Part 5

A recent writer, anonymous, but speaking from a respectable vehicle as platform, has told us that the short story is the highest form into which any expression of the art of fiction can be cast. This to me looks very like nonsense. I do not know any short story which can take rank with ‘Père Goriot,’ or ‘Vanity Fair,’ or ‘David Copper-field.’ The short story has charms of its own, and makes demands of its own. What those demands are only the writers who have subjected themselves to its tyranny can know. The ordinary man who tries this form of art finds early that he is emptying his mental pockets. Kipling’s riches in this respect have looked as if they were without end, and no man before him has paid away so much. But it has to be remembered here that in many examples of his power in this way he has been purely episodic, and the discovery or creation of an episode is a much simpler thing than the discovery or creation of a story proper, which is a collection of episodes, arranged in close sequence, and leading to a catastrophe, tragic or comic, as the theme may determine.

In estimating the value of any writer’s work you must take his range into consideration. Kipling stretches, in emotion, from deep seriousness to exuberant laughter; and his grasp of character is quite firm and sure, whether he deal with Mrs. Hawksbee or with Dinah Shadd; with a field officer or with Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd; with the Inspector of Forests or with Mowgli. He knows the ways of thinking of them all, and he knows the tricks of speech of all, and the outer garniture and daily habitudes of all. His mind seems furnished with an instantaneous camera and a phonographic recorder in combination; and keeping guard over this rare mental mechanism is a spirit of catholic affection and understanding.

Finally, he is an explorer, one of the original discoverers, one of the men who open new regions to our view. A revelation has waited for him. He is as much the master of his English compeers in originality as Stevenson was their master in finished craftsmanship.

VI.--UNDER FRENCH ENCOURAGEMENT--THOMAS HARDY

Within the last half-score of years an extraordinary impulse towards freedom in the artistic representation of life has touched some of our English writers. Thackeray, in ‘Pendennis,’ laments that since Fielding no English novelist has ‘dared to draw a man.’ Dr. George Macdonald, in his ‘Robert Falconer,’ whispers, in a sort of stage aside, his wish that it were possible to be both decent and honest in the exposition of the character of the Baron of Rothie, who is a seducer by profession. Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of Thackeray was, that he was a gentleman, and that his good-breeding and his manliness were essentially of the English pattern. Dr. Mac-donald’s most intense impulse is towards purity of life, as an integral necessity for that communion with the Eternal Fatherhood which he preaches with so much earnestness and charm. That two such men should have felt that their work was subject to a painful limitation on one side of it is significant, but it is a fact which may be used with equal force as an argument by the advocates of the old method and the adopters of the new. It is perfectly true that they felt the restriction, but it is equally true that they respected it, and were resolute not to break through it. Their cases are cited here, not as an aid to argument on one side or the other, but simply to show that the argument itself is no new thing--that the question as to how far freedom is allowable has been debated in the minds of honest writers, and decided in one way, long before it came to be debated by another set of honest writers, who decided it in another.

There never was an age in which outspoken honesty was indecent. There never was an age in which pruriency in any guise could cease to be indecent. There never was an age when the fashion of outspoken honesty did not give a seeming excuse to pruriency; and it is this fact, that freedom in the artistic presentation of the sexual problems has invariably led to license, which has in many successive ages of literature forced the artist back to restraint, and has made him content to be bound by a rigid puritanism. In the beat of the eternal pendulum of taste it seems ordained that puritanism shall become so very puritanic that art shall grow tired of its bonds, and that liberty in turn shall grow offensive, and shall compel art by an overmastering instinct to return towards puritanism.

It is France which has led the way in the latest protest against the restrictions imposed by modern taste upon art. It may be admitted as a fact that those restrictions were felt severely, for it is obvious that until they began to chafe there was no likelihood of their being violently broken. The chief apostle of the new movement towards entire freedom is, of course, Emile Zola. After having excited for many years an incredulous amazement and disgust, he is now almost universally recognised as an honest and honourable artist, and as a great master in his craft. Nobody who is at all instructed ventures any longer to say that Zola is indecent because he loves indecency, or is pleased by the contemplation of the squalid and obscene. We see him as he truly is--a pessimist in humanity--sad and oppressed, and bitter with the gall of a hopeless sympathy with suffering and distorted mankind.

