But, for good or for ill, Meredith has the habit of nobleness ingrained in him. No modern writer, for example, has so completely ignored the colloquial turns of speech and cast his dialogue in sentences that could without impropriety have been spoken by Queen Elizabeth in person. ‘Out of my sight, I say!’ ‘I went to him of my own will to run from your heartlessness, mother — that I call mother!’ are two examples found upon turning two pages of The Tragic Comedians. That is his natural pitch, although we may guess that the long indifference of the public increased his tendency to the strained and the artificial. For this, among other reasons, it is easy to complain that his world is an aristocratic world, strictly bounded, thinly populated, a little hard-hearted, and not to be entered by the poor, the vulgar, the stupid, or that very common and interesting individual who is a mixture of all three.
And yet there can be no doubt that, even judged by his novels alone, Meredith remains a great writer. The doubt is rather whether he can be called a great novelist; whether, indeed, anyone to whom the technique of novel writing had so much that was repulsive in it can excel compared with those who are writing, not against the grain, but with it. He struggles to escape, and the chapters of amazing but fruitless energy which he produces in his struggle to escape are the true obstacles to the enjoyment of Meredith. What, we ask, is he struggling against? What is he striving for? Was he, perhaps, a dramatist born out of due time — an Elizabethan sometimes, and sometimes, as the last chapters of The Egoist suggest, a dramatist of the Restoration? Like a dramatist, he flouts probability, disdains coherency, and lives from one high moment to the next. His dialogue often seems to crave the relief of blank verse. And for all his analytic industry in the dissection of character, he creates not the living men and women who justify modern fiction, but superb conceptions who have more of the general than of the particular in them. There is a large and beautiful conception of womanhood in Diana rather than a single woman; there is the fervour of romantic love in Richard Feverel, but the faces of the lovers are dim in the rosy light. In this lies both the strength and the weakness of his books, but, if the weakness is at all of the kind we have indicated, the strength is of a nature to counterbalance it. His English power of imagination, with its immense audacity and fertility, his superb mastery of the great emotions of courage and love, his power of summoning nature into sympathy with man and of merging him in her vastness, his glory in all fine living and thinking — these are the qualities that give his conceptions their size and universality. In these respects we must recognize his true descent from the greatest of English writers and his enjoyment of qualities that are expressed nowhere save in the masterpieces of our literature.
The Anatomy of Fiction
SOMETIMES at country fairs you may have seen a professor on a platform exhorting the peasants to come up and buy his wonder-working pills. Whatever their disease, whether of body or mind, he has a name for it and a cure; and if they hang back in doubt he whips out a diagram and points with a stick at different parts of the human anatomy, and gabbles so quickly such long Latin words that first one shyly stumbles forward and then another, and takes his bolus and carries it away and unwraps it secretly and swallows it in hope. ‘The young aspirant to the art of fiction who knows himself to be an incipient realist’, Mr. Hamilton vociferates from his platform, and the incipient realists advance and receive — for the professor is generous — five pills together with nine suggestions for home treatment. In other words they are given five ‘ review questions ‘ to answer, and are advised to read nine books or parts of books. ‘ 1. Define the difference between realism and romance. 2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the realistic method? 3. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the romantic method?’ — that is the kind of thing they work out at home, and with such success that a ‘revised and enlarged edition’ of the book has been issued on the tenth anniversary of the first publication. In America, evidently, Mr. Hamilton is considered a very good professor, and has no doubt a bundle of testimonials to the miraculous nature of his cures. But let us consider: Mr. Hamilton is not a professor; we are not credulous ploughboys; and fiction is not a disease.
In England we have been in the habit of saying that fiction is an art. We are not taught to write novels; dissuasion is our most usual incentive; and though perhaps the critics have ‘deduced and formulated the general principles of the art of fiction’, they have done their work as a good housemaid does hers; they have tidied up after the party is over. Criticism seldom or never applies to the problems of the present moment. On the other hand, any good novelist, whether he be dead or alive, has something to say about them, though it is said very indirectly, differently to different people, and differently at different stages of the same person’s development. Thus, if anything is essential, it is essential to do your reading with your own eyes. But, to tell the truth, Mr. Hamilton has sickened us of the didactic style. Nothing appears to be essential save perhaps an elementary knowledge of the A.B.C., and it is pleasant to remember that Henry James, when he took to dictation, dispensed even with that. Still, if you have a natural taste for books it is probable that after reading Emma, to take an instance, some reflections upon the art of Jane Austen may occur to you — how exquisitely one incident relieves another; how definitely, by not saying something, she says it; how surprising, therefore, her expressive phrases when they come. Between the sentences, apart from the story, a little shape of some kind builds itself up. But learning from books is a capricious business at best, and the teaching so vague and changeable that in the end, far from calling books either ‘ romantic ‘ or ‘realistic’, you will be more inclined to think them, as you think people, very mixed, very distinct, very unlike one another. But this would never do for Mr. Hamilton. According to him every work of art can be taken to pieces, and those pieces can be named and numbered, divided and subdivided, and given their order of precedence, like the internal organs of a frog. Thus we learn how to put them together again — that is, according to Mr. Hamilton, we learn how to write. There is the complication, the major knot, and the explication; the inductive and the deductive methods; the kinetic and the static; the direct and the indirect with subdivisions of the same; connotation, annotation, personal equation, and denotation; logical sequence and chronological succession — all parts of the frog and all capable of further dissection. Take the case of ‘emphasis’ alone. There are eleven kinds of emphasis. Emphasis by terminal position, by initial position, by pause, by direct proportion, by inverse proportion, by iteration, by antithesis, by surprise, by suspense — are you tired already? But consider the Americans. They have written one story eleven times over, with a different kind of emphasis in each. Indeed, Mr. Hamilton’s book teaches us a great deal about the Americans.
