills – hanged if I don’t.’
And so on ad infinitum.
Our author has the best of it in literary finish and in grammar, but I am inclined to think that the shorthand reporter makes a more vivid narrative of it.
It is as impertinent as it is inartistic of a novelist to wander away from his story in order to give us his own opinions on this or that subject. George Eliot, Victor Hugo, Thackeray and Ouida are all somewhat addicted to it. What would we think of a play-writer who would suspend the acting of one of his pieces while he came upon the stage and discoursed to his audience about the positive philosophy, or the Euphrates Valley railway? Both the railway and the philosophy are excellent things in their place, and we are glad to hear something about them, but surely it would be well to ring down the curtain on the fifth act before holding forth upon them. So, no one could reasonably object to any gentleman unburdening himself of his opinions in an appendix, but to obtrude them upon us at a moment when we are trying to get into sympathy with his characters is to risk the spoiling of his story – as a story. It may become an excellent mosaic of philosophy, information, theology – pantology in fact – but it ceases to be a good novel.
But the moral, oh the moral! We don’t want immoral stories but we want unmoral ones. Morals in a novel are as much out of place as physic in a champagne bottle. Why is vice always to be defeated and virtue triumphant? It is not so, I fear, in the world around us. Are we to be more prudish than Providence? There is not one of us who has not known in his experience of some good fellow who has gone to the wall, and of some scoundrel who has enjoyed every gift of fortune. It has jarred upon our finite sense of the fitness of things, but still the fact remained. Our instincts tell us that there ought to be some compensation which is beyond our ken, but we may be content to leave that question open and confine ourselves to depicting things as they are. Until we do so our romances are bound to be one-sided and unnatural.
It pleases us when that high-spirited and handsome youth, the hero, knocks the lumbering villain down. In real life, however, the scoundrel has a way of getting up again and returning the compliment. The heroine, too, has a miraculous trick of emerging pure and innocent at the end of the third volume after going through experiences which would, I fear, be too much for any poor lass who was only made of flesh and blood. The simple kind-hearted man of business does not invariably prosper. In this coarse, inartistic world of ours, he occasionally pays a shilling in the pound and dies in a lunatic asylum.91 Such a denouement would however be ‘in very questionable taste’ – to quote one of the favourite insipidities of the British critic. We should, according to this enlightened band, draw the world not as it is, but as it ought to be – a principle which if applied to art would be productive of some startling effects. There would be an opening then for the painter of tender years who remarked that, though he had seen many sunsets, he had never seen anything which came up to his idea of what a sunset ought to be.
No, the touchstone of a novel is the interest. If it succeeds in absorbing our attention and taking us away from the work-a-day world around us, it may claim to be a good novel, but if it fails in this essential no amount of clever writing or originality of thought can make it anything but a failure. It may still be a remarkable book, and a most admirable piece of literary work, but from the moment when our sympathy with the characters relaxes it disqualifies itself from taking a high place among the romances. Judged by this standard, and by their power of riveting and retaining the interest of the reader from the first page to the last, I believe that the three finest novels of the century are from the same pen. Foul Play, Hard Cash and It Is Never Too Late to Mend are invariably the three dirtiest books in a circulating library – a very fair criterion of popular taste.92 These three with The Cloister and the Hearth, Ouida’s Under Two Flags, the latter part of Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas and the first volume of Payn’s By Proxy are as fine examples of pure storytelling as our literature can boast of.