One English artist, whom, in the just language of contemporary criticism, it is no exaggeration to describe as great, has elected (rather late in life for so strong a departure) to cast in his lot with the new school. That his ambitions are wholly honourable it would be the mere vanity of injustice to deny. That his new methods contrast very unfavourably with his old ones, that he is lending the weight of his authority to a movement which is full of mischief, that in obeying in all sincerity an artistic impulse he is doing a marked disservice to his own art in particular, and to English art in general, are with me so many rooted personal convictions; but I dare not pretend that they are more. Mr. Hardy is just as sincere in his belief that he is right as I and others among his critics are in our belief that he is wrong. The question must be threshed out dispassionately and judicially, if it be faced at all. It cannot be settled by an appeal to personal sentiment on either side. But in the limits to which I am now restricted it is impossible to do justice to the discussion, and it would, indeed, be barely possible to state even the whole of its terms.

I am forced to content myself, therefore, with a temperamental expression of opinion in place of a judicial one, pleading only that the arguments against me are recognised and respected, although I have no present opportunity of recapitulating and disputing them. It appears, then--to speak merely as an advocate ex parte--to us of the old school that an essential part of the fiction writer’s duty is to be harmless. That, of course, to the men of the cayenne-pepper-caster creed seems a very milky sort of proclamation, but to us it is a matter of grave moment. I have always thought, for my own part, that the novelist might well take for his motto the last five words of that passage in ‘The Tempest’ where we read: ‘This isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs, which give delight and hurt not! Simple as the motto seems, it will be found to offer a fairly wide range. When Reade tilted against prison abuses and the abuses of private asyla, or when Dickens rode down on the law of Chancery as administered in his day, or when Thackeray scourged snobbery and selfishness in society, they were all well within the limits of this rule. We experience a delight which hurts not, but on the contrary is entirely tonic and inspiring, when Satire swings his lash on the bared back of Hypocrisy or cruel and intentioned Vice. We experience a delight which hurts not, but on the contrary freshens the whole flood of feeling within us, when a true artist deals truly with the sorrows and infirmities of our kind. To offer it as our intent to give delight and hurt not is no mere profession of an artistic Grundyism. It is the proclamation of what is to our minds the simple truth, that fiction should be a joyful, an inspiring, a sympathetic, and a helpful art. There are certain questions the public discussion of which we purposely avoid. There are certain manifestations of character the exhibition of which we hold to be something like a crime.

Mr. Hardy would plead, and with perfectly apparent propriety, that he does not choose to write for ‘the young person.’ But I answer that he cannot help himself. He cannot choose his audience. Fiction appeals to everybody, and fiction so robust, so delicate and charming as his own finds its way into all hands. When a man can take a hall, and openly advertise that he intends to speak therein ‘to men only,’ he is reasonably allowed a certain latitude. If he pitches his cart on the village green, and talks with the village lads and lasses within hearing, he will, if he be a decent fellow, avoid the treatment of certain themes.