Still, as Mr. Hamilton uneasily perceives now and then, you may dissect your frog, but you cannot make it hop; there is, unfortunately, such a thing as life. Directions for imparting life to fiction are given, such as to ‘ train yourself rigorously never to be bored’, and to cultivate ‘a lively curiosity and a ready sympathy’. But it is evident that Mr. Hamilton does not like life, and, with such a tidy museum as his, who can blame him? He has found life very troublesome, and, if you come to consider it, rather unnecessary; for, after all, there are books. But Mr. Hamilton’s views on life are so illuminating that they must be given in his own words:
Perhaps in the actual world we should never bother to converse with illiterate provincial people; and yet we do not feel it a waste of time and energy to meet them in the pages of Middlemarch. For my own part, I have always, in actual life, avoided meeting the sort of people that appear in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair; and yet I find it not only interesting but profitable to associate with them through the entire extent of a rather lengthy novel.
‘Illiterate provincial people’— ‘interesting but profitable’— ‘waste of time and energy’ — now after much wandering and painful toil we are on the right track at last. For long it seemed
that nothing could reward the American people for having written eleven themes upon the eleven kinds of emphasis. But now we perceive dimly that there is something to be gained by the daily flagellation of the exhausted brain. It is not a title; it has nothing to do with pleasure or with literature; but it appears that Mr. Hamilton and his industrious band see far off upon the horizon a circle of superior enlightenment to which, if only they can keep on reading long enough, they may attain. Every book demolished is a milestone passed. Books in foreign languages count twice over. And a book like this is of the nature of a dissertation to be sent up to the supreme examiner, who may be, for anything we know, the ghost of Matthew Arnold. Will Mr. Hamilton be admitted? Can they have the heart to reject anyone so ardent, so dusty, so worthy, so out of breath? Alas! look at his quotations; consider his comments upon them:
‘The murmuring of innumerable bees.’... The word innumerable, which denotes to the intellect merely ‘incapable of being numbered,’ is, in this connection, made to suggest to the senses the murmuring of bees.
The credulous ploughboy could have told him more than that. It is not necessary to quote what he says about ‘magic casements’ and the ‘iniquity of oblivion’. Is there not, upon page 208, a definition of style?
No; Mr. Hamilton will never be admitted; he and his disciples must toil for ever in the desert sand, and the circle of illumination will, we fear, grow fainter and farther upon their horizon. It is curious to find, after writing the above sentence, how little one is ashamed of being, where literature is concerned, an unmitigated snob.
Gothic Romance
IT says much for Miss Birkhead’s natural good sense that she has been able to keep her head where many people would have lost theirs. She has read a great many books without being suffocated. She has analysed a great many plots without being nauseated. Her sense of literature has not been extinguished by the waste-paper baskets full of old novels so courageously heaped on top of it. For her ‘attempt to trace in outline the origin of the Gothic romance and the tale of terror ‘ has necessarily led her to grope in basements and attics where the light is dim and the dust is thick. To trace the course of one strand in the thick skein of our literature is well worth doing. But perhaps Miss Birkhead would have increased the interest of her work if she had enlarged her scope to include some critical discussion of the aesthetic value of shock and terror, and had ventured some analysis of the taste which demands this particular stimulus. But her narrative is quite readable enough to supply the student with material for pushing the enquiry a little further.