I flatter myself that I am somewhat of a connoisseur of short stories. The wine-taster uses a liqueur glass, not a tumbler, and so the real flavour of an author can be appreciated best in his smaller productions. But how few there are who have written first-class tales. You could count them on your fingers. The reason is, I suppose, that when an author has hit upon a strong idea which may be amplified into a three-volume novel he cannot afford to throw it away upon a thirty-page story. Yet to my mind, the production of the short tales is the finer art of the two. Every little gem must be of the purest water and most delicately cut if it is to stand out among its fellows. There is no room for padding – every word must tell. It should be full of concentrated strength and yet flow easily and naturally. How distinct an art tale-writing is in its higher developments from novel-writing is shown by the fact that the masters of one have had no success at all at the other.93 Poe, who has written two short tales of the very highest merit – ‘The Gold-Bug’ and ‘The Murders of the Rue Morgue’ – never even attempted a longer flight. Bret Harte, whose ‘Luck of Roaring Camp’ and ‘Tennessee’s Partner’ are the very acme of pathos, fails to arouse any enthusiasm in the reader for Gabriel Conroy. Robert Louis Stevenson appears to be one of the few who are capable of producing a first-class tale and who can still excel in a more sustained effort. His ‘Pavilion on the Links’ is, to my mind, as certainly the best of recent tales as his Dr Jekyll is of the shilling dreadfuls. His manner and his matter are equally excellent.94
I don’t know whether dogmatism is one of the sympto
ms of rheumatic gout. Looking over the last few pages, it looks as if I had been visited by an acute attack of it. Put it down to the abominable weather and the demoralising effect of this course of solitary confinement. I have been feeding on my own mind without taking in anything fresh, either by reading or talking, until there is a danger of my finding myself without an idea left to draw upon.
Some men don’t keep any permanent stock of ideas but get them to order as they want them – and yet manage to pass as very well-informed and entertaining individuals. If a man crams himself in this way he should dole out his information very carefully and with great art, or he is liable to be detected. He must coax the conversation into his own channels – not drag it in. I remember an instance where the artifice was a little too transparent. I was returning from Kimberley with one Ferguson, a raw-boned ingenuous youth, and while passing through Capetown we were asked to dinner by an ex-premier of the Colony who had known my father. Ferguson, after his years of Bohemian life at the mines, was in the utmost trepidation at the idea of having to conform once more to the usages of civilised life. ‘There’ll be ladies there?’ he asked. ‘I’ll have to take one down to dinner.’ ‘Probably,’ I answered. ‘In heaven’s name,’ he cried distractedly, ‘what am I to talk to her about? I have no small talk. I know nothing about theatres or dress or any of the things which would interest a woman. I know nothing about anything except mines and niggers. I wish I was safely out of it.’ ‘My dear fellow,’ said I, ‘don’t distress yourself. Look over any books you have and post yourself up in one or two subjects. A very little knowledge will enable you to pass as an agreeable companion.’ Ferguson departed to his lodgings and, finding that the only book of information in his possession was a volume on the history of Ballooning, he studied this assiduously until he knew it from cover to cover. When the night of the dinner came round my companion appeared in most orthodox costume, and with all this accurate and unusual knowledge soaked well into his system. When we were waiting in the drawing room he informed us that a Jesuit named Francis Lana had first proposed to navigate the air by means of four hollow balls made of thin copper. As he descended the stairs with his lady I heard him assuring her that Black of Edinburgh had sent a bag of hydrogen into the air. When the soup was placed upon the table he told us how Joseph and Stephen Montgolfier had ascended in fire balloons at Annonay upon the 5th of June 1783. With the fish came a long account of how Madame Blanchard’s balloon had taken fire and she herself been precipitated to the ground and killed, and how Lieutenant Harris and the younger Sadler met with a similar fate. The meat arrived but Ferguson still rambled on with his chosen subject. He told us how the great Nassau Balloon had started from Vauxhall Gardens and had after eighteen hours descended at Weilberg in the Duchy of Nassau. He also informed us that Nadar’s great balloon contained no less that 215,363 cubic feet of gas and that it had taken as many as 35 soldiers into the air at one time. With the pastry he narrated the incidents of Mr Coxwell’s ascent at Belfast in 1865 on which occasion the balloon became uncontrollable and many people were injured. Having rejoined the ladies he went on to tell with much spirit the story of the remarkable ascent made by Glaisher and Coxwell from Wolverhampton in 1863, on which occasion the great height of seven miles was reached, and the adventurers nearly lost their lives through the rarification of the atmosphere. At this point poor Ferguson exhausted his subject and suddenly dried up, nor could question or entreaty get another remark out of him for the remainder of the evening. However he had done enough to secure his reputation as a conversationalist. ‘Your friend was brilliant, sir, brilliant,’ our good host remarked to me as we parted. ‘He is clearly a great aeronaut himself. We must see more of him – we really must.’ It is as well he didn’t, for within a week Jimmy Ferguson had forgotten all his suddenly acquired information and knew no more about balloons than he did about the differential calculus.
The Narrative of John Smith Page 8