To take the most striking example:--In ‘Jude the Obscure’ Mr. Hardy deals very largely with the emotions and reasons which animate a young woman when she decides not to sleep with her husband, when she decides that she will sleep with her husband, when she decides to sleep with a man who is not her husband, and when she decides not to sleep with the man who is not her husband. Now, all this does not matter to the mentally solid and well-balanced reader. It is not very interesting, for one thing, and apart from the fact that it is, from a workman’s point of view, astonishingly well done, it would not be interesting at all. Mr. Hardy offers it as the study of a temperament. Very well. It is an excellent study of a temperament, but it bores. The theme is not big enough to be worth the effort expended upon it. Here is an hysterical, wrong-headed, and confused-hearted little hussy who can’t make up her mind as to what is right and what is wrong, and who is a prey to the impulse of the moment, psychical or physical. I don’t think there are many people like her. I don’t think that from the broad human-natural point of view it matters a great deal how she decides. But I am sure of this--that the more that kind of small monstrosity is publicly analysed and anatomised and made much of, the more her morbidities will increase in her, and the more unbearable in real life she is likely to become. Mr. Hardy’s labour in this particular is a direct incentive to the study of hysteria as a fine art amongst such women as are natively prone to it. One of the gravest dangers which beset women is that of hysterical self-deception. The common-sense fashion of dealing with them when they suffer in that way is kindly and gently to ignore their symptoms until the reign of common-sense returns. To make them believe that their emotions are worthy of the scrutiny of a great analyst of the human heart is to increase their morbid temptations, and in the end to render those temptations irresistible. The one kind of person to whom ‘Jude the Obscure’ must necessarily appeal with the greatest power is the kind of person depicted in its pages, and the tendency of the book is unavoidably towards the development and multiplication of the type described. This is the only end the book can serve, apart from the fact that it does reveal to us Mr. Hardy’s special knowledge of a dangerous and disagreeable form of mental disorder, But it is not the physician’s business to sow disease, and any treatise on hysteria which is thrown into a captivating popular form, and makes hysteria look like an interesting and romantic thing, will spread the malady as surely as a spark will ignite gunpowder. This at least is not a mere matter of opinion, but of sound scientific fact, which no student of that disorder which Mr. Hardy has so masterfully handled will deny. In this respect, then, the book is a centre of infection, and that the author of ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes’ should have written it is matter at once for astonishment and grief. That is to say, it is a matter of astonishment and grief to me, and to those who think as I do. There is a large and growing contingent of writers and readers to whom it is a theme for joyful congratulation. It is one of the rules of the game we are now playing to respect all honest conviction.

Of Mr. Hardy, from the purely artistic side, there is little time to speak. On that side let me first set down what is to be said in dispraise, for the mere sake of leaving a sweet taste in the mouth at the end. Even from his own point of view--that lauded ‘sense of the overwhelming sadness of modern life’ which captivates the admirers of his latest style--it is possible to spread the epic table of sorrow without finding a place upon it for scraps of the hoggish anatomy which are not nameable except in strictly scientific or wholly boorish speech. But it seems necessary to the new realism that its devotee should be able to write for the perusal of gentlemen and ladies about things he dared not mention orally in the presence of either; so that what a drunken cabman would be deservedly kicked for saying in a lady’s hearing may be honourably printed for a lady’s reading by a scholar and a sage. It was once thought otherwise, but I am arguing here, not against realism per se, but against the inartistic introduction of gross episodes. Every reader of Mr. Hardy will recognise my meaning, and the passage in my mind seems gratuitously and unserviceably offensive.

To come to less unpleasing themes, where, still expressing disapproval, one may do it with some grace, one of the few limitations to Mr. Hardy’s great charm as a writer lies in his tendency to encumber his page with detail. At a supremely romantic moment one of his people sits down to contemplate a tribe of ants, and watches them through two whole printed pages. In another case a man in imminent deadly peril surveys through two pages the history of the geologic changes which have befallen our planet. Each passage, taken by itself, is good enough. Taken where it is, each is terribly wearisome and wrong.

I do not know that any critic has yet recorded Mr. Hardy’s singular limitations as to the invention of plot. Speaking from memory, I cannot at this moment recall a novel of his in which some trouble does not circle about a marriage licence, and I can recall many instances of going to church to get married and coming back single. That, indeed, is Mr. Hardy’s pièce de résistance in the way of invention, and it crops up in one book after another with a helpless inevitable-ness which at last grows comic.

But here we can afford to have done with carping, and can turn to the much more grateful task of praise. I do not think it too much to say that Mr. Hardy has studied his own especial part of England, has made himself master of its landscape, its town and hamlet life, its tradition and sentiment, and general spiritual atmosphere, to such triumphant effect as to set himself wholly apart from all other English writers of fiction. His devotion to his own beloved Wessex has brought him this rich and merited reward--that he is the recognised first and final master of its field. His knowledge of rustic life within his own borders is beautifully sympathetic and profound. His impression of the landscape in the midst of which this life displays itself is broad and noble and alive. His literary style is a thing to admire, to study, and to admire again. All worthy readers of English fiction are his debtors for many idyllic happy hours, and many deep inspirations of wholesome English air. And if, at the parting of the ways, we wave a decisive farewell to him, we are not unmindful of the time when he was the best and dearest of our comrades, and we leave him in the certainty that, whatever path he has chosen, he has been guided in his choice by an ambition which is entirely honourable and sincere.