Since it is held that Gothic romance was introduced by Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, in the year 1764, there is no need to confound it with the romance of Spenser or of Shakespeare. It is a parasite, an artificial commodity, produced half in joke in reaction against the current style, or in relief from it. If we run over the names of the most famous of the Gothic romancers — Clara Reeve, Mrs. Radcliffe, Monk Lewis, Charles Maturin, Sarah Wilkinson — we shall smile at the absurdity of the visions which they conjure up. We shall, perhaps, congratulate ourselves upon our improvement. Yet since our ancestors bought two thousand copies of Mrs. Bennett’s Beggar Girl and her Benefactors, on the day of publication, at a cost of thirty-six shillings for the seven volumes, there must have been something in the trash that was appetizing, or something in the appetites that was coarse. It is only polite to give our ancestors the benefit of the doubt. Let us try to put ourselves in their places. The books that formed part of the ordinary library in the year 1764 were, presumably, Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes, Gray’s Poems, Richardson’s Clarissa, Addison’s Cato, Pope’s Essay on Man. No one could wish for a more distinguished company. At the same time, as literary critics are too little aware, a love of literature is often roused and for the first years nourished not by the good books, but by the bad. It will be an ill day when all the reading is done in libraries and none of it in tubes. In the eighteenth century there must have been a very large public which found no delight in the peculiar literary merits of the age; and if we reflect how long the days were and how empty of distraction, we need not be surprised to find a school of writers grown up in flat defiance of the prevailing masters. Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, and Mrs. Radcliffe all turned their backs upon their time and plunged into the delightful obscurity of the Middle Ages, which were so much richer than the eighteenth century in castles, barons, moats, and murders.
What Horace Walpole began half in fun was continued seriously and with considerable power by Mrs. Radcliffe. That she had a conscience in the matter is evident from the pains she is at to explain her mysteries when they have done their work. The human body ‘decayed and disfigured by worms, which were visible in the features and hands’, turns out to be a waxen image credibly placed there in fulfilment of a vow. But there is little wonder that a novelist perpetually on the stretch first to invent mysteries and then to explain them had no leisure for the refinements of the art. ‘ Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroines’, says Miss Birkhead, ‘resemble nothing more than a composite photograph in which all distinctive traits are merged into an expressionless type.’ The same fault can be found with most books of sensation and adventure, and is, after all, inherent in the subject; for it is unlikely that a lady confronted by a male body stark naked, wreathed in worms, where she had looked, maybe, for a pleasant landscape in oils, should do more than give a loud cry and drop senseless. And women who give loud cries and drop senseless do it in much the same way. That is one of the reasons why it is extremely difficult to write a tale of terror which continues to shock and does not first become insipid and later ridiculous. Even Miss Wilkinson, who wrote that ‘Adeline Barnett was fair as a lily, tall as the pine, her fine dark eyes sparkling as diamonds, and she moved with the majestic air of a goddess’, had to ridicule her own favourite style before she had done. Scott, Jane Austen, and Peacock stooped from their heights to laugh at the absurdity of the convention and drove it, at any rate, to take refuge underground. For it flourished subterraneously all through the nineteenth century, and for sixpence you can buy to-day at the bookstall the recognizable descendant of the Mysteries of Udolpho. Nor is Adeline Barnett by any means defunct. She is probably an earl’s daughter at the present moment; vicious, painted; in society. But if you call her Miss Wilkinson’s Adeline she will have to answer none the less.
It would be a fine exercise in discrimination to decide the precise point at which romance becomes Gothic and imagination moonshine. Coleridge’s lines in Kubla Khan about the woman wailing for her demon lover are a perfect example of the successful use of emotion. The difficulty, as Miss Birkhead shows, is to know where to stop. Humour is comparatively easy to control; psychology is too toilsome to be frequently overdone; but a gift for romance easily escapes control and cruelly plunges its possessor into disrepute. Maturin and Monk Lewis heaped up horrors until Mrs. Radcliffe herself appeared calm and composed. And they have paid the penalty. The skull-headed lady, the vampire gentleman, the whole troop of monks and monsters who once froze and terrified now gibber in some dark cupboard of the servants’ hall. In our day we flatter ourselves the effect is produced by subtler means. It is at the ghosts within us that we shudder, and not at the decaying bodies of barons or the subterranean activities of ghouls. Yet the desire to widen our boundaries, to feel excitement without danger, and to escape as far as possible from the facts of life drive us perpetually to trifle with the risky ingredients of the mysterious and the unknown. Science, as Miss Birkhead suggests, will modify the Gothic romance of the future with the aeroplane and the telephone. Already the bolder of our novelists have made use of psycho-analysis to startle and dismay. And already such perils attend the use of the abnormal in fiction — the younger generation has been heard to complain that the horror of the Turn of the Screw is altogether too tame and conventional to lift a hair of their heads. But can we possibly say that Henry James was a Goth?
The Supernatural in Fiction
WHEN Miss Scarborough descr
ibes the results of her inquiries into the supernatural in fiction as ‘suggestive rather than exhaustive ‘ we have only to add that in any discussion of the supernatural suggestion is perhaps more useful than an attempt at science. To mass together all sorts of cases of the supernatural in literature without much more system or theory than the indication of dates supplies leaves the reader free where freedom has a special value. Perhaps some psychological law lies hidden beneath the hundreds of stories about ghosts and abnormal states of mind (for stories about abnormal states of mind are included with those that are strictly supernatural) which are referred to in her pages; but in our twilight state it is better to guess than to assert, to feel than to classify our feelings. So much evidence of the delight which human nature takes in stories of the supernatural will inevitably lead one to ask what this interest implies both in the writer and in the reader.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 476