VII.--UNDER FRENCH ENCOURAGEMENT--GEORGE MOORE

That salt of sincerity which saves ‘Jude the Obscure’ and ‘Tess o’ the D’Urber-villes’ from being wholly nauseous, is absent from ‘A Modern Lover’ and ‘A Drama in Muslin,’ and its flavour is but faintly perceptible in ‘Esther Waters.’ Except on the distinct understanding that Thomas Hardy and George Moore are bracketed here, for the sake of convenience, as being both ‘under French encouragement,’ it would be a gross critical injustice to couple their names together at all. It is not one man of letters in a hundred who has Mr. Hardy’s mere literary faculty, which is native and brilliant, whilst Mr. Moore’s has been painstakingly hunted for and brought from afar, and is, after much polishing, still a trifle dull. Mr. Thomas Hardy is distinctly one of those men who see things through an atmosphere of their own. Mr. George Moore has borrowed his atmosphere. The one is a man of genius as well as labour, and the other is a man of labour only.

It is very much of a pity that, a year or two ago, somebody’s sense of Mr. Moore’s position in the world of letters should have been very absurdly emphasised. It was solemnly advertised that a certain number of copies of a book of his might be had on large paper, with the autograph of the author. This was to be regretted, for Mr. Moore, in his own way, is worth taking seriously, whilst the trick is one of those which, as a rule, can only be played by the poorest kind of literary outsider. But that the author should have permitted himself to be thus made ridiculous is a characteristic thing, and one not to be passed in silence if we wish to understand him.

Consulting the critics, one of the first things we find about Mr. Moore is that he is an observer. As a matter of fact, that is absolutely what he is not. He is so far from being an observer that he is that diametrically opposite person, a man with a notebook. The man who amongst men of letters deserves to be ranked as an observer is he who naturally and without effort sees things in their just place, aspect, proportion, and perspective. The man who is often falsely described by the title which expresses this faculty is a careful and painstaking soul, who is strenuously on the watch for detail, and who takes much trouble to fill his pages with it.

Let me offer a concrete illustration. In ‘Esther Waters’ Mr. Moore is curiously and meaninglessly emphatic in his description of a certain room in which the heroine of his action sleeps. Esther, we are told, slipped on her nightdress and got into bed. It was a brass bed without curtains. There were two windows in the room. One of them was flush with the head of the bed, and the other was beyond its foot. A chest of drawers stood between them. An observer, unless he had a special purpose in it, would never have dreamt of writing down this bald detail. Nothing comes of the statement of fact. Nothing hangs on the relative position of the bed and the windows and the chest of drawers. Nothing happens in the course of the story which justifies the flat and flavourless statement. It is wholly without meaning, apart from the fact that it affords rather a plain insight into the author’s method of work. If a child of three after visiting a strange bedroom were able to tell as much about it as Mr. Moore has to tell about this apartment, his mother would probably be proud of him, and his nurse would say that he was a notice-taking little creature; but the critics would hardly hold him up to admiration as an observer. Yet the child would tell us just as much and just as little as Mr. Moore tells us in this particular instance. It goes without saying that this is not a fair specimen of Mr. Moore’s faculty, but it is significant of his general literary knack. He makes it his business steadfastly to jot down what he sees, and it is not impossible that in the course of a long and laborious life a man might in this way cultivate to a reasonable growth a turn for observation originally less than mediocre; but it is not the natural observer’s method of seeing things, and it is not the natural artist’s method of presenting them. If the critics in this case were in the right we should have to acknowledge an auctioneer’s catalogue as a chef d’ouvre.

To the sympathetic reader it was evident from the first that Mr. Moore was not greatly enamoured of his work for its own sake, and that he chose his themes, not because of any imperative attraction they had for him, but simply and purely for the use to which he could put them. His choice of subject has always been the result of a deliberate search for the effective. The mental process which gave rise to ‘A Mummer’s Wife’ is easily traceable. The domestic life of the class of people he made up his mind to treat was as little known to him as to almost anybody, but if properly handled it was pretty sure to make good copy. He must know it first, however, and so he set himself to learn it. This is the Zola method, but it is that method with a difference. The great French master started with an inspired and inspiring scheme, his idea being no less than to paint the society of an epoch from top to base, to present in a series of books, the writing of which should fill his literary lifetime, a completed portraiture of the whole people of his land and day. In the course of such a labour as he had courageously appointed for himself, many lines of special inquiry were necessarily indicated, but the details for which he searched were all employed with an artistic remorselessness in the building of that one great scheme of his, and each successive book which left his hands was like one more nail driven home and clinched for the support of his argument. Mr. Moore, as those who are honoured by his personal acquaintance know better than those who only read his books, resents with some warmth the obvious parallel which has been drawn between Zola and himself; but he is a copyist of Zola’s method for all that, and but for Zola’s influence would never have been heard of on his own present lines. In the writing of the ‘Mummers Wife’ the first obvious impulse came from Zola, It should be the writer’s business to discover a section of English life not hitherto exploited--it should be his business to explore it with a minute thoroughness--and it should, further, be his business to depict it as he found it. To be thoroughly painstaking in inquiry, and without fear in the exposition of facts discovered, were the aims before the writer. But Mr. Moore forgot, as was inevitable in the circumstances, that no desire for knowledge of things human is of real value without sympathy. He followed the fortunes of a theatrical company touring in the provinces, and though it is true enough that people who know that kind of life find trivial errors here and there, it has to be admitted that on the whole he gave a true and characteristic picture of the outside life of such a community. How a certain class of theatrical people dress and talk, what their work is, and what their outer ways are like, he has discovered with infinite painstaking; but the fact remains that it is the work of an outsider. He has never once got under the skin of any one of his people, and this is true, because he was impelled to write about them, not because they were human, and therefore endowed with all human characteristics of hatefulness, and lovableness, and quaintness, and humour, and vanity, and jealousy, but because he saw good copy in them. He neither loves nor hates, nor, indeed, except for his own sake, is for a. second even faintly interested. He is there to make a book, and these people offer excellent material for a book. He is astonishingly industrious, and his minuteness is without end, but he never warms to his subject. His aim, in short, is one of total artistic selfishness. It is very likely that he would accept this statement of his standpoint, and would justify it as the only standpoint of an artist. But it is answerable for the fact that his pages are sterile of laughter and tears, of sympathy and of pity.

In ‘A Modern Lover’ and ‘A Drama in Muslin’ we find him dealing with a life he knows. He is no longer on ground wholly foreign to him, and it is no longer necessary that he should grope from one uncertain standing place to another, verifying himself by the dark lantern of his note-book as he goes. He moves with a more natural ease, views things with a larger and more comprehensive eye, and has at least that outside sympathy with his people which comes of community of taste and knowledge, and of familiarity with a social milieu.

In ‘Esther Waters’ the earlier characteristics break out again, and break out with greater force than ever. What he calls--with one of those tumbles into foreign idiom which occasionally mark his pages--‘the fever of the gamble’ has never been truly diagnosed in English fiction, and the theme is undeniably fertile. He knows absolutely nothing about the manifestations of the disorder, to begin with; but that is of no consequence, for the world is open to observation; and the note-book, the inquiring mind, and the sleuthhound patience are all as available as ever. Then a combination occurs to him. Servantgalism awaits; its painter. The life is picturesque from a certain point of view: it impinges more or less on the lives of all of us, and nobody has hitherto thought it worth while to search into its mysteries, and to tell us what it is really like. He knows nothing at all about this either, but he will make inquiries. He does make inquiries, and they result in a picture which is, on the whole, a piece of surprising accuracy. But still all the fire is for the work. The subject is sought for, the details are gathered, the workman’s patience and labour are truly conscientious--at times they excite admiration and surprise--but the net result is lifeless. In the way of waxwork--it would be hard to find anything more effective than the people in ‘Esther Waters.’ They are clothed with an exactitude of detail which would do credit to Madame Tussaud’s exhibition in its latest development. They are carefully modelled and coloured and posed. They are capital waxwork, and if the author had only cared a little bit about them, they might have even that mystic touch of life which thrills us in the finer sorts of fiction. It is eternally true that the wounded is the wounding heart, and the mere descriptive and analytical method not only misses the natural human movement, but it is untrue in its results. Vivisection teaches something, no doubt, but it does not bring a knowledge of the natural animal. To get that knowledge you had better live with him a little, and even love him a little, and teach him to love you. All the scientific inquiry in the world is not worth--in art--one touch of affectionate understanding.

Esther Waters is to go to a lying-in hospital, and thither goes her author before her, bent on what he can picturesquely set down about her surroundings. Her husband is to go to a hospital for consumption. Thither goes the author, and sets down things seen and heard with the wooden, conscientious precision of a bailiff’s clerk. The conception of things inquired into seems never to move him to interest, though one is forced to believe that once, at least, he has narrowly escaped the contagion of a great scene. Esther’s illegitimate child is born, and the mother, who has temporarily left him for his own sake, to accept a position as wet-nurse, is inspired by a hungry maternal longing, which drags her irresistibly from warmth and comfort to a poverty whose bitterness has but a single solace--the joy of satisfied motherly love. There are writers who have not a hundredth part of Mr. Moore’s industry who would have moved the reader deeply with such a scene. But, if Mr. Moore feels at all, he is ashamed to show it. This mother-hunger is apparently just as affecting a thing to him as the position of the chest of drawers between the two windows--a fact made note of, and, therefore, to be chronicled. Either the writer is content coldly to survey this rage of passion, or he would have us believe he is so; and in either case he misses the mark of the artist, which is, after all, to show such things as he deals with as they truly are, and to seize upon their inwardness. We do not ask for a slavering flux of sentiment, or an acrobat’s display in gesticulation. But, from a gentleman whose corns when trodden on are probably as painful as his neighbours’, we are content with something less than a godlike indifference to the emotions of humanity. Let us suppose, charitably, that this is no more than a pretence, and that Mr. Moore is neither at heart so callous nor in vanity so far removed from mere emotional interests as he would seem.

The most patient of investigators in strange regions will make slips sometimes. Mr. Moore, for instance, investigating the racing stable, treats us to a view of a horse whose legs are tightly bandaged from his knees to his forelocks, and his vulgarest peasants and servants say ‘that is he,’ or ‘if it be.’ One characteristic of the common speech of our country he has caught with accuracy, though it can scarcely be said that it needed much observation to secure it. The very objectionable word ‘bloody,’ as it is used by the vulgar, is Mr. Moore’s ‘standby’ in ‘Esther Waters,’ It is very likely that it takes a sort of daring to introduce the word freely into a work of fiction, but the courage does not seem very much more respectable than the word.

VIII.--MR. S. R. CROCKETT--IAN MACLAREN

When I undertook the writing of this series, Mr. S. R. Crockett, except for his ‘Mad Sir Uchtred of the Hills,’ was unknown to me by actual reading. My opinion of that story was not a high one. I thought it, and on a second reading still think it, feebly pretentious. But for some reason or another Mr. Crockett’s name has been buzzed about in such a prodigality of praise that it came natural to believe and hope that later work from his pen had shown a quality which the first little brochure had not revealed, and that the world had found in him a genuine addition to its regiment of literary workmen. The curiosity with which a section of the newspaper press has been inspired as to Mr. Crockett’s personal whereabouts, as to his comings and goings, his engagements for the future, and his prices ‘per thousand words,’ would have seemed to indicate that in him we had discovered a person of considerably more than the average height.

The result of a completer perusal of his writings is not merely destructive of this hope. It is positively stunning and bewildering. Mr. Crockett is not only not a great man, but a rather futile very small one. The unblushing effrontery of those gentlemen of the press who have set him on a level with Sir Walter is the most mournful and most contemptible thing in association with the poorer sort of criticism which has been encountered of late years.